Gender, Dékasegi and Traslocality in the Japanese Pacific World: The Lives of Two Japanese Women, 1900s-1950s

Yukari Takai, York University

The journeys of two Japanese women, Nakatsu (née Takeuchi) Fudé and Shigeta (née Oku) Yasuko, illustrate the ways in which mobility shaped their life trajectories, including work and marriage within and beyond the geographic boundaries of Japanese archipelago. Deeply rooted in local culture, agency and capitalist need for labour, not to mention state policies, their passages weaved through remote villages in Wakayama and in the Amami Islands to western Japan’s capital of Osaka and industrial centre of Hikoné, to Japan’s formal empire in Manchuria, and to communities of overseas Japanese in North America. Drawing graciously on the work by a scholar and a local historian, this essay shows ways in which the lived connection or what some scholars call translocality, figured prominently and fundamentally in the unfolding of the transpacific and transnational experiences of the two women and perhaps of countless others in gender specific ways. Women played a key role in the workings of these translocal connections that linked one locality to another and yet to another both within and across national boundaries.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 202. Asian Migrations in the Pacific World.