Pacific Circle Lecture | Matthew M. Booker & Kjell Ericson: The Seed Oyster Inspectors скачать в хорошем качестве

Pacific Circle Lecture | Matthew M. Booker & Kjell Ericson: The Seed Oyster Inspectors

For most of the half-century between the 1920s and 1970s, young “seed” oysters collected in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture were exported in huge quantities each winter and spring. Their primary destination was North America’s Washington State, where the tiny shellfish were grown, canned, sold, and eaten across the United States. In Washington, white growers rebranded magaki as Pacific oysters. These largely overlooked transpacific movements of “Pacific” oysters had profound consequences in Miyagi, Washington, and beyond. Focusing on the Miyagi-Washington seed oyster trade offers opportunities to examine ideas and practices of migration, transplantation, and exclusion across the Pacific. In this lecture, Dr Matthew M. Booker and Dr Kjell Ericson examine migration and environmental change from situated and transpacific perspectives. Their presentation addresses a specific puzzle of mobility, labor, and race along far-flung Pacific tidelands. After 1941, war and internment removed Japanese go-betweens from the existing transpacific seed oyster trade – and Japanese labourers from Washington State’s tidelands. But demand for seed oyster imports remained. What changed was that, after 1945, Washington State required inspection of oysters transplanted “within the state from without” for so-called Japanese oyster drills, shellfish-eating sea snails. Using the 1945 regulations as a pretext, from 1947 the Washington State Fisheries Department, in conjunction with major state oyster growers, sent state officials to Miyagi villages to inspect seed oysters for drills and other pests. Washington inspectors attempted to manage Miyagi tidelands in the name of protecting the state’s tidelands. In parallel, villagers and Tokyo officials pursued their own visions of export-based livelihoods and alternative modes of “Japanese” inspection. We explore the contexts behind, consequences of, and complex resistance to the Washington State inspections, which continued for thirty years into the 1970s. The Pacific Circle Lecture is a regular online lecture series hosted by The Pacific Circle, an association dedicated to supporting and promoting research in the history of knowledge in the Asia-Pacific region, broadly construed. The association takes knowledge to encompass a cross-cultural diversity of beliefs about the workings of the universe and the command of a myriad of techniques applied to investigations and manipulations of worldly phenomena. Lectures are open to all and are advertised on the Circle's website (https://thepacificcircle.com/)and via its fortnightly newsletter. Dr Matthew Morse Booker is Vice President for Scholarly Programs at the National Humanities Center and Professor of Environmental History at North Carolina State University. He publishes in agricultural, environmental and food history. Dr Kjell Ericson is a Program-Specific Senior Lecturer at Kyoto University’s Center for the Promotion of Interdisciplinary Education and Research and teaches history in the Kyoto-Heidelberg Joint Degree in Transcultural Studies (JDTS) Program. His research interests are in histories of environment, technology, and law, in and around the Japanese archipelago. An in-progress monograph project examines Japan’s southern Mie Prefecture, a region that was once the global centre of saltwater pearl cultivation. Links: The Pacific Circle: https://thepacificcircle.com/ Dr Matthew M. Booker: https://chass.ncsu.edu/people/mmbooker/ Dr Kjell Ericson: https://www.cats.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/jdts/te...