Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how environmental change and Japanese fisheries labor migration in the Indo-Pacific in the first half of the 20th Century were reinforcing each other embedded in a transimperal race for fish.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how environmental change and Japanese fisheries labor migration in the Indo-Pacific in the first half of the 20th Century were reinforcing each other well before the "great acceleration" attributed to the post-WWII years or and the phenomenon of environmental refugees of the post-Cold War era. By focusing on tuna fishermen, it highlights how Japanese transpacific fisheries labor migration throughout this period was driven to a significant degree by man-made environmental transformation which saw the dramatic depletion of fish stocks in the coastal waters of Japan, and the changing migration patterns of tuna.

New technologies and fishing techniques enabled fishermen within the Japanese Empire to access tuna on the open sea. A new frontier of tuna fisheries was pushed into new fishing grounds in ecological strata that had previously been untouched. The expanding Japanese Empire played a crucial role in accelerating this process. While the new techniques allowed for migration, they also reinforced environmental change and the inevitable crash of newly discovered fishing grounds in the foreseeable future. This lead to increasing concern as to how best to deal with the tuna commons among fisheries migrants in Micronesia and its surrounding waters and islands. They aimed to regulate human interaction with tuna in order to stabilize fluctuating tuna stocks. However, Indo-Pacific waters more and more became a theater of transimperial competition not only in military terms, but a locale of an increasingly aggressive race for fish. This lead to conflicting ideas regarding fisheries management and the question of how to deal with tuna commons remained unsolved in the face of increased overfishing due to a lack of temporal and geographical goalposts, which were not in the interests of the expanding Japanese empire.