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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the pre- and post-war migration of Taiwanese to the island of Ishigaki. It will detail both the history of their presence and how memories of that history are reshaped in the present, examining the intersection between geographical and administrative border policies.

Paper long abstract:

Japan’s borders are now the subject of attention across diverse areas of scholarship. One field of interest has been Japan’s island borderlands, in which recent research has examined their histories (Yamamoto 2023), their presents (Iwashita 2016), and changes in policies towards them (Furukawa 2021). Another has looked at the management of population movements, through studies of pre-war emigration (Azuma 2019; Lu 2020) and the waves of repatriation and migration to Japan (Watts 2008; Liu-Farrer 2020; Boyle and Chi 2023), while also looking to analyse the country’s demography today. However, connections between changes in border and of populations have been highlighted in some cases, while remaining obscure in others.

The southern Okinawa island of Ishigaki presents one obvious blind spot. The geographical proximity of Ishigaki to Taiwan and the extensive connections that existed between the two under the Japanese empire have been examined (Matsuda 2020), but the pre- and post-war migration of Taiwanese to the island has attracted less scholarly attention. Nevertheless, this movement of people from Taiwan over several generations is central to the island’s history and topography, and how it is narrated in the present.

This paper offers a preliminary study into the presence of Taiwanese on Ishigaki, which seeks to capture both the history of their presence and how memories of that history are being reshaped in the present. In so doing, it will survey a site at which the intersection between geographical and administrative border policies is particularly pronounced, and draw out its broader implications.