Presentation short abstract

Jeju was rebranded as "Hawaii of South Korea"from the 1960s through developmental plans that centered on citrus farming supported by diasporic gifts from Koreans in Japan. This presentation shows how traveling citrus trees played a pivotal role in reshaping Jeju as a Cold War developmental frontier.

Presentation long abstract

Jeju Island was long impoverished and marginalized within Korea. Its devastation deepened with the 1948 April 3 Massacre, leaving the island with few viable paths to recovery. Reconstruction did not begin in earnest until the 1960s, when Park Chung Hee’s developmental regime designated Jeju as both a citrus-farming hub and a tourist frontier—the so-called “Hawaii of Korea.” During this period, diasporic Koreans, many displaced during and after colonial rule and state violence, pooled resources to purchase citrus saplings as gifts for their homeland. Sent as acts of return and care, these saplings traveled alongside grafting techniques, fertilizers, and horticultural expertise, creating a transnational postcolonial agricultural circuit linking Jeju and Japan.

Drawing on the last two years’ archival and ethnographic research on the movement of saplings agricultural inputs, and diasporic gifts, this presentation examines how citrus trees, through their botanical agency, have transformed Jeju’s economy, ecology, and everyday life across six decades of postwar reconstruction and Cold War development. Taking root in volcanic soil once deemed unsuitable for farming, these traveling trees reorganized rural labor, reshaped landscapes, and offered farmers a temporal anchor—a life pillar whose seasonal cycles structured care, obligation, and future-making. Their growth intertwined with farmers’ own life rhythms, generating a “citrus island” where human and botanical futures were grafted together. Traveling trees thus emerge not only as a means of production but also as an aim of production—living agents and archives that made new economic, ecological, and political possibilities imaginable on the island.