A Japanese Joint Venture in the Pacific (Routledge Contemporary Japan)

A Japanese Joint Venture in the Pacific

The Japanese, and other Asians, are increasingly taking over some of the roles previously played by Europeans in the Pacific islands, which is giving rise to interesting new economic relationships, and interesting new interactions between nationalities. This book considers the role of the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, focusing in particular on Solomon Taiyo Ltd, a joint venture between the Japanese multinational Maruha Corporation and the Solomon Islands government, which managed a tuna-fishing and -processing enterprise which was a mainstay of the Solomon Islands economy from the 1970s to 2000. Solomon Taiyo was a prime example of late-twentieth-century Japanese international relations in the Pacific, being a blend of private-sector trading interests, government support for Japanese overseas fisheries, and aid diplomacy. The theoretical driver behind the book is to explore national identities in the context of capitalist economic development involving a large Japanese company and a small island developing country in the Pacific. It considers a range of important themes including the changing nature of colonialism, the degree to which people’s ethnic sense of self, and therefore their relationship with others, is affected by how modern (or primitive) their nation is perceived to be, and how all this relates to the development of capitalism, nationalism, and modernity. Kate Barclay is Senior Lecturer at the Institute for International Studies, University of Technology, Sydney. Her research focuses on the social, cultural and political aspects of economic activity, especially tuna fishing in the Pacific. She co-edited Globalization, Regionalization and Social Change in the Pacific Rim.

Routledge contemporary Japan series

1 A Japanese Company in Crisis Ideology, strategy, and narrative Fiona Graham 2 Japan’s Foreign Aid Old continuities and new directions Edited by David Arase 3 Japanese Apologies for World War II A rhetorical study Jane W. Yamazaki 4 Linguistic Stereotyping and Minority Groups in Japan Nanette Gottlieb 5 Shinkansen From bullet train to symbol of modern Japan Christopher P. Hood 6 Small Firms and Innovation Policy in Japan Edited by Cornelia Storz 7 Cities, Autonomy and Decentralization in Japan Edited by Carola Hein and Philippe Pelletier 8 The Changing Japanese Family Edited by Marcus Rebick and Ayumi Takenaka 9 Adoption in Japan Comparing policies for children in need Peter Hayes and Toshie Habu

10 The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature Polygraphic desire Nina Cornyetz 11 Institutional and Technological Change in Japan’s Economy Past and present Edited by Janet Hunter and Cornelia Storz 12 Political Reform in Japan Leadership looming large Alisa Gaunder 13 Civil Society and the Internet in Japan Isa Ducke 14 Japan’s Contested War Memories The ‘memory rifts’ in historical consciousness of World War II Philip A. Seaton 15 Japanese Love Hotels A cultural history Sarah Chaplin 16 Population Decline and Ageing in Japan – The Social Consequences Florian Coulmas 17 Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity David Chapman 18 A Japanese Joint Venture in the Pacific Foreign bodies in tinned tuna Kate Barclay

A Japanese Joint Venture in the Pacific Foreign bodies in tinned tuna

Kate Barclay

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Kate Barclay All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Barclay, Kate, 1969– A Japanese joint venture in the Pacific: foreign bodies in tinned tuna/Kate Barclay. p. cm. – (Routledge contemporary Japan series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Japan–Commerce–Solomon Islands. 2. Solomon Islands–Commerce–Japan. 3. Joint ventures. I. Title. HF3828.S57B37 2008 338.8′889593–dc22 2007034548

ISBN 0-203-93090-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-43435-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-93090-8 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-43435-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-93090-8 (ebk)

Contents

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations and non-English words

viii x xv xviii

1

Introduction: foreign bodies in economic development

1

2

Theorizing the identity relations of modernism

8

3

Modernism, nationalism, and colonialism

42

4

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

74

5

Solomon Islanders and Solomon Taiyo

120

6

Okinawan fishermen: between modernity and the South Seas

143

7

Japanese managers: non-White moderns

162

8

Conclusion: the stinky jewel of modernity

182

Appendices Notes Bibliography Index

189 193 206 218

Illustrations

Figures 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 7.1

Skipjack on sale at Honiara Central Market, June 2005 Pole-and-line fishing gear Pole-and-line rods leaning on vessel bow Bait boat and pole-and-line vessel Bouke-ami (baitfishing net) Purse-seine fishing Solomon Taiyo production flowchart Solomon Blue can label ‘Palette’ Church in Baru, Noro, 1999 SIDT poster on development

75 79 79 82 83 88 91 95 117 174

Tables 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7

Solomon Islands baitfish catch 1973–1998 Solomon Islands tuna-catch utilization 1971–1994 Solomon Taiyo production 1981–1997 Solomon Taiyo canned-fish exports by country 1991–1995 Solomon Taiyo arabushi exports 1976–1994 Solomon Taiyo fishmeal production 1991–1995 Solomon Taiyo nationalities of shareholdings, directors, and senior managers 1973–2000 4.8 Solomon Taiyo net profit/loss and accumulated losses 1975–1996 4.9 Objectives of Solomon Taiyo joint-venture partners 4.10 Contributions of Solomon Taiyo to Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ 1982–1990 4.11 Contributions of Solomon Taiyo to Maruha 1992–1994 4.12 Contributions of Solomon Taiyo to the Solomon Islands economy 1982–1990 4.13 Solomon Taiyo proportions of women versus men employees 1995 4.14 Solomon Taiyo numbers of women in salaried staff gradings 1995

85 92 93 97 98 99 103 104 105 106 106 111 113 113

Illustrations ix 4.15

Solomon Taiyo training courses for Solomon Islander employees 1991 Exchange rates of Solomon dollars in US dollars 1987–1996 Exchange rates of Solomon dollars in Japanese yen and US dollars 1995–2001

A.1 A.2

115 191 192

Maps 1.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 6.1

Western Pacific Ocean Japan Okinawa Solomon Islands Noro and surrounds Solomon Taiyo base at Noro Irabu Island

2 43 52 59 89 90 144

Preface

The driver and I started back from Noro to Munda about 9pm. Usually I came along this potholed overgrown road sitting cross-legged on big scraps of brown paper in the tray of a truck with the workers and it took an hour or more. With the driver’s expert maneuvering in the Solomon Taiyo managers’ red Landcruiser with the grey lambskin seat covers it took about 35 minutes. We passed a small patch of bush where the trees were whipping around, leaves and dust flying. Within seconds we were through it and the bush was calm again. The driver said he often passed patches of bush like that on this stretch of road he knew so well. Also, sometimes he saw light-skinned men who weren’t there. And voices that sounded like men when he knew there were no men around. ‘Me no fraet of them. They do me no harm.’ I thought of all the Japanese soldiers who lived here briefly in hellish conditions, without enough food or ammunition to survive. I looked at the round patch of biscuity road visible in the headlights. A road built long ago for the war that changed this place in bigger ways more suddenly than any other event people can remember. Now the main thoroughfare for another harbinger of change involving Japanese people, Solomon Taiyo Ltd.1 Another night I found myself on a fishing boat illuminated green blue from below the water looking out over the inky waters of the Roviana lagoon, wavelets edged silver from a rising moon, while the anonymous shadows of crew worked around me as I listened to explanations from the Fishing Master. At times like these I wondered how I had ever come to be there at that time with those people. The most common response from people upon hearing of my research topic was to wonder how on earth it ever came about. I first heard of Solomon Taiyo when I visited Munda for a diving holiday in 1993. I was living in rural Japan at the time and had been interested in issues of development and international political economy for years, so was intrigued to find out what kinds of influences a joint venture between the Solomon Islands government and a Japanese multinational might have in a largely non-capitalist economy. And Solomon Islands is intoxicatingly beautiful. I remained curious over two successive visits to Munda and a masters degree in Canberra. When preparing for doctoral studies in 1997 Solomon Taiyo seemed a perfect case study given my Japanese-language ability, interest in processes of change due to capitalism, and love of the sea.

Preface xi Of all the history that happens, people inevitably pick and choose certain capital-‘H’ Histories to remember and valorize, or demonize, while other parts of the past are ignored. As part of this process of capital-‘H’ History-making the salient identities are shaped and shifted. In the early 1980s debates raged about the ‘invention of tradition’ as academics uncovered factual and historical inconsistencies in various traditions (see for example, Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Many people object to the taint of inauthenticity that comes from such deconstruction. Group identities and the rituals of tradition that engender a sense of identity may be sources of strength and pride, so people resent critical questioning of these identities and rituals. Academic challenges to traditions in the Pacific have been criticized on political grounds because they may undermine the group identities from which beleaguered peoples garner confidence and selfesteem (LiPuma 1997). In the case of (non-beleaguered) Japanese national identity, however, the political implications of challenging conventional Histories are quite different. Ruins of Identity (Hudson 1999) and Multicultural Japan (Denoon et al. 1996) are two examples of academic work that problematize conventional understandings of the Japanese nation as a homogeneous and primordial identity group by presenting evidence that the people who have inhabited the Japanese archipelago had heterogeneous origins and have undergone historical change, rather than all sharing a primordial and unchanging uniquely Japanese essence. Either way – choosing not to emphasize the recent origins of some Pacific Island traditions, or choosing to point out historical inconsistencies in Japanese national identities – both choices are decidedly political and both are based on the fact that academic representations of peoples can affect peoples’ identities. People themselves, of course, need not accept academic findings. Ghassan Hage has presented an illuminating quotation from Adolf Hitler to demonstrate this point: ‘I know perfectly well, just as well as all these tremendously clever intellectuals, that in the scientific sense there is no such thing as race’ (Hage 1995: 50). Nationalism does not cease to exist once it is pointed out that the categories are objectively unsustainable (Bourdieu 2000: 181). Academic representations of peoples are only one input among many in identity relations. Popular culture is arguably a more powerful input. Nevertheless, academics do have a role in identity formation, the knowledge about people they create carries the weight of scientific legitimacy, and through teaching and writing they inform many nonacademic representations. The history of complicity between social research in the Pacific and colonialism raises questions about the politics and ethics of yet another White researcher basing a career on a study of Solomon Islands.2 Through this work I become a participant in processes by which Solomon Islanders, Japanese, and Okinawans are known, with all the power implications that entails. As an English-language background White Australian woman researcher do I have the right to represent these people? This research involves people of various ethnicities, both men and women, from social positions of advantage and disadvantage. In terms of the politics of representation it might be better if this research had been done by a

xii

Preface

Solomon Islander woman. But no Solomon Islander women have come forward to do it, nor look likely to. Should it therefore remain undone? Judging from the numbers of Solomon Islanders encountered during research who said they wanted to know more about Solomon Taiyo, and the amount of help they gave towards the work, perhaps it is better done than not. We can only hope that some of the problems of White people dominating processes by which Pacific Islanders are known in the world might be mitigated by people from the groups studied being ‘relentlessly radical and skeptical’ about the knowledge produced (Keesing 1989: 24).

Notes on method and language My empirical method was to gather a range of materials to treat as texts to examine for evidence of identity relations. These materials included conversations with around 100 people, from fishers to politicians to managers to residents of relevant communities to bureaucrats to factory workers. I noted most of these conversations in fieldwork diaries, which also included notes of my observations, but I taped and transcribed about 20 more in-depth interviews. As well as interview data I collected documentary sources from media reports, consultancy reports, court records, and the files of several Solomon Islands government offices. These data were treated as texts and analyzed for the discourses contained therein. Document sources Archival materials used were mostly stored in the offices that generated the files, with the exception of some older files that had been deposited with the Solomon Islands National Archives in Honiara. References to archive material are in endnotes, rather than in the Bibliography of the book. References to archive material contain the name of the office in which the file was viewed and then the file name and/or number. Some files were not numbered, and most were not clearly dated, so the date on the document is included in the reference. Likewise, company documents are referred to in endnotes rather than in the text and Bibliography. Company documents are listed under the name of the company that produced the documents (for example, Maruha, Solomon Taiyo). Copies of these documents are in possession of the author unless otherwise indicated. Most newspaper articles were read in the microfilm collection of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau (PaMBU), which is based at the Australian National University (ANU) and held by several libraries including the National Library in Canberra and the Mitchell Room of the State Library in Sydney. Some other newspaper articles were found in the National Archives in Honiara, or in collections of the Solomon Islands National Library and Solomon Islands College of Higher Educations Library. The News Drum and Nius newspapers were at various times in their publication prefixed by ‘Solomons’ and at other times not, in this book they are uniformly listed without the prefix.

Preface xiii Some Parliamentary papers and Hansard for Solomon Islands were viewed in the ANU Library, some in the Australian National Library, some in the Solomon Islands National Parliamentary Library. Some of the older papers from the British Solomon Islands Protectorate administration were found in the Solomon Islands National Archives. Language The main language of this research was English but there were other languages involved. Despite the impossibility of perfect translation, multi-lingual and multi-sited ethnography are important forms of social research (Marcus 1995). Much of my research was done in a language other than the first language of either the researcher or the participant or both. For example, interviews with Okinawan fishermen were conducted in standard Japanese, my second language, and the second language of the fishermen, whose first language was the language of their island Irabu. Some of the interviews with Solomon Islanders were conducted in Pijin. All translations into English are my own, with help from Japanese and Papua New Guinean graduate students at Kagoshima University. The Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Technology, Sydney required that participants in this research remain anonymous. For that reason in this book interviewees are referred to, not by their real names, but by place names. Okinawan fishermen interviewees have been given names of places in the Miyako Islands, Japanese mainlander interviewees are referred to by place names from the mainland, Australians with places names from Australia, and Solomon Islander interviewees are referred to by place names from the Solomons, and so on. Long vowel sounds in Japanese are indicated with diacritical markings ‘o¯’ and ‘u¯’, except in place names such as Tokyo where common English-language usage has no diacritical markings. Long vowel sounds in Okinawan place and people names are indicated by ‘ô’ or ‘û’, as is customary in romanizations of Okinawan language. Although the word ‘pidgin’ has had negative connotations and has often been used in a derogatory way to label languages, Solomon Islanders have reclaimed the word and are proud of their Solomons Pijin. As a Solomon Islander, Jonathan Fifi’i asserted that Pijin was not bastardized English but was a language with locally grown rules and grammar (Fifi’i 1989: 147). Solomons Pijin seems to have been developed by traders, then used by labor recruiters. The British denigrated the language but Solomon Islanders persisted in using it (Jourdan 1985: 85). I use ‘Pijin’ to refer to the Solomon Islands lingua franca because this is what Solomon Islanders call it, rather than ‘creole’, as some other peoples prefer to call their language (although technically Pijin may be a creole). Most Solomon Islanders speak three or four local languages and Pijin, and many speak English. As the language of officialdom in Solomon Islands, English has developed some local forms and spelling is at times flexible, especially because of the semi-permeable boundary between English and Pijin. In the interests of

xiv

Preface

accuracy language is presented ‘as it was’ as far as practicable within the competing constraints of consistency and clarity. ‘Mistakes’ of syntax or spelling have not been altered in any quotes from documents and interviews. By the same token, quotes have not been ‘tidied up’. Because most of us do not speak in full grammatical sentences, spoken language often looks ‘uneducated’ when it is written. This is particularly the case in second or subsequent languages, and in the case of people, such as fishermen, who have not had tertiary education. Quotations have been left as they are in the interests of trying to convey interviewees’ voices as directly as possible, understanding that linguistic diversity reflects cultural and social diversity, and hoping that readers will take quotations in this spirit. Some of the quotations presented are quite chauvinist. In the interest of understanding the social relations of Solomon Taiyo such quotations are not toned down to avoid inducing distaste in readers, nor played up to present particular groups as more culpable than others. Apparently chauvinist representations are a vital part of identity relations and need to be taken into consideration. By the same token, the absence of chauvinist representations does not necessarily mean the absence of chauvinist sentiment. The habitus of some interviewees, Japanese managers with tertiary education for example, predisposed them to be less likely to express overt chauvinism than other people, but no less likely to be implicated in chauvinist social structures. Similarly, some readers may object to explicit use of racial terms such as White, fearing it reifies racial categories. In the interests of a coherent and frank discussion of the salient identities, however, there is no better alternative to using color words to denote racial categories. Terms such as White, Melanesian, Black, Asian, Europeans, are all thoroughly contestable, but in the absence of any more precise, less contentious terms these will have to suffice. Color words are capitalized when they are referring to racial categories – color in a political sense – and not capitalized for color in a physical sense.3 For example, ‘Melanesians are Black people but most of them have brown skin’. In order to fix this research historically the past tense is used for observations made during fieldwork and in any descriptions of practice that may or may not be ongoing, so as to acknowledge the changes that occur with the flow of time and situate this research as representing only a temporal slice rather than an ahistorical whole. Once the empirical part of the research was fixed historically it seemed strange to engage with writings in an ahistorical manner, so written materials, including secondary sources, are also discussed in the past tense.

Acknowledgments

My first thanks go to my interviewees. For reasons of confidentiality I cannot list your names but if you ever read this you will know who you are: Solomon Islander, Okinawan, Japanese, Filipina, and Australian people who generously gave your time and your stories. Your stories are the backbone of this book. This project would not have been possible without the permission and cooperation of the joint venture partners to Solomon Taiyo, the Solomon Islands Government (via the Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development), and Maruha Corporation (via the Overseas Operations Department). Thanks also to publisher Routledge and editors Peter Sowden and Tom Bates. A huge thank you to Morita Keiko and David Goodman in the Institute for International Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. I couldn’t have wished for better support in terms of assistance in finding funding for travel costs, computing facilities, ample workspace with a window, and being shouted coffee at Bella Ciao when I got in early enough. You told me honestly when it would not work and sent me back to try again, and praised me extravagantly when it did work. Thank you also to Milica Gavran, who helped sort out many administrative issues, and Sandra Margon, who helped with complicated travel plans. Thank you also for the moral support given by my various office mates over the years, especially Martin Williams and Monica Wulff. This project was carried out not only at UTS, but spent a year of its formation at Kagoshima University Marine Social Science Department. I am very grateful to my supervisor there, Matsuda Yoshiaki, and also to other academics who helped me along the way, such as Koh Sunhui and Lou Xiaobo. Thank you to the graduate students of various countries who made my stay in Kagoshima enjoyable, and especially thank you to the students who painstakingly checked my transcriptions of interviews. The doctoral research on which this book is based also spent some time gestating in the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. I am very grateful to all the people there who talked with me about my project and suggested helpful readings and contacts. Some of these people were Ewan Maidment, Donald Denoon, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Brij Lal, Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, John Naitoro, Joeli Viteiyaki, Glynn Rence, Chris Ballard, David Hegarty, Greg Fry, Gavin Mount, and John Docker. Other academics who offered helpful comments

xvi

Acknowledgments

along the way include Annette Hamilton, Shankar Aswani, Ghassan Hage, Akimichi Tomoya, Devleena Ghosh, and Stephen Muecke. The Irabu Town Fisheries Promotion Section in Okinawa was very helpful in finding interviewees, introducing me and ferrying me around the island, especially Mr Yamaguchi and Mr Hamagawa. Thank you also to the Tomitanis. Your warm hospitality and delicious cuisine made my stay in Irabu one I will never forget for personal as well as professional reasons. The list of people who helped me in Solomon Islands with introductions to interviewees, access to files, transport, and accommodation is a long one. In Honiara the staff at the National Archives, the National Museum, the Parliamentary Library, and the Solomon Islands College of Higher Education Library were all very helpful. Thank you to the Registrar of Lands and the Registrar of Companies for giving me access to records, and to the Immigration Department for dealing with my unusual visa requirements promptly. In fact, I went in to this fieldwork prepared for some bureaucratic wrangles in Solomon Islands because of the comments of previous researchers, but there was not one wrangle in Solomon Islands, which is more than can be said for either Australia or Japan. From the Forum Fisheries Agency I would like to thank Transform Aqorau, whose own PhD was still so fresh in his memory that he was especially helpful. The staff in the High Court helped me with case records, thank you to Johnson Makona. Various people in the Fisheries Division helped me in different ways, particularly Eddie Honiwala in the Research Section. The Hundelby family of Solomon Sights and Sounds helped me out with perfect accommodation in the most convenient location for the first stay in Honiara, and the Cartwright family invited me into their home with the gorgeous view for the second stay. In Munda the Kera family helped me out with a special deal at Agnes Lodge. The fieldwork for this research does not represent the anthropological rite of passage in a Melanesian village. I had a private room with a ceiling fan and a kettle, even if there were some sewage problems. Typing up transcripts is a pain, but the agony was somewhat relieved by looking over the top of the laptop out the window to the limpid waters of the Roviana Lagoon lapping the shore not ten meters away. My biggest source of help at Noro was the hardworking and committed Town Clerk David Mamupio. The rest of the Noro Town Office staff were also very friendly and helpful when I used the Town Office as my base while in Noro. The staff of Solomon Taiyo, from the General Manager down, cooperated with my interview schedule and enabled me to observe operations in the factories and on board one of the catcher boats. It was a shame to be able to view only the baitfishing in the lagoon, not the pole-and-line fishing out at sea, and it was a shame not to have access to company records, but I am grateful for the access I was given. Thank you also to the many drivers who gave me lifts between Noro and Munda. In the mornings I generally caught the trucks with the cannery workers but coming back to Munda in the afternoons I caught a range of vehicles, from Billy Veo’s truck, to the blue Copra crushing-mill truck, to an unmarked white semi trailer. Mostly it was the Ports Authority people who drove me home, however, and they generally gave me a seat in the cab rather

Acknowledgments

xvii

than making me ride in the back with the other hitchhikers. It was on the trips to and from Munda that I really gained a sense of what it was like to work in Noro. As well as ethical approval from their institution researchers should be required to seek the approval of friends and family because any project this large inevitably seems to impinge on their lives. I very much appreciate the patience of husband John, and I am endlessly grateful also for the practical and moral support of my mother, Lesley. Without her I never would have visited Solomon Islands and discovered Solomon Taiyo in the first place. She has not only been a kind and generous mother but, as a strong woman who bends much of her surroundings to her optimistic will and succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, she has also been an excellent role model. This research was funded by an Australian Government Postgraduate Award, a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship for postgraduate research, and a National Visiting Scholarship from the Australian National University in Canberra. The original research was conducted through the Institute for International Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, and the Institute has supported its writing up. Subsequent fieldwork was supported by an AusAID-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the Australian National University. Permission to reprint material was granted by the following people and organizations: Jully Makini (formerly Sipolo) for her poems ‘Civilized Girl’, ‘Development’, ‘Solomon Blue’, ‘Okinawa Fishermen’, and ‘Noro’; John Palmer for his post to the discussion group Iu Mi Nao ([email protected]); Wakabayashi Yoshikazu for his version of a Sarahama song about going fishing in the South Pacific; the Solomon Islands Development Trust for their poster on development; Nations and Nationalism for parts of my paper ‘Between modernity and primitivity: Okinawan identity in relation to Japan and the South Pacific’; Tomiyama Ichiro¯ and Social Sciences Japan Journal for the English translation of the Yamanoguchi Baku poem ‘Kaiwa’; and Bob Gillett for his line drawings of fishing gear.

Abbreviations and non-English words

Official documents often referred to Solomon Taiyo Ltd as ‘STL’. The company was also often referred to as ‘Taiyo’ and ‘Soltai’. In the interests of clarity acronyms have been kept to a minimum and Solomon Taiyo Ltd is referred to here as ‘Solomon Taiyo’ except in quotations from originals that used other words. ACP arabushi BSIP CBSI CPUE ECLA EEZ EU FFA GATT ICSI

kastom katsuobushi KFPL Lomé Convention

mt

Africa, Caribbean, Pacific country, for purposes of Lomé Convention (see below) Smoked skipjack loins before final processing into katsuobushi (Japanese) British Solomon Islands Protectorate Central Bank of Solomon Islands catch per unit of effort (way to measure sustainability in fisheries) Economic Commission for Latin America Exclusive Economic Zone (200 nautical miles from coastline) European Union, formerly the European Economic Commission Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency, based in Honiara General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Investment Corporation of Solomon Islands (in which government ownership of companies like Solomon Taiyo was vested) tradition, customs, indigenous Solomon Islands culture as opposed to Western culture (Solomons Pijin) smoke-dried skipjack cured with a mold used for flavoring in Japanese food (Japanese) Kolumbangara Forestry Plantations Ltd agreement by former colonial powers to allow former colony products to trade preferentially in the EU, superseded by the Cotonou Agreement metric tons

Abbreviations and non-English words NFD OFCF Solomons Pijin RIPL SDA SIDT SIEA SIG SINUW SIPL SIPPA SIWA SPC SPPF STL TAC TGKK UK US/A wantok WTO

xix

National Fisheries Development, the other main tuna fishing company in Solomon Islands Overseas Fisheries Cooperation Foundation (Japan) lingua franca of Solomon Islands Russell Islands Plantations Ltd Seventh Day Adventist Church Solomon Islands Development Trust Solomon Islands Electricity Authority Solomon Islands Government Solomon Islands National Union of Workers Solomon Islands Plantations Ltd Solomon Islands Planned Parenthood Association Solomon Islands Water Authority Secretariat of the Pacific Community South Pacific Project Facility, part of the World Bank group, based in Sydney Solomon Taiyo Ltd total allowable catch, government limits set on fisheries Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ Kabushiki Kaisha United Kingdom United States/of America relative, member of language group, member of ingroup (Solomons Pijin) World Trade Organization

1

Introduction Foreign bodies in economic development

The social processes relevant to Solomon Taiyo include political and economic change in Japan and Pacific Island countries, involving gender relations, ethnic relations, and social strata relations, and the history, economics, and politics of the international tuna processing industry. Solomon Taiyo as a social phenomenon was generated in ‘travels’ (Clifford 1997: 21–27) between the central business district in Tokyo, remote islands in Okinawa, the villages and reefs of Solomon Islands, and Sainsbury’s supermarkets in the United Kingdom (UK), tracing over earlier paths left by European and Japanese colonialism. As a case study, Solomon Taiyo therefore provides a window through which to examine the intricately complex nature of contemporary economic phenomena. The land area of Solomon Islands is about 27,500 square kilometers but the area of water inside the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is more than 100,000 square kilometers. Several varieties of tuna frequent these waters, including skipjack (or bonito, scientific name katsuwonus pelamis). Skipjack migrate between the double line of islands, feeding on baitfish from the passages, lagoons, and reefs. In the early 1970s the British Protectorate of Solomon Islands was preparing for Independence and the skipjack resource was seen as having good potential to become part of a decolonized capitalist economy. At the same time, Japanese distant water fisheries, which had been restricted to waters around Japan in the years following World War II, had reestablished themselves in fishing grounds in the southwestern Pacific and were seeking joint ventures for local bases. After 18 months of negotiation and fishing surveys Solomon Taiyo Ltd came into being in 1973 as a skipjack fishing, processing, and marketing joint venture between the biggest fishing company in the world, Taiyo- Gyogyo- Kabushiki Kaisha (renamed Maruha Corporation in 1993), and the Solomon Islands government. For most of the next three decades Solomon Taiyo was the biggest private sector employer in Solomon Islands, and became the only substantial employment opportunity for women without tertiary education. The company was a major source of revenue through duties, utility levies and employee taxes, and a major earner of foreign exchange. Most families in Solomon Islands had one or more of their members working for Solomon Taiyo at some stage. One of the company’s products, Solomon Blue (flake tuna canned in oil) has been a staple of the Solomon Islands diet since the 1970s, when it replaced imported

Map 1.1 Western Pacific Ocean.

Foreign bodies in economic development

3

tinned mackerel as the convenience food of choice. It has been a popular food for so long in Solomon Islands it has become an icon – a food overseas Solomon Islanders crave as a taste of home. In late 1998 Solomon Islands attracted column space in world newspapers because of ‘ethnic tension’ on Guadalcanal; violence by groups of young men native to Guadalcanal against settlers from nearby Malaita, and retaliatory violence by groups of young Malaitan men. Tensions remained high until May 2000 when, following the coup in Fiji, there was a coup in Solomon Islands. The Solomon Islands state, always weak, was virtually ineffectual from then until 2003, when the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) led by Australia reestablished order and has since then been working with the Solomon Islands government to rebuild government and public services. Solomon Taiyo came to an end in 2000 when the Japanese partner Maruha withdrew. Maruha withdrew partly because the social and political upheaval in Solomon Islands made the business environment impossible, but also because Solomon Taiyo ceased to be viable for Maruha because of changes within Maruha and changes to the buying strategy of the main customer, Sainsbury’s in the United Kingdom (UK). In 2001 a wholly Solomon Islands government-owned entity called Soltai Fishing and Processing emerged to take Solomon Taiyo’s place. Solomon Islands has struggled to create a functioning capitalist economy that provides access to a cash income for Solomon Islanders, so Solomon Taiyo was hugely important in the national economy. The company was an object of envy for many Pacific Island country governments because the large fishing fleet and shore base provided thousands of jobs for locals and a training ground for industrial fishing and related production processes. On the other hand, Solomon Taiyo also attracted much criticism. Acrimonious correspondence flew between high levels of officialdom and the Solomon Taiyo Board of Directors during the last months of former Prime Minister Solomon Mamaloni’s administration in 1997. The correspondence surrounded a ‘lightning visit’ to the Noro base on 20 and 21 June of that year by Mamaloni and various officials, including people from the Ministry of Labour, the Solomon Islands National Union of Workers, and the Investment Corporation of Solomon Islands.1 The trigger for the visit was alleged adverse media reports about Solomon Islands from an unspecified European source quoting increasing complaints of ‘foreign bodies’ in Solomon Taiyo tinned tuna exported to the United Kingdom. Mamaloni wrote that defective products from Solomon Taiyo were damaging the reputation of ‘Solomon Islands as a member of GATT and WTO’.2 He linked the quality control problems to what he called ‘seeming unchecked and nonprocedural recruitment’, specifically, the recruitment of supervisors from Fiji and the Philippines since the appointment of the most recent Cannery Manager, a Japanese man married to a Fijian woman. Mamaloni seemed to believe a Fijian supervisor had been improperly recruited through the Cannery Manager’s wife. He thought this Fijian had possibly caused the perceived quality control problem in the seaming process intentionally, to sabotage Solomon Taiyo’s cannery so that Fiji’s Pafco cannery might benefit.3

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It could be said that Mamaloni was more concerned about foreign bodies in the workforce than in tins of tuna. Much of the correspondence regarding the lightning visit was about recruitment and promotion of Solomon Islanders and benefits to the Solomon Islands economy, rather than quality control. Mamaloni started by claiming that the localization plan in Solomon Taiyo’s Corporate Plan 1996–2000 was ‘not positive or realistic enough’. Mamaloni felt the country’s tuna resources were likely to be depleted and when that happened ‘Solomon Islanders will be the first to be made redundant’. He asserted that many Solomon Islanders had worked for Solomon Taiyo for 15 or 20 years without reaching the level of senior management, and that there were too many expatriates at senior management level. Mamaloni estimated that expatriate employees were paid between SB$10,000 and SB$43,0004 per month, whereas none of the Solomon Island employees received anything like this amount, regardless of their qualifications. He wrote that the lack of nationalization of the workforce indicated Solomon Taiyo must have ‘hidden agendas’. ‘Obviously, STL [Solomon Taiyo Ltd] has failed in its training programs as manifested by the sudden increase in recruiting Filipinos and Fijians. How many Solomon Islanders are working in Fiji, Philippines or, for that matter, Tokyo?’ The conclusion to this letter was particularly strident. Mamaloni suggested the Solomon Islands Government should review its ‘generous’ policies towards Solomon Taiyo because ‘the country’s natural resources are being exported overseas through dubious means’. He had heard that one part of operations was now owned by ‘another foreign company’ and that Solomon Taiyo was constructing a repairs slipway in Indonesia. He wanted to be formally informed about these developments. ‘If the information is authentic, it certainly gives the government some idea of the volume of funds which are generated from our fisheries resources and which STL is exporting.’ He called for a ‘full-scale investigation’ of Solomon Taiyo because ‘more than SB$20,000,000 is exported annually [by Solomon Taiyo] in terms of expatriate salaries and what else?’ In his response to Mamaloni the then Chair of the Solomon Taiyo Board of Directors, J.D. Tausinga, provided copies of the Complaints Summary regarding Solomon Taiyo products from Sainsbury’s supermarket chain in the UK.5 These figures showed that the absolute numbers of complaints regarding Solomon Taiyo products had been 488, 443, 417, 508 and 477 respectively for the years 1992/1993 through 1996/1997. During the same period, however, the annual number of Solomon Taiyo tins sold through Sainsbury’s had increased from 18,000,000 to over 28,000,000 so the rate of complaint had actually decreased substantially. In any case, the Chair wrote, the numbers of complaints received by Sainsbury’s regarding Solomon Taiyo products were ‘well within Sainsbury’s acceptable limits’ of 50 per million. He wrote that all buyers of Solomon Taiyo products sent Quality Assurance experts to Noro each year and each year they approved the cannery. Tausinga then responded to the other concerns raised by Mamaloni. He stated that the Fijian supervisor had been appointed in 1992 to replace an inadequately experienced Solomon Islander Seaming Section supervisor who had caused an entire shipment of cans to be recalled. Tausinga wrote that

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it was company policy to recruit from other countries until there were enough local supervisors with requisite experience and qualifications, and he had no reason to believe any expatriate employees wished to sabotage the Solomon Islands tuna industry. He pointed out that all expatriates were recruited through the Board, which had balanced Solomon Islander and Japanese membership. The correspondence over ‘foreign bodies’ in Solomon Taiyo is one of the minutiae of economic life in which social relationships are visible, even when discussion is ostensibly about technical issues such as quality control. Mamaloni’s letter exuded economic nationalism. A strong discourse of ‘us and them’ along lines of nationality was manifest in the letter, and the same preoccupation was imputed to all individuals and organizations mentioned. Solomon Taiyo’s corporate reputation was seen as having an impact on the identity of Solomon Islands as a state in the international system. Employees were seen as having loyalties linked to their nationality; employees identified as ‘foreign’ were seen as an avenue through which Solomon Islands as a nation might be exploited. Our understanding of the social and cultural significance of phenomena like Solomon Taiyo is curtailed by the usual perspectives taken in studying such companies, for example, as sources of economic, social or environmental impacts, rather than holistically as integrated parts of contemporary societies. Anthropologists have often focused on the internal workings of small communities more than the connections between communities and wider social and political structures, or on artisanal and small-scale activities rather than large-scale industrial enterprises that are important realities for contemporary economies. Policy makers and business people have also usually lacked understanding of the social meanings of companies like Solomon Taiyo. ‘STL gives the impression of knowing a lot about the fishing business but not so much about people. Yet it is people that make the difference between a productive operation and one that lags behind its competitors’ (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 23). An understanding of ‘people’ makes the difference between a company that is seen as enabling locals to achieve their varied ends and therefore has goodwill, and a company that is resented as neocolonial and socially destructive. Tausinga’s response systematically addressed the quality control and recruitment procedure concerns in Mamaloni’s letter, but seems to have missed the more important points contained in Mamaloni’s letter about the low status of Solomon Islands in the world system, the continuing lack of economic growth, and the persistence of non-Solomon Islanders filling leadership roles in the capitalist economy. Tausinga also seemed not to notice the nationalist identity politics being deployed. Mamaloni’s framing of complaints about Solomon Taiyo as being caused by the company’s foreigners adroitly deflected attention from his own government’s role in the condition of Solomon Taiyo. The Solomon Islands government had been the major shareholder in Solomon Taiyo since the 1980s so company direction was clearly a government responsibility. As the organization responsible for education policies and systems the government also bore much responsibility for the condition of the Solomon Islands workforce.

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If we are to better understand processes of modernization and globalization we need methodologies for analyzing concrete examples of international business as it operates within and between societies. We need to further build bodies of knowledge that grasp the complexity of capitalism including its social, political, historical, and cultural as well as economic aspects. This book analyzes economic activity as mutually constitutive with the formation of identities. This might seem a strange combination, but many social commentators have wrestled with the homogenizing tendencies of globalization through capitalism and the social fragmentation caused by movements based on identity, commonly depicted as simultaneous and apparently contradictory centripetal and centrifugal forces. One example of this kind of work is Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999). Friedman wrote that the two most important problems for contemporary international politics are the Lexus (as metonym for the economic skills necessary in a globalizing world) and the olive tree (as metonym for the sense of identity and community linked to territory that countries need for stability). ‘A country without a Lexus will never grow or go very far. A country without healthy olive trees will never be rooted or secure enough to open up fully to the world’ (Friedman 1999: 36). Approaches such as Friedman’s to the problems and opportunities posed by globalization are deficient in that they leave important questions unasked. Is selfrule in a territory to which people have affective ties the only way to guarantee a secure sense of self for a people? Why are secure identities for peoples considered a worthy aim only insofar as they are necessary for opening economies for the purpose of growth? But the main problem with formulations such as Friedman’s is that positing stable ethnic identity as a prerequisite for economic development does not go far enough in recognizing the complex causal interrelations between identities and economic activity. Who you are (perceived by self and others to be) affects what you have, what you want, and what you can get. On the basis of gender, social strata, ethnicity, and other identities, people are considered (and consider themselves) more or less suitable for certain kinds of work, and identities affect the value accorded that work. Even where equal opportunity is formally encouraged, the clustering of particular groups around particular types of work or particular remuneration levels shows the persistent influence of identity. Social identities mean some individuals struggle to recognize themselves and be recognized as legitimately belonging in positions of high status and authority, while others are accepted without question as belonging. At the macro scale, a country’s relative level of economic development not only affects the material opportunities of its citizens, it also affects national identity and, by extension, its citizens’ identities. In a world system dominated by capitalism, whether or not a country has the capacity to build a Lexus is not only a matter of economic growth, it is a matter of prestige, and therefore affects levels of self-esteem and security in national identity. The symbolism of the Lexus may thus be reformulated as metonym for the sense of identity and community linked to a country’s economic performance. Indeed, in a globalized world it is arguable that a Lexus is a more potent symbol for national identity than an olive tree.

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The first part of this book sketches a methodology for the analysis of modernization and nationalism in the contemporary world political economy, and traces some of these issues through the histories of Japan, Solomon Islands, and Okinawa. Perhaps the best way to explain the approach to modernization taken in this book is to first eliminate some of the approaches that are not taken. I do not detail the inexorable process by which tradition is replaced by modernity. These questions are not asked: What stage along the path to modernity are these people? What modifications to a universally applicable model of modernization does this case study suggest? To borrow from Arjun Appadurai: ‘mine is not a teleological theory, with a recipe for how modernization will universally yield rationality, punctuality, democracy, the free market, and a higher gross national product’ (Appadurai 1996: 9). Questions I do ask include: Who gains what from identifying people as advanced or backward? What does being perceived (and perceiving oneself) as existing at a certain stage in modernist teleologies do to people’s sense of self and other? How do identities based on these perceptions affect relations between peoples? How do they influence economic behavior and how do they affect the legitimacy of economic activities? The second part of the book then uses this methodology in the case study of Solomon Taiyo. This starts with Chapter 4 detailing the ‘facts’ of Solomon Taiyo as a company, to familiarize the reader with the structure and operations of the company. Then Chapters 5, 6, and 7 analyze manifestations of Solomon Islander, Okinawan, and Japanese identities respectively. Mamaloni’s concern about ‘foreign bodies’ epitomizes the connections between national identity and modernization as played out in Solomon Taiyo. One of the main findings from this analysis is that modernist discourses are a key influence on nationalism, in that modernness is important cultural capital for ethnic identities. The flip side to this is that a perceived lack of modernness stigmatizes ethnic identities. The history of colonialism, in which modernness has been equated with Whiteness (and Blackness with a lack of modernness), means that on a symbolic level modernity has been a profoundly ambivalent object of desire for non-White peoples. The material nature of modernity too has been highly ambiguous, neither wholly beneficial nor detrimental, it has brought power, wealth, and improvements to health, but at the same time been a source of social and ecological breakdown. While predominant ways of thinking about modernization during the twentieth century have tended to dichotomize into proand counter-modern stances, and have tended to separate out the material from the symbolic aspects, I argue that modernization is better envisaged as constituted of interacting material and symbolic aspects, and as something that generates a great deal of ambivalence. From this perspective apparently paradoxical responses to modernizing projects become understandable. People may simultaneously want and not want the changes modernity brings, because while acquiring modernness brings prestige it also implicitly denigrates valued ‘traditional’ identities. And while modernization brings material benefits it also brings new problems.

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Theorizing the identity relations of modernism

Identities and subjectivities are usually held to be something separate from material economic phenomena and thus the two are not usually studied together. But economic status is clearly a crucial factor informing identities. And subjectivities are part of the symbolic baggage people bring to their economic choices. Modernism is a theoretical field most often associated with literary and aesthetic studies, yet here I propose to consider it as a feature of economic development. The purpose of this chapter is to explain how to bring these apparently disparate ideas together as a methodology for analyzing Solomon Taiyo.

How to research identities? There is some overlap between ‘identity’ and the notion of ‘role’, which was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Both studies on identity and on role focus on social presentations of self, but studies of identity tend to focus on the subjectivity involved with inclusion in or exclusion from certain groups, whereas the study of roles focused on the rights and duties involved. The concept of identity was first developed by psychologists for understanding the behavior of individuals, then was extrapolated for the study of society and social relations. The division between individual personalities and socially influenced traits is a contentious one. Yannis Stavrakakis has outlined some of the pitfalls of using psychology for the study of social phenomena such as his own work on the use of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explain politics (Stavrakakis 1999: 1–12). At the same time, the distinction between individual identities and collective identities may be seen as an ‘artificial dilemma’. As Etienne Balibar has pointed out. ‘[a]ll identity is individual, but there is no individual identity that is not historical or, in other words, constructed within a field of social values, norms of behavior and collective symbols’ (Balibar and Wallerstein 1995: 94). We generally notice identities when they are raised as social problems, are asserted in ‘identity politics’, or are celebrated in cultural production. As Michael Billig (1995) pointed out, however, identity formation is going on all the time in ‘banal’ routines, such as the hanging of national flags on public buildings in the USA. Identities are vastly complex phenomena. One complexity is that processes of knowing self and knowing others are mutually informative.

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Edward Said famously pointed out that European definitions of Orientals often amounted to Europeans’ definitions of themselves (Said 1978). In the same vein Marianna Torgovnick pointed out that moderns and postmoderns have similarly defined themselves in their images of the primitive. Social data cannot be neatly separated into evidence of self-identification and evidence of identification of others, often both processes are going on at the same time. Furthermore, these identity creating practices are not one-way. Through being part of the selfdefinition of Europe and modernity, and being incorporated as images of the exotic, Orientals and Primitives have participated in the creation of identities of Europe, the ‘West’ and modernity, and in turn take the images created of them and adapt them to their own uses. Not only are processes of knowing self and knowing others elaborately entwined, knowing self and being known are also inextricable processes. Pierre Bourdieu described this as interaction between the percipere and percipi. The social world is an object of knowledge for those who belong to it and who, comprehended within it, comprehend it, and produce it, but from the point of view they occupy within it. One therefore cannot exclude the percipere and the percipi, the knowing and the being known, the recognizing and the being-recognized, which are the source of struggles for recognition, and for symbolic power, that is, the power to impose the principles of division, knowledge and recognition. But nor can one ignore the fact that, in these truly political struggles to modify the world by modifying the representations of the world, the agents take up positions which, far from being interchangeable . . . always depend, in reality, on their position in the social world of which they are the product but which they help to reproduce. (Bourdieu 2000: 189) In addition to the fact that identities are created both internally and externally, there are also different kinds of external identifications. Richard Jenkins called human collectivities defined in terms subjectively meaningful to the members ‘groups’, as opposed to collectivities defined by objective criteria predetermined by external observers, which he called ‘categories’ (Jenkins 1997: 54–55).1 Jenkins found, in the tradition of anthropologist Fredrik Barth’s work on ethnicity, that identity collectivities are groups, and should be studied according to the perceptions and criteria of members rather than objectively observed as manifestations of universal categories. Class collectivities may be both identity groups (‘a class for itself’) and analytical categories (‘a class in itself’) (Jenkins 1997: 54–55; Balibar and Wallerstein 1995: 84). A problem with studying identities defined in terms meaningful to the members is whether researchers who are outsiders can make any sense of the members’ meanings; issues of translation across cultural, class, and gender divides, and across time, are a vexed and probably unresolvable issue. An issue related to these complications about internal and external creations of identities is that what people are/do and what they are known to be/do are different

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but not separate things. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus posits that the social contexts within which people grow up predispose certain groups to develop certain qualities. These qualities may be statistically measured and established as social ‘fact’. These dispositions are created through social processes, as are tendencies to notice particular dispositions in other groups. How people know what people are/do is affected by patterns of interpretation of information. Information used to categorize people is not simply absorbed raw – it is mediated by what people are willing/conditioned to see, according to their habitus. Widespread knowledge of dispositions as ‘facts’ therefore makes them part of the social processes that create the dispositions. For example, women grow up with various ideals about womanhood around them that encourage particular ways of living and discourage other ways. For social reasons (as well as whatever biological factors may be present) therefore, many women tend towards certain dispositions. These dispositions are in turn used as evidence that women are a particular way. In this vein, the perception that large numbers of women are ‘feminine’ (however defined) contributes to the social processes that create dispositions towards femininity. There are constant and diffuse cause and effect relationships between peoples’ actual ways of life and perceptions of their ways of living. In short, within any given social phenomena, identities of self and other are mutually constitutive, identities are created from both inside collectivities and outside, and processes of being, of knowing self, of being known and of knowing others are tangled together. But the complexity does not end there. A further complication to the study of identities is that people have multiple identities and each identity influences the others. For example, the identity ‘working-class White woman’ is quite different to that of ‘middle-class White woman’. Both are different to men’s identities in either class, different again for various racial, national, or ethnic groups, and different again according to religion, sexual orientation, status as able-bodied or not, and so on. Different kinds of identities operate together to give rise to a whole range of social phenomena. Balibar and Wallerstein assert that race started off as a class identity (to distinguish and naturalize the distinction between aristocracy and peasantry) but has been extrapolated to include even gender (Balibar and Wallerstein 1995: 29–36). They traced links between chauvinisms based on race, class, and gender to show that these chauvinisms work together and they may be seen as part of the one capitalist world system. For example, ethnicity and gender work together in legal and cultural frameworks to create households, which are important economic units and the structures within which reproduction occurs. Ethnicity and class interact for the development of occupational groupings, and class inequities are often ethnicized (Balibar and Wallerstein 1995: 83; Appadurai 1996: 144). Race, nation, and ethnicity are what most people have in mind when thinking about identities. These communal identities are of one type in that they may all refer to whole collectivities of people, in contrast to identities such as gender and social strata, which generally refer to relations within (and across) peoples. Any attempt to distinguish among race, nation, and ethnicity must include the

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caveat that the terms are often used interchangeably, and communal identity groups are often spoken of as being more than just one of these three types of identities. ‘Race’ is generally used when the basis of identity is perceived as consisting in shared biological inheritance, as opposed to cultural characteristics or a homeland. Race is being used when people are described in terms of their phenotypical characteristics such as skin color or perceived genetic connections often expressed as shared ‘blood’. Because of European colonialism and slavery ‘racism’ is often seen as something specific to relations between Whites and non-Whites, but non-White people have also engaged in categorizations of peoples based on perceived biological traits. Some of these racisms by nonWhites have been expressed in terms remarkably similar to those used in racism by Whites, not least because non-White ideas on race have incorporated European terminology and ideas (Dikötter 1997b). Nations may be defined as being comprised of three components; a people, their past, and their land, as reflected in the sentence ‘we have been here for a long time’ (Pettman 1996: 46, emphasis added). Ghassan Hage (1998) phrased the distinction in slightly different terms: ethnicity, race, and nation may all be used in essentializing and inferiorizing identity politics but nation also implies a spatial dimension – the ‘nation’ has territory, a space where nationals have greater rights than those deemed to be outsiders. Shared biological inheritance and shared culture are important parts of some national identities, but in these areas the terms ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ could equally apply. The combination of those forms of identity with a belief in the right to governance and selfdetermination via statehood in a particular piece of territory is distinctive to ‘nations’ as identity groups. Counter to the widespread belief that nations belong and are formed in particular territories, some theorists have pointed out that many national identities are partly formed from nationals being absent from their land for long periods of time through migration and diaspora. The link between land and nation remains normatively strong, but in actuality many contemporary nationalisms have been created and conducted outside the homeland (Appadurai 1996; Clifford 1997; Hage 1998). Ethnicity is a less politically volatile term than either race or nation. Racial identity relations may be euphemized by calling them ethnic, and the term ‘ethnic group’ is often applied to peoples within states to avoid the territorial and sovereignty implications of ‘nation’. Ethnic identification may have biological undertones, and may also be linked to a piece of land, but ethnic identification usually emphasizes shared culture. Ethnicity is often also used as an umbrella term for communal identities that have a mixture of racial, national, and ethnic connotations, as well as for tribal and other kinds of communal identities. Identities are fundamental parts of social and economic relations. Identity relations involve processes of drawing of lines between self and other; identifying with the in-group and distinguishing the in-group from others. These processes are major influences on human interaction. Identity relations affect the

12 Identity relations of modernism way we see similarities and differences between people. They act to include and exclude people from social groups and influence the qualities ascribed to those groups and the members. Identities, like ‘power’, therefore, may be found in virtually all social interactions, so to make a sensible study of them it is useful to define the purpose of the study at the outset. I once heard an academic preface her paper at a conference with an interesting agenda; she was studying Whiteness with the aim of one day obliterating the category and all categories of race.2 How practical or desirable is such an aim? Experience has shown that it is a fallacy to think that universalism may replace particularisms such as racism. Universalism has often amounted to assimilation of marginalized groups, who are supposed beneficiaries of universalism. Furthermore, marginalized groups often value their difference from dominant groups and may be offended by the suggestion that their difference is irrelevant. Universalism and particularisms are not necessarily opposites, indeed particularisms contain their own universalisms (Balibar 1994: 191–204). For example, the racial category ‘Yellow’ in China enabled marginalized groups to be included in the nation, at the same time as stigmatizing Blacks and Jews (Dikötter 1997a: 9). The chauvinist potential of racial categorizations is obvious, but all social categories may potentially be used to chauvinist ends, and it by no means follows that chauvinist violence will disappear if racial categories disappear. Social categories per se are not the problem. It is the meanings imputed to certain categories and the practices that flow from those meanings that may result in chauvinism. Identities that are closed, exclusive, and deny hybridity can result in violence towards people perceived as deviant. But identities with clear boundaries can also be vehicles for self-expression, solidarity, and celebration of heritage. Uncertain identity boundaries can be a source of anxiety, but also enable liberation. Analysis of identities may help us better differentiate between their potentials for violence as well as their more positive potentials. So rather than trying to get rid of the category of race, I would rather define my aim in studying identities as working out what it is that has made race relations so violent and how that may be addressed. One factor clearly causally related with violent identity relations is power inequality, so in this book identity is studied in connection with power relations. Since Michel Foucault there has been widespread recognition of the significance of the non-material aspects of power relations (Hindess 1996), and identity is a key area the non-material aspects of power are played out. Ranajit Guha (1997: 20–21) has discussed power inequalities as being made up of dominance and subordination; which are two sides of the same coin, and the interplay between them corresponds with the Hegelian notion of history as master–slave dialectic. Dominance and subordination respectively are made up of coercion and persuasion, collaboration and resistance, and the shape taken by these four is historically contingent. For example, domination may be made up of more persuasion than coercion (Gramscian hegemony) or more coercion than persuasion (Guha 1997: 23). Colonial India was ‘dominance without hegemony’ because even Indian intellectuals thoroughly educated in European thought were not persuaded

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that British rule was right and natural. I use Guha’s formulation as a methodology for analyzing identity relations as aspects of power relations by looking for patterns of domination, subordination, and their constitutive elements in identities. Since power is ubiquitous in social relations, however, there are caveats to be made regarding the study of power. Several scholars have pointed out that power has been overused as a tool for analysis in social research. Michael Brown quoted Marshall Sahlins from a ‘curmudgeonly after-dinner address’ to the Association of Social Anthropologists as having said: ‘power is the new functionalism’, and that much contemporary analysis reduces all culture to power (Brown 1996). One point to bear in mind is that, as shown in the work of Bourdieu and Foucault, power often operates in ways not easily recognized as such. Some kinds of coercion are clearly recognized, and are equally clearly resisted, but in many cases the distinctions between coercion and persuasion, collaboration and resistance, and phenomena that may be none of these things, are much less clear. For example, in the presence of hegemony, social pressures may blur distinctions between persuasion and coercion. Acquiescence to domination in the context of social sanctions on non-compliance does not necessarily mean persuasion, so situations must be critically analyzed for the kinds of pressures that potentially load people’s choices. Second, some academic work on power has focused unevenly on the domination side of the equation. This obscures the fact that weaker groups are often aware of the ways in which they are being dominated and are ingenious in resisting, even while appearing to collaborate, and may adapt situations of dominance to suit their own ends (Hanlon 1998; Fry 1996). For example, a preoccupation with dominance in writings about Pacific Islanders has resulted in much victim identification, resulting in ‘despondency theory’ (Sahlins 2000) or ‘fatal impact theory’ (Howe 1984). Writers too busy looking for domination have ended up representing colonized peoples as being without agency and colonized cultures as fragile things that collapse in the face of much stronger colonizer cultures. These representations may be disempowering. A related problem is an overemphasis on the power relation in which the researcher is interested, often between local communities and some outside force, which tends to obscure the importance of people’s internal politics (Ortner 1995; Brown 1996). On the other hand, an overemphasis on the subordination side of the equation is also problematic. Important work has been done by scholars such as James Scott on analyzing resistance, especially the myriad small forms of resistance most easily engaged in by subordinated people as a continuing part of dealing with repression (Scott 1985). Some researchers, however, possibly seduced by romantic images of anti-colonial struggles and possibly loath to be seen as ‘blaming the victim’, have tended to overlook collaboration in articulations with modernity, and have read resistance into social practices that were arguably not about resistance (Ortner 1995). Too quickly and uncritically accepting resistance as the motivation for actions obscures other explanations, oversimplifies, and denies the ‘complexity and creativity’ of people’s own concerns (Brown 1996).

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According to Frantz Fanon ‘the Native’s laziness [was] the conscious sabotage of the colonial machine . . . a sure break upon the seizure of the whole country by the occupying power’ (Fanon 1991: 294). Large-scale refusal to become the kind of workforce the colonials wanted certainly inhibited colonial expansion and therefore had the effect of resistance. It seems likely there were complicated motivations involved, however, and some of the many personal refusals making up ‘the Native’s laziness’ might be more accurately labeled something other than ‘conscious sabotage’. Intent and consequences should be considered when studying resistance (Scott 1985: 295–303). Scott’s ‘malicious speech acts’ are interesting examples of resistance. Some verbal protests may be resistance but some might better be described simply as expressions of resentment, or even Nietzschean ressentiment. A further point about resistance is that habitus affects whether or not resistance is effective. Resistance only works when the legitimacy of the domination being resisted is in crisis, and when the resistance is couched within the dispositions of the people involved. Otherwise actions of protest do not amount to resistance but only result in approbation of the protestor (Bourdieu 2000: 234–236). Another problem with some work on power is the use of simplistic binaries like rich and poor. Dorinne Kondo (1990) has asserted that considering the widespread questioning of the use of binaries in other parts of the social sciences and humanities, the practice should not remain unquestioned in analyses of power. In Kondo’s research she found that artisans in a factory producing Japanese sweets had complicated and contradictory attitudes to their position within the company. At certain times of year they worked illegally long hours and clearly resented this as a form of oppression, but at the same time felt a sense of masculine pride in their hard work, visible when they compared their product with that of other companies (214–255). She found that oppressed people engaged in collaboration and resistance; both bought into hegemonies and struggled against them, as part of their daily lives. Power is not a simple repressive force used by some on others. Lines of power inequality, such as those between worker and boss, become more or less salient depending on the identity relations at play in particular social contexts. That is, people who are superiors at work might be subordinated along ethnic or gender lines when socializing. At the other extreme from simplistic binary portrayals of power is work drawing on Derrida that acknowledges the complexity of power relations, but which may be somewhat difficult to follow (Ortner 1995: 183). In sum, some of the pitfalls in analyzing power relations include overemphasizing domination (overlooking resistance), overemphasizing resistance (overlooking collaboration), overemphasizing politics between local people and external agents of change (overlooking communities’ internal concerns), oversimplifying power relationships, and overcomplicating them. In this methodology I hope to avoid some of these imbalances by looking at the constitutive elements of both domination and subordination, and critically assessing their interconnectedness from various perspectives.

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Several social theorists have given us tools to conceptualize identity relations as aspects of power relations; postcolonial scholars’ ‘colonialism of the mind’ (Nandy 1988), Foucault’s ‘discourses’, Erik Erikson’s (1974) ‘identities’, and Irving Goffman’s (1968) ‘stigma’ all shed light on the politics of identity relations. I also find Bourdieu’s (1985; 1990; 1993; 1997) notions of ‘habitus’, ‘field’, ‘cultural capital’, ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘principles of hierarchization’ useful for this purpose. Ghassan Hage (1998) has used Bourdieu’s ideas to discuss power and ethnic identity. One example he gave is of differences between the perceptions of a Lebanese Australian boy and a White Australian police officer. The police officer described the boy as ‘a piece of shit’. The boy, however, said of the police and White Australians in general ‘they’re all shit’ (42–43). ‘A piece’ implies something small, but ‘they’re all’ implies something bigger than the individual. Hage found that the different sizes implied in these depictions of the problem reflected the respective ethnic positions of the speakers within the field of the Australian nation. Popular tropes of Australian nationalism presented by Hage also showed relative positions of different groups within the field of the nation. Some positions are subordinated, or are off-stage. In Australian nationalist tropes of the ANZAC soldier, women had roles as nurses, or as keeping the home fires burning and the wheels of industry turning. In tropes of the bronzed surfer, women waited and admired on the beach while holding the Chiko Roll. In various images of Australia both Aborigines and non-British immigrants were the lowly paid and exploited domestic workers, farm workers, and factory workers for Anglo or Irish bosses, male and female (66–67). The world political economy may be seen as a field in which peoples (usually conceived of as nations, although race and religion have also been important collectivities) compete for rank. People compete within fields for various kinds of capital – symbolic and/or material – in a manner analogous to economic competition. Cultural capital is a kind of capital used to accumulate symbolic ‘profit’ (such as honor and prestige). Hage once described cultural capital as something people accumulate in aspiring to maximize ‘being’, that is, feeling good about oneself and one’s place in the world, which is inextricably linked to identity.3 Particular tastes in music or certain speaking accents are examples of cultural capital that enable the holder to be recognized as a member of dominant groups; and a lack of cultural capital marks them as not belonging, which is symbolic violence. The drive to accumulate various kinds of capital is a desire with both rational and compulsive aspects.4 Cultural capital is not equally available to all players because its accumulation is affected by habitus. The habitus of dominant groups tends to make it easier for members to acquire cultural capital and the habitus of subordinate groups tends to make it harder. Identities, as informed by people’s habitus, are both reflections of hierarchical social relations and manifest dispositions that tend to reproduce those relations. Habitus may be described as somewhere between free choice and structural determinism. Strategies and choices for change are possible, but only within the structures that produce them (Bourdieu

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2000: 138). The complicated interactions of various social forces shaping habitus mean they are not static, they change over time, and some are more fluid than others. Habitus, cultural capital, and symbolic violence interact to make it seem that each group’s assigned position in the field is their natural or inevitable position. When the legitimacy of these positions is questioned on a social scale there is potential for change in power relations. Bourdieu called the rules for competitions over capital within fields ‘principles of hierarchization’ (Bourdieu 1993: 38–45). Principles of hierarchization organize players into hierarchies within a field. They influence people’s evaluations of things, events, and people, which in turn elevates some groups and brings others down. Value systems are principles of hierarchization. For example, within capitalist value systems, being identified as having a good work ethic affects people’s rank. Particular principles of hierarchization contribute to the dominance of particular groups in society because they bolster the symbolic aspects of their dominance. The application of different principles of hierarchization results in change to the positions of groups within the field, so people struggle to have particular principles prevail over others. For example, a struggle over the definition of ‘art’ is a struggle over what kinds of art are to be valued highly, which means a struggle over who gets most material and/or symbolic rewards for their art. Part of the struggle over the definition of ‘art’ therefore, is a struggle over the identities of the groups involved, and their relative ranks in the field (Bourdieu 1993). The creative use of principles of hierarchization is a strategy to produce social transformation. In this sense Bourdieu’s principles of hierarchization operate similarly to Foucault’s discourses. Discourses are part of power inequalities and have profound effects on identities (Foucault 1991). Discourses are representations of the world, ways of expressing ideas about the world through language, which color the way people understand the world and their evaluations. As such, discourses necessarily affect the subjectivities and identities of the people for whom the discourses are salient. Identities and relations between identity groups vary across different discourses. Broadly speaking, discourses and principles of hierarchization may be seen as part of people’s worldviews, which are influenced by habitus. The particular context in which people are socialized predisposes them to view the world in particular ways, with corresponding effects on hierarchical relations between identities. A great deal of work has been done to explain the subordination side of power equations in terms of identities. Richard Wright described subordinate identification in terms of oppressed subjectivity. This is a perspective with spatial orientation, as an ‘angle of vision . . . an outlook of people looking upward from below’ (as paraphrased in Gilroy 1993: 160–161). Wright drew on Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘frog perspective’ and psychoanalytic theory to explain that oppressed perspectives contain both love and hate towards the object against which the subject measures itself. ‘He [sic] loves the object because he would like to resemble it; he hates the object because his chances of resembling it are remote’, and because attempts to identify are rejected by dominant groups. In a classic work of social

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psychology Erik Erikson noted that certain identities are shunned, people generally strive to escape identification with these groups. He called these ‘evil’ identities, not because they are morally bad but because people treat these identities as if they were evil. He cited ethnic out-groups, minorities and exploited groups as examples of evil identities (Erikson 1974: 58). Subordinated groups often find it difficult to avoid adopting at least some aspects of the image created for them by dominant groups. ‘Therapeutic as well as reformist efforts verify the sad truth that in any system based on suppression, exclusion, and exploitation, the suppressed, excluded and exploited unconsciously accept the evil image they are made to represent by those who are dominant’ (Erikson 1974: 59). Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘stigma’ helps explain how this occurs (Goffman 1968). All things being equal, most groups tend to consider themselves ‘normal’. Stigmatization is the process by which some people, usually dominant groups in society, are able to impress a sense of abnormality on others, usually subordinate groups. For example, Keesing noted that categorizations from outside became self-fulfilling prophecies in the case of the identities of Kwaio people of Malaita (who are stigmatized as violent pagans) as defined by other Solomon Islanders (who are mostly Christian). He found that some Kwaio individuals who were quiet and calm at home in their village, when not being observed by outsiders, might swagger and behave violently in town, where they were observed by people who expected them to act that way (Keesing 1992: 240). Various postcolonial theorists have found that colonial relations predisposed the colonized to act in particular ways that the colonizers then used as evidence for their belief that colonized people’s deficiencies meant they were incapable of self-government in the modern world. For example, according to Fanon (1991), French colonials insisted that the biology of North African brains and/or the cultures of North Africans made them criminally inclined. The French refused to see ‘that the nature of a crime or the frequency of offenses depends on the relations which exist between men and women and between persons and the state’ (ibid.: 293–310). Memmi (1965: 90–91) also found that the colonial situation predisposed the colonized to act in ways that colonizers then used as evidence of their image of the colonized. A group of Subaltern Studies historians have since the early 1980s focused on identities influenced by colonial subordination, especially in South Asia. Subaltern Studies drew on ideas from Antonio Gramsci who dubbed those subject to the hegemony of ruling classes the subaltern classes. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony involved persuasion through ideology, in processes like those at play in ‘discourse’ and ‘principle of hierarchization’. Subaltern Studies ideas have been used to understand postcolonial societies around the world. One of the points raised is the effect of colonization on the minds of colonized peoples. The social condition of having been colonized exhibits some of the features of subordinated identity noted earlier. For example, various scholars of colonialism have pointed out that colonized peoples came to internalize the ‘evil’ identity created for them by the colonizers.

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Nandy found that colonial images of Indians were adopted by Indians, in part because they resonated with tropes in indigenous idioms of domination and subordination (Nandy 1988: 16–17). Fanon (1991: 293–310) wrote that many Algerians accepted French identification of them as ‘a bad lot’ and wrote that he would know the revolution was working when Algerians freed themselves of this colonization of the mind. Constantly confronted with this image of himself, set forth and imposed on all institutions and in every human contact, how could the colonized help reacting to his portrait? . . . ‘Is he not partially right?’ he mutters. ‘Are we not all a little guilty after all? Lazy, because we have so many idlers? Timid because we let ourselves be oppressed?’ Wilfully created and spread by the colonizer, this mythical and degrading portrait ends up being accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized. (Memmi 1965: 87) Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka found that Melanesians similarly ‘came to accept their status as native colonial subjects, inferior to their European masters’, even after having been through attempts to ‘reestablish their dignity’ in social movements presaging Independence (c.1996: 1). Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic violence’ can also explain how subordinate groups may come to accept their subordination, at least on some levels. Symbolic violence is perpetrated through a multitude of social practices, which act in concert. Symbolically violent practices are generally not recognized as violent or even as being based in power differentials. Particular cultural tastes are used in class identifications and so even something as apparently apolitical as preferences in music may act to hierarchically demarcate socio-economic groups (Bourdieu 1993). Symbolic violence is often manifest in small bodily gestures and reactions of habit and etiquette that act to keep certain people ‘in their place’. Dominated habitus means that even with conscious awareness of domination, people’s bodies make it difficult for them to challenge the domination. For example, people from subordinate groups become ‘tongue-tied’ when they step into roles usually associated with dominant groups, such as public debate (Bourdieu 1997: 51). This means that awareness of domination without a change in the social relations that produce the dominated habitus (which produces and transmits dispositions) will not alleviate the domination (Bourdieu 2000: 138). A further point to note about subordinated identity is that categories of identity, definitions of deviancy, and modes of resistance are all couched in terms set by dominant groups. Even if stigmatized groups organize to resist their stigmatization and to change the ways normals relate to them, they often do so within the boundaries of the group as set by dominants (Goffman’s ‘normals’), so the resistance is double-edged. For example, the stigma experienced by people in the future may be reduced by politicizing a stigmatized identity and challenging the stigma, but by calling attention to the category the category is reified (Goffman 1968: 139). Gayatri Spivak (1988) has noted that people identified as

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subaltern can only speak about being subaltern using categories of the dominant, indeed the category subaltern exists only in the context of domination. This is an area where the resistance and collaboration aspects of subordination are difficult to disentangle. At times negative identification that looks like stigma is not directed down a hierarchy. Jewish people in contemporary US society are a group with stigma whose position in society is not subordinate. Furthermore, in some cases stigma is ambiguous. Goffman (1968) cited the identity of rock star as one that is both stigmatic and glamorous. Then again, some groups do not feel negative effects from processes of stigmatization because they do not accept the dominant group’s mode of categorization. Goffman (1968: 173) cited people who opt out of nine-to-five society as being stigmatized by normals, but if they reject mainstream values they are either indifferent to or find dignity in their stigmatized status. A further scenario is where one group may avoid internalizing negative identification from another group through schisms in language and culture, or through social distance. For example, Koreans in Korea may find it easier than Koreans living in Japan to avoid negative effects from stigmatization in Japanese identifications of Koreans. There are many complicated reasons why subordinated identity is more or less of a problem for different people, including individual personality traits, or positions of relative privilege for individual members of subordinated groups. Evidence that some people escape some of the worst psychological and material effects of subordinated identity, however, should not be taken to mean that subordinated identity does not exist or that it is not a problem. Dominant identities are the other side of the coin in analyzing identity relations as power relations. Fewer thinkers have worked on this side; gender inequalities have been thought of within the framework of Women’s Studies and racial inequalities have been thought of as Black Studies or Aboriginal Studies. But since the 1990s more people have realized the importance of studying the identities of dominant groups. A group becomes dominant in society when its definitions of capital (including aspirations, ideals, and tastes) and symbolic violence come to seem natural and are therefore effective in shaping the field. This sets the ‘topography’ of the field, the ranks held by various groups, and the various kinds of capital needed to occupy those ranks (Hage 1998: 192). Whereas subordinated identities may be stigmatized, dominant identities are prestigious; they constitute a form of cultural capital. Hage described Whiteness as an identity with cultural capital in the field of the nation in Australia. Whiteness in this sense is not an essence or a physiological feature, but an ideal of nationhood, and an ideal of leadership identity within the nation (Hage 1998: 59–60). Over the history of Australia various kinds of White identities (such as ‘Anglo-Saxon or Celtic White’ or ‘cosmopolitan White’) have been dominant identities in Australian society. Just as subordinate identities may contain the perspective of looking up at the rest of society, dominant identities contain an elevated perspective from which they look down on the rest of society; a giraffe to Nietzsche’s frog. Ghassan Hage

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uncovered such perspectives in various ways of speaking about multiculturalism and immigration in Australia. For example, he cited an anonymous statement on immigration written on a wall: ‘May I remind you that you are here in Australia. You are welcome to bring yourself, your family and your culture to this country, but please leave your bigotry and your racism behind’ (1998: 16). Hage went on to show that this apparently anti-racist opinion about immigration actually shared common ground with racist anti-immigration discourses in Australia because the statement was written from the position that White Australians had the right to welcome people or not into the national space, and to decide what people may bring with them. Hage called this stance ‘governmental belonging’, as opposed to the ‘passive belonging’ to the nation of subordinated groups. Hage’s work showed how dominance is revealed through the perspectives adopted in representations of society. Hage’s analysis of graffiti in Sydney also contained another important point about dominant identities. Dominance may coexist with egalitarianism. Both dominance and representations of the world that reproduce dominance may be disputed from within dominant groups, and not all members of dominant groups consciously want subordinated groups to suffer subordination. Just as people may not be consciously aware of treating certain identities as evil (Erikson 1974: 58), dominant group members may not be aware that they assume a dominant position. Egalitarian norms often preclude people from explicitly admitting relations of superiority and inferiority, but even people who abhor chauvinism and prefer to think of themselves as egalitarian may unconsciously imply superiority in their speech and actions because of the subtle workings of habitus. For example, people who believe it is unfair to discriminate against people with disabilities might still use the word ‘retard’ in a derogatory fashion. A further important point about dominant identities is that dominants tend to locate the reasons for their dominance in the practices or nature of subordinated groups, rather than in the relations of domination. This is counterpart to the feature of subordinated identities whereby subordinated people come to resemble the evil image of them created by dominant groups. Habitus, in producing dispositions towards certain practices in particular groups, and in producing dispositions to notice certain practices as evidence of particular constructions of identity, contributes to dominant groups being able to sustain such reasoning. For example, working-class habitus may valorize physical pursuits, such as boxing, and discourage academic pursuits, such as reading. The subsequent tendencies to play sport more than read in working-class people may be seen by elite groups as demonstrating that people born into working-class families ‘naturally’ have skills and preferences towards physical rather than mental exercise, and thus justify elites’ positions of leadership. Dominant identities are as complicated as subordinated identities; and may be equally inconsistent in their effects. Kondo’s (1990) point about the multivalent nature of power is particularly salient here. Power, as she conceived it, is indelibly part of identity, and as such shifts across social contexts as particular identities are more or less relevant. For example, identities based on job type, gender, age, and

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schooling mean there are different patterns of dominance and subordination in the workplace, family, hobby groups, local politics, when shopping, and so on. This is particularly the case for people whose identity as a whole is made up of both dominant and subordinate parts, as in identities such as White Lesbian or Aboriginal Magistrate. As with subordination, however, inconsistencies in manifestations of dominance need not disprove overall situations of domination. In sum, my methodology for analyzing identity relations boils down to the following points: Some identities are subordinated in society. This may be visible in their perspectives on the world, such as feelings of ‘not fitting’ in high social positions. Negative aspects of subordinated identities are often internalized by subordinated groups. Frustrations associated with subordinated identity result in a love/hate attitude towards dominant identities. Dominance and subordination are visible in representations of society via perspectives (giraffe or frog) on the world and stances assumed vis-à-vis other groups. Dominant narratives of society often justify dominance through negative identifications of subordinate groups as being unsuited to leadership. Neither dominant nor subordinated identities have homogeneous effects on people, and both are complicated and multiple. Power operates across the various fields of social life through principles of hierarchization, in social interactions that are often unrecognized as exercises of power, and which shape identities.

Modernity, modernism, modernization, and modernness If the world political economy is conceived as a field, modernism is one of its key principles of hierarchization. Although modernism is often understood as a literary and/or aesthetic movement, Marshall Berman (1982) has shown that it may be envisaged more broadly; bringing together theorists as divergent as Marx and Goethe to show that political economy was actually a form of modernism. Modernity may be characterized as an economic and political condition of society. There is a long list of factors which serve as criteria for modernity, such as capitalism (or, until the late twentieth century, state socialism) being the dominant economic system, an ethic of profit-maximizing individualism, industrialized production, a significant service sector in the economy, a certain material standard of living, government based on democratic principles, a secular rules-based legal system, bureaucratized mass systems for administration of education and health services, Western science as the dominant mode of knowledge, wide availability of modern technologies, the list goes on. Modern society is also thought to inculcate alienation and anomie because of its secularism and individualism. As well as an externally observable and measurable condition of society, modernity is also an ideal; the utopian endpoint in modernism. A difference between modernity as lived experience and modernity as an ideal has been described by Tim Oakes. He distinguished between ‘false modern’ which he used to indicate a utopian ideal of modernity held by Guizhou villagers in China who saw that modernity existed in cities, not in their lives, and ‘authentic modern’, the

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process of modernizing, of human subjectivity struggling ‘ambivalently but irrevocably . . . over the trajectory of socio-economic change’, which was very much a part of the lives of those villagers (Oakes 1998: 25). Modernity as ideal has had different meanings for different people. During the twentieth century, socialist ideals of modernity were politically significant. Free-trade advocates, environmentalists, and social democrats have all had different visions of modernity. Many studies of modernity have focused on the societies of Europe and North America (generally thought of as modern) but modernity is also defined by what it is not; ‘primitivity’ or ‘backwardness’. According to Marianna Torgovnick the ‘primitive’ in the imaginary of the West has been a mirror for the self-identification of moderns. Meanings given to primitivity have been ambiguous – noble savage or cannibal, sexualized object of desire, or object denigrated as barbarous – depending on what moderns wanted to see in the mirror (Torgovnick 1990). ‘Backwardness’ is less ambiguous than ‘primitivity’ in that it is fairly clearly pejorative (people don’t collect backward art, for example), so ‘backwardness’ may be seen as part of a narrative that posits modernity as a good thing and non-modernity as a condition to escape. Modernity as culture can be conceptualized as existing through travel, over time, and across places considered modern and not. In their pursuit of modernity people move through many different local spaces, incidentally adding their contributions to modernity along the way (Clifford 1997). According to Marshall Berman (1982: 174) Russia in the 1800s was seen by Russians and others as lacking modernity, so modernity had different meanings in Russia than it did in Western Europe. Jonathan Friedman (1996: 112–114) discussed the Congolese (in Africa) and the Ainu (in Japan) as two peoples for whom modernity, and its flip-side, tradition, had particular meanings because they saw themselves and were seen by others as not modern. The Congo was decolonized so Congolese were able to reassert indigenous social formations, which meant they felt in touch with their traditions, and also meant they felt that modernity existed outside their country. Many Congolese wanted to bring some aspects of modernity into their country for reasons of wealth and power, and some attempted this aesthetically through the consumption of European designer clothing. The Ainu, on the other hand, were still colonized so saw modernity as existing all around them, and saw tradition as existing in the past. Many Ainu have tried to bring tradition into their present through the production of artifacts and rituals to bolster their sense of self. Cultures of modernity are underpinned by modernism, which Berman (1982: 16) defined as the ‘visions and values’ entailed in making one’s way through, and coming to belong in, the ‘maelstrom’ of modernity. Sometimes separate strands of modernist discourses contradict each other. For example, cosmopolitanism and universalism are both modern liberal norms, yet may be in contradiction, as may the norms of liberty and equality (Balibar 1994). Tessa Morris-Suzuki (1994: 599) has pointed out that with hindsight it seems inevitable there be a collision between two key contradictory aspects of modernity; European colonialism and European liberal notions of nationalism and self-determination.

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Modernism, like modernity, has a core set of defining features, but has been manifest differently across time and culture, so it is more accurate to speak of modernisms. Earlier modernisms have been rejected and modified by succeeding versions. For example, universalist modernism denied ethnicity, then multicultural modernism has celebrated ethnic difference (Berman 1982: 332–335). Decentralization of production and investment from the North to the South has led to changes in modernism. Modernism has become increasingly challenged in the West, and Asian variants have emerged. Asian modernisms may be characterized as less individualistic than Western modernisms but share ‘a competitive strategy of accumulation of wealth and power, as well as a largely future- and development-oriented perspective’ (Friedman 1996: 95–96). The operation of cultural capital and symbolic violence is slightly different in each variation. One of the defining features of modernist worldviews is a belief in the potential for improvement through change, both personally and for societies. Modernization – the achievement of modernity as a condition of society – is one such process of change. Social thinkers and governments have devised blueprints for modernization. Early efforts involved studying histories of Europe and North America to plot their paths to modernity, generally coming up with some version of a formula by which traditional society was replaced by modern society, with industrialization playing a crucial role. Preeminent was W.W. Rostow’s model with five stages of economic growth (1961). Barrington Moore detailed three alternative routes to modern society; ‘bourgeois revolutions culminating in the Western form of democracy, conservative revolutions from above ending in fascism, and peasant revolutions leading to communism’ (1967: 59–50). Attempts to explain modernization for the purposes of emulation came to the fore following World War II at the beginning of an era Wolfgang Sachs has called the ‘age of development’, which began in 1949 when Harry S. Truman announced that countries of the South were ‘underdeveloped areas’ (Sachs 1997: 2). Truman proposed that these places should be assisted to become like the United States (to prevent them from becoming like the Soviet Union). It was generally expected that modern consumer goods and technologies, as well as values of entrepreneurialism and pride in achievement through work, would spread into non-modern societies via trade conducted by the middle classes. Up to this stage orthodox Marxist theories of modernization were similar to liberalist modernization theories in supposing that non-modern societies required a bourgeois capitalist period, although to liberals bourgeois capitalism was the end point of the modernist teleology, whereas for Marxists bourgeois capitalism was just one of the steps on the way to their modernist utopia of communism. Nonmodern aspects of society were seen as ‘obstacles’ to development and the aim was to identify such obstacles and dismantle them. Failures to develop were seen as the result of factors internal to developing societies. Other theorists found that obstacles to development existed outside nonmodern countries in the structure of the world political economy. The fact that world commodity markets were on the whole less profitable than markets for manufactures led the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) to

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propose that a continuation of the trading pattern wherein Latin American countries exported raw commodities to pay for imports of manufactures would not lead to the diffusion of modernity but to impoverishment. So the ECLA plan for modernization was to protect markets for subsidized local manufactures as substitutes for imports. This worked well in some countries for several years but economic hardship escalated in Latin America in the 1960s. At the same time the 1949 revolution in China and the 1959 revolution in Cuba had caused a rethinking in Marxist circles about the necessity of a bourgeois capitalist phase in socialist versions of modernization. Perhaps pre-capitalist societies could go straight to socialism. Additionally there was a crisis of modernity in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So the ECLA model lost its appeal and a new body of theory on development – dependencia – came to prominence in Latin American policy circles and North American academia, then diffused among policy makers and academics around the world. The central tenet of most theories of dependency was that colonialism had made economies of the South fundamentally different to those of the North (or West). Northern development was seen to have been causally related to underdevelopment in the colonies. Colonialism had set up a constellation of metropoles and satellites both between the West and the South, and within the South between urban and rural areas. Metropoles extracted wealth from satellites, leading to development and underdevelopment respectively. Dependency theories are often called neo-Marxist because they drew on Marxist thought but varied from established Marxism in several important ways. For example, in dependencia colonialism was considered the biggest influence on development in the South, and Marx had written almost nothing on imperialism. Furthermore, orthodox Marxism focused on the mode of production whereas dependency theories were more about modes of exchange (trade). Dependency theories also varied significantly from Marxism in their vision of the path to modernity. Most dependency theorists seemed to be aiming for a fair and egalitarian liberal version of capitalism, whereas in Marxism capitalism is supposed to be exploitative and inequitable, so that it leads to socialist revolution. There were various different kinds of dependency theory. Palma characterized these as ranging from ‘formal theories of underdevelopment’ as is typified in the early work of Andre Gunder Frank, to more nuanced ‘methodologies for the analysis of concrete situations of underdevelopment’ exemplified by the work of Cardoso and Faletto (Palma 1978; Frank 1978). According to the formal theory, dependency meant that development in countries of the South was impossible while they remained engaged in world trade. In dependency theory understood as a methodology for examining situations of underdevelopment, development would possibly occur to some extent in satellites through participation in the world economy, but would be skewed and still dependent on the metropoles. Meanwhile, neoclassical economics had a set of blueprints for modernization more in line with early modernization theories, in that they were based on the belief that contact with modernity causes modernization and its benefits to

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spread, unless there are obstacles (such as trade barriers) in the way. In the 1970s and 1980s the success of some oil-producing countries in gaining wealth from trade in a commodity, and growth in the economies of the ‘Tigers’ in Asia (and for a time some Latin-American countries) appeared to disprove some simplistic versions of dependencia. By the 1980s neoclassical economics understandings of development were gaining the upper hand in policy circles and academia. These were adapted into a policy mix often labeled ‘neoliberal’, characterized by faith in small government, free trade, and privatization. Neoliberalism has had great influence on domestic policies, and also in powerful United Nations bodies such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and in multilateral development funding agencies such as the Asian Development Bank. In the late 1980s the demise of command economies as an alternative to market-based capitalism was greeted with triumph by liberal capitalists. It further strengthened the influence of neoliberalism and bolstered the belief that policies aimed at growth in gross national product would result in economic development. Simultaneously and paradoxically, evidence piled up that despite decades of development assistance since Truman’s speech, poverty remains a fact of life for most of the people on the planet. Ecological and social problems associated with attempts to modernize became widely recognized. There was growing disillusionment with modernity in Europe and North America. For those unconvinced by neoliberalism development had hit an ‘impasse’ (Schuurman 1993). Many anthropologists became ‘disillusioned with history; development was understood as disaster’ (Friedman 1996: 70). Ever since the emergence of modernism as a recognizable worldview there has been criticism of the destructive potential of developmentalist change, but late-twentieth-century counter-modernism was distinctive in that discussion became polarized between those optimistic of the potentials of modernity and those pessimistic of it (Berman 1982: 17). Many late-twentieth-century counter-modern movements saw conventional economic development models as gendered, and exclusionary of local knowledge and local people. Countermodernists made explicit the role of power in scientific knowledge, they questioned the nation-state and the individual as appropriate units of analysis, they pointed out that social and ecological destruction in the pursuit of capitalist profit was hardly ‘progress’, and so on. Kate Manzo (1991) found similarities between the underlying philosophical attitudes towards modernity of some movements concerned with development and theorists such as Foucault and Derrida, who are often described as postmodern. Feminist ecologists, traditionalists, liberation theologists, relativists, alternative development strategists, primitivists, and postmodernists made up some of the late-twentieth-century counter-modern movements. The impasse led some theorists to write of the end of modernization. For example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri wrote of postmodernization, wherein informatization replaced industrialization as the goal (Hardt and Negri 2000: 285). Others described the shift as a new form of modernization, such as

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‘reflexive modernization’, whereby technological change and other kinds of change are questioned rather than accepted by definition as ‘development’, and therefore a good thing (Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994). Yet others found space opened up for non-modernist views of social trajectories in public and academic debate on modernization. Clifford wrote of the opening up of ‘alternatives to the one-way street of traveling “West” ’ (Clifford 1997: 10). This last response arose as part of a growing awareness that modernism contained particular ways of conceiving of human history, conceptions which influenced images of peoples (identities). Modernist discourses involve teleological views of history. Their implicit or explicit utopia is modernity, defined against a dystopia of backwardness. ‘Progress’ and ‘development’ are needed to attain modernity. Francis Fukuyama very clearly expounded a modernist view of history when he wrote [t]he notion that mankind has progressed through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slaveowning, theocratic, and finally democratic-egalitarian societies, has become inseparable from the modern understanding of man [sic]. (1989: 4) Anthropological modernism was manifest as functionalist evolutionism as typified in the premise that societies developed strata, and evolved from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to feudal societies to modernity, in order to most efficiently meet their material needs (Friedman 1996). These ways of conceiving of history have transformed relations between peoples in terms of time and space. Prior to modernism other peoples had been considered ‘out there’, in modernism they came to be considered ‘back then’. Modernism developed in Europe at the same time as colonial expansion, of which a central activity was the ‘discovery’ of peoples and classification of them as ‘primitive’ compared to ‘advanced’ colonizing societies. According to Torgovnick, modernity has required the primitive ‘as a precondition and a supplement to its sense of self’. Primitivity is both exotic and familiar to moderns, an opposition that explains us (Torgovnick 1990: 8, 11, 246). Kate Manzo (1991: 10) used ideas from Derrida to describe modernist discourses as ways of thinking about the world in terms of hierarchical dichotomies. One of the most important of these dichotomies has been to place the modern world above ‘other areas of the globe which remained “traditional”, that is, less cosmopolitan, less scientific, less secular, less rational, less individualist, and less democratic’. Modernist identifications are visible in the use of terms such as ‘yet’ and ‘still’. For example: ‘the diverse cultures of the 800 islands in the Solomon Archipelago, with their 200 languages, have yet to be welded into a national unity’ (Daily Yomiuri 1999: 16(A), emphasis added). Another example: ‘When Sukuna was first appointed to the Legislative Council, colonial officials hoped he would help guide the Fijians in “their transition to individualism” . . . He now governed

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them with the conviction that they were “still at heart subsistence villagers” ’ (Norton 2000: 151, emphasis added). Modernist teleologies are manifest in notions that ‘subsistence’ or non-cash economic systems are primitive and should be abandoned in favor of capitalism, and that communitarian social relations should be broken down into European style individualism. In describing the ‘politics of historicism’, Dipesh Chakrabarty found that for places like India a singular view of history has involved a preoccupation with development and modernization, which lead always to seeing failure in India (2000: 6–16). Postmodernism may be modernist when it places another evolutionary step beyond modernity in a teleological fashion. A ‘post’ modern celebration of diversity may be modernist if peoples that do not celebrate diversity are denoted backward. Such places are usually in the East/South so this amounts to variation on the theme that ‘they’ are lagging behind the West/North (Billig 1995: 155). Modernism as a discourse, or a principle of hierarchization, pervades international organizations and is visible in international media representations of all sorts of identities. In holding up modernity (the condition of society in ‘developed’ countries) as the ideal to which ‘underdeveloped’ countries should aspire, modernism has ranked peoples of the world in hierarchies according to their relative levels of ‘modernness’. I refer to the identity and cultural capital aspects of modernity as ‘modernness’ (like ‘Whiteness’ in Ghassan Hage’s White Nation) rather than ‘modernity’, so as to distinguish the identity aspects from modernity as an ideal and as social condition. In the world political economy modernness is cultural capital, a prestigious identity, something to accumulate for status. Identification as modern is based on a combination of criteria such as particular kinds of technical skills, cultural competencies, values, and the size and growth rate of one’s national economy. Modernism acts on many identities, including gender, but its effect has been strongest on our understandings of ethnicity, race, and nation. Other small countries have transformed themselves greatly without being colonized. Thus a number of countries of Central Europe . . . But our listener has been smiling skeptically. ‘Yes, but it isn’t the same thing.’ ‘Why not? You mean, don’t you, that those countries are populated by Europeans?’ ‘Well – yes!’ ‘There you are, sir! You are just simply a racist.’ (Memmi 1965: 113) Modernness has always been linked to communal identities; especially to the prestige of Whiteness and the stigma of non-White identities. Arjun Appadurai wrote that when growing up in India he ‘first saw and smelled modernity reading Life and American college catalogs at the United States Information Service Library, seeing B-grade films (and some A-grade ones) from Hollywood at the Eros Theatre, five hundred yards from my apartment building’ (Appadurai 1996: 1).

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Modernity was seen to exist in America, not in India, despite the existence of picture theatres and apartment buildings in India. Since colonization Indian identity has included the belief that White people have modernness and Indians do not, and this difference was part of the ideology of colonial rule. Ideas about Blackness have been infused with perceptions of primitivity. Notions of the primitive and the civilized which had been integral to premodern understanding of ‘ethnic’ differences became fundamental cognitive and aesthetic markers in the processes which generated a constellation of subject positions in which Englishness, Christianity, and other ethnic and racialized attributes would finally give way to the dislocating dazzle of ‘Whiteness’. (Gilroy 1993: 9) Africa has been the ‘mythic counterpart to modernity’ with corresponding effects on the identity of people of African descent (ibid.: 113). Du Bois asserted that exclusion from modernity was something that affected not only Africans but all who ‘suffered a common disaster’ – the alienation brought about by slavery and colonialism – including peoples of ‘Yellow Asia and into the South Seas’ (Gilroy 1993: 126). To Du Bois the defining feature of the twentieth century was ‘the color line’; by which he meant contact between ‘European civilization’ and ‘the world’s undeveloped peoples’ (Du Bois 1971: 262–286). European colonialism allowed the rise to prominence of modernism as a principle of hierarchization for communal identities. Indeed I would say modernism is a large part of Ashis Nandy’s second form of colonialism – colonialism of minds – by which ‘the West’ has been universalized. Colonialism of the mind was the ideological counterpart to territorial and bodily colonialism, but it outlasted decolonization and ‘is now everywhere within the West and outside; in structures and in minds’ (Nandy 1988: xi). Modernity gave European colonialism its material power, and modernist identifications of ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ peoples were important parts of colonialism’s symbolic power. As non-White peoples gained formal independence from colonial governments, modernist notions of social, political, and economic development overtook race as the main principles of hierarchization. Japan demonstrated that non-White peoples could modernize without being colonized. Liberal norms of racial equality and national self-determination expanded and delegitimized the racial logic of colonialism in the mainstream, so racial or ethnic identities came to be partially delinked from the rationale for the ordering of the hierarchy between peoples of the world. Developmentalist modernism varied from colonial racist modernism, in that modernness came to be seen as achievable selfimprovement through rational strategy, rather than as a biological given. Ranks came to be assessed in terms of traveling time to modernity, rather than in absolutes; upward mobility became conceivable. I say partially because decolonization was only a partial revolution of the international political economy. Materially the subordinate position of former European colonies changed little

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in the first few decades after decolonization (although increasingly many Asian countries are upwardly mobile). Symbolically also, the fact that identifying certain racial groups as less capable of ‘doing’ modernity than others became socially unacceptable did not mean all tendencies to link modernness with race identities completely disappeared. Developmentalist modernism as a principle of hierarchization was laid over the top of colonial racism. In other words, the principle of hierarchization that posited European peoples as naturally civilized/superior and colonized peoples as naturally uncivilized/ inferior did not simply disappear when colonial governments were dismantled, or when overt racism became unacceptable in the mainstream, or when rank in the world system became couched in terms of relative industrial economic development rather than in terms of race. It changed, shifted, and fragmented, but did not disappear. Several scholars have made the argument that modes of categorization that denigrated colonial subjects survived decolonization to denigrate development subjects. David Hanlon wrote a history of Micronesia with a focus on the role of United States’ ideology, pointing out continuities between colonialism and development (Hanlon 1998). Hanlon asserted that development and modernization discourses are continuations of teleological colonial discourses that defined colonized peoples as primitive and savage. Non-modern ways of doing, being, and knowing have been dismissed in development circles with pejorative terms such as ‘backward’, ‘primitive’, ‘savage’, and ‘traditional’ (ibid.: 7–9, 21, 87). Kate Manzo argued similarly that whereas in the nineteenth century difference had been inferiorized as a lack of civilization, in the twentieth century difference came to be inferiorized as tradition. Local cultures were to assimilate Western ideals and then modernization and development would occur (Manzo 1991: 10). Clifford highlighted such a sense of competition in relating the story of an argument between an Indian and an Egyptian. The argument was about ‘whose country [was] better, more “advanced” ’, each ‘claiming to be second only to “the West” ’ (Clifford 1997: 4). The trope of childhood is an example of identification of colonized peoples that carried through into identification of underdeveloped peoples (Ramos 1998: 15–24). Manzo noted that tropes of childhood were prevalent in the early modernization theory phase of the 1950s and 1960s (1991: 15–18). For example, in Samuel Huntington’s version of modernization theory, Third World countries were portrayed as turbulent teenagers, and in dependencia, Third World countries were seen as adults whose growth had been stunted by the world capitalist system. Hage found that Western countries imagine themselves to be parents to ‘a host of nations imagined to be in various stages of development on the way to “adulthood” ’ (Hage 1998: 143). Apart from decolonization, other changes to modernism in the twentieth century included the rise and fall of the socialist command economy as a modernization strategy, the rise and fall of neomarxist theories of development, the rise and rise of neoclassical economics theories and neoliberal development policies, and the simultaneous rise of social movements espousing counter-modernism opposing the implementation of neoliberalism.

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‘Modern’ as dominant identity Whites have dominated the world system through their capitalist strategies of wealth accumulation and material technologies. This material domination came along with modernist worldviews (among other discourses) that explained and justified White success. The identity ‘modern’ is a dominant identity. This dominance is visible in the stances moderns assume vis-à-vis people they identify as nonmodern, and often moderns portray the reasons for their domination in perceived deficiencies of subordinated peoples (rather than in power relations). For example, Hanlon found that USA administrators felt (Micronesian) Yap culture discouraged work, and felt the land-tenure system was incompatible with economic development. Causes for failure to develop were found in perceptions of backward customs, and/or overpopulation. He cited a USA Navy report which concluded that Micronesian culture prevented development, and quotes American administrators who saw assertion of Micronesian identity as ‘an excuse to loaf’ (Hanlon 1998: 84, 97, 104). In (Micronesian) Palau few locals chose to enter the tuna-industry workforce, which USA administrators assumed was because ‘long trips beyond the reefs were culturally unpalatable’. A researcher, however, found that Palauans did not take up jobs in the tuna industry because the levels of pay for Palauan public servants were set at USA levels, so in comparison the pay for working on tuna-fishing boats was too low to be attractive (Pollard 1995: 9). The ideological underpinnings of USA administration of Micronesia included a notion that Americans are modern and Micronesians are not (yet) and therefore Americans are better suited to govern. American administrators were predisposed to look for lacks of modernness in Micronesians to justify their dominant position. Although it is rarely a conscious intention, moderns portray non-moderns in ways that justify moderns’ dominance. The hierarchizing effects of developmentalist modernism are obscured by the many egalitarian norms existing in development discourses. After all, development is supposed to be about reducing economic inequity. Nevertheless, developmental discourses result in the social ranking of those seen as ‘in need of development’ below those seen as ‘having developed’. This led Hanlon to call development discourses ‘insidious, self congratulatory platitudes’ (Hanlon 1998: 240). Hanlon saw developmentalism as a subset of Orientalism whereby countries deemed Third World ‘came to be known and controlled through the writing, describing, interpreting and teaching of [development] and by experts whose tools of measurement reflected the rationality and logic of their own very privileged powerful world’ (ibid.: 10). In developmentalist modernism dominance is evident in assuming the stance of ‘modernization expert’. Development consultants, visiting dignitaries, even tourists from places identified as ‘developed’ often adopt such a stance when talking about places identified as ‘underdeveloped’. The modernism of neoclassical economics assists with the subordination of the Third World. In neoclassical economic theory indigenous economies are labeled as backward, traditional, subsistence, having excess labor and inefficient allocations of resources. The theory of change implied in neoclassical explanations of

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modernization is that contact through trade with a modern economy causes dynamism in the non-modern economy, goods are produced for sale and the allocation of resources becomes more efficient. Development experts and leaders of governments trained in neoclassical economics (and its discourses) write reports and develop policy framed within discourses that represent non-modern ways of life as inferior and in need of fixing. The discourses of development economics are not simply analytical, they are also stigmatizing identity politics.

‘Non-modern’ as a subordinated identity ‘Few cities, even in the Third World, can prepare the visitor for the squalor of Angola’s once elegant capital Luanda’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1999, emphasis added). In contemporary global modernism, the Third World is a key stigmatized identity. Notwithstanding the intentions of those who first coined the term, labeling a country Third World can imply the country is corrupt, disease-ridden, and socio-politically unstable. Labeling people Third World can imply they are dirty, dangerous, criminal, lazy, crazy, uneducated, cheap labor, or in need of charity. For example, ‘Third World looking’ immigrants have been stigmatized by White Australians worried about immigration (Hage 1998). The fact that Kenya produced more than one budget in each financial year was taken by US officials as an indication of the ‘incompetence’ of ‘Third World economic management’, despite the fact that a coherent economy as presented in USA annual budget texts was fictitious, and OECD states subsequently came to release more than one budget a year themselves (Marcus 1990: 348). Our habitus about the Third World predisposes us to expect administrative incompetence and look for evidence of it. One of the important points mentioned earlier about stigma was that it does not have uniform effects. The identity ‘Third World’ is as complicated as any other identity. People who use the term ‘Third World’ do not necessarily intend derogatory implications, and not all First World people treat all Third World people badly. Some nationals of countries considered Third World are internationally rich and powerful and may not feel stigmatized, because they have the cultural capital – education, language skills, experiences, and tastes – to be comfortable operating in the First World. At the same time the economic and cultural lives of other less privileged people living in countries identified as Third World may be more locally focused, so their international identity as Third World is not salient to them. But there is no doubt that generally speaking this identity has stigma, and the symbolic violence of categorization as Third World is linked to the subordinated situation of the Third World in the world political economy. The identification of national economies as ‘developed’, ‘developing’, or ‘underdeveloped’ is a crucial factor in how citizens are seen and see themselves in relation to the rest of the world. According to Berman, Russia was the ‘archetype’ of the Third World as non-modern. The anguish of backwardness and underdevelopment played a central role in Russian politics and culture, from the 1820s well into the Soviet period.

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Identity relations of modernism In that hundred years or so, Russia wrestled with all the issues that Africans, Asian and Latin American peoples and countries would confront at a later date. (Berman 1982: 175)

Before colonization, whether or not Europeans considered them inferior was a non-issue for most non-White peoples. Identities were shaped instead by various local discourses. But colonialism’s material subordination brought with it symbolic violence, which often had devastating physical and psychological results. Ton Otto wrote that in the context of coercive colonial domination and racist White ideas about Melanesians, the colonized peoples of New Guinea compared the efficacy of their own cultures in providing for them with the culture of their dominators. They found White people ‘more powerful and the lives of the White people seemed easier, healthier and wealthier’. He discussed this process as ‘value dominance’, a process by which people come to see themselves as inferior by their own estimation. This was extremely damaging to local identities, and indeed in the early colonial phase some groups abandoned many of their values and ways of living in despair (Otto 1991: 145). The colonial image internalized by colonized peoples included pejorative feelings regarding their perceived lack of modernness. According to Otto, something in local cultures, which were inherited from the ancestors, were seen as ‘responsible for the backwardness’ of both the ancestors and colonized Melanesians. ‘Thus indigenous cultures were generalized, related to the past, and critically assessed in one conceptual move’ (Otto 1991: 145). This type of colonial modernism constituted successful symbolic violence, in that locals were persuaded (if temporarily) that White rule was inevitable, in some cases even legitimate. Resisting modernist subordination has involved adopting the categories of modernism. Many scholars noted this in relation to colonialism (Nandy 1988: 3; Memmi 1965: 129; Keesing 1992: 200–236; Guha 1997: 98; Fanon 1991: 10). One of the ways ‘non-moderns’ have appropriated the categories of modernism and used them to resist colonial and developmentalist modernism has been through counter-modern movements of traditionalism. Traditionalism challenges modernism and the hierarchies entailed through valorizing a cultural capital (tradition) different to the cultural capital of the dominant discourse of modernism (modernness) (Hage 1998: 194–197). Both Giddens and Friedman have noted that traditionalism is generally attractive when modernity and the modernism that underpins it are in crisis (Beck et al. 1994: 100; Friedman 1996: 189–193, 243). Before modernity what are now called ‘traditions’ had vastly different meanings. Indeed, many contemporary traditions arose through contact with colonial modernity. Anthropologists have highlighted misconceptions about indigenous practices as static islands of pre-contact ‘tradition’ (misconceptions which earlier generations of anthropologists helped create). For example in Ponam, Papua New Guinea, Carrier and Carrier found many social features which developed from precolonial bases but that all of what was considered

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traditional had changed radically from what it was before European contact (Carrier and Carrier 1989: 235–237). In Otto’s (1991) study of the development of traditionalism in Baluan, Papua New Guinea, kastam (usually spelled ‘kastom’ in Solomons Pijin) was a wide term, including everything that was seen to be of the village or of the ancestors (143–145). It was in opposition to the ways and things of White people. When the symbolic violence of colonial modernism was at its strongest, traditions were shunned by some colonized peoples. But in situations where colonialism was not hegemonic, or lost its hegemony, traditionalism has been a potent rallying point for anti-colonial sentiment and the revalorization of indigenous identities. In the post-World War II period kastam was negatively valued in Baluan and the Paliau revolutionary movement abolished most aspects of traditional life. By the 1980s kastam was much more positively valued (because of nationalist movements surrounding Independence) and had become an important, albeit contested, part of village life. Kastam was at stake in interaction between village and town, and in interaction between the national and local economies. Meltzhoff and LiPuma found that, in Sa’a in the Solomon Islands, tradition was also negatively valued during the years of the Maasina Rule movement following World War II, but by the 1970s was reevaluated more positively (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1986). Traditions such as the skipjack hunt and its rituals were reintroduced to boost local self-esteem and coexisted with newer features of village life (Laracy 1983). The ground work laid thus far brings me to the point where I can reasonably expect the reader to know what I mean when I say that national identities in the contemporary world political economy are shaped by modernist discourses, in which ‘modern’ is a dominant identity and ‘non-modern’ is subordinate. Before applying this theory of modernism as identity relations, however, I want to take the idea of ‘non-modern’ as a subordinated identity one step further. According to the theories mentioned earlier, in oppressed subjectivity there is simultaneous love and hate of the object against which the subject is measured. Thinking of subordinated identities in modernism in terms of simultaneous love and hatred of modernity is very useful in understanding people’s complex responses to modernization.

In two minds about modernity Various concepts of double consciousness have been used by theorists to explain responses to modernity by non-White peoples. Guha found that the Indian colonial situation had two ‘idioms’, that of the colonizers and that of precolonial Indian political traditions. He asserted that that paradoxes in Indian political culture were the product of the Lacanian ‘double meaning’ from the ‘coexistence of two paradigms as the determinant of political culture’ (Guha 1997: 24, 62–63). Memmi found that bilingualism means having two worldviews, but the bilingualism of colonialism is special because of the power and identity relations between the worldviews (1965: 107). Du Bois found that being both American and Black was a form of ‘double being’ (1971: 19–31).

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The frog perspective was mentioned previously as one formulation of oppressed subjectivity; people with subordinated identity both love the dominant identity (because the surrounding discourses and material conditions make it seem desirable) and hate the dominant identity (because their chances of identifying with it are slim). Memmi found that colonized people, especially the middle classes, often wanted to emulate the model presented by the colonizers. In the face of colonizers ridiculing and rejecting their attempts to identify, the colonized came to hate the colonizers and their model, but not completely. They remained caught and torn between love and hatred (Memmi 1965: 120–140). Wright called the simultaneous desire for and rejection of the ideal object ‘double vision’, which Gilroy denoted a version of double consciousness (1993: 161). In the identity relations of modernization, countries seen as Western (or industrialized, developed, wealthy, growing, and progressive) are the object against which countries considered Third World (or underdeveloped, backward, and poor) are measured. Modernist discourses are the principles by which countries are hierarchized, and identification as modern and the material benefits of modernity have proved elusive for the majority of non-White peoples. So for non-White and non-modern peoples there is desire as well as frustration and hatred regarding modernization.5 Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote of a ‘desire to be modern’ as an important social influence in India, but that modernization conceptualized as following a pattern established by others was an unoriginal and subordinating goal (Chakrabarty 1992). Modernist discourses that rank peoples in the world system have their roots in a traumatic colonial past. These discourses have been an instrumental part of the denigration of non-White identities. The historical equation of modernness with Whiteness, combined with the fact that despite decolonization concentrations of wealth and power mostly remain in White hands, means that modernization is a source of ethnic angst. In some cases the frustration and oppression of identification as not-yet-modern contribute to rejection of modernization (ecological and social concerns are among other contributing factors) and espousal of counter-modernism, such as radical forms of traditionalism. The fact that for non-White peoples modernization has been both a nationalist aim and a source of nationalist angst has created one of the most socially important forms of ambivalence about modernity. People want modernization for material reasons, for its exciting possibilities, and also for the status modernness brings to national identity, but centuries of European colonialism have hammered home the idea that modernity is racially White and culturally Western, so desiring modernization may seem like negating non-White self-identity and idolizing the oppressors. We often conceptualize debates over modernity as a struggle between modernists and counter-moderns. Consistent counter-modernism, however, is very rare. Apart from a few short-lived examples, such as Pol Phot’s Kampuchea, rejection of European colonial domination has not meant rejection of modernity or abandonment of attempts to modernize. Notwithstanding the many problems

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modernization brings, there are many reasons people identified as not-yet-modern might desire to become modern. These include the accumulation of health, wealth, power, and prestige modernization may bring. Rather than a clear division between totally modernist and totally anti-modernist groups, contradictory desires for modernization and urges to resist modernization have coexisted within the outlooks of individuals and groups. People do not simply and clearly accept or reject modernity, but respond to it with a deep and abiding ambivalence. An alternative to polemical conceptions of debates over modernization is to see them as struggles between competing modernisms, some of which utilize counter-modern rhetoric to denigrate their opponents’ version of modernism. One of the results of postcolonial ambivalence about modernity has been a splitting of modernity and non-modernity into aspects that are desired and aspects that are rejected. Berman wrote that the splitting of modernity into good and bad parts has also existed in European modernism. Goethe’s Faust and Mephistopheles were embodiments of the good (emancipation and enrichment of human lives) and the bad (obsession with profit) in development. Early Russian populists proposed splitting the good parts of modernity from ‘the breakdown of communities and the psychic isolation of the individual, mass impoverishment and class polarization’ as well as the cultural expressions that sprang from this social turmoil, and make instead a ‘more harmonious fusion’ of modernity with tradition (Berman 1982: 72, 124). Some of the generally desired aspects of modernity are technology, wealth, and health and education systems. Generally rejected aspects are ecological destruction, perceived Westernization and the social disruption modernization is often seen to bring. Modernization seen as Westernization is often denoted ‘loss of culture’, even though ‘culture change’ might be more accurate, and even though cultural changes occur whether or not modernism is present (Sahlins 2000: 57). Traditions may be valorized and celebrated as expressions of indigenous, nonWhite and non-modern identity as an antidote to Westernization through modernization. Such traditions are often deemed necessary for national self-esteem and are assumed to ensure social stability and ecological sustainability (Ruddle 1998). Some aspects of indigenous culture, however, are not valorized as tradition but are rejected even by indigenous people themselves. For example, some kinds of food preparation and waste disposal methods are rejected as unhygienic, or otherwise seen as aspects of culture that should rest in peace rather than be revived. Adoption of Christianity has also caused the rejection of many customs, such as headhunting (decapitation), and some funerary customs. Non-White ideals of modernity are often split into indigenized modernity (desired) and Westernization (rejected). In this kind of non-White modernism non-modernity is split into tradition (desired) and other aspects seen as anachronistic or backward (rejected). Ambivalence about modernity, as it is manifest in splitting and indigenizing modernity to try to achieve a balance between the best of both worlds, is visible in development rhetoric all around the world. Often the rhetoric of splitting and indigenizing modernity is couched in terms of desiring the technology and wealth of modernization without the culture of the West.

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Indigenized modernisms are frameworks for classifying some aspects of modernization as good and some as bad. For example, investment by transnational corporations may be evaluated as good or bad depending on whether it is seen as engendering the desired or the rejected aspects of modernization. Splitting allows for differential evaluations of modernization. It means modernization is not presumed to be a good or bad thing per se, but is more accurately envisaged as containing both positive and negative potentials. Just as White modernisms have their problems, however, so do indigenized modernisms. One result of splitting and indigenizing modernity is a ‘double whammy’ of local sexisms combined with sexisms inherent in many modernization processes. Women are often seen as symbols of their nation, and the traditional-ness of women is often seen as one of the important pieces of nonmodernity to keep and combine with modernity. But women’s (usually cheaper) labor is required for modernization too. Furthermore, articulations between societies’ modern and non-modern sectors in processes of modernization are often managed by men who may use their position as compradors to the (usually White) agents of modernization to gain at the expense of local women. For example, Lastarria-Cornhiel found that in privatization of land in Africa women who had rights in customary tenure often lost those rights in the process of privatizing land because male community leaders and male household heads were better able to stake their claims in those processes (LastarriaCornhiel 1997). Another problem with indigenized modernisms is that technological change cannot be completely divorced from cultural change and capitalism brings with it social relations which inevitably bear some resemblance to other capitalist societies. A result of this conundrum is that rhetorics of modernization without Westernization are often fragmented and occasionally contradictory. For example, Nandy described a convoluted situation whereby people compete with the West ‘on the strength of one’s acquired Westernness’ and counter-Westernism also draws on the West’s critical traditions (Nandy 1988: xiii). At the same time, fears that modernization might produce clones of the USA are probably misplaced. Even without conscious picking and choosing of which parts of modernity and non-modernity to mix, the nature of historical processes means cultural variations in modernity are inevitable. Dipesh Chakrabarty has discussed as interaction between ‘two histories of capital’ the situation wherein the introduction of capitalism in India has inculcated some of the social features of capitalism as manifest in Europe (as modernization theory would predict), but at the same time not operated in precisely the same way as capitalism in Europe, nor caused the eradication of noncapitalist practices (Chakrabarty 2000: 47–71). History 1 is a modernist conceptualization of the past generally attributed to Karl Marx in which progressive changes in economic organization move towards communism. History 2 is another kind of conceptualization of the past Chakrabarty found buried in Marx’s writings, a past that comes from parts of culture other than the economics Marx was centrally concerned with, and which Marx found

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persisted even within capitalist societies. For example, Chakrabarty pointed out that a factory worker, although acting in accordance with the logic of capital in being a factory worker, is more than a cog in a capitalist machine. Even during the eight hours of contracted work each day, workers have other things going on in their lives, such as religion and affective relationships. These noncapitalist aspects of being are affected by capitalism, and may be in conflict with capitalism, but they also affect people’s engagement with capitalism, and the histories of these aspects of being vary across different communities. So the specifics of interactions between History 1 and History 2 mean that capitalism has similarities but also variations across different societies. Chakrabarty also drew on precepts from Heidegger to assert that we have two different ways of making sense of the world around us, through objective analysis and through lived experience; double consciousness in this sense is therefore a natural state for human beings.6 Double consciousness often takes the form of a scientific, rational worldview coexisting with traditional, mystical, religious, or affective worldviews. In other words, a modernist worldview and a worldview that is not modern.7 Chakrabarty argued that the modernist insistence that rational scientific thought is the only valid way to understand the world has done symbolic violence to Subaltern and Indigenous peoples who have other ways of understanding the world (Chakrabarty 1992: 19; 2000: 95). A major way this symbolic violence has been perpetrated is through the application of modernist principles of hierarchization in taking non-modern ways of understanding the world as evidence of incomplete modernization (backwardness). Social theorists often find that the coexistence of modern and non-modern worldviews has the potential for causing confusion and anomie (Du Bois 1971: 19–31; Erikson 1974: 48–49). Du Bois called double consciousness the condition of being Black (or not modern) on one hand and European/American (or modern) on the other, the ‘dreadful objectivity’ of being simultaneously inside and outside ‘the West’ (Gilroy 1993: 30). He experienced double consciousness as ‘two souls, two thoughts, two unrecognized strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder’ (ibid.: 126). Meleisea wrote that in Samoa there are two coexisting ‘systems of legitimacy’ – ‘chiefly authority’ and ‘a set of Western liberal principles’ – and some individuals have abused overlaps and gaps between these systems for their personal gain, causing cynicism and ‘moral confusion’ (2000: 78–80). Swantz found that in southern Tanzania the coexistence of non-modern and modern systems of knowledge ‘split people’s lives into incompatible spheres’. She found many problems for Tanzanian women in the gaps between indigenous culture and modern culture, such as traditional birth attendants versus midwives, a ‘clash of systems’ (Swantz 1994: 98). But is the coexistence of modern and non-modern worldviews always necessarily destructive? Although Du Bois described double consciousness as difficult, his life history shows that it was also a source of creativity for him. Du Bois was able to deftly buy into European myths and undermine them at the same time (Gilroy 1993: 121). He used Western intellectual traditions and

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claimed these traditions were open for anyone to use, indeed he thought Western-style education was necessary for non-White people to be able to emancipate themselves. So double consciousness as the coexistence of different worldviews, like modernism itself, has positive and negative potentials. Ambivalence about modernity understood as double consciousness manifest in the coexistence of modern and non-modern worldviews has its counterpart in the material world. Many countries in the Pacific and parts of Africa have had dual economies. While there are non-capitalist and non-modern sectors in any society, these societies are particularly split, because as well as a capitalist sector there is a non-cash economic sector. For a time social scientists expected that this kind of duality would disappear in processes of modernization. Towns would attract workers and professionals who would settle permanently in town as they had in Europe, North America, and Japan, and the modern economy of town would eventually subsume the traditional economy and inculcate capitalist relations of trade and production, even in rural areas. By the mid-1980s, however, scholars such as Chapman and Prothero were working to ‘unhitch’ theories of urban migration from modernization theory because many people were clearly not shifting permanently and there was no clear linear pattern of movement from rural to urban areas going handin-hand with industrial capitalist development. They discussed terms such as ‘return’, ‘circular’, ‘pendular’, and ‘floating’ migration to explain movements between towns and villages. Contemporary life had brought new reasons for movement – church, school, and public service work – but the wokabaot (walkabout) pattern, which became widespread with wage labor (but in some cultures existed prior to European contact), had remained substantially unchanged. In 1962 only one out of 129 people interviewed in Honiara said they would stay in town upon retirement (Chapman and Prothero 1985: 7). For the vast majority their village remained ‘home’. This situation in Solomon Islands has not changed substantially in subsequent decades. Since we have realized the introduction of capitalism and other features of modern society does not simply subsume non-modern social features, various anthropologists have come up with new ways to theorize articulation between the capitalist modern system in towns and village systems, and the changes undergone by people who go from village to town and back again given that they are clearly not absolutely ‘modernized’ by their time in town (Carrier 1992). Friedman listed three types of articulation between modernity and non-modernity. He categorized Melanesia as being partially articulated, meaning that non-modern social formations and forms of reproduction remained intact. Modernity and its commodities (such as Coke, T-shirts, jeans, and McDonalds) were appropriated for indigenous purposes and imputed with indigenous meanings (1996: 88–100). The ability to retain the distance necessary for a non-modern sector to survive depends on how much coercion and persuasion the modern sector brings to bear on the non-modern sector. According to Roger Keesing, the Kwaio were able to reject the culture of modernity (unlike some other Solomon Islands groups) because there was no material reason Whites wanted to disturb their land (1992: 206).

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C.A. Gregory explored relationships between the capitalist economy, in which land and labor were commodified and cash was the medium of exchange, and what he called the ‘gift’ economy in Papua New Guinea. He found that growth in the use of cash did not result in a corresponding decline in the gift economy as per modernization theories. Rather, the gift economy changed and ‘effloresced’ in response to growth in the cash economy. He argued that the two sectors were not completely autonomous but may be seen as two interdependent parts of a whole (Gregory 1982). Gregory found that the relationship between town and village was one where the gift economy subsidized wage labor because wages were too low to cover the cost of reproduction (a family wage). Costs of reproduction were therefore covered in the village, which was only possible in a dual economy because in a more thoroughly capitalist society there is no alternative to cash for covering the costs of reproduction (ibid.: 143). Coming at the issue from the opposite direction, Carrier and Carrier found that in Ponam the capitalist economy was not subsidized by the village economy but the costs of reproduction in the village were being subsidized through remittances from the capitalist economy in town (Carrier and Carrier 1989: 229). According to Louise Morauta not only the material well-being but also the status of Pacific Island villagers was enhanced by gifts from relatives in town. Having gifts or not reflected on parents’ personal worth because it was seen as evidence of their relations with their children and of their skill as parents in rearing children ‘competent in the ways of the modern world’ (1985: 225). An important point raised by Morauta is that Pacific Island villagers have had their ‘social community of reference split between two places, town and village’ (ibid.: 225). The Kwaio people saw Solomon Islands society as divided in two, with multinational companies, the government and the Church missions on one side, and themselves, identified as traditional people living in villages in the bush, on the other (Keesing 1992: 183–184). This meant Solomon Island elites had to use tropes of tradition to build connections among themselves and villagers because social stratification and the fact that politicians lived in a modern world compared to the villagers created distance between them (Keesing 1982: 358). The Marovo people of Solomon Islands also saw society as divided between the government and companies in opposition to village life, but Christianity had been incorporated into life at the village level so was usually seen as being on the village side (Hviding 1996). Ton Otto’s description of Papua New Guinea’s Baluan culture was similar, although his concept of society was split into three different spheres – gavman (government), lotu (church), and kastam (tradition). The gavman sphere included government, the legal system, the health care and school systems, development projects, and banks. ‘In its widest meaning it may be identified with all aspects of modern development’, as opposed to kastam (Otto 1991: 23–24). According to Joel Bonnemaison the town/village divide implied a division between modernity and tradition. ‘The town is seen as a place of freedom and a symbol of modernity’ so people went to town for its ‘cultural charge’ as well as for material benefits through waged work (ibid.: 57–58).

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These conceptions of divisions in society are not synonymous with each other, but there is a common thread in that the social landscape in these dual societies was conceived as being divided into a sphere seen as capitalist and/or modern, in opposition to another sphere seen as traditional. These spheres roughly correlated with the rural/urban divide, indeed, town and village were often used as metonyms for the modern and non-modern spheres. The two spheres were not equally accessible to all. Bonnemaison noted that social strata affected Pacific Islanders’ use of the articulation between town and village. Because of their employment opportunities elites had ‘a more stable footing in the modern world’ and therefore often made it their home. Young men working as laborers, on the other hand, needed the security of the village. If they could leave the village temporarily, without burning bridges, they tended to go to town for some freedom and cash for a while, then go back to the village (1985: 57–58). Otto described spheres as ‘cultural domains’ and ‘institutional and semantic fields’ (1991: 26). They are not mutually exclusive, rather, differing worldviews coexist and people assume the different worldviews in appropriate contexts. To describe the modern and non-modern sectors in dual societies as spheres, therefore, is to say that they were not only economic sectors but that they contained their own worldviews, as can be seen in the title of the autobiography of prominent Solomon Islander politician Jonathan Fifi’i – From Pig Theft to Parliament: My Life Between Two Worlds (1989). Spheres have their own ‘definitions of authority’, criteria by which people are categorized as more or less suitable for leadership (Otto 1991: 22). Spheres may thus be likened to fields, with patterns of cultural capital and symbolic violence shaping hierarchies between people. Seen this way, spheres affect the identities and subjectivities of people involved in the sphere. In the modern sphere modernism has been a dominant discourse, affecting subjectivities accordingly. The attitudes of village children who spend time away at school are examples of modernism in action in articulations between the town and village spheres. Murray Chapman (1969) noted that in the 1960s Solomon Islands children became scornful of village life through their ‘modern’ life at school. In the 1990s Otto (1991: 221) argued that many young men in Papua New Guinea with some secondary education internalized enough modern values to find village life beneath their dignity, but due to very limited opportunities for employment were unable to succeed in the modern world. They then became ‘drop-outs’ unable to function effectively in either sphere and lived either in the village, but avoided participating in a ‘traditional’ village life with its communal work, or lived in town, staying with and relying on waged relatives. While in modern spheres ‘modern’ is a dominant identity and ‘non-modern’ a subordinated identity, in non-modern spheres identification as non-modern is not necessarily stigmatic or linked to material subordination. In the village sphere modernist discourses have less influence over people’s sense of self and other and their life opportunities. Proficiency in the cash economy is not a prerequisite for putting food on the table in the village, neither does it have such a direct

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impact on social rank as it does in town, where income levels and job descriptions such as ‘unskilled worker’ reflect modernist values. People without the cultural capital necessary to enter the privileged echelons of modern society (residency rights, schooling, English language skills, or other markers of modernness) that give entrée to a decent and reliable cash income, may thus benefit by the dislocation between modern and non-modern spheres in dual societies, because they can stop cash work and return to their village. In other words, the existence of different spheres does not necessarily lead to the negative outcome of people stranded half way between two worlds and unable to function effectively in either. A dual society can also have positive outcomes in that people subordinated and stigmatized in one sphere may find refuge in the other. Thinking of economic development in terms of identity relations and modernism thus allows us to go beyond the polemic of conceptualizing modernity as either good or bad. We have a theoretical framework to deal with both the simplistically positive assertions that globalization leads to world peace and harmony, and the simplistically negative assertions that multinational corporations destroy local identities. Conceptualizing modernism as Both/And removes obstacles to our understanding of the partial and paradoxical ways in which people often engage with modernity.

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This chapter outlines the historical development of the ethnic identities of three peoples brought together through Solomon Taiyo – Japanese, Okinawans, and Solomon Islanders – focusing on modernist influences on these identities.

Japan Japaneseness and foreignness Various polities existed for centuries on the main islands that make up what we now call ‘Japan’. Japan came into existence as a unified political unit in 1604. Japanese identity in relation to peoples around Japan was at that time considered in a framework adapted from Chinese Confucian notions of ethnicity. That is, the further out from the center of civilization the more barbarous the people (Morris-Suzuki 1996). There were four grades of barbarousness: cooked barbarians, raw barbarians, then inner barbarians, and lastly outer barbarians. This notion of ethnicity inferiorized its others, but on cultural or political grounds rather than racial ones (Weiner 1997: 100). Racial groups were recognized but both Black and White peoples were more or less equally inferiorized. The notion of inside/outside in this schema of identity was largely a spatial idea; peoples were identified according to their relative proximity to or distance from the center. From the early 1600s, when Japanese relations with the West were restricted, until contact was reestablished with Europe and North America in the 1850s, ideas of Japanese national identity were concerned with escaping the label of barbarian bestowed by the Chinese on the Japanese as a peripheral people. This was done by setting Japan up as a center itself, with neighboring peoples such as the Ainu and Ryûkyûans as their barbarian periphery (Morris-Suzuki 1994: 602). By the late nineteenth century the ‘modern hegemony of the Western world view’ had reached Japan (Morris-Suzuki 1994: 600). Earlier Chinese-influenced hierarchies of civilization based on spatial notions of distance from the center were overtaken by European-influenced hierarchies of civilization based on temporal notions of traveling-time to modernity. For example, the ideals towards which Japanese administrators thought colonized peoples should be pushed

Map 3.1 Japan.

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changed from the notion of a civilized center surrounded by barbarians, concerned with ‘order, stability and etiquette’, to notions of progress, development, positive change, and the improvement of lives (Morris-Suzuki 1994: 602; 1996: 86, 90). This was about the same time as general Japanese attitudes about China in Japan started to change. China went from being the respected center of culture to being despised as ‘backward’ (Sato 1997: 118–120). Racial identities in twentieth-century Japan developed using ideas from European colonial discourses. For example, European images of Black peoples in colonialism and slavery influenced Japanese identifications of these people such that Blacks came to be seen as inferior to Whites. The hierarchies in Japanese notions of peoples of the world came to be seen in terms of modernness, civilization, and backwardness. Evolutionary tropes became hierarchies influencing notions of ‘civilization’ and ‘primitivity’ as used by Fukuzawa Yukichi in the late 1800s. Criteria for civilization included work habits, and the presence of industry and technology (Weiner 1997: 100–112; Young 1997: 161). New understandings of inside/outside required new words, so most of the words that are used in contemporary Japanese to refer to peoples, nations, cultures, etc., were coined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Bunmei came into use as the equivalent of the European notion of ‘civilization’, and it implied the ability to accumulate ‘material wealth and capital’. New words appeared for nationals (kokumin), ethnic groups (minzoku), and culture (bunka). The word for race ( jinshu) had been used before the Meiji Restoration (1868), but became far more widespread after that when it was easier to import ideas from outside, at a time when hierarchies of racial characteristics were rife in Western thought (Morris-Suzuki 1996: 86–90). Japanese archeologists and anthropologists debated the ancestral origins of the Japanese and various neighboring peoples, and these debates acted as subtexts to support the idea of the Japanese nation as a naturally autonomous polity. Ideas of race were therefore part of the ideology of nation building. For example, definitions of the Ainu as a subset of the Japanese contained racial ideas about ‘mingling of blood’ but also contained non-racial ideas about relative modernness of economy and culture (Morris-Suzuki 1998; Siddle 1997). European ideas on ethnicity were not simply imported in the forms used by Europeans but were adapted to suit Japanese interests in ethnicity; thus Japanese variants of modernist principles of hierachization for ethnicity were created (Young 1997: 160; Weiner 1997: 100–105). For example, Japanese thinkers on nation and race were not comfortable with the position assigned Japanese (as non-White) in European conceptions of racial hierarchies, in which race had negative connotations for Japanese identity, so racial aspects of Japanese nationalism were often implied rather than explicit, and were denied when the question of racism arose (Morris-Suzuki 1996: 88; Massarella 1996: 148; Tomiyama 1995; Young 1997: 200). Therefore jinshu, which like ‘race’ has genetic overtones, was a less popular word for ethnic collectivities than minzoku, which like ‘volk’, ‘ethnic group’, or ‘nation’ has no direct genetic implication (MorrisSuzuki 1996: 88). Although minzoku is not explicitly racist, however, it has been

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defined by Japanese academics as marked by phenotype criteria, and it has certainly been used in the public sphere in discourses of Japanese ‘blood’. The two main tropes of Japanese nationalism in the prewar years were purity and homogeneity, of race as well as culture (Weiner 1997: 98–101). As happened with European colonial racist modernism, definitions of modern Japaneseness as learnable (rather than biologically determined) coexisted with (biologically determined) race as a basis for exclusion of non-Japanese. No matter how hard people such as the Ainu learned Japanese culture, they met with many refusals to be identified as Japanese, proving that racial categorizations were involved (Morris-Suzuki 1998). Japanese nationalists’ unease with European modernist notions of race was an instance of non-White ambivalence about modernism because of the identity relations implied therein, and the reworked Japanese modernist version of ethnicity constituted an example of split and indigenized modernism. Japan is often considered to be a model of successful balance between the good parts of modernity and the good parts of tradition.2 Japanese split and indigenized modernism was also somewhat contradictory. According to Gavan McCormack, Japanese nationalists split European modernity by avidly accumulating economic and military modernness while rejecting ‘Western’ values of civil society such as ‘citizenship, equality, fraternity, solidarity and enlightenment’ (McCormack 1996a: 273). European ideas of ethnicity were mixed with local ideas to develop Japanese self-identity and identifications of neighboring peoples that were attuned to Japanese national aspirations (Young 1997: 58). Neighboring peoples were defined, not simply as foreign, but as related (within the European category of ‘Asian’) and backward, which justified Japanese invasion so the Japanese could liberate and educate their benighted relatives (Morris-Suzuki 1996: 90). Primordialist Japanese nationalism used modernist tropes to define two neighboring groups as Japanese rather than foreign so they could be subsumed within the Japanese Empire as home territories rather than external colonies – the Ainu to the north and Ryûkyûans to the south. ‘The societies of the frontier had shifted, in the framework of Japanese scholarship, from being “foreign countries” (ikoku) to being communities that not only were Japanese, but always had been Japanese, only Japanese stranded in an earlier phase of historical evolution’ (Morris-Suzuki 1996: 91). Because these peoples were incorporated into Japan proper, prevailing notions of nation required assimilation and representations of them as branches of the Japanese people (Hanazaki 1996). The Ainu were viewed by the prewar Japanese administration as a backward subset of the Japanese race, a dying race, and incapable of operating in the modern world without Japanese protection. Ainu writings from the prewar period highlight the damage to Ainu sense of self through these representations; the evil image had been internalized (Morris-Suzuki 1998: 10–12). Japanese notions of cultural capital had been to a large extent accepted (Japaneseness and modernness were prestigious identities) and Japanese symbolic violence was effective (non-Japaneseness and backwardness were stigmatic). Japanese

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representations of the Ainu located the causes of domination in the Ainu themselves rather than in the relations of domination. Japanese often asserted that the decline of the Ainu under Japanese occupation was because of a lack of modernization (not because the Japanese had taken their land and denigrated their culture), that the Ainu would die out if they did not modernize, and that failures to modernize lay in Ainu culture. According to Japanese stereotypes, for the Ainu to become fully part of the Japanese nation they had to modernize, which was defined as losing their Ainuness and becoming Japanese. So the solution was to accumulate Japanese language, dress, housing, lifestyles, education, and daily rituals. Interestingly enough this meant wearing Western-style dress and living in Western-style houses (Morris-Suzuki 1998: 9–10, 13). Ainu people, on the other hand, seem to have defined Ainuness as being both racially and culturally distinct from the Japanese as well as less modern than the Japanese, but felt that the accumulation of modernness would not negate their Ainuness (any more than becoming modern had turned the Japanese into Europeans). An early Ainu activist, Iboshi Hokuto, in describing the awakening of his Ainu identity, presented his determination to work for ‘raising the position of our people’ as a decision not to become a shamo (Ainu word for a member of the Japanese ethnic group) but to be a good nihonjin (Japanese word for Japanese person, it implies citizenship as well as ethnicity) (Morris-Suzuki 1998: 11). This assertion only makes sense if Iboshi saw Japaneseness as split between Japanese culture, denoted shamo, the accumulation of which would negate Ainuness, and Japanese modernness, denoted nihonjin, the accumulation of which could enhance Ainuness by helping Ainu be successful in the modern world. The pattern of identifying other peoples as being in need of Japanese leadership because of their perceived backwardness was repeated throughout Japanese representations of colonized peoples. Japanese imperial government and anthropological representations of Pacific Islanders thus constituted a process of identity formation similar to that in European colonial representations. Japanese imperialists used both local and imported ideas to ‘define and justify the relationship between settlers and indigenous people’ (MorrisSuzuki 1994: 600). Because imperial Japanese notions of themselves in relation to Europeans demanded that their categorization of other peoples not be based on race – Japanese colonialists wanted their colonialism to be ‘good’ colonialism compared to European ‘bad’ colonialism, by not being racist – the criteria used to denote colonized Pacific Islanders as inferior to Japanese were not based explicitly on race but on factors such as sexual behavior, hygiene, education, diet, lifestyle, work ethic, and level of modernization. The result was a colonialism that was nominally concerned with teaching development through ‘co-operativism’, while nevertheless classifying colonized peoples in such a way as to make it seem natural that Japanese people dominate them (Tomiyama 1995). Relations between Pacific Islanders and Japanese were underpinned by coercive colonialism and capitalism but these relationships were strategically ignored in categorizations of both the colonizing self and the colonized other.

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Like their European counterparts, early Japanese anthropologists generally identified Pacific Islanders as inferior to themselves and blamed the features of Islander lifestyles they categorized as inferior on Islander race or culture, overlooking the effect of colonialism on those lifestyles. For example, Islanders were described as inherently lazy rather than as people who preferred not to work for their colonizers, or as people who preferred not to work for little pay under bad conditions (Tomiyama 1995). Notwithstanding Japanese success in modernizing, in avoiding material subordination by Europeans, and in developing their own colonial Empire, symbolic subordination through identification as Asian resulted in an ambivalent love/hate attitude towards Europe. This was evident in the complicated juxtapositions of Japan relative to Europe and Asia in prewar Japanese nationalist rhetoric. The identity relations that went hand in hand with early Japanese industrialism and nation building after the Meiji Restoration were to reject Asia and become part of Europe (datsu-a nyu¯-o¯) (McCormack 1996b: 9). Europeans rejected Japanese attempts to identify, however, so the rhetoric changed from joining Europe to being in competition with Europe (Weiner 1997: 110; Young 1997: 161; Sato 1997: 130–131). In the build-up to World War II Japanese nationalists talked of rejoining Asia in the name of coexistence, co-prosperity, liberation, respect for autonomy, and anti-racism. Despite the egalitarian norms, however, many Japanese people felt the peoples they were invading were of a lower order than themselves. Rejoining Asia was to be nominally an egalitarian partner in opposition to Western imperialism, but was actually as a dominating force (McCormack 1996a: 270–272). Japanese notions of Asianness were ambiguous; when juxtaposed with Europe, Asia was a unified block in competition with Europe, but when Japan was juxtaposed with other Asian countries, Asia was divided hierarchically, with Japan at the top. In Japanese representations of Asia Japan self-identified with the dominant stance of the ‘teacher’ of modernization (Sato 1997: 131). Modernization and ideals of womanhood: social strata and ethnicity Modernization in Japan brought various intersections between ethnic, gender, and social strata identities. These affected notions of womanhood in terms of creating ideal roles for women in cash employment, in the family, and as sexual beings. These intersections also affected the forms taken by social sanctions against women who contravened these norms. During the Meiji period the upper-class model of home and family encapsulated in the household (ie) was generalized to become an ideal for all social strata in Japan (Harden 1994: 180). Ie was, in turn, a model for the national polity; filial piety was the model for respect and duty owed to the tenno¯ (emperor). The homology between family and nation meant that in Japan, as in many other countries in the world, women’s conduct was seen as a reflection of the condition of the nation. Nationalists’ concerning themselves with the conduct of women had several knock-on effects.

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One was that sexual freedom in women was used as a criterion for hierarchizing women, both in terms of ethnicity and of class. ‘Looseness’ was seen as a characteristic of low-social-strata women. The interaction between social-strata identities and ideals of sexual purity in notions of womanhood contributed to the social sanctions against komori (nursemaids), which Jacalyn Harden noticed in prewar Japanese media. Komori tended to come from working-class or peasant backgrounds and their frank discussion of bodily functions and sex was seen as somehow corrupting the children of wealthy families (Harden 1994: 183). In the context of Japanese colonialism, as in European colonialism, this class distinction was ethnicized and foreign women became a low-social-strata group in relation to Japanese women. In both Japanese and European colonialism, as part of representations of the cultural and economic strength of the colonizers in general, colonizer women were represented as morally superior to colonized women (and were expected to conform to this ideal) (Harden 1994: 178–179). It is probable that European ideals of the virginal upper-class White woman influenced Japanese ideals of womanhood, both within Japanese class hierarchies and within colonial Japanese ethnic hierarchies, throughout this period. Thus colonized women were seen as suitable for sex work as ‘comfort women’. Japanese stereotypes of non-Japanese women were, and still are, used as the contrast against which Japanese womanhood is defined. Harden (1994) presented her own experience as a non-Japanese woman living in Japan as evidence that many Japanese people define non-Japanese women as different to Japanese women and part of that difference is that foreign women are perceived to be more sexually active from an earlier age and to accept sexual overtures that Japanese women would be expected to find offensive. Another knock-on effect from the Japanese modernist nationalists’ concern with the conduct of women was the idea that a good woman was first and foremost a wife and mother. Nationalists argued that middle-class women should be dedicated housewives and mothers. The imperatives of industrialization meant that nationalists wanted some women to work outside the home, in factories, but it was generally accepted that the work and lifestyles of these women should be strictly controlled. Working-class women were encouraged to work in factories and live in single-sex company dormitories before marriage, and then they were expected to leave paid employment.3 Lesbians and other women who refused wifehood/ motherhood as their primary role were denounced as un-Japanese (Harden 1994). Using ‘un-Japanese’ as a term of censure was related to concerns about the Westernization of women. In Japanese nationalists’ split and indigenized modernism (as with many non-White modernisms), Westernized women were seen as bad modernity. Non-Westernized women were the good tradition to be mixed with the good parts of modernity to achieve the right balance. Liberal strands of modernism have been used around the world by groups discriminated against in their local culture but non-White women who have used the emancipatory potential of modernism have often met with hearty disapproval from their nonWhite compatriots.4 In early-twentieth-century Japan such women were called modan-gya¯ru (from the English ‘modern girl’) or mo-ga for short, characterized

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by their preference for Western dresses and bob haircuts over kimono and long hair. They often had ‘pink collar’ paid work (Tipton 2002). Nationalists often portrayed mo-ga as selfish and unruly. Mo-ga were resented for not doing their ‘proper’ work at home and were accused of causing economic decline and moral decay through their lifestyles (Harden 1994; Birnbaum 1999). Non-White but modern5 Through the history of European colonialism, modernness came to be inextricably bound up with Whiteness. Anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles have succeeded in delegitimizing these connections but, under close scrutiny, even in the ‘post’ colonial world, the connections between Whiteness and modernness remain tenacious in national, ethnic, and racial identities. The material counterpart to these identity relations is the continued concentration of wealth and power in White former-colonizer countries and the continued lack of wealth and power for the majority of the populations of non-White former colonies. The field of international economic development is a key arena where these identity relations are played out.6 As a non-White country that successfully modernized, Japan confounded White identity throughout the twentieth century. Japan was the central case for debates over whether industrialized societies tend to converge in political, economic, and cultural terms, and also raised debates over how modernity is to be defined (McCormack and Sugimoto 1988). Since the 1990s, as more Asian economies are widely recognized as economically ‘developed’, modernity is increasingly being understood as an Asian as well as a White phenomenon, so contemporary and future Japanese identities will not have the same meanings in relation to Whiteness and modernness. But during the twentieth century Japan’s status as ‘non-White but modern’ was central to Japanese identity, creating confusion over the categories to which Japan could be said to belong. Economically Japan was part of ‘the North’, which distanced it from the rest of ‘Asia’ with its connotations of ‘Third World’, yet culturally Japan was clearly not part of ‘the West’.7 As well as confusion over where Japan belonged in imaginaries of the world, Japan’s success in ‘beating the West at its own game’ provoked anxiety in the West manifest variously in fear of the ‘Yellow menace’ and a sense of rivalry visible in many representations of Japan vis-à-vis the West in books such as Ezra Vogel’s (1979) Japan as Number One: Lessons for America, Bill Emmot’s (1989) The Sun Also Sets: Why Japan Will Not Be Number One, and William Nester’s (1990) Japan’s Growing Power Over East Asia and the World Economy. During and after the 1997 Asian Crisis, Westerners who had been chafed by Asian Values claims triumphantly decried ‘crony capitalism’ (Milner 2000). In Japan the 1997 crisis and continuing recession was seen as an invitation by a string of Westerners to point out what is ‘wrong’ with the Japanese economy, assuming that making the Japanese economy more like ‘Western’ economies would fix Japan’s economic problems.8

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From the other side, books such as Ishihara Shintaro’s (1992) The Japan That Can Say No positioned Japanese rivalry with the USA within the wider context of ‘Asia’ versus ‘the West’ in the Asian Values debate. Contemporary Japanese nationalist historians, as well as giving a positive spin to Japan’s colonial past and wartime aggression, have frequently compared Japanese civilizational and cultural achievements with those of Europe from the same period (Nelson 2002). Some competitive comparisons on the part of Japanese nationalists have included the notion that Japan’s society is superior to the polyglot USA because of Japan’s perceived racial and/or cultural homogeneity (McCormack 1996b: 276). In the words of former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, ‘Japan is an intelligent society. Our average [IQ] score is much higher than those of countries like the US. There are many Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in America. In consequence, the average score over there is exceedingly low’ (quoted in Sautman 1996). Particularly in discussions of business practices, some Western commentators positioned themselves on the pro-Japanese side of the debate over whose modernity is best. Ronald Dore found that the less market-driven Japanese economic model has important benefits missing in the British and North American model, for example, in terms of stability and security for employees and contractors, and in terms of long-term corporate planning (Dore 2000). Other positive Western representations of Japanese capitalism emerged from the belief that Japanese business practices had been more successful than Western ones, leading to a plethora of management texts and tours to Japanese companies to study Quality Circles and Just-in-Time procurement systems, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s (less so after the recession dragged on). The rivalry between Japan and the USA over economic models affected the subjectivities of Japanese and Americans towards each other (Kondo 1990: 25). In the following quote a Japanese woman, Kazue, explained to her American friend Cathy how her identity as Japanese was affected by (her understandings via the media of) American angst against Japanese capitalist modernity. [Kazue:] ‘. . . You feel angry with Japan, all the trade imbalance and so forth. When I was growing up it was the other way around. America was mad at Japan because we were importing everything. We were dependent and weak. Everything we made was cheap, no good. Now it is hard for us to hear it when you complain because you owe us too much money. I don’t mean the government – I don’t care about that’. She points to her heart. ‘I mean in here, individuals, ordinary people we Japanese feel this. We worked so hard for Western approval, we have pride, we didn’t like being cheap, dependent. But now it’s the opposite. The other night on the news in New York I even heard how Japan is taking over America and there was worry about too many Japanese restaurants and Toyotas and so forth. But no one here wears kimono! Look at us! Everything we do is Western. We live in Western-style apartment buildings in Western-style cities. We dress in Western clothes. We eat McDonald’s, we

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watch Batman. It doesn’t feel to us like we are taking over America. And it’s hard for us to see your rich country and understand why you have such a big debt and no one has savings and there’s poverty and unemployment . . . [Cathy] ‘. . . You know’ I say, ‘that we thought about living permanently in Japan. We decided against it – the language was too difficult for us, we didn’t like being gaijin [foreigners] all the time. There are many things we don’t like about Japan, but other things we love. It’s why we built this house, it’s our substitute for the real thing.’ ‘Listen Cathy-san’, Kazue-san says as she gives me a gift. ‘This is better for you than Japan. It happens sometimes – that the imitation is better than the original.’ She laughs again. ‘We know all about that in Japan.’ (Davidson 1993: 276–281, emphases in original) Another rivalry effect in Japanese self-identifications has been a preoccupation with defining Japaneseness as being distinct from the West, which is visible in much nihonjinron literature.9 Marilyn Ivy (1995) has theorized this in terms of nostalgia about that which has been lost in Japanese modernity manifesting in a kind of auto-Orientalist tendency to view the Japanese essence as mystical and incomprehensible, in opposition to logic and rationality, seen as Western traits. These struggles over the symbolism of modern Japaneseness may be seen as efforts to assert that modernization has not meant irreparable Westernization. Huge investments are made by state and non-state actors to valorize certain Japanese traditions, as if to develop counterweights to the parts of Japanese modernity that might be taken for Westernization. Symbolic rivalry over the nature of modernity is also visible in Western representations of Japanese society. One such representation is of Japanese modernity as having gone too far; a scary dystopia of overworked automatons and/or Blade Runner-esque cityscapes (Ueno n.d.). Another is of Japanese modern culture as ‘whacky’ or ‘kooky’, epitomized by use of the character Mathew G. Minami, the loud, camp television presenter in Sofia Coppola’s (2003) film Lost in Translation. In both the prewar and postwar modernizations Japanese modernism was materially powerful, but it lacked the symbolic power of European and North American modernism in the world political economy. In recent decades, however, Japaneseness (and also East Asianness more generally) has become a form of cultural capital in the world political economy, in popular culture, high culture, in high-technology industries and in business more generally (Sautman 1996; Iwabuchi 2002). ‘Non-White but modern’ encapsulates the aspects of twentieth-century Japanese identity that are important for the purposes of this book.

Okinawa The Ryûkyû archipelago stretches between the southern Japanese island of Kyu¯shu¯ and Taiwan, bordering the East China Sea. Human fossils as old as

Map 3.2 Okinawa.

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30,000 years have been found in the Ryûkyû islands, but it is not clear exactly where the ancestors of the Ryûkyûans came from, or whether they came from more than one place (Lebra 1966; Pearson 1996; Hudson 1999). Annexation of the Ryûkyû Kingdom For much of the last millennium the Ryûkyûs were a transport and trading hub in the China-centered region (Furuki 2003). Ryûkyû was a unified kingdom from 1416 to 1609, when it was nominally taken over by the Satsuma Daimyo based in Kyu¯shu¯ . In reality the seat of government on the main island of Naha was too remote for effective control to be exerted so Ryûkyû remained a functionally independent tributary state of Kyu¯shu¯ until the late 1800s. Ryûkyû was also in a tributary relationship with China during this period, and the local economy benefited greatly from trade relations with China (Pearson 1996). As with most countries bordering China, elite men had Chinese education, and Chinese culture had great influence on food, housing, and religion (Lebra 1966: 3–20). After the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868, efforts to dominate Ryûkyû increased and after several failed attempts during the 1870s the King was taken to Tokyo in 1879. He was forced to sign an abrogation of his power over the Kingdom, which then became the Okinawa Prefecture of Japan. From then until 1903 a series of legal and administrative changes were instigated in Okinawa by the Japanese government. These measures dismantled the strict feudal class structure, which had bound peasants to their villages, replaced the exclusively male land tenure and inheritance system with the modern Japanese tenure and inheritance system, and extended a centralized education system run in the standard Japanese language. The annexation of Ryûkyû was technically different to Japanese imperialism in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchukuo because Okinawa was incorporated within Japan proper as a prefecture rather than being a colony (or in the case of Manchukuo a puppet-state). Since Japanese nationalism was based on notions of cultural and racial homogeneity (Dikötter 1997b), Ryûkyûans’ ethnic difference was a problem for the Japanese national project, so Ryûkyûans were incorporated into the Japanese nation in the Ryûkyû Shobun process (Oguma 2002). Japanese representations of the Ryûkyûans usually claimed that they were racially and culturally related to the Japanese, despite the fact that archeology and anthropology have been unable to offer clear evidence that the Japanese and Ryûkyûans were at one point the same people (Pearson 1996: 99; Lebra 1966). Likewise Japanese pundits have tended to describe Okinawan languages as dialects of Japanese, or an older branch of the Japanese language, rather than separate languages, even though according to one scholar the Ryûkyûan group of languages is only related to Japanese as much as French is related to Italian (Lebra 1966: 8). Certainly Japanese and Okinawan languages are mutually unintelligible, as are regional languages within Okinawa, and as are many mainland regional languages. For example, in standard mainland Japanese the word for ‘welcome’ (to a place) is yo¯koso. In Okayama in southwestern Honshu it is

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oidense¯. In Naha Okinawan it is mensôre. In the language of the Miyako island group in the far south of Okinawa it is nmyâchi. Regional cultural and linguistic differences were discouraged throughout Japan for most of the twentieth century, especially through the education system and mass media (Narramore 1997; Wigen 1996). Assimilation policies were even stronger in annexed territories like Okinawa, and as well as local language a range of cultural practices in clothing, food, housing, and religion were regulated against. There was initially indignant opposition to assimilation policies after annexation but Japanese disparaging of all things Okinawan eventually took effect and a sense of inferiority was internalized (Lebra 1966: 18). At the end of World War II the United States invasion of Japan began in Okinawa and, because of Japanese strategic choices in the face of certain defeat, this invasion was massively destructive. Twenty percent of the Okinawan population was killed or injured and almost all of the buildings were destroyed. Okinawan attitudes towards Japan and the USA are still colored by this violence. Elsewhere in Japan the United States occupation ended in 1952 but Okinawa was administered by the United States until 1972, and several large United States military bases remain on Naha. During the United States administration the currency in Okinawa was American dollars, cars drove on the right-hand side of the road, phone calls to the mainland were international and therefore expensive, and passports were required for traveling to the mainland. Okinawans identified as part of Japan throughout the years of United States administration and it was widely accepted that Okinawa would revert to Japan after that period, rather than independence being an option, but there has been long-running animosity reflected in conflict between the Okinawan Prefectural Government and Japan’s national government, with the former often asserting that the latter subordinated the prefecture to national interests (Eldridge 1997). For example, the United States bases in Okinawa are meant for the security of Japan as a whole (indeed the region), but the negative effects of the base are felt by Okinawans. In 1995 some American soldiers raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl, which led to protests against the Base and the national government. Governor Ôta’s prefectural government acted against national government directives on various local issues in the mid-1990s and was subsequently punished by the national government, which controls the budget. Working towards some form of autonomy has remained a significant political topic in Okinawa, and Okinawans still strongly assert their cultural differences from mainland Japan, for which they have numerous names: tafuken, naichi, hondo, todo¯fuken, and yamato, to name a few. Japanese influences on Okinawan identity 10 Tomiyama Ichiro¯ invited his readers to contemplate this sentence from a 1951 publication: ‘. . . seventy years of pain, after that these Okinawan young people have become perfectly splendid Japanese . . .’ (Tomiyama 1990: 5). Tomiyama asked what ‘perfectly splendid Japanese’ might mean in this context. What were

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the Okinawans perceived to be such that it was desirable they should shed their Okinawanness and become ‘perfectly splendid Japanese’? He went on to suggest that the assimilation policies after annexation were not simply aimed at assimilation of the Okinawans into the Japanese nation, or at the modernization of Okinawa, but acted to put Okinawans in a particular (subordinate) place within the Japanese political economy. In Ryûkyû Shôbun distinctions were made between Japanese and Okinawans in a range of central government policies in areas as diverse as the promotion of strict timekeeping, control of language and religion (particularly burial practices), medical treatment (particularly for mental illness), toilet sanitation reforms, and the prohibition of bare feet. Such policies were most intense in the interwar period. The policies both reflected and reproduced prevalent mainlander ideas of Okinawans as backward, lazy, inefficient, prone to insanity, irrational, and unhygienic. Using Derrida’s logocentrism idea, to define Okinawans thus implied that Japanese were in contrast modern, hardworking, efficient, sane, rational, and clean (Tomiyama 1990: 5; Allen 2002). Tomiyama found that the sentence about the ‘perfectly splendid Japanese’, therefore, was part of the social process of creating an ‘Okinawan-to-be-swept-away’ and a ‘Japanese-to-beemulated’. Tomiyama described the relationship between mainland Japan and Okinawa as a form of internal colonialism with the characteristics of core–periphery relations as per world-systems theory (Tomiyama 1990: 5, 7). Assimilation policies and ethnic stereotypes worked together with political and economic domination to push Okinawans towards being working class, both materially and subjectively. The economic collapse called the ‘cycad palm crisis’ (sotetsu jigoku) in Okinawa in the early 1900s compelled large numbers of Okinawans to roam the mainland in search of work (Tomiyama 1998). Okinawans came to be associated with labor, and ethnic tensions gained a class dimension (Tomiyama 1990: 6). Okinawan identity vis-à-vis Japan has involved Okinawa being seen as economically backward, in need of development and modernization. Yearly rankings of standards of living for the 48 prefectures in Japan consistently place Okinawa last. Okinawa’s special status as a prefecture needing extra help is reflected by the fact that 80 percent of development projects in the prefecture are directly funded by the national government (Pearson 1996: 112). The category dyads that appeared in a systematic pattern (hardworking–lazy, efficient–inefficient, rational–irrational, hygienic–unhygienic) used to identify Okinawans as opposed to Japanese, were ostensibly ethnic but Tomiyama notes that they were also important categories for workers in a capitalist economic system. Okinawans’ sense of self was irrevocably affected by their subordinating incorporation into the Japanese empire, and the economic shocks resulting from the forced introduction of capitalism. Ryûkyû Shôbun thus created Okinawans as subordinated subjects within the Japanese nation. Tomiyama argued that the formulation of Okinawan identity exhibited the logic and values of imperialist capitalism. For my purposes, however, the characteristics attributed to Okinawans also exhibited modernist values in the

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ranking of Okinawans as backward in relation to the modern Japanese and therefore subordinate within the Japanese nation. The Okinawans-to-be-swept-away were primitives who brought no benefits to the modern Japanese Empire. The ‘perfectly splendid Japanese’ to emulate were modern workers. Historians such as Tessa Morris-Suzuki (1996) and Oguma Eiji (2002) have theorized representations of Okinawa as primitive in relation to Japan as an important part of the discourses by which Okinawa was subordinated.11 South Seas influences on Okinawan identity Tomiyama argued that Okinawan identity developed in conjunction with Japanese identity (Japan ‘orientalized’ Okinawa), but some of his work also shows that Okinawan identity was created in conjunction with Pacific Island identities. The development of Ifa Fuyû’s ideas about Ryûkyûanness, as depicted by Tomiyama, reveal interesting permutations of modernism in Ryûkyûan identity as it has related to Pacific Island identities (Tomiyama 1998). Ifa was a Ryûkyûan anthropologist, working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who started his career assisting the mainlander anthropologist Torı¯ Ryu¯zo¯. Ifa and Torı¯’s studies were aimed at cataloging the peoples whose territories had been newly colonized by the Japanese. At that time Aboriginal peoples from Taiwan, the northern Philippines and other places were commonly denoted seiban (shengfan in Chinese, literally ‘raw barbarians’). Torı¯ usually did not categorize Ryûkyûans seiban, because he wanted to establish that Ryûkyûans and Japanese shared common ancestry, but he was never able to anthropologically distinguish clearly between the seiban and the Ryûkyûans. At first Ifa was also concerned with finding an analytical distinction between the Ryûkyûans and the seiban. For instance, he called the Ryûkyûans and the Koreans ‘nations’, whereas he called the Ainu and seiban ‘peoples’. According to Tomiyama, Ifa found that the similar nature of the inquiries into the seiban and the Ryûkyûans (‘who are these people?’), and the lack of anthropological evidence to distinguish the two meant the category Ryûkyûan felt to Ifa as if it could never be completely Japanese. Ifa’s writings from that period showed great anxiety over this (Tomiyama 1998: 169–174). Japan was associated with modernity and progress, and aspirations to identify with Japan went hand in hand with Ryûkyûans being ‘hypersensitiv[e] to any perceived backwardness’ (Siddle 2003: 138). By the 1920s Ifa had started using nanto¯jin (south islander) in preference to the term Ryûkyûan. He had stopped attempting to scientifically determine whether Ryûkyûans were Japanese or seiban, and simply classified nanto¯jin as Japanese, or ‘co-descendant’ with the Japanese, as distinct from the seiban. The parts of nanto¯jin identity that were clearly more similar to seiban than Japanese, such as Yaeyama culture, were seen as romantic and exotic, rather than perceived as worrying evidence of backwardness. Such aspects of nanto¯jin culture were recognized as different to Japanese culture without taking the idea further to question the Japaneseness of nanto¯jin as a whole. So Ifa’s construction of

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Okinawan identity as nanto¯jin was ‘both “Japanese” and not’ (Tomiyama 1998: 169–174). But why was Ifa so concerned that Okinawan identity escape identification as seiban? What was so evil about seiban identity? Some of the issues of negative identification of Okinawans by mainland Japanese arise in a poem called ‘Kaiwa’ (The Conversation) by Yamanoguchi Baku, a man who migrated from Okinawa to Tokyo in 1924 and worked as an itinerant laborer. Where are you from? Asked the woman. (Hmm. Where do I come from? Let’s just say . . . I light up a cigarette, but my thoughts are permeated with images of tattoos and snake leather. That home of mine with pattern-like, textured customs!) A long way away. A long way away? Whereabouts? Asked the woman. (A long way away. Just before you reach the southern tip of Japan. Where women carry pigs on their heads and everybody walks around barefooted. That home of mine, where living on the compass point marked ‘melancholy’ is taken for granted!) South. South? What do you mean? Asked the woman. (South is south. Where eternal summers settle over a sea of deep indigo. Where snap dragons, coral trees, adan bushes, and papaya stand with white, changeless seasons overhead. And as the conversation turns to ‘that one couldn’t be Japanese’ and ‘do you speak Japanese?’ that home of mine plays host to the latest preconceived notions.) Anettai. Anettai! exclaims the woman. (Yes, my dear, anettai, the Tropical Zone. And it’s sitting here right before your eyes! Don’t you see it? I think of the Japanese who understand Japanese like me, all of us who were born in the Asian tropics, in that home of mine appreciated by all the latest prejudices that regard chief, native, karate, awamori liquor and the like all as synonyms.) Yes, down there around the equator. (Tomiyama 1998: 175, English translation in original, italics in original) Tomiyama argued that the Okinawan identity which emerged through Okinawans’ contact with mainland Japanese perceptions of them came to be ‘a very stressful burden’ (Tomiyama 1998: 176). The poem shows clearly the symbolic violence felt by members of stigmatized groups by the naming and categorizing processes involved in questions such as those the woman asked. Members of dominant groups do not usually understand that such questions can be violent, partly because they are rarely on the receiving end of such questions, but also because dominant group answers to the question ‘who are you?’ are less fraught with inferiorizing potential. Another way of putting this is to say exertions of

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power through symbolic violence are not easily recognized as such, and are only felt as violent by those whose habitus predisposes them to feel it (Bourdieu 1997: 51). The poem typifies a common reaction to this kind of symbolic violence, a refusal to answer the question ‘properly’. Tomiyama suggested that such refusals to participate in the categorizing process may be seen as a form of resistance, a ‘dagger’. The effect of the man’s reluctance to answer, however, was unlikely to have a result that could be characterized as resistance. The markers ‘chief’ and ‘native’ Yamanoguchi raised as part of mainland identifications of Okinawans are interesting for the purposes of my argument. Tomiyama quoted Ifa as having written: ‘It is unbearable that a people that has exhibited “uniqueness” in such areas as poetry and architecture should be likened in terms of destiny to the primitive aborigines of the South Seas’ (Tomiyama 1998: 173). ‘Uniqueness’ as a valued quality of Ifa’s Ryûkyûanness indicates that he wanted it to be equated with Japaneseness, because Japanese nationalism was and is preoccupied with uniqueness (McCormack 1996b: 3). Hanazaki Ko¯hei also noted that Okinawans ‘regarded it as an insult to be placed on a par with the Taiwan Aborigines and the Ainu of the north’ (Hanazaki 1996: 121). Ifa’s concern about being seiban or not was about being identified with ‘primitive’ peoples, such as Pacific Islanders. Japanese and Okinawans imagined ‘Pacific Islander’ as an evil identity, an identity stigmatized as nonmodern, which Ryûkyûans like Ifa wished to avoid.12 If Okinawa as a whole was denigrated by the Japanese because of perceived resemblances to peoples further south, the most southern regions of Okinawa were denigrated as backward by other Okinawans, and seem to have been considered more ‘primitive’ than Naha by mainland Japanese as well. The Yaeyama island group and the Miyako island group make up the Sakishima archipelago in southern Okinawa, not far from Taiwan. These islands seem to have been first peopled in the second millennium BC. Links between the islands of Miyako and Okinawa, 300 kilometers apart, were established later and were less frequent than links between Okinawa and islands to the north (Pearson 1996: 97–99). Morris-Suzuki (1996: 91) wrote of mainlander Yanagita Kunio’s chronicles of a journey to Okinawa, including Miyako, in 1921. The further south he went the more his writings were obsessed with death and the past. Going south was a metaphor for going back in time. Okinawa has been considered both geographically and developmentally between Japan and the South Seas, and the further south the point in Okinawa the further away from and behind Japan. While the category of ‘barbarian’ may have originated from Chinese spatial notions of foreignness, since the end of the nineteenth century modernism has been an important part of ethnicity in Japan, so what was wrong with ‘barbarians’ was their perceived primitivity. In a sense it could be said that Okinawan identity, as distinguished from or likened to both Japanese and Pacific Islanders, has been influenced by both Chinese notions of center and periphery, and White colonial notions of non-White peoples. Modernist identity relations between Okinawans and Japanese have been a dyad existing within a spectrum. Okinawan identity during the twentieth century

Map 3.3 Solomon Islands.

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was marked as less modern than the Japanese, and implicitly or explicitly compared with peoples like Pacific Islanders. From both Japanese and Okinawan perspectives there was a hierarchy of civilization and modernness that put ‘barbarians’ of the South Seas below/behind the Japanese. Okinawans who lived in Japanese Nan’yo¯ (South Seas) colonies were identified in precisely this way; they were seen as a sort of middle ground between the Japanese and Micronesians, and were referred to as ‘Japan Kanaka’. Pay scales allocated Japanese the highest remuneration, Okinawans and Koreans less, and under them the various Pacific Islander ethnic groups (Tomiyama 1995; 2002).

Solomon Islands The archipelago that now makes up Solomon Islands is in the South West Pacific Ocean, between five and 12 degrees south of the equator. The six main islands, Choiseul, Isabel, Malaita, New Georgia, Guadalcanal, Makira, and thousands of smaller islands, form a double line 1,400 kilometers in length, surrounded and connected by reefs and lagoons teeming with aquatic life. There are volcanic islands – mountainous, covered in rainforest and ringed by mangroves – and low-lying coral islands. It is not clear when humans first inhabited Solomon Islands or precisely where they came from but there seem to have been humans living in the archipelago for about 4,000 years (Laracy 1989). Solomon Islanders were categorized as Melanesians by anthropologists, and contemporary Solomon Islanders have adopted this identity. Within the category ‘Melanesian’ there is great variety. People from different parts of Solomon Islands have varying skin and hair color, and distinctions in facial shapes and stature. Political formations varied, from the ‘Big Man’ model anthropologists have associated with Melanesia to more hereditary tribal forms of leadership usually seen as more Polynesian (Allen 1984). With a current population of around 400,000 there are up to 60 living language groups in Solomon Islands. European contact is thought to have started with the arrival of the Spanish explorer Alvaro de Mendaña and his ships in 1568. The Spaniards named the archipelago after the fabled wealth of King Solomon because they thought the archipelago contained gold. Mendaña was followed sporadically by other Europeans over the next couple of hundred years but sustained and frequent contact did not occur until the 1800s when whalers and traders visited the islands on their way to and from Sydney (Bennett 1987; McKinnon 1975). European men began settling, first as traders, then as copra plantation owners. Towards the end of the nineteenth century indentured labor was recruited for sugar plantations in Queensland and Fiji around some Solomon Island areas. This labor recruitment, often called ‘black birding’, has been portrayed as a form of slavery, but historical works demonstrate that the labor trade, while not equitable, was voluntarily engaged in by Solomon Islanders for their own purposes. Despite the terrible pay and conditions many people signed on for a second contract, and sent letters of complaint when the White Australia Policy prohibited

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Melanesians being imported as indentured laborers to Queensland in 1906, and when indenture to Fiji was stopped in 1911 (Corris 1973; Laracy 1983). By the 1890s White settlers in the Western Pacific convinced their governments to establish colonies to protect their interests. After some wheeling and dealing with Germany, Britain annexed a group of islands that had not previously been considered unified in any social or political sense and the British Solomon Islands Protectorate was born.13 With colonial rule established missionary work began in earnest. More than 90 percent of Solomon Islanders eventually became Christians of one denomination or another, and some locally specific denominations also emerged, such as the South Seas Evangelical Church and the Christian Fellowship Church. There was no material incentive for the colonial government to extend its control into the daily lives of villagers so, apart from ‘pacifying’ the headhunters of the west and the blood feuding bounty hunters of the east, instituting a head tax to force people into cash-earning activities, and replacing customary laws with a British colonial legal system, the colonial government did not exert a great deal of control over village life.14 Many of the changes in village life that occurred prior to World War II were due to missionary influences and economic contact with colonial capitals via wage labour and trade. London refused the requests of planters to import indentured labor, so non-indigenous inhabitants remained less than 10 percent of the total population. These were colonial Europeans (including White Australians and New Zealanders), Chinese traders, and later a population of I-Kiribati relocated from the over-populated colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands.15 European colonial worldviews included racial hierarchies. White people did almost no physical labor in Solomon Islands. They perceived Solomon Islanders to be ‘primitive, dirty, savage and ignorant’ (Keesing 1992: 228). Chinese traders and shopkeepers were ranked higher by the Whites than Solomon Islanders but were also excluded from White society. Polynesians were on the next rung down after the Chinese, and Melanesians were at the bottom. There were various rituals and symbolic expressions of racial superiority on the part of Whites, and to this planters added physical brutality and material mistreatment of Solomon Islanders. The missions were less materially subordinating but were nevertheless symbolically violent. Solomon Islanders were cast in the role of ‘peaceful and passive children, worshipping as second-class citizens in a White God’s kingdom’. European, specifically British, culture was seen as ‘civilization’ in opposition to ‘anarchic and irrational’ Solomon Islands cultures (Keesing 1992: 228). At first the British were able to impose their topography of the field on Solomon Islands. Whites defaced sacred places with impunity and their religion seemed to Solomon Islanders to give the Whites superior strength. ‘Apathy and a lack of interest in life’ was observed and the rumour started about the imminent extinction of the Melanesians. As they did with the Australian Aborigines, Whites came to assume that Melanesians were unable to survive contact with modernity and were a ‘dying race’ (Bennett 1987: 115). In the early colonial period returning indentured laborers usually brought back a box of goods, such as axes, knives, and tobacco. These goods constituted

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a challenge to the established power relations in villages at the time, in which older men accumulated power and prestige through a lifetime of feasting, orating, fighting, negotiating, shamaning, and/or marriage broking. Younger men with goods from Australia or Fiji could establish themselves as warriors or chiefs without passing through the same routes to power (Corris 1973: 113, 137; Keesing and Corris 1980; Laracy 1983). Many women started to find plantation experience desirable in a mate (Bennett 1987: 169). Plantation work came to be seen in some parts of Solomon Islands as a rite of passage to manhood (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1986). Trade was another form of contact with capitalism. Contact between European whaling and trading ships and the western islands of New Georgia, Rendova, Simbo, Choiseul, and the Shortlands intensified during the nineteenth century (Bennett 1987; McKinnon 1975). The ships went through the archipelago on their way to Sydney, originally looking for fresh food, water, and whales, but later also bêche-de-mer, pearl shell, and hawksbill turtle shell. Islanders wanted iron, especially tomahawks for the headhunters of Roviana. McKinnon suggested that the ferocious efficiency of first iron then rifles in headhunting caused the violence to effloresce, which meant the trading that brought in the iron and rifles increased, causing inflation in the local currencies of shell money used for headhunting contracts, bride price, and compensation payments. This all peaked in the 1880s, the heyday of wealthy warrior Big Men such as Hingava of Roviana, who were the point of contact between Europeans and their compatriots, and thereby monopolized trade. But by the early 1900s the colonial government was repressing violence between Solomon Islanders to make society more amenable to plantations and missionary activity. Copra became an important trade item and many local people set up small copra plantations. There was more widespread direct contact between White and Chinese copra buyers and local producers. In plantation work Solomon Islanders from different island groups worked together. Prior to colonization inter-group violence and the great distances between islands had mostly kept island groups apart. The settling of White planters meant that after indentured labor opportunities in Queensland and Fiji dried up in the early 1900s, there were opportunities in the Solomon Islands. Although people were working closer to home they usually traveled away from their home island to take up plantation labor work. One reason for this was that dissatisfied workers tended to leave if they could, so planters preferred to import a captive workforce who could not easily return home (Bathgate 1985: 92). Plantation owners tended to prefer all-male workforces. For various reasons the introduction of women to plantations for sexual purposes was not condoned, so family life was not possible. This, in combination with violently subordinating working conditions, low levels of pay, and barracks-style living arrangements, made plantation labor unthinkable as a long-term option for most people. Both Bennett and Chapman found evidence that plantations with more natural living conditions (with families in hamlets rather than barracks) were popular places to work, but single-sex workforces remained the norm. The tradition of

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transient wage labor in Solomon Islands was born (Bennett 1987: 169, 173–174, 190; Chapman 1969). Solomon Islanders thus came to be identified as having a low work ethic and as being ‘culturally’ predisposed not to commit to wage labor for most of their working life. Pijin, which had been developed from nautical trading English and the language used on plantations in Australia and Fiji, was the lingua franca for plantation work. Having a common language fostered a sense of belonging across island group divides. Likewise, common oppositional relations between Native workers and White bosses bred a sense of kinship where none had existed before. The colonial experience of plantation labor therefore changed local identities, introducing a unity of identity across island groups for the first time. Changing discourses of prestige and power also affected local identities. The colonial government, missionaries, and the introduction of capitalism into Solomon Islands created greater divisions between rich and poor than had previously existed, and wealth became organized in new patterns. Slaves and adoptees, for whom upward mobility had been impossible in the pre-contact era, now had the option of Western style education in the missions. Knowledge that had been powerful in the non-modern sector of society lost some of its power and the patterns of indigenous discourses of power changed as intermediaries between Europeans and villagers had new kinds of opportunities for power and wealth, as compradors in land sales, for example (Bennett 1987). Opportunities for waged work were greatly reduced during the Depression but expanded again during World War II. Japanese forces invaded in 1942 and swept east before being turned back at Guadalcanal in 1943 and were mostly pushed out of the western islands by 1944. The British made no attempt to defend Solomon Islands from the Japanese but evacuated most White people before the Japanese arrived, so it was the American forces that fought the Japanese in Solomon Islands. Men from all over the islands worked as Coast Watchers for the United States forces. Many Malaitan men migrated to work for the American forces in Guadalcanal. The wages paid by the Americans were generous compared to what had been paid by British and Australian employers. Solomon Islanders had the experience of seeing Black people in new contexts, in more equal relations with their White colleagues. Black Americans wore the same clothes as their White counterparts whereas Solomon Islanders were banned from wearing the same clothes as Whites. Black American soldiers were better paid than Solomon Islanders. Black Americans were allowed to operate technical equipment from which Solomon Islanders had been barred. Solomon Islanders made friendships with American soldiers, who denounced the repressive British colonial regime. These experiences had a great impact on the men who established the Maasina Rule proto-nationalist movement after the war (Fifi’i 1989: 48–50; Zoloveke 1980). The different example of race relations presented by the US forces – along with the fact that nearly all the Whites had left when invasion became imminent, abandoning Solomon Islanders and other migrant communities, such as Chinese traders, to their fate – damaged the

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psychology of the colonial order. The aim of Maasina Rule was to found a new social, political, and economic order in villages, without interference from the colonials in Honiara. It was not strictly speaking an independence movement, it was aimed at improving the organization and living conditions of local people, but the colonial government felt threatened so they repressed the movement and imprisoned its leaders (Laracy 1983; Fifi’i 1989). Maasina Rule was influential in the eastern and central parts of Solomon Islands and there were also other movements pushing for greater autonomy, such as the Moro movement in the central islands (Bennett 1987: 261; Davenport and Çoker 1967). World War II thus marked an epoch in Solomon Islander identities; the beginning of processes of decolonization of the mind. During the 1960s and 1970s the stigma of the categories Native, Melanesian, and Black were challenged by Solomon Islanders as part of a global wave of resistance against racism by Black people. Traditionalism arose as one way of addressing the ‘systematic denigration’ suffered under colonialism (Keesing 1982a). Kastom and Melanesian culture were valorized in opposition to European culture. Kastom . . . represents a commitment to pride, as counter to colonial racism and scorn for ‘native’ ways, a commitment to the ancestors and their rules, a commitment to communal solidarity rather than individualism, to lands and villages rather than to money and progress (Keesing 1982b) The symbolic power of colonial modernism was weaker than it had been. Elites embraced dependency theories that placed the causes of Melanesian nonmodernness in the colonial system rather than in the cultures or genes of Melanesians. Self-government and self-directed modernization became the aims of most leaders. Britain retained control of Solomon Islands until there was a rush to abandon colonies in the Western Pacific in the 1970s. Independence was planned for some years before it was granted in 1978. Large per capita amounts of international aid flowed in, and there was preferential trade access to the European Economic Commission, later the European Union, under the Lomé Convention (which later became the Cotonou Agreement). Modernization and capitalist accumulation of material wealth, however, proved elusive for the postcolonial Solomon Islands. Economic dissatisfactions simmered for decades while successive post-Independence governments were unwilling or unable to address those concerns.16 The decolonization of Solomon Islands, therefore, did not mean Solomon Islands’ status in the world system improved markedly. Rather Solomon Islands went from being a colony to a Least Developed Country, still low in the world hierarchy. Colonial racism became less salient over time. Solomon Islanders became more confident in relations with Whites, and Whites became somewhat less racist and less certain of their right to dominate (Keesing 1982a). Modernism as a stigmatizing discourse, however, remained influential

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for Solomon Islander subjectivities in the new discourse of economic developmentalism. Internalization of modernist stigma has been visible in various aspects of Solomon Islander self-identification, such as Christians’ identification of Pagans (Keesing 1992: 231–238). Many Christian Solomon Islanders saw themselves as more modern and civilized than Pagan Solomon Islanders and sometimes identified (Pagan) Kwaio in almost precisely the same subordinating way Solomon Islanders as a whole had been identified by the British (Fifi’i 1989: 122, 142, 146). For example, an article written by an overseas-educated Solomon Islander described Kwaio celebrations of the return of one of their leaders, Jonathan Fifi’i, from the United States in 1967: Stepping ashore I could not believe my eyes, when I saw naked men and women, burst into cry [sic] when they shook hand with Mr F . . . Watching the primitive crowd I started to think out, what brings so many of them to meet Mr F . . . (Keesing 1982b) The journalist went on to ridicule the Kwaio people for having unsophisticated beliefs about America. Western clothing, alcohol, and store-bought food had been markers of Whiteness in the Protectorate, and prewar colonials strictly prevented locals from having access to these commodities in order to preserve the hierarchies these commodities symbolized (Bennett 1987: 99–100). This affected the meanings such commodities had for Solomon Islanders, and probably added to their allure when they later did become available for general consumption, being metonyms for modernity and enabling the consumer to claim some identity with the dominant class with which these commodities were associated. The internalization of European categories, however, is not always straightforwardly hegemonic. Solomon Islanders found modes of resistance within modernism. For example, they manipulated Christian and modernist liberal values to argue for equality with Whites (Bennett 1987: 162). Although the categories Solomon Islanders used were those established by the British, the values the colonizers accorded those categories were not necessarily accepted. When Sarah Meltzhoff did her research on Solomon Taiyo in the late 1970s people described the choice to work for the company as a choice between kastom and ‘civilization’. Solomon Islanders had come to understand indigenous ways of life as ‘traditional’, in opposition to ‘modern’, ‘capitalist’, ‘civilized’ ways of life. It is interesting to note, however, that while colonizers clearly saw civilization as a marker of status and a lack of civilization as a stigmatic deficit, these values were not necessarily implied in Solomon Islander appropriations of the category ‘civilized’. When Meltzhoff’s interviewees denoted cash work ‘civilization’ and village life kastom, there was no sense that they felt they should choose civilization over kastom, or that they saw civilization as better than kastom. The values they accorded civilization were often ambiguous and sometimes negative.

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Modernism, nationalism, and colonialism Civilized Girl Cheap perfume Six inch heels Skin-tight pants Civilized girl Steel wool hair Fuzzy and stiff Now soft as coconut husk Held by a dozen clips Charcoal-black skin Painted red Bushy eye-brows Plucked and penciled Who am I? Melanesian Caucasian or Half-caste? Make up your mind Where am I going – Forward, backward, still? What do I call myself – Mrs Miss or Ms? Why do I do this? Imitation What’s wrong with it? Civilization (Sipolo 1981: 21)

This poem clearly shows the importance of modernness in racial identities when it brings together questions of race and notions of progress (‘forward, backward, still?’). The poet adapted meanings imputed to the categories by which Solomon Islanders were stigmatized in colonialism, to subvert subordinating identifications of Solomon Islanders. While identification in opposition to Whites was one preoccupation in Solomon Islander subjectivities, it was by no means the only important identity battle in post-Independence Solomon Islands society. Rivalry and chauvinism between island groups was at least as important. The fact that during colonial times eastern islanders had taken to wage labor and western islanders taken to trade and smallholder production meant that western islanders came to view Malaitans in particular as laborers, of lower status than themselves. Bennett estimated the difference in income generated from western island trade compared to labor to be about three to one, so there were also material differences in the way different island groups fitted within the capitalist sector (Bennett 1987: 87). People from the Western Province

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were to an extent entrepreneurial, although they tended to back away from the capitalist sector when it proved unreliable, during the Depression, for example. Western Province people also tended to make more use of schooling opportunities in the colonial system and when bureaucratic posts became available for Solomon Islanders it was people from the west who took most of those posts. The modes of resistance that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s between eastern islanders and western islanders were different; easterners tended to explode suddenly and make strategies outside the colonial framework, such as the Maasina Rule movement, and westerners tended to resist from within the colonial framework with organized strikes, petitions, and activities lead by White missionaries, such as John Fallowes on Isabel and John Goldie in the Roviana area (Bennett 1987: 245–283). Nathan Kera, from the Roviana Lagoon in the Western Province, wrote that westerners were different to easterners because they were better able to cope with Europeans and their modernity, as opposed to easterners whom he thought ‘overreacted’ by developing cargo cults (Kera 1994). Jonathan Fifi’i, from Malaita, distinguished between easterners and westerners somewhat differently: he wrote that easterners were less likely to let the Europeans dominate them than the more submissive westerners (Fifi’i 1989: 35). Intra Solomon Islands divisions predated the advent of Europeans, and took new forms within colonialism. Bennett found that in the early trading period Simbo people presented New Georgians in a very negative light to discourage Europeans from going to New Georgia so the Simbo chiefs could monopolize trade. Although western islanders dominated the public service, many politicians were Malaitan, and as it became clear that Malaitans would dominate the postIndependence parliament, in the months leading up to Independence in 1978 there was talk of Western Province seceding to form its own state (Bennett 1987: 27, 327–330). As well as inter-island group politics, gender relations changed through colonial and modernist discourses. It is difficult to know exactly how gender relations were constituted prior to European contact, except to say they would have varied across the different cultures that became Solomon Islands. Sometimes contemporary divisions of labor are justified in terms of perceptions of traditional divisions of labor, which often reflect a European public/private discourse. Anthropologists have pointed out, however, that pre-contact divisions of labor were less rigid than many contemporary representations lead us to believe. For example, both men and women fished, and both men and women gardened, but there were divisions within this. Women tended to glean along coastlines and men tended to fish in deeper water, and the sexes may have cultivated different varieties of food plant (Jolly 1991; Hviding and Baines 1992). In Solomon Islands, as in Japan, articulations between modernism and indigenous discourses affected gender relations, but the specifics of the opportunities and constraints modernization brought for Solomon Islander women were quite unlike those it brought Japanese women. This was because of the different background of non-modern culture in Solomon Islands, because Solomon Islands was colonized by the British, and because Solomon Islands

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generally did not require women to take up paid labor as part of a push for industrialization. The working lives and roles of women probably changed little in the very early years of contact. The iron tools obtained through trade or labor tended to be used for men’s work, and the spare time those tools afforded men does not appear to have been used to help women with their work, but was used by men for intensified politicking, feasting, and fighting. This probably made more work for women, as raisers of pigs and growers of food, and in communities where young unmarried men left for wage labor it is likely the workloads for those left behind, including women, increased (Bennett 1987: 34). Within a few years, however, European contact had a large impact on the work of women, their status, material opportunities, and ideals of womanhood. One change was that most of the Europeans who came were men, and sexual liaisons between European men and local women were on the whole socially accepted in the western islands (they were generally not accepted in Malaita and other eastern islands).17 This no doubt led to much exploitation of women but it also created opportunities for local women and their families to gain material goods and the cultural capital of modernness/Whiteness, through marriage or otherwise. Norman Wheatley, a plantation owner and trader in Munda around the turn of the twentieth century had two local wives who were already of high social strata, and marriage to him brought further prestige and wealth to them and their families (Boutilier 1975). Another facet of modernization with far-reaching effects on gender relations was the general exclusion of women from wage labor, in conjunction with British preconceptions of sexual divisions of labor and tenure. In the early colonial period most women did not speak Pijin because women tended not to move in the circles where it was used – wage labor and trade with Europeans (Jourdan 1985: 53; Keesing 1992: 204). The British did not expect women to be landowners so when purchasing land through compradors the compradors were able to exclude landowning women from negotiations, a job made easier by the fact that women did not understand Pijin (Bennett 1987: 118). After Independence women’s position in the economy changed a little – through schooling most women came to speak Pijin – but in other areas there was not much change. Modernization projects included logging, palm oil plantations, and fisheries. Men gained most of the employment and royalties from logging. Some women did not want logging, but resistance against logging generated arguments, so they let the logging continue (Scheyvens and Cassells 1999: 119). Some men who lost self-confidence because of lack of success in the modern sector turned to substance abuse and violence to vent their frustrations, and women bore the brunt of this (Scheyvens 1999: 54). Women have been the main producers and workers at the village level, and they undertook most of the basic community responsibilities in Solomon Islands, but women were generally excluded from development planning and implementation (Scheyvens 1999; 1997). The same pattern has existed in fisheries developments around the Pacific. Women’s fishing consistently provided more important protein for

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communities, yet women had the least access to boats, other equipment, and extension services. Village divisions of labor in fishing were generally mutually supportive, but development projects excluded women. Women usually fished in gleaning areas, which is where mariculture occurs, but mariculture trials rarely included women. The orientation of development programs in fisheries was towards large-scale, full-time, industrial fishing for cash markets in urban areas. This excluded women and diverted resources from local oriented small-scale, part-time artisanal fisheries in which women might have participated more easily. For example, development projects tended to favor chilling and freezing (requiring ongoing capital inputs) as preservation techniques rather than smoking or drying (more easily produced from village resources) (Schoeffel 1985). One of the reasons for the exclusion of women from development activities was that the sexism that arose from the articulation between modernity and indigenous society meant women were considered part of the traditional sphere, not belonging in the modern sphere or modernization efforts. On the island of Sa’a, women were explicitly excluded from community development planning because it was thought they were incapable of understanding the cash economy (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1986). While there has been parity between the sexes in the first few years of primary school in Solomon Islands since the 1970s, from secondary school onwards the proportion of girls in educational institutions has been far less than for boys. In 1996 75 percent of primary-school-age children went to school, 46 percent of these were girls. Of the 14 percent of secondary-school-age children who went to school, 38 percent were girls, and at the end of secondary school (Form Six) there were about four times as many boys as girls enrolled. Five percent of school leavers went on to tertiary education and only a tiny fraction of these were women. Adult literacy (in English) in 1992 for the population as a whole was between 22 and 30 percent, for women the figure was 17 percent. In 1995 23 percent of the formal sector workforce were women, and 40 percent of this work was in the public service, mostly teaching or nursing (Scheyvens 1999: 53; Solomon Islands Government 1998). Solomon Islander Doreen Sam has asserted that traditional notions of womanhood encouraged women to be in the home and the garden, and discouraged them from being in workplaces through institutional discrimination including insufficient accommodation for girls in places of education and training (Sam 1992). In the first 20 years of independent government, only one woman, Hilda Kari, was elected as a representative in the National Parliament. Except for the ‘caring professions’ of teaching and nursing, women have been vastly underrepresented in the modern sectors of Solomon Islands society, especially in leadership roles. The Westernization of women, especially through ‘women’s liberation’ was seen as bad modernity in Solomon Islands. In 1987 the then Minister for Home Affairs and Provincial Government, Andrew Nori, spoke on women and kastom in a speech reported in a Honiara newspaper (Nius 1987). Nori asked women to respect religious and cultural values and warned that ‘radical deviations’ in

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women’s activism might alienate women from the rest of society and lose them support. He was paraphrased by the paper as saying ‘it is uncommon in our society for women to revolt against their menfolk’. He said women did not need to fight for more equality because they already had laws for Equal Opportunity. Solomon Islands cultures were sometimes very sexist, as can be seen in Roger Keesing’s writings on the Kwaio of Malaita. In Kwaio culture ideas about menstruation, women’s methods of conflict resolution and women’s work were used in insults between men to imply their opposite number was disgusting and/or weak (Keesing and Corris 1980). Kwaio women had reason to hate local culture because the blood bounty system meant women were often killed for things men did, or for suspected infringements even if there was a less severe punishment available in kastom, because they saw women as easy targets. Men sometimes apparently lied about women to have bounties raised against them so as to be able to kill them and claim a bounty (Keesing 1992: 31–32). Nevertheless, Kwaio women rarely identified as women in opposition to oppressive men, but usually identified as Kwaio in opposition to the government or other Solomon Island ethnic groups (Keesing 1995: 225). In spite of the subordination of women in Solomon Islands, both via kastom and via modernism, most Solomon Islander women have tended to place more importance on ethnic solidarity than on gender inequity.18 Ambivalence about modernity in a dual society Development Big word Lotsa meanings Staka dollar Magnetic circle Entices Urban drift Empty villages Customs forgotten Loose living Lost identity Rat race Dollar talks Values change Wantoks ignored Every man for himself I want to develop too! (Sipolo 1986: 13) In this poem Jully Sipolo highlighted the irresistible urge towards development even when its negative effects are well understood. Some villagers on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal and in the mountains of Malaita aimed for lifestyles completely free of modernity but most Solomon Islanders have not

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rejected modernization outright – rather they have been ambivalent about it. Ben Burt noted that for the Kwara’are people of Malaita, being able to survive without money was a source of pride, but that desire for things that cost money created incentive for capitalist development and modernization. Burt also noted that the capitalism and modernity people had in mind was indigenized, not European (Burt 1982). Solomon Islander politicians have indigenized their modernization policies in various ways. David Kausimae inherited the political mantle of the Maasina Rule movement and so could freely appeal to kastom in his political rhetoric. Peter Kenilorea had no such legitimacy in kastom, so his rhetoric instead appealed to ‘Melanesian-style modernization’ (Keesing 1982b). Many Honiara-based politicians sent one of their children to their home village to acquire a customary education, both because this protected their land interests and because it accumulated the kinds of non-modern cultural capital that could not be bought with cash (Bennett 1987: 339–341). Exhibitions staged by multinational joint ventures for tenth anniversary celebrations of Solomon Islands Independence in 1988 showed a balancing act between the ideals of modernity and tradition (LiPuma 1997: 231). The achievements of the joint ventures were simultaneously ‘presented as an index of the extent to which the nation-state has superseded traditional relations of production . . . and as an expression of the values (such as hard work and community solidarity) inscribed in those same traditional relations’. The point here is not to deride Solomon Islands modernization rhetoric as inauthentic – leaders the world over in all eras have used selective and disprovable images to present themselves in ways that further their aims – but to point out that modernist discourses are permeated with the history of colonial racism. This means that the symbolism of indigenized modernity often contains contradictions. Solomon Islands society’s duality included double consciousness as coexisting worldviews. Keesing found that there were at least two worldviews in operation when he looked at stories surrounding a multiple murder in Honiara. One version of events was a non-modern Kwaio explanation in terms of relations with the ancestors. The other was a modern explanation, the explanatory mode used in the legal case and in much of the gossip about the murders that circulated in Honiara. The same events were only ‘barely recognizable’ in the two types of explanation. Keesing concluded ‘my data suggest that Kwaio precept and practice allow and sustain multiple world views (just as ours do)’ (Keesing 1995: 227). Earlier events on colonial plantations often had dual explanations too. Bennett found that the public explanation for one rebellion was bad rations, but further investigation revealed fighting because one group of men believed another man was engaging in sorcery (Bennett 1987: 175). Jonathan Fifi’i was Christian, and a modern politician, yet his stories about his life also reflected a Pagan worldview. For example, in relating a story about the killing of a woman he wrote that her killer was found by divination and a curse placed on him, and Fifi’i felt the curse was the reason the killer was executed by the colonial government (Fifi’i 1989: 98). Frances Harwood (1978) found that dual worldviews in Solomon Islands meant that sometimes quite different sets of meanings were applied to the same

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events, notwithstanding mutually predictable behaviors at the point of meeting. Silas Eto, the Holy Mama of the Christian Fellowship Church, once hosted a dinner for the District Commissioner and some other officials. The colonials felt that the fact that Eto remained standing while he served them dinner and did not eat with them signified power relations with which they were happy. At the same time Eto felt that remaining physically higher than his guests throughout the dinner and that they accepted his hospitality without him eating in front of them signified power relations with which he was happy. The double consciousness of Solomon Islands society was sustained by its dual economy. Even though since the adoption of iron Solomon Islanders had been partially dependent on the world system, the majority of the economy remained in the village non-cash sphere, so they still had a viable non-capitalist basis of production. While working conditions were bad and pay was low there was no reason to abandon the non-cash economy of the village and that partial dependence on cash was preferable to full dependence (Bennett 1987: 166). For various reasons, however, this strategy did not entirely satisfy large numbers of Solomon Islanders. Despite the security of the dual system the inability to achieve all their aims in the modern sphere rankled.

Conclusion Modernism thus had quite different effects on the historical development of ethnic identities in Japan, Okinawa, and Solomon Islands. European modernism ranked Japan, as a non-White country, beneath Europe in the world political economy, but because Japan escaped European colonialism and modernized, the rank did not stick. As non-White but modern, Japan loosened the connections between Whiteness and modernness as cultural capital identities within the world political economy in the twentieth century. At the same time, however, Japan adopted many of the principles of Western modernism and, after adjusting them to suit Japanese nationalist aspirations, used modernism to denigrate other non-White and non-Japanese peoples as backward. Okinawans were identified thus in Japanese modernism. Japanese colonialism replaced Okinawa’s nonmodern modes of administrative and economic organization, simultaneously drastically changing Okinawan cultures and subjectivities. Identity relations between Japan and Okinawa were mutually informative. Japanese identification of Okinawans as backward bolstered their own selfidentification as modern, and definitions of Japan affected Okinawan identities. But there were not only two ethnic identities involved in this process. Japanese and Okinawans defined themselves and each other within a wider hierarchical schema of the peoples of the world. The combination of Chinese ideas of barbarians and European notions of primitives interacted with Okinawan and Japanese notions of ethnicity to posit Pacific Islanders as an evil identity from which Okinawans strove to escape identification. In terms of modernism, Okinawan identity may be seen, therefore, as existing between Japan and the Pacific, between modernity and primitivity.

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Solomon Islanders were colonized by the British and since Independence have been identified as an aid recipient with very little modernness in their collective identity and very little cash accumulating in their coffers. Unlike the Japanese colonization of Okinawa, British colonization of Solomon Islands left indigenous culture relatively intact as a whole way of life, so the articulation of modern and non-modern in Solomon Islands took the form of a dual society. Modernism did not replace indigenous discourses, rather both town and village spheres changed as a result of articulations between them. This duality weakened the power of modernism as a discourse, both its coercive and its persuasive aspects, because Solomon Islanders had alternative principles of hierarchization and alternative material bases of existence. Solomon Islanders have not been completely disarticulated from modernity since the 1800s, but neither have they been wholly dependent upon it for sustenance, and modernism has not necessarily been the strongest discourse influencing their senses of self.

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Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

The key ethnographic aim of this book is to analyse the effects of modernist discourses on ethnic identities, but in order for such a discussion to be meaningful, the concrete nature of Solomon Taiyo should first be explained. This chapter outlines the context in which the company was established, gives an overview of the company’s operations, the human resources and financial situations in the company, and contributions made by the company to the Solomon Islands economy.

The fish Solomon Taiyo specialized in a type of fish known as skipjack or bonito in English, scientific name katsuwonus pelamis. It is a surface-schooling variety of tuna that is particularly abundant in the reefs and lagoons of the Solomon Islands archipelago. Skipjack are relatively small and take only a couple of years to reach their mature weight of two to three kilograms. For this reason stocks replenish quickly and skipjack stocks are much more resistant to depletion than other commercially exploited varieties of tuna. Solomon Taiyo also dealt in lesser amounts of yellowfin tuna, which is a larger species more vulnerable to overfishing. Skipjack is most popular in Western countries in its canned form. The meat is relatively dark with a strong smell and taste. Some European countries have had established tuna canning industries and markets for many decades. In other markets such as the UK, Germany, North America, Australia, and New Zealand tinned skipjack became popular as other varieties of tinned fish such as albacore, yellowfin, and salmon became more expensive in the later decades of the twentieth century. In Japan, Okinawa and Solomon Islands skipjack has always been prized, fresh or preserved. Smoke-dried and shaved or powdered skipjack (katsuobushi) is used as flavoring in the daily diet of most Japanese. Fresh skipjack served tataki (seared) is popular, and occasionally skipjack is served raw as sashimi. In Japan skipjack is not considered a tuna, it is called katsuo while the tuna varieties are called maguro, and it is marketed differently to the other tuna varieties (Matsuda 1987). In several Solomon Islands languages skipjack is called makasi. In coastal communities in Solomon Islands skipjack has long been high status and

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Figure 4.1 Skipjack on sale at Honiara Central Market, June 2005.

nutritionally important. The hunting of skipjack and the fish itself have had religious meanings. For example, in the village of Sa’a on Small Malaita learning to hunt skipjack was a part of the passage to manhood; only ritually pure men could fish for skipjack and secrets of hunting were hidden from women (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1986; Laracy 1989: 96–97). The skipjack hunt in Sa’a was disrupted by labor migrations in the late 1800s, then abandoned completely during the Maasina Rule period after World War II when certain aspects of indigenous culture were deliberately dropped. The Sa’a skipjack hunt was then revived as a symbol of cultural pride as part of community development efforts during the 1970s. The religious importance of skipjack in Solomon Islands has waned with widespread adoption of various forms of Christianity and much of pre-contact fishing knowledge has disappeared, but skipjack remains a very

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popular eating fish in Solomon Islands. It may be wrapped in leaves and baked on hot cooking-stones or grilled on a metal plate over a fire.

Establishing Solomon Taiyo Japanese distant-water fisheries first moved into the West Pacific in the early twentieth century. By the 1920s there were many Japanese fleets working from Japanese colonies in Micronesia (former German territories that became Japanese after the Treaty of Versailles), including the Marianas, the Carolines, and the Marshalls (Matsuda 1987; Waugh 1986). By the 1930s there were about 8,000 Japanese fishers operating in the West Pacific and there were shore bases producing katsuobushi and canned fish. This food and the fishing boats played a role in Japanese military expansion before the war, so after the war Japanese fisheries were restricted to within a 12-mile limit of the Japanese coast. Later the fishing borders for Japanese fleets, the so-called ‘McArthur lines’, were extended in phases. By the 1960s Japanese fleets were again fishing around the world. At that time it was looking increasingly likely that newly independent countries in the West Pacific would make use of the developing United Nations Law of the Sea to claim that the seas around their coastlines as Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), meaning that distant-water fishers would no longer have free access. The Japanese distant-water fishing fleet prepared for the advent of EEZs by establishing joint ventures with Pacific Islands country governments (Fujinami 1987). In joint ventures the fleets were locally based rather than ‘foreign’ and thus did not pay access fees. The rising yen made moving production offshore attractive and joint ventures employed local labor at a time when Japanese labor costs were rising. The Japanese Fisheries Agency (part of the Ministry of Forestry Fisheries and Agriculture) preferred joint ventures because they secured supplies for Japanese markets, and gave Japan allies in international fisheries debates. Another important factor in favor of joint ventures was that the big tuna markets of Europe and the USA were heavily protected but canned tuna originating from former European colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific (ACP countries) had preferential trade access to Europe. Under the Lomé Convention (forerunner to the Cotonou Agreement) tinned tuna from Solomon Islands thus avoided the 24 percent tariff the European Union placed on imported tinned tuna from major competitor countries Thailand and the Philippines (Grynberg 1998; 2003). Another reason Japanese skipjack-fishing companies favored joint ventures over distant-water fishing arrangements was because they employed the pole-and-line method of fishing, which requires a source of live bait. In Solomon Islands and other Pacific countries, access to the reefs and lagoons where baitfish are caught depends on local villagers, who have rights to coastal areas under customary tenure. The concept of ‘ownership’ in these cases is very disputed and varies from case to case. It would probably not have been feasible for Japanese

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 77 companies to negotiate access to these baitfishing grounds without the high levels of local government commitment engendered by joint-venture relationships. Thirteen skipjack- and tuna-fishing joint ventures were established with Japanese companies in the Western Pacific between the 1950s and 1980s. Kyokuyo¯ Gyogyo¯, Ho¯koku Suisan and Kaigai Gyogyo¯ were involved in Papua New Guinea in Kavieng, Rabaul, and Medang. C. Itoh company was involved with the Fijian government in skipjack fishing and canning, and several companies were involved in Micronesia and Indonesia (Wakabayashi 1996: 141). The company that formed a joint venture in Solomon Islands, Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯, was established as a family firm in 1883. Still owned and run by the Nakabe family, by the late 1960s Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ had become the biggest fishing company in the world, but it still did not have a skipjack-fishing joint venture in the Pacific. Captain Honda, one of Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯’s leading fishermen managers at the time, surmised that since the fishing was good in Papua New Guinea to the west and Fiji to the east, Solomon Islands might also have good fishing potential. He paid a visit to government offices in Honiara with an interpreter, Mr Mito, in 1970. In 1970 the British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP) administration was planning to give Solomon Islands independence. Records from the time show that the colonial office was working to establish some kind of economic basis for independence because more than 40 percent of the country’s monetary gross domestic product was aid (BSIP 1971a: 5).1 Commercial exploitation of fisheries resources was one of the options available. In late 1971 and early 1972 there was a flurry of correspondence to and from the Western Pacific High Commission in Fiji and interested companies about possibilities for fisheries developments in the BSIP, including unnamed Taiwanese and Korean companies as well as Starkist, John West, and Van Camp. In correspondence and notes by the colonial fisheries advisor, John Pepys-Cockerel, the American-based companies were rejected because they were not prepared to do any processing in Solomon Islands because of ‘prohibitive duties’ on imports of canned tuna to the USA. He preferred the proposal from Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ because this company seemed the most committed to establishing a shore base and conducting value-adding processing in-country.2 Another Japanese company Mitsui had expressed interest in mining for phosphate so David Kausimae, the Chair of the Committee on Natural Resources under the Governing Council (the Solomon Islands government-in-training under the colonial administration in the years before Independence), went to Japan and visited the head offices of Mitsui and Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ for further discussions. Kausimae and a Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ representative signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a fishing survey and Kausimae brought a copy back to the Financial Committee. Kausimae said he signed the agreement for two reasons: foreign exchange and employment. But at first the agreement made him very unpopular. Apparently Solomon Mamaloni accused him of ‘selling our birthright’. He received death threats and was warned by the police not to let his children out of doors after dark.3

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Media reports and parliamentary records of the time show that many members of the Governing Council were surprised by the signing of the agreement and the arrival of Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ ships to start fishing (BSIP 1971b; PIM 1971b: 57, 59; PIM 1971a: 21–22). The Natural Resources Committee had discussed the agreement and sent an information paper to all members beforehand but not everyone had read the paper, so they had not warned their constituents about the coming of the fishing vessels, and the last time Solomon Islander villagers had seen Japanese ships in their lagoons they had been at war. Okinawan fishermen remember village people running screaming, hiding in their houses, and throwing rocks at them.4 Some Council members worried that the Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ vessels would deplete food stocks, others felt that the entry fee of AU$500 per ship was too low. The agreement was for 18 months’ fishing, of which 39 days (12 December 1971–26 January 1972) was spent doing a feasibility survey.5 For the rest of the time the Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ vessels fished commercially. Eighteen catcher boats worked with four motherships to freeze and transport the catch. The fishing was so good, with some vessels catching 20 metric tons in just a couple of hours, that the motherships did not have time to freeze one catch before the next was ready to load, so the fishing had to stop until the freezing process caught up.6 The ‘survey’ period may be characterized as a lesson in fisheries negotiation for Solomon Islands in that they received a survey, but had also effectively given away a lot of fish to Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ (Hughes 1987; BSIP 1972; BSIP 1973a; BSIP 1973b; BSIP 1973c). In November 1972 the first Solomon Taiyo Joint Venture Agreement was ratified by the Governing Council, with a start-up investment from Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ of AU$500,000. By this time parliamentarians who had previously opposed the joint venture, even Mamaloni, had been persuaded that the joint venture was in Solomon Islands’ best interests (BSIP Newssheet 1972d). Death threats to Kausimae were replaced with expressions of gratitude.

The pole-and-line fishery Pole-and-line fishing was the main method used by Solomon Taiyo and, apart from small technological innovations, it remained substantially unchanged over three decades of the company’s history. Pole-and-line fishing is one of the most ecologically sustainable of the industrial tuna fishing methods, being very target specific (very little bycatch), and being unable to scoop up entire schools of fish. It was also a socially responsible method for the Solomon Islands situation, being very labor intensive and being low-tech enough that engineering and maintenance could be carried out domestically. Solomon Taiyo fishing boats ranged in catching capacity from 40 tons to 70 tons, but most were 44 tons with crews of around 30–35.7 Pole-and-line fishing for skipjack uses 3.5-meter-long rods with a fixed line and a feathered barbless lure, one rod per crew member. Skipjack often school near the surface. When a school of skipjack was located, by sonar or by the telltale frigate birds that circle above, the Fishing

Pole-and-line fishing rod, line, and hook

Pole-and-line fishing vessel

Figure 4.2 Pole-and-line fishing gear.

Figure 4.3 Pole-and-line rods leaning on vessel bow.

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Master eased the boat close to the school and live bait from flooded tanks in the hold was ‘chummed’ onto the surface of the water. Water was also sprayed by hose onto the surface of the water to simulate baitfish. The skipjack were induced into a frenzy, madly snapping for the tiny silver forms of the baitfish and the shiny L-shaped hooks of the fishermen. The scene on board was also frenzied at this stage. The crew sat around the prow of the boat, facing outwards. They dipped their hooks into the water then hauled the rod up over their shoulders so the fish hooked on the end was flung high into the air, slipped off the barbless lure in mid-flight and continued on behind the fisherman to landflapping furiously, on the deck. By this time the rod was already swung back down and the next fish was soon airborne. One fisherman can catch dozens of fish in a matter of minutes by this method. Fishing started before dawn and continued until the baitfish supply was exhausted, usually during the morning. Ships then returned to a baitground to rest until darkness when baitfishing could start. When the hold was full the boat returned to base to land the catch, refuel, and restock supplies. The small size of the Solomon Taiyo boats precluded long trips far from the coast, and the fishing around Solomon Islands was so good that long trips were not necessary. Some Solomon Taiyo catcher boats were equipped with brine freezers and so could stay at sea for up to a week, but many of the catcher boats just chilled the fish on ice, so these boats had to return within four days to ensure landing a goodquality catch. Solomon Taiyo was involved with another pole-and-line fishing venture set up in Solomon Islands in the late 1970s, National Fisheries Development (NFD). This venture with the Solomon Islands Government was to perform some of the training and development tasks the Solomon Islands Government requested of Solomon Taiyo, but which were deemed by management to be commercially unfeasible. NFD achieved some of its training goals but was unprofitable. NFD was privatized in the late 1980s, after which it was much more successful, becoming the largest fisheries producer in Solomon Islands in 2004. During the first few years of operations the Solomon Taiyo pole-and-line fleet grew by a few boats each year until 1977, when the fleet comprised 20 catcher boats.8 The fleet remained at about this level with a couple more or less boats in some years. When Solomon Taiyo first started almost all of the catcher boats used were owned by Okinawan fishermen and were ‘chartered’ to Solomon Taiyo. Localizing the fleet had always been part of the overall localization plans of the Solomon Islands government, but as late as 1992 12 boats in the fleet were still Okinawan owned (Hughes and Thaanum 1995). After heavy losses in the early 1990s the foreign exchange costs of this arrangement were finally seen by management as unacceptable, and as part of a restructuring initiated in 1993 the entire fleet was purchased by Solomon Taiyo over a period of four years. As well as sonar, another innovation introduced during Solomon Taiyo’s lifetime was the payao, a fish-aggregation device (FAD) developed in the Philippines. Tuna school under things floating on the surface of the sea, such as

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 81 logs, possibly to feed on the tiny fish that feed on the build up of algae and other life that accumulates on the underside. Solomon Taiyo’s payao (or payo as they were called in Pijin) were rafts, often made of lashed together bamboo, which were anchored to the floor of the sea, usually a few kilometers off the coast, in waters up to several hundred meters deep. Okinawan fishers started using payao in the 1970s. By the mid-1990s up to 70 percent of Solomon Taiyo’s pole-and-line fishing was around payao (Hughes and Thaanum 1995). Pole-and-line fishing, and the associated baitfishing, is extremely physically demanding work. The crews had only a few hours, rest each day and a couple of days off each month. The pole-and-line fishing and the baitfishing done by Solomon Taiyo required great skill and knowledge of the sea. For instance, captains had to be able to navigate through reefs in the dark to be able to baitfish at night then be in the fishing grounds at sea ready to start fishing by dawn the next day. The labor-intensive nature of pole-and-line fishing was well suited to the Solomon Islands economy, which needed employment, but it is less efficient than the purse-seine method, which developed technologically during the 1970s. The international skipjack fishing industry has thus become dominated by the purse-seine method and Solomon Taiyo had one of the only pole-and-line skipjack-fishing fleets still in existence in 2000 (others were in the Maldives, Ghana, and Japan). Although the style of fishing was ecologically sustainable, Solomon Taiyo’s vessels were sometimes guilty of other kinds of environmentally damaging practices. Catcher boats expelled bilge water, often containing oil and/or petrol, into enclosed waters such as lagoons and harbors. There were frequent complaints of oil on the surface of the water in Diamond Narrows, and the Roviana and Vonavona Lagoons.9 Petroleum products built up in these areas and sat on the surface of the water or coated the shoreline, potentially killing shellfish and other coastal aquatic life. According to the Operations Manager, in the past all boats used to dump their bilge waste without thinking, but in the 1990s the company had encouraged them to do it in the open sea or into a metal trailer on the wharf at the Noro Base, which then took the bilge waste to the dump. Not all captains heeded these guidelines, however. During fieldwork I often sat at the end of the wharf and watched the catcherboats unload their catch and restock with supplies. About half the time the bilge bin was nowhere to be seen, and brown scummy water or pink blooms of fuel washed downstream from the ships. Crew members tossed their drinking coconuts and juice containers overboard.

The baitfishery The pole-and-line fishery relied on the associated baitfishery. The method used by Solomon Taiyo was perfected by the fishermen from Sarahama in Okinawa, and passed on to Solomon Islander fishermen. Baitfish were caught around reefs and lagoons. The small shiny silver-and-white species of herring, sprat, and

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Figure 4.4 Bait boat and pole-and-line vessel.

some kinds of anchovies were favored as baitfish. Solomon Taiyo fishers caught baitfish with the assistance of small diesel-powered vessels called bait boats. A certain number of bait boats, usually between one and four, was ordered by radio by the Fishing Master of each catcher boat each day. Bait boats and the catcher boat converged on the arranged baitground by nightfall. The bait boats were in effect mobile light sources with a powerful lamp and generator taking up most of the space on the boat. Fishing Masters set the bait boats at various points around the reef to be fished. After sunset the bait boats set their lamps several meters under the water, and the catcher boat also set a lamp. The very bright light illuminated the blue-green lagoon water around the catcher boat and reflected from their white hulls, so from shore the effect was eerie but beautiful. Baitfish aggregate around lights. The darker the night the more they aggregate; on brighter nights other light is diffuse so the fish aggregate less. For this reason crews often rested for a day or two at full moon. The lights were set for a few hours and then fishing took place at the darkest time of the evening, usually between eight and midnight. The catcher boat caught the baitfish aggregated around its own lamp first. Baitfish were caught using a bouke-ami, a fine-gauge net, rectangular in shape with one end attached down the side of the boat and the other side held straight and floated on the surface parallel to the boat by a long floating rod, such as a PVC pipe. The net was allowed to dip in the middle between the boat and the pipe to a sufficient depth (20 meters or more) for the school of baitfish to swim into it. The lamp, still under water, was slowly brought around the boat by a

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 83

Figure 4.5 Bouke-ami (baitfishing net).

couple of crew members in a dinghy, and the baitfish came with it. The lamp was brought into the middle of the net and then the crew carefully pulled tight the edges of the net (letting the dinghy and lamp out one corner), leaving only the middle of the net still dipped. Then the rod was brought slowly in towards the boat, gradually reducing the size of the dipped area in which the baitfish were concentrated. The net was pulled slowly in by hand by the crew members until the dipped area was only a couple of square meters teeming with baitfish. Then a crew member scooped the baitfish up with buckets and passed them along a chain of crew to a storage tank under the deck, where the baitfish swam live until the next day’s fishing. Larger species of fish (sharks, rays, turtles, even dolphins) were occasionally caught inside the baitfishing net. These animals damage the net and the baitfish so they were either chased out of the net or were killed and later eaten by the crew. From setting the bouke-ami to scooping the last bucket of bait took between 40 minutes and one hour. Most Solomon Taiyo catcher boats could hold between 200 and 300 buckets of baitfish, but depending on the size of the hold some could carry only 180 buckets and others 400 buckets. Sometimes the hold was filled with one drop of the net but usually up to six drops were required. After the first drop the catcher boat upped anchor and proceeded carefully to one of the waiting bait boats. The lamp of the bait boat was turned off at the same time as the nearby catcher boat’s lamp was turned on. The aggregated baitfish moved from the bait boat to the catcher boat’s lamp, and the whole process was repeated. Once the baitfishing was completed the

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catcher boat then started off for the skipjack-fishing grounds in the open sea, which were often several hours away. There were recurrent concerns about the ecological sustainability of Solomon Taiyo’s baitfishing. Some of the grounds were intensively fished for many years, and it was often assumed that apparent depletions in reef fish targeted by coastal communities was caused by the baitfishing. A report on baitfishing from the Fisheries Division in 1980 asserted that the level of operations in limited lagoon areas were ‘cropping at lower and lower levels per amount of fishing effort put in’ according to statistical yield analysis.10 In 1973 each catcher boat used only one or two lights but in 1977–1978 larger-capacity vessels entered the fishery and by 1979 each vessel used four or five lights. The catch per unit of effort was measured at catch per 2,000 watt light per night. In 1973 this was 45 buckets, in 1979 it was down to 25 buckets. The author of that report could not determine whether there had been a direct effect on food stocks, but felt that overfishing would definitely upset the ecosystem and could thus affect food stocks. The Solomon Taiyo Fleet Manager and Okinawan fisherman Tôriike both described baitfish populations as being like plants, in that if pruned they reproduced faster and reestablished numbers. Company interviewees also said the baitfishery was self-regulated; when baitfish catches declined in one area fishermen moved on and fished in another area. At the same time, it did not follow that the baitgrounds not being used were necessarily unproductive. Fishers tended to use the baitgrounds closest to their intended skipjack-fishing grounds, so when the skipjack were biting in a new area baitground use shifted accordingly, even if the previous baitground had been very productive.11 Because of concerns about possible depletion of baitfish and food fish stocks the Fisheries Division collaborated with Australian organizations to more thoroughly monitor the baitfishery. In 1987 the Australian Council for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) was commissioned to do a study of baitfishing in Solomon Islands, to work out whether they were reducing stocks of baitfish or food stocks of reef fish. The research found that the baitfish were not part of the same food chains as the food fish, so harvesting baitfish should not affect foodfish stocks (Blaber and Copland 1990; Blaber, Milton, and Rawlinson 1993). This research and subsequent follow-up also indicated that although there had been reductions of reef-fish stocks around Tulagi (SIG 1988b: 22), which was heavily fished for many years, all of Solomon Taiyo’s other heavily baitfished areas, such as the Roviana and Marovo lagoons, showed no signs of depletion in baitfish populations.12 The measure of stock depletion is catch per unit of effort (CPUE) and Solomon Taiyo’s CPUE remained largely unchanged throughout its 27 years of operation (see Table 4.1). Even if 1970s data is discounted due to deficiencies in the reporting and monitoring systems rectified in the 1980s, that is still nearly 20 years of fishing without a sustained CPUE decline. There were fluctuations in CPUE for some years, such as the good years in 1981 and 1983 and the bad years in 1982 and 1984, but as declines in stocks rectified without a decline in fishing effort, it seems unlikely the stock declines were caused by the fishing

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 85 Table 4.1 Solomon Islands baitfish catch 1973–1998 Year

Nights fished

Buckets hauled

Buckets per night per boat

Hauls per night

Buckets per haul

Catch metric tons (mt)

1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998

1,722 1,503 1,563 1,967 2,913 3,597 4,858 4,903 4,892 5,335 6,844 6,548 7,593 8,150 7,372 8,008 7,347 6,638 7,866 6,757 6,008 7,202 – – – –

118,808 91,371 130,587 167,685 225,076 238,965 303,741 325,645 645,811 672,203 895,631 813,570 1,015,539 1,075,263 956,323 1,135,289 968,301 863,163 1,043,811 901,224 881,537 942,509 1,005,973 948,017 405,596 766,403

69.0 60.8 83.5 85.2 77.3 66.4 62.5 66.4 132.0 126.0 130.9 124.2 133.8 131.9 130.0 142.0 132.0 130.0 133.0 133.0 147.0 138.0 – – – –

– – – – – – – – 10,580 14,525 17,543 18,167 20,024 21,878 21,671 21,251 19,281 18,923 23,261 23,261 18,389 20,794 20,792 17,848 8,468 13,288

– – – – – – – – 61.0 46.3 51.1 44.8 50.7 49.1 44.1 53.4 50.2 45.6 44.9 38.7 47.9 45.3 48.4 53.1 47.9 57.7

488.8 375.9 537.2 689.9 926.0 983.1 1,249.6 1,339.7 1,420.8 1,478.8 1,970.4 1,789.9 2,234.2 2,365.6 2,103.9 2,497.6 2,130.3 1,899.0 2,296.4 1,982.7 1,939.4 2,182.3 2,213.4 1,896.0 892.3 1,686.0

Source: Solomon Islands Government Annual Reports from the Fisheries Division, other Fisheries Division records. Notes 1 One bucket of bait was approximately 2.2 kg wet weight of baitfish. 2 These figures included Solomon Taiyo-owned vessels, Okinawan-owned vessels and NFD vessels from 1979. 3 Nights fished was not as specific a measure of effort as hauls of the net, because in one night there may be as few as one and as many as ten hauls of the net (usually it was between two and six), so figures on buckets per haul started to be collected and eventually figures on nights fished ceased being collected. 4 The sudden jump in catch per unit effort from 1981 was probably due to the introduction of a system of baitfishing maps, logs, and observers that made the records more accurate than before, rather than being due to a sudden increase in capacity. Statistics on baitfish held by the Fisheries Division included a caveat that figures from 1973–1980 were raised by a factor of 1.87 to compensate for underreporting of catches during those years. 5 According to Solomon Taiyo management and the Fisheries Division the length of the fishing season was usually nine or ten months per year. Shorter or longer seasons account for some yearly fluctuations in catch size. For example, the 1988 baitfish catch total was up 394mt on the total for 1987 of 2,104mt because the fishing season in 1988 was 8,008 nights, in 1987 it was only 7,372 nights (SIG 1989: 21).

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(SIG 1986: 11, 13). For example, Fisheries Division records note that in the 1980s there was a drop in CPUE around Tulagi followed by a stock explosion without remedial action having been taken by the fishery.13 Overall short-term declines were probably caused by oceanographic effects such as El Niño. Fluctuations and stock declines were also noted in individual fishing grounds. Solomon Taiyo’s fishermen thought these were likely to be caused by oceanographic effects as well, or by pollution, such as silt runoff into lagoons after logging.14 Villagers often asserted that it was harder to catch food fish in lagoons by the 1990s than in had been before Solomon Taiyo commenced operations. Decreasing food catches could be explained by a number of factors, including pollution from logging and/or villages, and changing fishing practices of increasing village populations.15 Solomon Islands has one of the world’s highest population-growth rates so there has probably been increased pressure on food stocks, and increased pollution, which may have affected fish stocks. There has been clear felling of forests in many areas, resulting in topsoil washing into rivers and fragile coral reef systems, which may have destroyed fish breeding grounds and habitat. There has also been a decline in customary knowledge about fisheries resources over recent generations, so it is possible that some customary taboos that protected stocks were no longer being observed.16 How reliable were the Fisheries Division figures on CPUE? In 1981 a reporting system with no incentive for underreporting was implemented, and refined over the next few years (Blaber and Copland 1990; Blaber et al. 1993; SIG 1986). Solomon Taiyo catcher boats were charged royalties for each time they entered a baitfishing ground, regardless of how much or little they caught. Baitground trustees could monitor which catcher boats entered their baitground and check their records against their royalties. Numbers of buckets of fish were recorded by a senior crew member on each boat and were filed monthly with the Fisheries Division, where they were collated with figures for all baitgrounds and monitored by research staff. The catcher boats needed a fairly accurate count for their own purposes because each vessel’s hold could contain a specific amount of baitfish in healthy condition until the next day’s fishing – too few buckets and the tuna-fishing day was shortened, too many and the baitfish were sluggish and ineffective as bait. Fisheries Observers traveled at random on Solomon Taiyo vessels. Observers’ figures on buckets of bait were collated by the Fisheries Division and cross-checked with the Solomon Taiyo figures. Inaccuracies probably occurred from time to time in this system but because there was no reason to underreport the catch it was unlikely that this factor biased CPUE records. Fisheries Division officers interviewed all said that on the basis of their monitoring they believed the baitfishery was sustainable. At first the intention was that baitground communities would do the fishing themselves and sell baitfish to Solomon Taiyo. Media reports in 1972 announced plans for Mr T. Kanna (the name of the family who owned Tokuyo¯ Gyogyo¯, the company that recruited fishermen from Okinawa to work for Solomon Taiyo),

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 87 cited as a Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ fishing expert, to teach locals how to catch baitfish to sell to the company (BSIP Newsheet 1972a: 10; BSIP Newsheet 1972b: 6). Under the first joint-venture agreement the company was bound to donate the equipment, train local fishers, and buy bait from them at commercial rates.17 In 1973 Solomon Taiyo put out a call for interested fishers to volunteer to learn baitfishing techniques. A baitfishing lamp had arrived from the Philippines and Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯’s fishermen had worked out a method using a powerful paraffin lamp on the surface, four canoes, and an Indonesian bagan net, a small mesh net protected on the outside by a larger mesh net used as a lift net. Live bait was to be kept 24 hours in a pound net and be sold to the catcher boats. Large fish caught would be the property of the villagers to take home or sell.18 Plans for localization of baitfishing continued throughout the 1970s according to the records, and according to interviewees even in the 1980s, but villager-run baitfishing never operated commercially.19 The joint-venture partners treated baitgrounds (lagoons and reefs used for baitfishing) as owned under customary tenure by the relevant group of villagers.20 The most heavily utilized baitgrounds were around Vangunu in the Marovo Lagoon, in Choiseul, Munda in the Roviana Lagoon, and Raromana in the Vona Vona Lagoon. Disputes over who were the legitimate baitground owners, and thus who had the right to receive payments, occurred periodically throughout Solomon Taiyo’s history, although they were much reduced by the 1980s. Baitground communities occasionally asked Solomon Taiyo to cease using their baitground for a range of reasons including perceptions that food stocks of reef fish were being depleted by baitfishing, pollution from the boats (generally petroleum wastes in bilge), disturbances caused to lagoons by large vessels passing through at speed, and disturbances caused to village life by crews (drinking, fighting, liaisons with village women, taking of nuts from village trees, etc.). With around 70 registered baitgrounds to choose from, Solomon Taiyo catcher boats could use other baitgrounds when a particular baitground became the subject of dispute. Disputes over baitground ownership and concerns about the sustainability of baitfishing meant the company periodically considered alternative sources of bait, but a feasible alternative had not been found.

The purse-seine fishery Solomon Taiyo’s main fishing operation was pole-and-line but since 1980 Solomon Taiyo also engaged in purse seining. This was done by a group of vessels; a net boat in cooperation with a freezer boat and a pilot boat. At various times Solomon Taiyo also contracted single seiners (capable of carrying out all functions on the one vessel). A purse-seine net is circled around a school of fish and then the bottom of the net is drawn closed to prevent the fish escaping. When full the net is drawn into the boat and the fish stored. Solomon Taiyo’s purse seining was done around payaos. Solomon Taiyo’s purse-seine group had a holding

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Figure 4.6 Purse-seine fishing.

capacity of 100 metric tons, which is very small compared to some ‘superseiners’ with holding capacities of 1,500 metric tons or more. Purse seiners are more technically complicated than pole-and-line vessels. They are expensive to operate and maintain, and the heavy machinery needed to lift the net means working on purse seiners can be dangerous. In 1986 a ‘lapse in caution’ resulted in the death of a crewman on a purse seiner (Hughes 1987: 223). In 1991 the net boat in Solomon Taiyo’s purse-seine group sank when caught by heavy seas while lifting the net. Several Solomon Islander crew members drowned.

Onshore processing The first Solomon Taiyo shore base was at Tulagi, site of the first colonial capital, which had been destroyed by Japanese bombing in the war. A small cannery and a fish-smoking plant were established soon after the joint venture was established in the early 1970s and were used until new facilities were opened at Noro in 1990. Hathorn Sound was first used as a fishing base in the mid-1970s when Solomon Taiyo outgrew the Tulagi base. Hathorn Sound is a natural harbor. Apparently it was used as a coaling port for the British Royal Navy and had been considered as an option for the main Pacific port for the British Empire when Singapore was chosen (Sunset News 1984; UN Development Advisory Team 1975b). During the first half of the twentieth century Noro Point, which was locally known as Musi Boko (stinky pig), was used by Levers Bros while they applied for a lease over the surrounding Kazukuru land under the Waste Lands regulations in a lengthy process that began in 1914 and ended in 1931.21 During the war the Americans upgraded and used the wharf area, which had also long been used by local copra exporters. A new generation of Roviana families claiming Kazukuru descent who had fought the original Levers Bros lease began contesting the alienation of the land again in the courts in the early 1970s (and

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 89

Map 4.1 Noro and surrounds.

continued throughout the life of Solomon Taiyo). But effectively Noro was no longer considered to be customary land and was therefore available for commercial use. When the Solomon Taiyo joint venture was being renegotiated in 1981, the partners undertook to establish an upgraded and expanded base at Noro. Delays with establishing housing, roads, wharves, power, water, and other infrastructure meant that the Noro base was not fully functional until the early 1990s. Europe (then the European Economic Community) funded the building of much initial infrastructure at Noro. The Japanese government also funded several millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and infrastructure for the Ports Authority at Noro in three phases. Japanese funding also built the Noro Town Council office and the accommodation facilities called Noro Lodge on the far side of Cutter Point (the Ports Authority area) from the Solomon Taiyo Base, in the central business district area of Noro, where the market place, banks, Telekom office, and several trading stores were based (see Map 4.2). By 1999 the Solomon Taiyo facilities at Noro included two wharves for landing catches – one for purse seiners and one for pole-and-line boats. Other facilities included a government wharf and container storage area, and another wharf with cold storage called Kitano, which had been constructed with Japanese aid money and was therefore intended for public use, but in practice was only used by Solomon Taiyo. On the Solomon Taiyo base there was cold storage for several hundred metric tons (mt) of fish, brine freezing tanks with a combined

Map 4.2 Solomon Taiyo base at Noro.

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 91 Fishing

Pole and line

Base operations

Freezing brine tank

Purse seine

Cold storage

Cannery

Smoke house

Fishmeal plant

Products

Canned tuna

Fishmeal

Arabushi

Whole frozen fish

Figure 4.7 Solomon Taiyo production flowchart (source: adapted from Solomon Taiyo brochure, c.1992:18).

capacity of more than 100mt, and a 35mt ice-making machine. There were factories on the base for the manufacture of canned fish, dried fish, and fishmeal, which were the biggest and most high-tech in the South Pacific at the time they were built. Also on site was an administration block, a waste-water treatment plant, facilities for the slip and repair of boats, a large engineering and maintenance department, storage for food, fuel and equipment, and a clinic. Building the factories on the Noro base cost US$12,000,000.22 In 1999 the base was undergoing another upgrade to meet the requirements of a 1998 inspection by European officials monitoring standards for food imports, including relining the cannery walls, segregation of cooking and processing areas, and an upgrade of employee amenities, including a dining hall and ablutions area. Further planned renovations included changes to entry/exit sanitation controls, additional protective clothing, and cooler air temperatures in the loin processing areas (SPPF 1999). Solomon Taiyo made four kinds of product: frozen whole fish, canned fish, smoked fish (arabushi), and fishmeal products. The proportions changed over time. Frozen exports fell from 57 to 18 percent of exports in the period 1990–1994 because more of the catch was being canned in the new Noro factory (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 21). The canned products included solid or ‘chunk’ light meat in brine or oil, ‘flake’ dark meat in oil, and a combination of chunk and flake in oil. The light or ‘fancy’ meat was produced mostly for export markets and the dark meat sold for low margins domestically and in regional markets. In the late 1990s two flavored varieties of the light meat in oil were produced, chili and curry. Consultants had accused the company of not being ‘adventuresome’ in developing new products. Suggestions for innovations included meal-style

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Table 4.2 Solomon Islands tuna-catch utilization 1971–1994 Year

Frozen exports

Frozen local sales

Canned/ cannery input

1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994

4,711 7,905 5,278 8,400 3,641 12,051 9,773 14,518 21,918 19,001 23,246 15,064 29,183 32,532 26,346 39,737 26,226 34,516 28,705 11,035 37,882 21,357 15,280 13,837

– – 91 248 172 145 195 132 137 225 290 194 284 149 436 510 336 454 517 428 422 851 915 910

– – 321 1,836 2,619 2,076 1,745 2,056 2,267 2,163 2,060 2,679 2,579 3,205 2,904 3,270 3,503 3,938 4,282 8,739 10,041 11,427 13,197 24,936

Arabushi

– – 0 429 1,006 1,117 964 1,003 786 919 842 1,324 1,575 859 784 1,206 1,735 1,802 2,034 2,489 1,996 1,848 2,649 5,215

Fishmeal input

Others

Total

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 3,471 3,396 3,141 1,988 14,949

0 0 8 45 88 72 0 0 84 186 108 53 44 39 23 85 74 72 32 255 727 115 144 144

4,711 7,905 5,698 10,985 7,526 15,461 12,659 17,709 25,202 22,494 26,546 19,314 33,665 36,784 30,998 44,208 31,874 40,782 35,570 26,417 54,464 38,740 34,173 60,009

Source: Solomon Islands Government, Annual Reports, Fisheries Division. Notes National Fisheries Development (as well as Solomon Taiyo) catches are included from 1979. From 1980 purse-seine catches are included. In 1993 2mt of ‘fishmeal/others’ were produced and in 1994 123mt of ‘bonemeal exports’ were produced. In 1994 62mt of loin (butchered and boiled pieces of skipjack) were produced. The sudden increase in fishmeal input in 1994 to more than ten times the amount from the previous year may be a typographical error in the source material. No explanation was offered in the annual report for this increase.

products and changing to easy-open cans, which would have required expensive new filling and seaming equipment, and new ingredients, which were not easy to procure in the Solomon Islands (SPPF 1999; Hughes and Thaanum 1995). Frozen/fresh fish Solomon Taiyo always sold some frozen fish in the domestic market. In the 1970s, when fish was the most important source of protein for nine out of ten Solomon Islands households, the company apparently sold ten to 15 metric tons a month in the Honiara market, three-quarters of which was skipjack (BSIP 1974b: 30). In the early 1990s the company was selling about 1,000mt annually

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 93 Table 4.3 Solomon Taiyo production 1981–1997 Year

Frozen fish metric tons

Canned fish ’000s cases

Arabushi metric tons

Fishmeal metric tons

Total catch metric tons

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997

23,830 16,387 29,447 34,740 25,730 39,096 29,329 36,075 20,652 13,576 25,800 11,265 7,440 5,515 16,268 10,030 7,105

139 160 175 196 171 181 225 242 257 513 623 697 726 956 1,037 880 1,072

116 224 264 158 173 226 313 342 381 462 406 411 611 773 814 922 935

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 322 713 968 791 1,378 1,165 1,076 960 1,598

26,830 20,316 33,367 39,125 29,254 43,797 34,828 41,948 27,924 25,486 37,488 24,724 22,768 26,451 35,173 26,869 26,105

Source: Solomon Taiyo Ltd. Notes The total catch included fish caught by National Fisheries Development (NFD) until 1989 when Solomon Taiyo divested its shareholding in NFD. The figures in this table do not tally exactly with the figures in Table 4.2, indicating discrepancies between the two sources.

in the domestic market, much of it bycatch, such as rainbow runner or king fish (Spanish mackerel), rather than skipjack.23 By the early 1990s exports of frozen fish for canning or smoking in other countries amounted to about 25,000mt annually. Solomon Taiyo’s frozen-fish markets were flexible, and they sold to wherever they could get a good price, so they did not sell to each buyer country every year. Some of the countries to which Solomon Taiyo exported frozen fish were: Japan, Thailand, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Fiji, Australia, Indonesia, and Canada (SIG 1987: 18; SIG 1988a: 28; Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 21, 66). Canned fish The Noro Cannery had the capacity to process 20,000 tonnes of tuna a year, or 1.2 million cases (Hughes and Thaanum 1995). Fish were brought from cold storage to the cannery by forklift in metal containers. The containers were parked in the first shed and defrosted by water spraying from hoses suspended from a pipe along the ceiling. After being defrosted the fish were gutted. Then they went to the steaming room, which smelled strongly of boiled fish. The steamers were large, round, metal tanks connected to each other by pipes. The floor in this room was slippery with blood, bones, and scraps of flesh. According

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Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

to the Quality Control Manager the Noro water supply was inadequate to sluice the floors as per best practice.24 The cooked fish went to the first cleaning line. The bones, heads, and tails were removed. Meat clinging to the bones was taken off and put with other scraps of red meat and broken parts of white meat to make the flake product. Piles of bones, heads, and tails were carted away to be processed into fishmeal or taken to the dump. On the second cleaning line the skin and fine bones were removed. The third cleaning line took off any remaining skin and the red meat was ‘scratched’ off the white meat to make clean white loins. Scraps from these processes all went to the flake pile. The flake meat was broken up very finely to search for scraps of metal from the ship or other ‘foreign bodies’ that sometimes get lodged in the flesh of the fish. The meat for export was checked with a metal detector before it went into the cans, and a metal detector was to be installed on the flake production line. The loins were packed into tins by a machine. The cans were fed to the packer by a framework of stainless-steel-rod chutes from a hole high in the wall down to the packing machines. Cans were fed by hand into these chutes from the next room, but this was due to be mechanized. After packing, the cans were weighed and topped up with more meat if necessary. Then the meat was drizzled with oil or brine, the lids fitted and seamed. The cans were cleaned, put into boxes, sent on to be labeled and then put back into the boxes. Cans were checked for puffing, indenting, or leaking. The contents of irregular cans were tested for microbes in the small base laboratory. Each skipjack is made up of light meat, dark meat, bone, head, tail, and water. One metric ton of frozen fish yields around 610 kilograms of waste and 390 kilograms of edible meat. The contents for Solomon Taiyo’s usual tin size were 180 grams (150 grams of fish and 30 grams of oil or brine and salt). There were 48 tins in a case. Ideally one metric ton of frozen fish made 54 cases of fish (40 fancy light chunks of meat, and 14 flake broken up and dark meat), but this varied according to productivity levels (BSIP 1974b). According to the Deputy General Manager the benchmark yield rate in Thai canneries was 17 to 18 kilograms of skipjack per carton of canned product. Earlier the Solomon Taiyo yield rate had been 25–30 kilograms per carton, but in 1999 it had reached the range of 20 kilograms or less per carton due to improvements implemented by the then Cannery Manager. Solomon Taiyo tinned fish, commonly called ‘Taiyo’, was one of the shopbought foods popular in Solomon Islands, along with rice, biscuits, tea, sugar, instant noodles, and various snacks. Tinned fish has been popular in Solomon Islands for many years. Out of 100 household surveys conducted in 1973, 57 households placed tinned mackerel at the top of important sources of animal protein, and 30 placed it second in importance after fresh fish. In the first three years of the 1970s tinned fish imports had then been 500 metric tons a year, of which 400 metric tons were mackerel from Japan (BSIP 1974b). Prices for Japanese mackerel started to rise in 1973, so Solomon Taiyo product took market share from imported fish. Government procurement helped with this; Solomon Taiyo’s flake product was provided at boarding schools and hospitals, and was also used as emergency rations.

Figure 4.8 Solomon Blue can label.

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Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

Solomon Islanders generally liked the Solomon Taiyo product and they often commented that the canned tuna available in shops overseas was less delicious. Solomon Islanders who lived overseas often had cases of Solomon Blue sent to them. An interviewee who had lived in Australia for a while said he was ‘desperate for some decent canned tuna’ because what he called ‘the cheap Thai stuff’ did not ‘taste the same’. Solomon Islanders preferred the flake product Solomon Blue, which had a stronger flavor than the white meat preferred by Westerners, and which was cheaper to buy. Solomon Taiyo’s domestic canned sales in 1993 were SB$14,500,000, and nine-tenths of this was Solomon Blue (Hughes and Thaanum 1995). The General Manager said the company saw production of Solomon Blue as a social responsibility because it had become many people’s routine meal, part of their daily lives, a ‘household name’. Britain was the most important export market for Solomon Taiyo’s canned product. A company called Taiyo UK was the sole agent for sales in the UK (SPPF 1999: 4). British buyers historically sourced fish products through Japanese trading companies because they guaranteed quality. The market for skipjack tuna in the UK developed since the 1960s and there were no domestic producers to compete with importers (Owen and Troedson 1994). In the 1970s more than 50 percent of canned tuna sold in the UK was sourced from Japanese companies (Hughes and Thaanum 1995). The UK market for canned skipjack has been substantial since the early 1980s. In 1985 75 percent of Solomon Taiyo’s canned exports went to the UK, 15 percent went to Belgium, and the rest to Japan and the Netherlands. In 1986 all canned fish exports went to the UK (SIG 1987: 18; SIG 1988a: 28). In 1992 Solomon Islands provided 7 percent of UK imports, and by 1995 was providing 10 percent (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 21). After the large cannery came on line at Noro, canned exports to the UK became Solomon Taiyo’s core business. The biggest buyer was the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain, with another large buyer being the Waitrose chain. In the late 1990s, 90 percent of all Solomon Taiyo canned exports went to Sainsbury’s (SPPF 1999: 4). According to the Solomon Taiyo General Manager, Sainsbury’s business totaled 60 percent of Solomon Taiyo’s income in 1999. Sainsbury’s retail strategy was to supply environmentally and socially responsible products of high quality at a premium price. The company was willing to pay up to 10 percent more than market prices for products that increased its customer loyalty through this strategy (Sainsbury’s, The Magazine 1997; Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 21). Solomon Taiyo’s canned fish fit this product profile because the pole-and-line fishing method is very labor intensive so generates more local employment than purse seining, and Solomon Taiyo also reported to Sainsbury’s on labor conditions, such as the sex distribution (to show gender equity) and age of workers (to show no child labor was used). The pole-and-line method is the most environmentally friendly form of industrial tuna fishing. Solomon Taiyo was in the late 1990s working towards certification as environmentally friendly by the London-based Marine Stewardship Council.25 In addition, Solomon Taiyo’s product was high quality. In part this was due to the pole-and-line mode of fishing. Purse-seined tuna may be squashed and

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 97 damaged by struggling in the net, they may take a long time to die (releasing stress chemicals throughout the body), and may heat up in the mass of fish in the net, all of which affects the meat. Pole-and-line fish can go from swimming in the sea to being on ice in the hold in a matter of ten or 15 minutes. As one of the few companies in the world that fished by pole-and-line, Solomon Taiyo was one of a small number of suppliers of skipjack and yellowfin for Sainsbury’s home brand. In the late 1990s 60–70 percent of Sainsbury’s supply came from Solomon Taiyo, with the Maldives providing the rest (SPPF 1999: 4). As a product of Solomon Islands, Solomon Taiyo’s canned tuna escaped the 24 percent tariff and an import quota on tinned fish brought into the European Union under the Lomé Convention (now the Cotonou Agreement). In 1991 European officials questioned the nationality of Solomon Taiyo for the purposes of the Lomé Convention. The nationalities of members of the Board of Directors (three Japanese and three Solomon Islanders), the fact that many of the fishing vessels used were registered in Okinawa, and the nationalities of senior managers (seven non-Solomon Islanders and three Solomon Islanders) apparently put the ACP (Africa Caribbean Pacific) country label in jeopardy.26 After that Solomon Taiyo embarked on a hire-purchase scheme for the chartered vessels. With localization of fleet ownership but almost no change in the nationalities of senior management or directorship, Solomon Taiyo managed to retain the ACP country label. Without the ACP advantage Solomon Taiyo would have found it difficult to compete with Thai and Filipino canned tuna; southeast Asia having economies of scale, high productivity, low wages, and efficiencies related to being in an industrialized area with easy to organize and competitively priced freight. Maruha’s marketing strategy for Solomon Taiyo was not to compete internationally with lower-priced products but to concentrate on markets with ACP benefits to even out the price differential, and market the product as worth the higher price for quality and ethical reasons.27 This strategy was risky in the context of increasing international pressures for trade liberalization, but considering Solomon Islands’ difficult business environment compared to southeast Asian competitors, it is hard to see what else the company could have done. Table 4.4 Solomon Taiyo canned-fish exports by country 1991–1995 1991 Cases

1992

1993

1994

1995

United Kingdom Other European countries Japan Australia Others

434,900 –

476,150 –

550,750 13,600

743,000 3,400

768,174 1,700

– 1,500 17,720

– – 7,400

– 11,600 21,700

16,500 4,725 14,098

30,000 7,814 17,850

Total

452,620

483,550

597,650

781,723

825,538

Source: Adapted from Solomon Taiyo Ltd 1996, Corporate Plan 1996–2000: 16.

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Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

Solomon Taiyo’s other markets for cans at various times included Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu. These markets, however, were tiny compared to the UK. Between January and May 1995 four containers went to Australia, three to Vanuatu and two to PNG, while 250 containers went to the UK. Small amounts of canned product also went to other parts of Europe and Japan (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 18, 19, 57). Arabushi and fishmeal In the late 1980s in Japan 160,000 metric tons of skipjack were smoked annually for katsuobushi (literally ‘skipjack loin’), a stock flavoring and condiment used extensively in Japanese cuisine. Japanese household consumption of katsuobushi had dropped over the decades as Western foods increased in popularity, but sales to institutions and processed food manufacturers increased, so the overall market decreased only slightly during the 1970s and 1980s. The Japanese demand for overseas sources of katsuobushi went up when the costs of fishing increased with the oil shocks in the 1970s. In 1980 2,000 metric tons was imported, mostly from Taiwan, Thailand, and Solomon Islands. Solomon Taiyo produced arabushi (literally ‘rough loin’), smoke-dried skipjack loins that required a final processing with a special mould to become katsuobushi. In 1974 Solomon Taiyo exported 68 metric tons of arabushi, and in 1977 59 metric tons. Apparently Solomon Taiyo’s Table 4.5 Solomon Taiyo arabushi exports 1976–1994 Year

Quantity (kilograms)

Value (SB$)

1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994

140,000 106,000 228,800 141,750 187,170 70,275 298,600 209,940 154,589 211,905 225,576 313,500 313,165 – 521,303 406,365 428,891 503,517 1,042,785

225,252 388,301 721,296 438,134 781,092 344,601 1,246,110 891,685 609,736 726,816 1,231,989 2,493,022 2,930,484 – 3,555,753 2,771,815 3,063,291 5,227,243 5,613,628

Source: Solomon Islands Government, Annual Reports, Fisheries Division, Honiara.

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 99 Table 4.6 Solomon Taiyo fishmeal production 1991–1995 Metric tons 1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

968

791

1,419

1,165

1,076

Source: Solomon Taiyo Ltd 1996, Corporate Plan 1996–2000.

product was highly regarded in Japan, compared to other non-Japanese arabushi (Ashenden and Kitson 1987: 109). Production increased when the Noro arabushi plant came on line in 1987. By 1999 the Solomon Taiyo arabushi plant was the only one outside Japan. It was producing 900 metric tons of arabushi a year, which was 8 percent of total Japanese production (SPPF 1999: 5). There were plans to increase output to 1,200 metric tons per year. Solomon Taiyo had an arrangement whereby Yamaki (a large katsuobushi company) undertook to buy all of Solomon Taiyo’s arabushi as long as the production process was managed to Yamaki’s satisfaction by Japanese contractors living on site. Frozen fish was brought from cold storage to the plant where it was thawed and put into big, open-topped, diesel-powered boilers. After boiling the fish was loined and the skin and bones removed. The loins were placed on metal trays stacked on frames, which were put into a huge smoking shed made of concrete blocks. The smoking utilized two types of locally harvested coastal swamp harwoods; qema (Pometia pinnata) and buni (calophyllum spp.).28 This timber was sourced locally, at times purchased from landowners, but often logged by the company in the Noro Town Council area.29 The smoking process took several days, depending on the size of the loins (longer for larger). Arabushi was then stored and transported in refrigerated containers at a constant temperature of 60°C. In 1993 Solomon Taiyo started a new arabushi product, boiled packed loins, which were frozen and exported to Japan for smoking and curing.30 Fish waste from the cannery and arabushi plant were sent on to the Fishmeal Plant. There the scraps were dried and crushed into a rough powder that was sold as fertilizer or as animal feed. The Noro plant was capable of producing 1,200mt of fishmeal annually. Although it never brought in significant amounts of income, fishmeal was sold as animal feed and fertilizer in Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and Malaysia.

Sales and marketing In the 1980s all sales and marketing of Solomon Islands tuna, even that caught by the National Fisheries Development (NFD), was undertaken by Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ (SIG 1985). By the mid-1990s domestic marketing and regional marketing of Solomon Taiyo products was being done by Solomon Islander employees in Solomon Taiyo, but sales to the UK, which according to the annual reports of the Central Bank of Solomon Islands in the early 1990s made

100

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

up over 90 percent of the value of Solomon Taiyo’s total sales (CBSI 1995: 11), were still being done by Maruha on behalf of Solomon Taiyo for a commission, under a Sales and Marketing Agreement. Sales to Japan were also exclusively handled by Maruha.

Quality control Solomon Islands domestic food-production regulations were left over from the colonial administration, in the form of the UK Pure Food Act. But the Solomon Islands government did not have the resources to enforce these regulations effectively. More stringent quality control was required by the UK buyers than by the Solomon Islands government. Solomon Taiyo had to meet EU import regulations as well as the quality requirements of buyer companies. Complying with the European standards was an ongoing process. In July 1998 there was an inspection and many recommendations were made, including improvements to facilities for employees. Solomon Islands was in 1999 a ‘list two’ country in terms of food safety for importation to Europe, which meant imports were possible only to individual countries within Europe by bilateral agreement. Solomon Islands was working towards becoming a ‘list one’ country, which involved developing food safety testing and regulation systems such that Europe would recognize the Solomon Islands government as a ‘competent authority’, which would mean Solomon Islands products could be exported freely throughout Europe. To comply with European regulations Solomon Taiyo used the HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) safety and quality control and analysis method, and GMP (Good Manufacturing Process).

Pollution It was obvious that the sea around Noro was polluted. Several interviewees said they felt it was unsafe for swimming and that fish from the area would be full of toxins. In 1994 the Noro Town Council commissioned a scientist from the Solomon Islands College of Higher Education to investigate the pollution levels in Noro Harbour and Diamond Narrows.31 The scientist found that nitrates, ammonia, and phosphates were all above acceptable levels and that dissolved oxygen was below acceptable levels in water directly in front of the Solomon Taiyo Base. Water in Diamond Narrows was less polluted. Tidal flows helped by pushing water through the harbor and out to sea towards Kolumbangara. Not only Solomon Taiyo polluted Noro Harbour. The Solomon Islands Electricity Authority plant pumped black sludge diesel waste from the electricity generators into the sea. Noro’s residents also contributed to pollution in Noro. There were no toilets for the majority of the population, which was numbered about 3,500 in 1999, so they used the bush or the sea. People living in crowded conditions kept pigs and chickens to supplement their income, and there were many dogs.32 According to Town Council employees further problems were caused by littering. In most villages women kept the areas around their houses

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 101 clean so littering did not cause problems, but the Town Council did not have the resources to clean up the public spaces of town. The waste water from Solomon Taiyo’s Noro Base was the most serious environmental problem posed by the company’s operations (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 28–30). A waste-water treatment plant was situated on the edge of the Solomon Taiyo base. The plant consisted of two open-topped tanks of bubbling water. Effluent was oxygenated through these two tanks, left to settle overnight, then the next day the water was pumped up to the ponds on the other side of the main road. After further aeration in the ponds it was released into nearby wetlands. The machines and the tank capacity were not changed since installation in the 1980s, but more air pipes were installed so the plant could treat more water per day. According to an independent evaluation of the waste-water treatment system carried out by a World Health Organization consultant in 1999, when functioning optimally the waste-water system was adequate.33 But there was no technician to oversee operations, the plant was maintained by untrained local sanitation workers who could not read the Japanese instructions and labels on chemicals. There were frequent delays in obtaining the treatment chemicals and spare parts in the event of breakdown. The plant was frequently not working, and when it was not working it smelled terrible. Noro Town Council records were full of correspondence complaining about the smell from the nonfunctioning waste-water treatment system.34 Sometimes there were mechanical faults in the treatment plant, or delays in the supply of chemicals used in the plant. Sometimes the treatment plant lay idle for months at a time. For example, in 1994 the pump to take the water from the plant to the ponds broke down and was not fixed until late 1995. When the plant was not functioning waste water was pumped untreated into the sea. For a period of some years in the 1990s the pipe from the fishmeal plant to the waste-water treatment plant was blocked, so no fishmeal plant waste water was treated. The fishmeal-processing area discharged a chemical that was potentially harmful to sea life (Hughes and Thaanum 1995). In 1999 the fishmeal waste water was still going out to sea because it contained too much debris to go through the waste-water system. Noro’s waste water contained many pollutants. Apart from the fishmeal chemicals, fish offal, and toilet wastes, the cannery used detergent and a chlorine solution of ten to 20 parts per million for cleaning. Petroleum wastes also found their way into the mix. It was therefore unacceptable for Noro’s waste water to be going untreated directly into the sea. Solomon Taiyo management recognized this but said the company should not be given full responsibility for the problem. Although Solomon Taiyo was the sole user of the waste-water treatment system, the system had been built by the Solomon Islands government using European aid money. The treatment plant was on the border of Solomon Taiyo land, but once it left the plant the rest of the system was in Noro Town Council land. Management felt the Solomon Islands Water Authority (SIWA) should maintain the system, but SIWA did not have the resources to do this.

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Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

It was the responsibility of both the Western Province government and the national government to regulate the environmental practices of companies, but they never effectively did this with Solomon Taiyo. World Health Organization advisors had set standards for the waste treatment system during construction in the 1980s, but the government had never monitored compliance with the standards. The company had lost their records of these standards and had no plan for maintaining the standards (Hughes and Thaanum 1995). The national and provincial legal frameworks were insufficient to enforce compliance.35 Government regulation consisted of an honor system based on negotiations with officials. Local and provincial government records showed that complaints and requests for change were the strongest measure any level of government ever used on Solomon Taiyo regarding the waste water.36 According to Noro Town Council and Western Province officials interviewed, the Province never attempted to discipline Solomon Taiyo. Indeed, one Provincial official asked during his interview that I keep information on waste-water problems ‘quiet’ in case it caused problems for Solomon Taiyo with the EU regulators. The importance to Solomon Taiyo of the UK market, where there was consumer and retailer preference for tuna harvested and processed in an ecologically and socially responsible manner, meant that the regulatory powers of the European inspectors and the buyers from Sainsbury’s and Waitrose (who made yearly inspections of the Base) had far more influence than the Solomon Islands government. All major reforms for employee welfare and environmental protection carried out in the 1990s at Solomon Taiyo had been done to meet European and buyer requirements.

Ownership and management Capital for Solomon Taiyo was provided by the Japanese partner, with the Solomon Islands government essentially bringing fish resources to the partnership. During the first joint venture period until 1981 Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ owned a clear majority of shares, but during the second joint venture in the 1980s this was evened up with the Solomon Islands government holding 51 percent of shares in the company and having the authority to appoint three of the six directors to the Board. Senior management of the company remained dominated by Japanese appointed by the Japanese partner company throughout the life of Solomon Taiyo.

Profitability Solomon Taiyo was not a particularly profitable company. According to the auditors’ reports for Solomon Taiyo kept by the Registrar of Companies in Honiara, dividends were never paid. Income tax was recorded as having been paid once, SB$186,976 in 1981.37 Large debts and lack of profit left the company vulnerable in the years it suffered losses (insolvency threatened in 1978, 1986, and 1993). There were losses from 1989 to 1993, particularly big in 1991–1993,

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 103 Table 4.7 Solomon Taiyo nationalities of shareholdings, directors, and senior managers 1973–2000

Ratios of shareholdings SIG: TG/Maruha

Senior management positions by nationality

Ratios of appointments to Board of Directors SIG: TG/Maruha General manager Deputy general manager Financial manager Operations manager Personnel and training manager Commercial manager Administration manager Fleet manager Engineering manager Arabushi manager Cannery manager Quality control manager

Joint Venture Agreement 1 1973–1981

Joint Venture Agreement 2 1981–1992

Shareholders’ Agreement 1993–2000

1973

25%:75%

1981

50%:50%

1993

1979

49%:51%

1986

51%:49%

51%:49%

(Chair appointed by TG)

(Chair appointed by SIG)

(Chair appointed by SIG)

2:3

3:3

3:3

Japanese –

Japanese

Japanese

Japanese/Australian

Australian

Japanese

Japanese

Japanese

Solomon Islander

Solomon Islander

–

–

Japanese Solomon Islander

–

–

Japanese

–

–

–

Japanese Japanese

Japanese Japanese

Japanese Japanese

Japanese Japanese –

Japanese Japanese

Japanese Japanese Filipina

–

Sources: Solomon Taiyo Ltd Joint Venture Agreements 1 and 2, Shareholders’ Agreement, Corporate Plan 1996–2000, and interview material. Notes 1 SIG: Solomon Islands Government, TG: Taiyo- Gyogyo2 All of the senior management positions listed are in the management flowchart of the Corporate Plan; ‘–’ indicates those positions were not filled for those periods.

partly due to equipping the new factory and taking some months to assemble and train enough workers to keep it running at an efficient capacity. These losses were exacerbated by yen loans as the value of the yen rose and the Solomon Islands dollar fell.38 The lack of profitability was a constant question mark over the reputation of Solomon Taiyo. Certainly it is remarkable that a company of Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯/Maruha’s international standing remained engaged for so many years in an unprofitable joint venture. It has been widely assumed that in fact Solomon

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Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

Table 4.8 Solomon Taiyo net profit/loss and accumulated losses 1975–1996 Year

SB$ Net profit/loss

SB$ Accumulated losses

1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996

–559,266 543,198 31,177 –2,931,239 1,514,456 1,933,436 1,136,155 –2,412,842 –911,783 –410,494 –1,768,193 –1,926,813 144,798 – –5,685,812 – – –38,925,325 –26,836,060 832,112 2,372,913 1,029,560

– – – – – – – 714,095 1,625,878 2,036,372 – 5,731,378 – – 9,657,643 – – 79,127,025 105,963,085 105,130,973 102,758,060 101,728,500

Source: Registrar of Companies (Honiara): Solomon Taiyo, correspondence, auditors’ reports and financial statements. Notes 1 ‘–’ indicates that the file contained no information for that year. No records were found from 1991. Solomon Taiyo suffered very large losses this year (according to the Central Bank of Solomon Islands Annual Report of 1992 the company ran up accumulated losses of SB$79 million and had SB$115 million worth of non-current liabilities) so it could be that details of this financial year were kept confidential. 2 The auditor’s report for 1986 noted that foreign exchange losses were to be deferred in six installments until 1992 (the yen appreciated more than 50% against the Solomon Islands dollar in 1986). The auditor’s report for 1996 noted that putting foreign exchange losses/gains on non-current portions of long-term loans in currency fluctuation reserve instead of the profit-and-loss account possibly contravened International Accounting Standard IAS21.

Taiyo was profitable but that Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯/Maruha hid the profits in some way so as to reap all the benefits rather than sharing with the Solomon Islands government through tax payments and dividends. Detailed assessments were made of the company’s finances by two sets of experienced consultants with access to Solomon Taiyo’s books in the 1990s and both concluded that there was no evidence of deceptive accounting (SPPF 1999; Hughes and Thaanum 1995). The annual auditors’ reports about Solomon Taiyo finances (by a range of different accountants from more than one company over the years) compiled by the Registrar of Companies all concluded that the company’s books seemed to be in order.39 No records of substantiated public or

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 105 legal challenge to Solomon Taiyo about cheating the Solomon Islands government out of profits was found in the government files, back issues of newspapers or parliamentary reports searched during the course of this research. Nor were any such challenges mentioned by any interviewees. If the company was honestly not profitable, why did both partners keep it going? The explanation lies in the fact that both partners had a range of objectives for the company and were content to accept a lack of profits as long as the other objectives were being met (see Table 4.9). In addition, the company was structured so that even without profits both partners received payments from the company; in the form of taxes and duties to the Solomon Islands government and in the form of commissions to Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯/Maruha. According to one estimate both Maruha and the Solomon Islands government were making about Table 4.9 Objectives of Solomon Taiyo joint-venture partners Taiyo- Gyogyo-/Maruha ✓ ✓ ✓

Gain access to fisheries resources after declaration of 200-nautical-mile EEZs Secure income for Okinawan fishers with whom Taiyo- Gyogyo- /Maruha had long-running social and financial ties Develop Taiyo- Gyogyo-/Maruha’s role as adviser in Japanese government in fisheries diplomacy, involving access for Japanese vessels to EEZs, and access to contracts in lucrative Japanese bilateral aid program

✓

Have Solomon Taiyo contribute financially to overheads of above aims

x

Commercial viability Solomon Islands government

✓

Commercial exploitation of marine resources

✓

Attract long-term foreign investment, technology, and know-how

✓

Decentralize cash economy activity from Honiara

✓

Increase and diversify the revenue base through taxes

✓

Increase foreign currency earnings

✓

Create cash employment

x

Localize management and control of the joint venture

x

Commercial viability

Source: Adapted from Hughes and Thaanum (1995: 31). Notes 1 Taiyo- Gyogyo- was one of the world’s biggest traders in marine products, especially tuna, and by establishing joint-venture enterprises could continue to supply quality products to world markets without having to pay fishing access fees. 2 For example, Taiyo- Gyogyo- had guaranteed loans for fishing vessels bought by Okinawan fishers and used by Solomon Taiyo. 3 See Tarte (1998) for details on how Japanese companies were connected to bilateral aid programs in the Pacific.

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Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

Table 4.10 Contributions of Solomon Taiyo to Taiyo- Gyogyo- 1982–1990 1990 SB$’000 Sales commission 3,081 Management fees 1,542 Procurement 535 commission

1989

1988

1987

1986

1985

1984 1983 1982

2,096 3,016 2,236 1,866 1,158 1,201 1,027 635 1,140 808 0 0 273 0 183 273 518 362 214 282 172 140 0 0

Source: Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara): EL/3.2, Solomon Taiyo correspondence.

5 percent on funds invested (SPPF 1999). For example, in 1996 Maruha purchases included equipment, vessels, and spare parts worth $28,621,528 charged at CF (cost and freight) plus 3 percent procurement commission. That year Maruha also charged $6,893,993 for salaries paid in Japan, traveling expenses, and for Japanese technicians. Total sales commissions to Maruha for 1996 totaled $4,601,308.40 In 1998 Maruha’s take included $2.9 million interest on loans, $4.1 million sales commissions on canned sales, and $0.75 million procurement fees.41 There were also administration charges for traveling expenses for Japanese staff. Other avenues for Maruha to make income from Solomon Taiyo included profits on supplies purchased from associated companies (such as cans), and profits from processing exported frozen fish or arabushi in other countries through associated companies (SPPF 1999: 4, 12–13). In addition to the fact that both partners made a return on their investment without the company being profitable, Solomon Taiyo managers also had little incentive to push a profit, as their career prospects were not linked to profitability. So they allowed operations to continue with a high cost structure rather than maximizing efficiency (Hughes and Thaanum 1995). It is a well-known feature Table 4.11 Contributions of Solomon Taiyo to Maruha 1992–1994 1992 SB$’000 Sales commissions Management fees Procurement/technical services Interests on debt

1993

1994

Total

%

3,333 1,572 971

4,113 – 459

5,398 – 474

12,844 1,572 1,094

5.3

5,563

2,729

1,288

9,580

3.1

Total to Maruha

11,439

7,301

7,160

25,900

8.4

Total sales

79,791

99,747

127,313

306,851

100.0

Source: Adapted from Hughes and Thaanum (1995). Note Japanese managers told me that loans to Solomon Taiyo were passed on at cost, without Maruha taking any cut. The source material for this table suggests otherwise, although it was noted that a large Overseas Fisheries Cooperation Fund loan for the cannery was passed on at cost.

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 107 of the pre-recession Japanese economy that profitability in any case was a less important goal than in the Anglo-Saxon shareholder-driven business world.42 Solomon Islands supervisors and managers, for their part, had all been trained in the public sector, so the administration was top-heavy and saw pay rises as more important than profit. Together the managers and the partners had facilitated the non-profitability of Solomon Taiyo through continuing an uneconomic cost structure and a debt to equity ratio that drained huge amounts from the company with the steady decline in value of the Solomon Islands dollar relative to the Japanese yen and the American dollar (see Appendices for exchange rates). The Solomon Islands Government as shareholder contributed to the company’s lack of profitability in two main ways. First, most Solomon Islander board members (like the managers) had public service backgrounds, because the public service was virtually the only career avenue available in Solomon Islands. This background meant they viewed annual pay increments and compensation for cost-of-living increases as a right. In addition, their lack of economics or financial background meant they had a simplistic view of what was good for the Solomon Islands economy, assuming that the more money going to Solomon Island entities (such as remuneration to Solomon Islanders and taxation to the government) the better Solomon Taiyo was for the Solomon Islands’ economy, rather than seeing the less direct but greater benefits that could have come from greater profitability. Their decisions as Directors of the Board reflected this view (SPPF 1999: 4; Hughes and Thaanum 1995). Second, the Solomon Islands government’s inability to meet financial obligations as a shareholder left the company short of equity funds. In 1995 ICSI still owed SB$4 million on the 51 percent equity they had acquired during the second joint venture agreement, which had been signed in 1981 (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 1, 33). The shortage of funds meant the company’s operations were more of a struggle than necessary. In addition to the owners and managers of Solomon Taiyo not facilitating profitability as much as they could have, external factors affected the company. A main factor was that international skipjack markets had become progressively more competitive since the 1980s (Schurman 1998). In the 1960s and 1970s international skipjack prices were good and purse-seine technology enabled fishers to harvest massive amounts of fish. Then competition in both fishing and canning intensified. The prices plummeted in the 1980s and have been volatile ever since. From 1984 to 1993 the lowest cost and freight price of a case of 48 seven-ounce cans of skipjack in the UK was US$26 and the highest US$37, finishing at US$33. During this same time frame the cost and freight price of a metric ton of frozen skipjack in Bangkok went from less than US$700 in 1984 and 1985, to more than US$1,200 in 1987, swinging up and down a couple more times between that range until finishing at about US$1,000 in 1994.43 From 2000–2002 the price fluctuations for a case of Thai canned skipjack in the UK were between US$14–23, and Bangkok prices for frozen skipjack between US$400–950 (FFA 2002: 1, 8). Solomon Islands’ business environment made it difficult to compete with lower-cost competitors. For example, Solomon Taiyo had to pay for employees’

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housing, education, and transport that in other countries would be provided by government, or by the private sector and paid for by employees themselves (SPPF 1999: 7). Historically workplaces provided these services in Solomon Islands, and the small size of the cash economy meant the private sector did not provide supporting infrastructure and services, and the government did not have the revenue to provide them either. Solomon Taiyo worked with the government and aid donors to construct and maintain infrastructure such as the water supply, port facilities, local government buildings, and roads. Solomon Taiyo paid for commuting transport for employees, collected the rubbish for Noro town and provided fuel for the local police vehicle. Combined, these costs were estimated to have added 70 to 75 percent to the company’s labor bill (SPPF 1999). Another major cost that was much higher for Solomon Taiyo was freight. Solomon Islands is far from major shipping routes so freight was less frequent and less competitive than in southeast Asia, making it more than double the cost for importing inputs and exporting product. Notwithstanding the many explanations for Solomon Taiyo’s lack of profitability, it was widely believed by Solomon Islanders (and Western commentators) that the company was actually profitable but that the Japanese partner somehow hid the profits for themselves, rather than sharing with the Solomon Islands side. Usually it was imagined that this occurred through transfer pricing: when a multinational company sets prices among its subsidiaries by internal decision instead of by market mechanisms, specifically to minimize tax and/or tariff payments. Commissions to Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯/Maruha could be seen as a form of transfer pricing in that they were at the high end of, sometimes above, market rates. Anthony Hughes was party to the first and second joint-venture negotiations in his capacity as a Solomon Islands public servant. According to Hughes, even though these payments were sometimes higher than market rates they should not be characterized as transfer pricing because there was no intent to deceive the Solomon Islands government, and there was no evidence of falsified prices or costs (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 30–40). For example, in negotiations for the second joint venture (1981–1993) the Solomon Islands government agreed to commissions at the high end of market rates at that time, knowing they were high, as a ‘sweetener’ in exchange for Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ committing to establish the new cannery at Noro. According to Hughes, the Solomon Islands government side also knowingly agreed to the payments to Okinawan fishers negotiated by Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯/Maruha (guarantor on loans for Okinawan fishing vessels), even when these rates meant operating losses for Solomon Taiyo.44 Although procurement was not as parsimonious as it could have been, there was no systematic transfer pricing involved, because most materials were not bought from companies related to Taiyo/Maruha (except for cans which were sourced from a Thai company in which Maruha had a minority shareholding). With fishing gear the procurement managers bought whatever the Okinawan Fishing Masters preferred to use, which was Japanese fishing gear they were familiar with, and which was expensive (Hughes and Thaanum 1995). Transfer pricing could also have occurred through contracts with Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ freighters

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 109 (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1983). According to Hughes, however, the company did not only use Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ freighters, but whatever ships were in the area. The ordering of freighters was carried out by a range of employees in English in an open-plan office, not always by Japanese managers in Japanese language. Despite the risk of losing their jobs, Solomon Islander employees generally demonstrated willingness to ‘whistle blow’ at any perceived wrongdoing by Solomon Taiyo (Hughes and Thaanum 1995), so it is likely that any recurrent irregularities would have been reported. Another way Solomon Taiyo could have hidden and appropriated profits was through ‘double book-keeping’. When Hughes was on the Board of Directors in the 1980s the Board had viewed Solomon Taiyo’s books and made detailed inspections of the buying and selling practices more than once, but never uncovered any suspicious irregularities. The books were not merely in Japanese and contributed to only by Japanese employees, but were in English and contributed to by a range of employees, including Solomon Islander employees. It would have been remarkable if, over three decades, the Solomon Islander employees had not noticed irregularities and exposed them. According to Hughes, the Tokyo office of Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ had been audited by the Japanese taxation authorities in the 1980s, and no irregularities were uncovered at that end either.45 Transshipping at sea to avoid paying export duties on fish was highly unlikely for two reasons. One was that there were many boats in the waters around Solomon Islands and if transshipping had been happening it was likely to have been either reported by Solomon Islander crew-members, or witnessed and reported by another vessel, and the company would then have been challenged by the government. No such challenge is recorded in the media or government reports. The other reason is that Okinawan Fishing Masters were paid according to the catch they landed; if they transshipped at sea they would lose income, the company would have had to recompense them for this and lose any financial gain from avoiding duties. Given the lack of evidence that the Japanese partner was cheating the Solomon Islands out of profits, it is reasonable to accept that the company was honestly not very profitable. By the mid-1990s, however, profitability had become relatively more important for both partners for a range of reasons relating to international, Japanese, and Solomon Islands economic conditions. Management correspondingly tried harder and profits improved until the company suspended operations in 2000. Each year since 1992 the company declared modest profits, except in 1997 when the profit was wiped out by currency fluctuations. In order to try to improve profitability and in line with international economic orthodoxy since the 1980s, aid agencies encouraged the Solomon Islands government to sell off government shareholdings in several large joint ventures including Solomon Taiyo. By the time the third joint venture agreement was negotiated in 1992 the government was considering privatization as a possibility for Solomon Taiyo.46 The Asian Development Bank and the World Bank both funded reports into the feasibility of privatizing Solomon Taiyo (SPPF 1999; ADB 1989). Privatization of Solomon Taiyo was discussed in Parliament as a

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Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

positive move, but many parliamentarians were worried about the fact that any company likely to be able to buy the government’s shares would be foreign (NPSI 1990: 26–44).

Contributions to the Solomon Islands’ economy Economists often assert that Pacific Island governments would generate more revenue and foreign exchange from collecting resource rents via access fees from foreign fishing fleets than from locally based ventures like Solomon Taiyo, arguing that although Pacific Islands countries have fish, they do not have competitive advantage in fisheries production. In theory, maximized fees can provide revenue to help improve development opportunities in whatever fields the private sector decides will be profitable, generating economic growth. This would lead to better economic outcomes than the benefits that come from inefficient activities from state-owned enterprises, like Solomon Taiyo. In practice, the development opportunities in Solomon Islands have been very limited, and revenue has tended to stick in government circles, rather than diffusing out into society through improved services. Many have felt that private-sector-driven capitalist growth was just not feasible, so that rather than being a choice between inefficient state-owned enterprises and efficient private-sector enterprises, it was a choice between state support and no enterprise at all. If this was the case, at least state-sponsored industries distributed wealth somewhat through remuneration. Since its inception Solomon Taiyo was a major player in the Solomon Islands capitalist sector in terms of having a large turnover, providing employment and human resources development, and generating duties and taxes for the government. In the early 1970s the Solomon Islands’ cash economy was mainly run by foreign firms, and none of the few existing local firms manufactured or processed products. Domestic monetary levels were set by exports and aid, and a large percentage of money was spent on imports. The economy was characterized by a lack of linkages within the economy; most firms procured from overseas. Local inputs, as a percentage of gross output for the economy as a whole, amounted to about 5 percent. In the 1970s Solomon Taiyo was one of only two firms that involved significant capital investment in Solomon Islands (UN Development Advisory Team 1975a: 6, 9, 10). It retained this important role, being described in the 1990s by the Central Bank as vital to the Solomon Islands economy (CBSI 1993: 14). In 1999 the company was paying SB$12 million in yearly remuneration (net of tax), providing employment for 2,200 Solomon Islanders. The company was also spending SB$40–45 million a year in purchasing goods and services in Solomon Islands, and paying SB$6 million annually in payments to national and provincial governments and superannuation payments to the National Providential Fund (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 1). By the early 1990s Solomon Taiyo’s annual sales were about SB$155,000,000, and about SB$135,000,000 of this was exports (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 3). Solomon Islands as a whole was only averaging SB$400,000,000 in exports

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 111 Table 4.12 Contributions of Solomon Taiyo to the Solomon Islands economy 1982–1990

Import/export duties PAYE/withholding tax Bait royalties Wages

1982 SB$’000

1983

1,417

1,469

624 1,607 1,675 3,004 6,590 4,839

3,077

477

1,131

884

2,397

40 1,967

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

914 2,417 2,662 3,348 1,970

1990

45 44 163 204 198 241 147 159 2,796 3,506 2,421 4,175 5,048 5,695 9,031 12,147

Source: Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara): EL/3.2, Solomon Taiyo correspondence.

annually so Solomon Taiyo’s sales made up a significant proportion (CBSI 1999: 87). Most of the rest of the exports were in logging, the remainder being copra and palm oil. The value of fish exports in 1991 was SB$106,417,000 out of total exports of SB$229,888,000. In 1996 (when log exports were high) fish exports made up SB$105,319,000 out of SB$576,648,000. Solomon Taiyo’s activities also contributed to balance of payments through its domestic sales replacing imported canned fish. According to one estimate, economic benefits from Solomon Taiyo in the mid-1990s included SB$30–35 million per annum in foreign exchange earnings and savings (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 1). Another contribution Solomon Taiyo made to the economy was through payments to villagers for the use of their baitgrounds. The system for these payments changed many times over the history of the company. In the 1970s there was a one-off payment to the Western Council (Western Province’s colonial predecessor) of AU$10,000 as well as nightly fees, then the system changed to the Council receiving SB$50 per month and villages near baitfishing grounds SB$2 per night per boat (News Drum 1975a: 8; News Drum 1976b: 4). In 1980 the fee per night for the smallest boats was SB$12.50, and for the largest boats SB$35. This went up for two years, with fees in 1982 for the smallest boats being SB$20 and the largest SB$50.47 It apparently went down again then, with fees for the smallest vessels of SB$18 a night, and for the largest SB$36 recorded for 1986–1987 (SIG 1988a: 15). From 1989 to 1993 the company paid out a total of about SB$152,000 in baitground royalties each year, but in 1994 this increased to SB$325,000. From 1993 the size of the hold was no longer considered, royalties were a flat rate for every catcher boat. These increased from SB$58 to SB$77 a night from 1994–1996 (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 7). Since 1997 that rate had been SB$106 per night. According to the Deputy General Manager, the total amount paid out in royalties in 1998 was about SB$500,000. These economic contributions, however, were overshadowed by a widespread belief that Solomon Taiyo paid no taxes. The company paid little or no income tax because it was not very profitable, and extensive remissions on taxes were granted over the years. Despite this, however, the company did

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Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

contribute to Solomon Islands’ revenue through duties on imports of cans, boxes, tools and food, exports of fish products, fuel taxes, and payroll tax on remuneration of all local and expatriate employees. Consultants’ estimates varied but the amount of revenue generated by Solomon Taiyo by the late 1990s was probably around SB$10 million a year (SPPF 1999: 11).

Employment: remuneration, conditions, and human resource development Solomon Taiyo’s employment conditions were collectively bargained, in accordance with relevant national legislation. Solomon Taiyo workers had originally been part of the Solomon Islands National Union of Workers (SINUW), but due to a scandal over forged registration forms in the early 1990s, Solomon Taiyo management secured a court order against SINUW representing their workers. After that collective bargaining was with the in-house union, the Solomon Taiyo Ltd Employees Association (STLEA). This had two wings, one to represent waged workers and another to represent salaried staff. Solomon Taiyo’s hours of work were Monday to Friday 7.30am–11.30am and 1pm–4.30pm, and Saturday 7.30am–11am. The nature of production, however, meant workers in some areas might start earlier or finish later. For example, the cannery cleaning lines began operating at 6am, and retort and sterilizing often continued to 10pm. Any individuals who worked longer than the standard 42 hours a week were paid overtime as per the Collective Agreement. The president of the in-house union STLEA and the president of the independent union SINUW both said in interview there were few problems with underpaying at Solomon Taiyo. Although the company employed many illiterate people, they were able to check their pay slips with the help of literate colleagues.48 According to the STLEA president, when mistakes were discovered they were soon rectified, and management was willing to take action when particular areas of the company had recurrent problems, and I found no evidence to contradict this assertion. The Collective Agreement was very detailed because of the minute negotiations that had been carried out on every aspect of working conditions over the life of the company (Hughes and Thaanum 1995).49 Some of the allowances salaried staff received were: vehicle, housing, education, annual leave expenses, insurance, health care, utilities, and subsistence. For waged workers there were allowances for: regular attendance, subsistence, housing, rations, education, bonuses, merit, transport, cold store, brine mixing, fleet, and embarrassment (for toilet sanitation work). There was 12 weeks’ maternity leave for permanent employees. The majority of the workforce was permanent, in 1999 several hundred out of around 3,000 were casual. Employee grading among Solomon Islanders took into consideration factors such as education level, skills, merit, levels of responsibility, and seniority. There were six levels of remuneration for salaried staff and three levels for wageearning workers, and each level was divided into increments. The legal minimum

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 113 Table 4.13 Solomon Taiyo proportions of women versus men employees 1995 Place of employment

Women vs men

Honiara Office Noro Base Office Cannery (staff) Cannery (workers) Arabushi Fleet

10 of 58 (31%) 3 of 58 (5%) 38 of 94 (51%) 648 of 763 (85%) 7 of 99 (7%) 0

Source: Adapted from Hughes and Thaanum (1995: 23).

wage for Solomon Islands had been SB$1.50 per hour but in 1995 management from several large companies including Solomon Taiyo successfully lobbied the government for a special primary industries minimum wage of SB$1.20 per hour. Solomon Taiyo employees received an income comparable with other ‘blue collar’ workers in Solomon Islands, which in 1999 was between SB$300 and SB$600 a month. Workers in positions of seniority or technical skill, such as captains in the fleet or technicians in the Base laboratory earned over SB$1,000 a month. Women were employed at Solomon Taiyo mostly as administrative staff or cannery workers. The employees cleaning fish for canning were all women. It is generally accepted in tuna canneries the world over that women attain a better yield rate than men. This belief seems to be in turn based on notions that women are better than men at performing tasks requiring manual dexterity and are more likely to stay doing monotonous repetitive work, possibly due to the limited range of other employment opportunities.50 Table 4.14 Solomon Taiyo numbers of women in salaried staff gradings 1995 Staff grading

No. of women

A B C D E F G H I

0 of 0 0 of 2 1 of 1 (100%) 0 of 8 0 of 16 2 of 30 (7%) 7 of 46 (15%) 9 of 15 (60%) 13 of 17 (76%)

Source: Adapted from Hughes and Thaanum (1995: 23). Note ‘A’ was the highest level of management, and ‘I’ the lowest level of salaried staff.

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Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

In 1995 34 percent of employees were women, and 24 percent of graded staff were women. Women and men in the same role were paid the same, but gender typing of roles meant women on the whole were paid less than men. That is, women were more concentrated in waged worker roles rather than the higher paid, more secure and more prestigious salaried staff roles, and within the staff roles women were concentrated at the lower end of the pay scale (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 23). The company enforced a policy of divide and rule regarding island groups. No one island group was allowed to dominate, and wantok (members of one language, kinship, or island group) relations were prevented from becoming an organizing structure within the company by ‘mixing up’ workplaces. Over the years Japanese managers tried various strategies to prevent wantok groups from forming within Solomon Taiyo, in living and working arrangements, and through preventing unemployed wantoks from coming to stay with their employed relatives (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1983: 27–31). In order to prevent wantok preferences benefiting employees, all recruitment and promotion was checked by the Personnel Manager. Survey responses provided by nearly 1,000 workers who attended sexual health workshops in 1993 showed that the ethnic make-up of Solomon Taiyo’s workforce was fairly evenly distributed among the island groups, allowing for the fact that it was based in Western Province. Malaitans made up 20 percent of male employees, and Western Province men made up 18 percent. Western Province women made up 59 percent and Malaitans made up 7 percent of female employees. The next largest group of men employees were Guales at 13 percent, all others were less than 10 percent (21 percent of men and 15 percent of women were listed as not having answered the question about which was their home province).51 Pay rates varied greatly according to nationality. Japanese managers, Okinawan fishermen, and Australian accountants were paid the highest. Next were Filipino and Fijian technical supervisors in the cannery and fleet. The lowest level of remuneration was for Solomon Islanders. The practice of ranking remuneration according to nationality, even for the same work, is common in the international fishing industry and in all Solomon Islands’ workplaces. The ratios of remuneration differences according to nationality in Solomon Taiyo were typical by Solomon Islands’ standards. Solomon Islander fishing masters received about one-tenth the salary of Okinawan fishing masters. I estimate that the Solomon Islander Deputy General Manager received at most one-fifth of the salary of Japanese senior managers, although he was reputed to be one of the highest-paid Solomon Islanders in the country.52 Localization, understood as replacing expatriate with local employees, was always a contentious issue for Solomon Taiyo. Worker positions were localized very quickly after the establishment of Solomon Taiyo, but a core of Japanese managers and Okinawan fishermen remained in place until the appreciation of the yen and the depreciation of the Solomon Islands dollar in the late 1980s and early 1990s forced the company to localize further. In 1985

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 115 Solomon Taiyo employed about 1,600 Solomon Islanders and about 200 expatriates, of whom the bulk were Okinawan fishermen. In 1995 the figures were 2,220 and 60 respectively, with about 50 of the expatriates being Okinawan fishermen (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 3, 24). In 1999 the numbers of Solomon Islander employees had risen to over 2,500 and the expatriate numbers had stayed at about 60 (31 Okinawan fishermen, some Filipino engineers, supervisors and a manager, seven Japanese managers, two Australian accountants, and a handful of short-term technical contractors). During the 1990s two Solomon Islander senior managers were appointed to deal with government liaison and personnel issues. The other crucial management areas of fishing, production, finance, and marketing, however, were not localized and by 1999 there were no plans to localize them in the near future. It was anticipated that the key roles of General Manager and Operations Manager would remain Japanese indefinitely. During the first ten years Solomon Taiyo tended to employ Solomon Islanders with low levels of formal education, and did little to assist them to undertake technical training, ostensibly because of rapid staff turnover (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1983: 40–42; Hughes 1987: 218).53 By the 1990s, however, Solomon Taiyo had an extensive education and training plan for its employees in conjunction with local educational institutions and Japanese aid organizations. There were also additional informal courses. For example, the Public Health Officer from the Noro Town Council ran food-safety training courses covering food poisoning, cold chain, and related issues for employees. The Personnel Manager organized a range of short courses for all levels of employee in late 1995.54 During the 1990s as many as nine students were sponsored by Solomon Table 4.15 Solomon Taiyo training courses for Solomon Islander employees 1991 Course details

Numbers

Coxswain course, two months Marine engineering, five years of alternating study at SICHE and practical experience at Solomon Taiyo Solomon Taiyo-sponsored apprenticeship training outside the company Solomon Taiyo apprentice trainees Certificate in accounting, one year full-time, Solomon Islands College of Higher Education (SICHE) Elementary bookkeeping, evening class, SICHE 300 BHP certificate of competency course, SICHE 500 BHP certificate of competency course, SICHE Mate Solomon Islands certificate of competency course, SICHE Administration, accounting, English-language skills evening classes, University of the South Pacific Centre, Honiara Overseas Fisheries Cooperation Foundation technical training in fisheries, canneries or engineering in Japan

4 10 recruited

Source: Solomon Taiyo Ltd 1991, Revised Manning Plan 1986–1992.

2 training 64 training 1 5 1 1 3 9 6

116 Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd Taiyo to train as Marine Engineers at the Solomon Islands College of Higher Education. Other students were privately funded or sponsored by other organizations, but most years more than half of the students in the Marine Engineering course were sponsored by Solomon Taiyo. The attrition rate was high, with only about half of each intake finishing the course. The course was four years in duration with alternating periods at College and in the workforce. Students sponsored by Solomon Taiyo worked as apprentices for an extra year during this time, so their total period of training was five years.55 Occupational health and safety had apparently improved over time. There were fairly high levels of injury on the fleet in the late 1970s and some Okinawan fishermen seemed to be prioritizing fishing over getting injured people to hospital quickly (News Drum 1980a: 6; 1980c: 3; Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1983). By the 1990s, however, accidents on board had become very rare because the crews were more experienced and skilled (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 24). The only deaths at sea were on the purse-seine group, with at least one death due to entanglement in heavy equipment on the net boat, and some drownings associated with a wave swamping the net boat in the early 1990s. Solomon Taiyo Clinic health workers said they treated relatively few work-related injuries from the Base, perhaps up to four a year, sometimes fewer. One interviewee who had worked in the Solomon Taiyo Clinic for nearly 20 years said during that time the number of work-related injuries stayed relatively constant, but at the same time the number of employees grew, so safety standards must have improved. Most of the injuries they treated happened after hours as a result of alcohol and/or fighting. The only Solomon Taiyo death onshore was a stabbing in Tulagi in the 1970s when a Japanese national was killed by a Solomon Islander national he had fired earlier that day (News Drum 1979: 1). The general health of the workforce was not very good, and this was partly a company responsibility due to housing and commuting conditions (Hughes and Thaanum 1995; Sasabe 1993). There was a small amount of housing around the Base, and a larger residential area several kilometers along the coast at Baru. It was intended that the Western Province government would build and run housing for Solomon Taiyo employees as a revenue-raising exercise. Unfortunately the Provincial government had not managed this properly. They built a small number of houses, failed to maintain them, and failed to build more as the population of Noro swelled with people working at the Base.56 People built makeshift houses made from disassembled forklift palettes (see Figure 4.9) and any other materials to hand. Accommodation was overcrowded. There were a few communal running-water outlets and people used the bush or the sea as toilets. The housing situation in 1995 was described in one report as ‘atrocious’ and Solomon Taiyo management was berated for seeming to have little idea of the effect this was having on employee morale and Solomon Taiyo’s reputation. Management alleged they could not put resources into maintaining existing properties because of the insecurity land tenure, and could not get permission to build new housing. Local, Provincial, and National government offices all gave

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 117

Figure 4.9 ‘Palette’ Church in Baru, Noro, 1999.

Solomon Taiyo conflicting information about their rights regarding land in Noro (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 28–30). Common health complaints among the workforce included influenza, headache, joint pain, ear infections, eye infections, diarrhea, numbness, and gastric pain. Lack of rest due to housing and commuting problems, malaria, unbalanced diet, and the working environment all contributed to these problems.57 Health workers interviewed said the lunch put on by the company for workers each day was too high in fat and did not contain enough fresh meat or vegetables. Most days the lunch was a base of white rice and instant noodles stir fried with tinned tuna and a small amount of leafy vegetable, spring onion, and/or tomato. There was also some cooked food on sale at the market near the Noro Town Council, but the price of the market food was quite high considering the wages of most of the workers. There was also no refrigeration and no regulation of the preparation of food sold at the markets so Town Council employees considered the market food a health risk. Because there was inadequate housing at Noro, several hundred employees who came from nearby villagers lived in their home village and commuted to Noro daily. Initially it had been hoped that commuting would be a positive thing, enabling women workers to live with their families rather than in the barracks-style accommodation customary for waged labor in Solomon Islands. In practice, however, the length of the commute and the discomfort of traveling in open trucks and canoes meant commuting was hard work. There were several commuting runs to and from Noro every day except

118

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd

Sunday, by outboard-motor-powered canoe or truck. Solomon Taiyo managed some of the transport in house, and contracted some out to local businesspeople. One of the main commuting routes was the road between Munda and Noro. Commuters from the Roviana Lagoon caught outboard-motor-powered canoes to Munda and met the trucks there. The road was less than 20 kilometers long, but because it was in a very bad state of repair the trip took an hour or more. Commuters from the Vona Vona Lagoon and Diamond Narrows went directly to Noro by canoe (see Map 4.1). The departure times of canoes and trucks were approximate and most people did not have a watch, so passengers often spent up to an hour waiting for transport. This added considerably to the length of the working day. Many of the women cannery worker interviewees said commuting was the worst part of their job. They had to be ready to leave home by 5.30am and did not return till between 7–9pm. The one- or two-hour bumpy ride in the back of a truck was itself unpleasant, especially when it rained. Commuting contributed to health problems for workers in several ways. The very length of the day fatigued workers. Very few husbands took up the housework duties of their working wives so women had a ‘double shift’ of housework when they returned at night, resulting in further exhaustion (Sasabe 1993: 39–43). When many women workers returned home after a long day they had to cook for themselves and were often too tired to make a nutritious meal but might just have a few biscuits and a cup of tea (male workers’ meals were prepared for them by wives or women relatives), meaning their diet was inadequate. Workers sometimes became sick after traveling in wet and windy conditions. The company had provided raincoats and alarm clocks in an attempt to make commuting conditions easier.58 Village culture was such, however, that the coats and clocks soon became dispersed throughout the community. The best thing the company could have done to improve commuting conditions was to make housing available at Noro.

The demise of Solomon Taiyo Solomon Taiyo was very much a creature of its time. It was born when the context was favorable in the Japanese tuna industry and British colonial offices. Its form was influenced by developments in the United Nations Law of the Sea, and New International Economic Order thinking about newly independent colonies’ potential for wealth accumulation through commodities markets. It prospered during the halcyon days of skipjack fishing then somehow managed to hang on after competition drove the prices down. Resource nationalism fell out of vogue, trade liberalization and privatization became fashionable, and the partners were increasingly pressured to raise profits. From the 1980s fishing was seen as unprofitable for Japanese fishing companies so many of the larger ones reoriented to marketing and distribution enterprises. Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ had acquired interests in many subsidiary businesses in shipping, telecommunications, fuel, stock feed, sugar refining, packaging, and other industries from the 1970s. By the early

Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 119 1990s fishing was less than 5 percent of the company’s business and in 1993 the change in focus was reflected in the name change to Maruha Corporation.59 By the late 1990s Solomon Taiyo had become an anachronism. It was showing signs of adjusting to changed conditions but it is far from certain that it would have survived even if the Solomon Islands government had been able to maintain social order. In 2000 Sainsbury’s buying strategy changed, meaning they wanted the same quality but were no longer willing to pay a premium price for Solomon Taiyo product.60 Maruha decided to give up on supplying Sainsbury’s with Solomon Taiyo product and withdrew from the joint venture. In Solomon Taiyo’s place the Solomon Islands government set up a fully state-owned enterprise called Soltai Fishing and Processing Ltd. Fishing continued, and arabushi production even increased, but Soltai was unable to sustain large-scale cannery production or sales, selling only smaller amounts in Australia and Pacific Islands countries. Loins ready for mechanized canning were introduced as a new export to Italy in 2004. This helped the company remain solvent but was suffering from crippling financial problems (Barclay 2005). From 2004 Soltai was reinvigorated through a close commercial relationship with NFD and its parent company multinational Trimarine, which injected much-needed capital and provided vital international trading contacts. For the sake of the Solomon Islands’ economy, and the opportunities for employment and training the company offered to Solomon Islanders, it is to be hoped that Soltai is successful.

5

Solomon Islanders and Solomon Taiyo

Solomon Islands has one of the most effective and highly technical factory that manufactures tuna in this part of the southern hemisphere . . . it is really creating more opportunities to our women and the people of Solomon Islands . . . we should be looking at expanding this kind of activities in Solomon Islands . . . other fishing companies who are fishing in Solomon Islands for our tuna resource should also be taking this line of development because this is value added. (E. Hunuehu, Member for East Are’Are [NPSI 1993: 228])

Modernization and nationalism have always gone hand in hand. Nationalist sentiment has been considered a prerequisite for modern political and economic formations within states, and for most nationalists political and economic modernization has been a key aim. Solomon Taiyo and other joint ventures with the Solomon Islands government have advertised themselves as ‘good for the nation’, as integral parts of nation building (LiPuma and Meltzhoff 1990: 231). In the correspondence cited in Chapter 1, former Prime Minister Solomon Mamloni pointed out that Solomon Taiyo played an important role in Solomon Islands’ reputation in international fora. His example was a negative one (quality control problems reflected badly on Solomon Islands), but Solomon Taiyo also had positive effects on the reputation of Solomon Islands. The existence of such a large and longrunning industrial enterprise enhanced national identity by signifying modernness. Mr Hunuehu’s pronouncement above shows that Solomon Taiyo was valued for bringing the cultural and material capital of modernity to Solomon Islands. Positive representations of the benefits brought to Solomon Islands by Solomon Taiyo, however, were in the minority. Representations such as the following post to an internet discussion list were more prevalent: [I have] some concern over semi govt enterprises which include Solomon Taiyo recently. For background information, SIG [Solomon Islands Government] has majority shareholder (correct me if I am wrong) in Solomon Taiyo. The other shareholder is the Taiyo Giogio of Japan. Whilst fish exports is one of our top export commodities and looks good in CBSI [Central Bank of Solomon Islands] stats the dark side of the story is that

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Solomon Taiyo has been declaring losses for the past number of years (can not recall how many years), thereby NOT PAYING any dividend to its shareholder SIG. If a business has consistent losses for many years, one only wonders how could they manage it. Indeed very unbelievable and I suspect something dirty is going on with their paper work. The assumption is that they are using ‘transfer pricing’ in accounting terms to benefit the overseas partner only. What this means is that fish is sold at a loss (below world market prices) to its shareholder in Japan. The shareholder in turn trades the fish at higher prices and the profit is returned overseas. What tangible benefits does SIG gets??? . . . nil, maybe Taiyo provides employment and contribute to good export commodity in the CBSI stats and that’s it. Why then the Government is silent?? Do they care that its not benefiting from this partnership?? As we can see there is complete one-sided conflict of interest here. Just recently Solomon Taiyo advertised in the Australian Financial Review dated 17/9/99 for the position of Financial Controller. In that same advert it was stated annual turnover is AUD175m. This roughly SBD$500m turnover pa. I would like to cry when I saw this figure how could they ripped our resources even to the extent of SIG is struggling to manage its cashflow problem. Mind you this position was not advertised locally, may be they employ exparts [sic] to do professional dirty paper work?? You make your own conclusions.1 These very negative perceptions of Solomon Taiyo were not necessarily supported by the available evidence (see Chapter 4). Why, then, did overwhelmingly negative beliefs about Solomon Taiyo persist? In part this was simply a public relations failure on the part of the company and the shareholders – they did not disseminate information to counter prevalent suspicions about the company. This chapter makes the case, however, that there was more to these negative representations of Solomon Taiyo than a simple lack of information. There was a predisposition to expect exploitation from foreigners in business, that Tony Hughes called ‘a generalized mistrust of foreign investors’ (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 3). Solomon Islanders’ negative representations of Solomon Taiyo reflect the effects on national identity of subordination in the world system. This subjectivity, rooted in the history of colonialism and postcolonial developmentalism, grew out of Solomon Islanders’ domination by foreigners, a domination that has been legitimated by identification of the foreigners as being more modern than Solomon Islanders.

‘Solomon Islander’ national identity and Solomon Taiyo Social unrest manifest as violence between Guale and Malaitan people from 1998 to 2003 demonstrated that Solomon Islands has strong ethnic divisions. Of nearly 100 Solomon Islanders interviewed for my research only two identified themselves as ‘Solomon Islander’ when initially asked about their identity at the start of the interview. The others all primarily identified themselves as being

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from their province or island group. Identities, however, work in subtle ways. Although most interviewees’ conscious self-representation was that they belonged to their sub-national group, the identities implied through constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in representations of Solomon Taiyo by Solomon Islanders revealed that ‘Solomon Islander’ national identity was indeed salient, if fractured and overridden by island group differences in many contexts. ‘Solomon Islander’ emerged as a primary identity in the context of relations with foreigners. One of the two interviewees who identified themselves to me primarily as Solomon Islanders was a businessman who had been employed by an international bank and through this work had traveled extensively in Asia, so had spent a great deal of time in social situations where ‘Solomon Islander’ would have been his primary communal identity. The other said she came to think of herself as a Solomon Islander through her experience working on the Solomon Islands stall at the 1988 World Expo in Brisbane. Even interviewees who initially identified themselves with their island group often slipped into identifying as Solomon Islanders when relating to Solomon Taiyo. Ilangana had worked on the Solomon Taiyo fishing fleet for some years in the 1980s. He initially identified as being from Roviana and often the ‘we’ in his discussions was of Roviana people. He talked of fights on board his catcher boat when ‘we’ fought with men from Malaita and other island groups on board. But when Ilangana talked of fighting with ‘Gilbertese’ or ‘Okinawans’ his ‘we’ became larger, encompassing Solomon Islanders as a whole, as distinguished from the foreigners.2 Non-governmental organization (NGO) leader Baunani also identified initially with his island group but then during his comments on Solomon Taiyo he said ‘we’ have been exploited by ‘the Japanese’ through Solomon Taiyo, because ‘the Japanese’ dominated the company while ‘Solomon Islanders’ remained in menial labor jobs.3 The extent to which economic nationalism pervaded representations of the company is the main indicator that national identity was a salient factor in Solomon Islander understandings of Solomon Taiyo. I was often surprised by interviewees’ predisposition to see things along nationalist lines. When discussing Solomon Taiyo’s regional marketing strategy the Deputy General Manager said he expected that Fijian consumers would prefer to buy Pafco tuna to support their local industry. He said Solomon Taiyo should not market aggressively in Fiji and ‘upset their own rightful market’ because ‘once nationalistic feeling comes in of course it is better that they go for their own canned tuna than someone else’s’.4 When discussing the difference between the ways women and men use income with NGO leader Panatina, I mentioned that Okinawan fishermen’s wives had control of the money earned through Solomon Taiyo and tended to use it for the benefit of the family as a whole (improvements in housing and education). Panatina, however, saw quite a different meaning in this story. She reacted bitterly to evidence that money earned by Okinawans in Solomon Islands went overseas.5 The national identity visible in the vast majority of Solomon Islander representations of Solomon Taiyo was a beleaguered identity. The company was

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most often portrayed as an instance of bad modernization, as inflicting negative impacts upon Solomon Islanders. The grievances against Solomon Taiyo included accusations of environmental destruction and inequitable returns to Solomon Islanders for their tuna resources, typified in the following poem: Solomon Blue You reap a harvest you did not plant You drain my resources in the name of development You fish in my waters for bonito You pay me a little for permission You process your catch compressed into cans You pour back your waste into our seas Pollution! Then you sell back to me, at a profit Solomon Blue (Sipolo 1986: 15) Some of the grievances Solomon Islanders listed against Solomon Taiyo were about loss of culture and concomitant loss of valuable skills and knowledge. For example, some Munda interviewees said in baitground villages like theirs, fishing practices had changed because it was easier to catch fish around the company’s baitfish lights than use kastom techniques. In addition, these villages also received donations of bycatch fish from the catcher boats, or traded fish for fresh fruit and vegetables or handicrafts. In these villages, therefore, fishing kastom knowledge was being lost because of the activities of Solomon Taiyo. Another key complaint against the impact of Solomon Taiyo was a clustering of issues involving loss of culture and social breakdown, under the rubric of ‘mixing up’. Elsewhere I have discussed in detail the idea of mixing up and its effect on perceptions of Solomon Taiyo (Barclay 2004). Mixing up was how people referred to the social interaction between groups of people previously segregated in society, such as island groups, brought about through modernization. Noro businessman Kohinggo explained ethnic mixing up through modernization as having both good and bad potentials: Something, because of development, people have to, have to be, everyone must live together. Yeah? That is something no one disputes. When I say we live together, is no matter White people [inaudible] we will work with them. In any development. I saw this when I visited Bougainville many times. . . .

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Solomon Islanders and Solomon Taiyo And there I found all the Europeans and locals and whatever, all live together. No any problem between them all . . . I thought that was good. Yeah? So, that is something that comes from development. It brings people together and makes them understand each other. That is a really good thing from development. Yeah? In my opinion. . . . But there is another side to development (laughed). It causes problems. Between us, yeah. What I mean is, because development now, brings people together. So people come inside then we mix and somehow one group of people and another group of people have a little bit of friction, something quickly starts, no good. So development brings two kinds of things. In Noro, at the moment [1999], we are still OK. We are still OK. We are mixing up well. From Tikopia to Shortlands. We all live in Noro.

Most Solomon Islander interviewees, however, were more pessimistic of the effects of mixing up; they perceived it as one of the downsides of modernization, as ‘social impact’. Representations of Solomon Taiyo included concerns about social breakdown and perceived moral decay, especially regarding the sexual practices of young women. The large numbers of young women working in the Noro cannery, living away from their parents and the rigid social mores of village life, had a reputation for being sexually free. The Deputy General Manager of Solomon Taiyo referred to a public joke about the company ‘mekim Taiyo, mekim pikanini’ (make Taiyo, make babies) when talking frankly about some of Solomon Taiyo’s social issues in a Tuna Management Plan meeting.6 An article titled ‘Hidden Cost of Tin Pis’ (‘tinned fish’ in Pijin) asserted that as a result of the tuna industry the number of sex workers in Solomon Islands was increasing.7 A technical report into gender issues as part of a wider study to set up a national Tuna Management Plan in 1998 cited the ‘social impacts’ of the tuna industry: sex work, sexually transmitted diseases, and cultural and family breakdown (Nelson and Tuara c.1998: 13). Interviewees echoed these concerns, one saying he worried about the ‘social impact of fishermen’ who came ashore ‘looking for ladies’ causing disruption, for instance, by giving villagers alcohol. He felt that due to these activities ‘the attitudes of females has changed’ through being ‘exposed to the fishermen’ and communities were worried about women’s ‘changed behavior’ resulting in increasing numbers of ‘single mothers’ and ‘half-caste kids’.8 The stories of negative social impacts from Solomon Taiyo were similar to stories about the downsides of modernization the world over; labor migration causes social change and gives rise to ethnic conflict, and so on. An interesting point about these representations of Solomon Taiyo as causing negative social impacts is that they often went beyond the observable actuality of social problems. For example, most interviewees assumed that sexually transmitted diseases, prostitution, and single motherhood were worse in Noro than other parts of the Solomon Islands, because Solomon Taiyo was based in Noro. Noro as a town, however, was made up mostly of Solomon Taiyo’s employees, and therefore the population was skewed towards the 18–30-year-old bracket. This meant that the rates of sexual activity and problems arising from it were higher per head of population, because the most sexually active age group was overrepresented in

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Noro’s population but, according to reproductive health workers, for this age group the rates were no higher in Noro than in other places.9 Another interesting point about these representations is that perceived problems with sexual behavior in association with Solomon Taiyo were very much seen as connected to the company’s foreigners. For example, the Matron at the Noro Women’s Hostel said that sometimes men came to Noro ‘looking for women’ and her response to them was that she was ‘not selling Solomon Islanders’.10 When questioned further she said not only foreign men approached her or the security guards to gain access to the hostel, Solomon Islander men did also, but her overall representation of prostitution was as something foreign men did to local women. NGO leader Panatina explained that sexual relations with crews were a village responsibility as well as the responsibility of fishermen, and that the root causes of prostitution lay in an economic situation wherein local women had no other opportunities to earn cash. Following that, however, the narrative of foreign exploitation reasserted itself. She said ‘foreigners are good, very friendly’ but ‘communities have to prevent these activities’. ‘We can’t regulate the sex life of the people’ but perhaps ‘a policy or something could be written down so foreigners don’t do this’.11 Church leaders and town officials also expressed concern about prostitution in Noro along these lines. One interviewee described it as ‘our own people selling women to foreigners’.12 Minutes from a Noro Town Council Meeting in 1994 noted with concern that ‘certain girls in Noro Town are now going into overseas boat coming into Noro port for unknown reasons’.13 Solomon Islander crews had outnumbered Okinawans since the 1980s, and fieldwork observations as well as documentary evidence indicated that Solomon Islander crew were just as likely as foreign crew to encourage villagers to drink alcohol with them and engage in sexual relations.14 However, interviewees and documentary sources generally held foreigners as responsible for these kinds of problems. For example, a memo from a local government administrator in Western Province to the Provincial Secretary regarding ‘brothel practice in Taiyo Catcher Boats – Marovo Lagoon’ stated that community leaders had been complaining about prostitution ever since Solomon Taiyo started baitfishing in Marovo. The practice was called ‘boatclimbing’ and according to the memo, it started with ‘Japanese’ crews but was then adopted by Solomon Islanders.15 Auki said his village had ‘very bad social impacts’ from the fishermen. ‘People did not want the Okinawans especially to go ashore’, and there were a few ‘part Okinawan’ children in his village.16 In addition to believing that sexual health problems were worse in Noro than in Solomon Islands society generally and connecting these problems to foreigners, interviewees tended to accord the company disproportionate responsibility for causing and solving the problems. A 1994 article from the Solomon Star was titled ‘Solomon Taiyo responsible for educating its workers’. The article discussed naïve girls with sheltered upbringings and minimal education being vulnerable in Noro and held the company responsible for fixing this situation.17 This representation may be interpreted in various ways. One is that the company

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was seen as a social evil (in contrast to Solomon Islanders, seen as innocent) and therefore was fully responsible for any evil that arose from its activities. Another is that in according the company total responsibility (as opposed to recognizing the role of local patriarchy in the situation, for example), Solomon Islanders were identifying as subordinate to the company. This tendency can be seen in another similar article, which cited the Executive Director of the Solomon Islands Planned Parenthood Association (SIPPA) as being disturbed by the high levels of sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancies in Noro.18 The SIPPA representative was quoted as saying the majority of these girls have always lived with their parents and have led sheltered lives until they come to Noro . . . without their parents around and with very limited knowledge and experience to handle men and the new kind of freedom they find in Noro, the girls are at the mercy of any sexually irresponsible male worker. He was quoted as saying he thought women should be encouraged to ‘take control’ of their lives and make wise decisions, thus acknowledging the role of patriarchy in creating the situation he described. But the overall tone of the article placed responsibility with the company, not the women involved or the social context in which they were raised. For example, the measures suggested for alleviating the situation, including educational workshops and greater provision of contraception, were all to be carried out by the company. No suggestions were made for government, villages, churches, parents, or schools for changing gender relations such that women would be less vulnerable. This representation accorded all capacity for generating social change with Solomon Taiyo, and no capacity with Solomon Islands society, which is a profoundly disempowered picture. Some interviewees did mention Solomon Islanders’ roles in creating and solving social problems, but in ways that showed that the company was usually given primary responsibility. And I think it depends on us Solomon Islanders to have something, because people say ‘Oh, problem there, problem’. It depends on us to control ourselves. Many times we feel that, especially the hospital, because of Taiyo lots of girls have STDs and lots of boys have STDs and, but it depends on us, yeah? Individuals to think. The problem is sometimes comes from people on the boats. They have VD and I mean gonorrhea and syphilis. But also us. The Solomon Islanders themselves, they get it from here, from that girl, from that boy, from this place, from that place, from the Solomons ourselves. It depends on us, to try to control everything.19 At another point in her interview Kindu also said that when Solomon Taiyo vessels first came to fish near her village she was very unhappy with the Japanese crew members coming ashore and having sex with local women, and said that these kinds of problems were less now because most of the crew were

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Solomon Islanders. After having implied that the foreign crew were responsible for unsanctioned sexual liaisons, however, she also said that local women ‘chased’ the foreign fishermen, and that women’s families were often happy to accommodate such relationships because of the shop-bought goods that came their way.20 A man from the same village related the narrative the same way, first blaming the foreigners then pointing out that some local women and their families sought out the relationships.21 Predominant representations of Solomon Taiyo’s social impact by Solomon Islanders were thus made up of a cluster of related perceptions. One was that the company caused negative impacts, which overshadowed benefits the company brought. Another was that the main responsibility for social problems lay with the company, especially its foreigners, both of which were seen as dominating Solomon Islanders. The subjectivity of Solomon Islanders vis-à-vis Solomon Taiyo visible in narratives of negative social impact was of a subordinated people. The idea that Solomon Islanders were subordinated by Solomon Taiyo also pervaded representations of the company on issues other than social impact. [Solomon Taiyo’s] local processing is largely export-oriented, whereby the choice tuna meat is bound for foreign markets. What is consumed in the islands is often of poor quality, made from brown flakes (the part of the tuna that ends up as pet food in some Western countries). Such products are nonetheless still a popular food item among Solomon Islanders because of the prohibitive price of the export grade. (Samou 1999: 149) Samou implied that Solomon Islanders would prefer the light meat and settled for the dark meat only because the light meat was too expensive. This representation is in some ways inaccurate. Skipjack flesh is dark with a strong flavor, so in cultures where sweeter light meat varieties of fish are preferred, such as the Englishspeaking world, skipjack has not been highly valued, and the dark part of the fish could only be sold as pet food. There is no objective quality difference between the light and dark parts of the skipjack, it is a matter of cultural value. In Solomon Islands and Japan, where the strong flavor of skipjack has been popular for centuries, skipjack is not viewed the same way as it is in the English-speaking world. Most Solomon Islanders actually preferred the dark meat in the ‘Solomon Blue’ flake product because it had more taste than the white meat. Indeed, when disruption to export markets after 2000 meant the Solomon Blue product contained a higher proportion of light meat, the company received many complaints and requests to return to the ‘original recipe’.22 Solomon Islanders living overseas often had cases of Solomon Blue sent to them because they preferred it to white meat skipjack available overseas. Why then did Samou represent Solomon Blue as something Solomon Islanders only settled for because they could not afford the white meat product? Samou’s representation makes sense if it is seen as utilizing English-speaking cultural values about tuna quality in order to deploy the

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rhetoric of Third World exploitation in talking about Solomon Taiyo. The rhetoric of Third World exploitation was closely related to narratives of negative social impact in representations of Solomon Taiyo. The nature of Solomon Islanders’ subordinate identification in relation to Solomon Taiyo was largely not collaborative as per Guha’s formulation outlined in Chapter 2, rather the subordination was protested against as being unjust neocolonialism. The underlying perception that Solomon Taiyo brought about the unjust subordination of Solomon Islanders was manifest in a ‘whistle-blowing’ attitude by Solomon Islanders towards the company. When public officials, concerned members of the public, and employees suspected that Solomon Taiyo was doing something wrong they were usually quick to voice those concerns publicly. For example, in 1999 one of the Chief Fisheries Officers sent a memorandum accusing Solomon Taiyo of cheating resource owners to various senior officials in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries after noticing an apparent inconsistency between the faxed copy of a baitfishing logsheet submitted by Solomon Taiyo and the original, submitted later.23 I had found this memorandum during archival research, and followed it up with the officer concerned. He said the apparent inconsistency turned out to have been a mistake in reading the numbers on the faxed copy, because the fax had distorted the image of the logsheet. The alacrity with which he jumped to the conclusion of company wrongdoing and spoke out against it typified a general tendency by Solomon Islanders towards Solomon Taiyo (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 23–24). Whistle-blowing was so accepted as a mode of response to Solomon Taiyo in Solomon Islands that Solomon Islanders were surprised when their whistleblowing met with adverse reaction. The Solomon Islander head of a Solomon Islands NGO had visited Tokyo to attend an NGO forum leading up to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. While in Tokyo he voiced suspicions that Solomon Taiyo engaged in bribery and transfer pricing, and these suspicions were published in the media. In Solomon Islands such representations of Solomon Taiyo were commonplace so the NGO leader was surprised when Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ officials reacted badly to these media reports. He said the Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ officials were ‘really hurt’ by his comments and went so far as to have Solomon Taiyo managers enlist the support of Japanese volunteers in Solomon Islands to come to his village home and ask him to sign a retraction of his accusations. He said it appeared to have been the wrong etiquette to publicly voice suspicions about Solomon Taiyo in Japan, whereas in Solomon Islands this was normal.24 If the protesting nature of many Solomon Islander representations of Solomon Taiyo indicates that Solomon Islands’ subordination was not collaborative, does this mean they may be characterized as belonging to the other side of Guha’s formulation of subordination – resistance? Were Solomon Islanders utilizing ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985) through their whistle-blowing narratives? By representing Solomon Taiyo as impacting negatively upon and exploiting Solomon Islanders the symbolic violence of Solomon Islander identity as a Least Developed Country was transformed into a kind of symbolic weapon to challenge the legitimacy of their subordination. The social effects of

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these narratives, however, were not easily recognizable as resistance, and indeed some effects may actually have contributed to processes of subordination. Portraying Solomon Taiyo as a ‘big bad multinational’ exploiting Pacific Islanders constituted a kind of victim identification. Several scholars have noticed various forms of victim identification of Pacific Islanders and shown that they have been disempowering. K.R. Howe traced the historical development of the idea that Pacific Islanders suffered a ‘fatal impact’ from their contact with Europeans and modernity (Howe 1984). The assumption that ‘European entry into the Pacific meant sooner or later doom and disaster for the islands’ inhabitants’ began with early admirers of the noble savages, continued on through social Darwinism and perceptions that the Melanesians were a dying race. They have persisted despite a generation of Pacific historians who questioned the assumption of omnipotent power on the part of colonials and who, in focusing on the activities of Pacific Islanders themselves, discovered other ways of viewing the changes brought about by contact with Europeans and modernity (Howe 1984: 348). ‘To see Islanders as passive, helpless, and always persecuted and suffering at the hands of Europeans not only excludes modern research findings but, it is now argued, denies the Islanders their essential humanity’ (ibid.: 352). Howe’s fatal impact theory shares some central tenets with Marshall Sahlins’ ‘despondency theory’ (Sahlins 2000). Both ideas critique victim identification of Pacific Islanders in articulations with foreigners and modernity because it is empirically inaccurate, and more importantly because it is symbolic violence; it identifies people in ways that disempower them. This aspect of Solomon Islanders’ identification in relation to Solomon Taiyo could also be theorized as a form of colonialism of the mind. Colonial-style subordinate identity did not simply disappear with decolonization, it remained and even spread from relations with Whites to relations with other ethnicities, such as Asians, seen as having the cultural capital and material wealth of modernness (Tara Kabutaulaka c.1996; Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1986). Representations of Solomon Taiyo as bearing the main responsibility for fixing social problems in Noro and surrounding communities indicates a ‘mentality of dependency’ (Bennett 2002) on the part of Solomon Islanders in relation to the company. Judith Bennett has explained Solomon Islanders’ engagement with foreigners and their modernity since the 1900s as being characterized by foreigners bringing to Solomon Islands modern ‘cargo’ as well as expertise in modern governance and modern business, through colonialism and postcolonial aid programs. For their part Solomon Islanders came to expect and rely on this pattern in their relations with foreigners and their modernization projects, be they aid schemes or foreign investment (Bennett 2002). The deployment of narratives of Third World exploitation and negative social impact regarding Solomon Taiyo were not intended to disempower. On the contrary, writers such as Samou and Sipolo deployed the narrative as protest against subordination. Nevertheless, representations of Solomon Taiyo as a big bad multinational causing negative social impact are double-edged in that, as well as challenging the legitimacy of domination, they reified it through identifying

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Solomon Islanders as helpless in their engagement with the company. Representations of Solomon Taiyo’s female employees as naïve, uneducated village girls, who were unable to protect themselves in the social context of the modern town of Noro, were part of the social conditions (habitus) predisposing women to be vulnerable to unsanctioned sexual liaisons and their effects (the stigma of promiscuity and the hardship of rearing children as a single parent). The fact that representations challenging the legitimacy of the company were potentially disempowering as a form of victim identification means the term ‘protest’ is more appropriate than ‘resistance’ in this case. Solomon Islander identities in relation to Solomon Taiyo may be characterized as ‘protesting subordinate national identity’. Protesting subordinate national identity was very clear in a letter to the editor from a 1995 issue of the Solomon Star newspaper signed by ‘a concerned nationalist’. This letter described Solomon Taiyo as a ‘blueprint of Japanese imperialism’. The concerned nationalist asserted that women workers left for work at 3am and returned home at 10pm six days a week. The letter went on to say that there were no Japanese workers in the factory, only ‘Black faces’. Local workers were described as ‘human tools’, ‘unskilled, half educated cheap labor’. The writer accused Solomon Taiyo of taking fish resources ‘without equitable returns to us people of Munda and the whole nation’. Solomon Taiyo was described as a ‘crime against our people’ and the writer concluded ‘we do not need such development’ (Solomon Star 1995). The letter demonstrates the strongly nationalist frame through which Solomon Islanders viewed Solomon Taiyo. The gender and class inequities in the picture painted were left unchallenged, only the national/racial angle was highlighted. Solomon Taiyo was understood as an enterprise that subordinated Solomon Islanders, seen as Black people who had suffered imperialism and were being exploited as cheap labor, and was denounced on those grounds. This representation also hints at the modernism that infuses national identities. The letter does not reject modernization per se but ‘such development’. Solomon Taiyo was widely seen as the kind of modernization that exploited Solomon Islanders. The rest of this chapter explores the nexus between national identity and modernization in Solomon Islander subjectivities from the perspective of one of the most important roles for Solomon Islanders in Solomon Taiyo – as employees.

Solomon Islanders as employees In the late 1990s Solomon Taiyo employed nearly 3,000 people, and paid around SB$20 million to Solomon Islanders as remuneration (SPPF 1999). Solomon Taiyo was the largest private-sector employer in the country, and the majority of these workers were unlikely to have been able to find work elsewhere. In a country were only around 10 percent of the population had paid employment and unemployment had resulted in a large floating population of disaffected youth, the job opportunities provided by Solomon Taiyo were very important and were recognized as such by Solomon Islanders.

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While appreciating these job opportunities, however, many Solomon Islander interviewees asserted that pay and conditions at Solomon Taiyo were bad. The head of the NGO Development Services Exchange gave a typical response in saying: ‘job opportunities at Solomon Taiyo are a good thing, especially for women, but someone should check whether the company fully complies with the labor regulations’. As with other kinds of representations of the company, representations of the company as an employer were strongly colored by the presumption that it exploited Solomon Islanders. The sense that the company was exploitative was bolstered by the nature of hierarchies in the company. Capitalist enterprises are hierarchical organizations. Particular job types garner more remuneration, prestige, and authority to make decisions. Normatively such hierarchies are based on meritocratic criteria such as skills and experience. Behind this apparently objective mechanism, however, are complex criteria and practices for valuing work. The workings of habitus mean that particular groups are more predisposed to acquire the valued criteria than other groups. These criteria are expected from some groups and overlooked in other groups. For example, in the case of Solomon Taiyo middle-class Japanese men were viewed as being naturally suitable for leadership and worth high remuneration. Solomon Islander women, on the other hand, were categorized as culturally and/or biologically well-suited to ‘scratching’ fish in the factory, and as being unsuited to leadership positions. There was thus slippage between meritocratic principles of hierarchization, which were ostensibly not about ethnic or gender identity, and precisely those identities. There was some grumbling about the inequity of company hierarchies in and of themselves, in terms of the unfairness of pay and housing differences between salaried staff and waged workers.25 For example, ‘the company puts their operations first and equality second’, ‘management tries to destroy the solidarity of the workers’,26 and ‘the workers are exploited and oppressed’ and ‘company structures prevented improvements for the workers’.27 Notwithstanding these complaints, hierarchies of job type were usually seen as being based on meritocratic principles, which were more or less accepted as legitimate. Complaints about company hierarchies were much more prevalent when they lined up with identity divides. Only women were employed in the cleaning lines in the cannery, and only men were employed on the fleet, but apart from that there was supposed to be equal opportunity for men and women. There were no official guidelines to pay women less than men. Nevertheless, women were clustered around the lowest paid jobs in both the staff and worker categories (see Chapter 4). Women were seen as being naturally dextrous at the work of preparing fish but they were also seen as inherently less committed to cash work because of birth and childrearing responsibilities.28 Meritocratic principles of hierarchization in the company thus coincided with the gender divide. Women’s job ‘scratching’ fish was seen as the worst work in the company: boring, standing up all day, and smelly. It was recognized that mostly women bore the brunt of the long commute necessary due to inadequate housing in Noro

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(see Chapter 4). The conditions under which women worked at Solomon Taiyo were often included as one of the complaints about the company. As I have argued elsewhere (Barclay 2004), while some interviewees saw women’s situation as a result of patriarchy in Solomon Islands and Japanese society, none proposed that changing gender relations was the solution to the problem. Rather, problems suffered by women in Solomon Taiyo were usually framed as problems of modernization, which should be addressed by the company, especially its foreigners. Gender discrimination, therefore, was not so much seen as something men did to women, but something that foreigners did to our women. Meritocratic principles of hierarchization here slipped from gender into ethnicity. Hierarchies based on ethnicity generated the most strident protests. Interviewees commonly asserted that recruitment and promotion within the company were based on island group preferences. Solomon Taiyo management actively prevented consolidation of island groups within the company through mixing work teams up and through centralized vetting of recruitment and promotion applications (see Chapter 4), but many interviewees believed that Solomon Islanders involved in recruitment and promotion in Solomon Taiyo gave preference to their wantoks, rather than those with the best skills.29 Wantok preference in the workplace was seen by Solomon Islanders as something their country people did as matter of course, a ‘Solomon or Melanesian characteristic’.30 Many interviewees also believed Solomon Taiyo employed a disproportionate number of Malaitans, a group demonized by other island groups as taking too much of the scarce cash work in the country. Sometimes wantok preference was seen being based on meritocratic criteria and therefore as legitimate. For example, several interviewees thought Solomon Taiyo probably recruited many Malaitans because they were hard workers, and more willing than other island groups to work away from home.31 But mostly recruitment and/or promotion on the basis of wantok relations was seen as ‘not a good thing’ because success within the company should be based on ‘skills and knowledge’.32 Protests about wantok preference, however, were overshadowed by protests against hierarchies being based on nationality. Company hierarchies clearly lined up with nationality. Expatriates held the most senior posts and were paid at a higher rate, sometimes as much as ten times the rate for nationals, even for the same work (see Chapter 4). National identity was thus explicitly tied to pay rates, power, and prestige in Solomon Taiyo. The ranking of Solomon Islander employees underneath Japanese, Australians, Filipinos, and Fijians had profound effects on Solomon Islander subjectivities. In the words of a Parliamentarian trying to make sense of the disparity in payments between Solomon Islanders and foreigners in Solomon Taiyo: ‘Mr Speaker sir, are Solomon Island people very cheap?’ (NPSI 1990: 30). The structural subordination of Solomon Islander employees was not simply based on national identity. One of the main explanations was the labor-market principle that scarce skills have high value. Expatriates were employed in the job types for which there were insufficient numbers of skilled locals and had to be remunerated sufficiently to attract them away from employment in their home

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countries. Insofar as expatriate employees were doing work Solomon Islanders could not, the greater seniority and remuneration was more or less accepted. Questions were raised, however, about why the company had not trained up enough Solomon Islanders after more than 20 years of operation. Somebody have mentioned to me, an Okinawan’s salary for one month is equal to two catcher boats’ salary for a month. So, that you can find out, maybe skill comes in, or maybe exploitation comes in. The other answer I can provide for that is that it is the characteristic of transnational companies, they do that . . . they will continue to maintain their dominance. . . . That in one way or another, raises the question about exploitation. Yeah? And I would refer to that one as colonial dominance or brainwashing. That’s what I would refer to it as, because as I have said. If it is intentionally done, not to speed up the localization program, then it raises a lot of questions. Why is [localization] taking this long?33 In 1996 there was an investigation into localization progress at the Noro Base by the Labour Division of the Ministry of Commerce, Industries and Employment.34 The purpose of the inspection was to examine the recruitment of expatriates by Solomon Taiyo Ltd. Apparently a letter of complaint had been sent to the Labour Division accusing the company of employing too many expatriates, employing expatriates without appropriate qualifications, and asserting that no localization had taken place since 1992. The report from the investigation recommended that one of the two Filipinas working in Quality Control was redundant, so her work permit should be canceled. The report also recommended that the position of Contract Accountant held by an Australian should be phased out and that the position of Operations Manager, held by a Japanese national, should be localized. The author of the report felt the four Fijian supervisors in the Cannery were not required, they were only employed because they were friends and relatives of the Cannery Manager, a Japanese man who had worked in Fiji and was married to a Fijian. The Smoking Department employed 104 local workers, two Japanese managers, one Filipino and one Malaysian at the time of the inspection. The report said the two Japanese managers were necessary but all other positions could be filled by Solomon Islanders. A Solomon Islander supervisor working in Smoking had allegedly been demoted in favor of a nonnational. The report recommended that no more expatriates be employed as supervisors in the Smoking Factory: ‘After all, these are Solomon Island Products’. The nationalism in the Labour Division report was palpable. Not only did the author of the report have strongly nationalist ideas about who should gain benefits of employment at Solomon Taiyo, he assumed that foreigners as employees would behave according to nationalist logic. Many Solomon Islander interviewees also believed that Solomon Taiyo’s foreigners would be nationalist in their dealings with Solomon Islander employees. Some interviewees also felt that management prioritized ‘first the Japanese and then the friends of the Japanese’. Noro Customs employee Kavachi asserted

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that one middle-level Solomon Islander manager received double the pay of another middle-level manager because of their different relations with Japanese managers.35 Another interviewee said the Japanese managers ‘have their own stories among themselves’ regarding recruitment and promotion, and described staff as being divided between those who followed the managers and ‘those of us who stay neutral, who get nothing’.36 The stark difference in authority and remuneration between expatriates and locals in Solomon Taiyo was a raw nerve exacerbating Solomon Islanders’ sense of subordination. It was often explained in Third Worldist terms as exploitative. The public consensus that Solomon Taiyo exploited Solomon Islander employees was such a strong preconception sometimes stories that demonstrated exploitation were overplayed and contradictory evidence was underplayed. Several male interviewees who had worked for the company related firsthand stories of physical violence on the part of Japanese and Okinawan supervisors, such as Lambi who said he was sometimes given a ‘bang on the boom’ with a spanner by his boss in the Engineering Department.37 There were stories of Okinawan fishermen physically abusing their Solomon Islander co-workers reported in newspapers (BSIP Newssheet 1974: 4–5; News Drum 1980c: 3; Solomon Star 1996). But some representations overplayed the violence. For example, one interviewee said workers in the Smoking Plant were ‘treated like slaves’, they had to work without rest or ‘the Japanese will shoot a tray at them’. He said the Japanese Smoking supervisor carried two knives, one on his hip and one on his calf, and he was good at throwing them, so the Smoking workers ‘lived in fear’.38 On the occasions I saw this supervisor on the Base he carried no knives. The only death from violence in Solomon Taiyo’s history was of a Japanese national (Uekago Yoshi, probably Okinawan) who was stabbed to death by a Solomon Islander national (Terry Baka’a Tekaua, ethnically I-Kiribati) (News Drum 1979: 1). Furthermore, interviewees usually did not mention physical violence between Solomon Islanders, which was far more prevalent than with foreigners. Fights among groups of young men who had been drinking alcohol were frequent features of life in Noro and places that the fishing vessels visited. One interviewee described foreign bosses as likely to shout at or hit local employees. When asked if Solomon Islander supervisors ever shouted at or hit employees he acknowledged that local workers did fight among themselves, especially between island groups.39 Intra-Solomons violence was not denied by interviewees, but it was not what sprang to mind when talking about Solomon Taiyo as a workplace. As well as tending to overplay violence by foreigners against Solomon Islanders in Solomon Taiyo, Solomon Islanders tended to assume that the working hours were illegally long and that people were paid less than the legal minimum wage. Indeed, interviewees often implied or stated that Solomon Taiyo was one of the worst workplaces in the country. According to my research, however, working conditions at Solomon Taiyo were average by Solomon Islands standards, and had improved over time (see Chapter 4). In addition, narratives of bad conditions tended to lay all blame on the company,

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whereas many of the problems with housing and commuting were at least as much the responsibility of the government and wider society as the company. One interviewee, who as a businessman and politician in Western Province had close dealings with Solomon Taiyo over a long period of time, highlighted this tendency of Solomon Islanders to be overly negative in assessments of Solomon Taiyo as a workplace: I think a lot, honestly a lot of people do not like Solomon Taiyo . . . they all sometimes say, oh the pay is no good. Sometimes the conditions are not much good but, personally, in comparison with other companies, Solomon Taiyo has much better conditions than other companies . . . all of the main companies in Solomon Islands. And even the government too.40 The public consensus that Solomon Taiyo was a terrible place to work was part of the postcolonial mindset in which Solomon Islanders expected that foreigners and multinational companies would exploit them. This mindset involved viewing social interactions like those of Solomon Taiyo through the lens of nationalism, and the identities assumed in this nationalism included particular versions of ‘foreigner’ and ‘Solomon Islander’. One of the main foreign identities at play in Solomon Taiyo was the ‘expert expat’. This was the identity that justified higher remuneration and authority on the basis of having special expertise. The identity ‘expert expat’ had its roots in the colonial era but survived largely intact in the post-independence development assistance era. An ‘expert expat’ was stereotypically White but in recent years could also be Asian. This identity did not only exist in the heads of expatriates who self-identified this way, identities are also created through the perceptions and behaviors of others (see Chapter 2). One of Solomon Taiyo’s Australian accountants said he felt that because he was White he was ‘supposed to be an expert at everything’, and found that Solomon Islander co-workers looked to him as a source of advice regarding areas far beyond his capabilities. Solomon Islander identifications thus also had a role in sustaining the identity of the ‘expert expat’. Another part of this process was the identification of Solomon Islanders as the counterpart to the ‘expert expat’, as lacking the kinds of expertise that are important in modern business. Narratives about Solomon Islander ‘culture’ were prevalent in the discourses feeding Solomon Islanders’ subordinate identity in relation to modern business. Solomon Islander culture was seen as an obstruction to capitalist development because of perceived effects of ‘culture’ on the quality of the workforce. ‘Culture’ as a factor affecting the workforce was explained in a range of ways. One of the non-Solomon Islander managers who worked for Solomon Taiyo felt her Solomon Islander co-workers’ ‘customs and beliefs’ meant they ‘absorbed ideas slowly’ compared to people from other countries; that Solomon Islanders had some resistance to taking on board concepts necessary for running capitalist enterprise. ‘There is a wall they are behind, in the Solomons, ideas bounce off and go back.’41 ‘Culture’ was also

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seen as affecting the productivity of Solomon Islander workers. One of Solomon Taiyo’s Australian accountants explained that remuneration levels between Thai cannery workers and Solomon Island workers were similar, but Thai workers were much more productive in a given time period, and emphasized the point with a joke. If you offer a Thai worker a dollar to jump in the air the worker will jump once for that dollar and jump again for another dollar. If you offer a Solomon Islands worker a dollar to jump in the air the worker will stop to argue that the jump is worth two dollars.42 Some Okinawan fishermen told me Solomon Islanders worked very hard, but most implied or stated that Solomon Islanders lacked work ethic. Solomon Islanders have no work ethic [kinro¯ seishin ga nai] . . . Work, no motivation. . . . So, when they get their pay they won’t come [back] to the ship. When I ask ‘Why don’t you come to the ship? Why won’t you work?’ they say ‘Now my father is sick so I am going back to my island’. Next time ‘My mother died so I am going back to the island for the funeral’. That kind of thing. So their mothers and fathers are dying once or twice a year. Therefore they have none of this work ethic.43 Another Okinawan fisherman Maezato said half of the Solomon Islanders he worked with worked hard, and half worked less hard, and then there were a few he said spread stories among the crew that the Japanese bosses were bad so the crew should go on strike.44 Okinawan former fisherman Shitajima referred to a series of strikes that occurred when he worked in the Solomons in the early 1980s. Japanese manager Osaka said these strikes happened because the spirit of Independence (1978) inspired some of the crew to agitate against Okinawan leadership on the fleet as a form of foreign dominance.45 Shitajima, however, noticed that by the late 1970s some Solomon Islander crew members had become experienced and skilled enough to be doing the same work as Okinawan fishermen. When Solomon Islander fishermen started doing the same work as Okinawan fishermen the difference in pay levels came to seem very unfair.46 Shitajima saw this unfairness as a factor in the strikes, but none of the other Okinawan interviewees mentioned pay disparities having a role in Solomon Islander attitudes to work. Differences in remuneration were also under-recognized by Okinawan interviewees in their representations of Solomon Islanders’ ability to manage money in the cash economy. The frequency with which Solomon Islander employees had no money left soon after payday was often framed as being due to Solomon Islands’ cultural values about sharing wealth among the family. One Okinawan fisherman, Maezato, depicted the ability to handle money in a cash economy as a modernization learning curve. He said that when he first went to Solomon Islands in the early 1970s most Solomon Islanders did not wear shirts, and no

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one wore shoes, and the Solomon Islander fishers spent their entire monthly pay on beer within three days of getting paid. He said that by the late 1990s most people wore T-shirts and many had shoes or rubber sandals. He thought about half the crew still spent their money in the first few days, but many had come to want clothes and radio cassette players so were more careful with their spending. None of the Okinawan fishers raised the possibility that Solomon Islanders may have gone through their pay quickly because they were paid so little. In 1999 the most senior Solomon Islander fleet workers were paid a little more than SB$1,000 (US$210) in monthly remuneration, while most crew received less. Okinawan fishermen received ten times this amount. They received SB$1,000 a month in pocket money to spend in Solomon Islands while the other nine-tenths of the Okinawans’ pay went home to Irabu for their wives to use for the family’s living costs, including housing, cars, and tertiary education for the children. In portraying Solomon Islanders as unable to manage their money Okinawan fishermen were expecting Solomon Islanders to cover their whole living costs and those of their families on the amount Okinawans themselves used as pocket money for their days off. Connections between productivity and culture were also drawn through ideas about Solomon Islanders’ sense of time, labor transience, and wantok relations. ‘Island time’ was often sited as a cultural feature detracting from Solomon Islanders’ value as employees, as it has been all over the Pacific. Colonialism and modernization have involved invasions of time as well as space, and turning Islanders into modern subjects has always involved changing their sense of time as a key project. Pacific Islander conceptions of time were seen by US administrators in Micronesia as ‘the root of all labor problems’ (Hanlon 1998: 38). The identification of Solomon Islanders as unable to manage their time in ways that made them suitable employees had been internalized, with several Solomon Islander interviewees saying explicitly that Solomon Islander employees ‘waste time’ and that this was a reason to retain foreigners as managers in Solomon Taiyo.47 Because to the Okinawans time means money. That sort of attitude. So it sort of move Solomon Islanders to be more practical, more active, not just lazy. So in other aspects it may be bad, in terms of the law of the country. But in other aspects it might be good to encourage the Solomon Islanders to work hard, to develop some sort of attitude, not being lazy, or not sleeping on board the ship, I mean time means money . . . I think in terms of how they teach those boys I think that is a benefit they are issuing . . . Because they have been harsh with the boys [laughed], so they learn it on the hard way, not the easy way . . . And the other things they have been very good at is timekeeping, I mean the Solomon Islanders they are poor in timekeeping, the Japanese are very good at timekeeping. So I think, two sort of benefits, sort of educate Solomon Islanders. So I am sort of seeing those as the benefits for Solomon Islanders . . . With the Okinawans some of the Solomon Islanders have developed and become good fishermen.48

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Solomon Islanders and Solomon Taiyo I do not believe that the company [Solomon Taiyo] will be totally taken over by Solomon Islanders. And me too, I don’t want it to be totally taken over by Solomon Islanders. Because one thing I cannot tolerate is people wasting time and [laughed] one thing which is very popular in the Solomon Islands is people waste a lot of time, even in companies, yeah, in Pacific Island companies.49

One of the few Solomon Islanders to reach management level in the company had clearly worked hard to escape this identification. He wore a futuristic digital watch of a style that was at that time the height of fashion in Japan, and the screen saver on his laptop read ‘Time is Money’. Labor transience has also long been seen by employers in Solomon Islands, including Solomon Taiyo managers, as a feature of Solomon Islanders’ culture that detracted from productivity levels (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1983: 27–31). Workers were seen as willing to work for a few years to earn money then to lose interest and return to their village, rather than being willing to commit long-term to wage work. Labor transience, however, was at least as much caused by work environments as Solomon Islands’ ‘culture’ (see Chapter 3 for discussion of the historical emergence of transient wage labor). During the 1970s harsh working conditions and the all-male barracks-style living arrangements (an inheritance from the plantation system) in Tulagi were found to be a cause of worker transience (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1983: 27–31). When the main base moved from Tulagi to Noro, where greater space meant that living arrangements could accommodate families, employee retention rates improved greatly.50 People could see Noro as a place to live long-term. Nevertheless, dreadful housing conditions as well as negative perceptions about pay and working conditions were still affecting employee retention in the 1990s. ‘Shortages of skilled nationals persist, although they have improved, and will persist while pay remains low.’51 The tendency to identify the work practices of ethnic groups as being cultural predispositions, rather than seeing the role of employment environments (which employers have a key role in creating) in shaping work practices, was recognized by Albert Memmi as a feature of colonialism. He noted that the image of the colonized created by the colonizers contained notions that the colonized were lazy. Nothing could better justify the colonizer’s privileged position than his industry, and nothing could better justify the colonized’s destitution than his indolence. The mythical portrait of the colonized therefore includes an unbelievable laziness, and that of the colonizer, a virtuous taste for action. At the same time the colonizer suggests that employing the colonized is not very profitable, thereby authorizing his unreasonable wages. . . . Every firm needs specialists, of course, but only a minimum of them, and the colonizer imports or recruits experts among his own kind. . . . The colonized, however, is asked only for his muscles; he is so poorly evaluated that three or four can be taken on for the price of one European. (Memmi 1965: 79–80)

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Low productivity was explained by colonizers as something inherent in the colonized, and colonizers ignored explanations based on ‘malnutrition, low wages, a closed future, a ridiculous conception of a role in society’ (ibid.: 81). Dominant identification often involves dominant group members finding causes for power inequalities in perceived shortcomings of the subordinated rather than in the relations of domination (see Chapter 2). Explanations of Solomon Islander employees’ predispositions regarding waged work as a result of their ‘culture’ should be seen in this light. Wantok relations were another aspect of Solomon Islands culture seen as detracting from the value of Solomon Islanders as employees. The networks of obligation comprising wantok relations were seen as a negative characteristic for capitalist development in general in Solomon Islands. Solomon Islanders who were promoted to supervisory or management positions were often put under great pressure by their relatives to use their position to direct benefits to their relatives. Requests might include gifts of fish, or preferential recruitment or promotion. Japanese manager Okubo felt wantok loyalties made Solomon Islanders unsuitable as managers because they were unable to discipline some of their supervisees due to ‘village relationships’.52 In order to enable Solomon Islanders to become managers, the company was trying to implement a ‘look after wantoks after hours approach’ in which employees would have ‘business loyalties’ during working hours. He thought the wantok system was good in that it contributed to social stability, but he believed it prevented economic growth. ‘Traditional’ social networks, however, have been shown to actually assist capitalist development in other contexts. Japanese manager Okubo reflected that social relations of the Okinawan fishermen who worked for Solomon Taiyo were very much like the wantok system, but their close clan ties and networks of obligation were seen as enhancing their ability to work as productive teams (Wakabayashi 1996; Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1983: 25). There are examples of successful businesses in the Pacific that use wantok networks as a key part of their organization, such as Agnes Lodge in Munda, Solomon Islands, and Aggie Grey’s Hotel in Samoa (Fairbairn-Dunlop 2000). The perception that wantok loyalties are only detrimental to capitalist enterprise, rather than having a range of potential effects, and suggestions that changing or destroying such ‘traditions’ is the only way for capitalism to work, are modernist discourses. These perceptions bolster modern identity and act to justify the dominance of those identified as modern over those identified as non-modern. Discussions of localization of Solomon Taiyo’s workforce brought modernist mindsets about national identity to the fore because it was all about whether Solomon Islanders were ‘yet’ competent enough in the ways of the modern business world. Interviewees from the Investment Corporation of Solomon Islands (ICSI, the government shareholding agency) described Solomon Taiyo as ‘the worst company you can possibly think of’ regarding localization. Solomon Islands Plantations Ltd (SIPL) had only two positions not localized in 1999, when eight of Solomon Taiyo’s senior managers and around 50 supervisors were still non-nationals.

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Even though most interviewees said they wanted more localization and wanted Solomon Islanders to take up leadership positions in companies, Solomon Islanders who were recognized as having the right skills, and so were given management positions, were perceived in interesting ways by other Solomon Islanders. One Solomon Islander labeled staff he saw as being particularly close to management in Solomon Taiyo ‘Japanese Solomon Islanders’, and this was clearly a term of derision.53 Another labeled Solomon Islander staff who ‘followed management’ as ‘small Japanese’.54 Solomon Islanders who acquired the skills necessary to take leadership roles within a capitalist enterprise were thus somehow seen as less Solomon Islander. Acquiring the cultural capital of modernness was seen as negating ethnic identity. This shows the deep-seated links between modernness and ethnic identity and the resulting love–hate ambivalence towards modernity held by non-White peoples identified as lacking modernness. Solomon Islander managers were living out the modernization dream, helping their country achieve its nationalist goals and were no doubt admired for doing so, yet because of the association of modernness with foreignness, together with the history of subordination at the hands of foreigners, they were also considered somewhat traitorous. This typifies the paradox of modernization for non-White peoples: it is simultaneously a nationalist aim and a cause for nationalist angst. One of the key factors affecting Solomon Islander employees’ engagement with Solomon Taiyo was their status as landowners. Landlessness has been a crucial feature of working classes in capitalism. Solomon Islanders had not been completely self-sufficient since the 1800s but in the 1990s Solomon Islanders were still producing a significant amount of their food and shelter themselves. Cash was valued in the village sphere but it was not necessary, in economic terms or in terms of social status, to commit a whole working life to the pursuit of cash. Each household had a range of economic activities, some cash-earning, some not, which combined to satisfy most of their needs and some of their wants. People moved in and out of the town and village spheres. Bennett has argued that the duality of the Solomon Islands economy allowed Solomon Islanders to have a diversity of strategies, and that considering the instability of international commodities markets upon which the Solomon Islands capitalist sector has relied, this course of action was economically sound (Bennett 1987: 339–341). As employees with independent means of production, Solomon Islander employees had a safety net from the excesses of capitalism, which influenced their commitment to cash work. Because they owned land, Solomon Islanders were able to choose, at times, not to work as hard as management would have liked, not to work for cash for their whole lives, and not to prioritize cash work above other social considerations. Employees in more thoroughly capitalist societies also make such choices. As a matter of degree, however, customary tenure meant the choice to opt out of the capitalist employment system was easier for Solomon Islanders than for workers in other countries (such as Thailand, for instance). This is not to say that Solomon Islanders moved seamlessly between life in wage labor and life in the village. Several interviewees pointed out that

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increasing numbers of Solomon Islanders did not want to live in their villages until they retired. University graduates, for example, wanted careers. Even some Solomon Taiyo workers had come to see cash work as ‘security in terms of their future’ the way ‘they earn their living’. These people felt unable to leave the company even if they were not enjoying their work.55 In addition, the values of the modern cash-earning sphere, in which non-cash-earning lives in the village were devalued, affected the capacity of some people to re-integrate with village life after a time outside. For example, interviewees talked of some returned Solomon Taiyo crew members who refused to help out with building houses or other communal work in the village, even if they were now living in the village permanently. The other complication inherent in the dual system was that in making use of their economic choice not to engage in wage labor Solomon Islanders fed discourses about being less-than-ideal employees. Interviewees who located causes for Solomon Islander employee transience and lack of motivation for cash work in Solomon Islands culture usually explained the causes along the lines of Solomon Islander employees having a low feeling of responsibility for their job at Solomon Taiyo because they could always ‘go back to the island’56 or take a ‘Makira holiday’ and not return to work after the Christmas break.57 Solomon Islander identities as employees were thus comprised of complex interactions between perceptions that Solomon Islanders were ‘not yet’ good capitalist employees, a dual society that enabled them to opt out of cash work, and working conditions that discouraged them from committing more fully to their cash work. How Solomon Islander employees can make capitalist enterprise work for them, in competition with landless laborers, without losing the economic security benefits (among other kinds of benefits) of their dual system, is one of the huge challenges facing Solomon Islands as it works out how to forge a locally appropriate version of modernity.

Conclusion Solomon Islanders represented Solomon Taiyo from a ‘frog perspective’, in which Solomon Islanders seemed to be looking up at the world from the bottom of hierarchies in the world political economy.58 These representations were permeated with Third Worldist protest again unjust subordination by a multinational company and its foreigners. As such, the representations were not collaborative but neither can they be accurately described as ‘weapons of the weak’ resistance. The protesting representations disempowered as much as they resisted, through being a form of victim identification. Solomon Islanders’ sense of self in relation to Solomon Taiyo is best characterized as a protesting subordinate national identity. The nationalist nature of Solomon Islander identifications in relation to Solomon Taiyo was striking. Despite the strength of sub-national island group identities and the salience of other kinds of identities to the company’s operations (such as gender and class/social strata), nationalism was the strongest sentiment

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coming through most representations. Although the company clearly did create hierarchies between Solomon Islanders and expatriates, many Solomon Islander representations overplayed the domination of Solomon Islanders by foreigners, obscuring the roles of local disputes and failures of local leaders and contributions of local government and society to problems attributed to Solomon Taiyo. The national identities arising in representations of Solomon Taiyo were shaped by modernism. Modernity itself was often seen as a negative social impact perpetrated on Solomon Islanders by foreigners. A perceived lack of modernness, framed as a deficit of the skills and commitment valued in capitalism, justified the subordination of Solomon Islanders, through lower pay and restricting their participation in leadership. Solomon Islanders were identified as ‘not yet’ being good modern workers or managers, and this was often blamed on Solomon Islanders as being a result of their (backward) culture, when in fact the development of skills and commitment was demonstrably inhibited by employment conditions. The nexus between national identity and modernism was most clear in uses made of the split in Solomon Islands society between the capitalist sector and the village sphere. This duality was seen as contributing to problems in productivity levels, especially related to employee turnover. Solomon Islanders’ use of the village sphere to opt out of the modernist sphere was interpreted by some as evidence of their ‘backwardness’. The fact that ambivalence about modernity meant people did not want to commit wholeheartedly to capitalism, and a dual society that meant they did not have to, presented Solomon Islanders with a paradox. The degree of autonomy from global capitalism which duality offered Solomon Islanders gave them some choices about how Solomon Taiyo fit into their lives, but at the same time, the company was financially weakened such that it could not provide all of the cultural and material capital Solomon Islanders might have hoped for from such a joint venture. Considering the instability of the capitalist sector in Solomon Islands it was good to have a safety net, but at the same time, the safety net contributed to the instability of the capitalist sector. Solomon Taiyo’s modernization presented Solomon Islanders with a range of material and symbolic contradictions.

6

Okinawan fishermen Between modernity and the South Seas1

The history sketched in Chapter 3 raised the idea that one of the effects of domination by Japan on Okinawan identity was that Okinawans were perceived to exist temporally between the modern Japanese and peoples imagined to be primitive, such as those of the South Seas. In Solomon Taiyo this modernist influence on Okinawans’ ethnic subjectivity manifest in various ways. It was by no means the only influence on Okinawan fishermen’s relations with other ethnic groups; class was an important factor, and another key influence was Okinawans’ self-identification and identification by Japanese managers as grassroots cosmopolitans. Modernism, however, permeated relations, with hierarchical ethnic identities interacting with workplace hierarchies. Modernism in Okinawan identity was an antagonistic influence on relations with Solomon Islanders in Solomon Taiyo, exacerbating frictions caused by workplace hierarchies and negating the conciliatory influences of their cosmopolitanism. In relations with Japanese managers, structural hierarchies between permanently employed Maruha managers and annually contracted Okinawan fishermen were also compounded by the historical subordination of Okinawans within Japan, part of which was the subjectivization of Okinawans as backward.

South Seas fishing from Sarahama Sarahama is the fishing port on the island of Irabu in the Miyako group of islands in southern Okinawa near Taiwan. Humans first settled the Miyako Islands about 4,000 years ago. The archeological record shows the early inhabitants shared some cultural features with peoples from the northern Philippines and Micronesia, and other cultural features with Ryûkyûan islands to the north, so it is not entirely clear where they came from, perhaps they were a mixture of peoples from different places. The Miyako Islands became part of the Ryûkyû Kingdom in the 1500s (Pearson 1996: 97). Miyako Islanders are thus different to people from Okinawa Island. While Okinawa as a whole was imagined as primitive in relation to Japan, Miyako was seen as primitive in relation to the civilization centered on Okinawa Island. The Miyako Islands lie in the path traveled by western Pacific typhoons throughout summer and autumn. The typhoons are needed for the rains they bring,

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Okinawan fishermen

Map 6.1 Irabu Island.

but salt water in the winds burns the leaves of vegetation, and the soil is not very fertile, so only a narrow range of agriculture is possible. After annexation by Japan in 1897 the cash economy became increasingly important, so commercial skipjack fishing was developed. In 1916 boats with engines were introduced to Irabu and a katsuobushi factory was opened. In 1924 the Sarahama Fisheries Co-operative was established. Miyako fishers joined the southward colonial expansion (nanpo¯) and went to fish in the colonial territories Japan acquired in the Pacific following World War I (Wakabayashi 1993; 1996). The following song recorded by fisheries sociologist Wakabayashi Yoshikazu is said to have been improvised by the first fleet of Sarahamans who went to the South Seas to fish in the early 1930s. The floating world beloved of this period of Sho¯wa Lost in the love of money Depart to find your fortune in the far South Seas The pain of the ship leaving is heavy with money Well-wishers overflowing the beach Urging you to return safely Return rich, return safely Stay in good health and send us news won’t you

Okinawan fishermen 145 Weighing anchor with the blowing of the whistle The ship is already swiftly leaving the harbor. (Wakabayashi 1993: 85–86)2 The reign of the Emperor Sho¯wa (known in English as Hirohito) started in 1926. In Japanese Buddhist philosophy the ‘floating world’ is transitory material life on earth, so claims that the Sho¯wa period was particularly enamored of the floating world, in conjunction with the other references to money in the song, show how keenly Sarahamans were feeling the effects of the increased importance of the cash economy, and that this was pushing them to travel for cash work. By the mid-1930s there were Miyako fishers working Palau, Chuuk (Truk), Ponape, Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan (Borneo), and Sulawesi (Celebes) (see Map 1.1) (Wakabayashi 1993; Waugh 1986; 1994). At the end of World War II Miyako fishers were repatriated and worked around their home islands for the next 15 years. Because of the very limited range of economic opportunities at home, however, in the 1960s when Japanese fishing companies returned to prewar fishing grounds in Micronesia and southeast Asia – and also new areas around Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Solomon Islands – Miyako fishers were willing to go south again. According to Wakabayashi Yoshikazu (1993: 85, 102) an important reason Sarahama fishermen remained involved in South Seas fishing, when fishers from other parts of Japan increasingly abandoned the hard life of distant water fishing, was the ‘backwardness’ (ko¯shinsei) of the Miyako Islands. His choice of adjective illustrates how relative lack of affluence is often understood within the modernist discourses that have stigmatized Okinawan identity; a ‘colonialism of the mind’ still affecting contemporary Okinawan subjectivities (Nomura 2002). In the second half of the twentieth century the numbers of Sarahama fishers operating locally remained fairly constant at between 200 and 300 while several hundred worked in the South Seas. South Seas fishing peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when about 700 Sarahama fishers were absent for the ten-month fishing season. These were halcyon days for the usually frugal economy of Irabu Island. The generation of fishermen that worked in the South Seas from the 1960s to 1990s grew up in economic conditions not dissimilar to those in Solomon Islands. Tôriike said he had no shoes as a child, and there was no electricity on Irabu until he was ten years old, and even then it was only on a few hours a day while he was a teenager.3 People lived in houses made of timber and straw. In the 1970s, the fisheries turnover outdid agriculture, and 90 percent of the value of Irabu fisheries came from the South Seas fisheries, and indeed Irabu was contributing a large proportion of the whole Prefecture’s fisheries-related revenue. The most valuable catch the Irabu South Seas fisheries landed was in 1989 when it brought in JP¥7,400,000,000 (Wakabayashi 1993: 92) (approximately US$53,200,000 at 1989 exchange rates). During this period many families realized aspirations to replace their timber houses with modern concrete and steel constructions. Fishers who were able to continue working in the South Seas for a decade or

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more changed the socio-economic outlook of their families through sending their children to university. By the 1980s, however, the pole-and-line method of fishing in which Sarahama fishers specialized was squeezed out by the high-tech, low-labor purseseine method, and fishing companies employing crews from countries with cheaper employment costs. The number of Sarahama fishers working in the South Pacific had halved by the mid-1980s and continued to shrink thereafter (Wakabayashi 1993: 92–93). All of the fisheries employing Sarahamans in the South Seas closed down, except for one, Solomon Taiyo. At first Solomon Taiyo’s fishing crews were made up of 15 Japanese nationals (mostly Sarahamans) to 15 Solomon Islander crew-in-training. Gradually the proportion of Sarahamans decreased and the proportion of Solomon Islanders correspondingly increased. Up until 1983 there were ten Sarahamans per boat, then until 1987 there were six or seven, until 1993 when there were four, and from 1993 until the cessation of the joint venture in 2000 there was a maximum of three Sarahamans on board each ship, and up to 35 locals (Wakabayashi 1996: 148; Barclay and Wakabayashi 2000).

Relations with Solomon Islanders: cosmopolitanism vs hierarchy One significant influence affecting relations between Okinawan fishermen and Solomon Islanders was the Okinawans’ cultural predisposition towards grassroots cosmopolitanism. Harking back to the pre-annexation history of the Ryûkyû Islands as a peaceful center of trade and cultural contact, since the 1980s some Okinawans have asserted a positive non-Japanese identity symbolized by Ryûkyûan trading ships having acting as a ‘bridge to all nations’ (Arakaki 2002). Representations of Okinawans as having a bridging culture is a way of imagining Okinawa’s difference from Japan that counters stigmatic images of Okinawa as less modern than Japan. This cosmopolitan identity movement was manifest in, and contributed to by, the publication of a series called Sekai no Uchinânchu (Okinawans of the World), started in 1984 by the major Okinawan daily newspaper Ryûkyû Shinpô. The August 1986 issue of this series included a section on the Sarahama fishers of Solomon Taiyo, with photos of Sarahama fishers and their Solomon Islander friends and co-workers, and text detailing their daily lives in Solomon Islands (Ryûkyû Shinpô 1986: 258–269). In the mid-1980s the Sarahama fishers, with financial support from the Japanese partner company, initiated homestay visits to the Miyako Islands for one Solomon Islander crew member from each of the 20 boats in the fleet, as a reward for working well. The selected Solomon Islander crew members accompanied the Sarahama fishers home for a couple of weeks during their annual December–January holiday. The homestays were conducted for several years. All of my Okinawan interviewees cited the homestay visits as a central part of their representations that Irabu people related well with Solomon

Okinawan fishermen 147 Islanders. Within Okinawa Prefecture and nationally the homestay visits were lauded as exemplary grassroots ‘internationalization’ (kokusaika) activities (Kuruma 1984; Yomiuri Shimbun 1985). In addition, when Cyclone Namu devastated much of Solomon Islands in 1986 the Sarahama community rallied in support, sending donations. Mainland Japanese and some Solomon Islander interviewees shared the perception that Sarahamans related particularly well with Solomon Islanders. Several interviewees pointed out that vessels can only have good production figures if the interpersonal relations on board are functional.4 According to the recruiter of Sarahama fishermen in Miyako, the production figures from konzuri (‘mixed fishing’, referring to crews made up of mixed ethnic backgrounds) vessels were as good as all Okinawan vessels had been, which was evidence that Okinawans related well with Solomon Islanders.5 Former crew member Malaita noted that when they returned to Solomon Islands from their annual holidays at home Okinawan fishermen brought clothing, shoes, stereos, and watches for their Solomon Islander friends, and recommended pay rises for good workers.6 Wakabayashi Yoshikazu found that, in addition to their fishing skill and willingness to work away from home, one of the reasons only Sarahama fishers were employed by Solomon Taiyo was that they were seen by the Japanese partner company as ‘wealthy in conciliation with other peoples’ (taminzoku to no yu¯chisei ni tomi) compared to fishers from other parts of Japan (Wakabayashi 1993: 101). Phrases Solomon Islanders used to express this included saying the Okinawans were ‘so friendly’ and were willing to ‘mix up’ with ‘ordinary’ locals, unlike the Japanese manager ‘bigwigs’. Areke, a Solomon Islander manager who worked for Solomon Taiyo put it thus: Okinawans are much more like Solomon Islanders, you know? The Islander mentality. Okinawans have it, the mainland Japanese, they don’t. They don’t have that sort of attitude. Not as intimate as the Okinawans. . . . The way you talk, ah, the way you share things, the way you reward things. The Okinawans are a little bit more casual. Whereas the mainland Japanese are more formal. And ah, on the boat too, the purse-seine fleet is manned by mainland Japanese people. . . . It is the way they organize work on board. On the purse seine fleet they are more strict, more aggressive, whereas on the pole-and-line boats [where Okinawans work] they are more together.7 Claiming identity with southeast Asian and Pacific Island countries as ‘Okinesian’, in opposition to the ‘mainland’ culture of Japan, was part of the cosmopolitan reclamation of a positive Okinawan identity in the 1980s (Hanazaki 1996). While Okinawan interviewees’ primary narrative of their relations with Solomon Islanders identified them as being good at bridging cultures, however, Okinawans were not primarily identified as cosmopolitan by Solomon Islanders. Many Solomon Islanders described clear social boundaries between Okinawans and themselves. Ilangana, who had worked on the Solomon Taiyo fleet for

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several years in the 1980s and become close friends with an Okinawan colleague, had this response to my questions on the matter: I don’t feel part of their group. No. We always keep separate. You didn’t eat with your friend? No. He was in with the Okinawans . . . They had another room. And all the boys [Solomon Islanders] eat at the back [of the boat].8 Although the homestay visits are evidence of a certain social closeness between the Sarahama fishers and their Solomon Islander co-workers, when I asked Sarahama fishers for details of their social mixing with their co-workers while in Solomon Islands, they replied that there was little if any socializing. Sarahama fisher Ikema said he knew it was ‘rude’ (mo¯shiwakenai), but he did not socialize with Solomon Islander co-workers.9 The reason Ikema gave for this was that when the Solomon Islanders drank alcohol some tended to become too ‘uninhibited’ (cho¯shi ni noru), leading to conflict. One reason conflict might arise was the structural inequality between the groups; Okinawan fishers always held the top ranks on the boats on which they worked (such as Fishing Master, Chief Engineer, and Captain) so their Solomon Islander co-workers were in effect their subordinates. Under the influence of alcohol dissatisfactions about this may have been expressed forcefully. Solomon Islanders who had worked for Solomon Taiyo indicated dissatisfaction with the nature of their subordination under Okinawan fishers. Lambi was a Solomon Islander who trained as an engineer through Solomon Taiyo and worked for the company for some years. Working for Solomon Taiyo, I enjoy working for Solomon Taiyo . . . [but] I have a feeling that sometimes don’t really create a good working mood, yeah? Because sometimes the treatment they give us students, not nice for us . . . They want to give us ideas all the time, force us to work like slaves. . . . That’s what happened with us. In the department where I work. With other departments maybe different . . . I believe in sharing ideas, working together. That is what I think. Bosses down there never did that. Not sharing ideas. Maybe they think they know everything. Sometimes when I am doing my work I receive some bangs on my head, even spanners they hit with. Especially these Okinawan people.10 Many interviewees indicated that Okinawan fishermen’s style of ship-side management was often authoritarian, with strict hierarchies enforced by physical demonstrations of force and/or the threat of violence. One Sarahaman fisherman remembered an Okinawan engineer he worked with in the early 1980s becoming furious because the local crew did not wake up to start baitfishing on time, so he threw water over the sleeping crew, about which they were very angry.11 The Operations Manager also indicated that each side had come to respect the other, indicating that possibly there was a lack of respect earlier on.

Okinawan fishermen 149 Umm, how should I put this. Generally speaking, um, at the beginning, the people from here [Solomon Islands] didn’t know anything about fisheries you see. Then, as you’d expect, on the whole, to have everyone smoothly come to know about fisheries, it was difficult. . . . At the beginning I think instructing the Solomon Islanders was tedious and hard for the Okinawans. The environment in which those Okinawan fishermen had been brought up, they taught the way they had been taught by their seniors. Which, as we got closer to Independence, the teaching method changed bit by bit . . . At that time [before Independence] it was a bit, how do you say, the relationship to themselves was made very clear. Then, after independence the balance of those crews, there were problems with the balance of numbers, but, both sides were very cooperative. . . . So now, there are Solomon Islander Captains. An Okinawan is Fishing Master and, really cooperative. . . . Both sides you see, I think they have come to respect each other. Old Japanese people, those kinds of old people are, as you’d expect, even if just a little bit, they were distorted [magatta] I think, when they end up distorted, there were things like that. By that I mean, their manner was quite militaristic, there was that kind of influence, decidedly.12 Other interviews also referred to improved relations between Okinawans and Solomon Islander co-workers over time, such as the following comment from a Solomon Islander manager. Yes, I think we have improved a lot since the beginning. The crews especially, the crews on board, they worked along very well with the Okinawans. You can tell this by the number of incidents we have. Before there were numerous incidents of big fighting or something on the boat. Now very very few. I think also the Okinawans have realized that they should work with the Solomon Islanders.13 Part of the narrative that disputes with Okinawans had decreased over time was that when there were more Okinawans per vessel the Okinawans often tried to force the Solomon Islander crew to do things their way, and the Solomon Islander crew resisted, as evidenced in the following quote from a Solomon Islander former crew member: Oh yeah, sometimes problems with the Okinawans. . . . One time when we drop the net and we catch the dolphin, and the Okinawans wants to kill it and the Solomon Islanders said ‘No! Let it out’ and the Okinawans jumped down and get a rope and tied it and killed it. And they said ‘we’ll eat it in the dinner, everybody.’ And the Solomon Islanders said ‘Oh, no, no no, we not eat.’ And they fight with the Malaitans. Because some of the Roviana people in their culture they don’t eat dolphin. And some boys from Malaita also, so they, the Malaitans fight with the Okinawans. And sometimes they fight just working, the boys get tired so they don’t want to work [laugh]. . . .

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Okinawan fishermen Yeah, Okinawans and Gilbertese, they use knives to fight. So all the Solomon Islanders watch them very carefully because if they’re cross they always use knives. So we have to watch them and take a timber, and smack their head [laugh] don’t try to get close to them or, just bamboo and just pole and [clapped hands together] . . . [These days] there are 30 of us so . . . [we] always kill them [the Okinawans], so they are always scared of us and we just follow our mind. But the first time, they follow their mind.14

The causes of fights apparently diminished as the numbers of Okinawans reduced, because they no longer felt able to coerce the locals and gave the local crew more of a role in directing operations. In the words of Okinawan fisherman Ikema: Of course, before, um, we pushed it a bit far . . . when the locals say we want a day off, well, day off, now. Before, even if the locals said we want a day off, the Okinawan crew, because there were about 15 or 16 so at that time, we didn’t listen to what the locals said. Well, now, we usually have a meeting, listen to the opinions of the locals, um, set days off, do operations, these days. . . . Localization, isn’t it? . . . Localization, not Okinawan-style, bit by bit, there are more of them so, there are 40 on board so, and there are only two of us.15 Okinawan fishermen’s cosmopolitanism was thus often confounded by hierarchical relations with Solomon Islander co-workers, and the unambiguously dominant way they conducted those relations. Cosmopolitan practices more strongly flavored Okinawan fishermen’s relations with Solomon Islander villagers, over whom they had no structural position of authority, who lived near the baitgrounds they used. Village elder Lambete told me he had several Okinawan friends who visited his house regularly over the years.16 When they visited they brought whiskey for themselves and Lambete to drink. They taught Lambete’s wife how to prepare sashimi and other foods they liked. They gave his wife money to pay for the food each time they visited. They brought Lambete’s family presents from Japan. After the meal the fishermen slept over at their host’s house, on mats on the floor with everyone else. Lambete emphasized that his Okinawan friends did not require special rooms or arrangements; they drank and ate together with him in an atmosphere of camaraderie. Lambete’s representations of Okinawans show that egalitarianism and willingness to associate socially were clearly part of the Okinawan fishers’ relations with Solomon Islanders. At the same time, however, the fact that Lambete stressed that the Okinawan fishers treated him as their equal, implies an expectation that the Okinawan fishers might choose not to treat him as their equal. This impression is strengthened upon examination of other representations of relations between Okinawans and Solomon Islanders. For example, even when relationships with local women were committed and long-term these women were always the ‘second wife’. Children with Solomon Islander women were

Okinawan fishermen 151 not given the status of being their fathers’ primary children. All the Okinawan fishermen had wives back home, and most had children, and these families were their official primary families. The following quote shows how relations with villagers were perceived from the perspective of an Okinawan fisherman: If they invite us for a meal, we don’t say no, we go, there they don’t use chopsticks, they eat with a spoon or their fingers so, eat together. And their food, we don’t say ‘your food is yuck so I won’t eat it’ or anything like that, we eat together with our fingers, because if you eat together it makes them happy. That is how you get close.17 In this comment Nagahama invokes an identity as well able to get along with other peoples, by explaining how the Sarahama fishermen ‘get close’. At the same time, however, the stance he takes towards Solomon Islanders is hierarchical. In this representation of Solomon Islander hospitality eating together was something he gave to Solomon Islanders, which made them happy. Nagahama gave Solomon Islanders the courtesy of not insulting their food, and of not refusing to eat with his hands as they did. There is no sense of equal reciprocity in this picture, no sense that their hospitality made him happy. The acknowledgement of the importance of his courtesy towards Solomon Islanders, in the absence of any sense that courtesy on the part of Solomon Islanders was also important, indicates a subjective inequality in ethnic relations. The nature of this subjective hierarchy emerges through further extracts from the interview with Nagahama: They almost all use Miyako’s, Sarahama’s language, those guys [Solomon Islanders] . . . ‘You haven’t seen Nakada recently have you?’ they say, those guys in Sarahama language. ‘I don’t know so why do you [ask]?’ In the end, they want a cigarette, they come and call out to people they think are Japanese, take a cigarette and smoke it. One time, last year, it happened last year I think, with a baby, holding a baby, she came up to me . . . ‘Why are you walking around in bare feet?’ [I asked], she was going around with no shoes on. When I asked whose baby it was she said it was mine, this person I didn’t know. ‘What? If it was my child wouldn’t its skin be a bit whiter?’ I asked, [she said] ‘No, you didn’t give me an umbrella, you wouldn’t give me money even for a sun umbrella so I couldn’t protect the baby from the sun. The baby is tanned by the sun, that’s why the baby is so black.’ [Laughter] That’s what she said. In my language. ‘That’s strange, I don’t remember you, here, have 20 dollars’ I said, she said ‘OK’, took it and said ‘Thank you’ . . . Before, a long time ago, this undeveloped place [mikaichi], is the word ‘undeveloped’? When we first went in, they threw lots of rocks, threw rocks, but they don’t do things like that now. Now everyone is close . . . [We] gave cigarettes, gave sewing machines, whatever we gave, they thought Japanese were great. Especially if you are

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Okinawan fishermen Okinawan, if you are Okinawan, they think we are the best, if you go there. If you are from this island [Irabu] . . . We brought them here. Then when it was time to go home, we gave them money . . . Old clothing from each house here in Sarahama. We filled the ships with used clothing and went, and gave it to everyone. At that time over there even young women walked around with their breasts hanging out, most had them out, only a piece of bark wrapped around their waist. So, poor things, so, we went around each family and gathered everyone, and filled each boat with stuff for children to stuff for old people. We went and gave it to them and they thought it was the best. They were really happy. . . . And when we go ashore, the Japanese should look like proper Japanese, put shoes on, well it is OK not to put a tie on, like a private ambassador, um, go ashore properly. If you do that they think ‘as you’d expect, the Japanese are impressive aren’t they’.

The picture of Okinawan fishermen that emerges from this representation is multifaceted. Again, Nagahama explains how the Okinawans bridged cultural barriers and became ‘close’ to Solomon Islanders through generosity: gifts of cash, cigarettes, sewing machines, and clothing. Generosity, however, not only generates closeness between peoples, it may generate hierarchy. While charity and benevolence are difficult to recognize as symbolic violence because they are manifest in behaviors that show good intentions on the part of the donor, they may nonetheless reinforce hierarchical relations (Kondo 1990: 15; Ortner 1995: 179). The hierarchy implied in Nagahama’s narrative of generosity is shaped by modernist discourses. He identifies as having the material wealth of modernity, and his references to shoes and bare feet are modernist. Before annexation Ryûkyûan commoners did not wear anything on their feet (Pearson 1996: 4–5). Barefootedness was one of the markers of backwardness by which mainland Japanese stigmatized Okinawans after annexation, and prohibition of barefootedness was one of the ‘reforms’ imposed in the name of modernizing Okinawa (Tomiyama 1990). Being barefoot and eating only sweet potato is a negative image of the Ryûkyûan past used in political rhetoric by officials arguing against the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty after nearly three decades of US military occupation (McCormack 2003: 93). Wearing shoes was part of how Nagahama thought Okinawan fishers should present themselves in Solomon Islands, so that Solomon Islanders would look up to them, in contrast to the Solomon Islander woman in the interviewee’s story who was characterized as being barefoot. Nagahama’s references to footwear marked Solomon Islanders as being less modern than Okinawans. Modernism was also visible in ethnic subjectivities relating to work in Solomon Taiyo. Okinawan fishers were structurally dominant over their Solomon Islander co-workers in terms of workplace authority and remuneration. Okinawan representations of themselves as fishers in relation to Solomon Islanders legitimized their superior rank and remuneration based on ethnicized assumptions about capabilities as modern industrial fishermen. Key tendencies

Okinawan fishermen 153 visible in these representations included assumptions that Solomon Islanders could not be as good at fishing as Sarahama fishermen, and that Solomon Islanders lacked work ethic. Mainland Japanese managers felt Sarahama fishers were the best in Japan at the kind of fishing done by Solomon Taiyo (pole-and-line fishing using live baitfish). Sarahama fisher Shitajima explained that the reason Sarahama men were so good at this kind of fishing was that they played at fishing all throughout their childhood, so they became very good at reading water and weather conditions, and at reading fish behavior.18 Many Solomon Islander children also play at fishing throughout their childhood and become remarkably skilled at reading sea conditions and navigating, but not one Okinawan interviewee mentioned any skills Solomon Islanders brought to their fishing for Solomon Taiyo. Any fishing skills attributed to Solomon Islanders in Solomon Taiyo by Okinawan and Japanese interviewees were seen as having been taught them by their Okinawan co-workers. Okinawans strongly identified as teachers in relation to Solomon Islanders, seen as learners. Several Okinawan fishers described Solomon Islanders as quick learners, but none questioned the assumption that Okinawans taught and Solomon Islanders learned, always in that direction. So strong was the narrative that Okinawans had special fishing skills that Solomon Islanders lacked; it led some Okinawan interviewees to overlook evidence to the contrary. In 1999 seven of Solomon Taiyo’s fleet of 21 pole-and-line boats had no Okinawans working on them; some were fully localized, and some had Solomon Islander crews working with a Filipino Chief Engineer. Ikema, who had been working in Solomon Islands as late as 1998 and so should have known about the localized boats, told me Solomon Islanders were unable to run a fishing vessel unsupervised and that there were not yet any Solomon Islander Chief Engineers who had completed their training. Other Sarahamans acknowledged the existence of the localized boats, but several doubted the capacity of Solomon Islanders to manage fishing vessels without supervision by Okinawans. According to the Miyako-based recruiter of Sarahama fishermen and Solomon Taiyo’s Personnel Manager the localized ships had about the same catch as the Okinawan-managed ships, and localized boats were often amongst the top catchers each season.19 Solomon Taiyo’s Personnel Manager pointed out that Solomon Taiyo was a commercial operation, not a training school, so no local executive crew members were appointed unless they demonstrated the capacity to work at the level of the rest of the fleet. Nevertheless, the perception that Solomon Islanders were less competent persisted among Okinawan interviewees, and was reflected in statements by several Okinawans that it was undesirable to work on a boat with fewer Okinawans because they equated this with a lower catch (annual bonuses for Okinawan fishers were tied to the catch rates). In addition to feeling they were more skilled than Solomon Islanders, and therefore were legitimately ranked and remunerated above Solomon Islanders, Okinawan fishermen sometimes also legitimized their dominant position through narratives about work ethic and ability to manage money (see Chapter 5). While somewhat based on observable evidence, these representations also went beyond

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the evidence into ethnicized representations of differences between Okinawans and Solomon Islanders. The dyads implied in these representations – skilled/unskilled, diligent/lazy, and able/unable to manage money – are reminiscent of the dyads Tomiyama (1990: 5, see Chapter 3) highlighted in Japanese subjectification of Okinawans in the early twentieth century. The dyads applied in Okinawan representations of themselves and Solomon Islanders were about competence to function in a modern capitalist economy. Modernist discourses were even more clearly visible in Okinawan representations of Solomon Islands society. Several Okinawan fishermen defined Solomon Islands as a ‘very poor country’. Fishing Master Tôriike described Solomon Islands as ‘the poorest country’ (ichiban bimbo¯ no kuni), and said it ‘does not develop, at all’ (hatten shinai, nanimo). A couple of interviewees called Solomon Islands ‘undeveloped’ (mikaichi) and several referred to the country as ‘behind’ (okureteiru). Ikema gave a very detailed and concrete description of what he meant by describing Solomon Islands as okureteiru: (1) there was a lack of culture, defined as the lack of a television broadcaster, the lack in most houses of video or satellite televisions, karaoke machines, fridges or washing machines, and a severe lack of jobs; (2) the level of schooling was low, with most people not finishing primary school; (3) organized labor did not work in Solomon Islands because leaders of unions were easily corrupted by management, and finally; (4) the Solomon Islands government did not protect the environment from fishers releasing fuel-polluted bilge in harbors. For every one of these points he compared Solomon Islands unfavorably with ‘Japan’ (Nihon). While Ikema’s comments may be seen as more or less factually correct on one level, they also exhibit modernist ethnicization. This is most obvious in his use of the word okureteiru (behind), and in his valuing of consumer culture over non-consumer culture. Ethnicization is also indicated by his representation going beyond the actuality of the situation. For example, he posited Solomon Islands’ labor and environment protection systems as flawed in contrast to Japan’s, when in fact these systems have been far from perfect in Japan as well. Japanese legal systems patently did not protect the marine environment from heavy-metal pollution that maimed and killed people who ate fish from industrialized coastal areas of Kyu¯shu¯ in the 1960s and 1970s. There are ongoing problems of environmental degradation in many Japanese fishing grounds, including those around Irabu. Through such representations Okinawan fishers applied modernist discourses – by which Okinawans have been stigmatized within Japan – to Solomon Islanders. Okinawans’ self-identification as cosmopolitan and therefore able to relate well with Solomon Islanders sat uncomfortably with this coexisting identification as more modern than Solomon Islanders. The damage done by modernist discourses to relations with Solomon Islanders was most clearly visible in Solomon Islander representations of Okinawans. While Okinawan representations of relations with Solomon Islanders emphasized the positive aspects of their grassroots cosmopolitan practices, Solomon Islander representations of Okinawans emphasized more negative aspects of relations. The primary narrative related about Okinawans by Solomon

Okinawan fishermen 155 Islanders was in the form of complaints about sexual liaisons between Okinawan fishermen and village women. Okinawan Fishermen There’s a strange ship at Labete Weird music blares across Raucous laughter Who are they? Foreigners. Short stunted pygmy-like Black stiff sea-urchin hair Sickly yellow skin Half moon eyes Okinawa fishermen. Strolling thru the village Looking out of place Clad in woollen jerseys And track-suit trousers Expensive radios To impress the local lasses Okinawa fishermen. Are they accepted? There is division among the people Some for – some against Many more on the fence But there are half-castes now Planted by Okinawa fishermen. (Sipolo 1981: 5) This poem captures the essence of most Solomon Islander interviewees’ representations of Okinawan fishermen. Solomon Islander protests against the sexual activities of Okinawan fishermen date back to the earliest days of Solomon Taiyo. In 1973 a representative of Western Province asked the Governing Council what was to be done about the fishermen ‘marching up and down the streets in my constituency looking for girls’ (BSIP 1974a). There was a flurry of letters to the editor in a Honiara newspaper about prostitution in 1975 (News Drum 1975b; 1975c; 1975d). In 1977 newspapers carried the headline ‘ “Curb the girls” demand’ for a story about a petition against women selling sex to fishing crews in Western District (News Drum 1977). In 1980 the same paper printed a story about Solomon Taiyo discussing disciplinary measures in response to complaints from baitfishing communities about the ‘behaviour of some Okinawan crew members towards villagers’ (News Drum 1980b).

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Many Solomon Islander interviewees pointed out that the Okinawans’ greater access to the material goods of modernity, such as clothing, ‘expensive radios’, shop-bought food, and alcohol made them attractive to women, and to families with eligible daughters. Well, let’s say during those times, when they come down to shore they bring more food. And um, maybe girls, women or whatever, during the beginning when they arrive working, maybe just they like some food I think, maybe money. Yeah, ’cause there is no job during that, many girls don’t have a job. So when the Japanese come some of the families accept their home, so maybe one or two Japanese come and have rest there. So lots of them were sort of being looked after, in this village. And at the same time it happened that some of their daughters from these homes get pregnant. So when things start to go differently then people start to hate them, they don’t accept them to be, especially the chiefs and the church leaders in our village.20 When they [Okinawans] started fishing here they will come down to anybody in the village. But bringing fish, bring coffee, sugar, biscuit, rice, everything they bring from the boat, everything and then go to that house there, where they go every day. And that’s how ah, started, more babies. Parents they see these Japanese bringing lots of food, oh, they can just let their daughter to friend. Because the Japanese they look for girls too. So that’s how ah, this problem started, in the early times of fishing, that these girls get babies.21 Representations of Okinawans as modern in relation to Solomon Islanders from the Solomon Islander perspective looked quite different to representations from Okinawan perspectives. Desire competed with resentment in Solomon Islanders’ subordinated subjectivity. Like in Okinawan representations of Solomon Islanders, ethnic identity was performed in Solomon Islander representations of Okinawans, and the performative aspect was visible in disjunctures between representations of relations and the apparent actuality of relations. Negative images like those in Jully Sipolo’s poem were apparent only on the surface of representations. A closer look at the detail of stories about relations with Okinawans revealed a more complicated picture. The poet told me in an interview that most of her experience of Okinawan fishers was from when she was recuperating from an illness while staying with an aunt in a village frequented by Solomon Taiyo fishermen. One of the Okinawans noticed she looked unwell so brought her tonics and special foods until she recovered. Sipolo, therefore, had positive experiences of Okinawan fishermen, but somehow only negative images ended up in her public representation of them. The relationships between Okinawan fishermen and village women were also not as sordid and exploitative as they appeared in prevalent Solomon Islander representations. Rarumana had two children with her Okinawan boyfriend.22 He had paid for her house, which was constructed of timber on high stilts with louver windows, and had electricity. This was the kind of house that indicated

Okinawan fishermen 157 wealth in a Solomon Islands village. Rarumana had a television with a video player, there were toys including tricycles underneath the house, and hanging on the washing line were small T-shirts with the decorative English slogans so popular in Japan, such as ‘glorious boyhood life’. Rarumana spoke warmly of her boyfriend, whom she knew had another family and wife in Sarahama, and whom she knew she would never see again once he stopped working for Solomon Taiyo. Rarumana said that since she had a nice home and a family to raise, she was satisfied. On the other hand, these kinds of relationships had social stigma. Women who had relations with Okinawan fishermen were often considered ‘naughty women’ or prostitutes, and by association half-Okinawan girl children were also viewed in this light.23 There was also a kind of racism in which half-Okinawan children were discriminated against, visible in the following comments (emphases added). ‘They are very clever boys and girls, very clever. Very good for school. So I said to the girls don’t hate, because they are my future army. My soldiers. Oh, they are very good at school.’24 ‘These kids, they are part of us, we look after them, and maybe they will be proud of their identity in the long term.’25 ‘Half-Okinawan children are nice and beautiful, so they should go to work for Solomon Airlines as cabin crew. They are also clever at school so communities should lift them up, give them position.’26 One interviewee explained that half-Okinawan children sometimes did not have ‘full priority’ in their families. She said some mothers ‘speak up loud’ to secure land rights for their children, but there was a tendency to consider the children as only halfbelonging, and half-foreign. She said it was difficult to totally accept such children in ‘Melanesian kastom’.27 The actuality of relations between Solomon Islanders and Okinawans was that Solomon Islanders enjoyed the Okinawans’ generosity and grassroots cosmopolitanism. But this was overshadowed in their representations of Okinawans by negative sentiments, some of which were related to modernist influences on ethnic subjectivity in relation to Okinawans. That is, Okinawa had attained the material wealth and cultural capital of modernity in relation to Solomon Islands (if not in relation to Japan), while Solomon Islands remained struggling to achieve a successful modern economy and was stigmatized as a Least Developed Country. It is reasonable to suppose that Solomon Islanders’ history of having been colonized and imagined as the epitome of Black primitivity means they were particularly sensitive to subordinating modernist identity relations. Elsewhere I have argued that this combination of factors was indeed a negative influence on Solomon Islanders’ perceptions of relations with Okinawans in Solomon Taiyo (Barclay 2004). There were other influences, including anti-Asian racism, but modernist discourses by which the Solomon Islands nation (as a part of Melanesia) was imagined as backward compared to Okinawa (as a sub-group of the Japanese nation) was a key influence. Modernism within nationalist discourse thus detracted from the Okinawans’ grassroots cosmopolitan practices and contributed to friction in relations between Solomon Islanders and Okinawans.

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Relations with Japanese managers: ethnicity and class Okinawan fishermen’s identity in relation to mainland Japanese in Solomon Taiyo was no less complex. As evident in the quotes presented in this text, Okinawans, Japanese, and Solomon Islanders often identified the Okinawans and Japanese together as all being ‘Japanese’. As with their self-identification in relation to Solomon Islanders as grassroots cosmopolitans, Okinawans often represented their relations with Japanese mainlanders in Solomon Taiyo as amicable, however, they also often expressed negative feelings about mainlanders. For example, one fisherman said the Okinawans and Japanese in Solomon Taiyo were close ‘like brothers’ (kyo¯dai mitai), then later expressed anger about a mainlander and said this person was proof that mainland Japanese were untrustworthy and ungrateful.28 Overt discrimination against Okinawans was not part of Japanese representations of Sarahama fishermen, yet in various ways the interviews showed that the broader social context in which such discrimination existed had caused problems in Solomon Taiyo. Most managers were not with Solomon Taiyo long enough nor worked closely enough with the fishermen to learn the Sarahama language. Only one of the mainland Japanese managers, the Fleet Manager, had any working knowledge of Sarahama language. He said that before he came to Solomon Taiyo in the mid-1980s the Tokyo office had sent several different Fleet Managers. They had all found it difficult to communicate with the Okinawan fishermen ‘because of the history of Japan’.29 One Okinawan fishermen explained the difference in terms of an urban/rural divide. He said that even in the early days of postwar South Seas fishing when fishermen from all over Japan worked together the Okinawans tended to relate better with people from other regional parts of Japan than people from the urban centers. And also, as you’d expect, the Okinawans and the mainlanders, as you’d expect, they’re a bit different. . . . Around Okinawa, and in the north, that Hokkaido and Aomori and places, we became close with them very quickly, even though we were all travelers [strangers], even among travelers we became close quickly. But from around the Kanto region [the heavily industrialized urban areas around Tokyo], it was hard going with those people. . . . It was easy going among people from the periphery. . . . Almost everyone from Kagoshima, Okinawa, Hokkaido, Aomori, Nı¯gata, and from the north, we quickly became friends. And with most of them we have remained in close relationships. So a person we were on board with once 20 years ago, even now, as you’d expect, close, sending things, by phone, if you contact them they’ll introduce you to people running freight shipping and things like that.30 Language was a sensitive point in relations between Okinawans and mainlanders in Solomon Taiyo. For most of the twentieth century Japanese educational policies

Okinawan fishermen 159 discouraged the use of local languages in order to foster a sense of national unity through linguistic homogeneity, particularly in areas like Okinawa (Wigen 1996). Although by the end of the century there was a groundswell of pride in regional languages there was still a pervasive sense that, except for those of Osaka and Kyoto, local languages and accents sound ‘country bumpkin-ish’. The poem Kaiwa quoted in Chapter 3 noted that (in)ability to speak ‘Japanese’ was one of the troubling distinctions mainlanders made in identifying Okinawans. Elsewhere in Japan the standard language as used by national broadcasters and taught in school is called hyo¯jungo. Because hyo¯jungo has connotations of ‘real’ or ‘proper’ Japanese language, however, Irabu people prefer to call standard Japanese instead ko¯tsu¯go (lingua franca). One of the Japanese managers asked me if I had heard any references to ‘Irabu keigo’ from other interviewees.31 He explained that there had been disputes between Okinawans and Japanese technicians on the base because the Okinawans had used the imperative grammatical form, which made it seem they were trying to order the Japanese technicians around (yarinasai, ‘do it!’). The Okinawans were surprised by the Japanese taking offense at this. When the inappropriateness of their language use was pointed out, they said they did not mean to use the imperative form, they actually meant to use the honorific form (keigo). Some mainlanders apparently thought this was funny and made a joke of Irabu keigo, but to the Okinawans this was not a humorous matter. Local languages and strong regional accents in Japan have been associated with a lack of education and therefore imply a class distinction. In the case of Irabu keigo the class connection was particularly strong because the mistake was with keigo; honorific language. Fluency in keigo is a marker of socio-economic status. It is used by some people, particularly women, ‘with uppermiddle to upper-class pretensions’, to add an ‘air of distinction’ (referring to Bourdieu’s [1984] theorizing of the social aspects of judgments of taste) to their social presentation of self (Kondo 1990). The language divide between Okinawan fishermen and Japanese managers was not just the result of ethnic difference, it had a class dimension. The Okinawan fishermen were identified as belonging to a low social stratum by Solomon Islanders, for reasons of language, among others. Since colonial times English-language ability had been a marker of education and a criterion for the most prestigious and lucrative employment. Okinawan fishermen usually had very little English language. Solomons Pijin uses many English words, but for working on the boats the Okinawan fishermen used either Sarahama language (which longer-term Solomon Islander co-workers picked up) or an adapted form of Pijin using their own words, called Okinawan Pijin.32 Some Solomon Islander interviewees expressed amusement about Okinawan Pijin or said they liked it, but it was also disparaged by many Solomon Islanders as an inferior kind of language.33 Both because of their limited English language and because of their reputation for forming sexual liaisons outside the dictates of kastom, Okinawans were often identified by Solomon Islanders as uncivilized.34

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Okinawan Pijin was seen as demonstrating the limited abilities of the Okinawan ‘wild men’ (Hviding 1996: 324). The Japanese managers of Solomon Taiyo were of higher socio-economic strata than the Okinawan fishermen, and this was probably the most significant social influence on relations between them. The mainlander Fleet Manager said it took him several years to have the Okinawan fishermen accept him. At first they undermined his authority by ‘doing things to make him look bad’ within the company. But he thought he managed eventually to earn their cooperation, whereas previous mainlander Fleet Managers had not, because he was a fisherman. Okinawan fisherman Tôriike agreed that their ‘feelings matched’ (kimochi ga au) with the Fleet Manager because he was initially a fisherman rather than a manager.35 Tôriike then went on to list grievances against the mainland managers such as, the managers’ satellite TV worked for all programs whereas the Okinawan Resthouse TV had a restricted connection so only showed the news, the managers’ housing was better than the Okinawans’ Rest House, the managers had a nice new four-wheel-drive car and driver provided by the company, whereas the Okinawans only had a battered sedan they bought for themselves. He said there was no social mixing between the Okinawan fishermen and the mainland managers and that there was bad feeling between the two groups. The Japanese mainlander Operations Manager agreed, saying there was little socializing between the two groups in order to try to avoid open conflict: As you’d expect we, there are positions they and we take, that is, not very, draw a little distance. Occasionally we’d go to the Okinawa Rest House, distance [inaudible]. From their point of view they would naturally have dissatisfactions regarding us I think, and if we drank a bit of alcohol, there would be those kinds of unpleasant things I think, so we avoid going there at night whenever we can. We draw a line. So, just the managers. Our respective positions are different so, unless there is some special occasion we do not drink together.36 Relations between Okinawans and mainland Japanese in Solomon Taiyo were clearly hierarchical, largely because the former were employed as highschool-graduate annually-contracted fishermen, while the latter were universitygraduate (excepting the Fleet Manager) permanent-employee managers in the large multinational company Maruha. The Okinawans’ remuneration, authority, and living conditions were inferior to those of the Japanese mainlanders in Solomon Taiyo. This class difference, however, was not the only salient difference, it lined up with ethnic difference, understood as being from the periphery of Japan as opposed to the center and highlighted through sensitivities about linguistic difference. Modernism did not arise explicitly as part of Solomon Taiyo’s Japanese managers’ identifications of Solomon Taiyo’s Okinawans, or Okinawans’ self-identifications in relation to the mainland Japanese, but it is clear from the historical literature that modernism has been a part of these problematic ethnic relations in the broader context.

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Conclusion Since Japanese modernity was imposed on Ryûkyûans in the 1870s, modernist discourses have ranked Okinawans below/behind the Japanese. Modernist hierarchies in ethnic subjectivities have been part of the history of troubled relations between Okinawans and mainland Japanese, and modernism also caused friction in Okinawans’ relations with Solomon Islanders in Solomon Taiyo. Okinawans’ cultural predisposition towards grassroots cosmopolitanism was confounded by hierarchical modernist imaginaries that ranked them above/ahead of Solomon Islanders. Solomon Islander interviewees’ representations of Okinawans generally left out the fishermen’s generosity with shop-bought gifts and homestay visits to Okinawa, instead focusing resentfully on their greater access to the goods of modernity and hierarchical workplace relations, and putting a negative spin on their friendships with Solomon Islander villagers. Relations between Okinawans and Solomon Islanders were on the one hand sweetened by the Okinawans’ egalitarian informal manner and generosity, then on the other soured by this hierarchical stance taken as moderns in relation to Solomon Islanders.

7

Japanese managers Non-White moderns1

During interviews for this book non-Japanese interviewees persistently and unquestioningly portrayed Japanese investment in Solomon Islands as socially exploitative and ecologically unsustainable. On the other hand, several Japanese interviewees made unsolicited references to reprehensible Western fishing and employment practices. Representations of Solomon Taiyo often contained rivalry in both self-identifications by Japanese people and external identifications of ‘the Japanese’ by non-Japanese. These competitive identifications were part of a subset of a wider jostling for position in the field of the world political economy during the twentieth century, wherein Japanese identity was ‘non-White but modern’. Solomon Taiyo’s mainland Japanese employees were mainly career managers seconded for periods of three to four years from Maruha. As a large company with a long history, Maruha has had the pick of the crop of young graduates from Japan’s fisheries-related universities (the importance of where young men went to school or university, generating a lifelong network of contacts,2 have been as important in gaining lifetime employment in Maruha as they have in any large prestigious Japanese company). In addition to the university graduates, some of Maruha’s managers were (high-school graduate) fishermen who worked their way up the ranks to management positions. Captain Honda, who was instrumental in the establishment of Solomon Taiyo, was such a fisherman-manager, as was Solomon Taiyo’s Fleet Manager for the last decade of the joint venture. Maruha’s managers were organized into two streams, those who would spend their careers managing overseas operations around the world (fishermen-managers were in this group), and those who would rotate as managers overseas for five or ten years then return to Tokyo to act as central managers (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1985). Solomon Taiyo’s managers had usually been of the first kind, but in the later years of the joint venture at least one manager with experience at Solomon Taiyo was promoted to a central management role in Tokyo.3 Solomon Taiyo’s General Manager in 1999 had worked in Nigeria and Mozambique before being posted to Solomon Islands, with stints in the Tokyo office between each posting. The Operations Manager, the Fleet Manager, and the Cannery Manager in 1999 were permanent Maruha employees, but were more or less permanently based at Solomon Taiyo. Two of these were married to

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Pacific Islander women. The Operations Manager had been working for Solomon Taiyo since the early 1970s and the Fleet Manager since the mid-1980s. The Cannery Manager had only been at Solomon Taiyo a couple of years, but before that had lived and worked in Fiji for many years. The rest of the Japanese managers usually left their families in Japan while they worked overseas, for a variety of reasons including concerns about families being able to fit into the host society and about families being able to fit back into Japan when they returned, especially for children reaching middle-school age, when school performance became vital for their future prospects. Prevalent public perceptions of Solomon Taiyo were colored by the Japanese identity of Solomon Taiyo’s managers. Solomon Taiyo was often represented as an example of ‘bad’ modernization because Japanese management of the company was seen as unconcerned about social and/or ecological damage the company might do. In addition, the Japaneseness of management meant the company was seen as a vehicle for domination of Solomon Islanders by foreigners. Non-Japanese representation of Solomon Taiyo frequently included suspicions that the Japanese management of the company was cheating their local partner, the Solomon Islands government, from their rightful profits from the venture, and that the company typified illegal and ecologically destructive Japanese fishing practices. Since, on the whole, Solomon Taiyo’s business practices were lawful and, although the waste water from the Noro base was a problem, their fishing practices were sustainable (see Chapter 4), the persistence of these negative identifications of Solomon Taiyo’s Japanese is curious. Negative representations of Solomon Taiyo can be understood as being part of an Orientalist discursive framework in which Japanese and Asian resource capitalism in least-developed countries have been seen as competition to Western capitalism. This predisposed White commentators to view companies such as Solomon Taiyo negatively, as part of the construction of White involvement in the Third World as a positive influence. Non-Japanese representations of Solomon Taiyo to some extent varied according to whether the commentator was White or Solomon Islander. White people showed a tendency to present Solomon Taiyo negatively because it was Japanese/Asian, as distinct from White. Some Solomon Islander representations, on the other hand, portrayed the company negatively because it was foreign, categorizing Whites and Japanese together as (neo-)imperialist. Other Solomon Islander representations, however, were very similar to representations by White people. This is somewhat counter-intuitive since Solomon Islanders do not have the same subject position as Whites in Orientalizing the Japanese as bringers of bad modernity compared to the good modernity brought by Whites. One explanation for anti-Japanese/Asian representations of Solomon Taiyo by Solomon Islanders is that Orientalist tropes were being used for a White audience to utilize the competition between Whites and Japanese as a ‘weapon of the weak’. Variations and similarities in non-Japanese representations of Solomon Taiyo reflect the subject positions of Whites and Solomon Islanders vis-à-vis each other, ‘the Japanese’ and modernity, in a postcolonial historical context.

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On the other side of the coin, Japanese managers saw themselves as bringing a good kind of modernization to Solomon Islanders. Japanese self-identification in representations of business and fishing practices was as socially and ecologically responsible in contrast to the West’s callous disregard for employment security and destructively efficient fishing methods. Japanese involvement in Solomon Taiyo was self-identified as a charitable mission for the economic and social development of Solomon Islands.

Non-Japanese representations of Japanese fisheries Non-Japanese people who have worked closely with Japanese fisheries, such as government officials who work with Japanese government and company representatives on international fisheries issues, generally identify Japanese fisheries negotiators as ‘very tough’ but reliable in honoring agreements (Schurman 1998).4 Such representations by well-informed commentators do not talk of a monolithic ‘Asian’ approach to fisheries, but distinguish Japan from countries such as Korea and Taiwan (and increasingly China), seen as more prone to illegal fishing, breaking environmental laws and regulations, and misreporting catches. General public opinion, however, has tended to categorize Japanese and Asian fisheries together as ‘bad’. Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating accused both Japan and South Korea of illegal fishing, misreporting catches, and underpaying for catches (The Australian 1994), and Australian Senator Bob Brown has said of Japanese fisheries: ‘When it comes to marauding our oceans it seems the Japanese have no limits’ (Sforza 2006). English-language representations of Japanese fisheries have often been negative, and often contrasted Japanese fisheries unfavorably with Western organizations. [L]ocal fishing resources are flowing out of the countries concerned through the operations of the Japanese joint ventures. Also, the operation of the Japanese fishing companies never lead to the development of the local fishing industry and the development of local fishing technology. . . . Do the Japanese firms feel responsible for the well-being of local employees and local economies? The obvious consequence will be that these Japanese firms will completely dominate the local markets and will control the prices of fish inside the countries. . . . The Japanese government in January, 1979 gave Tonga and Western Samoa $750,000 worth of canned tuna in ‘grant aid’. This ‘gift’ was made merely at the convenience of the Japanese fishing business and the Japanese government. The tuna skipjack industry, suffering from a slump, wanted the Japanese government to buy surplus canned tuna at the taxpayers’ cost, while the Japanese government suffering from surplus foreign exchange holdings wanted to abate its dollar reserve. This ‘gift’ also had the effect of imposing ‘canned food culture’ on the people of Western Samoa and Tonga. In sharp contrast with this selfish type of ‘aid’, we witnessed a really helpful kind of assistance provided by Denmark to

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Western Samoa. . . . The Japanese fishing industry, unless it discards its arrogance and complacency, someday will certainly be carried out of the seas of the world. (UNDP c.1983) Solomon Taiyo was usually portrayed by non-Japanese as representative of these ‘bad’ Japanese/Asian companies. One White Honiara resident was adamant in telling me that Solomon Taiyo caught whales off Guadalcanal even though their fishing gear and vessels were not at all suitable for whaling. The kinds of practices of which Solomon Taiyo was most often suspected included cheating the Solomon Islands government out of profits, treating Solomon Islander employees unfairly, and fishing practices that were ecologically unsustainable, illegal, and/or conducted without consultation with affected communities. One of the ideas underpinning representations of Japanese fishing practices by non-Japanese was a perception that Japanese and other Asian businesses were hungry for natural resources. Village elder Ndunde had worked for the US forces as a Coast Watcher during World War II, then interacted with Japanese people from a different perspective when working with tour groups coming to pray for the war dead and search for bones to take home for burial. He said the Japanese he met after the war were friendly and generous with gifts of whiskey and sweets. But you know we Solomon Islanders, we still suspect them. Just because they would like to get something, like copra, fish, logs, something like that. . . . Well Solomon Taiyo, they come here just for fishing . . . we local people don’t know anything about that, it’s between Taiyo and the government. . . . We’ve got an agreement with Taiwan or Japanese, Korea, anyone and everyone. Same as log. Japanese, they reserve their trees. And they come to Solomon Islands, we got trees. . . . They going to spoil the future generations. If we don’t do replanting quicktime, generation will be in big trouble . . . The politician they spoil everything, if a big company comes to invest in the Solomon Islands.5 Ndunde represented Solomon Taiyo as a company seeking to extract Solomon Islands’ natural resources, belonging to the same category as companies from other Asian countries. Furthermore, he portrayed Solomon Islands politicians as doing this together with the big overseas investors. For reasons of economic nationalism as well as the scarcity of private-sector investors, Solomon Islands government has been a partner in all the large ventures in the country. Above its status as partner, however, the national government was seen as having an even more intimate relationship with Solomon Taiyo than the other ventures (Hviding 1996: 233). Related to the idea that Solomon Taiyo was ecologically destructive was an implication that it had corrupt relations with government. As well as representations that Japanese fishers were resource hungry and prepared to go outside the law, Solomon Taiyo was portrayed as being unconcerned

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about causing environmental damage. A blunt example of this type of representation came from one of the tourists I met while on fieldwork in Solomon Islands in 1999. Upon hearing my research topic a young (White) American man asked me ‘so, are they destroying all the resources?’ Media representations also engaged in these kinds of discourses. ‘Here we go again. After the Asian plunder of Solomon Islands forests, its fishery is now under heavy attack. . . . First they did it with forestry. Are they now doing it with fish? . . . Under pressure from aid donors disgusted by uncontrolled Asian plunder of the forests . . .’ (Islands Business 1996: 43) This article was about events occurring in the early 1990s during the administration of the late former Prime Minister Mamaloni. First a joint venture called Makirabelle was started between Makira Province (Mamaloni’s home province) and a Philippines-based company, Frabelle. Makirabelle asked for 35,000 metric tons from the national total allowable catch (TAC), so the TAC was increased by Cabinet from 75,000 to 120,000 metric tons. This TAC increase was not a problem because South Pacific Community tagging research indicated that an increase in Solomon Islands TAC to this level would probably be sustainable, and in any case despite the increased TAC the actual catch still did not exceed 70,000 metric tons. But Makirabelle had set a precedent and by 1995 there were numerous ‘joint ventures’, with Ministers and their wives on the Boards, and the TAC jumped to 500,000 metric tons, most of which was fortunately never caught (the companies had government approval for this level of catch but most of the companies never commenced operations). The article cited two companies as ‘the good’ and four as ‘the bad’ of the Solomon Islands fishing industry during this period. ‘The good’ were Solomon Taiyo itself and another company National Fisheries Development (NFD), which for the first decade or so had substantial Japanese input via Solomon Taiyo. In 1999 NFD was owned by Singapore-based multinationally-owned company Trimarine. Solomon Taiyo and NFD were defined as good because they complied with local conditions for catch reporting, local employment, and licensing fees. ‘The bad’ were joint ventures with two companies based in the Philippines, one in Thailand and one in Singapore, who apparently did not comply. Both ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ companies had ‘Asian’ input, but the article identified only ‘the bad’ as Asian, and the Asianness of ‘the good’ was somehow erased. Representations such as this indicate the existence of an anti-Asian identity politics at play in discourses about resource capitalism. The negative tropes of Japanese/Asian fisheries as socially and ecologically unconcerned resource plunderers constitute a kind of Orientalism by which Whites/Westerners have constructed themselves as ‘green’, development-minded influences in the Third World. The identity ‘aid donor’ was also interesting in the Islands Business article. Japan has been a major aid donor in the Pacific for some decades but the ideal aid donor the journalist had in mind was clearly not Asian, but probably White.

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The powerful players in this representation of Pacific fisheries were the bad Asian fishing companies being brought to task by the good White aid donors. Solomon Islander politicians were not portrayed as innocent in the article, but neither were they given full responsibility for their actions. Rather, they were portrayed as passive impactees under attack from the Asian plunderers, and being saved by the good White aid donors. [A]s this abundant fishery is ‘discovered’ by more and more Asian ships moving ever southward, locals are noticing the impact of large fishing ships on their catches. A fisher of Lengana village explains: ‘The Japanese fleet gets permission from the [Solomon Islands] Fisheries Department. The boats come right close to the reefs where our people usually do their fishing. They don’t ask permission in the village; they just go there. And villagers are asking: “Why are these people fishing in our sea?” They do not know that the sea is open and that Fisheries can just let anyone fish anywhere.’ He also objects to the way the outsiders fish: ‘The Japanese take thousands of fish of all kinds. They do not worry that in their nets are sharks and dolphins. There is nothing left for village people to catch. And the Japanese fleets do not want to share anything with the villager people. Normally if you fish on that reef, you must share your catch with the villagers. The village elders spoke strongly to them and pointed out their mistakes. So the Japanese people just give a bit of fish, not much. Locals are still angry, though.’ (Kalgovas 2000) Clearly the journalist who wrote the above passage was engaging in a discourse of bad Japanese fishers, as was her informant. The assertion that the activities of commercial fleets were depleting the resources of food-fish stocks in Solomon Islands was common in representations of Solomon Taiyo. Solomon Taiyo’s skipjack fishery was widely accepted as sustainable by relevant government and international bodies because skipjack are a resilient species and the pole-and-line method employed by Solomon Taiyo is not as ecologically destructive as other methods of industrial fishing. Concerns about Solomon Taiyo depleting food stocks were usually directed at the baitfishery, conducted in reefs where locals fished for their food. Solomon Taiyo was often accused of illegal fishing in baitgrounds, underreporting of bait catch, and purposely inaccurate reporting of where baitfishing was carried out. For example, several interviewees said they believed amounts of bait were deliberately underreported so that Solomon Taiyo could avoid some of their royalty payments (baitfishing was conducted on reefs considered customary resources so the company paid an access fee to baitground owners). This was unlikely, however, because from 1981 the system of monitoring baitfish catches for the purposes of stock assessments and payment of royalties to baitground owners had been designed to remove incentives to underreport by de-linking calculations of catch from calculations for payment, and enabling

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villagers to monitor activities for which they should be paid (see Chapter 4). Fisheries Division interviews and records contained no evidence that Solomon Taiyo had falsified baitfishing records since the 1970s.6 The perception that Solomon Taiyo’s baitfishery depleted food stocks in lagoons has existed since the earliest days of Solomon Taiyo. At a Synod in Munda in 1972 a Reverend was reported as having said ‘people’s livelihood and diet is being affected by Taiyo fishing in lagoons’ so it should be banned (BSIP Newssheet 1972c: 3). According to Judith Bennett (1987: 336), in the 1970s villagers started to buy tinned fish because baitfishing had depleted food stocks in lagoons. Most Solomon Islanders I interviewed believed Solomon Taiyo’s baitfishing was depleting fish stocks in lagoons, often expressed in terms of small fish attracting big fish, so by taking out too many small fish for bait Solomon Taiyo reduced the numbers of larger food fish available in the lagoons. Former fleet worker Ilangana said when he worked for Solomon Taiyo in the 1980s they caught a great deal more fish for the same fishing effort than in the late 1990s. He thought baitfishing had depleted stocks of a range of fish species that used to be easily caught in lagoons.7 Village elder Kazukuru talked of a species called in local language katukatu, which had disappeared entirely from the waters off her village since Solomon Taiyo boats started using the lagoons. Many Solomon Islander interviewees said that local fishers had to go further offshore and fish for longer periods to get the same catch compared to earlier years. Material presented in Chapter 4 shows that there is no evidence that Solomon Taiyo’s activities contributed to perceived fish-stock depletion in Solomon Islands’ coastal areas. In fact, because Solomon Taiyo’s most important market was the ecologically concerned supermarket chains of the UK including Sainsbury’s, Solomon Taiyo had a commercial imperative to operate as per environmental best practice for an industrial fishing company. Why then were representations that the company was an environmental disaster so widespread? One answer to this question is that the company’s public relations strategy did nothing to disseminate information about its environmental record or otherwise counter negative rumors. But a simple lack of information does not explain the persistent negativity of nonJapanese representations of the company’s fishing practices. I propose that identity politics against Japanese fishing companies, and wider Asian resource capitalism, predisposed non-Japanese players to perceive the company negatively. Representations of Solomon Taiyo bought into existing global discourses and deployed the identity of Asian resource ‘plunderers’. White negativity regarding Solomon Taiyo resembles an earlier set of antiAsian identity politics engaged in by Whites in Solomon Islands. The majority of trading businesses in Solomon Islands have long been run by the local Chinese community, who came to Solomon Islands in the early colonial period as tradespeople, then later established stores and trading ships. Before the Chinese traders were established, stores had been run by large (White) companies such as Burns Philp and Levers Bros, or individual White traders and planters. Chinese traders were unwelcome competition because they bought produce from locals at higher prices and sold goods to locals at lower prices than

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the big companies. Chinese shopkeepers built a better rapport with locals, socialized with locals more, and provided eating houses that were more affordable and comfortable for Solomon Islanders than the White colonial clubs. In response, the big companies persuaded the colonial administration to disadvantage the Chinese traders. As part of their campaign against Chinese traders White companies portrayed the Chinese as a bad moral influence on Solomon Islanders (Bennett 1987: 206–210). Eventually the large White companies pulled out of trading and left it to the Chinese but White representations of the Chinese as avaricious and exploitative of Solomon Islanders persisted. This identification of Solomon Islands’ Chinese has no basis in historical fact. In 1975 a report into foreign businesses in Solomon Islands found that Solomon Islanders were ‘well served’ by their Chinese traders, the prices were judged to be fair and the margins low (UN Development Advisory Team 1975a). The portrayal of the Chinese as exploitative of Solomon Islanders seems to have been partly a conscious strategy to influence the government to restrict Chinese traders’ activities, but was probably also less consciously motivated by a sense of rivalry about who should bring ‘civilization’, as it was called in those days, to Solomon Islands. One of the (White) Australian accountants who had worked for Solomon Taiyo said he felt that White expatriates in Solomon Islands were negative in their representations of Solomon Taiyo because they resented an Asian company bringing development to Solomon Islands.8 He thought Whites saw themselves as the ones to bring modernity to Solomon Islands, as having a special role as teachers of modernization to Solomon Islanders, and so were predisposed to disparage Solomon Taiyo. White representations of Chinese traders as preying on Solomon Islanders may be seen as part of a set of global White anti-Asian discourses to which representations of Solomon Taiyo as a ‘bad’ company also belong. One manifestation of this discourse in White representations of Solomon Taiyo was to contrast exploitative Asian/Japanese capitalism with benevolent White capitalism. The main way this was done was through comparisons of Solomon Taiyo with the other large businesses in Solomon Islands (which were White rather than Asian): Solomon Islands Plantations Limited (SIPL, a joint venture with the British Commonwealth Development Corporation, or CDC); Kolumbangara Forestry Plantations Limited (KFPL, also with CDC); and Solomon Telekom (with a British telecommunications company). For example, a White church leader who had lived in Solomon Islands for more than ten years, told me that Solomon Taiyo’s working conditions and housing were much worse than those of the other large joint ventures, that Solomon Taiyo gave nothing to the community compared to the other companies, and that Japanese managers did not care about their workers.9 His explanation for why this was the case was that Japanese companies had little sense of social responsibility. Interviews and documentary sources from the Solomon Islands National Union of Workers (SINUW) showed that working conditions and remuneration of all of the large joint ventures were actually the same, and were around the national standard. According to a school teacher in Noro, Solomon Taiyo gave

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plenty of assistance to Noro school in comparison to the school KFPL workers used at Ringgi Cove.10 Solomon Taiyo also donated money to various community sports facilities in Noro, and had a small project fund local villagers could apply to for community projects. Solomon Taiyo’s housing in the base town of Noro was abysmal; overcrowded, unsanitary, and not maintained. This, however, was not solely the fault of the company but was the responsibility of the Western Province government, which had reserved the right to develop Solomon Taiyo’s housing as its own business venture, yet never developed the housing properly. Unfavorable comparisons with the White joint ventures on the grounds of social responsibility were thus like representations of ecological unsustainability. They contradicted the available evidence, leading to the conclusion that identity politics were involved. A News Drum article on Solomon Taiyo in the 1970s written by a White New Zealander noted there were only three Japanese out of 117 employees in the Tulagi factory, but that the ‘atmosphere is Japanese in the office’ (Young 1975: 4–5). In this account an Assistant Manager shouted in Japanese to the fishing boats via a radio telephone, Japanese characters covered the walls on calendars, and a concrete monument on the wharf had no English inscription, only a Japanese one. The journalist also pointed out that electricity for the cannery came from a plant made of Japanese equipment, which generated 110 volts (the Japanese standard, as opposed to the usual 240 volts in Solomon Islands, which is the Australia/New Zealand standard). ‘And the trainee foreman, Tebukewa Mereki, is Gilbertese [I-Kiribati], but he bowed to me when it was time to leave. I wonder where he learnt that?’ Would Young have thought it worthy of comment if an I-Kiribati man had shaken his hand rather than bowed? Why was having the plant on the Japanese electrical standard less appropriate than having it on the Australia/New Zealand standard? Why should the inscription on the sculpture have been in English when the majority of Solomon Islanders read neither English nor Japanese? The article may be characterized as a veiled accusation of cultural imperialism, ironic considering the violently imperialist mode by which Anglophone culture was introduced to Solomon Islands. In portraying Solomon Taiyo unfavourably compared to the other White large companies in Solomon Islands, Whites were overlooking their own cultural hegemony. Many White people encountered during fieldwork refused to acknowledge any benefits from Solomon Taiyo to Solomon Islands. Whites tended to downplay benefits from employment by claiming that the pay and conditions were bad, that social benefits were counteracted by social breakdown caused by the company’s operations, and in any case came at the expense of the environment, or were only what was left after the Japanese partner siphoned off the profits. In addition to identification of Japanese businesses as socially and ecologically irresponsible, Solomon Taiyo’s Japanese managers were identified by Solomon Islanders as secretive, as ‘hiding’ things from Solomon Islanders, such as information about payments to the Okinawan fishermen and cannery sales in the UK. Comments included: ‘Asians are very good at that, hiding things’,11

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‘one thing about a Japanese company, they don’t tell you the whole truth’,12 and ‘these Japanese, they are cunning’.13 This reputation for secretiveness was partly based in the language barrier. Consultants noted: ‘communications inside the company are weak. Language barriers have not been seriously addressed’ (Hughes and Thaanum 1995: 1). The ‘language barrier’ meant more than a simple inability to communicate. For instance, Japanese language was seen by many as the method by which Japanese managers kept secrets. Waghena, a former politician who had been involved with Solomon Taiyo in various capacities over the years, said it was difficult to engage with the Japanese partner company, because the Japanese ‘would insist to talk in their own language’.14 Senior public servants Maramasike and Borukua, whose jobs involved managing the directorship of Solomon Taiyo on behalf of the government, said that Japanese managers spoke with each other in Japanese so that local management would not know what they were saying, and that the Solomon Islander representatives on the Board were at times prevented from having input because the Japanese representatives worked ‘in their bloody Japanese language’ (Borukua).15 Solomon Islander former manager Kukum corroborated this perspective saying that when issues arose in meetings where further clarification was needed this was often carried out in Japanese, leaving him ‘in the dark’.16 The language barrier within Solomon Taiyo was not, however, as impermeable as the above suggests. Linguistic diversity is a fact of life in Solomon Islands and most Solomon Islanders are consequently adept at picking up new languages, which is evidenced by the way fishing crews and villagers accommodated the Okinawan fishermen’s language. Several of the long-term office employees did pick up Japanese, such as the Personnel Manager who spoke both Japanese and the Sarahama language. It is unrealistic to suppose that the office staff understood nothing of the Japanese spoken around them. That an impenetrable language barrier was less a concrete reality than part of the image of Japanese managers in non-Japanese minds was revealed in a letter from the Chair of the Investment Corporation of Solomon Islands (in which government ownership was vested) to the authors of a Forum Fisheries Agency report on Solomon Taiyo (Hughes and Thaanum 1995). He was very surprised that Solomon Taiyo management cooperated with the consultants: it seemed to be un-thought of bearing in mind the suspicions of the Japanese literally hiding facts and figures in Japanese language. . . . The study was a real success and a break through of the barriers that we mentally constructed over the partnership years.17 In addition to perceived sinister motives in the language barrier, Japanese managers were seen as unable to communicate effectively because of their culture of communication. Some interviewees noted that in Solomon Islands Japanese are sometimes called iapas, a Pijin word literally meaning deaf due to infection blocking up the ears. When applied to Japanese people it meant that

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they were unable to understand, regardless of language.18 Apparently the tradition of employing Australian accountants at Solomon Taiyo emerged because, in the absence of sufficiently qualified and experienced Solomon Islanders, communication problems gave rise to mutual suspicion with Japanese accountants, and it was felt that an Australian would be able to bridge the gulf between the Japanese managers and Solomon Islander colleagues.19 Since the Australians had neither Solomon Islander nor Japanese language skills this was clearly not a language issue as much as something about cultures of communication. Japanese people were also identified as approaching life in Solomon Islands with an enclave mentality, socializing only with other Japanese. While this occurred to a certain extent, the reputation for doing this more so than other expatriate communities was not justified; several Japanese managers from Solomon Taiyo had married Pacific Islander women, Japanese volunteers lived in local communities as volunteers from other countries did, and I observed Solomon Taiyo managers participating in mixed social events according to their social position and personal inclination. Perceptions that Japanese managers were more unwilling to socialize with Solomon Islanders than other expatriate groups and perceptions that they were unable to communicate effectively, including suspicions that they used the language barrier to help cheat Solomon Islanders out of benefits from Solomon Taiyo, were like other negative representations of Solomon Taiyo, not convincingly supported by evidence, indicating that identity relations were at work.

Differing subjectivities in non-Japanese representations Not all non-Japanese representations of Solomon Taiyo’s Japanese followed this pattern of unfavorable comparisons with White companies. Variations in representations were to be expected since Solomon Islanders’ identity agenda would be quite different to that of Whites. Solomon Islanders were not in a position of equal rivalry with Japan. They were in a position of subordination relative to both Japanese and Whites. Representations of Solomon Taiyo’s Japanese by Solomon Islanders were less determinedly negative than representations by Whites. For example, Solomon Islanders tended to balance negative assertions about the company with qualifications that the company provided a lot of employment and training and that they liked the company’s products. Japanese manager Okubo suggested Solomon Islanders were more balanced in their assessments of Solomon Taiyo because most Solomon Islanders had either worked for the company themselves at some stage or a close relative had, so they had direct experience on which to base their opinions, whereas most White people had no direct experience.20 As well as being more balanced in citing positive as well as negative impacts from the company, Solomon Islander representations also varied from White representations in that Solomon Islanders tended not to associate negative perceptions of the company with its Japaneseness/Asianness (as implicitly or explicitly distinct from White companies) but with its foreignness, which cast it

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into the same category as White companies.21 Previous researchers Metzhoff and LiPuma found in the 1970s that Solomon Islanders perceived the working conditions at Solomon Taiyo as being as bad as (not worse than) those at any other expatriate-run company (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1983: 31). Many Solomon Islander interviewees in my research expressed similar sentiments. One local church leader who had worked for several years in Bougainville before working in Noro drew parallels between Solomon Taiyo and the Australian mining company in Bougainville.22 Two Solomon Islander interviewees said they saw the behavior of Solomon Taiyo as following the pattern of any large multi- or transnational corporation, for example, through using overseas subsidiaries to control prices.23 Other interviewees who worked for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) spoke of Solomon Taiyo as one of the overseas companies that gave money or ‘big fat promises’ to local people to make them forget the potential impact on their lives of environmental degradation.24 Figure 7.1 is a poster produced by the local NGO Solomon Islands Development Trust (SIDT). It portrays Solomon Taiyo (frame 2) as one of the big companies of no specified nationality that has given villagers money for their resources – trees, fish, and gold – and then left villagers unable to feed or house themselves, resulting in aid dependency. While a significant proportion of Solomon Islander representations of Solomon Taiyo were thus different to White representations – in that Solomon Taiyo was seen as a negative influence because it was foreign rather than because it was Asian or Japanese as opposed to White – some Solomon Islander representations did resemble White representations in contrasting Solomon Taiyo negatively with White-sponsored development activities. For example, Solomon Islander interviewees who worked for the Ministry of Finance and the Investment Corporation of Solomon Islands contrasted Solomon Taiyo unfavorably with the British joint ventures in terms of the level of local management achieved.25 Some of the passages presented earlier in this chapter demonstrate the point, with Islanders deploring the activities of Asian/Japanese resource plunderers compared to the activities of ‘good’ White aid donors. It is possible that the trope of the Japanese/Asian resource plunderer has simply diffused into Solomon Islands understandings of peoples because it is so widespread in the English-speaking world, even though the White subjectivity that generated the trope is not relevant for Solomon Islanders. As noted earlier, Whites promoted images of immoral exploitative Chinese traders in Solomon Islands throughout the colonial era and beyond, so it would not be difficult for the slightly different image of the Asian resource plunderer to take root. Another related explanation for anti-Asian/Japanese (rather than simply antiforeign) representations of Solomon Taiyo by Solomon Islanders, is that Solomon Islanders may have been tapping into the Orientalist aspect of discourse of the Japanese/Asian resource plunderer specifically for a White audience. This probably happened in interviews with me. Some Solomon Islander interviewees – knowing that White people, even liberal types like myself, enjoy

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Figure 7.1 SIDT poster on development.

(or at least are predisposed to expect) the discourse of the Japanese/Asian resource plunderers – may have tailored their story to me as a White person. Some interviewees may have been telling me the story they thought I wanted to hear about Solomon Taiyo, a story that by implication painted White development enterprises in a positive light.

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A case in point is the previously cited comments of a ‘fisher from Lengana’ (Kalgovas 2000), that Japanese boats fished in the lagoons without consultation with neighboring villages or compensation to them. Similar kinds of representation were made by Solomon Islanders to me; it constituted one of the prevalent narratives about Japanese fisheries in Solomon Islands. The only ‘Japanese’ fishers working the lagoons were Solomon Taiyo boats baitfishing, because tuna were caught outside the reefs in the open sea. No Solomon Islander I interviewed was unaware that baitfishing agreements were made with customary reef owners and royalties paid for baitfishing (see Chapter 4). Furthermore, according to interviews and field observations, Solomon Taiyo catcher boats in lagoons frequently gave bycatch to villagers who paddled out to the boats, often in exchange for fresh fruit and vegetables. Bycatch could not be used in the cannery or sold overseas so there was no reason not to give it away. The fisher from Lengana was unlikely to have been ignorant of the fact that Solomon Taiyo’s baitground access was based on extensive negotiations with villagers, villagers were paid for access to baitgrounds, and the vessels frequently gave fish to baitground residents. Why, then, did he lead the journalist to believe otherwise? It could be that the fisher from Lengana’s representation constituted a deployment of ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985). Creative manipulation of dominant groups’ discourses is one way for subordinated peoples to achieve their ends, and the playing off of dominant groups against each other is another useful strategy. For example, Acida Rita Ramos found that Indigenous Brazilians have utilized divisions between groups of non-Indigenous Brazilians in order to gain media and political attention so as to create space to get a point across and to attract material support (Ramos 1998: 16, 98–101). During the Cold War some Pacific Island governments gained benefits from rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. For example, a standoff with the USA over fishing-access fees was finally resolved in the late 1980s after Pacific Island governments granted access to Soviet fishing fleets, goading the US government, and leading to a compromise. Some Pacific Island countries, including Solomon Islands, continue to benefit from the rivalry between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. Perhaps the fisher from Lengana saw Western NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund (the journalist’s employer) as potential allies to gain leverage with Solomon Taiyo. He may have been engaged in pragmatic politics in appealing to internationally circulating negative images of Japanese fisheries by telling a story to spark NGO concern.

Japanese self-representations of fisheries Japanese managers interviewed were aware of the unflattering image they had in the minds of many White and Solomon Islander people. The General Manager explained it by saying that Japanese people were not good at senden (public relations). They saw their role in Solomon Islands society through Solomon Taiyo quite differently, however. Japanese representations of Solomon Taiyo

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were of the company being a development and modernization success story. As General Manager Komito left Solomon Taiyo to return to Tokyo in 1991, a newspaper report of his farewell speech listed some of the achievements of the company (Nius 1991: 9). The popular canned product Solomon Blue was being sold regionally and Solomon Taiyo had fulfilled its social obligations regarding employment, taxes, and foreign earning. Indeed it excelled in terms of employment, being the only substantial employer of village women in the country. Komito was reported as saying Solomon Taiyo was the most successful tuna joint venture in the region, even the world. When the former Mayor of Irabu (the town in Okinawa from which most of the fishermen employed by Solomon Taiyo came) visited other countries in the Pacific, all the government officials he spoke to said they wanted to start a company like Solomon Taiyo because it employed local people and the shore base was a permanent investment in the country.26 The former Mayor had toured places in the Pacific where Irabu fishermen were employed, such as Papua New Guinea, and Mindanao in the Philippines. He described Solomon Taiyo as a model other countries wanted to follow. As part of general public relations and corporate citizenship, Solomon Taiyo and its managers made donations to local charities (Nius 1988, 3; News Drum 1976a: 2), but Japanese managers also tended to view the company itself as a kind of charity. Some Japanese managers even described Solomon Taiyo as a ‘charity company’.27 In relating the history of Solomon Taiyo the General Manager said Maruha had not wanted to become a ‘charity company’, Maruha would prefer that Solomon Taiyo was profitable, but it was impossible to turn a good profit because the Solomon Islands government as co-owner had insisted on a shore base even though business costs in Solomon Islands were much higher than major competitor country Thailand, and the Solomon Islands government had no capital to invest in the company or utilities to support the shore base.28 The Operations Manager’s version of the history of the company had a different take on Maruha’s motivations in Solomon Taiyo in terms of profit versus charity. He said that the President of then Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ in the 1970s, Nakabe Kennichi, had visited Solomon Taiyo and told employees that Solomon Taiyo’s purpose was to ‘feed the people of the Solomons’. He told the managers to look after the Solomon Islanders, it did not matter whether Solomon Taiyo was profitable, the important thing was to keep the company going so that it could be of benefit for Solomon Islanders. In those days, according to the Operations Manager, the word of the President of the company was law, so this order from Nakabe was taken very seriously. When he died his son Nakabe To¯jiro took over as President, and To¯jiro felt Solomon Taiyo should continue to be managed according to his father’s wishes. The Operations Manager said that in the 1990s Maruha was moving in the direction of requiring their overseas joint ventures to be profitable, but he believed there genuinely was a charitable motivation behind Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯’s involvement in Solomon Taiyo in the 1970s and 1980s.29 Okinawan fisherman Ikema corroborated the Operations Manager’s

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story that the President of Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ had ordered Solomon Taiyo to feed the people of Solomon Islands, and this fisherman felt that through baitfishing fees and other benefits to Solomon Islands, Solomon Taiyo had fulfilled this promise to provide.30 This identification on the part of the Japanese as charitable benefactors in relation to Solomon Islands is interesting. On one level it is a generous stance to take. But at the same time it is a profoundly dominant stance. This identification of self and other is not of an equal partnership but involves self-identifying as having something the other lacks. Solomon Islanders had been feeding themselves perfectly adequately for thousands of years by the time Solomon Taiyo was established, they did not need feeding, what they lacked was the cultural capital and skills necessary to build and maintain a successful capitalist enterprise. Part of the dominance Japanese assumed in relation to Solomon Islanders through Solomon Taiyo was of moderns in relation to a ‘backward’ society.31 None of the managers interviewed in 1999 labeled Solomon Islanders ‘backward’ or ‘primitive’, but earlier managers had identified them as such. Previous researchers found that in the 1970s and early 1980s Solomon Taiyo managers, like White expatriates living in Solomon Islands, imagined Solomon Islanders, especially those living in villages, to be ‘primitive’. This identification was then used to justify the crowded housing and monotonous food provided by the company, because managers felt that village life was no better (Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1983: 23). In 1999 Solomon Islands’ lack of modernness was understood by Japanese managers in terms of an inhospitable environment for capitalism. This was often explained as a result of Solomon Islanders’ ‘traditional culture’ on work ethic and on the quality of government policies, but also in terms of other factors such as the distance from major trade routes making freight costs uncompetitive and necessitating the importation of many inputs. Japanese managers felt Solomon Islands’ difficult business environment was the reason Solomon Taiyo was unprofitable.32 One Maruha manager wrote that Solomon Taiyo could not ‘be competitive with merely her own power and capacity’, so the Japanese government must help with grant aid and low-cost finance, and the Solomon Islands government must help subsidize the company, for example, by requesting aid loans to pay for capital investment in the fleet (Tarte 1998: 124–126).33 This was in contrast to prevalent Solomon Islander and White explanations for the lack of profitability, involving suspicions that Japanese managers were cheating Solomon Islanders of profit by transfer pricing. The Operations Manager’s story about company President Nakabe’s charitable motivations for Solomon Taiyo acknowledged the impression Maruha’s continued involvement in a non-profitable Solomon Taiyo gave: Of course, from the outside it must appear ‘What are you doing here if you are not making a profit?’ . . . Somehow in the end [they believe we are] doing something tricky behind the scenes. ‘Isn’t there something tricky going on?’ It might be natural to become suspicious feeling.34

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There was no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Maruha managers, however, as detailed in technical reports about the finances of Solomon Taiyo (Hughes and Thaanum 1995; SPPF 1999). These reports also acknowledged the difficulties inherent in Solomon Islands’ business environment, but did not share the view of Japanese managers that it was impossible that Solomon Taiyo could be profitable, asserting that management had not exhausted all avenues for improving profits. The identification of Japanese managers visible in these reports did not buy into the stereotype of Japanese/Asian resource plunderers, but it did resonate with another discourse about Japanese capitalism; that it was ‘wrong’ in prioritizing throughput and market share over profitability. Maruha and Solomon Taiyo followed a common Japanese corporate model in which, compared to British and US companies, there was a high debt-to-equity ratio. Rather than shares being seen as a real avenue for investment, shareholdings were often cross held between a company and its main financial backer bank, in Maruha’s case the Industrial Bank of Japan (this model has to some extent been broken down in efforts to overcome the 1990s recession by Maruha and many other companies). The consultants’ reports (Hughes and Thaanum 1995; SPPF 1999) listed a range of areas in which Solomon Taiyo could have cut costs and increased productivity to improve profitability. Japanese management perspectives on Solomon Islands as being in need of charity were not nakedly racist, and were based in the frustrating reality of business life in Solomon Islands. At the same time, however, the representations also bolstered Japanese positions of authority and wealth in Solomon Taiyo by portraying Solomon Islanders as incapable of supporting a functioning business without their assistance. Japanese identity as manifest in the discourse of the charity company was a ‘good’ identity, in contrast to prevalent English-language images of the ‘bad’ Japanese of Solomon Taiyo. In addition to the charity company narrative, Japanese self-representations of Solomon Taiyo involved another main narrative that bolstered the image of good Japanese fisheries. Several Japanese interviewees compared Japanese tuna fisheries – employing the pole-and-line and longline methods, with a relatively small purse-seine fleet made up of relatively small capacity vessels – favorably against the mainly purse-seine US fleet, which included vessels of very large capacity (and therefore potentially ecologically destructive efficiency). It was not just the environmental effects of purse seining that caused contention. The Japanese-favored pole-and-line method is very labor intensive, and so over a certain level of catch it is cheaper to use the very large purse-seine ships with labor-saving technologies. Purse-seine-caught tuna therefore all but killed international markets for the more expensive Japanese pole-and-line-caught skipjack. Competitive self-identification as ‘good’ fishers compared to the US fleet had a history. There was a long-running rivalry between Japanese tuna-fishing companies and the American Tunaboat Association (ATA), which together had dominated fisheries in the Pacific Ocean from the 1960s to the 1980s. Until the 1970s the Japanese fleet dominated the Western Pacific Ocean. Then towards the end of the 1970s the US tuna-fishing fleet started to move west across the Pacific

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because of declining catches, disputes over dolphins, and deteriorating relations with Latin American governments in the East Pacific. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the US tuna lobby did not want to pay the access fees being demanded by island states in the Western Pacific for fishing in their newly declared EEZs and the US government supported them in this through a piece of domestic legislation called the Magnuson Act. Any country that impeded US tuna boats from fishing for highly migratory species (on the grounds that such species do not belong to any country) in their EEZ could have their trade to the USA embargoed. Until the late 1980s US tuna boats thus fished illegally in the EEZs of the West Pacific, with the support of their government. Japanese managers’ self-identification in opposition to US tuna interests came to the fore in representations of a 1980s dispute about illegal fishing by a US purse-seine vessel, the Jeanette Diana. In 1984 several Pacific Island countries were becoming increasingly annoyed with illegal fishing by US purse seiners in their EEZs. The Jeanette Diana was a very large, high-tech purse seiner with its own small helicopter to ‘spot’ schools of fish. The ship had been noticed in several places within Solomon Islands’ waters over a period of days, so the authorities sent out a patrol boat to request the Jeanette Diana to stop so they could board and check whether or not the ship had been fishing. The Captain of the tuna boat refused to stop, so eventually the patrol boat fired shots across the bow of the tuna boat. It seemed the boat had been fishing, so it was impounded and the Captain was prosecuted. Under pressure from the American Tunaboat Association the Magnuson Act was activated and all trade from Solomon Islands to the USA was embargoed. The only substantial trade from Solomon Islands to the USA at that time was frozen-fish sales from Solomon Taiyo to canneries in American Samoa and Puerto Rico. Suddenly Solomon Taiyo had to open new markets for their frozen fish in Thailand. They managed to do this but Maruha manager Shibuya said the embargo was his worst memory of his long association with Solomon Taiyo. They could only get low prices at such short notice and it ruined the financial year for Solomon Taiyo.35 The US government refused to acknowledge the findings of the Solomon Islands High Court that the Jeanette Diana had been fishing illegally. The Los Angeles Times quoted the Captain of the Jeanette Diana as saying ‘we realized we weren’t dealing with a rational government . . . the laws don’t mean anything to those people’ (Kengalu 1988: 170–171). Some media reports called for an immediate cessation of US aid to Solomon Islands, but at that time the only support was about $500,000 in a Peace Corps program (Kengalu 1988: 170–171). Eventually the Jeanette Diana was sold back to the original owners for SB$861,000 (reimbursed by US taxpayers) in 1985, and the embargo was lifted. Japanese fisheries people took the moral high ground over the USA because of the unquestionably bad behavior of the USA in the Jeanette Diana affair and their refusal to acknowledge Pacific Islands states’ rights over their EEZs. A Japanese media source described the United States position on EEZs as contradictory because, although the government supported US boats fishing in the

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EEZs of other countries, the US coastguard would not allow foreign boats to fish in the US EEZ. This source said the USA was ‘arrogantly subverting the rights and laws of another nation’ (Kengalu 1988: 171). Fujı¯ Hiroshi, a manager in the Overseas Operations section in the Tokyo office of Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯, was reported by the Pacific Islands Monthly as having said ‘we are very unhappy about the manner in which these huge ships fish’ (Pacific Islands Monthly 1985: 41, 45). He estimated there were about 35 500mt purse seiners based in Japan but in the USA there were many more even larger vessels, such as the 1,500mt Jeanette Diana. Fujı¯ hoped that the high operating costs of the very large vessels might drive them out of business. ‘The American policy about following migratory fish, regardless of exclusive economic zones, causes problems. It has led to disorder.’ Fujı¯ described purse seiners as very environmentally destructive. He estimated that there were about 140 purse seiners operating in the South Pacific by the mid-1980s and he was sure fish stocks would be depleted as a result. File material showed that Maruha and Solomon Taiyo managers repeatedly registered concern with the Solomon Islands government over protecting Solomon Islands’ skipjack stocks from purse seiners.36 Solomon Taiyo’s Okinawan fishermen also expressed ill-feeling towards Westerners about purse seining. Fisherman Tôriike thought it hypocritical of Western organizations, such as Greenpeace, to oppose whaling and longlining but not purse seining when he felt that purse seining was very environmentally destructive. He thought the reason Greenpeace did not campaign for a ban on purse seining was because the American tuna industry was heavily involved in purse seining and Greenpeace found it easier to target Japanese industries than American ones. He also cited the fact that there was not a substantial market for environmentally friendly pole-and-line tuna in the USA as evidence that Americans were hypocritical in their attacks on Japanese fisheries. He asked why Americans complained about whales and made a fuss about dolphin-friendly tuna when they would not even buy pole-and-line product?37 In addition to self-identification as having ‘good’ fisheries compared to US fisheries, Japanese managers also occasionally exhibited a competitive selfidentification as ‘good’ in contrast to the West to do with more general business issues. For example, when I asked Maruha manager Shibuya about Solomon Taiyo’s lack of profitability, he answered that Solomon Taiyo had not made a profit because Japanese companies look after their employees properly, not like Western companies, which preferred to sack their employees rather than forfeit dividends for shareholders.38

Conclusion The Japaneseness of Solomon Taiyo’s management was an important factor in perceptions of what kind of modernization the company brought to Solomon Islands. Non-Japanese commentators tended to assume the company was exploitative because of stereotypes of Japanese/Asian resource capitalism, or simply because its management was foreign; foreign domination over

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Solomon Islanders having particular postcolonial resonances. Non-Japanese representations of Solomon Taiyo’s fishing practices often included suspicions of illegality and accusations of ecological unsustainability. These representations were quite inaccurate, in fact, Solomon Taiyo’s fishing practices were on the socially and ecologically responsible end of the spectrum of industrial fisheries. The discrepancy between actuality and representation may be partly explained by a predisposition on the part of non-Japanese to view Japanese fishing practices negatively, as part of wider global Orientalist discourses of predatory Japanese/Asian resource capitalism, which have as their flip-side the discourse of good White capitalism. In contrast to White representations that compared Solomon Taiyo unfavorably with White companies, many Solomon Islander representations often categorized Solomon Taiyo together with White companies, both as big ‘bad’ foreign businesses that dominated Solomon Islanders. These representations make sense in terms of Solomon Islanders’ subjectivity, which is rooted in their history as a colonized people and contemporary status as ‘underdeveloped’, and which involves quite different subject positions than Whites in relation to ‘the Japanese’ and modernity. These subjective differences between Whites and Solomon Islanders, however, were belied by the fact that some Solomon Islander representations of Solomon Taiyo did describe Solomon Taiyo as being bad modernization because it was Japanese, compared to good White modernization. Some of this may be put down to global diffusion of White representations through the English language, but Solomon Islanders may also have bought into the Orientalist discourse of the Japanese/Asian resource plunderer in framing their representations for a White audience. Solomon Islanders may have been practicing pragmatic discursive politics in representing Solomon Taiyo as a ‘bad’ company, in implicit contrast to ‘good’ White companies, in order to leverage assistance from Western NGOs. Global discourses about Japanese modernity as manifest in its resource capitalism were localized and shaped by the postcolonial historical specificities of Solomon Islands society. By contrast, in Japanese self-representations Solomon Taiyo was seen as beneficial for Solomon Islands because it assisted with economic development in Solomon Islands (as a kind of charity), and behaved ethically compared to the US skipjack-fishing industry. The modernism in these identifications was not obvious on the surface, but analysis shows that at least part of the competitive nature of identifications vis-à-vis Whites was over Japan challenging the White monopoly in modernness and, in cases like Solomon Taiyo, over whose modernization was the best for the Third World. Developmentalist modernism was also at least part of the justification for Japanese dominance over Solomon Islanders in Solomon Taiyo.

8

Conclusion The stinky jewel of modernity

Noro Noro, a pearl slowly sinking in the pigsty of development Noro, a diamond twinkling in the midst of rotten fish guts and blue flies Noro, an opal glistening between bug-infested copra Noro, an emerald isle floating in a sea of suspicion land disputes and greed (Sipolo 1986: 15)

When I interviewed the author of the above poem she summarized her opinions of Solomon Taiyo by laughing ‘Noro is a jewel, but hem stink!’ She neatly captured the ambivalence with which most Solomon Islanders viewed Solomon Taiyo as an agent of development. Solomon Taiyo provided some of the things Solomon Islanders wanted from modernity, such as cash employment, and also some of the things they did not want, such as pollution. Finding ways of expressing this ambivalence in my research was a difficult task. At the outset of writing, explanations of Solomon Taiyo as an example of modernization kept falling into one of two equally unsatisfactory narratives. The material clearly indicated that Solomon Islanders found modernity to be both good and bad, but explanations kept falling into either modernism, with its assumptions that modernization is good, or counter-modernism, with its assumptions that modernization is bad. Marshall Berman put my writing dilemma into historical perspective; thought on modernity had until the twentieth century encompassed both the positive and negative potentials of modernization, but in the twentieth century thought became polarized. ‘Open visions of modern life have been supplanted by closed ones, Both/And by Either/Or’ (Berman 1982: 24). Other scholars too have noticed the shortcomings of the Either/Or vision of modernity. For example, Acida Rita Ramos (1988: 197–200) wrote that when

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‘development’ is seen either as ethnocentric and not leading to material and psychological improvement in the lives of subsistence peoples, or as inevitable and beneficial in the long run, the agency of the people involved is obscured, their resilience in the face of change is ignored, and in any case the ability of Whites to control these processes is overplayed. The ways modernization has been understood as a choice either to modernize or to remain traditional have obscured the complicated interactions between modernity and non-modern social features that exist in all contemporary societies, be they identified as modern or not. In many ways writing this book has been about finding ways to capture the Both/And aspects in explanations of modernization. Sarah Meltzhoff and Edward LiPuma (1983) found, back in the 1970s, that Solomon Islanders perceived their engagement with Solomon Taiyo as an Either/Or choice, between kastom and civilization. In the late 1990s none of my interviewees represented Solomon Taiyo as a choice between kastom and civilization, but many still grappled with representing the company either through counter-modern or modernist narratives, which ended up seeming inconsistent. Thinking of modernization as a destructive as well as a creative process explains why desire for modernity is (and always has been) accompanied by counter-modern sentiments. The way I found through the Either/Or barrier was to conceptualize modernism as a discourse in which some identities are dominant identities and others subordinated, which is part of power relations that have material aspects in the wealth accumulation and technology that modernization has brought some countries. Tropes of duality in relation to modernity, such as ambivalence, double consciousness, and dual society, further unstuck explanations of Solomon Taiyo and allowed me to weave between the usual polar oppositions. Modernism has taken root very differently in the contexts of Japan, Okinawa, and Solomon Islands. Solomon Islanders were denigrated as non-modern under British colonialism. Colonial modernism changed aspects of Solomon Islands society, but did not replace indigenous discourses; society remained dual, comprising two worlds. Social strata shifted somewhat, and dual society gave people choices to escape the modes of hierarchization in one sphere for those of the other, at least temporarily. Local experiences of colonialism and continuing subordination in the world system and identification as ‘underdeveloped’ meant that global anti-colonial and anti-racist discourses were adopted as central tenets of Solomon Islander understandings of themselves in relation to other peoples. They came to automatically see themselves as being dominated and exploited by foreigners, and to protest that as unjust. Solomon Taiyo was understood by Solomon Islanders from this perspective. It was seen as a Japanese company that unjustly dominated Solomon Islanders, at the same time as bringing various desired outcomes, such as employment. Representations of Solomon Taiyo’s Japanese as exploitative could be considered a form of resistance, although as victim identification they also reified subordination, so I chose to label them ‘protest’. Solomon Taiyo was made up of many hierarchical social relations based on nationality, gender, and class, and

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there was rivalry between island groups. Subordination of women was protested, but usually on the grounds that the subordination was too severe, or that subordination of our women by foreigners was a bad thing, rather than that subordination of women per se was a bad thing. Social-strata relations were similar, in that class subordination on the basis of differential skills and knowledge was accepted as legitimate, but when that subordination was seen to be at the hands of foreign bosses, or one island group was seen as dominating another, the subordination was protested. Structurally there was little inter-island group inequality, but in terms of nationality there were clear structural inequalities in Solomon Taiyo. Foreigners had greater remuneration and positions of authority over Solomon Islanders. Visible structural inequality between nationalities, in combination with the identity relations of modernism and postcoloniality in which the domination of Solomon Islanders by foreigners was not accepted, gave Solomon Taiyo a major legitimacy problem. Evidence of social breakdown and ecological problems were harnessed to these perceptions of the company. Solomon Taiyo was thus characterized as ‘bad’ modernization, resulting in much ‘whistleblowing’ public airing of suspicions of wrongdoing. The criteria by which Solomon Islanders were ranked lower than foreigners in Solomon Taiyo included a perceived lack of certain types of skills and knowledge, and a less than wholehearted commitment to the operations of the company. Material and symbolic subordination, however, inhibited the accumulation of these skills and knowledge, and vitiated against wholehearted commitment. Because modernism, even indigenized modernism, was not the only salient way of conceptualizing social change, and because modernization was not unambiguously desired but was also not desired, people (especially landowning workers) utilized the dual economy to ‘opt out’ of Solomon Taiyo. This was a form of resistance against the company and its modernization, although ‘opting out’ was also many things besides resistance, and one of its effects was to reinforce stereotypes of Solomon Islanders as being unsuited to modern capitalist enterprise. Subordination contributed to ambivalence, and ambivalence was seen as evidence of a lack of modernness, which justified subordination. Their dual society thus gave Solomon Islanders a measure of autonomy in their choices regarding the company, but it also limited the potential for the company to provide the desired material capital and cultural capital of modernness. This is a key problem for Solomon Islanders to grapple with as they create a version of modernity to suit their society. Okinawans were on the receiving end of Japanese modernism. From 1897 their territory, economy, and administrative system were forcibly incorporated into the Japanese state, and purist, primordialist Japanese nationalism required that Okinawans also be culturally assimilated into the Japanese nation. Dominant and modern ‘Japaneseness’ was a key identity against which Okinawan identity was formed as subordinate in the twentieth century, just as ‘Okinawan’ was a key identity against which Japanese nationalists defined themselves as modern and dominant. Okinawan identity, however, was also formed against another key identity, that of South Sea Islanders. Okinawans, denigrated as less modern

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and subordinate to Japan, in turn denigrated South Sea Islanders as less modern than themselves. Okinawan fishermen in Solomon Taiyo were structurally subordinated by Japanese managers in class terms by their respective occupational groupings as high-school-graduate fishermen and university-graduate managers. The general historical context of Japanese–Okinawan relations, in which modernism was a factor, was not often overtly played out in identity relations in the company, but emerged from time to time in explanations of difference between Okinawans and mainlanders. For example, in reference to Okinawans’ ability to speak standard Japanese, in core-periphery relations within Japan, and in Okinawans’ ‘island mentality’. On the other hand, Okinawan fishermen were dominant over Solomon Islanders. This dominance was made up of various aspects, including their supervisory work roles in relation to Solomon Islanders, their greater remuneration, and their gifts of shop-bought (modern) goods to Solomon Islanders. Okinawans identified as wealthy and modern compared to Solomon Islanders. Many Solomon Islanders expressed hatred for Okinawans, even stigmatized them as barbarian and uneducated, and they blamed Okinawans for many of the negative effects of modernization felt in villages. At the same time, Solomon Islanders also admired the Okinawans for their glamorous modernness, appreciated their down-to-earth informal manner and generosity, and formed enduring friendships with them. Japanese modernism merged ideas from European ideas about modernity and ethnicity with home-grown and Chinese ideas about ethnicity, into a mix suited to Japanese experiences and nationalist aims. Early twentieth-century Japanese modernism involved the denigration of colonized peoples as backward, thereby justifying colonial domination in order to teach the colonized how to modernize. Japan’s modernization brought Japan levels of wealth, power, and prestige in the world political economy that had hitherto only been attained by White countries. Non-White peoples had been subordinated in modernism, but Japan joined the ranks of the modern and competed as an equal but different group – as nonWhite but modern. Solomon Taiyo was seen as a Japanese company, and its Japaneseness was often interpreted by non-Japanese as meaning the company was ‘bad’ capitalism. The available evidence, however, contradicted prevalent public perceptions, showing that the company was at least as socially and environmentally responsible as any of the other large companies operating in Solomon Islands at that time. The persistence of beliefs that Solomon Taiyo was bad, despite a lack of evidence that this was so, indicates that identity relations were at play in these public perceptions. Many Solomon Islander representations of Japanese managers put them in the same category as Whites, as exploitative foreigners, reflecting Solomon Islanders’ postcolonial subjectivities. Japanese capitalism, however, was also often represented as being more socially exploitative and ecologically damaging than White capitalism. This makes sense coming from White people because of the challenge Japan posed to Whites’ monopoly over

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modernity. Some Solomon Islanders also portrayed Solomon Taiyo this way, however, and it is less clear what Solomon Islanders would gain from such representations. Part of the explanation could be that prevalent (White) Englishlanguage representations of predatory Japanese resource capitalists diffused into Solomon Islanders’ lexicon, and then were deployed as ‘weapons of the weak’. Buying into Orientalist tropes of Asian-resource-plunderers in representations to Whites like me could have been a strategy to leverage assistance from NGOs and aid donors in efforts against the company. The Japanese managers I interviewed in the late 1990s were cosmopolitan. As for Hage’s (1998) White cosmopolitans in Australia, however, Japanese managers’ cosmopolitanism did not cancel out their dominance. Japanese managers were structurally dominant and despite also having egalitarian norms, their modernist understandings of Solomon Islands society as being incapable of sustaining profitable businesses served to justify their dominance and to locate the causes of inequality in Solomon Islanders rather than in relations of domination. The perception that Solomon Islands was incapable of sustaining profitable business seems to have contributed to the tendency, noticed by two independent consultants (SPPF 1999; Hughes and Thaanum 1995), of Japanese managers in Solomon Taiyo not to make every possible effort to make the company profitable. So the (in)actions of Japanese managers contributed (in small part) to the state of affairs Japanese managers saw as being inherent to Solomon Islands society, and which justified their well-paid superior positions in the company. The dominance of Japanese managers in Solomon Taiyo contributed to the company’s considerable public relations problems. Close relations between modernism and European colonialism led to a specific form of postcolonial antipathy to modernity on the part of non-White peoples. This antipathy occasionally took the form of outright counter-modernism, such as radical traditionalism, but more often it emerged as ambivalence, often manifest in the splitting of modernity and tradition into desired and rejected aspects, and piecing together the desired aspects into an indigenized modernism. Indigenized modernism contains frames of reference with which various processes of modernization may be evaluated as good or bad. Solomon Islands’ postcolonial modernism posited foreign-dominated modernization as bad modernization. The modernization brought by Solomon Taiyo was insufficiently localized to persuade Solomon Islanders of its legitimacy. What issues does the analysis of modernism in ethnic identities in Solomon Taiyo raise for the field of economic development more generally? As an anatomy of a particular set of articulations between modernity and non-modernity the case study of Solomon Taiyo helps explain why modernization efforts do not produce clones of Western Europe, and why contact with modernity brings change but does not always bring modernization. Efforts to facilitate economic development could be much more effective if they were based on the premises that all societies are made up of modernity and non-modernity, capitalism, and other kinds of economy, homogenizing and heterogenizing influences, and that ambivalence about modernity (rather than absolute enthusiasm for it) is a realistic response. The big challenge for future researchers, planners, consultants, activists, and managers

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will be to incorporate understandings of ambivalence about modernity in more fundamental ways than just doing social and environmental impact studies. People working in development must reassess the modernisms underpinning their work, and be neither unrealistically optimistic nor pessimistic about modernization, but recognize that the goals of modernity are ‘stinky jewels’. Universalistic, economistic, optimistic theories of modernization must be tempered with understandings of the negative potentials of modernization in order to create modernization that can deliver versions of modernity more welcome than unwelcome. This can be done through exploring the social and cultural aspects of economic practices, and noticing the importance of local specifics in global phenomena. Clearly some planners, managers, politicians, and development experts do understand that peoples with economies considered ‘underdeveloped’ are ambivalent about modernization, and they understand some of the reasons behind this ambivalence. But the same general trajectories based on outmoded modernization theories still seem to inform most enterprises. Development professionals and business investors are often aware of inherent impossibilities in their models of modernization, but continue to use those models regardless, perhaps because of the lack of conceivable alternatives (Mies 1993: 57). A direction suggested by the case of Solomon Taiyo for how to take ambivalence on board and improve economic strategies accordingly would be to interrogate the modernisms underpinning modernization efforts as a foundational part of project design and planning processes. That is, map out a feasible and appropriate vision of modernity to aim for, taking into consideration what kind of modernity the people concerned want, and be innovative in working out options to suit their social, cultural, historical, geographical, and economic context. Ideally people would do this for themselves and drive their own modernization, but in cases of top-down government- or business- or aid-sponsored development this must be done consultatively, not least because many intended beneficiaries of development have not necessarily consciously thought out what kind of modernity they want. For example, in the case of Solomon Taiyo ‘interrogating the modernisms’ could have meant accepting that Solomon Islanders benefited from a dual economy and engaged in wage labor as one of a diverse range of activities supporting their households, so their ideal modernity might support a continuation of the dual economy. The actuality was that Solomon Taiyo treated the Solomon Islands’ labor force as flawed in comparison to the Thai labor force, implying that a desirable modernization outcome would be for Solomon Islanders to stop utilizing their dual economy and become fully committed to wage labor. If the ideal labor force was not taken as a given but work structures were planned in accordance with an alternative vision of modernity and the role of wage labor in it, perhaps a more innovative model of employment could have been devised in which Solomon Islander employees were respected for their specific qualities instead of being seen as deficient. Whether or not this could be financially feasible remains an important question, but if it were possible it might have improved employee loyalty.

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Loyalty, commitment, and goodwill towards Solomon Taiyo could also have been improved if the principle of interrogating the underlying modernisms were applied in the area of nationality and power in Solomon Taiyo. To Solomon Islanders, being dominated by foreigners really cut to the core of what they wanted from Solomon Taiyo, and the Japanese side did not seem to realize how fundamentally important this was. If Solomon Islander modernism had been explored and the crucial importance to Solomon Islanders of becoming leaders in the modern world was revealed, the Japanese side may have understood that in many ways continued Japanese/Okinawan domination through the company spoiled its modernization for Solomon Islanders. Again, conventional wisdom would question the financial feasibility of having Solomon Islander leadership in the context of demonstrable lacks of specific skills in capitalism. However, considering that the joint venture lasted nearly 30 years, had the central importance of localization to the highest levels been taken more seriously at the outset, it seems possible that creative thinking in human resources and training plans could have balanced concrete short-term skills deficits with the long-term psychosocial importance of fostering local leadership. At the same time as recognizing the importance of local leadership in modern enterprise, however, interrogation of the modernism underpinning Solomon Taiyo would also need to have highlighted where Solomon Islander understandings of Solomon Taiyo’s modernization as being bad because it was foreign/ Japanese/Asian were needlessly damaging the company. In other words, while the company could have been better if Japanese and Okinawan participants realized how damaging their continued dominance was to Solomon Islanders’ subjective experience of Solomon Taiyo’s modernization, the company also could have been better if Solomon Islander participants had realized that their antipathy to foreign/Japanese/Asian dominance was largely subjective; in concrete terms the company was not as bad as they believed it was. Clearly interrogations of the modernisms underpinning economic development are not simple exercises easily undertaken by someone with no training in social/cultural research. Multidisciplinary input is needed if development efforts are to be improved by learning from the mistakes of the past half-century, to enable more people to generate versions of modernity that suit their specific circumstances, bringing them more of the things they desire from modernity and minimizing the negative side-effects. The final lesson from the case study of Solomon Taiyo is that economic development, which these days is generally understood to be generated through business development, is too important to leave to the economists and business people. People with understandings of the intangible aspects of social change must insert themselves into the decisionmaking process, effectively communicate how and why the intangible aspects are connected to the material aspects, and contribute to more creative and innovative designs for the future.

Appendices

Solomon Islands and Solomon Taiyo chronology c.2000 BC 1568

Late 1800s 1893 1902 1906 1911 1913 1915 1927 1942 1943 1945

1960s 1971 1972 1973 1973 1974

People arrived in Solomon Islands, possibly from several different places over periods of hundreds of years. Spanish navigator Alvaro de Mendaña arrived. Probably sporadic contact with shipwrecked sailors, traders, and whalers for next couple of centuries. Missionaries, traders, whalers started arriving more regularly. British Protectorate of Solomon Islands (BSIP) declared (borders changed slightly over next few years). Methodist mission founded on New Georgia (Rev. John Goldie). White Australia policy enforced Melanesians working in Queensland sent home. Fiji closed for Solomon Island laborers. Approximately 5,000 laborers employed on Solomon Island plantations. Non-indigenous population exceeded 600. Massacre of colonial officer Bell and 12 others collecting tax on Malaita, devastating punitive raid launched in response. Japan invaded BSIP, capital at Tulagi destroyed. USA turned the tide on Japanese advances in the Pacific. Returning British chose to reestablish capital at Honiara where US forces had established infrastructure (abandoning previous capital at Tulagi). Japanese fishing boats returned to the South Pacific. Meeting of BSIP officials and Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ representatives; fisheries survey started. (November) Solomon Taiyo first joint-venture agreement ratified. Fisheries Division established to govern the commercial tuna fishery and to develop rural fisheries. (March) Solomon Taiyo started operations, including cannery. Solomon Taiyo arabushi plant opened.

190

Appendices

1974–1976 1976 1976 1977

1978 1978–1981 1979 1979 1981 1981 1981–1984 1984

1984–1986 1986 1986–1989 1986 1986–1987 1987 1989–1993 1989 1989

1990 1991 1991–1995 1992

1993

Solomon Mamaloni was Chief Minister of the Governing Council (pre-Independence government). Internal self-rule; Peter Kenilorea was Chief Minister. Solomon Taiyo established small fishing base at Noro, Western Province. National Fisheries Development established with Solomon Taiyo shareholding 25% and Solomon Islands Government shareholding 75%. Solomon Islands Independence, 7 July; 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone declared. Peter Kenilorea was Prime Minister. Solomon Islands government approached Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ regarding second joint-venture agreement; two years of negotiations ensued. Murder of a Japanese national by an Islander on the Tulagi Solomon Taiyo Base. Second Solomon Taiyo joint-venture agreement signed. Baitfishing logsheet system implemented. Solomon Mamaloni was Prime Minister. American purse seiner Jeanette Diana was caught fishing illegally in Solomon Islands and impounded by government; USA retaliated by banning all tuna imports and Solomon Taiyo suffers; Jeanette Diana eventually resold to the owners. Peter Kenilorea was Prime Minister. Forced to step down over possible misuse of French aid funds for cyclone disaster. Cyclone Namu devastated areas of Solomon Islands. Ezekiel Alebua took over as Prime Minister until elections called in 1989. Tulagi arabushi plant shut. Solomon Taiyo restructured after heavy losses in 1986. Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ President T. Nakabe dies, Y. Amatatsu takes over. Solomon Mamaloni was Prime Minister. New Solomon Taiyo cannery at Noro opened. Solomon Islands Total Allowable Catch (TAC) reviewed and increased by Parliament up to 120,000 metric tons for purse seining and pole-and-line. First full year of operation of Solomon Taiyo Noro cannery. Solomon Taiyo group purse seiner sank off Simbo with six Solomon Islander lives lost. Proliferation of ‘joint ventures’ and TAC increased (theoretically) to 500,000mt. Financially difficult year for Solomon Taiyo, prices low and debts accumulate; STL restructured to reduce take off before profit and change debt-to-equity ratio. Solomon Taiyo shareholders agreement replaced second joint venture.

Appendices 191 1993

1993–1994 1994 1995 1994–1997 1997–2000 1998 1998

1998 2000 2000

Poor weather most of year resulted in 20% drop in commercial tuna catch; poor catch worldwide: prices sank from $700–800 to $600 per ton for frozen fish; Solomon Taiyo imported frozen fish to fulfill delivery promises of canned product to the UK. Francis Billy Hilly was Prime Minister. A good year for Solomon Taiyo, better catches after two bad years. Record catches by Solomon Taiyo, cannery exceeded 1 million cases in one year. Solomon Mamaloni was Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa’alu was Prime Minister Fisheries Act 1998 came into force, requiring the establishment of a Tuna Management Plan and a Fisheries Advisory Council. (July) European Union inspection of entire STL operation resulted in an Action Plan to improve safety and cleanliness in processing and employee facilities. (December) Guadalcanal–Malaita troubles began disrupting Honiara. (May) Guadalcanal–Malaita violence on Guadalcanal rendered the state virtually unworkable. (August) Solomon Taiyo suspended operations, (December) Maruha’s withdrawal announced.

Currencies When Solomon Taiyo was established Solomon Islands used Australian dollars as currency. In the mid-1970s the Solomon Islands dollar was launched. The Solomon Islands dollar has slowly and steadily lost value against other currencies. The Central Bank of Solomon Islands Annual Reports have further breakdowns of currency rates.

Table A.1 Exchange rates of Solomon dollars in US dollars 1987–1996 Year US$

1987 0.49

1988 0.48

1989 0.43

1990 0.39

1991 0.36

1992 0.34

1993 0.28

1994 0.21

1995 0.19

1996 0.27

Source: Solomon Islands Government 1998, External Trade Second Quarter 1996, Statistical Bulletin 1/98, Statistics Division, Honiara.

192

Appendices Table A.2 Exchange rates of Solomon dollars in Japanese yen and US dollars 1995–2001 Year

SB$–JP¥

SB$–US$

2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995

22.15734 20.51162 23.78194 29.47343 32.80330 30.65842 27.95785

0.19370 0.19520 0.20342 0.22556 0.27123 0.28198 0.29566

Source: www.oanda.com/converter/cc_table?lang=en (viewed April 2001).

Notes

Preface 1 Notes from field journal, 16 July 1999. 2 Solomon Islanders often refer to their country with no preceding ‘the’, and ‘the’ is not used in official publications such as Hansard. This thesis will follow that convention, using ‘the’ before ‘Solomon Islands’ only when the country name is used as a noun modifier, as in ‘the Solomon Islands economy’. 3 Many writers on racial issues follow this convention, for example, Ghassan Hage (1995; 1998). 1 Introduction 1 The concerns behind the visit were documented in a Memorandum from the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet to the Ministry of Commerce, Industries and Employment, presumably sent also to the Board of Solomon Taiyo. The Memorandum itself was not in any of the files explored, but it was systematically addressed in a reply from the Chair of the Solomon Taiyo Board of Directors found in the records of Solomon Islands National Union of Workers (SINUW) (Honiara): Solomon Taiyo correspondence, letter dated 27 June 1997. The Memorandum was also referred to by Mamaloni in his reply to the Chair’s reply found in the records of the Western Province Government (Gizo): 10/1/17 I, natural resources – fisheries – Solomon Taiyo – Noro, letter dated 17 July 1997. 2 Western Province Government (Gizo): 10/1/17 I, letter dated 17 July 1997. 3 SINUW (Honiara): Solomon Taiyo correspondence, letter dated 27 June 1997. 4 Currencies are in Solomon Islands dollars (SB$) unless otherwise specified. Exchange rates for the Solomon Islands dollar expressed in US dollars and Japanese yen from 1987 are in the Appendices. 5 SINUW (Honiara): Solomon Taiyo correspondence, letter dated 27 June 1997. 2 Theorizing the identity relations of modernism 1 Mark Hudson (1999) approached this issue slightly differently as one of discrepancies between ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ categories. 2 The conference was ‘Adventures of Identity: Constructing the Multicultural Subject’, held at the Goethe Institut, Sydney, July 1998. 3 Hage presented these ideas on cultural capital in his paper at the conference referred to above. 4 I have borrowed the notion of compulsion from Giddens, who drew on Freud, to show that modernity can be seen as a kind of addiction, a ‘compulsive urge of repetition’. Calvinism was the original ‘motor’ of this compulsion, but without Calvinism, capitalist

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Notes

entrepreneurialism (the work ethic and urge to profit) may be seen as an irrational compulsion, like anorexia (Beck et al. 1994: 70–71). 5 White people who identify as modern could also be said to have double-consciousness about modernity in that postmodern disillusionment in White societies coexists with the continued strength of modernism. Hippies are examples of White people who express counter-modernism but often continued living within, and enjoying the benefits of, modernity. Ambivalence about modernity in White societies, however, is clearly different to ambivalence about modernity for non-White peoples who have been stigmatized as backward, and have not benefited from the emancipatory potential and material goods of modernity. 6 This summary of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s thought comes from papers and discussions presented at a postgraduate winter school, ‘Subaltern, Multicultural and Indigenous Histories’, presented by the Institute for Cultural Research as part of the Trans/Forming Cultures project at the University of Technology, Sydney, 20–21 July 2000. 7 Nandy also wrote of two alternative views of history in India, the modern and the nonmodern (1988: 57). 3 Modernism, nationalism, and colonialism 1 Dikötter (1997a: 3) contains a list of terms for ethnicity, race, and nation used in Japan and China in the late nineteenth century. 2 The novelist who committed suicide by the ritual seppuku method in the 1970s, Mishima Yukio, is a famous example of someone who thought the balance unsuccessful and considered Japan to have lost the best parts of its culture in modernizing. 3 For a discussion of the ways this worked for rural women going to cities to work see Francks (2006). 4 On the other hand White people have used sexual hierarchies in non-White societies as a means to denigrate non-White societies as backward because they indicate a lack of modern egalitarianism. Ortner (1995) quoted Spivak who wrote about White men saving Brown women from Brown men as part of colonialism in South Asia. 5 Parts of this argument about Japanese identity during the twentieth century being ‘non-White but modern’ are included in an earlier paper submitted to the online publication Japan Focus. 6 For explanation of the idea that ‘development’ is a discourse by which those designated ‘underdeveloped’ are rendered inferior to, and requiring domination by, the rich ‘West’ see Sachs (1997). 7 This confusion over where Japan belongs in the world is from a description of an Asian Studies conference briefly described by Harden (1994). 8 See, for example, Wilkin (2001). 9 See, for example, Tsunoda (1964). 10 An earlier version of this section of this chapter was included in Barclay (2006). 11 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out Oguma’s (2002) work and its relevance for this topic. 12 Not all Okinawans have reacted negatively to identification with Pacific Islanders, especially since the 1970s. Some Okinawans sided with anti-nuclear groups from the Palau Republic against the Japanese government in 1980 when there were plans to dump Japanese nuclear waste in the Pacific, and identified Okinawans as Pacific Islanders in rhetoric surrounding this battle. Since the 1960s some Japanese intellectuals had used the term ‘Yaponesia’ for Japan asserting that the Japanese archipelago could be seen as a group of islands, like Indonesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, and that peoples inhabiting these islands shared some characteristics. Some Okinawan intellectuals countered by asserting that mainland Japanese people had lost all similarity to other Islanders but that the Ryûkyû section of the archipelago

Notes

13

14 15 16 17 18

195

might still be considered to have Islander characteristics, so perhaps it should be called ‘Okinesia’ (Hanazaki 1996: 129–130). Generally speaking, however, in Okinawan imaginaries the identity ‘South Sea Islander’ has been stigmatic. Malaita, San Christobal, Guadalcanal, and New Georgia were annexed in 1883, Rennell, Bellona, and Sikiana claimed in 1887, The Eastern Outer Islands in 1898, and in 1899 Isabel, the Shortlands, Choiseul, and Ontong Java were added by the Samoan Tripartite Convention. After World War II several more outlying Polynesian islands were included. Some of the changes that did occur were the forcible incorporation of villagers into the cash economy through taxes (Keesing and Corris 1980) and the outlawing of kastom retribution for adultery and its replacement with fines (Bennett 1987: 277). For a discussion on the Chinese community in Solomon Islands and why Indians or indentured laborers from elsewhere were prohibited in Solomon Islands see Willson, Moore, and Munro (1990). It is remarkable how similar contemporary dissatisfactions are to those of the Moro movement in the 1960s as detailed by William Davenport and Gülbün Çoker (1967). Association with White men was not unambiguously a positive thing for women’s reputation, it also carried some stigma of sexual immorality, but on balance in western islands it brought more upward social mobility than downward. Non-White women in other parts of the world have also done this. As Pat O’Shane, an Australian Aboriginal woman lawyer, once said: ‘sexist attitudes did not wipe out whole tribes of our people, sexist attitudes are not slowly killing our people – racism did and continues to do so’ (dé Ishtar 1994: 238). Ortner (1995: 184) described a case wherein a Muslim woman in India used the Indian court system to sue for support from the husband who divorced her, and won, but she rejected her victory after it was held up by Hindus as a victory against Muslim sexism. She refused to take the money she desperately needed and affirmed her solidarity with Muslim people.

4 Background on Solomon Taiyo Ltd 1 Fisheries Division (Honiara): RF 8/2, correspondence, documents dated 26 May 1972, 6 June 1972, 16 October 1972; Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 8/9, correspondence. 2 Fisheries Division (Honiara): RF 8/2, correspondence, documents dated 26 May 1972, 6 June 1972, 16 October 1972; Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 8/9, correspondence, document dated 26 June 1973. 3 Interview with David Kausimae at the Hibiscus Hotel in Honiara, 18 May 1999, Solomon Islands. 4 Interview with former fisherman Hirara in his office on Miyako Island, 4 November 1998, Okinawa. 5 Fisheries Division, Honiara: Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ Kabushiki Kaisha 1972, Survey of the Oceanography and Aquatic Lives in the Waters of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, 10 March. 6 Interview with Osaka at the Solomon Taiyo Base at Noro, several times June–July 1999, Solomon Islands. 7 Solomon Taiyo Ltd 1996, Corporate Plan 1996–2000, Honiara: 14. 8 Solomon Islands Government 1978, Fisheries Management Plan, Fisheries Division, Honiara: 17. 9 A letter of complaint about petroleum wastes being dumped in lagoons, coating the coastal shellfish people harvested for food, was sent to Solomon Taiyo from the Roviana Area Council dated 16 October 1996. Western Province Government (Gizo): 10/1/17 I, natural resources – fisheries – Solomon Taiyo – Noro. 10 Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 10/19, correspondence, notes dated 20 February 1980. 11 Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 10/19, correspondence, memorandum dated 1 October 1985.

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Notes

12 Although Edvard Hviding (1996: 323) asserted that the scientific evidence on baitfishing was inconclusive. Fisheries Division scientist Gideon Tiroba (1993) called for other kinds of stock assessment and for a check of what kinds of juveniles were being caught in baitfishing, and asserted there had been a CPUE decline in heavily fished areas. 13 Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 10/19, correspondence, report by the Fisheries Division, possibly to the Minister, about the viability of Tulagi area baitgrounds, c. 1988. 14 While the Solomon Taiyo Base was at Tulagi the area was quite polluted, and this may have contributed to baitfish declines (SIG 1988a: 22). 15 Village-related factors, rather than baitfishing, were cited as possible causes for reef food-fish stock declines by national and provincial fisheries officers at a meeting held at the King Solomon Hotel in Honiara, 27 July–3 August 2005. 16 At the time of fieldwork in 1999 it was the low-tide season around Munda. Local communities were using this time of year to engage in an indigenous fishing practice using a herding device made of a long rope of vines wound into a circle tens of meters in radius, which fishers wound into a progressively smaller circle by walking over reefs towards each other. When the circle was only a couple of meters in diameter and teeming with fish, a paste made of sand and a leaf from a plant with fishstunning properties was tossed in and the stunned fish were scooped out into waiting canoes. It seemed that this kind of fishing was being carried out more frequently each season than it would have been in the past, and it was likely that walking on the reefs had detrimental effects on the ecosystem. 17 Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 8/9, correspondence, memorandum dated 12 January 1973 for various government officers for the Western Development Committee Meeting to discuss sections 34.1, 34.2 and 35 of the (first) joint-venture agreement. 18 Fisheries Division (Honiara): FS 74/3, correspondence, notes of a meeting between representatives of Solomon Taiyo and the Senior Assistant Secretary (John PepysCockerel) about various aspects of Solomon Taiyo operations dated 26 October 1973; notes of a meeting between representatives of Solomon Taiyo and the Senior Assistant Secretary on baitfishing dated 15 October 1973. 19 Fisheries Division (Honiara): RF 8/2, correspondence, notes of a meeting between the Fisheries Division and Solomon Taiyo representatives about baitfishing proposals dated 16 April 1975; notes from a meeting with Japanese representatives from an Australia–Japan fishing agreement dated 20 November 1975; Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 8/9, correspondence, memorandum for various government officers for the Western Development Committee Meeting dated 12 January 1973; British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP) 1975, National Development Plan 1975–1979, vol. II, Honiara: 24. British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP) 1977, National Development Plan 1975–1979: A Review, Honiara: 2; Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 10/19, correspondence, report on a baitfishing survey undertaken in 1980. Interview with Ilangana at Agnes Lodge in Munda, 3 June 1999; interview with Lambete at Agnes Lodge in Munda, several occasions June–August 1999. 20 Fisheries Division (Honiara): FS 74/3, correspondence, notes dated 26 October 1973. It is possible the customary tenure of baitgrounds did not have a basis in Solomon Islands law, and may have been ruled to be Crown land if the matter had been taken to court (Kabui 1997). In 1998 a legislative basis for treating baitgrounds as customary land was established in the Fisheries Act. 21 High Court (Honiara): Western Customary Land Appeal Court Case No. CLAC(W) 1/84 (s.5 Forest and Timbers Act) Kazukuru Left Hand Forest and Timbers Appeal Judgement (Biku and others vs Zinihite and others), Chief Justice Rimu Baizovaki. Contains long summary of court cases involving Kazukuru land to the mid-1980s. 22 Solomon Taiyo brochure, c.1992. Produced by Network Communications/Kathy Wong Creative Design. 23 Ibid.

Notes

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24 The Noro water supply had been a major problem because it was sourced at a point on the nearby Ziata River that was on customary land, and the Kazukuru landowners fought very hard over several years for a large payout (several million Solomon dollars, granted in 1999) in return for using the water. After 2000 the new company solved this problem by sinking a well and using groundwater. 25 The Marine Stewardship Council www.msc.org is a London-based non-governmental organization that provides ‘green’ labels for seafood consumer products. 26 Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara): EL/3.2, Solomon Taiyo correspondence. 27 Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 8/3, correspondence, minutes of a meeting of the Solomon Taiyo Board of Directors dated 29 April 1988. 28 Personal communications Asery Kukui (Deputy General Manager, Soltai Fishing and Processing Ltd) July 2005 and Ian Scales (expert on Solomon Islands forestry), email, 3 August 2005. 29 There was some controversy over sourcing of timber for smoking, both about whether mangrove timber was being used (which would have been environmentally damaging, but qema and buni are not mangrove species) and about whether the local and/or provincial government was being appropriately recompensed for the timber the company logged in Noro. Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 8/9, correspondence; Noro Town Council (Noro): 2/2/1, file containing papers and correspondence on administration – meetings – Full Council meetings; Western Province Government (Gizo): 10/1/17 I, natural resources – fisheries – Solomon Taiyo – Noro; Noro Town Council (Noro): cf. 1/28, confidential file containing papers and correspondence on full Council and Executive – elections – Board – Commission and Committees, several sets of minutes from 1997 and 1998; Western Province Government (Gizo): 10/1/17 I, natural resources – fisheries – Solomon Taiyo – Noro. 30 Report from the Solomon Taiyo Board of Directors to the Ministers of Finance, Development Planning, and Agriculture Land and Fisheries, about Board resolutions for restructuring. Fisheries Division (Honiara): RF 8/2, correspondence, letter dated 15 August 1994. 31 Noro Town Council (Noro): 9/1/7, file containing papers and correspondence on natural resources – fisheries – Noro sea front and marine products, report by L. Mani, ‘An Assessment of Fish Cannery Effluent Discharge on Pollution Status of the Noro Sea Front, Western Province, Solomon Islands’, dated 16 May 1994. 32 A letter from the Health Officer to the Town Clerk in Noro noted that the seaside was being used as a rubbish dump and a toilet, and that chickens, pigs, and dogs were being kept in unsanitary conditions in Noro. Noro Town Council (Noro): 8/3/7, file containing papers and correspondence on health and medical services – environmental health – communicable diseases, letter dated 9 December 1994. 33 The report was titled Noro Fish Processing Facility Waste Water Treatment and Effluent Disposal, report by I. Wallis, Noro Town Council (Noro): 8/3/11, file containing papers and correspondence on health and medical services – waste-water treatment plant – environmental health. 34 Noro Town Council (Noro): 8/3/11, file containing papers and correspondence on health and medical services – waste-water treatment plant – environmental health; Noro Town Council (Noro): 9/1/7, file containing papers and correspondence on natural resources – fisheries – Noro sea front and marine products; Western Province Government (Gizo): 10/1/17 I, natural resources – fisheries – Solomon Taiyo – Noro, report no. WPE(99)367, 1999. 35 The Legal Advisor of the Western Province wrote to the Town Clerk on 7 March 1995 saying there was no legal recourse in the environmental protection legislation for prosecuting the company for dumping untreated waste water into the sea, but they could use the doctrine of nuisance. Noro Town Council (Noro): 9/1/7, file containing papers and correspondence on natural resources – fisheries – Noro sea front and marine products.

198

Notes

36 Noro Town Council (Noro): 8/3/11, file containing papers and correspondence on health and medical services – waste-water treatment plant – environmental health; Noro Town Council (Noro): 9/1/7, file containing papers and correspondence on natural resources – fisheries – Noro sea front and marine products; Western Province Government (Gizo): 10/1/17 I, natural resources – fisheries – Solomon Taiyo – Noro; Western Province Government (Gizo): 10/1/17 I, natural resources – fisheries – Solomon Taiyo – Noro, report no. WPE(99)367, 1999. 37 The auditor’s report for 1975 read that no dividends were paid ‘after allowing for income tax’ (no amount specified), so tax may have been paid that year. According to the ADB report (1989: 39) Solomon Taiyo recorded a profit only five times in its first 16 years of business and once managed to pay a small dividend after tax. 38 The ADB report (1989) detailed the role of currency fluctuations in causing huge losses to Solomon Taiyo in the late 1980s and attempts by the Solomon Islands government to ameliorate the risks of currency fluctuations through its financial relations with Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ . 39 The only question raised was in the auditor’s report for 1996 (Registrar of Companies, Honiara), which noted that putting foreign exchange losses/gains on non-current portions of long-term loans in currency fluctuation reserve instead of the profit-and-loss account possibly contravened International Accounting Standard IAS21. 40 Registrar of Companies (Honiara): Solomon Taiyo, correspondence, auditors’ reports and financial statements, financial statement for year ending 31 December 1996: 15. 41 Maruha managers interviewed insisted that loans to Solomon Taiyo, including lowinterest loans from the Overseas Fisheries Cooperation Foundation, were all passed on directly with no commission taken by Maruha. 42 For details on the relative lack of importance of profitability in pre-recession Japanese business see van Wolferen (1993: especially 61, 139), Wilkin (2001), and Dore (2000). 43 Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara): EL/3.2, Solomon Taiyo correspondence, letter dated 1 August 1994. 44 These points from Hughes’ written work (1987; Hughes and Thaanum 1995) have been supplemented with information from an interview at Agnes Lodge, 22 July 1999. 45 Interview with Tony Hughes at Agnes Lodge, 22 July 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. 46 Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara): EL/3.2, Solomon Taiyo correspondence. 47 Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 10/19, correspondence, notes from a meeting between baitground owners and Solomon Taiyo dated 20 February 1980. 48 Employees were willing to query their pay records. The STLEA president said many new employees came to complain to him after receiving their first pay packet because they expected $1.50 per hour (the normal minimum wage) and he had to explain that they were receiving the special primary industries minimum wage of $1.20 an hour. 49 Copies of the Collective Agreements from 1982 and 1997 were viewed in the offices of the Solomon Islands National Union of Workers in May 1999. 50 Len Rodwell (1999) ‘Women and productivity in tuna canneries’. Email (4 October 1999); David Doulman (1999) ‘Women and productivity in tuna canneries’. Email (13 October 1999). The same kind of loining and cleaning work, however, was also done in the Smoking Department (to produce arabushi), and less than half of these employees were women (according to the Personnel Manager 40 out of 112 were women). None of the managers asked had a clear answer for why, if women were better at scratching fish in the Cannery, were men employed to do it for the Smoking Department. The Operations Manager said the productivity rates between the Cannery and Smoking Departments were not different as far as he knew. 51 Noro Town Council (Noro): 8/1/4, file containing papers and correspondence on health and medical services – health education seminars and workshops.

Notes

199

52 Remuneration figures were guarded closely by the company so none of the files explored during fieldwork contained figures on salary packages for individuals, or a breakdown by nationality. I pieced together a picture of the pay differences from several sources. Okinawan fishing masters interviewed said they received a monthly income about ten times that of Solomon Islander fishing masters, and a survey I conducted of Solomon Taiyo fleet workers corroborated this. Japanese employees in Solomon Taiyo said that they were paid an amount roughly equal to a similar position in Japan, plus a bonus because this was considered a hardship posting. According to Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare statistics in 1999 the average monthly income for manufacturing employees in enterprises of a similar size to Solomon Taiyo was US$3,067 (www.mhlw.go.jp/english/database/ db-l/basicsurvey/99f.html, accessed 18 May 2007). The median monthly income for 50 Solomon Taiyo workers surveyed in 1999 was US$100–120. Even considering that the Ministry figures include management whereas the Noro figures did not, the ratio of ten to one is a conservative estimate of the income difference. In 1998 the total remuneration for 60 or so expatriates was SB$17.7 million, whereas the total remuneration for 2,200 Solomon Islanders was SB$21 million (SPPF 1999). 53 Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ Kabushiki Kaisha c.1990, Minami Taiyheiyo¯ ni ikiru suisan go¯ben: Soromon Taiyo¯ (Joint Venture Living in the South Pacific: Solomon Taiyo), company document, in possession of Wakabayashi Yoshikazu, Kochi University, Japan. 54 Noro Town Council (Noro): 10/3/2, file containing papers and correspondence on trade, industry and labor, commerce and industry, Solomon Taiyo Ltd, especially memorandum dated 12 June 1995. 55 Interview with Lambi, Noro Town Office, 19 July 1999, Solomon Islands. 56 Noro Town Council (Noro): cf. 1/2/14, confidential file containing papers and correspondence on elections, Board, Commission and Committees, Western Province Investment Secretariat matters; Noro Town Council (Noro): unnumbered file on Western Province Investment Secretariat. 57 Solomon Taiyo Ltd c.1998, Human Resources and Training Plan, Honiara, in possession of Solomon Taiyo Ltd Employees Association (STLEA): 5–6. 58 Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara): EL/3.2, Solomon Taiyo correspondence, memo from Deputy Personnel and Training Manager to all managers re ‘Cannery Workers Transport Schedules Report’ dated 6 December 1991. 59 Maruha Corporation c.1997, Corporate Profile, Maruha Corporation Public Relations Office, Tokyo. 60 Interview with the former Operations Manager of Solomon Taiyo at the Forum Fisheries Agency, July 2005, Honiara, Solomon Islands. 5 Solomon Islanders and Solomon Taiyo 1 John Palmer (1999) ‘Solomon Taiyo’, Iu Mi Nao internet discussion group about Solomon Islands. Online posting. Available email: [email protected] (October 1999). 2 Interview with Ilangana at Agnes Lodge, 3 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. 3 Interview with Baunani in his office in Chinatown, May 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands. 4 Interview with the Deputy General Manager at the Solomon Taiyo Base, several times June–July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 5 Interview with Panatina at the Young Women’s Christian Association office, 23 April 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands. 6 Tuna Management Plan Meeting, Forum Fisheries Agency, Honiara, April 1999. 7 The article was probably published in the early 1990s. A copy of the article was found in the files of Noro Town Council, with no indication as to the publication

200

8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Notes

name, date, author, or page number. Noro Town Council (Noro): 2/2/1, file containing papers and correspondence on administration – meetings – full Council meetings. Savo and Tetepari interviewed in offices of the Western Province Government, 3 August 1999, Gizo, Solomon Islands. Interview with former Solomon Taiyo manager Kukum at Noro Town Council, 28 July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands; interview with health worker Tikopia at Noro Town Council, 21 June 1999; interview with nurse Isabel at the Noro Town Council Clinic, 14 July 1999; interview with health worker Ndai at the Solomon Taiyo Clinic, 24 June 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands; interviews with reproductive health workers Vella and Ugi at Gizo Hospital, 2 August 1999, Western Province, Solomon Islands. Interview with Kira Kira at the Women’s Hostel at Baru, 23 June 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. Interview with Panatina at Young Women’s Christian Association office, 23 April 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands. Interview with Ziata at Noro Town Council, 22 June 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands (emphasis added). Noro Town Council (Noro): cf. 1/28, confidential file containing papers and correspondence on full Council and Executive – elections – Board – Commission and Committees (emphasis added). In the early 1990s there was an incident in Vangunu where Solomon Islander crew members apparently raped a village woman, which resulted in fighting between the crew and villagers, causing injuries and the jailing of at least one villager. Letter from a church leader in Patutiva, Marovo to the General Manager of Solomon Taiyo Western Province Government (Gizo): 10/1/17 I, letter dated 19 March 1996. Western Province Government (Gizo): 10/1/17 I, natural resources – fisheries – Solomon Taiyo – Noro, memorandum dated 1 June 1994 and memorandum dated 22 November 1994. Interview with Auki in Fisheries Division office, 11 August 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands. This article was also found in the files of Noro Town Council with no indication of date of publication or page number. Noro Town Council (Noro): 8/3/5, file containing papers and correspondence on health and medical services – environmental health – communicable diseases. From the ‘Women News and Views’ section of Pacific Islands Monthly. A copy of this article was found in the files of Noro Town Council with no indication of the date or page number. The article was probably published in 1994 because it summarized Mari Sasabe’s work and quoted a Japanese manager on the workshop for up to 1,000 employees undertaken by Solomon Taiyo in 1993. Noro Town Council (Noro): unnumbered file containing papers and correspondence on sexual harassment issues. Interview with Kindu, who had worked for some years as a health worker for the Western Province, 6 July 1999, Lambete, Munda, Solomon Islands. Interview with Kindu, who had worked for some years as a health worker for the Western Province, 6 July 1999, Lambete, Munda, Solomon Islands. Interview with Ndunde in his home, 13 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. Interview with the Deputy Managing Director of Soltai Fishing and Processing at the Base in Noro, 18 July 2005, Solomon Islands. The logsheet was for the vessel named Soltai 1 in November 1998. Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 8/6, correspondence, memorandum dated 2 March 1999. Interview with Baunani in his office in Chinatown, May 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands. Interview with Ulawa at Noro Town Council, 21 June 1999, Solomon Islands. Interview with Ziata at Noro Town Council, 22 June 1999, Solomon Islands. Interview with Bougainville at Noro Town Council, 22 June 1999, Solomon Islands.

Notes

201

28 Interview with the Deputy General Manager of Solomon Taiyo, several times June–August 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 29 Interview with Brisbane at the Noro Town Council, 22 June 1999; interview with Ziata at the Noro Town Council, 22 June 1999, Solomon Islands. 30 Interview with the President of the Solomon Taiyo Limited Employees Association, 1 and 5 July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 31 Interview with church leader Brisbane at the Noro Town Council, 22 June 1999; interview with public servant Roviana several times at Noro Town Council June–July 1999, President of the Solomon Islands National Union of Workers at his office in Honiara, 17 May 1999, Solomon Islands. 32 Interview with Customs employee Kavachi at Noro Town Council, 21 June 1999, Solomon Islands. 33 Interview with public servant Roviana several times at Noro Town Council, June–July 1999. 34 The Inspection was carried out by the Principal Labour Officer Employment between 22 and 26 July 1996. Labour Division (Honiara): L 17/S/12, correspondence. 35 Interview with Customs employee Kavachi at Noro Town Council, 21 June 1999, Solomon Islands. 36 Interview with fleet administrator Shortland on the Solomon Taiyo Base in Noro, 14 July 1999, Solomon Islands. 37 Interview with Lambi at Noro Town Council, 19 July 1999, Solomon Islands. 38 Interview with Customs employee Kavachi at Noro Town Council, 21 June 1999, Solomon Islands. 39 Interview with a Noro police officer at Noro Town Council, 23 June 1999. 40 Interview with Kohinggo at Noro Town Council, 28 July 1999. 41 Interview with Luzon at the Solomon Taiyo Base, 2 July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 42 The SPPF report (1999: 7) confirmed interviewee Australian accountant Melbourne’s assessment that the wage levels between Thai and Solomon Islander tuna-processing workers were similar, but the productivity of Thai workers was two to three times that of Solomon Islander workers. It should be noted that not just Solomon Islanders as employees but the Solomon Islands economy as a place to do business affected productivity rates. 43 Interview with Nagahama in his home, 6 November 1998, Irabu Island, Okinawa. 44 Interview with Maezato in his home, 6 November 1998, Irabu Island, Okinawa. 45 Interview with Osaka on the Solomon Taiyo Base, several times June–July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 46 Interview with Shitajima in his home, 2 November 1998, Sarahama, Irabu Island, Okinawa. 47 Interview with former manager Kukum at Noro Town Council, 28 July 1999; interview with Areke at the Solomon Taiyo base in Noro, several times June–August 1999; interview with public servant Roviana at the Noro Town Council several times June–August 1999; interview with school teacher Baru at Noro Primary School, 16 July 1999. 48 Interview with former manager Kukum at Noro Town Council, 28 July 1999. 49 Interview with Roviana at Noro Town Council, 15 June 1999. 50 Interviews with Osaka at the Solomon Taiyo base in Noro, several times June–August 1999. 51 Solomon Taiyo Ltd c. 1998, Human Resources and Training Plan, Honiara, in possession of Solomon Taiyo Ltd Employees Association (STLEA), pp. 5–6. 52 Interviews with manager Okubo at the Solomon Taiyo head office in Honiara and the base in Noro, several times April–September 1999. 53 Interview with Customs employee Kavachi at Noro Town Council, 21 June 1999. 54 Interview with church leader Bougainville at Noro Town Council, 22 June 1999.

202

Notes

55 Interview with former manager Kukum at Noro Town Council, 28 July 1999. 56 Interview with Quality Control Manager at the Solomon Taiyo base at Noro, 2 July 1999. 57 Interview with former politician Sulofoloa at the King Solomon Hotel in Honiara, 18 May 1999. 58 The frog perspective in Black subjectivities is an idea Richard Wright adapted from Nietzsche as discussed by Paul Gilroy (1993). 6 Okinawan fishermen 1 Parts of this chapter have previously been published in a paper in Nations and Nationalism (Barclay 2006). 2 This song was published in Japanese by Wakabayashi (1993: 85–86). I translated it into English. 3 Interview with Tôriike at the Okinawa Rest House, 26 July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 4 Interview with Osaka on the Solomon Taiyo Base, several times June–July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands; interview with Hirara in his office, 4 November 1998, Miyako Island, Okinawa; interview with Areke on the Solomon Taiyo Base several times June–August 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 5 Interview with Hirara in his office, 4 November 1998, Miyako Island, Okinawa. 6 Interview with Malaita in the Fisheries Division offices, 11 August 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands. 7 Interview with Areke on the Solomon Taiyo Base at Noro, several times June–August 1999. Dyer (1988) found that spatial organization of different groups on board a Japanese surimi trawler was designed to minimize workplace conflict by separating hierarchically demarcated groups. 8 Interview with Ilangana at Agnes Lodge 3 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. 9 Interview with Ikema in his home on Irabu Island, 5 November 1998, Okinawa. 10 Interview with Lambi in the Noro Town Office, 19 July 1999, Solomon Islands. 11 Interview with Shitajima in his home, 2 November 1998, Sarahama, Irabu Island, Okinawa. 12 Interview with Osaka on the Solomon Taiyo Base, several times June–July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 13 Interview with Areke on the Solomon Taiyo Base at Noro, several times June–August 1999, Solomon Islands. 14 Interview with Ilangana at Agnes Lodge, 3 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. In Pijin the word ‘kilim’ is used for ‘to bash’ and does not usually mean actual murder, which is ‘kilim finis’. 15 Interview with Ikema in his home, 5 November 1998, Sarahama, Irabu Island, Okinawa. 16 Interview with Lambete at Agnes Lodge in Munda, several times June–August 1999, Solomon Islands. 17 Interview with Nagahama at his house on Irabu Island, 6 November 1998, Okinawa. 18 Interview with Shitajima in his home, 2 November 1998, Sarahama, Irabu Island, Okinawa. 19 Interview with Hirara in his office, 4 November 1998, Miyako Island, Okinawa. 20 Interview with Kindu at Agnes Lodge, 6 July 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. 21 Interview with Ndunde in his home, 13 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. 22 Interview with Rarumana at her home in a baitfishing village, 31 May 1999, Solomon Islands. 23 Interview with Kolumbangara in the office of the NGO she worked for, 13 May 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands. 24 Interview with Ndunde in his home, 13 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands.

Notes

203

25 Interview with Roviana at Noro Town Council, 15 June 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 26 Interview with Rendova in his home, 10 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. 27 Interview with Kolumbangara in the office of the NGO she worked for, 13 May 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands. 28 Interview with Ikema in his home, 5 November 1998, Sarahama, Irabu Island, Okinawa. 29 Interview with Yokohama on the Solomon Taiyo Base, 15 July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 30 Interview with Shitajima in his home, 2 November 1998, Sarahama, Irabu Island, Okinawa. 31 Interview with Osaka on the Solomon Taiyo Base, several times June–July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 32 Captain Honda (1979) published a small lexicon of useful words and phrases in Solomons Pijin, Sarahama language, and Japanese for the use of fishermen. This was made up of Sarahama language and Solomons Pijin, with a handful of Japanese English loan-words thrown in for good measure. For example, the English word ‘girl’ in Pijin is pronounced ‘gel’ or ‘geli’, but as it came into Okinawan Pijin via Japanese is pronounced ‘gya¯ru’. In Pijin the word ‘swim’ is used for personal washing, but in Okinawan Pijin the word ‘sawa’ (shower) is used. Pijin’s bia (beer) is Okinawan Pijin’s bı¯ru. The Pijin word for ‘is’ or ‘exists’ is ‘stap’ (stop), as in ‘Wea John, hem stap lo hia?’ (Where is John, is he here?). In Okinawan Pijin the stap is replaced by ‘stay’. In Pijin the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are used similarly to the ways they are used in English, but in Okinawan Pijin different English is used – ‘number one’ for good, ‘number ten’ for bad, with grades in between. Hviding (1996: 324) gave some detail on the syncretist grammar and syntax of Okinawan Pijin and called it a nautical pidgin as defined by Roger Keesing. According to former fisherman Hirara (interviewed in his office on Miyako Island, 4 November 1998) the Okinawan fishermen not only invented a new language, they gave reefs and islands in Solomon Islands that resembled reefs and islands in Miyako the same names as the Miyako places, rather than learning and using the local names. In some cases local fishermen working with them came to call these places by the Miyako names as well. He thought this might not be desirable and likened it to ‘brainwashing’ (sen nou). Just as Solomon Islander power to negotiate work practices increased as their ratio to Okinawan crew increased, the dominance of the Okinawan fishermen’s language waned as their numbers dwindled. Okinawan Pijin and Sarahama language were still used on the fleet in 1999, but by then Okinawans needed also to have a working knowledge of Solomons Pijin. 33 Elder village woman Kazukuru (interviewed 12 June 1999 in her home in Munda) and Kindu (interviewed 6 July 1999 at Agnes Lodge in Munda) said they liked Okinawan Pijin, Kindu called it ‘a very nice Pijin’. Gizo (interviewed 22 April 1999 at the Forum Fisheries Agency in Honiara) said he and his male relatives sometimes spoke to each other in Okinawan Pijin as a joke. Village elder Rendova (interviewed 10 June 1999 in his home in Munda) described Okinawan Pijin as a ‘rubbish language’. 34 Interview with Ilangana at Agnes Lodge, 3 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. 35 Interview with Tôriike at the Okinawa Rest House, July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 36 Interview with the Operations Manager at the Solomon Taiyo Base, several times June–July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 7 Japanese managers 1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 2003 IIS annual research workshop, where Elaine Jeffreys, Bronwen Dalton, Ilaria Vanni, and Guo Yingjie provided helpful comments. The ideas were further refined during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National

204

2 3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Notes

University, and presented again at the 2005 biennial conference of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia in Adelaide, South Australia, then later submitted as a written paper to the online publication Japan Focus. For an example of how important such university contacts were in Japanese fisheries businesses operating in Singapore in the first half of the twentieth century, see Shimizu (1997). Japanese manager Shibuya had worked in Solomon Taiyo twice, once as Financial Manager, then as General Manager in the 1990s, and also been posted more than once to the Overseas Operations section in the Tokyo office that dealt with Solomon Taiyo, among other joint ventures. Later he was promoted to Department Chief (bucho¯) of a central planning and finance department. This reputation has been damaged by the 2006 exposure of Japan’s long-running underreporting of southern bluefin tuna catch while being a dominant player calling for ecological responsibility within the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna. See CCSBT (n.d.) and AFP (2006). Interview with Ndunde at his home, 13 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. Fisheries Division (Honiara): RF 8/2, correspondence; Fisheries Division (Honiara): F 8/6, correspondence. Interview with Ilangana at Agnes Lodge, 3 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. Interview with Sydney at his home office, September 1999, Sydney, Australia. Interview with Chicago at the Noro Town Council, 23 June 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. Interview with Baru at Noro Primary School, 16 July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. Interview with Customs employee Kavachi at Noro Town Council, 21 June 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. Interview with Western Province government employee Ulawa at Noro Town Council, 21 June 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. Interview with Investment Corporation of Solomon Islands (ICSI) employee Rennell in the ICSI office, 13 August 1999, Honiara. Interview with senior public servant Waghena in his office, 4 May 1999, Honiara. Interview with ICSI manager Maramasike and Ministry of Finance manager Borokua in the ICSI office, 10 August 1999, Honiara. Interview with former Solomon Taiyo manager Kukum at Noro Town Council, 28 July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara): EL/3.10, Solomon Taiyo correspondence, letter to authors of the FFA report, dated 28 September 1995. Interviews with former politician Ranonga at Prince Henry Hospital, June 1997, Sydney and Solomon Islander academic Utupua at the Australian National University, 3 July 1998. Interview with Australian accountant Sydney in his home, April 1999, East Ryde, New South Wales, and Australian accountant Melbourne in the Solomon Taiyo office, June 1999, Honiara. Interviews with Okubo in Solomon Taiyo offices several times April–July 1999, Honiara and Noro, Solomon Islands. I have elsewhere discussed Solomon Islanders’ aversion to domination by foreigners as an aspect of the identity relations of Solomon Taiyo (Barclay 2004). Interview with Bougainville at Noro Town Council, 22 June 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. Interview with Choiseul at his home 20 May 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands; interview with Roviana at Noro Town Council several times June–July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. Interview with Panatina at the office of the Young Women’s Christian Association, 23 April 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands; interview with Bellona at the office of the Development Services Exchange, 29 April 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands.

Notes

205

25 Interview with Borukua and Maramasike at office of the Investment Corporation of Solomon Islands, 10 August 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands. 26 Interview with Nakachi in the Fisheries Promotion Section office at Sarahama, 10 November 1998, Irabu Island, Okinawa. 27 Interview with Shibuya in Maruha Head Office in O¯ temachi, January 1999, Tokyo, Japan. 28 For further details on the cost structure of Solomon Taiyo see Chapter 4 and Barclay and Wakabayashi (2000). 29 Interview with Osaka on the Solomon Taiyo Base several times June–July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 30 Interview with Ikema in his home, 5 November 1998, Irabu Island, Okinawa. 31 For further explanation of the role of modernness in ethnic identity using the example of Solomon Taiyo’s Okinawan fishermen see Barclay (2006). 32 For further explanation of the lack of profitability of Solomon Taiyo see Chapter 4 and Barclay and Wakabayashi (2000). 33 Fisheries Division (Honiara): RF 8/2, correspondence, letter dated 3 February 1997; Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara): EL/3.2, Solomon Taiyo correspondence, letter dated 1 August 1994. 34 Interview with Osaka on the Solomon Taiyo Base several times June–July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. 35 Interview with Shibuya in Maruha Head Office in O¯ temachi, January 1999, Tokyo, Japan. 36 Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara): EL/3.10, Solomon Taiyo correspondence. 37 Interview with Tôriike, at the Okinawa Rest House, 26 July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands. US consumer protests about tuna-harvesting methods that kill dolphins focused on drift netting rather than purse seining, and also were related to the locations fish were caught, because in some areas dolphins school with tuna and therefore are killed when tuna is caught, whereas in other areas dolphins do not school with tuna to the same extent. 38 Interview with Shibuya in Maruha Head Office in O¯ temachi, January 1999, Tokyo, Japan.

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Index

ACP xviii, 76, 97 ambiguous 7, 19, 22, 47, 65, 184 ambivalence about modernity 7, 22, 34–5, 38, 45, 47, 70–1, 140, 142, 182–4, 186–7, 194n5 anti-modernism 35; see also counter-modernism arabushi xviii, 103, 106, 189–90; production 91–3, sales 98–9; Soltai 119; workers 113; see also katsuobushi backwardness 7, 22–7, 194n4, 194n5; Japanese 177, 185; Okinawans 44–6, 55–8, 143, 145, 152, 157; Solomon Islanders 66, 72, 142 baitfishery 77, 80–7, 124–8, 148, 155, 167–8, 175–7, 190, 196n12, 196n14, 196n15, 196n18, 196n19, 202n22; see also bouke-ami Balibar, Etienne 8–12 barbarian 22, 42, 56, 58, 60, 73, 185 Blackness xiv, 7, 12, 19, 28–37, 42–4, 50, 61–6, 130, 151–7, 202n58 bouke-ami 82, 83; see also baitfishery Bourdieu, Pierre xi, 9–18, 58, 159 cannery xvi, 3–4, 74–136, 162–91, 197n31, 198n50, 199n58 capitalism i, x, 3, 6, 10, 40, 72, 193n4; and identities 16, 30, 49–50, 55, 65–6, 131, 135, 140–2, 154, 163, 166, 168–9, 177–8, 184–6; and modernization theories 21–9; and noncapitalist societies 36–9, 40, 72; in Solomon Islands 5, 13, 62–4, 67, 71, 110, 139 Christianity 17, 28, 35, 39, 61, 65, 71–5, 199n5, 200n11, 204n24 civilization 28–9, 42–4, 50, 60, 65–6, 169, 183; being un/civilized 28–9, 42–4, 50, 60, 65–6, 159, 169, 183 class/social strata 16, 35, 140; and identity 9–10, 17–18, 20, 34; Japan 47–8; Okinawa 53, 55, 143, 158–60; and social change 23, 45, 146; Solomon Islands 65, 141; Solomon Taiyo and 130–1, 183–5 coercion 12–13, 32, 38, 46, 73, 150; see also Guha collaboration 12–14, 19, 128, 141; see also Guha colonialism 59–64, 128, 133–9, 168, 173,

186–9; and identity 7, 13, 17–18, 22, 27–9, 32–4, 64–7, 71, 121, 135, 138, 186, 194n4; Japan 42–50, 60, 76, 144, 185; Okinawa 55–8, 145; Solomon Islands 61–4, 67–8, 71–2, 77, 88, 100, 111, 118, 129, 133, 137, 157–9, 168–85; see also decolonisation, imperialism, neocolonial, postcolonial cosmopolitanism 19, 22, 26, 186; Okinawan 143, 146–7, 150, 154, 157–8, 161 Cotonou Agreement xviii, 64, 76, 97; see also Lomé Convention counter-modernism 7, 25, 29, 32–5, 182–6, 194n5; see also postmodern cultural capital 31, 40, 71; definitions of 15–16; and identities 19; Japanese 45, 51; modernness as 7, 23, 27, 32, 68, 72, 129, 140, 157, 184 culture xi, xviii, 13, 23, 26, 127, 142–9, 156, 170; and identity 11, 17, 19–20, 31–2, 40–7, 135, 142; Japanese 44–7, 51, 171–2, 194n2; modernity as 22, 38–9; modernization and 29–30, 35–9, 48, 67, 123; Okinawan 53, 56, 146–7, 154; Solomon Islands’ 61, 64, 67, 70, 75, 118, 123, 135–41, 150, 154, 177 decolonisation 1, 22, 28–9, 34, 64–5, 129; see also colonialism development (economic) i, x, xiii, 8, 182, 186–8, 194n6; developmentalism (and identity) 6, 23, 26–32, 34, 65, 181; Japan and 44, 46, 49, 163–4, 166, 169, 173–4, 176, 181; Okinawa and 55, 58; Solomon Islands and 38, 64–75, 110, 120–39, 151–7, 174; theories of 24–6; see also underdevelopment discourse xii, 20, 73–4, 161; definitions of 15–17; gender 67; modernist 7, 22, 26–34, 40, 56, 64–5, 71, 135, 139, 141, 145, 152, 154, 157, 183, 194n6; national 5, 44–5, 63, 166–9, 173–5, 178, 181, 184 dominance 12–19, 39, 121, 129, 136, 203n32, 204n21; dominant identity 19–21, 30–34, 40, 46–7, 139, 183–4, 194n6; by Japanese 46–7, 53, 55, 57, 102, 122, 133, 143, 164, 175, 177, 186; by Okinawans 150, 152–3, 163, 185; by Whites xii, 34, 64–5, 67; see also Guha

Index 219 double consciousness, 33–8, 71–2, 183, 194n5 dual society/economy 38–41, 70–3, 141–2, 183–4, 187 eastern islands see western vs eastern islands ecological un/sustainability; and Japanese fisheries 163–4, 166, 170, 185, 204n4; and modernization 7, 25, 34–5; and Solomon Taiyo 78, 81, 84, 102, 162, 165, 167–8, 170, 181, 184; see also environment EEZ xviii, 1, 76, 179–80 egalitarianism 20, 24, 26, 30, 47, 150, 161, 186, 194n4 environment 22, 97, 107, 164, 170, 177–8; friendly products 96, 180; impacts on 5, 173, 187; pollution 154; protection of 154, 102; Solomon Taiyo and 81, 101, 123, 166, 168, 185, 197n29 Erikson, E.H. 15, 17 ethics xii, xiii ethnicity i, xi, 1; definitions of 6–7, 10–11, 194n1; ‘ethic tensions’ 3, 121; Japanese 42–9, 185; modernism and 23, 27–8, 34, 140, 186, 205n31; Okinawan 53–5, 58, 60, 72, 143, 147, 151, 158–61; power and 14–15, 17; Solomon Islander 70, 123–4, 129; Solomon Taiyo and 114, 131–2, 152, 154, 156–7; and work ethic 138; see also race European xiv, 74, 89, 124; colonialism i, 1, 9, 11–12, 18, 28–9, 32–4, 38, 60–3, 67–8, 129, 138, 186; EU as export destination xviii, 3, 64, 76, 91, 97, 100–2, 191; ideas in Japanese nationalism 44–8; modernism 22, 27, 28, 35, 37, 42, 49, 51, 65, 72, 185 FAD 80–1, 87 Fifi’i, Jonathon xiii, 40, 63–7, 71 Fijian 3–4, 26, 77, 114, 122, 132–3 Filipino/a 4, 97, 103, 114–15, 132–3, 153 foreign; bodies 3–5, 7, 94, 157; exchange 1, 77, 80, 104–5, 110–11, 164, 176, 198n39; fishing fleets 76, 110, 180; investment/employees (Solomon Islander attitudes to) 4–5, 105, 110, 121–2, 125, 127, 129, 132–7, 140, 142, 155, 163, 169, 172–3, 180–8, 204n21; Japanese ideas about 45, 48, 51, 58 frog perspective 16, 19, 21, 34, 141, 202n58 gender 10, 14, 19–20, 27, 67–70, 96, 114, 124–32, 184 Goffman, Irving 15, 17–19 Guadalcanal 3, 63, 70, 165, 191; Guale 114, 121 Guha, Ranajit 12–13, 33, 128 habitus xiv, 10, 14–16, 18, 20, 31, 58, 130–1 Hage, Ghassan xi, 11, 15, 19–20, 27, 29, 186 hegemony 12–13, 17, 33, 42, 176 Hughes, Anthony V. 108–9, 121, 198n44 identity/ies; definitions of 28–32; development

and 6–8, 183–6; evil 17, 20, 45, 57–8, 72, 126; Japanese 42–51, 162–3, 166–72, 178, 194n5; Okinawan 54–8, 143–7, 151, 156–8, 195n12, 205n31; Solomon Islander 5, 60–73, 120–2, 129–35, 139–42, 204n21; writing about xi–xiv; see also class, ethnicity, gender, nationalism, race illegal fishing 164, 167, 179 impact, negative 127, 172 imperialism 24; cultural 170; European 47; Japanese 53, 130 indigenous 18, 22, 30, 32–3, 35, 37–8, 46, 63, 65, 67, 69, 73, 175, 183, 196n16; indigenized modernism 35–6, 45, 48, 71, 184, 186 Irabu island xiii, 137, 143–6, 152, 156, 159, 176; see also Miyako island groups 62–3, 66–7, 114, 122–3, 132, 141, 184 Japanese; joint ventures x, 1, 76–7; see also identity; management kastom 64–5, 71, 123, 157, 159, 183, 195n14 katsuobushi xviii, 74–6, 98–9, 144; see also arabushi Kazukuru 88, 168, 196n21, 197n24 Keesing, Roger 17, 38, 70–1, 203n32 keigo 159 language xii–xiv, xix, 16, 19, 31, 41, 66, 94; barrier 109, 171–2; diversity in Melanesia 26, 63; in Okinawan identity 53–5, 151, 158–9, 203n32, 203n33; see also Pijin localization 4, 80, 87, 97, 105, 114–15, 133, 139–40, 150, 153, 181, 186, 188; see also indigenous Lomé Convention xviii, 1, 64, 97; see also Cotonou Agreement Malaita 13, 17, 63, 66–8, 70–1, 75, 114, 121–2, 132, 159, 189, 191 Mamaloni, Solomon 13–17, 77–8, 166, 190, 191 management xiv, 4, 50, 80, 196–9, 102–9, 112–16, 124, 128, 131–49, 153–85 marketing 97–100, 115, 118, 122 Maruha 1, 3, 97, 100, 103–8, 119, 143, 160, 162, 176–80, 191, 198–9; see also Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ Miyako xiii, 54, 58, 143–7, 151–3, 203n31 modernism as teleological worldview 8–41; see also ethnicity; modernism and modernity as social condition 21–7 modernization 6–7, 27, 29, 33–8, 46–7; Japanese 51, 163–9, 176, 180–8; Okinawan 55; Solomon Islander 64–71, 123–42; theories of 23–6, 29–31, 39 modernness 7, 27–34, 177, 184–5; Asian 129; Japanese 44–9, 181; Okinawan 60, 205n31; Solomon Islander 64–73, 140–2 multinational x, 39, 41, 71, 108, 119, 129, 135, 160, 166

220

Index

Munda x, xvi–xvii, 68, 87, 118, 123, 130, 139, 168 nanpo¯ 144 nationalism xi, 6–8, 10–12, 15, 19–20, 22, 25, 27–9, 31, 33–5, 157; Japanese 11, 42, 44–50, 53, 55–6, 58, 72, 159, 184–5, 194n1; nationality 5, 97, 114, 132, 173, 183–4, 188, 199n52; resource 118; Solomon Islander 3, 5, 63, 71, 120–2, 130, 132–5, 139–42, 165, 180; women and 36, 48–9; see also ethnicity, modernism and Native 14, 18, 57–8, 63–4 neoclassical economics 24–5, 29, 30–1 neocolonial 5, 128; see also colonialism Noro x, xvi–xvii, 3–4, 81, 88–138, 163, 169–70, 173, 182, 190, 197n24, 197n29, 197n32, 199n52 OFCF xix, 106, 115 Okinawan see identity; language; women Orientalism 9, 30, 51, 56, 163, 166, 173, 181, 186 payao see FAD persuasion 12–13, 17, 32, 38, 73, 78, 186; see also Guha Pijin, Solomons xiii, xviii–xix, 33, 63, 68, 81, 124, 159–60, 171, 202n14, 203n32, 203n33 pole-and-line 76, 78–82, 87–9, 96–7, 146–7, 153, 167, 178, 180, 190 pollution 86–7, 100, 123, 182 postcolonial 15–17, 35, 64, 121–35, 163, 181, 184–6; see also colonialism postmodern 9, 15, 27, 194n5 power xi, 7, 9, 188; disempowered 126, 129–30, 141; in identity 12–35, 183; Japanese 49, 51, 58, 85; Solomon Islander 62–4, 72–3, 132, 139, 203 primitive 9, 22, 25, 26–9; Japanese (ideas about) 44; and Okinawan identity 56, 58, 72, 143; and Solomon Islander identity 61, 65, 157, 177 profitability 80, 102–11, 118, 121, 123, 138, 153–5, 170, 176–8, 180, 186, 198n37, 198n39, 198n42, 205n32 purse seine 81, 87–9, 91–2, 96, 107, 116, 146–7, 190, 205n37; dispute with US 178–80 race xi, xiv, 10–12, 15, 19–20, 27–9, 34, 157, 193n3, 195n18; Japanese ideas on 42, 44–7, 50, 53, 178, 194n1; Solomon Islanders and 61, 63–4, 66, 71, 129–30, 183 resistance 12–14, 18–19; Okinawan 58; Solomon Islander 64–5, 67–8, 128–30, 141, 183–4; see also Guha; weapons of the weak Roviana 62, 67, 81, 84, 87, 88, 118, 122, 149 Ryûkyû 42, 45, 51–8, 143, 146, 152, 161, 194n12 Sainsbury’s 1–4, 96–7, 102, 119, 168

Sarahama 81, 143–59, 171, 203n32 SIDT xix, 173, 174 Sipolo, Jully xvii, 66, 70, 123, 129, 155–6, 182 skipjack 1, 74–84, 92–8, 107, 127, 167, 180–1 Solomon Blue 1, 96, 123, 127, 176 Solomon Islands see identity; nationalism Solomon Islands business environment 3, 97, 107, 177, 178 Soltai xviii, 3, 119, 174 stigma 12, 15–19, 130; of non-modernness 27, 31, 40–1, 194n5; Okinawan 45, 57–8, 145–6, 152, 154, 157, 185, 194n12; Solomon Islander 64–6, 195n17 subordination 12–15, 28, 55–6, 175, 183–5; Japanese 47; Okinawan 54–6, 143; Solomon Islander 61–2, 65–6, 70, 121, 126–42, 148, 156–7, 172; subordinate identity 15–21, 30–4, 40–1; see also Guha symbolic violence 23, 31–3, 37, 40, 45, 57–61, 128–9, 152; definition of 15–19 Taiyo¯ Gyogyo¯ xix, 1, 77–8, 87, 99, 102–9, 118, 128, 176–7, 180, 189–90 Tara Kabutaulaka, Tarcisius 18 Third World 163, 166, 181; identity 29–31, 34, 49 Third Worldism 148–9, 134, 141 Tokuyo¯ Gyogyo¯ 86 underdevelopment 23–4, in modernism (identity) 27–34, 181–7, 194n6 United Nations Law of the Sea 76, 118 victim identification 13, 129–30, 141, 183 Wakabayashi Yoshikazu 144, 147 wantok xix, 70, 114, 132, 139 weapons of the weak 128, 141, 175, 186; see also resistance West, the xviii, 9, 21–4, 26–9, 34–8, 42, 47, 74, 90, 96, 127, 186, 194n6; Japan and 42–6, 49–51, 72, 108, 162–4, 166, 180–1; Solomon Islands and 63, 65, 175 Western Province 102, 111, 114, 116, 125, 135, 155, 170, 190 western vs eastern islands 61–2, 86–8, 195n17 Westernization 3, 5–6, 48; of women 48, 69 whistle blowing 109, 128, 145, 184 Whiteness xi–xii, xiv, 7, 10–12, 15, 19–21, 27–8, 30–8, 42–51, 194n4, 194n5; and Japaneseness 58, 72, 162–77, 181–6; and Solomon Islanders 60–8, 123, 129, 135 women 10, 15, 36–7, 194n4, 195n18; as cannery workers 113, 198n50; employed at Solomon Taiyo 113–14, 117–18, 120, 130–2, 176, 184; Japanese 47–8, 194n3, and nation 36; Okinawan 57; (local) in relationships with Okinawan fishermen 150, 155–7; and perceptions of vice in Noro 124–7, 130, 155 work ethic 16, 46, 63, 136, 153, 177, 194n4