Japanese
immigrants in search of pearls:
a Japanese hand-made photo album captures life
in Queensland in the 1890s
In 2010, I received a note to say I was awarded a
Fellowship to undertake research in the National Library’s Asian Collections,
access to one of the richest sources of materials on Japan’s relations with
Australia, (and the region more broadly) dating back to the 19th century. My
primary interest was to examine materials, in Japanese, about Australia, who
wrote them, what did they write, what did they ‘see’? I was looking for the
historical origins of the Australia-Japan trade in natural resources but also ‘more’.
What that ‘more’ was I hoped, included details of how Japanese people viewed Australia,
what connections were there prior to the well-documented economic partnership. At
the time, something was known of the ‘pearl divers’ who came to Australia particularly
Thursday Island and Broome, and since then, more stories are coming to light.
This post sets out the foundation of one of my current
projects that, without the resources of the National Library of Australia,
would not have happened. The discovery of the album has taken me to archives
and libraries in Japan where I have since tracked down the provenance of the ‘anonymous’
photos, and which has opened up a whole new area of inquiry into Japanese ‘migration
societies’ and early colonial ambitions of the Japanese ruling elite. As we
unfold more stories about the indentured labourers sent to Australia from
Japan, we are also looking into who brought them here, their motivations, their
actions. In his report, Watanabe detailed an encounter with Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander people, including several words translated into Japanese
language, He documented costs of living of all manner of daily products. The
report is the formal version of his tour; the minutes of the ‘migration
association’ of which he was a member document much deeper insight into the
views and attitudes of the time.
Watanabe in this story, was elected to the Japanese
Parliament in the early 1900s as was Satoh, the self-proclaimed ‘merchant king’
of Thursday Island. The links are deep and complex; the work continues.
It is easy to dismiss this as ‘niche’ history, as
something only a few people would be interested in. But it is much more than that.
As a society, we don’t do history very well. We cannot stop because of ‘other
priorities’. To abandon our past is to ignore our present and dismiss our
future. We each have a role to play in ensuring that does not happen.
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(First written in 2012 as part of the record of the fellowship)
Amidst
the serious business of examining the National Library’s Japanese language
materials written about Australia c. late 19th and early 20th
centuries, several serendipitous moments of pure research magic revealed
themselves over my three-month tenure. One story in particular, retold here,
highlights the value of the collections and how we, as researchers, can use the
resources of the Library to map out some very intriguing stories about
Australia told from a somewhat unanticipated perspective.
A secondary purpose of my research in
examining Japanese writing about an earlier period in Australia was to also try
and assess the visual images of Australia that the Japanese were taking back
with them at the time. Among the expected maps and illustrations in a number of
books and pamphlets I came across a catalogue entry describing an album of
sepia photographs described thus:
Gōshū Hoku-a chihō
shashin (Photographs from Australia [Northern region]),
[Japan: s. n.] , Meiji 27 [1894] [28] p. ; 29 cm.
It consists of sepia
colour photographs, mounted on cardboard papers and bound; cover title,
handwritten in ink; captions on each photographs also hand written in Japanese.
There
is no note of author or photographer, just the captions which give an
indication of the photographer’s journey—Darwin, Northern Territory, Thursday
Island, and other parts of Northern Queensland—and the date on the cover, Meiji
27 [1894] (plus a note that it was a ‘gift’). This was just the sort of record
of images I hoped to find, but I didn’t anticipate the anonymity. With its
provenance uncertain, I began to imagine the circumstances under which the
photos were taken, the captions written (in Japanese), the care with which the
album was made, and the fact that it had survived almost 120 years. Could the
photographer have been someone involved in Northern Queensland, with interests
in the pearling industry? Certainly, there was a nagging familiarity about one
or two of the photos before me. I recalled an image of the pearl divers very
similar to the one in the album.
 |
| The cover of the album |
Although
not strictly part of my brief, I couldn’t resist the urge to find out more
about the photos, maybe solve the puzzle. I started out on Japanese websites
mentioning Thursday Island and names of note in 1894. One prominent Japanese
person at the time was Sato Torajiro (sometimes ‘Satow’). He established a shop
on Thursday Island and was involved in the pearling industry. His story alone
is worth investigating for his role in early Japan-Australia relations. He
eventually returned to Japan and became a politician of some note.
The emerging detective story took me to look up
material written about Sato and the pearling industry on Thursday Island. This
led me to some of the detailed histories of migrants from western Japan (Kinan
chihō imin shiryōshū series) written by Shimizu Akira in the including two
which dealt particularly with Satō
Torajiro. Not expecting them to be there, I looked up
the NLA catalogue anyway. The full series is in the library. I went to
investigate further. While looking for these two documents in the stacks, I
also noted a collection of stories put together to commemorate the year of
friendship anniversaries, 1998. Entitled, Ōsutoraria no
Nihonjin : isseiki o koeru Nihonjin no sokuseki = Japanese in Australia,
1867-1998, it
was edited and overseen by Hosaka Yoshihide.
An initial ‘serendipitous’ breakthrough occurred when I realised
that two illustrations used in a couple of stories were reprints of two of the photos from the album. The first was a
sketch of a photo showing pearlers on a ship, one of whom is fitted out in
diving equipment, including the helmet. He is being watched and assisted by
four other men (p. 21). It illustrates a story told by Jotani Isamu, a pearler
who arrived on Thursday Island in 1936, and returned to Japan in March 1946
after internment. But if the sketch is from the 1894 photo collection, then
this didn’t quite match. There was nothing in the text to indicate the source
of the illustration.
A further article on pages 30-32,
was a short history of sugar cane and Japanese contract labourers, by former UQ
history graduate Murakami Yuichi. The sketch accompanying this article matched
another of the photos from the collection, this time a photo of two labourers
pictured outside their ‘tin shed’ lodgings. A minor breakthrough: the pictures
in this article were sourced to DCS Sissons, a renowned Australian scholar of
early Japan-Australia relations. Sissons wrote the Australian Dictionary of
Biography entry on Sato Torajiro, so I thought I was getting closer to my
answer.
DCS Sissons has left a substantial
collection of his writings to the NLA, and I was planning to peruse them during
the tenure of my HWF. However, the lure proved too strong and I found myself in
the manuscript room, seeking out the Sissons collection (ms 3902). There are
several boxes of materials, but very well archived, to the extent that I
briefly wondered about such collections in the future. With most of us working
electronically these days, there will be little in the way of such archival
treasures. In the material, there was one box of ‘Japanese in
Australia—photographs’ as well as several materials on pearling and Thursday
Island. Feeling a sense of zeroing in on my quarry, I first examined the box of
photographs and there, in a folder in the very first envelope, were photographs
of the sketches, and the annotation on the envelope was ‘Watanabe Tanken
1894’…right date, but not the name I was anticipating. Who was Watanabe, and
why sketches of the very photos I had seen?
On a hunch, I typed in ‘Watanabe tanken’ to the catalogue and the
result was
Gōshū tanken hōkokusho
by Watanabe, Kanjūrō
with
the catalogue description: [Tokyo] Gaimushō Tsūshōkyoku Dai 2-ka, Meiji 27
[1894], 3, 5, 289 p., [11] leaves of plates (3 folded): ill., maps ; 26 cm.
The 11 leaves of plates promised something. The plates
included reproductions, probably lithographs, of the photos from the album.
Indeed, this report was the likely source of Sissons’s illustrations.
One step closer but it was not conclusive proof that
the photos in the album were taken by Watanabe for his report. The librarians
demand a high standard of proof, fortunately. Next step was to find evidence,
something that would indicate the source of the sketches in the report that
hopefully linked them back to the album.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Connecting the illustrations 1: top: the oft-reproduced picture from Sissons; middle: the annotated original photo in Watanabe's album; bottom:the lithographic reproduction in the Watanabe Report
Reading official reports in 19th century
Japanese is not an easy task since such reports are written in a combination of
full-form, pre-modern kanji and katakana. However, on page four of his
introduction we find a comment about him taking a ‘photo machine’, the ‘convenience
of which allowed him to capture aspects of the local conditions’. Further on,
he notes that most of the time on this trip was around Queensland and the
Northern Territory, which matches the captions and images in the album.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Connecting the illustrations 2: the pearl divers
Top:the oft-reproduced Sissons illustration; middle: the original photo with hand-written caption from Watanabe's album; bottom: the lithographic reproduction in Watanabe's report
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So, not 100% proof but as close as one might get.* What
we also appear to have achieved is the discovery of the original photographs of
those reproduced in the Watanabe report which were in turn used by David
Sissons, and then others, using the Sissons’s reproductions. For example, in
box 45 of the Sissons’s manuscripts, there is correspondence between Sissons
and ‘Miss Mays’ the Reader Services Librarian at James Cook University wherein
he forwarded copies of the Watanabe reproductions for use in a library
exhibition; and the prints are used in Sissons’s article in Queensland Heritage (1979, MS 3092, box
2), including the diver and crew (p. 8), the scenic view of Thursday Island (p.
9) and the Japanese club on Thursday Island (looking up from below, p. 15).
*The link has now been made via the record of minutes of the migrant society.
 |
| The minutes from a meeting in 1894 showing evidence of Watanabe's 'gift' of the album, presented at Wakayama University in December 2014. |
The National Parliamentary Library in Japan holds a
copy of the Watanabe report but not any evidence of the photos (according to
the on-line catalogue). The mystery remains however, of how the photos came to
be separated from the report and lodged with the NLA. While the condition of
some photos is poor, and the detail not particularly remarkable, those that do
show detail are worthy of preservation (although my preference would be for the
whole album to be preserved). The three photos of the indigenous men and women
(and young European boy in one), which were made into one image in the final
report, along with the list of local words with Japanese meanings, surely has
heritage value.
Although a temporary sidestep in my main project, the
exercise reiterated two significant points for me as a researcher. The first is
the value of the Asian collection we have in the Library and what it tells us
about how others saw us, particularly in the 1890s as the collection of six
colonies were debating the emerging federation. The Watanabe Report and the
photo album are but one example of a myriad of such materials in the
collection. Part of my work now considers how much about Australia’s emerging social
and political debate might have made it back to a Japanese socio-political
milieu as its leaders were similarly dealing with a ‘new’ world.
The second point of course is that the materials in
our national collection serve as a reminder that Australia’s engagement with
Asia stretches back over many years and in a variety of ways. The value of this
collection cannot be underestimated as our politicians embark on yet another
White Paper on how we might capitalise on the contemporary relationship.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Footnote: There was also the incidental side-discovery
that the late International Relations professor, Sato Seizaburo, occasional
visitor to Australia, was the grandson of Sato Torajiro of Thursday Island
fame—the connection was made in the archives of DCS Sissons.
