Critical Mass: Charting a Course for Japanese Diaspora Archaeology
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Critical Mass: Charting a Course for Japanese Diaspora Archaeology Koji Lau-Ozawa 1 & Douglas Ross 2 Accepted: 20 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Archaeology of the Japanese diaspora has reached “critical mass” in its disciplinary development, and there is a need to document the current state of this burgeoning subfield of historical archaeology. In this introduction we present a summary of the history of the Japanese diaspora and an overview of scholarly literature in related disciplines. The papers in this special issue reflect both current trends in archaeological scholarship and point in new methodological and theoretical directions. A concluding forum by three historians of the Japanese diaspora offers a critical reflection on the assembled papers and places them within a wider academic context. Keywords Diaspora . Transnationalism . Japanese . Historiography
Introduction This issue of the IJHA came together as a result of an increase in archaeological research on the Japanese diaspora. Its ultimate origin was a symposium called “Charting the Emerging Field of Japanese Diaspora Archaeology” at the 2018 Society for Historical Archaeology conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, organized by current editors Koji Lau-Ozawa and Douglas Ross. This symposium was accompanied by a workshop on the identification and dating of Japanese ceramics, led by Douglas Ross and Renae Campbell. The concurrence and success of both events made it clear that the time had come to produce a formal record of the current state of this rapidly expanding
* Koji Lau-Ozawa [email protected] Douglas Ross [email protected]
1
Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Main Quad, Building 50, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
2
Albion Environmental, Inc., 1414 Soquel Ave, Suite 205, Santa Cruz, CA 95062, USA
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
subfield of historical archaeology. That is, it was apparent the field of Japanese diaspora archaeology had reached a sort of “critical mass.” While the list of contributors to the 2018 symposium differs somewhat from the current collection of articles, this issue retains much of that event’s scope and diversity. We would like to open this special issue with a few words about the concept of diaspora. Diaspora has been defined and characterized in various ways, but as used here refers to a social condition or process involving a dispersal of people from an original homeland to two or more destinations over multiple generations, who maintain ongoing physical and/or psychological relationships with that homeland and a self-conscious identity abroad (Butler 2001). As argued by Nobuko Adachi (2006b), and as is apparent in the historical outline presented below, Japanese migrants qualify as members of diasporic communities. While some scholars have cautioned against the term diaspora on political or conceptual grounds when applied to Japanese migration (e.g., Azuma 2005: 219; Tsuda 2012, 2016), elsewhe
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