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Rasa Island: What Industrialization To Remember and Forget
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
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Rasa Island, a small, remote coral atoll of Okinawa, was once a robust company town of Rasa Phosphate Industry Inc. Now abandoned and forgotten, the barren island nonetheless tells a rich story of Japan's industrialization, a counter-narrative to the problematically simplified and celebratory history provided at the Meiji Industrial Revolution Sites recently inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. By using Rasa Island and critical heritage studies scholarship, this article examines the place of “industrial heritage” in post-industrial societies and what kind of heritage is performed at Japan's World Heritage sites.
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References
Notes
1 Bernhard Welsch, “Was Marcus Island Discovered by Bernardo de La Torre in 1543?,” The Journal of Pacific History 39, no. 1 (2004): 109-22.
2 Takara Kurayoshi, “The Senkaku Islands Problem as Seen Through Okinawan History,” Challenges for Japan-China Relations and Okiawa (March 2013), 100-101.
3 Hiraoka Akitoshi, Ahodori to teikoku nihon no kakudai (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 2012), 70-83.
4 Jimmy Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1994). According to Hiraoka Akitoshi, seabirds and their excrements also drove Japan's colonial expansion to the South Pacific. See Hiraoka, Ahodori to teikoku nihon no kakudai.
5 Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Michael Monteón, Chiele in the Nitrate Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
6 Sato Hiroyuki, “Tsunetō Noritaka to hiryō kōbutsu chōsasho,” Chishitsu Nyūsu, no. 278 (Feb 1986): 36, 39.
7 Tsunetō Noritaka, Yo to rinkō no tanken (Tokyo: Tokyodō, 1936), 26.
8 Tsunetō Noritaka, Rasatō shinkei (Rasa Rinkō, 1919), no page number.
9 Rasa kōgyō kabushikigaisha shashi henshūsha, Rasa kyōgyō hachijûnenshi (Rasa kōgyō, 1993), 18-23; and Hiraoka, 194-5. Tsunetō's career pattern resembles that of Takamine Jōkichi, internationally renowned chemist-cum-entrepreneur. Takamine worked for the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce before he established Tokyo Artificial Fertilizer Company in 1877, the first superphosphate works to produce chemical fertilizer in Japan. The company changed its name to Japan Artificial Fertilizer Company in 1910 and became one of the largest chemical companies in Japan, Nissan Chemical Industries. Takamine went on to become one of the most successful Japanese entrepreneurs in the U.S. with the successful isolation and production of adrenaline and amylase that he patented.
10 Tsunetō, Rasatō shinkei, 19-21; and Hiraoka, 196.
11 Tsunetō, Rasatō shinkei, 15.
12 Tsunetō, Rasatō shinkei, 33-39.
13 Yamada Gentarō, Rasa tō no ippan (no publisher information, 1911), 4.
14 Rasa kōgyō hachijûnenshi, 36; and Hiraoka, 196-8.
15 Ishikawa Ichirō, “Superphosphate Industry in Japan,” Journal of Chemical Industry 24, no. 281 (July 1921): 63.
16 Chōfûsō tsurikyaku, Kaubeki kabu nijuunana shu (Tokyo: Imai sennosuke, 1920).
17 Rasa kōgyō hachijûnenshi, 46-8.
18 Rasa kōgyō hachijûnenshi, 59, 84, 92, 95.
19 Rasatō shinkei, 18-9.
20 Rasatō shinkei, 46, 62.
21 Rasatō shinkei, 48.
22 Rasatō shinkei, 52.
23 Rasatō shinkei, 73.
24 Morita Yoshio, Rasatō shubitai ki: gyokusai wo kakugoshita heishitacih no ningen dorama (Tokyo: Kōjinsha, 2011), 96, 133.
25 Morita, Rasatō shubitai ki. The original was published in 1995 by Kawade shobō.
26 UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuiding and Coal Mining,” [last accessed September 28, 2016
27 Takazane Yasunori, “Should ‘Gunkanjima’ Be a World Heritage site? The Forgotten Scars of Korean Forced Labor,” Japan Focus Vol 13, issue 28 (July 13, 2015).
28 China and advocates for former American and British POWs also complained about the nomination of these sites to World Heritage without acknowledging this negative page in history. William Underwood, “History in a Box: UNESCO and the Framing of Japan's Meiji Era,” Japan Focus Vol. 13, Issues 26, Number 1 (June 2015).
29 “Shokasonjuku Academy,” Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Kyushu-Yamaguchi and Related Areas. [last accessed March 20. 2016]. This webpage has been replaced by a new web page created by the Japanese government's Department of Industrial Heritage under Cabinet Secretariat.
30 Department of Industrial Heritage, Cabinet Secretariat, “Shokasonjuku Academy,” Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution. Last accessed on Sept 11, 2016. http://www.japansmeijiindustrialrevolution.com/en/site/hagi/component05.html
31 Underwood, “History in a Box.”
32 Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London and NY: Routledge, 2006), 3.
33 UNESCO, “Tomioka Silk Mill and Related Sites,” World Heritage Centre, last accessed Sept 28, 2016, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1449
34 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (London: Little, Brown, and Company, 1975, 1995).
35 James Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Scientific Tradition (Yale University Press, 1993); and Hiromi Mizuno, Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 2009).
36 For example, Hiroshige Tetsu, Kagaku no shakaishi (Tokyo: Chûō kōronsha, 1973).
37 ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4. See also Joel Mokyr, “The Second Industrial Revolution, 1870-1914,” in The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
38 Barbara Molony, Technology and Investment: The Prewar Japanese Chemical Industry (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990), 2-3.
39 Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, “33 Heritage Constellations of Industrial Modernization” (2007) and “Zoku 33 Heritage Constellations of Industrial Modernization” (2008). The quote is in the first page of both 2007 and 2008 reports.
40 Sangyō isan kokumin kaigi, “Sangyō kokka nihon no genten: ‘Meiji nihon no sangyō kakumei isan’ o jisedai he,” Nyûsu letaa 6: 4.
41 Smith, Uses of Heritage, 39.
42 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), xv.
43 Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches (NY: Routledge, 2013), 81.
44 Harrison, Heritage, 89.
45 Forty-nine percent, to be precise. See UNESCO, “World Heritage List Statistics,” World Heritage Centre, last accessed December 12, 2016.
46 David Lowenthal, “The Heritage Crusade and Its Contradictions,” in Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States, eds. Max Page and Randall Mason (NY: Routledge, 2004), 14.
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