ABSTRACT
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’.
