ABSTRACT
Few people know the prewar presence of Japanese settlers in Papua and New Guinea.( 1 ) Only elders of the villages and islands or the descendants of the migrants, can tell the full story. Some Japanese activities were also recorded in official reports or in literature, but only when their presence annoyed the western colonisers or pleased Japanese nationalists. The other exception was the report of a curious western anthropologist who happened to hear about the Japanese from New Guinean villagers. Probably because of the lack of written materials, this small but important settlement did not attract academic interest. It is important because the settlers were different from other Japanese in other South Pacific islands or in Australia. Those in Papua and New Guinea had independent business interests, unlike others who were mostly labourers for European entrepreneurs. Their community was unique because it functioned like a small Japanese colony within the western colonial structure. In my previous article [Iwamoto, 1994], I attempted to construct a overall framework in the analysis of the settlement which existed from the early 20th century to the outbreak of the Pacific War. I tried to present the reality of the migrants by contrasting the nationalist perceptions of both Australian officials and Japanese nanshin-ron advocates. In this article, I shall explain how such a settlement started and developed, analysing its implications in the contexts of Japanese social history and the colonial history of Australia and Papua and New Guinea. I focus on the period from 1890 to 1914 because the settlement was most prosperous in this period, showing sharp contrast to the period after the outbreak of World War One in which the settlement began to decline.
