Manako Ogawa
Professor,
Ritsumeikan University
Manako Ogawa is a professor of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. She obtained Ph.D. from the University of Hawai‘i with her dissertation, “American Women’s Destiny, Asian Women’s Dignity: Trans-Pacific Activism of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1886-1945.” While publishing articles on topics related to women’s international peace and reform movements in the Journal of World History, Diplomatic History, and various other academic journals in both English and Japanese, she has gradually shifted her academic concerns to the sea and fishing communities, and published books and articles, including Sea of Opportunity: The Japanese Pioneers of the Fishing Industry in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015), and Umi no Tami no Hawai: Hawai no Suisangyo wo Kaitaku shita Nihonjin no Shakaishi (Jimbun Shoin, 2017).
“Tuna, fishing, or nuclear testing: The early cold war dialogue over the exploitation of the central Pacific”
This presentation reveals the collaboration and contestations among Japanese fishermen, the international NGOs, the territorial government of Hawai‘i, and the Federal government in Washington DC over the development of the fishing industry in Hawai‘i from the 1920s to the late 1940s. Through a detailed examination of official archival documents as well as private records of local fisheries-related organizations and the international NGOs, this research highlights the complicated arguments and policies over the role and security/economic implications of the Japanese fishing industry in Hawai‘i from the multi-layered (national, transnational, and international) analytical framing.