The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 8 | Article ID 2508 | Aug 01, 2007

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Fishing. Western, Japanese and Islander Perceptions ofEcology and Modernization in the Pacific

Kate Barclay

Fishing. Western, Japanese and IslanderPerceptions of Ecology and Modernization inthe Pacific

Kate Barclay

Summary

This paper explores conflicting representationsof Japanese fishing practices in a joint venturecompany in the Pacific. Western and Islanderrepresentations frequently included suspicionsthat Japanese management was cheating theirlocal partner and engaging in illegal andecologically destructive fishing practices. Incontrast, Japanese self-identified as as sociallyand ecologically responsible in contrast to thecallous disregard for employment security anddestructive industrial fishing methods used byAmericans. Analysis of these differentperspectives shows underlying conflict aboutwhose development assistance is best, withIslander perspectives demonstratingpostcolonial reactions to their continuedsubordination in the world system. [1]

Introduction

Research on a joint venture tuna fishing andprocessing enterprise based in the SolomonIslands from 1971 to 2000, Solomon Taiyo Ltd.,provides a means to investigate clashingconceptions of identity and modernity. Theanalysis is based on interviews, news mediaand government documents. Japanese self-representations are juxtaposed againstrepresentations by Westerners and Islanders.Both Western and Islander representation ofthe Japanese-owned firm Solomon Taiyo

frequent ly included suspic ions thatmanagement was cheating its local partner, theSolomon Islands government and that thecompany was engaged in i l legal andecologically destructive Japanese/Asian fishingpractices. Representations of Solomon Taiyo tosome extent varied according to whether thecommentator was of Western descent orSolomon Islander, reflecting different relationswith Japan, but in general depicted theJapanese as bringing a ‘bad’ kind of modernityto the Islands. By contrast, Japaneserepresentations of business and fishingpractices contrasted their own socially andecologically responsible behavior withWesterners’ callous disregard for employmentsecurity and destructive industrial fishingmethods. Japanese involvement in SolomonTaiyo was self-identified as a charitable missionfor the economic and social development of theSolomon Islands. Japanese managers sawthemselves as bringing a ‘good’ modernity toSolomon Islands.

Japanese and Western modernities are similarin that they are both capitalist, although thereare also some culturally and historicallycontingent specificities, such as shorter/longertime frames and different attitudes towardsrelationships of obligation. This paper does notaddress the concrete nature of Japanese andWestern modernities, or which might be bestfor Solomon Islands (probably neither, SolomonIslanders’ own modernity would likely be best).Neither does it assess how beneficial thecompany was for Solomon Islands in terms ofmaterial economic development, I havediscussed that elsewhere (Barclay 2000; 2005;forthcoming). The central concern here is the

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subjective aspects of the social interactions ofthe company; specifically to reveal the politicsinforming narratives that view developmentprojects as good or bad because of the ethnicityof the people involved. Narratives that portrayJapanese fisheries as good or bad areinfluenced by the subjective positions of thenarrators, a point that is useful to bear in mindwhen considering contemporary public debatesabout over-fishing and whaling.

The concepts of identity and modernity framethis discussion. Scholars such as Michael Billighave convincingly argued that nation is themost important communal identity in today’sworld (Billig 1995) [2]. National identity is inturn greatly influenced by ideas aboutmodernity. Marshall Berman has shown thatthe aesthetic and literary movements mostusually associated with modernism may begrouped with more materialist movements suchas Marxism and modernization theory as anoverall worldview ordered by a teleologicalstriving for modernity (Berman 1982).Mar ianne Torgovnick ’s work on theappreciation of primitive art demonstrates thatmodernity requires as its flipside the creationof a primitive against which it can be defined(1990), in much the same way as Europerequired the Orient in Edward Said’s seminalwork Orientalism (1978). For their part criticaldevelopment theorists have asserted thatdevelopmentalist discourses, visible inpreoccupat ions with ‘progress ’ and‘ d e v e l o p m e n t ’ — o r t h e i r l a c k — i nrepresentations of peoples, have acted todenigrate peoples identified as underdeveloped(Manzo 1991; Sachs 1997; Escobar 1997;Hanlon 1998). Taken together these apparentlydisparate pieces of social theory build theargument that ideas about modernity have longbeen influencing communal identities,especially nations [3]. The conflictingperspectives on Japanese identity in relation tomodernization and capitalist development infisheries discussed in this paper serve tounderline the contested nature of modernity,

and of histories of modernization.

The identities discussed in this paper aresometimes about race, sometimes nation, andoccasionally about class. Rather than pinning itdown to only ‘race’ or ‘nation’ or ‘ethnicity’, Iprefer to discuss using the umbrella term‘identity’. The terms ‘Japanese’, ‘Asians’‘Solomon Islanders’ and ‘the West’ used in thispaper are inherently problematic, but are themost expedient to enable coherent discussion.‘European-descent English speaking people’were usually referred to by Solomon Islandersas ‘European’ (although it included mostlyAustralians and New Zealanders), or localterms such as arai kwaio or tie vaka. In thispaper ‘Westerner’ will be used, except wherethe people under discussion are morespecifically identified with a particular place(such as the US). ‘Japanese’ in the context ofSolomon Taiyo sits uncomfortably over a splitbetween mainland Japanese managers andOkinawan fishermen, and uneasily under theumbrella term ‘Asian’. For the purposes of thispaper, however, it is possible to speak of ‘theJapanese’ to the extent that they were spokenof as such by the participants in the research.

It is also the case that, in a world of culturalflows and diffusions, ideas are not discreetunits belonging exclusively to any one group, soit is problematic to attribute ethnic provenanceto representations, such as calling themWestern or Japanese, as I do here. Japanesecategorizations of peoples have beeninfluenced by Western categorizations ofpeoples, especially in terms of ‘nation’ andmodernist understandings of ‘civilization’(Dikötter 1997). Likewise Solomon Islandercategorizations of peoples have long beeni n f l u e n c e d b y E n g l i s h l a n g u a g erepresentations, both in the colonial period andafter, when Australians and New Zealandershave occupied prominent positions in SolomonIslands society and where English is one of theimportant languages. Global English languagerepresentations of peoples are thus part of the

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worldviews of all the players in this research. Itis not the case, however, that representationsfrom all groups were the same; there werediscernable differences between types ofrepresentations, and it is on this basis that( s l i p p e r y ) a t t r i b u t i o n s o f c e r t a i nrepresentations as belonging to particularethnic groups are used in this paper.

Solomon Taiyo Ltd

Solomon Islands is a double chain of islandsstretching into the western Pacific south east ofPapua New Guinea and north east of Australia,with a current population of around 400,000.These islands were annexed by Britain in thelate nineteenth century. Solomon Islands firstbecame significant to Japan in World War IIwhen it was a key battlefield in the Pacific War.Of the nearly 400,000 Japanese (andconscripted Taiwanese and Koreans) who wentto Melanesia during World War II, over sixtyper cent died there, mostly from starvation andsickness (Nelson 1982). Over 20,000 Japanesetroops died on Guadalcanal.

Japanese occupation of Solomon Islands wasnot like the long-term colonial situation in other

former German territories in the Pacific.Japanese forces only reached Solomon Islandsin 1943, at the furthest stretch of Empire,managing to maintain military occupation insome parts of the islands before being turnedback by US forces in 1944. Oral histories of thewar years indicate that Solomon Islandersvacated the parts occupied by the Japanese, sothere was very limited contact (White andLaracy 1988). Some Solomon Islander menwere employed by US forces, but none seemedto have worked in this way for the Japanese.Most Solomon Islanders thus avoided beingcaught up in the fighting, although the waryears must have been difficult for thosedisplaced from areas where fighting wasoccurring.

Although the Japanese ousted the Britishcolonizers, Solomon Islanders did not identifythe Japanese as liberators, instead most sawUS forces as their saviors and identified theJapanese as the enemy during the war and forsome decades after. Hungry Japanese soldiersstole food from villagers. Apparently Japanesesoldiers defecated on the desks of colonialDistrict Officers, which may or may not havebeen seen as a bad thing by Solomon Islanders,but they also defecated on sacred places, whichwas certainly taken as an insult (Fifi’i 1989,45-47). Although many saw the Japanese as theenemy, a collection of Pacific Islander oralhistories of World War II showed that therewere those who ‘approached both sides withwariness, pragmatism, and humanity’ (Whiteand Laracy 1988, 3). Some Solomon Islandersfelt the Japanese were less racist towards themthan were the British colonizers (BSIP 1972a,80). But on the whole it is fair to say that thewar background was a negative starting pointfor interactions with the Japanese in SolomonTaiyo. According to former fisherman Hirara,when his fishing boat first ventured intoSolomon Islands fishing grounds in the early1970s, many villagers ran screaming into theirhouses, or threw rocks, because theyassociated Japanese ships with war [4].

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By 1970 the British colonial administration waspreparing Solomon Islands for Independence(1978). The administration deemed that therewas not enough of a capitalist economic basisfor independent statehood so decolonisationpreparations included inviting foreign investorsto establish locally based enterprises, to jointhe few forestry and plantation businesses(mostly owned by Westerners) and tradingbusinesses (mostly owned by ethnic Chinese)[5].

At the same time it became clear that newlyindependent countries would be declaring twohundred nautical mile exclusive economiczones around their coastlines under the UnitedNations Law of the Sea, so Japanese fishingcompanies wanted to invest in local bases tosecure their access to resources (Waugh 1994).Out of this confluence of interests SolomonTaiyo Ltd was established in 1973 as a jointventure between the Solomon Islandsgovernment and the fishing giant Taiyo Gyogyo(which changed its name to Maruha in 1993).

Solomon Taiyo vessel and bait boat

The most important market was the Britishtinned skipjack (a tuna-like species also calledbonito) market. Solomon Taiyo was one of thefew companies in the world that producedtinned skipjack according to the requirementsof large British supermarket chains such asSainsbury’s and Waitrose, which preferred highquality, socially and ecologically responsible

products. Solomon Taiyo grew steadily over theyears until by 1999 it had an annual turnover ofaround USD$100 million, employed close to3,000 Solomon Islanders on its fleet of morethan twenty fishing boats, and had a largeshore base with a canning factory. At start upmost employees had been Japanese nationalsbut over the years the proportion of SolomonIslander employees increased. In 1999 therewere less than ten mainland Japanesemanagers, and around thirty Okinawanfishermen working for the company. Up tothirty technical positions were filled by short-term contractors from the Philippines and Fiji,but the rest of the workforce, including somesenior management, most middle managementand technical supervisory positions, were filledby Solomon Islanders. Since the mid 1980s thecompany had been 51 percent owned by theSolomon Islands government, with theJapanese partner company owning theremaining 49 percent of shares, andappointments to the Board of Directors werebalanced between the two shareholders.

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Skipjack at Honiara Market

Solomon Taiyo’s main form of fishing was pole-and-line (called ‘poling’ in Australia andipponzuri in Japanese) for skipjack. This is alow technology, high labor form of fishing withvery low bycatch levels, and that can producehigh quality meat. The skipjack fishery was inthe open sea outside the reefs and lagoons.Solomon Taiyo’s pole-and-line fishery had anassociated bait fishery to catch small shinysilver and Western fish that were ‘chummed’(scattered) live across the surface aboveschooling skipjack to induce a feeding frenzyand encourage skipjack to snap at the shinyhooks on the lines. The baitfish were caught bybouke-ami nets at night in lagoons using lightsto attract the fish. They were stored live inwells in the hold of fishing ships to be used thefollowing day.

Pole and line vessel

Solomon Taiyo’s mainland Japanese employeeswere mainly career managers seconded forperiods of three to four years from Maruha. Asa large company with a long history, Maruhahas had the pick of the crop of young graduatesfrom Japan’s fisheries-related universities. Theimportance of where young men went to schoolor university, generating a lifelong network ofcontacts [6], have been as important in gaininglifetime employment in Maruha as they have inany large prestigious Japanese company. Inaddition to the university graduates, some ofMaruha’s managers were (high schoolgraduate) fishermen who worked their way upthe ranks to management positions. At leasttwo managers involved with Solomon Taiyoover the life of the company were fishermen-managers. Maruha’s managers were organizedinto two streams, those who would spend theircareers managing overseas operations aroundthe world (fishermen-managers were in thisgroup), and those who would rotate asmanagers overseas for five or ten years thenreturn to Tokyo to act as central managers(Meltzhoff and LiPuma 1985). Solomon Taiyo’smanagers had usually been of the first kind, butin the later years of the joint venture at leastone manager with experience at Solomon Taiyowas promoted to a central management role inTokyo [7].

Solomon Taiyo’s General Manager in 1999 hadworked in Nigeria and Mozambique before

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being posted to Solomon Islands, with stints inthe Tokyo office between each posting. TheOperations Manager, the Fleet Manager andthe Cannery Manager in 1999 were permanentMaruha employees, but were more or lesspermanently based at Solomon Taiyo. Two ofthese were married to Pacific Islander women.The Operations Manager had been working forSolomon Taiyo since the early 1970s and theFleet Manager since the mid 1980s. TheCannery Manager had only been at SolomonTaiyo a couple of years, but before that hadlived and worked in Fiji for many years. Othermanagers usually left their families in Japanwhile they worked overseas, for a variety ofreasons including concerns about familiesbeing able to fit into the host society and aboutfamilies being able to fit back into Japan whenthey returned, especially for children reachingmiddle school age, when school performancebecame vital for their future prospects.

Solomon Taiyo’s human resource managementhad always been affected by the intra SolomonIslands ethnic rivalries that had beenexacerbated during the colonial era and leftunresolved by successive independentgovernments. ‘Ethnic tension’ was the form inwhich a variety of dissatisfactions withincontemporary Solomon Islands society (mostlyabout persistent failures and unevenness ineconomic development) came to be expressed.In late 1998 these dissatisfactions boiled overinto widespread violence, particularly betweenthe men of Guadalcanal and Malaita, andculminated in a coup in mid 2000. Thegovernment remained unstable until 2003when the Regional Assistance Mission toSolomon Islands restored state control. Theunstable business environment, however,coincided with a new purchasing strategy bymain buyers in the UK, so the Japanese partnercompany withdrew from Solomon Taiyo in2000. The then wholly Solomon Islandsgovernment owned company was renamedSoltai and reopened in 2001 [8].

Western and Islander representations ofJapanese fisheries

Westerners who have worked closely withJapanese fisheries, such as government officialswho work with Japanese government andcompany representatives on internationalfisheries issues, generally identify Japanesefisheries negotiators as ‘very tough’ butreliable in honoring agreements [9]. Suchrepresen ta t i ons by we l l - i n f o rmedcommentators do not talk of a monolithic‘Asian’ approach to fisheries, but distinguishJapan from countries such as Korea and Taiwan(and more recently China), seen as more proneto illegal fishing, breaking environmental lawsand regulations, and mis-reporting catches(Schurman 1998).

Travel brochure image of Solomon Islandsfishing

General Western public opinion, however, hastended to categorize Japanese and Asianfisheries together as ‘bad’. Former AustralianPrime Minister Paul Keating accused bothJapan and South Korea of illegal fishing,misreporting catches and under paying forcatches (The Australian 1994), and AustralianSenator Bob Brown has said of Japanesefisheries: ‘When it comes to marauding ouroceans it seems the Japanese have no limits’( S f o r z a 2 0 0 6 ) . E n g l i s h l a n g u a g e

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representations of Japanese fisheries haveoften been negative, and often contrastedJapanese fisheries unfavourably with Westernorganizations.

[L]ocal fishing resources areflowing out of the countriesconcerned through the operationsof the Japanese joint ventures.Also, the operation of the Japanesefishing companies never lead tothe development of the localf i s h i n g i n d u s t r y a n d t h edevelopment of local fishingtechnology… Do the Japanese firmsfeel responsible for the well-beingof local employees and locale c o n o m i e s ? T h e o b v i o u sconsequence will be that theseJapanese firms will completelydominate the local markets andwill control the prices of fish insidethe countries… The Japanesegovernment in January, 1979 gaveTonga and Western Samoa$750,000 worth of canned tuna in‘grant aid.’ This ‘gift’ was mademerely at the convenience of theJapanese fishing business and theJapanese government. The tunaskipjack industry, suffering from aslump, wanted the Japanesegovernment to buy surplus cannedtuna at the taxpayers’ cost, whilethe Japanese government sufferingfrom surplus foreign exchangeholdings wanted to abate its dollarreserve. This ‘gift’ also had theeffect of imposing ‘canned foodculture’ on the people of WesternSamoa and Tonga. In sharpcontrast with this selfish type of‘aid’, we witnessed a really helpfulkind of assistance provided byDenmark to Western Samoa… TheJapanese fishing industry, unless it

discards i ts arrogance andcomplacency, someday wil lcertainly be carried out of the seasof the world (UNDP c.1983).

Solomon Taiyo was usually portrayed inEnglish-language media as representative ofthese ‘bad’ Japanese/Asian companies. Thekinds of practices of which Solomon Taiyo wasoften suspected included cheating the SolomonIslands government out of profits, treatingSolomon Islander employees unfairly, colludingcorruptly with government in developmentprojects that bring no benefits to the generalpopulace (Hviding 1996, 233), and fishingpractices that were ecologically unsustainable,illegal and/or conducted without consultationwith relevant village communities [10].

‘Here we go again. After the Asianplunder of Solomon Islands forests,its fishery is now under heavyattack… First they did it withforestry. Are they now doing itwith fish?… Under pressure froma i d d o n o r s d i s g u s t e d b yuncontrolled Asian plunder of theforests…’ (Islands Business 1996,43).

This article was about events occurring in theearly 1990s during the administration of thelate former Prime Minister Mamaloni. First ajoint venture called Makirabelle was startedbetween Makira Province (Mamaloni’s homeprovince) and a Philippines based company,Frabelle. Makirabelle asked for 35,000 metrictons from the national total allowable catch(TAC), so the TAC was increased by Cabinetfrom 75,000 to 120,000 metric tons. This TACincrease was not a problem because SouthPacific Community tagging research indicatedthat an increase in Solomon Islands TAC to thislevel would probably be sustainable, and in any

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case despite the increased TAC the actual catchstill did not exceed 70,000 metric tons. ButMakirabelle had set a precedent and by 1995there were numerous ‘joint ventures’, withMinisters and their wives on the Boards, andthe TAC jumped to 500,000 metric tons, mostof which was fortunately never caught.

The article cited two companies as ‘the good’and four as ‘the bad’ of the Solomon Islandsfishing industry during this period. ‘The good’were Solomon Taiyo itself and anothercompany National Fisheries Development(NFD), which for the first decade or so hadsubstantial Japanese input via Solomon Taiyo.In 1999 NFD was owned by Singapore-basedmultinationally-owned company Trimarine.Solomon Taiyo and NFD were defined as goodbecause they complied with local conditions forcatch reporting, local employment andlicensing fees. ‘The bad’ were joint ventureswith two companies based in the Philippines,one in Thailand and one in Singapore, whoapparently did not comply. Both ‘the good’ and‘the bad’ companies, therefore, had Asianinput, so the opening premise of the article that‘Asian’ fisheries were resource plunderers doesnot f it the observable evidence. Suchcounterfactual representations may indicatethat identity politics is involved, in this case ananti-Asian discourse about resource capitalism.In building an image of ‘Asian’ fishing as badthe article erased the Asianness of ‘the good’.

The negative tropes of Japanese/Asian fisheriesas socially and ecologically unconcernedresource plunderers constitute a kind ofOrientalism. The flipside of the negative tropesof Asian fisheries in this Orientalism is theconstruction of Westerners as ‘green’ anddevelopment-minded influences in the ThirdWorld. In this sense the identity ‘aid donor’ isinteresting in the Islands Business article.Japan has been a major aid donor in the Pacificfor some decades but the ideal aid donor thejournalist had in mind was clearly not Asian,but probably Western. The Islands Business

article represented bad Asian fishingcompanies being brought to task by goodWestern aid donors.

[A]s this abundant fishery is‘discovered’ by more and moreA s i a n s h i p s m o v i n g e v e rsouthward, locals are noticing theimpact of large fishing ships ontheir catches. A fisher of Lenganavillage explains: ‘The Japanesefleet gets permission from the[Solomon Islands] FisheriesDepartment. The boats come rightclose to the reefs where our peopleusually do their fishing. They don’task permission in the village; theyjust go there. And villagers areasking: ‘Why are these peoplefishing in our sea?’ They do notknow that the sea is open and thatFisheries can just let anyone fishanywhere.’ He also objects to theway the outsiders fish: ‘TheJapanese take thousands of fish ofall kinds. They do not worry that intheir nets are sharks and dolphins.There is nothing left for villagepeople to catch. And the Japanesef leets do not want to shareanything with the villager people.Normally if you fish on that reef,you must share your catch with thevillagers. The village elders spokestrongly to them and pointed outtheir mistakes. So the Japanesepeople just give a bit of fish, notmuch. Locals are still angry,though’ (Kalgovas 2000).

This kind of representation of Solomon Taiyo’sactivities was common in my interviews (thearticle was describing activities conducted bySolomon Taiyo alone). Like the Islands Businessarticle, evidence to the contrary was

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overlooked in this narrative. Because SolomonTaiyo’s most important market was ecologicallyconcerned British supermarket chainsincluding Sainsbury’s, Solomon Taiyo had acommercial imperative to be ‘green’ and wasactually not far from environmental bestpractice for an industrial fishing company. In1999 the company was working towardsachieving accreditation by the MarineStewardship Council [11]. Skipjack are aresilient species and the pole-and-line methodemployed by Solomon Taiyo was not asecologically destructive as other methods ofindustrial fishing.

Solomon Taiyo’s baitfishery, conducted on reefsand in lagoons, could potentially have depletedfood fish stocks as asserted in the Kalgovasarticle. The perception that the baitfisherydepleted food stocks in lagoons has existedsince the earliest days of Solomon Taiyo (BSIP1972b, 3; Bennett 1987, 336). Most SolomonIslanders I interviewed believed SolomonTaiyo’s baitfishing was depleting fish stocks inlagoons, and often expressed this by sayingthat small fish attract big fish, so by taking outtoo many small fish for bait Solomon Taiyoreduced the numbers of larger food fishavailable in the lagoons, and that that localfishers now had to go further off shore and fishfor longer periods to get the same catchcompared to the years before Solomon Taiyostarted fishing [12]. But according to theSolomon Islands Fisheries Division and bodiessuch as the Australian Council for InternationalAgricultural Research, that had researched theeffects of Solomon Taiyo’s baitfishery on foodfish stocks, the baitfishery was sustainable(Blaber and Copland 1990; Blaber, Milton andRawlinson 1993; Solomon Islands Government1986, 11, 13). Records of baitfish catch andeffort dating from the start of Solomon Taiyoshowed that Solomon Taiyo’s ‘catch per unit ofeffort’ in the baitfishery had remained stable,even in the most heavily fished areas [13].

The other contestable assertion in the Kalgovas

piece is that Solomon Taiyo gave nothing inreturn for their baitfish catches, and that theyrefused to share the catch. The reefs andlagoons where villagers fished were consideredcustomary land, and from the outset there wasa royalty payment system administered by theFisheries Division, by which Solomon Taiyonegotiated access and paid reef-owningvillagers for the use of baitgrounds. It tookseveral years for a workable system to beestablished, it was arguable that the royaltieswere very low, and there were ongoingarguments about which villagers had rights toreceive the payments, but most SolomonIslanders were aware that the company couldonly fish in baitgrounds where access had beennegotiated with landowners, and that thecompany paid royalties for fishing there.Furthermore, most Solomon Islanders werealso aware that Solomon Taiyo vesselscommonly gave away bycatch (non targetspecies which had no commercial value to thecompany) to villagers, or exchanged fish forfresh fruit and vegetables.

If Solomon Taiyo’s fishing was sustainable, itsnearshore fishing activities were negotiatedwith villagers who were paid for this access,and the company did share some of the catchwith villagers, why did the opposite narrativepersist in representations such as that in theKalgovas piece? Part of the reason was that theSolomon Islands government and SolomonTaiyo failed to counter negative rumors aboutthe company, and failed to disseminateinformation about the environmental impacts ofits fishing activities, so the fact that SolomonTaiyo’s fishing was sustainable was notcommon knowledge. The arrangements forbaitfishing were, however. Why, then, didSolomon Islanders make such representations,and why did Westerners such as Kalgovasaccept these representations readily withoutverification? I propose that identity politicsagainst Japanese fishing companies, and widerAsian resource capitalism, predisposedWestern and Islander players to perceive the

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company negatively. Representations ofSolomon Taiyo slotted into existing globaldiscourses of Asian resource plunderers.

This kind of negativity regarding SolomonTaiyo resembles an earlier set of anti-Asianidentity politics engaged in by Westerners inSolomon Islands. The majority of tradingbusinesses in Solomon Islands have long beenrun by the local Chinese community, who cameto Solomon Islands in the early colonial periodas tradespeople, then later became traders.Before the Chinese trade stores wereestablished, stores had been run by largecompanies such as Burns Philp and Lever Bros,or individual Western traders and planters.Chinese traders were unwelcome competitionbecause they bought produce from locals athigher prices and sold goods to locals at lowerprices than the big companies. Chineseshopkeepers built a better rapport with locals,socialized with locals more, and providedeating houses that were more affordable andcomfortable for Solomon Islanders than theWestern colonial clubs. In response, the bigcompan ies persuaded the co lon ia ladministration to disadvantage the Chinesetraders. According to Bennett, as part of theircampaign against Chinese traders, Westerncompanies portrayed the Chinese as a badmoral influence on Solomon Islanders (Bennett1987, 206-210). This seems to have been partlya conscious strategy to influence thegovernment to restrict Chinese traders’activit ies, but was probably also lessconsciously motivated by a sense of rivalryabout who should bring ‘civilization’—as it wascalled in those days—to Solomon Islands.Eventually the large Western companies pulledout of trading and left it to the Chinese butWestern representations of the Chinese asavaricious and exploitative of SolomonIslanders persisted. A 1975 report into foreignbusinesses in Solomon Islands corroboratedBennett’s finding that this reputation had nobasis in historical fact, in finding that SolomonIslanders were ‘well served’ by their Chinese

traders. Their prices were judged to be fair andthe margins low (United Nations DevelopmentAdvisory Team 1975).

Western representations of Chinese traders aspreying on Solomon Islanders may be seen aspart of a set of global English language anti-Asian discourses to which representations ofSolomon Taiyo as a ‘bad’ company also belong.One manifestation of this discourse in Westernrepresentations of Solomon Taiyo was tocontrast exploitative Asian/Japanese capitalismwith benevolent Western capitalism. The mainway this was done was through comparisons ofSolomon Taiyo with the other large businessesin Solomon Islands, which were Western ratherthan Asian; Solomon Islands PlantationsLimited (SIPL, a joint venture with the BritishCommonwealth Development Corporation,CDC); Kolumbangara Forestry PlantationsLimited (KFPL, also with CDC); and SolomonTelekom (with a British telecommunicationscompany). For example, a Western churchleader who had lived in Solomon Islands formore than ten years, told me that SolomonTaiyo’s working conditions and housing weremuch worse than those of the other large jointventures, that Solomon Taiyo gave nothing tothe community compared to the othercompanies, and that Japanese managers did notcare about their workers, because Japanesecompanies had l i t t le sense of socia lresponsibil ity [14].

Interviews for this research and documentarysources from the Solomon Islands NationalUnion of Workers (SINUW) showed thatworking conditions and remuneration of all ofthe large joint ventures including SolomonTaiyo were similar, around the nationalstandard. Solomon Taiyo also donated money tovarious community sports facilities in Noro, andhad a small project fund local villagers couldapply to for community projects. According to aschool teacher in Noro, Solomon Taiyo gaveplenty of assistance to Noro school incomparison to the school KFPL workers used at

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Ringgi Cove [15]. Solomon Taiyo’s employeehousing in the base town of Noro was abysmal;overcrowded, unsanitary and not maintainedproperly. This, however, was not solely thefault of the company but was also theresponsibility of the Western Provincegovernment, which had reserved the right todevelop Solomon Taiyo’s housing as its ownbusiness venture, yet never developed thehousing properly. Unfavourable comparisonswith the Western joint ventures on the groundsof social responsibility were thus likerepresentations of ecological unsustainability.They contradicted the available evidence,leading to the conclusion that identity politicswere involved.

Differences between Western and Islanderrepresentations

The examples of negative representations ofJapanese fishing presented thus far mayequal ly have come from Is landers orWesterners; interviewees from both groupssaid these kinds of things about Solomon Taiyo.Other representations, however, were morelikely to come from one group or the other.

Many Westerners encountered duringfieldwork refused to acknowledge any benefitsfrom Solomon Taiyo to Solomon Islands. Theydownplayed benefits from employment byclaiming that the pay and conditions were bad,that social benefits were counteracted by socialbreakdown caused by the company’soperations, and in any case came at theexpense of the environment, or were only whatwas left after the Japanese partner siphoned offthe profits. Many Islander interviewees, on theother hand, were more balanced in theirassessments; at first portraying the company asbad, then qualifying this with positivecomments, for example, that the companyprovided a lot of employment and training andthat they liked the company’s products.Japanese manager Okubo suggested SolomonIslanders were more balanced in their

assessments of Solomon Taiyo because mostSolomon Islanders had either worked for thecompany themselves at some stage or a closerelative had, so they had direct experience onwhich to base their opinions, whereas mostWestern people had no direct experience [16].

One of the Australian accountants who hadworked for Solomon Taiyo, however, had adifferent explanation [17]. He felt that Westernexpatriates in Solomon Islands were sonegative in their representations of SolomonTaiyo because they resented an Asian companybringing development to Solomon Islands. Hethought Westerners saw themselves as havinga special role as teachers of modernization toSolomon Islanders, and so were predisposed todisparage Solomon Taiyo.

In a broad sense, Japanese modernization hasposed a challenge to Western identity asmodern since at least the 1904 Russo-Japanesewar. A sense of r ivalry on the part ofWesterners in relation to the Japanesecapitalism is visible in a range of late twentiethcentury English language books about Japan,such as Ezra Vogel’s (1979) Japan as NumberOne: Lessons for America, Bill Emmot’s (1989)The Sun Also Sets: Why Japan Will Not BeNumber One and William Nester’s (1990)Japan’s Growing Power Over East Asia and theWorld Economy. During and after the 1997Asian Crisis, some Westerners triumphantlydecried Japanese ‘crony capitalism’ (Milner2000). Rivalry is also visible in some Westernrepresentations of Japanese modernity ashaving gone too far; a scary dystopia ofoverworked automatons and/or Blade Runner-esque cityscapes (Ueno n.d.), or of Japanesemodern culture as ‘kooky’. The rivalry noted bythe Australian accountant in Westernrepresentations of Solomon Taiyo as badmodernization could be seen as part of thisbroader rivalry with Japanese modernity.

Solomon Islanders did not share this sense ofrivalry between modern peoples and have been

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subordinated by both Westerners and Japanese.The subordination of Solomon Islanders had itsroots in British colonialism but also continuedafter Independence through dependence on aidand foreign investment. As Asian companiesand governments became wealthier and moreinternationally powerful in the late twentiethcentury, the tendency of Solomon Islanders toidentify as subordinate to Asians, includingSolomon Taiyo’s Japanese managers, wasstrengthened (Tara Kabutaulaka c.1996).

As well as being less determinedly negativeabout Solomon Taiyo than Westerners,Solomon Islanders’ different subjectiverelationship to Japanese modernity wasmanifest in representations of Solomon Taiyothat attributed negative factors not to thecompany’s Japaneseness/Asianness (asimplicitly or explicitly distinct from Westerncompanies) but with its foreignness, which castit into the same category as Western companies[18].

Previous researchers Metzhoff and LiPumafound in the 1970s that Solomon Islandersperceived the working conditions at SolomonTaiyo as being as bad as (not worse than) thoseat any other expatriate-run company (Meltzhoffand LiPuma 1983, 31), and many SolomonIslander interviewees in my research expressedsimilar sentiments. One local church leaderwho had worked for several years inBougainville before working in Noro drewparallels between Solomon Taiyo and theAustralian mining company in Bougainville[19]. Two Solomon Islander interviewees saidthey saw the behavior of Solomon Taiyo asfollowing the pattern of any large multi- ortransnational corporation, for example, throughusing overseas subsidiaries to control prices[20]. Other interviewees who worked for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) spoke ofSolomon Taiyo as one of the overseascompanies that gave money or ‘big fatpromises’ to local people to make them forgetthe potential impact on their l ives of

environmental degradation [21]. Figure 1 is aposter produced by the local NGO SolomonIslands Development Trust (SIDT). It portraysSolomon Taiyo (frame 2) as one of the bigcompanies of no specified nationality that hasg i v e n v i l l a g e r s m o n e y f o r t h e i rresources—trees, fish, and gold—and then leftvillagers unable to feed or house themselves,resulting in aid dependency.

Solomon Islands Development Trust Poster

While some Solomon Islander representationsof Solomon Taiyo thus portrayed Solomon Taiyoas a negative influence because it was foreignrather than because it was Asian or Japanese(as opposed to Western), some SolomonIslander representations were the same asWestern representations in contrastingSolomon Taiyo negatively with Western-sponsored development projects. For example,Solomon Islander interviewees who worked forthe Ministry of Finance and the InvestmentCorporation of Solomon Islands contrasted

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Solomon Taiyo unfavourably with the level oflocal management achieved in the British jointventures [22]. Some of the passages presentedearlier in this paper illustrate the point, withIslanders deploring the act iv it ies ofAsian/Japanese resource plunderers comparedto the activities of ‘good’ Western aid donors.

It is possible the trope of the Japanese/Asianresource plunderer has simply diffused intoSolomon Islands understandings of peoplesbecause it is so widespread in the English-speaking world, even though the subjectivitythat generated the trope of bad Japanesemodernity is one Solomon Islanders share. Asnoted earlier, Western-sponsored images ofimmoral exploitative Chinese traders took holdin Solomon Islander imaginaries throughoutthe colonial era and beyond, so it would nothave been difficult for the slightly differentimage of the Asian resource plunderer to takeroot.

Another related explanation for anti-Asian/Japanese (rather than simply anti-foreign) representations of Solomon Taiyo bySolomon Islanders, is that Solomon Islandersmay have been tapping into the Orientalistaspect of discourse of the Japanese/Asianresource plunderer specifically for a Westernaudience. This probably happened in interviewsw i t h m e . S o m e S o l o m o n I s l a n d e rinterviewees—knowing that Western peopleenjoy (or at least are predisposed to expect) thediscourse of the Japanese/Asian resourceplunderer—may have tailored their story to meas a Westerner. Some interviewees may havebeen telling me the story they thought I wantedto hear about Solomon Taiyo, a story that byimplication painted Western developmententerprises in a positive light.

This may have been behind the very negative(and inaccurate) picture of the companypainted by the ‘fisher from Lengana’ in theKalgovas (2000) piece quoted earlier. It couldb e t h a t t h e f i s h e r f r o m L e n g a n a ’ s

representation that Solomon Taiyo fishedwithout consultation with or recompense tovillagers constituted a deployment of ‘weaponsof the weak’ (Scot t 1985) . Creat ivemanipulation of dominant groups’ discourses isone way for subordinated peoples to achievetheir ends, and the playing off of dominantgroups against each other is another usefulstrategy. For example, Acida Rita Ramos foundthat Indigenous Brazilians utilized divisionsbetween groups of non-Indigenous Brazilians inorder to gain media and political attention so asto create space to get a point across and toattract material support (Ramos 1998, 16,98-101). During the Cold War some PacificIsland governments gained benefits fromrivalry between the Soviet Union and theUnited States, by resolving a standoff with theUSA over fishing access fees in the late 1980sby granting access to Soviet fishing fleets,which made the support of Pacific Islandscountries relatively more important to the USgovernment than their domestic tuna lobby.Some Pacific Island countries, includingSolomon Islands, continue to benefit from therivalry between the People’s Republic of Chinaand Taiwan. Perhaps the fisher from Lenganasaw Western NGOs like the World WildlifeFund (Kalgovas’ employer) as potential allies togain leverage with Solomon Taiyo. The fisherfrom Lengana may have been engaging inpragmat ic po l i t i c s by appea l ing tointernationally circulating negative images ofJapanese fisheries in a story designed to sparkWestern NGO concern.

Japanese f isher ies-re lated se l f -presentations

Solomon Taiyo’s Japanese managers wereaware of their unflattering image in the mindsof many Westerners and Solomon Islanders.The General Manager explained it by sayingthat Japanese people were not good at senden(public relations). Japanese managers’ selfimage in relation to Solomon Taiyo andSolomon Islanders was quite different to the

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image in Western and Islander representations.Japanese managers saw their role in SolomonIslands society through Solomon Taiyo in termsof the company being a development andmodernization success story. As GeneralManager Komito left Solomon Taiyo to returnto Tokyo in 1991, a newspaper report of hisf a rewe l l speech l i s t ed some o f theachievements of the company (Nius 1991, 9).The popular canned product Solomon Blue wasbeing sold regionally and Solomon Taiyo hadfulfilled its social obligations regardingemployment, taxes and foreign earning. Indeedit excelled in terms of employment, being theonly substantial employer of village women inthe country. Komito was reported as sayingSolomon Taiyo was the most successful tunajoint venture in the region, even the world.

When the former Mayor of Irabu (the town inOkinawa from which most of the fishermenemployed by Solomon Taiyo came) visited othercountries in the Pacific, all the governmentofficials he spoke to said they wanted to start acompany like Solomon Taiyo because itemployed local people and the shore base wasa permanent investment in the country [23].The former Mayor had toured places in thePacific where Irabu fishermen were employed,such as Papua New Guinea, and Mindanao inthe Philippines. He described Solomon Taiyo asa model other countries wanted to follow. TheO k i n a w a n f i s h e r m e n ’ s a t t i t u d e t omodernization was interesting in that Okinawaitself suffered internal colonialism within Japan,has remained economically disadvantaged andbeen denigrated by mainland Japanese in partfor being ‘primitive’. The islands of Miyako,where Solomon Taiyo’s fishermen came from,were even more disadvantaged and wereconsidered backward also by other Okinawans.Elsewhere I have discussed the Okinawanfishermen’s complicated perspectives onSolomon Taiyo as a modernization project(Barclay 2006).

As part of general public relations and

corporate citizenship, Solomon Taiyo and itsmanagers made donations to local charities(Nius 1988, 3; News Drum 1976, 2). Japanesemanagers also tended to view the companyitself as a kind of charity. A Maruha employeein the Overseas Operations Section workingclosely with Solomon Taiyo described it as a‘charity company’ [24]. In relating the historyof Solomon Taiyo the General Manager saidMaruha had not wanted to become a ‘charitycompany,’ Maruha would prefer that SolomonTaiyo was profitable. He said it was impossibleto turn a good profit because the SolomonIslands government as co-owner had insistedon a shore base when the costs of doingbusiness in Solomon Islands were highcompared to major competitor countryThailand, and because the Solomon Islandsgovernment had no capital to invest in thecompany or utilities to support the shore base[25].

The Operations Manager’s version of thehistory of the company provided a differenttake on Maruha’s charitable motivations inSolomon. He said that the President of thenTaiyo Gyogyo in the 1970s, Nakabe Kennichi,had visited Solomon Taiyo and told employeesthat Solomon Taiyo’s purpose was to ‘feed thepeople of the Solomons’. He told the managersto look after the Solomon Islanders, it did notmatter whether Solomon Taiyo was profitable;the important thing was to keep the companygoing so that it could be of benefit for SolomonIslanders. In those days, according to theOperations Manager, the word of the Presidentof the company was law, so this order fromNakabe was taken very seriously. When he diedhis son Nakabe Tojiro took over as President,and Tojiro felt Solomon Taiyo should continueto be managed according to his father’s wishes.The Operations Manager said that in the 1990sMaruha moved in the direction of requiringtheir overseas joint ventures to be profitable,but he believed there genuinely was acharitable motivation behind Taiyo Gyogyo’sinvolvement in Solomon Taiyo in the 1970s and

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1980s [26]. Okinawan fisherman Ikemacorroborated the Operations Manager’s storythat the President of Taiyo Gyogyo had orderedSolomon Taiyo to feed the people of SolomonIslands, and this fisherman felt that throughbaitfishing fees and other benefits to SolomonIslands that Solomon Taiyo had fulfilled thispromise to provide [27].

This identification on the part of the Japaneseas charitable benefactors in relation toSolomon Islands is interesting. On one level itis a generous stance to take. But at the sametime it is a profoundly dominant stance, onethat is patronizing of Solomon Islanders. Thisidentification is not of an equal partnership butinvolves self-identifying as having somethingthe other lacks. Solomon Islanders had beenfeeding themselves perfectly adequately forthousands of years by the time Solomon Taiyowas established, what they lacked was thecultural capital and particular skills for buildingand maintaining a successful capitalistenterprise. Part of the dominance Japaneseassumed in relation to Solomon Islandersthrough Solomon Taiyo was of moderns inrelation to a ‘backward’ society.

None of the managers interviewed in 1999labeled Solomon Islanders ‘backward’ or‘primitive’, but in the 1970s and early 1980sSolomon Taiyo managers, like Westernexpatriates living in Solomon Islands, imaginedSolomon Islanders, especially those living inv i l l a g e s , t o b e ‘ p r i m i t i v e ’ . T h i s(mis)understanding was then used to justify thecrowded housing and monotonous foodprovided by the company, because managersfelt that village life was no better (Meltzhoffand LiPuma 1983, 23).

By the later 1990s Solomon Islands’ lack ofmodernity was understood by Japanesemanagers in terms of an inhospitableenvironment for capitalism. This was oftenexplained as a result of Solomon Islanders’‘traditional’ work ethic and the quality of

government policies, but also in terms of otherfactors such as the distance from major traderoutes making freight costs uncompetitive andnecessitating the importation of many inputs.Japanese managers felt Solomon Islands’difficult business environment was the reasonSolomon Taiyo was unprofitable. One Maruhamanager wrote that Solomon Taiyo could not‘be competitive with merely her own power andcapacity’, so the Japanese government musthelp with grant aid and low cost finance, andthe Solomon Islands government mustsubsidize the company, for example, byrequesting aid loans to pay for capitalinvestment in the fleet (Tarte 1998, 124-126)[28]. This was in contrast to Solomon Islanderand Western explanations for the lack ofprofitability, which often involved suspicionsthat Japanese managers were cheatingSolomon Islanders of profit, for example, bytransfer pricing through Maruha subsidiaries inorder to avoid paying dividends or taxes inSolomon Islands.

Japanese managers knew that Maruha’scontinued involvement in an unprofitablecompany aroused suspicions in Westerners[29]. In Western (particularly Anglo and NorthAmerican) versions of capitalism profit isparamount. But in Japanese capitalism, at leastuntil the 1990s recession, profit has beenrelatively downplayed and other factors, suchas market share, have assumed relativeimportance. When I asked Maruha managerShibuya about Solomon Taiyo’s lack ofprofitability, he answered that Solomon Taiyohad not made a profit because Japanesecompanies look after their employees properly,not like Western companies, which were quickto sack their employees rather than forfeitdividends for shareholders [30]. Technicalreports on the management and financialstructure of Solomon Taiyo (Hughes andThaanum 1995; SPPF 1999) found that Maruhawas acting in a characteristically Japanese waywith cross shareholdings with an investmentbank reducing the pressure for profitability,

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and factors other than profit motivatingcontinued involvement, such as maintaining asupply of skipjack to facilitate importanttrading relationships. These reports found noevidence of unethical practices on the part ofMaruha, and acknowledged the difficultiesinherent in Solomon Islands’ businessenvironment, but did not share the view ofJapanese managers that it was impossible thatSolomon Taiyo could be profitable, assertingthat Japanese management had given up on theidea of profitability too easily, and notexhausted all avenues for improving profits.

Japanese management perspectives onSolomon Islands as being in need of charitywere not nakedly racist, and were based in thefrustrating reality of business life in SolomonIslands. At the same time, the representationsalso bolstered Japanese positions of authorityand wealth in Solomon Taiyo by portraying(backward) Solomon Islanders as incapable ofsupporting a functioning business without(modern) Japanese assistance. The discourse ofthe charity company was closely related todevelopmentalist discourses revealed bycritical development studies theorists in the1990s as subordinating peoples identified as‘underdeveloped’ to those who are seen to haveachieved modernization and are thus identifiedas ‘developed’ (see for example, Sachs 1997;Manzo 1991; Hanlon 1998).

Japanese self-identification in the discourse ofthe charity company was a ‘good’ identity, incontrast to prevalent English language imagesof the ‘bad’ Japanese of Solomon Taiyo.Competitive identification as ‘good’ was also inevidence in narratives about the social andenvironmental practices of Japanese fisheriesin contrast to American fisheries. SeveralJapanese interviewees compared Japanese tunafisheries—employing the pole-and-line andlongline methods, with a relatively small purseseine fleet made up of smaller capacityvessels—favorably against the mainly purseseine US fleet, which included vessels of very

large capacity (and therefore potentiallyecologically destructive efficiency) [31]. It wasnot just the environmental effects of purseseining that caused contention. The Japanese-favored pole-and-line method is very laborintensive, and so over a certain level of catch itis cheaper to use the very large purse seineships with labor saving technologies. Since the1990s purse seine caught tuna has therefore allbut killed international markets for the moreexpensive pole-and-line caught skipjack, ofwhich Japanese companies were the majorproducers.

Fishing boat with purse seine

Competitive self-identification as ‘good’ fisherscompared to the US fleet had a history in thelong running rivalry between Japanese tunafishing companies and the American TunaboatAssociation (ATA). Until the 1970s the Japanesefleet dominated the Western Pacific Ocean.Then towards the end of the 1970s the US tunafishing fleet started to move west across thePacific because of declining catches, disputesover dolphins, and deteriorating relations withLatin American governments in the EastPacific.

At this time newly independent island stateswere declaring 200 nautical mile exclusiveeconomic zones (EEZs) under the in-progressUnited Nations Law of the Sea, and demanding

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access fees from distant water fishing fleets.The US tuna lobby did not want to pay accessfees and the US government supported them inthis through a piece of domestic legislationcalled the Magnuson Act. Any country thatimpeded US tuna boats from fishing for highlymigratory species (on the grounds that suchspecies do not belong to any country) in theirEEZ could have their trade to the USembargoed. Until the late 1980s US tuna boatsfished illegally in the West Pacific, with USgovernment support.

Japanese managers’ self identification inopposition to US tuna interests came to thefore in representations of a 1980s disputeabout illegal fishing by a US purse seine vessel,the Jeanette Diana. In 1984 several PacificIsland countries became angry at illegal fishingby US purse seiners in their EEZs. The JeanetteDiana was a very large, high tech purse seinerwith its own small helicopter to ‘spot’ schoolsof fish. The ship had been noticed in severalplaces within Solomon Islands waters over aperiod of days, so the authorities sent out apatrol boat to request the Jeanette Diana tostop so they could board and check whether ornot the ship had been fishing. When theCaptain of the tuna boat refused to stop, thepatrol boat fired shots across the bow of thetuna boat. The boat had been fishing, so it wasimpounded and the Captain was prosecuted.Under pressure from the American TunaboatAssociation the Magnuson Act was activatedand all trade from Solomon Islands to the USwas embargoed. The only substantial tradefrom Solomon Islands to the US at that timewas frozen fish sales from Solomon Taiyo tocanneries in American Samoa and Puerto Rico.Suddenly Solomon Taiyo had to open newmarkets for their frozen fish in Thailand, whichruined the financial year for Solomon Taiyo[32] . The US government refused toacknowledge the findings of the SolomonIslands High Court that the Jeanette Diana hadbeen fishing illegally. The Los Angeles Timesquoted the Captain of the Jeanette Diana as

saying ‘we realized we weren’t dealing with arational government… the laws don’t meananything to those people’ (Kengalu 1998,170-171). Eventually the Jeanette Diana wassold back to the original owners (who werereimbursed by US taxpayers) in 1985 and theembargo was lifted.

Japanese fisheries people took the moral highground over the unquestionably bad behaviorof the US regarding EEZs in the WesternPacific. A Japanese media source described theUS position on EEZs as contradictory because,although the government supported US boatsfishing in the EEZs of other countries, the UScoastguard prevented foreign boats fromfishing in the US EEZ. This source said the USwas ‘arrogantly subverting the rights and lawsof another nation’ (Kengalu 1998, 171). FujiHiroshi, a manager in the Overseas Operationssection in the Tokyo office of Taiyo Gyogyo, wasreported by the Pacific Islands Monthly ashaving said ‘we are very unhappy about themanner in which these huge ships fish’ (PacificIslands Monthly 1985, 41, 45). He estimatedthere were about 35 500 ton purse seinersbased in Japan but in the USA there were manymore even larger vessels, such as the 1,500 tonJeanette Diana, which he thought were veryenvironmentally destructive. Fuji hoped thatthe high operating costs of the very largevessels might drive them out of business. ‘TheAmerican policy about following migratory fish,regardless of exclusive economic zones, causesproblems. It has led to disorder.’ Fuji said hewas sure fish stocks would be depleted as aresult. File material showed that Maruha andSolomon Taiyo managers repeatedly registeredconcern with the Solomon Islands governmentover protecting Solomon Islands’ skipjackstocks from purse seiners [33].

Solomon Taiyo’s Okinawan fishermen alsoexpressed ill feeling towards Westerners aboutpurse seining. Fisherman Toriike thought ithypocritical of Western organizations, such asGreenpeace, to oppose whaling and longlining

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but not purse seining, and thought the reasonGreenpeace did not campaign for a ban onpurse seining was because the American tunaindustry was heavily involved and Greenpeacefound it easier to target Japanese industriesthan American ones. He questioned Americanretailers’ marketing of purse seine tuna asdolphin-friendly when he felt the pole-and-linemethod (which he specialized in) was muchmore environmentally friendly than purseseining [34].

Conclusion

Western and Islander representations ofSolomon Taiyo’s fishing practices oftenincluded suspicions of illegality and accusationsof ecological unsustainabil ity. Theserepresentations were quite inaccurate, in fact,Solomon Taiyo’s fishing practices were on thesocially and ecologically responsible end of thespectrum of industrial fishery practices. Thisd iscrepancy between actua l i ty andrepresentation may be partly explained by apredisposition on the part of Westerners toview Japanese fishing practices negatively.Such representations of Solomon Taiyo drew onwider global discourses of predatoryJapanese/Asian resource capitalism, which haveas their flip-side the discourse of good Westerncapitalism. These English-language discoursesfiltered into Islander worldviews.

Some Solomon Islander representations ofSolomon Taiyo’s fishing practices were morebalanced than Western representations inpresenting positive as well as negative imagesof the company. Some of the posit iverepresentations of the company by Islanderswere in the vein of taking pride in having alarge modern industrial enterprise in SolomonI s l a n d s . B u t m o s t o f t h e p o s i t i v erepresentations of Solomon Taiyo were buriedin the detail of narratives that started off withunfavourable representations; despitecontaining positive representations the maindiscourse shaping those narratives was of bad

Japanese capitalism. In contrast to Westernrepresentations that compared Solomon Taiyounfavorably with Western companies, manySolomon Islander representations categorizedSolomon Taiyo together with Westerncompanies, both as big bad foreign businessesthat dominated Solomon Islanders. Theserepresentations make sense in terms ofSolomon Islanders’ history as a colonizedpeop le and contemporary s ta tus as‘underdeveloped’, and which involves quitedifferent experiences than Westerners inrelation to the Japanese and modernity.

Some Solomon Islanders representations ofSolomon Taiyo, however, were almost identicalto Western representations. Some of thissimilarity in representations may be put downto simple diffusion of Western representationsthrough the English language. Anotherexplanation is that Solomon Islanders may havebought into the discourse of the Japanese/Asianresource plunderer in framing theirrepresentations for a Western audience. Insome of these cases Solomon Islanders mayhave been representing Solomon Taiyo as a‘bad’ company, in implicit contrast to ‘good’Western companies, in order to leverageassistance from Westerners.

Japanese self-representations by contrast wereof law-abiding, ecologically sound fisheries thatinvolved the Japanese bringing modernizationin the form of economic development toSolomon Islands. The identification ascharitable benefactor towards SolomonIslanders was a dominant stance, just asWestern identifications as teachers ofdevelopment to the Third World have been.Self-presentations by Japanese fisheries peoplewere often created in opposition to particularperspectives on US tuna fisheries as beingecologically irresponsible.

The contradictions between representations ofJapanese fishing practices between Westerners,Islanders and Japanese may be seen as part of

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a wider rivalry between Japan and the Westover competing modernity strategies, withIslanders having a third view based onexperiences of pursuing their interests amongpowerful and wealthy foreigners.

Kate Barclay is a Senior Lecturer, Institute forInternational Studies, University of TechnologySydney. Kate.Barclay@uts.edu.au. She wrotethis article for Japan Focus. Posted on August29, 2007.

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Notes

[1] This research was part of doctoral workundertaken through the Institute forInternational Studies at the University ofTechnology Sydney. An earlier version of thischapter was presented at the 2003 IIS annualresearch workshop, where Elaine Jeffreys,Bronwen Dalton, Ilaria Vanni and Guo Yingjieprovided helpful comments. The ideas werefurther refined during a postdoctoral fellowshipat the Crawford (formerly Asia Pacific) Schoolof Economics and Government at the AustralianNational University, and presented again at the2005 biennial conference of the JapaneseStudies Association of Australia in Adelaide,South Australia. Thanks also to Mark Selden,Hirokazu Miyazaki and Chris Nelson forsuggestions for improvements to the paper.[2] The conceptualization of identity andmodernity in this paragraph borrows from an

earlier paper (Barclay 2006).[3] Elsewhere I give an expanded explanationof connections between the various ideas tiedtogether here as modernism and their relationto the study of identity (Barclay forthcoming).[4] Interview with Hirara in his office, 4November 1998, Miyako Island, Okinawa. TheHuman Research Ethics Committee of theUniversity of Technology Sydney required thatpart ic ipants in this research remainanonymous. For that reason in this paperinterviewees are referred to, not by their realnames, but by place names. Okinawaninterviewees have been given names of placesin the Miyako Islands, Japanese mainlanderinterviewees are referred to by place namesfrom the mainland, Solomon Islanderinterviewees are referred to by place namesfrom the Solomons, and Westerners have placenames from Australia. Interviews withSarahaman fishers and Japanese managerswere conducted in Japanese. Interviews withSolomon Islanders were conducted in Englishor Pijin. Translations into English are my ownunless otherwise specified.[5] Solomon Islands was (and largely remains)a non-capitalist society with up to 90 per centof the economy existing in the non-cash sphere.For a thorough discussion of the economichistory of Solomon Islands since Westerncontact see Bennett (1987).[6] For an example of how important suchuniversity contacts were in Japanese fisheriesbusinesses in Southeast Asia in the earlytwentieth century see Shimizu (1997).[7] Japanese manager Shibuya had worked inSolomon Taiyo twice, once as FinancialManager, then as General Manager in the1990s, and also been posted more than once tothe Overseas Operations section in the Tokyooffice that dealt with Solomon Taiyo, amongother joint ventures. Later he was promoted toDepartment Chief (bucho) of a central planningand finance department.[8] Although wholly nationally (government)owned, Soltai has remained dependent oninternational capital, expertise and trade

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networks (Barclay 2005).[9] This reputation has been damaged by the2006 exposure of Japan’s long-runningunderreporting of southern bluefin tuna catchwhile being a dominant player calling forecological responsibility within the Commissionfor the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna.See CCSBT (n.d.) and AFP (2006).[10] Interview with Ndunde at his home, 13June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands.[11] The Marine Stewardship Council is aLondon-based non-governmental organizationthat works with f isheries to developenvironmental industry standards.[12] For example, Interview with Ilangana atAgnes Lodge, 3 June 1999, Munda, SolomonIslands; Interview with Kazukuru at her home,12 June 1999, Munda, Solomon Islands. Factorsthat could have contributed to the perceiveddrops in food fish stocks include pollution andoverfishing from rapidly growing coastalcommunities. Interview with Vangunu at theFisheries Division offices, 11 August 1999,Honiara, Solomon Islands; National FisheriesWorkshop held at the King Solomon Hotel inHoniara in July/August 2005.[13] For further details on the baitfishery andits sustainability see Barclay (forthcoming).Interviewees often asserted that Solomon Taiyofalsified baitfishing records so as to pay lowerroyalties, but from 1981 the system ofmonitoring baitfish catches for the purposes ofstock assessments and payment of royalties tobaitground owners had been designed toremove incentives to underreport by de-linkingcalculations of catch from calculations forpayment, and enabling villagers to monitoractivities for which they should be paid.Fisheries Division interviews and recordscontained no indications that Solomon Taiyohad falsified baitfishing records (FisheriesDivision [Honiara]: RF 8/2, correspondence;Fisher ies Div is ion [Honiara] : F 8/6,correspondence; Blaber and Copland 1990;Blaber, Milton and Rawlinson 1993).[14] Interview with Brisbane at the Noro TownCouncil, 23 June 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands.

[15] Interview with Baru at Noro PrimarySchool, 16 July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands.[16] Interviews with Okubo in Solomon Taiyooffices several times April-July 1999, Honiaraand Noro, Solomon Islands.[17] Interview with Sydney at his home office,September 1999, Sydney, Australia.[18] I have elsewhere discussed SolomonIslanders’ aversion to domination by foreignersas an aspect of the identity relations ofSolomon Taiyo (Barclay 2004).[19] Interview with Bougainville at Noro TownCouncil, 22 June 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands.[20] Interview with Choiseul at his home 20May 1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands; interviewwith Roviana at Noro Town Council severaltimes June-July 1999, Noro, Solomon Islands.[21] Interview with Panatina at the office of theYoung Women’s Christian Association, 23 April1999, Honiara, Solomon Islands; interview withBellona at the office of the DevelopmentServices Exchange, 29 April 1999, Honiara,Solomon Islands.[22] Interview with Borukua and Maramasikeat office of the Investment Corporation ofSolomon Islands, 10 August 1999, Honiara,Solomon Islands.[23] Interview with Nakachi in the FisheriesPromotion Section office at Sarahama, 10November 1998, Irabu Island, Okinawa.[24] Interview with Shibuya in Maruha HeadOffice in Otemachi January 1999, Tokyo, Japan.[25] For further details on the cost structureand profitability of Solomon Taiyo see Barclayand Wakabayashi (2000).[26] Interview with Osaka on the SolomonTaiyo Base several times June-July 1999, Noro,Solomon Islands.[27] Interview with Ikema in his home, 5November 1998, Irabu Island, Okinawa.[28] Fisheries Division (Honiara): RF 8/2,correspondence, letter dated 3 Feb. 1997;Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara): EL/3.2,Solomon Taiyo correspondence, letter dated 1Aug. 1994.[29] Interview with Osaka on the SolomonTaiyo Base several times June-July 1999, Noro,

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Solomon Islands.[30] Interview with Shibuya in Maruha HeadOffice in Otemachi January 1999, Tokyo, Japan.[31] Pole-and-line fishing involves poles withfixed lines and barbless hooks. The hooks aredipped into the water amongst schools of fish,from the side of the boat, and snagged fish areflicked up over the head of the fisher to landbehind on the deck. The longline method uses along line dropped out in the ocean draggingbehind a fishing vessel. Short lengths of linewith hooks dangle from the long line. The longline is reeled back into the vessel and snagged

fish pulled aboard. Purse seine vessels have alarge net they drop behind into the water, thenrun in a circle to make a tube of net vertical inthe water, then pull the bottom shut like apurse, and the surrounded fish are pulledaboard with the net.[32] Interview with Shibuya in Maruha HeadOffice in Otemachi January 1999, Tokyo, Japan.[33] Forum Fisheries Agency (Honiara):EL/3.10, Solomon Taiyo correspondence.[34] Interview with Toriike, at the OkinawaRest House, 26 July 1999, Noro, SolomonIslands.