Seaweed, Seawomen, and Supply Chains: Merchant Capital, Marginal Fishers, and the Making of Japan’s Chemical Industry

Although the history of Japan’s industrialization has long held significance in the English-language scholarship, there has been a tendency to emphasize a progressive, sunny narrative centered on what are perceived to be the most ‘developed’ industries like textiles. While the field has largely abandoned the teleology of modernization theory in favor of more complex narratives, these works still tend to use a generalized ‘modernity’ as a stand in for a particular capitalism. This formulation developed as the field consciously moved away from Marxist ideas prominent in the Japanese literature, which had theorized the inequalities and unevenness of capitalist development as the result of ‘semi-feudal remnants’ within Japanese capitalism.

I argue that without dealing seriously with such ideas our picture of Japan’s industrialization and how its development structured everyday life remains necessarily incomplete. Engaging with the recent revival of histories of capitalism and the resurgence of interest in Marxist theories of development, my paper aims to bring the Japanese Marxist focus on the particularity of Japanese industrialization and the issue of an ‘incomplete transition’ back into the conversation on the history of capitalism. Looking at the development of Japan’s supply chain capitalism in the longue durée, it analyzes the way merchant capitalism appropriated the family and community structures of nomadic fishers over the 19th and 20th centuries, highlighting their role as precarious labor for collecting raw materials like seaweeds which were then used as byproducts for the emerging chemical industry. I argue that the subordination of their labor to capital was indispensable to Japan's foreign trade, the rise of the chemical industry, and Japan's colonial expansion. In doing so, I show how their lifeways, gender dynamics, and the ecologies they worked in were transformed in the process.