The Changing Face of Labour between Hawai'i, Japan and colonial Taiwan.

By the 1930s, the Hawaiian archipelago had become a touchstone for a Japan-centric history of transplanted peoples, meanings and memories across the northwestern Pacific world. This article sketches one aspect of this transpacific history through reconstructing for the first time the commission, composition and reception of an iconic painting from 1885. 'Japanese laborers on Spreckelsville, Maui', by Joseph D. Strong (1853–1899), frames one story of Japanese sugar production in the Pacific world. My article first examines the contemporary political significance of the faces of 'Japan' and 'Hawai'i' on display in the painting, and then extends this analysis to consider the painting's later reframing as part of the story of Japan's colonization of Taiwan after 1895. In these ways, I highlight, first, the need for new research on Native Hawaiian support for Japanese immigration in the late-nineteenth century; and, second, the importance of the recent trend in the historiography of the Japanese empire to consider 'emigration' and 'colonization' as two sides of the same coin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]