This paper explores conflicting representations of Japanese fishing practices in a joint venture company in the Pacific. Western and Islander representations frequently included suspicions that Japanese management was cheating their local partner and engaging in illegal and ecologically destructive fishing practices.
In contrast, Japanese self-identified as as socially and ecologically responsible in contrast to the callous disregard for employment security and destructive industrial fishing methods used by Americans. Analysis of these different perspectives shows underlying conflict about whose development assistance is best, with Islander perspectives demonstrating postcolonial reactions to their continued subordination in the world system. Research on a joint venture tuna fishing and processing enterprise based in the Solomon Islands from to , Solomon Taiyo Ltd.
The analysis is based on interviews, news media and government documents. Japanese self-representations are juxtaposed against representations by Westerners and Islanders. Japanese involvement in Solomon Taiyo was self-identified as a charitable mission for the economic and social development of the Solomon Islands. Neither does it assess how beneficial the company was for Solomon Islands in terms of material economic development, I have discussed that elsewhere Barclay ; ; forthcoming.
The central concern here is the subjective aspects of the social interactions of the company; specifically to reveal the politics informing narratives that view development projects as good or bad because of the ethnicity of the people involved. Narratives that portray Japanese fisheries as good or bad are influenced by the subjective positions of the narrators, a point that is useful to bear in mind when considering contemporary public debates about over-fishing and whaling.
The concepts of identity and modernity frame this discussion. National identity is in turn greatly influenced by ideas about modernity. Marshall Berman has shown that the aesthetic and literary movements most usually associated with modernism may be grouped with more materialist movements such as Marxism and modernization theory as an overall worldview ordered by a teleological striving for modernity Berman Taken together these apparently disparate pieces of social theory build the argument that ideas about modernity have long been influencing communal identities, especially nations [3].
