The Rice-Eating Body and Colonial Intermarriage in the Japanese South Seas

A decade before the Second World War reached into Japan's Pacific Island territories, a small network of agriculturalists was diligently working to crossbreed Japanese rice for the tropics. White rice already possessed a unique ability to mark and police Japanese racial identity at home, but as colonies multiplied and war approached these ties between rice and race deepened. On Pohnpei, a high island in the Caroline archipelago, colonial agriculturalists envisioned a landscape made Japanese through the planting of Japanese rice and the proliferation of Japanese settlers, and the spread of that racialized landscape to the fertile soil of New Guinea and Indonesia. Yet even as Pohnpei’s Japanese settlers asserted their own racial identities through rice consumption, many intermarried and produced offspring with Islander women as well. This presentation explores the introduction of new plant and human genetic material to the Japanese South Seas, its intersection with race and settler colonialism, and its legacy in postwar American territories ostensibly cleansed of Japan’s colonial influence.