オーストラリア・木曜島に渡った日本人の足跡を追う : 藤井富太郎氏の生涯から考える

Thursday Island, located to the far northeast of Australia and made famous in Japan by Shiba Ryotaro\u27s novel "Mokuyo-To no Yakai" (the night meeting on Thursday Island), once had a population consisting of 60% Japanese. In the Meiji period, in particular, many youths from the coastal area of Wakayama travelled to Thursday Island with the dream of striking it rich as a pearl diver. Although production gradually decreased, the pearl industry on Thursday Island continued to operate through to the Pacific War. However, at the outbreak of the war, most residents from Japan or of Japanese descent were confined in internment camps on the Australian mainland, and those without family in Australia, were forcibly repatriated to Japan after the war. Now, only a few families of Japanese descent remain living on Thursday Island, and it seems that the memory of the time when many Japanese emigrants lived on the island is fading. In this study, our aim is to gain a detailed understanding of the "perspective" of the Japanese emigrants on Thursday Island via an analysis of historical documents and previous studies. Further, we aim to show the multi-faceted and 3-dimensional nature of the lives of the Japanese emigrants on the island before and after the Pacific War by superimposing this "perspective" onto the individual life of Tomitaro Fujii