Nichibunken Evening Seminar

This presentation, part of an ongoing joint project with Professor Matthew Booker of North Carolina State University, examines the environmental history of the trade in living Crassostrea gigas oysters between Northeastern Japan and the North American Pacific Coast, where they were transplanted by the millions between the 1920s and 1970s. My talk introduces some of the complexities that emerged when seemingly immobile oysters went into motion on a massive scale.

The trade in what white American shellfish growers began to call “Pacific” oysters does not fit easily into nationally-framed Japanese or North American histories alone. Our project instead argues that the seed oyster trade was at the center of parallel transformations in coastal Japan and North America. Far-flung sites came to be linked—both before 1942 and in new ways after 1947—through the seasonal circulation of living organisms that spent their lives partially along the coast of Miyagi Prefecture and partially in the nearshore waters of British Columbia, California, Oregon, and above all Washington State. Crucially, one can see efforts not only to foster but also restrict the movements of oysters, people, and organisms vilified as oyster pests. Here I will highlight several examples of what we have identified as transpacific tidelands: places that can be studied simultaneously in terms of regional histories and trans-regional processes.