『China viewed from the frontier : an ethnography of the Chinese fishermen in the Yellow Sea islands』（fukyo 2023）
Hiromi Ogata
（Professor, Faculty of Economics, Kagawa University）
I am deeply honored to receive the prestigious Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Award. I would like to express my sincerest gratitude.
As you know, China’s national life has generally improved, but there is still an economic disparity between rural and urban areas. Improving the livelihood of farmers, who account for more than one-third of China’s population of approximately 1.4 billion people, is still an important issue for the Chinese government, and these problems faced by rural areas have often been the subject of research and mass media coverage. At the same time, however, we felt that it was important to note that the reality of some non-urban areas is different from that of the economically vulnerable people covered by the mass media in the past. It is through this process that we have had the fortuitous opportunity to present to the world the actual condition of fishermen on remote islands in modern-day China.
In the past, Mr. Deng Xiaoping achieved economic success through his “reform and opening-up” policy under the banner of the “first wealth theory,” which advocated that “some people and some regions should become rich first. Fishermen on China’s Yellow Sea islands, the subject of my book, also rode the wave of this “reform and open-door” policy, developing their fishing and tourism industries and earning incomes that exceed those of city residents. Although there are various “pressures” from outside the islands, at present the islanders are proactively maintaining a vibrant and autonomous society, armed with economic success. Incidentally, this remote island region in the Yellow Sea of China has long been an area that has not received much academic attention, despite its proximity to Japan. In addition, since there has been no previous systematic record of this region published, my book details the history and present state of the island as an ethnography, and then clarifies the changes in the island’s society and the choices of the islanders’ interactions through case analysis.
In the future, although my contribution is very small. I would like to make further efforts to contribute to solving the problems of depopulation and declining fisheries in not only china but also the remote islands of the Seto Inland Sea and Kagawa Prefecture.
Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all the professors and alumni who gave me guidance and advice in the publication of my book. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to everyone at Fukyo sha for their efforts in editing and publishing this book.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all those who have supported my research, and I would like to ask for your continued support in the future.
Profile
Professor, Faculty of Economics, Kagawa University.
Completed the doctoral course at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo in 2010. ( Ph.D. in 2019),JSPS Research Fellow PD 2010-2013.
Specialize in cultural anthropology especially on social changes, kinship studies, and folk beliefs in island fisheries and rural villages in East Asia.
major thesis: “An Anthropological Study on the “Individualization of the Family” on Islands: A Case Study of Small Islands in the Seto Inland Sea”, The Journal of Island studies (2022).
