Was Lafcadio Hearn’s Prophecy about Japanese Migrants in Guadeloupe Right? The Background of the 1895 Japanese Workers’s Labour Movement
Was Lafcadio Hearn’s Prophecy about Japanese Migrants in Guadeloupe Right? The Background of the 1895 Japanese Workers’s Labour Movement

Summary/Abstract: On November 2, 1894, the famous author Lafcadio Hearn wrote an editorial in the Kobe Chronicle, where he developed a rather prophetic vision regarding the situation of some 490 Japanese laborers that had been sent only two weeks earlier to Guadeloupe, a French colony in the Caribbean Sea, in order to work in sugar cane plantations or in the sugar industry. In this article, Hearn warns that the conditions on the French island are totally unsuited to Japanese emigration, for several reasons. In this paper, after having summed up the historical background of migrant labor in Guadeloupe, we will first explain why and how 490 Japanese migrants were sent to Guadeloupe and we will present a few important facts, some of them previously unveiled, about these Japanese laborers in the French colony. Then, we will examine Hearn’s statement about the future failure of that immigration, and try to cross it with historical facts. We will try to demonstrate that, whereas Hearn had quite well analyzed the situation of the colony in many respects, his views were quite biased, and that he has somehow missed some key elements that can explain why the Japanese migrants could instigate an important labor movement.

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