All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Drawing Lines: The American Population Resident in the Yokohama Treaty Port, 1884, and the Question of Group Boundaries
| The paper--a case study of group boundaries and ethnocultural difference--examines the role of nationality in the experience of Americans in Yokohama, the main treaty port in Japan in the nineteenth century. Yokohama's population was an amalgam, comprising, in the 1880s, at least seventeen national groups. The year 1884 was chosen for examination because of the availability of primary sources. The paper reconstructs the American population, setting out the migration stream's demography and cultural antecedents. It then explores how national ties figured in the immigrants' experience, focusing on the character and structure of group boundaries.
Some 250 Americans lived in Yokohama in 1884. National ties were an important part of migration stream daily experience. Americans clustered residentially. American businesses clustered. American workers clustered at American businesses. Organizational membership was often ingroup. Endogamy was the norm.
In theory the Americans living in Japan's treaty ports could co-mingle with others as prevailing law did not segregate non-Japanese by nationality. The immigrants' ingroup behavior was largely due to two factors. Competition and animosity engendered by racial, ethnic, national, and cultural--in particular religious--difference and compounded by class and economic conflict characterized life in Yokohama and led to groups maintaining boundaries.The Americans' centripetal behavior was also a consequence of the particular background of the migration stream. The immigrants on a sub-national level had much in common which led to a sense of mutuality and solidarity including shared regional ties, ancestral origins, and religious affiliation. The paper treats both of these aspects of the Americans' experience.
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