CFP: Island Infrastructures – Confinement, Coherence, and Connections

Venue: Izuhara, Tsushima City, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan

Date: 23 and 24 October 2025

Keywords: Construction state; Tanaka Kakuei; regional development; communications; resilience; connectivity; sustainability; machizukuri; regional disparities; transnationalism; borderlands

This Workshop will examine the role and significance of infrastructure for islands in Japan and elsewhere. Infrastructure is a crucial component of island life, one which shapes their character, the rhythms of daily life, and the degree of intra and inter-island connectivity. In some senses, it is infrastructure which creates islands, the enabling factor that allows them to be treated, rather than merely represented, as unitary, insular units. Finally, it is infrastructure that will determine island futures, containing as it does the promises and possibilities for island lives, and their imaginaries.

The Workshop will be held on Tsushima, located between Japan and Korea, and an ideal site from which to survey the significance of islands to Japan. Having long mediated Japan’s relations with Korea, the island’s connections with the peninsula were formally severed in the postwar period. From a gateway, Tsushima became the outer edge of a once-again archipelagic nation. The completion of National Highway 382 in April 1975 connected the islands of Tsushima and Iki to the mainland near Karatsu in Kyushu. The straight lines of the “maritime national roads” that link the islands to one another and the mainland stand in for the aspirations and indeterminacy of infrastructural effects on insular spaces. That same year, Tsushima’s airport was completed, but fast forward fifty years, and the island’s issues of depopulation and isolation remain ever-present, despite the dramatic rises and falls in the numbers of visitors the island receives.

We are looking for exciting research proposals which examine the perceptions and policies that have shaped Japan’s engagement with its islands, and are particularly interested in papers which touch upon:

• The 1970s as a formative period for Japan’s relations with islands today.

• Shifts in the role of island policy, and in understandings of Japan’s territory.

• The relationship between infrastructure and perceptions of islands.

• Islands as transborder heritage, and its transnational possibilities.

Proposals for research on any other aspect of research into Japan’s relations with its islands are welcome, as are comparative studies that examine these issues in a broader Northeast Asian or global context.

Travel support is primarily intended for those in Japan and neighbouring countries, but applications from further afield will be considered.

The Workshop is collaborative event between two Nichibunken team research projects:

• “Beyond the Postwar and Modernity: Japan in the 1970s”, headed by Professor Ayako KUSUNOKI; and,

• “Island Japan: Fluid Bodies, Senses, Imaginaries”, headed by Associate Professor Edward BOYLE

The Workshop will be hosted with the cooperation of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Project Nos. JP22K01369, and JP23K25478, and with the support of the Center for Global Risk, Nagasaki University, and the Eurasia Unit for Border Research, Hokkaido University.

Applications:

To apply, please submit a title and abstract (250 words) for the proposed contribution to the Workshop. The application should also include the following:

– Name and surname

– Full contact details

– Current status or place of employment

– Curriculum vitae

Please send your CV, title, abstract and other application details to japansborders@gmail.com no later than Friday 27 June 2025.

Results will be communicated to applicants by 11 July.