The Caribbean island of Carriacou was ceded to the British by the French after the Seven Years’War (1763). Carriacou’s population of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Scots, and free people of color, along with their enslaved workers, comprised a distinctive slaveholding society in comparison to that of the old British colonies.
This article explores Japanese literary engagement with the Caribbean island of Jamaica, one informed most directly by the recent popularity of Jamaican musical culture in Japan. I link these works to a discursive imagination of the international, including the Third World, as a proving ground for artistic accomplishment and for the acquisition of an ideological cosmopolitanism counterposed against life in insular Japan. This includes the discourse of jibun sagashi, or self-searching, that has emerged in the post-1991 recessionary era. I argue that a consistent trope in many works of fiction and non-fiction on Japanese travel to Jamaica is of their protagonists' or authors' intimate encounter with Afro-Jamaican blackness as both menacing and impoverished, but also vitalizing and endearing. Encountering the Afro-Jamaican, and surviving it, simultaneously affords a sense of toughness and sociopolitical enlightenment impossible elsewhere in Japan. I conclude that although these narratives usually include returns to a Japanese homeland appreciated anew, an ethnographic perspective on these issues - though not the focus of the paper - suggests that the experiences of less famous Japanese youth travelling to Jamaica might complicate these narratives offered to mainstream audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR].