Studies of nineteenth-century migration patterns to northern Australia usually reveal quite localised networks of movement, not only associated with specific occupations but also from definable regions to particular destinations. Japanese pearling workers for instance arrived from the provinces of Ehime and Wakayama, and within Wakayama from a string of villages on the southern coast. Such migration patterns reduced economic and social insecurity, because they afforded the migrants a ready supply of information about the destination before departing, a social support structure to ease their way into the new lifestyle, and usually guaranteed employment. Organisational aspects of migration such as travel and accommodation, visas and passports were facilitated by support structures which developed around relatively large migration flows. Close grained studies of the regions of origin are necessary to decipher these dynamics of migration and settlement which can not be satisfactorily explained either by individualistic accounts, nor by accounts relying on the relationships between nation-states or colonies, because government intitiatives (such as restrictive or facilitating legislation) tended to respond to rather than anticipate such migration flows. Little work has been done on the regions of origin, but David Sissons in Australia and Ogawa Taira in Wakayama have undertaken important and detailed research on the origins of Japanese immigrants. In this article, I focus on Japanese migration to northern Australia and on the construction of homelands out of the experience of migration.