Research report: Nov 17-24

Hokkaido University Library (Northern Studies Collection)

I collected the majority of my resources here, including travelogues from Nagayama Takeshirō (which frequently mentions the Ainu it seems), reports on Karafuto Ainu and their deportation to Hokkaido, reports and papers related to W.S. Clark, etc. I have a good haul of readable archival materials, and some higher resolution retakes of materials I collected last time including two Tondenhei histories compiled in the 1880s.

Additionally, I had the bright idea of searching simply for "活字" in the archival search engine and collected a wide variety of documents either published in movable type originally, or later reprinted in historical journals. These include some interesting travelogues. All of it is quite readable. The journals were published in the 1970s and it may be useful to collect more of these if they're cheap.

Also in the 活字 collection, I found two reprinted Koga Dōan books on coastal defence from the 1880s. They mention Hokkaido and the United States frequently. I'm not certain, but he seems to claim that Ezo was an "unpeopled borderland" (無人の境), which draws into question the novelty of later terra nullius claims and deindigenization discourses which both erased the presence of the Ainu. I wonder, though, if there was influence of New World settler colonialism on this thinking via 蘭学 texts Koga read which would have informed his knowledge on the matter, as in formal discovery doctrine and popular pioneering narratives alike, was of course typical to imagine oneself as the first 'person' on aboriginal land.

I was able to locate more by Sekiba. It seems he was a Kantian, who, like Nitobe Inazō, quoted Faust. Very Germanocentric, but kind of fascinating how he achieved a high level fluency and took such interest in the Arts. How much influence did philosophers and poets have on his outlook? He also discusses eugenics, such as surveys of Japanese blood types. Included is a short second book on the Ainu from the 1930s.

Lastly, rather than by some more アイヌ史資料集, I selectively photocopied some smaller volumes, including -- I believe -- a print copy of the above mentioned Karafuto Ainu report, and some testimony on some British residents in Hakodate who stole some Ainu bones and were arrested, of which I likewise collected a handwritten copy. I should order British National Archives copies of English language testimony if I follow up on this story. Other scholars have already, but not for the purpose of discussing the ugly introduction of racialized phrenology into Japan.

Otaru Municipal Library

I briefly visited here and collected some newspaper articles related to Oyabe Zen'ichirō and Katō Masanosuke's speech on Ainu education, and happened upon some articles on trips to Russia to find export markets for Hokkaido products. The Oyabe speech appears in its entirety, paired with articles related to the Ainu. The Russian trade article is interesting as its another example of how desperate Hokkaido officials were to find export markets. Of course they would be, but it seems to have been a major preoccupation.

Hokkaido Prefectural Library (Northern Resources Library)

I spent one day at this library and collected resources related largely to Nagayama Takeshirō and the Tondenhei. They should generally be high quality copies, but I found out later that the high intensity spotlights from the copy table may have been too much for my poor phone camera. There may be some distortion or blurred sections.

Perhaps significantly, I found a Tondenhei textbook! Most of it looks quite generic, and if anything, useless or obvious to people who spent most of their time farming (such as a section on which vegetables are nutritious), but the opening chapter is a nationalistic celebration of the army with a Tondenhei focus.

Hokkaido Former Prefectural Office

I did not use the archival sources this trip. I have collected a lot already and have found the sources by and large both generic (ie. statistical reports without much commentary or explanation) and difficult to use effectively. Moreover, I have many leftovers from last time. However, I did collect some resources from the museum section including a copy of an edict banning Ainu salmon fishing in the name of protecting (保護) valuable salmon stocks for commercial use. I didn't take photos, but there were some labels for tins of salmon for export. I believe I didn't take photos unfortunately, but in the Hokkaido University-housed Clark papers, he describes salmon canning in detail and gives Washington state canneries as a model, going so far as to recommend importing the fish themselves (which is ridiculous). A story unfolds, which seems to suggest Ainu were being banned from fishing to maximize profits. Maybe see how this relates to the destruction of Ainu/Wajin fishing guild.

Another document describing Ainu land being 'nationalized' (国有化). Some other readable photographs along these lines on my cell phone; copies likely available online or in books.

Sapporo Beer Museum

General Observations: I visited the museum for another project. There is some content on Horace Capron and Kuroda Kiyotaka), a quote by Shima Yoshitake, and some other information useful for my purposes. I should find the Shima book, but this is the poem in its entirety:

河水遠く流れて　山隅に峙つ
平原千里　地は膏腴
四通八達　宜しく府を開くべし
他日　五州第一の都

Things I still want

Tondenhei journals, documents which relate the Tondenhei to the Ainu, documents by or about 19th century Ainu which relate to the direct and indirect consequences of colonial policy, documents by Japanese which relate to perceptions of お雇い外国人, pre-1890s newspapers, journals. Collections of Hokkaido newspapers from the Meiji peroid.

Source overview: Henry Frei: "Japan Discovers Australia: The Emergence of Australia in the Japanese World-View, 1540s-1900"

This paper by Henry Frei gives a chronological description of knowledge of the Australian continent and interchange with British Australia from the earliest descriptions of Australia by Portuguese sojourners in Japan and particularly through the wide dissemination of the famous Matteo Ricci map in Japan.

Besides dated allusions to "the Japanese mind" (which is the Hivemind that all Japanese are linked to), the "discovery" of Australia by Europeans, blithe references to "pioneers" taking control of that country, narratives of Tokugawa-era national 'stagnation', or ruminations on the degree of "authenticity" of Japanese illustrations of what the world might look like if it were the size of a piece of paper, the paper provides a good overview of Japanese geographical knowledge during the Tokugawa period and Meiji-era participation in colonial fairs.

On the Ricci map's afterlife in Japan, Frei writes:

In 1602, by order of the Chinese court in whose employ he was, the Jesuit missionary drew, what was for China, a revolutionary new map. Based on reports of Italian and Portuguese voyages to different parts of the world,’ Ricci’s map was widely esteemed for its accuracy and scientific exposition, and copies of it were sent from Nanking to various parts of China, to Macao, and almost immediately to Japan. As this map was transmitted to Japan mainly for scholarly purposes and was written in the familiar Chinese script, it reached a wider audience of Japanese intellectuals and cartographers than did the contemporary world-maps from Portugal, Spain, and Holland, which were either gifts for the shogun or passed into the hands of unappreciative bakufu officials, whence geographical knowledge went no further. 

The influence of Ricci’s map of the world was accordingly more penetrating and lasting. It served as an important basis for the making of Japan’s first printed world-map in 1645, which, meant for popular education, had all place names spelled in easily readable katakana. In this new world-map, the Southland, or ‘Magellanica’ [瓦喇尼加], still extended around the entire lower part of the globe, not far below the Tropic of Capricorn. But its shape was now drawn with greater consistency, almost as an even strip of land, except for three or four major protruding interruptions in the places where there was now definite geographical evidence of the Australian continent.

On Russian maps filtering into late Tokugawa Japan after the return of the castaway Daikokuya Kodayū, Frei notes:

In that same year of 1792, however, amid all the diligent copying of outdated Dutch world-maps, a new map reached Japan from Russia, which, in the fourth stage of our study, revealed probably for the first time the correct shape of the Australian continent.’ An up-to-date and precise world-map even by European standards, it had been printed on a Russian copper-plate press as recently as 1791. We have already referred to it above as the Katsuragawa Map, named after its translator, the rangakusha Katsuragawa Hoshū 桂川甫周, 1751-1809, who reproduced the map in 1794 with the collaboration of Daikokuya Kodayū 大黒屋光太夫. And here it is worth digressing to recount the circumstances that had allowed this advanced world-map to reach Japan from Russia, for its prompt transmission owed much to the Japanese castaway Kodayū and his repatriation in 1792.

In part due to the influence of these maps, he quotes Yoshida Shōin, the bakumatsu Nihonjinron-influenced revolutionary who wrote in his Prison Notebook (幽囚録):

South of Japan, separated by an ocean but not too distant, lies Australia, with its latitudes situated right on the middle of the globe. Australia’s climate is fertile, its people rich and prosperous, and it is only natural that various countries compete for the profit of that territory. England cultivates only one-tenth of it as a colony. I have always thought that it would be most profitable for Japan to colonize Australia. 

Quoted from 吉田松陰全集 II, 105

While the author describes this as seemingly holding "ominous prospects" for the future of British colonialism in Australia (or "for the future of Australia"), if we take a closer look at Yoshida's writings, we see a wider pattern emerge:

日は升のぼらざらば則ち昃かたむき、月は盈みたざれば則ち虧かけ、國は隆さかんならざれば則ち替すたれる。故に善く國を保つ者は、徒いたずらに其れ有る所を失うこと無からず、又た其れ無き所を増すこと有り。今ま急に武備を修め、艦略具そなえ、礮略足らし、則ち宜しく蝦夷を開墾して、諸侯を封建し、間に乘じて加摸察加カムチャッカ隩都加オホーツクを奪かちとり、琉球を諭し朝覲會同し比ひして内諸侯とし、朝鮮を責め、質を納め貢を奉る、古いにしえの盛時の如くし、北は滿州の地を割わり、南は台灣・呂宋ルソン諸島を牧おさめ、漸に進取の勢を示すべし。然る後に民を愛し士を養い、守邊を愼みて、固く則ち善く國を保つと謂うべし。然らず坐して群夷が爭い聚まる中、能く足を擧げ手を搖すこと無けれども、國の替すたれざらん者は其の幾きと與ともなり。

So while elsewhere in the book, Yoshida may well be calling for the colonization of Australia, he's also calling for Japan to colonize (kaikon) Ezo (Hokkaido), as well as Kamchatka and Okhotsk. He then sees Japan as taking possession of the Ryukyu Kingdom, seizing Korea as a vassal state, moving into Manchuria, and then south into Taiwan and the Philippines. While this was more or less Japan's colonial trajectory, with the exception of the Russian territories north of Hokkaido, there is no reason to see this as anything other than pie in the sky.

Yoshida provides a clear vision of Japan as a settler colonial power. And while no doubt while Yoshida's great popularity in the Bakumatsu period and into the Meiji may very well have spurred on actual colonial policy regarding at least Hokkaido, he was one of many thinkers during this time period who advocated colonial policy. Decades before, for example, Koga Kokudō (古賀穀堂) in Saga Domain also called for the colonization of Hokkaido and Australia as part of the same colonial venture, and, like Yoshida's proposal, also in the context of Japanese coastal defence. 

Entering Meiji, Frei refers to Fukuzawa Yukichi publishing Sekai Kunizukushi (世界国尽) in 1869 describing the countries of the world. This sort of document may be interesting in how, based on Western books and widely published Japan, disseminated what was essentially a colonial view of the world to a Japanese audience. 

Finally, Frei describes Japanese attendance at the Australian Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne, 1875-76 by Hashimoto Masato (橋本正人) and Sakata Haruo (坂田春雄). Hashimoto in particular wrote a report on the agricultural products of Australia and his racist reaction to some Australian Aborigines he met, who he apparently calls "black devils" (which the author glibly compares to Dampier's and Cook's descriptions of "coal-black savages" and the "wretchedest people of the earth"). We learn that Hashimoto produced a similar travelogue of his trip to the United states. Discussing Australia, Frei does not make reference to Hokkaido, however, it would be interesting to see if he does have anything to say. Both in Japan's participation in an intercolonial exhibition as well as his descriptions of how the British economically developed Australia, it could be quite interesting. 

Misc references

Just to clear out my Firefox tabs, I'm temporarily posting some notes from Google books here:

Nitobe Inazō on hygiene/衛生 in Japan refers to Faust in arguing that farming is the most "hygienic" of lifestyles somewhat dubiously quotes Mephistopheles, who says in an English translation of Faust:

Good ! would'st thou means that need
Nor gold, nor drug, nor witchcraft to possess?
Up, and betake thee to the field with speed.
Where thou the earth may'st hack, and dig, and dress,
To keep thyself and sense within the bounds
Of this thy narrow circle, duly care.
Nourish thy body with unseasoned fare,
Nor heed the idle riot that surrounds ;
Live with the beast as beast, disdain not thou
Thyself to dung the acre thou dost reap.
These are the best of means, in sooth, I know,
A man at eighty years still young to keep. 

From Faust; a tragedy by Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832; Bowen, Charles Hartpole Published 1878 (pg. 109)

Unrelated to this, Darwin helped popularize a discourse of Ainu racial primitivity which we see in various Euro-American writings on the Ainu from around the time of the Japanese annexation of Ainu territories, and not long after this in Japanese writings. One N. Holmes responds to Darwin's writings on the Ainu, with reference to the contradictions and anxieties present in European race theory:

It is forcibly argued by Mr. Darwin that the earliest semi-human tribes were both bearded and hairy, and that their successors, in the course of time, by sexual selection, became more and more naked and beardless. Whatever the cause, the fact seems to be so, generally, with all the colored races to the present time. In this characteristic, the red Indians share with the Mongolian and Malayan populations. At the same time, they exhibit such well-marked differences in color, in the high nose, in the forms of the skull, and other peculiarities, as to distinguish them now from all other races of men. And this fact would certainly argue a separation from them for an immense length of time, if not an occupation of this continent since the beginning of the Pliocene period. Except the Ainos (most probably an isolated survival form a very ancient origin), the white race is said to be the most bearded and hairy of all. The suggestion of Mr. Darwin, that this character is due to a later reversion toward a primitive characteristic in the semi-human progenitors of all, is at least not inconsistent with the theory here maintained, viz., that the white race and color received its distinctive development from approximate types of darker shades growing lighter and lighter as in the course of migration from lower latitudes and levels they ascended to the fertile valleys of Central Asia; not suddenly, but as the slow effect of climates and conditions (together with inward causes) operating through a geological epoch, in which sexual selection may have continued to have some operation. (pg. 34)

From N. Holmes: "Geological and Geographical Distribution of the Human Race" in "Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis, Volume 4 (1878-1886)"

Just briefly, for future reference, related to both settler colonialism, race, and agrarianism, Brian Dippie's 1970 book The Vanishing American; Popular Attitudes and American Indian policy in the Nineteenth Century seems to be useful for understanding this topic. 

Similarly W. Arens' 1979 book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy may be useful in unpacking the relationship between discourses of Ainu primitivity/savagery, and 19th century anthropological assertions that some or all of the Ainu had, at some point in the past, practiced cannibalism. 

Source overview: Hokkaido Kaisōroku (1964)

I've began selectively reading through this collection of recollections of the children of influential Meiji-era figures involved in the colonization of Hokkaido. Today I read through the first two chapters belonging to Nagayama Takemi, the son of Tondenhei head and Hokkaido governor Nagayama Takeshirō, and Dan Mariko, the daughter-in-law of the American Kaitakushi employee, rancher, and diplomat Edwin Dun. In both cases, I'm reading these short, intimate family biographies to try to better understand these figures outside of their formal role in colonial politics.

Nagayama Takeshirō

Takemi, the third son of Nagayama Takeshirō, remembers his father as a stern, almost severe man. It's clear that Takemi loved his father, though always at some distance. In contrast, Takeshirō was deeply loved by other soldiers, and seemed to reciprocate. He seemed to be a 'soldiers' soldier', being visited frequently by high ranking officers in the Imperial Army, and being visibly energized as he lay dying of cancer by news about the Russo-Japanese War, and particularly devastated to hear about the death of a friend. He was not, according to Takemi, completely without affection for his children, but largely the children seemed to be afraid of their father when they were young. There's a sense that there were some issues beyond the Nagayama patriarch simply being an authoritarian father. We learn that he suffered from stress headaches, apparently from overwork during the time he was simultaneously the Tondenhei commander and the Hokkaido governor, and in all of this, there's some sense of him as being an incredibly repressed person who is unable to connect with his own family members except in brief instances.

We learn that Takeshirō's last wish, while dying in Tokyo, was to return to Sapporo one last time, which he wasn't able to do because of his health and the arduous journey by train and sea to what was still then a remote location. Takemi recounts that his father said 「じぶんは屯田兵と約束しているから、東京では死にたくない、札幌の家へ帰って、あの庭を見ながらおれは死にたい、骨は、豊平の墓地に埋めて欲しい」(I've made a promise to the Tondenhei, and so I don't want to die in Tokyo; I want to go back to my house in Sapporo and I want to die there while looking out at my garden. I want my bones to be buried in the Toyohira cemetary.). About this, Takemi explains that his father welcomed incoming Tondenhei recruits by saying 「おまえたちは途中で内地に帰ってはならぬぞ、北海道の開拓というものは、容易なものじゃない、おれもおまえたちと同じように、ここの土になる」(You guys don't to go home to the mainland part way through. Colonizing Hokkaido is no easy job, and like me, all of you are going to become dirt here).

In this, there's a powerful sense of connection between Takeshirō as a settler and the land, for the most part typical of settler colonial discourse elsewhere. More on this later.

Edwin Dun

More briefly, the second essay gives a sketch of an elderly Edwin Dun from the perspective of his daughter in law, Michiko. While it consists of short glimpses into Dun's life, particularly during a reassessment of his historical importance in the post-war years as a sort of civilizer of Japan/pioneer of Hokkaido.

We learn that Dun was deeply moved by his encounter with the Meiji emperor, which is a sentiment seemingly shared by Horace Capron. Dun, however, was not simply awed by the experience of being honoured by a monarch, but rather claimed well into his old age (at which time the Meiji emperor was long dead) that 「日本でいちばん好きな人は明治天皇さま」(My favourite person in Japan is His Royal Highness Meiji).

Moreover, we learn about Edwin Dun's infamous campaign, evidently successful, to exterminate the Hokkaido wolf with strychnine. Michiko recounts this story fondly, using it to demonstrate Edwin's humility in simply saying 「″ご飯だ″と言われたから手を洗ってテーブルのところへ行ったら、お皿にはもう何もなくバターのおふたが取れていて歯形がついていた」(We're told "dinner!" but when we get to the table, there's nothing on the plate, the lid to the butter's missing, and there are teeth marks in it). Others have discussed this a length, but Dun is referring indirectly to ranchers losing livestock to wolves as a sort of domestic theft, which can be directly contrasted to the perceived value of wolves, foxes, etc., just a few short decades earlier in the Tokugawa period where these predators helped in the cultivation of rice by killing rodents. Similar to Leonard Cohen's line that "there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order", it is actually quite shocking how nonchalant the decision was on the part of Dun and his contemporaries to drive a species into extinction to minimize unpredictable loss and thereby maximize the profits of large scale commercial agriculture.

This too is a common occurrence in other settler colonies, including Dun's birthplace, the United States, where wolves, bears, and buffalo alike were largely exterminated to allow for high profits in ranching and to allow for uninterrupted lines of transportation to be opened. This is a particular form of capitalist accumulation which should be explored further.

Source overview: Eiwa Taiyaku Jisho

荒井郁之助 編 - 英和対訳辞書 (小林新兵衛//開拓使蔵版 pub) – 1872

I’ve been working to more clearly understand the semantics of terms related to colonialism in Hokkaido and Karafuto in the Meiji period. Authors such as James Hevia and Lydia Liu have written at length about translation and British colonialism in China, where certain terms in either language started to be treated as absolute equivalents with direct politically and ideologically laden implications and direct consequences in Anglo-Qing relations. For example 夷/yi and “barbarian” as supposedly referring to the British rather than a more nuanced translation of “foreigner”.

Not dissimilar to this, Nakamura Jun has talked about the phrase 土人/dojin (often translated as “aborigine” or “native”) which seemed to have experienced a sort of semantic drift from referring to “locals” to becoming a racial slur by the end of the Meiji period and thereafter. Given the richness of the research into this topic by these scholars and many others, I’m not going to conduct any sort of philological work on my own, however, I am very conscious of the fact that I’m reading an archaic form of Japanese and that many of the terms used in formal Chinese-inflected documents may have been archaic-sounding even at the time they were written. I’ve been keeping an eye out for old dictionaries

I was lucky enough to find a Kaitakushi-published Japanese-Russian glossary from the early Meiji period, which I glanced through and found 土民 as (through an English-Russian dictionary) “national” (as in, a member of a national community). Later I found a full Kaitakushi English-Japanese dictionary, the Eiwa Taiyaku Jisho, published in 1872, which after a thorough peruse, seems to be quite accurate and thorough.

I intend to use this (and hopefully, if I can find one, a Japanese-English dictionary from the period) to better understand texts from this time period. As both the nuance of Japanese words and English words have changed a great deal in the past 150 years, it’s something of a challenge not just to understand these early texts but translate them. So, for this, it’s useful to at least have a hint of what the intentions of the authors were.

More than this, however, I’m interested in, like Hevia and Liu’s studies referred to above, value-laden Western colonial terms rendered into Japanese and how these loan-translations were paired with or superimposed onto existing Japanese vocabulary. For this purpose, I did a survey of key terms related to race/racism, indigeneity, and colonialism to better ascertain how these ideas were framed in the time period.

In this dictionary, “aborigines” (pg. 5) is defined as “最初の住民” or “土人”, whereas “native” (pg. 310) refers generally to locals (“此土地の住たる人”), and in its adjectival form, to native plants, animals, etc (“根元, 生付, 生の”). “Indian” (pg. 238) refers strictly to India. “Savage” (pg. 415) is defined as “荒の？き人” and “猛悪人” , or in its adjectival form, “荒き”, “馴れて居るた” and “猛なる夷狄” and doesn’t seem to have been used to specifically refer to particular nations or ethnic groups. This is closely mirrored by Barbarian (pg. 39), translated as “バルバリン人”, “夷人”, “夷狄”, and while “barbarism” is much the same definition as the adjectival form of “savage”, added to this is “荒テ居ル不行儀なる蛮夷ノ” and “規則ナキ”. “Colony” (pg. 89) is defined as “殖民”, “殖民所” or “動物の一群”.

The fact that, at least in this dictionary, there isn’t a clear racialization of terms like “savage” or “barbarian” which – by the mid 19th century – were quite racist in English is interesting, as is the factual definition of “aborigine” as “first people” or “first residents”. This seems to confirm to some degree Nakamura Jun’s thesis. However, it’s interesting that there is strong association of lack of law and order and “savage”, which would make this an accurate translation of the English term. Interesting in that from Vitoria’s time forward, “Indians” are defined as devoid of sovereignty and sovereign power, which is the nucleolus of any legal system. They would not be savages because they’re lawless, but lawless because they’re savages. Finally, it’s interesting that (while I didn’t include it in my list above) “civilized” is not yet calqued at this time as “文明”, and “barbarian” is not so much translated, but transliterated, and the 夷/yi character is prominent in the other two translations given.

Source overview: Kangoku Hōrei Ruisan - Ch. 20 Genpei Oyobi Tondenhei Kankei

This brief section of this wide-ranging book on criminal justice in Japan deals with the Tondenhei and the military police. The chapter consists of seven ordinances regarding military courts, six of which relate directly to the Tondenhei. While there is no commentary included, these provide something of a primer for further studies on the Tondenhei, as it clearly states the following:

• Tondenhei colonists, even while primarily working as farmers, were subject to military and not civilian law
• The Tondenhei was officially a branch of the Japanese army (rikugun)
• The Tondenhei was, at least as of 1899, a volunteer army
• Tondenhei members were recruited between the ages of 17 and 30
• A separate Tondenhei military court, subject to the ministry of defence, was established in Sapporo
• Graduates from the Sapporo Agricultural College (who under Clark's instructions, received basic military training) were fast-tracked into the officer corps when they joined the Tondenhei
• Tondenhei members with children could retire if family responsibilities became to much, and non-officers could retire and remain attached to the Tondenhei as reservists

It becomes exceptionally clear that the Tondenhei were highly integrated into the Japanese armed forces and were not colonists with a simple ceremonial connection to the army. In other words, while they were farmers that worked to clear the land, and presumably after being discharged from service were granted portions of this land to farm individually, they regularly trained for combat.

This certainly highlights Michele Mason's assertion that the Tondenhei were an occupying army on Ainu land. And, I wonder to what degree they were at the time officially regarded as such. The Tondenhei branch was abolished in 1904 but was resurrected in the 1930s in Manchukuo with much the same purpose. But, we simply don't see the Tondenhei active in Taiwan or Korea or Nan'yo or other Japanese colonies. It was, at least until the Japanese colonization of Manchuria, a system unique to Hokkaido.

Another consideration is the question of the origins of the Tondenhei. While the name itself is clearly an allusion to the ancient Han dynasty's Tuntian system of military colonies in borderlands, a major difference is that Chinese agri-colonies were borne out of logistical necessity as supplying large occupying armies with food was extremely difficult and it was easier for them to grow their own. With this in mind, some scholars have linked the actual Meiji Japanese system to the Russian Empire's Cossacks who lived semi-autonomously in the empire's borderlands and represented the first wave of settlement, though unlike the Tondenhei, shared a balance of power with the Russian imperial government. Moreover, the Hokkaido government's own museums show that the Tondenhei lived in balloon-frame housing based on models used by American frontier cavalry, and the Hokkaido settlers guidebook I wrote about in a previous post shows plans for log houses used by Tondenhei which were typical of first-wave colonists' housing on the American western frontier. It seems that the Tondenhei were extremely hybridized, though Michele Mason was absolutely correct.

Source overview: Kyūdojin Ishokujū Sonohoka Torishirabe-sho

This study was published in 1883 and combined an analysis of Ainu living conditions in (1) Sapporo district in general, (2) the village of Tsuishikari -- dominated by Karafuto Ainu forcibly brought from Hokkaido in 1875-6, and (3) in Muroran, just south of Sapporo. This study aimed to analyze the reasons for a decline in the Ainu population explicitly from on the basis of hygienic conditions as the state understood them. In this case, hygiene (eisei) referred not to pubic health, but seems to have been -- as expressed in other posts -- quite an anomalous concept that had more to do with lifeways than anything remotely scientific. 

The three sections of this report aim to find fault in Ainu hygiene by investigating clothing, food and drink, housing, as well as marriage, childbirth, work/employment, bathing, exchange with other Ainu communities, life expectancy, and funerals. With these analyses, the author(s) aimed to demonstrate how and why Ainu populations were dropping so sharply.

While the word "study" may apply to this document, it's not scientifically rigorous in any way. Areas where one might ordinarily consider hygiene -- either in the 'personal' or 'public' senses -- such as food preparation, for example, are not seriously considered in regards to the spread of disease. Even less so than Sekiba Fujihiko's writings which tend to simply inscribe any aspect of Ainu culture that Sekiba did not approve of as "unhygienic", there is nothing in this study that even approaches a medical analysis of hygiene in these Ainu communities. Instead, this study links -- with absolutely no evidence -- things such as the soily smell of earthen floors in Ainu houses to a decline in the Japanese population.

We do see much of the same deeply ethnocentric assimilationist discourse as Sekiba, however, and clearly much of the impetus for the eventual Former Natives Protection Act comes from this sort of pathologization of Ainu daily life. 

Sapporo District Ainu

The author of the report on Sapporo district appears to have learned enough about the Ainu in this region to give Ainu names for particular textiles and articles of clothing, though this may be based on second hand reading rather than observation. While at times the report is quite a matter of fact, other times he makes what appear to be sweeping generalizations and exaggerations. For example, in discussing childbirth, he writes:

Pregnant women, unlike during ordinary times, are given extremely simple clothes and plain food and just barely escape from destitution (tōtai). Moreover, these pregnant women, suffer through a livelihood without frills, without the time to make decisions about things such as their health, being sent to the mountains to gather kindling, and facing the elements out in the wasteland. And also, they're sent to fish on the seashore and made to do hard labour. And in regards to how this babies are nurtured after they're born, even if they don't grow up to be excellent (zenryō), the Ainu mothers tenderly nurture their children with emotion. I think even more than ordinary people (jōjin). 

This description of Ainu women as borderline slaves (not to mention the characterization of Ainu babies as collectively destined to grow up as less-than-excellent people) is reminiscent of Orientalist stereotypes of Asian/non-Western women as collectively devalued and abused, continuing today with the so-called "white savour complex". It's one of many references to Ainu women which take on a specifically gendered tone.

The author of the first report notes that statistics (likely the koseki) lists Ainu in this district as living upwards of 70 years -- which in reality is staggeringly high for the 1880s. The author wonders, then, why the population is decreasing year after year. Here he returns to his image of hard done by Ainu women, and states that women going barefoot, braving the elements and being exposed to the cold air damages their uteri and that these elements can also damage the health of already pregnant women. He further states that not having proper bedding and, mentioned above, the earthy smell of Ainu homes damages their bodies, and women have miscarriages (ninki wo ushinashi) as a result. Moreover, he lists the heavy labour that pregnant women supposedly perform as a reason for the population decline. The lack of choice of foods for pregnant women and eating uncooked food are further given as reasons.

While, even if his report was true, much of this might be attributed to the realities of deep poverty, what does the author think should be done? The author describes the Ainu, referring to colonialism in the most indirect terms, explains that,

compared to other races that live in mixed environments [with other races], they are slow in raising their level of civilization (kaika) and escaping from their old traditions and adopting new ways. They have been neglectful of all of the necessities of life, and this has caused great damage to their health.

He concludes his analysis by simply stating that there are "too many reasons for their population decline to count", and as if to say that the Ainu are truly doomed, closes this section by discussing Ainu funerals.

Tsuishikari Ainu

The second author (I'm assuming there were two or three authors because of major stylistic differences in the writing itself), in discussing Karafuto Ainu far away from their homeland in Tsuishikari is in some ways much more straightforward and compared to the first author. For example, the first author claims that Sapporo district Ainu have no real form of cooking, no real form of marriage ceremonies, no real form of funerals, and the second author gives whole recipes and discusses Ainu ceremonies in detail. While it's not clear how accurate these observations are, they are largely without obvious personal bias. And, there are places -- such as his description of Ainu textiles made from treated tree bark -- where he directly gives examples of close Japanese equivalents. This almost gives the impression that the author thinks of the Ainu as not so different from the Japanese. However, there are other areas where the analysis is crudely culturalist and not just deflects Japanese colonialism or the fact that the Karafuto Ainu were ethnically cleansed from their far off homeland, but disavows these things altogether. He states, for example, that "the Ainu custom of building homes on uncleared swampland (mikai shichi) is the reason for the spread of disease" as a key reason for the decline in population. Much more troubling, the only other reason that the author gives for the population decline is that "as their homes and food are quite crude, when [Ainu] women have friendly relations with Japanese (wajin), they come to hate [other] natives. For this reason, there are a lot of bachelors amongst Ainu men and women." He concludes, before discussing funerals, by declaring the value of human life and advocating "giving the sick medicine, improving homes, and changing eating habits". Or in other words, he pushes for assimilation on explicitly biopolitical terms; a phenomenon which we see much more intensely later. The focus on Ainu women, both in terms of the quasi-orientalist "saving Ainu women from Ainu men" trope as well as the assertion that "friendly relations" with Japanese men have turned them off to Ainu men are typical of gendered colonial writing. Other sources, like the aforementioned Sekiba, have a strong gendered approach to Ainu women as well, giving special/especially creepy focus on them while Ainu men are treated as default. Given that still most immigrants travelling alone to Hokkaido were men, the focus on Ainu women as objects of desire is perhaps unsurprising, but it's odd to repeatedly see these references embedded in biopolitical writing.

Muroran Ainu

Lastly, the Muroran section is by far the shortest, and compared to the other two, is the most clinical. It's precise, including both descriptions of how Ainu houses are built and measurements of typical structures, and describes Ainu diet in detail simply missing from the first author's account of Sapporo district Ainu. Outstandingly, the third author has nothing disparaging to say about the Ainu at all. The picture of Ainu domestic life is in fact just that-- it's presented in a way that does not Other them in any explicit way, regardless of the veracity of the information presented itself. Interestingly, however, the section on life expectancy, where the other two authors discussed their harebrained theories as to why the Ainu population was decreasing, is nowhere to be found. Given the brevity of the entire section, it's possible the author only gave a cursory account of their field work, though this seems somewhat unlikely given the precision with which the third author talked about Ainu cooking or carpentry. They simply do not given an opinion as to why the Ainu were supposedly disappearing. 

There is an overwhelming tendency in late 19th and early 20th century Japanese accounts of the Ainu to characterize them as a 'vanishing race'. This still persists today, particularly but not exclusively with the Japanese ethnic nationalist right who have a tendency to declare the Ainu as extinct. Ainu activists sometimes comment on how their people are viewed as semi-mythological by Japanese settlers in Hokkaido with no bearing in reality. Well known academics, even non-Japanese ones writing in English, describe them in past tense ('The Ainu were a people that lived in Hokkaido'). But, the idea that there was a major population drop in the late 19th century itself should be interrogated. The main thing to consider is there are Ainu accounts of a sort of exodus into the interior of the island, away from settlers. Similarly, some settlers mention Ainu running away as soon as they see them. Like today, during this time, the Japanese government kept track of births and deaths using the koseki (family registers), in which many Hokkaido Ainu were first recorded in the late 1870s, When someone changes their permanent address, they would have to move their koseki as well. Especially given the limited access to on-the-ground information in the 19th century, it's not impossible that there were Ainu who were tied to a particular address on their koseki who simply got up and left and  in a legal sense became missing persons, or were even declared dead. After all, there aren't accounts of huge numbers of Ainu dying at once, but of particular towns losing Ainu populations. This could very well account for at least part of this drop in population so widely reported.

The other thing to consider is the actual effects of Japanese and Russian settler colonialism in Ainu lands. The only references to the Japanese in these reports, the creepy 'once you go wajin you'll never go back' comment in the second report and a reference in the Muroran report that mentions trade, are incredibly oblique. There's absolutely no mention of the fact that Ainu lands were confiscated by the state and were redistributed to settlers and mainland corporations for economic exploitation. There's no mantion that Ainu were restricted in hunting and fishing as well as gathering daily use goods like tree barks used to make clothing, completely tanking their trade-based economy and severely restricting their access to the bare necessities of life. And there's no mention that many Ainu were forcibly moved from their homes and put into what for some were alien environments, like seaside Karafuto Ainu communities sent to interior swamp areas in southern Hokkaido. What impact did these things have on the Ainu populations? How many people simply weren't able to survive with these massive, catastrophic changes to their communities? Was there violence inflicted on Ainu communities, especially with individuals who refused or resisted colonization? Did settlers ever forcibly take land from Ainu or harm them in other ways? These questions remain unanswered, and at least partly it seems that this was on purpose. 

The fact that these reports or many others like them, including writings by supposed critics of the Japanese state's treatment of the Ainu like John Batchelor, do not mention colonialism at all and instead offer a thousand different excuses for Ainu population based on something lacking in the Ainu itself is very telling. It's certainly not that individuals didn't know or just missed it altogether. And it's not even that colonialism in Hokkaido was a taboo topic as it is now: colonialism itself was widely discussed and celebrated. Rather, there was a conscious choice to divorce Ainu precarity from the effects of settler colonialism. And the inevitable conclusion reached by these sorts of reports was simple: the essential faults with the Ainu as a culture or, worse, as a race could only be fixed through assimilation campaigns. So, in other words, the unspoken effects of colonialism could only be fixed with more, deeper colonialism. Domestic spaces were to be colonized, which is exactly what happened in the two decades after this report was published.

Comment: the presence/absence of Japanese colonialism/the Ainu in historical documents

Going through a number of historical descriptions of the Ainu and of Japanese colonialism itself in the 19th century, an interesting pattern emerges. In texts describing Japanese colonialism, such as guides for incoming settlers, official reports on the conditions of the colony, or as Ueki Tetsuya brilliantly showed, late 19th century Japanese academic studies of the process of colonizing Hokkaido, the Ainu are simply absent. And not absent in the sense that they were left out of these writings by accident, but rather, that there seems to have been a conscious decision in many cases to write them out of history.

The term "mujin no sakai" (unpeopled borderland) comes up frequently as a sort of romanticized trope of pioneering. As mentioned in an earlier post, where the Ainu are mentioned is purely where they are relevant to the economic development of the colony. Otherwise, less attention is paid to them than to what kind of fish or trees are native to Hokkaido. Where academic writing does focus on the Ainu, it's often to discuss how they're "vanishing" or how they can be "saved".

In this case, the Ainu are characterized as undergoing a process of a sort of racial evanescence, as though they're simply fated to disappear into the wilderness like a fog burning off the forest in the heat of the morning sun.

Even where some texts make allusions to the catastrophic effects settler colonialism has had on Indigenous communities as their economy was systemically dismantled (and with it, their access to the basic necessities of life), as their land was stolen from them by the state and sold private corporations and incoming settlers, and as their lifeways were stigmatized and banned, these references are often sideways, opaque, and ultimately disavowed. Where there are direct references to the Ainu, these depictions present them collectively in a sort of pure, unblemished, museumized state, or as European writers at the time might have put it, a state of nature, without the slightest mention of the Japanese settlers or settler colonial state. Indeed, these descriptions of Ainu primitivity often are used to demonstrate how and why the Ainu are in a state of sharp decline in a rapidly modernizing Hokkaido.

The result is writings on the Ainu and writings on the settlers form a pair of parallel lines. But what does this accomplish? What effect does it have?

The effect is that these texts disconnect the Indigenous people from their land. This both neutralizes the question of the morality of colonialism (a question that should be taken seriously when analyzing historical writings). This may very well have had a reassuring effect for settlers in Hokkaido while it literally pulled the Ainu out of history (with a capital "h"). The Ainu are rendered timeless, landless, and miserably primitive without the spiritual, cultural, or material means to elevate themselves. Their suffering is, according to these texts, not a material effect of settler colonialism, but simply based on their inability to progress collectively as a race.

This discourse, as Lorenzo Veracini writes, takes many forms in settler colonies throughout the global history of settler colonialism, and is by no means unique to Japan. The process of imagining Indigenous people as non-existent has obvious genocidal implications while it reinforces the romanic pioneering myth, or bringing industry and progress to a waste land. This myth seems to simply slip off the tongue, and is seen again and again in official documents and popular discourse alike. But, is there not an element of it which is self-consciously systematic and persistent. What are the roots of this discourse of Hokkaido as "unpeopled", besides, presumably, wishful thinking? It's clear who is benefited and who is disbenefited by it, but how does a discourse like this develop?

Source overview: Okamoto Bunpei - Hokumon Kyūmu ch. 4 - Dojin

Okamoto Bunpei was a member of what seems to have been essentially a lobby group, Hokumonsha (the Northern Gate Society). This group formed in the late Tokugawa period to advocate the aggressive colonization of Ainu lands to stop them, and perhaps Japan with them, from falling into the hands of the Russian Empire. Okamoto in particular was an early colonist in Karafuto, or Sakhalin, and wrote this text as a sort of treatise on how to effectively colonize the island. Southern Karafuto at this time was inhabited by in reality only a small number of permanent Japanese settlers, who were joined by Russian citizens of various nationalities -- many of them criminals and political prisoners. And, of course, the Karafuto Ainu are the Indigenous people of the southern half of the island, though today the vast majority of them, after waves of Japanese and Soviet ethnic cleansing campaigns, reside in Hokkaido and Honshu.

It seems that Okamoto moved to Karafuto in part to put his money where his mouth with some official government support. However, the situation was far from ideal with the colony teetering on collapse, which may have contributed to the decision to formally cede it to the Russian Empire. However, in this context, Okamoto's text may be interpreted as policy suggestions designed to develop the colony economically.

While I intend to read more later on, I quickly went through the short section on the Karafuto Ainu which, keeping in the spirit of the text, was both a critique of existing policies toward the Ainu as well as suggestions for future policies. Okamoto's views are interesting in part because of how differently things actually went, and in retrospect come across as in many ways a continuation of Tokugawa-era direct rule policies.

Taken as a whole, these retrograde policies can be understood as 'winning the hearts and minds' of the Ainu as part of a defense against Russian encroachment while at the same time, assimilating them to the degree that the would be understood internationally as firmly under Japanese suzerainty. As Russians were, according to the new Meiji government's own admission, comparatively kind to the Ainu, Okamoto felt that Japan would have to essentially bribe them, continuing the buiku system from a half century prior. For this, Okamoto suggests, alcohol is "incomparable" in its ability to "tame the barbarians (imin)". Moreover, he suggests keeping a clear distance from Ainu religious practice, going so far as to suggesting Japanese settlers from cutting down willow trees which are used for Ainu religious paraphernalia. One might wonder what Marx with his "opiate of the masses" view of organized religion would make of this pairing.

Okamoto then reaffirms the official Japanese policies of providing a brown rice stipend for the elderly, infants, the disabled, and the sick. He warns, however, that the "stupid (gumai)" Ainu are apt to lie to get more rice and recommends colonial administrators become well aware of the situation and be prepared to punish infractions. Okamoto further chastises the former shogunate for being overly generous with its rice stipends and recommends forcing the Ainu into unpaid labour to compensate for rice beyond what Okamoto imagines would be the right amount to win their loyalty.

With this aid, he warns against using underhanded methods to control the Ainu, and returning to similar policies such as his more 'liberal' stance toward Ainu religion, suggests that Japan would have to be fair in its dealings to properly defend against the Russians, and ends by suggesting teaching them handwriting, arithmetic, and farming and intermarrying poor (as in impoverished) Japanese women to the Ainu, and in turn Ainu women to Japanese settlers.

Source overview: Hokkaidō-chō Shokuminka-hen - Hokkaidō Imin Mondō

北海道庁植民課編: 北海道移民問答 [April 1891]

This book was compiled by the Hokkaido prefectural government as a sort of FAQ for incoming settlers. It largely is intended to help settlers establish themselves economically. And based on repeated warnings about coming unprepared, and the existence of settler protection policies in the previous decade, it's likely that a good number of settlers needed a guide like this.

A series of chapters divided by industry are book-ended by a chapter on climate and at the beginning and a miscellanea chapter at the end. Those chapters on industry are furthermore seemingly divided by the economic importance of the field as it stood in 1891, either by the volume or questions or importance placed on the fields by the government of Hokkaido. Most importance is placed on agriculture, which is subdivided into four chapters largely focusing on obtaining leases or buying crown land, clearing this land, and suitable crops for different regions within Hokkaido. From there there are descending chapters (with a smaller and smaller page count) on fisheries, stock farming, sericulture, forestry, mining, construction, salaries, commerce, and transportation. In effect, this book represents the economic life of the colony of Hokkaido, and likewise, with its focus on the distribution of crown land to private industry, reflects the process of primitive accumulation of Indigenous land.

Particularly relevant to the latter, given the widely-known presence of the Ainu, they go almost entirely unacknowledged. In fact, there are instead references to Hokkaido as an "unpeopled borderland", similar to Michele Mason's observations of the Hokkaido as a "virgin land" myths so prominent in Meiji-era popular fiction. However, strangely, given this conceptual erasure of the Ainu, there are two direct references to them as it relates to their employability. One states that their wages are by and large on par with settlers, and the other states that they are useful labourers for settlers to hire, especially as boatmen, leading horses, or as guides into the interior. As such we might understand the erasure of the Ainu in throughout the remainder of this text not simply as reflecting the romantic pioneer myth of settling land 'untouched by human hands', nor simply reflecting a genocidal vision of Hokkaido entirely bereft of its Indigenous population, but rather, as also reflecting the economic positioning of the Ainu vis-a-vis their land in the Hokkaido settler colony. Simply put, for the Japanese state, profits were maximized precisely through the appropriation of Ainu land and the ethnic cleansing of the Ainu from that land. This process continued (and arguably still continues as with examples such as the infamous Nibutani dam construction) through the Meiji period, and this book instructing mainland Japanese on how to properly settle "unpeopled" land in Hokkaido directly reflects this. Moreover, where Ainu enter the picture, as briefly as it is, it is in the context of their being used as labourers by settlers to maximize their profits. Indigenous people in settler colonies -- not just Hokkaido -- in this regard were/are treated as a sort of pure surplus labour. And, indeed, it was in the 1890s that the Former Natives Protection Act attempted in turn to mobilize the Ainu as settlers on their own land.

With that said, one thing which is unclear throughout this text is the term "capital" (資本). I say this because, as the foreign employees of the Kaitakushi wrote in their reports in the 1870s (which, it seems, the Hokkaido government followed to the letter), there was a huge emphasis on the exploitation of Hokkaido by private capital as soon as possible. Report after report chided the Japanese government for establishing state enterprise or building infrastructure itself, and the foreign advisors, like good capitalists, both argued that private industry would more efficiently settle the island, and would also be quicker to bring "civilization" to Hokkaido. We learn from the reports that by the 1890s, all state-own industry on the island had been sold off to private buyers and that the government had stopped funding (lit: "protecting"/保護) individual settlers in favour of pouring money into infrastructure and subsidies both to companies and individuals. Subsidies to the point where private individuals did not pay income tax, it appears. But, back to the question of capital, the term as used in this text is not precisely capital in the sense used in capitalism. At times, such as would-be farmers asking how much "capital" they'll need until the farm is fully functional, the term seems to be more in reference to having enough money to live day-to-day until the farm is productive enough to feed the farmer's family. While the development of Hokkaido at large was unambiguously capitalist, and we learn many farmers grew cash crops for export rather than food they would eat themselves, I wonder to what degree ordinary settlers were thinking about this. Was settlement understood as escaping poverty, was it a sense of adventure, was it patriotic duty, or were individuals seeing themselves as capitalist agents? It's not clear at all from the questions asked in this text.

Key points

Page 5, 6 discuss late March as the best time of year to immigrate, largely related to snowfall and maximizing the chances of clearing land and establishing a farm before the following winter. This is repeated in the miscellaneous section which discusses building a provisional shelter and then more permanent log cabin. In both cases, there's a warning of "bitter regret" if a strict timeline is not kept.

Pages 8-13 go into detail about how much land is developed, how much land is left, the types and quality of land, etc. It may be useful in creating a 'profile' of colonizable land.

Pages 19-29, in reference to the 北海道土地払下規則施行手続, discuss land grants, how to buy crown land, etc. Settlers are instructed to write a proposal of how they would use land and submit it to the Hokkaido government. A sample application is attached. Related to this, I wonder if Ainu had similar procedures during the promulgation of the Protection Act. Would land be surveyed on their behalf?

Page 35 indicates that about 70 km2 (7000町歩) are being developed per year and rising. This still seems rather small. Page 36 discusses the optimal use of different types/qualities of land.

Page 54 discusses large scale farming in an explicitly Euro-American fashion, including European farming tools (and a Sapporo-based factory to make them).

Page 65 describes Shorthorn, Ayrshire, and Devon as "most suitable" among "European-American cattle" (洋牛) for Hokkaido.

Page 67 describes Thoroughbred, "Arizerii" [Arabian?], and Percheron as "suitable" among the "Euro-American horses" (洋馬) for Hokkaido. Among these, the Thoroughbred was introduced by the Kaitakushi from America, and remains "most suitable for this prefecture".

Page 68 repeats this question regarding pigs. It provides a long list of Euro-American breeds and lists Berkshire and "Sabbuuku" [Saddleback?] as easiest to breed, but Essex as most profitable for small scale farmers.

Page 74 describes "imported" foreign grasses as suitable for Hokkaido.

Page 98 describes laws banning settlers [/Ainu] from freely cutting trees on crown land beginning in Meiji 21.

Page 106 describes Kaitakushi-era state own factories and convinced that they were all sold off but many of the buyers continue to operate them.

Page 108 introduces the term "拓地植民".

Pages 109-110 displays a table of wages by industry and metropolitan region including average wages for men and women.

Page 111 confirms (officially, though who knows) that Ainu wages are roughly 30 sen a day, so the same as "common employees" (参拾銭前後にして尋常の雇人と異ならず). The employment chart contradicts this claim, but I wonder if it doesn't refer to proletarian day-labourers. If so, that would be interesting it itself.

Page 134 discusses how mainlanders can get to different settlement sites (植民地). The answer discusses routes to various "wastelands" (原野). This may be interesting in relation to the government's settlement of Ainu populations as well as its relation to settler narratives (real or imagined).

Pages 142, 143 discusses "protection" (保護) of settlers, including transportation fees and subsidized wages. We learn that the Hokkaido government recently cut "protection" of individual settlers in favour of using this money to build roads and power lines to make transportation and communication easier, survey wasteland (原野を区画) and "protect industrial companies owned by settlers" (移民を持ち工業会社を保護).

Pages 143-145 discuss "indirect protection" (間接の保護) for settlers, including, (1) "region costs" coming from the national treasury, (2) government owned wastelands lent to settlers and then, when developed, sold at a flat rate of 1 yen/1000 tsubo (3300 m2), (3) tax exemption on this land for 20 years, (4) land that was taxable after Meiji 2 [the year Hokkaido was annexed] is tax exempt from Meiji 22 to 31 (1889-1898), (5) land tax as 1/100 of the lands value, (6) income tax as applying only to public servants [Really??], (7) breweries tax cut in half, (8) tax exemption for confectionery, soya sauce, and carriages [Why??], and (9) those living outside of Hakodate, Fukuyama, or Esa (ie. former Matsumae towns) are exempt from the draft.

Page 145 describes the "hardships" and the "matter of life and death" of settling an "unpeopled borderland" (無人の境) as farmers.

Page 148 discusses the Meiji 16 imperial decree: 明治十六年第拾号布達北海道転籍移住者手続.

Page 155 describes settler livelihoods as having more "elbow-room" (余裕) than mainlanders.

Page 156 describes a 50/50 split (五分 ... 五分) between settlers involved in industry and settlers involved in farming/fisheries.

Pages 160-163 describe 屯田兵/士族 houses and provides blueprints.

Pages 170 discusses Ainu (旧土人 glossed as あいぬ) as useful to hire for settlers living in close proximity, especially for guides into mountains and valleys, leading horses (馬追い), or boat rowers (船漕ぎ).

Page 172 gives population statistics by county.

Page 174 describes roads as "the most necessary addition/convenience to transportation for the purpose of colonization" (開拓に最も必要なるは交通の便にして道路). Very similar to Warfield's argument that roads lead to commerce and thus civilization.

Page 175 provides a bibliography of books which are usual for information on the colonization of Hokkaido. Of particular use are (1) 開拓使事業報告, (2) 北海道志, (3) 県統計書, (4) 北海道庁統計書, (7) 北海道庁勧業年報, (8) 北海道庁勧業月報, (9) 北海道農業手引草, (23) 北海道植民地選定報文, (24) 北海道移住案内.

Page 180 lists the best overviews of Hokkaido.

Page 181 lists the best periodical on production increases.

Source analysis: Sekiba Fujihiko - Ainu Ijidan

關場不二彥：あいぬ醫事談) [1896] 

Sekiba Fujihiko was trained as a medical doctor at Tokyo Imperial University, where he studied under the German physicians Julius Scriba and Erwin Bälz, and continued his studies at the University of Berlin. He immigrated to Hokkaido after completing his studies. Inspired by his meeting with the British missionary John Batchelor, Sekiba began offering pro bono medical treatment to Ainu, and eventually treated more than 400 Ainu patients. Also during his time in Hokkaido, he assisted his former mentor Erwin Bälz, a noted eugenicist and race theorist, in his own study of the Ainu. Ainu Ijidan is partly the result of his firsthand experience treating Ainu patients. However, it also relies heavily on John Batchelor's writings on the Ainu, as well as official Kaitakushi publications and Tokugawa-era travelogues of Japanese officials sent to survey Ainu territory. I have focused on the introduction as well as three chapters which analyze the hygiene of Ainu culture and living conditions, as well as Sekiba's own recommendations for Ainu protection. For the time being, I have skipped his survey of traditional Ainu medical knowledge.

This text clearly situates the Japanese attitudes toward the Ainu in transcolonial discourse regarding Indigenous/colonized people. Prominent throughout the text is a discourse of racial hygiene which characterizes the Ainu collectively as pathologically deficient in hygiene (衛生), and this leading to the eventual extinction of their race without direct, long-term Japanese intervention and the total assimilation of the Ainu down to the smallest rhythms of daily life. According to this line of thought, it was Ainu hygiene – not borderline genocidal restrictions on Ainu access to the basic necessities of life – which was the sole reason for the purported sharp decline in Ainu population the late 19th century.

This analogy of racial hygiene was drawn as early as the Katō Masanosuke's comments in the Japanese Diet 1892, where he appealed for Ainu protection by stating,

[The Ainu] don't respect the laws of hygiene. They suffer from illnesses and don't know to visit a doctor to be cured, don't know to take medicine, and gradually their bodies have become unhealthy. This diseased race is today in a state of decline. ... If we continue our practice of non-interference as we do today, I think the Ainu race will go extinct in some decades just as the Australian natives have gone extinct. 

What is perhaps most surprising is that Katō’s characterization of racial hygiene came a full year before the publication of German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz's infamous Foundations of Racial Hygiene, Part I: The Efficiency of Our Race and the Protection of the Defectives (Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene. Band I, Die Tuechtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen). This is not to suggest that Japanese politicians influenced German eugenicists, but rather that both can be traced to a longer genealogy of settler colonial Indigenous management. A major clue to this is a passage early in Sekiba's analysis of Ainu hygiene where he approvingly cites Charles Darwin. Darwin himself discusses the Ainu as a sort of missing link between modern man and a sub-human progenitor. And although this reference to Darwin is brief, his influence on Sekiba's view of the Ainu is clear throughout the rest of the text. While so-called ‘social Darwinism’ is often seen as a sort of perversion of the biologists' otherwise benign work on evolution, Darwin's 1871 publication The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex reads the devastating effects of European colonialism on Indigenous peoples worldwide as natural, inevitable, and directly linked both to different races' level of civilization. Civilization itself is understood by Darwin as a cultural expression of the concept of the survival of the fittest. Those like Sekiba who called for Ainu protection, far from resisting this sort of crude biological racism, seems to have crystallized it perfectly. Largely disavowing the effects of Japanese colonialism, they saw the Ainu as doomed to destroy themselves, and, as Sekiba, Katō, and others clearly state, only the morality (morality being an expression of the highest order of civilization) of the Japanese could save them. Indeed, for Sekiba, the Japanese colonization of the Ainu was “a great blessing for these suffering Ainu” and believes the Ainu “should be delighted to have come into contact with us”.

In his ‘diagnosis’ of the Ainu, Sekiba Fujihiko's Ainu Ijidan discusses both Ainu physiological and cultural defects, and thereby straddles biological racism and culturalism. This is notable, though I suspect not totally uncommon for this type of text, as biological racism and culturalism are understood as being to a large degree mutually exclusive. And indeed, in Sekiba's work, as in a lot of the Ainu protectionist discourse, there's an uneasy relationship between the widely held assumption that the Ainu are hopelessly inferior to the Japanese and assimilationsts' insistence that the Ainu as a race are improvable and are capable of being absorbed into the Japanese national body. In Ainu Ijidan, these two ideas are both present and are the two modes by which the author articulates his quantitative medical/anthropological and qualitative socio-cultural analyses. At times, such as his serious consideration of whether Ainu suffer collectively from hypertrichosis, his explanation of how to stop Ainu women from “smelling like dogs” (犬臭), or his assertion that some Ainu have a custom of cannibalism, his analysis is crudely and contemptuously biologically racist. At other times, however, such as his likening the Ainu to the Celts or Mongols who were brave and powerful but lacked the capacity to form a nation-state, the analysis much more geared to a sort of historicist culturalism. These seemingly opposing points of view overlap toward the end of the book where Sekiba, if only partially, disavows the idea of the decline in the Ainu population as strictly the result of their losing ground in the survival of the fittest (優勝劣敗) and instead argues that their decline is based largely on their lack of hygiene, and that fixing this would give them a fighting chance at survival in this arena. However, even this is contradicted elsewhere throughout the book, he describes the decline of “these naturally plain, stupid Ainu” as based on their natural susceptibility as barbarians to disease or their inability to live hygienically without assistance as based on their mental faculties.

But while Sekiba asserts that hygiene alone can cure the Ainu of their racial defects, it’s not entirely clear what “hygiene” (衛生) or “unhygienic” (不摂生) mean. This is perhaps not surprising, as scholars of the 19th century hygiene movement often comment on how slippery this term was in its use in Europe. For his part, Sekiba clearly is not talking about public health or sanitation. And while at times he talks about hygiene in the sense of personal hygiene, it’s unclear how this relates to the contraction of disease or racial extinction, and it seems to be little more than a way of slandering the Ainu, or, as alluded to above, reforming Ainu women, presumably to be suitable mates for the large number of bachelors who immigrated to Hokkaido during this time. By and large, Sekiba understands hygiene as related explicitly to lifestyle and sees banal patterns of daily life such as regular or irregular mealtimes or the quantity of food one consumes as hygienic or unhygienic and directly related to the contraction of disease. He accordingly sees the traditional Ainu economy based on hunting, fishing, and trade as fatally unhygienic in contrast to the more sedentary, modern, and civilized Japanese/Euro-American agrarian lifestyle. Elsewhere, he describes the supposed practice of Ainu going barefoot as unhygienic due to exposure to elements, or the architecture of Ainu houses itself as unhygienic. Indeed, any time Sekiba describes any aspect of Ainu domestic life, it’s to comment on how unhygienic it is. The only exception is Ainu straw raincoats which, after heaping praise on them, he mentions as closely resembling those of the Japanese.

In effect, Sekiba is pathologizing every aspect of Ainu cultural life. While he seems, like John Batchelor, largely unconcerned with Ainu language or outward displays of Ainu culture, Sekiba is perhaps going much further than many assimilationists by instead calling for total erasure of the smallest minutiae of Ainu cultural life through a regime of biopolitical disciplining of Ainu bodies.
Finally, one area where Sekiba stands out from virtually all other protectionist discourse is how muted his descriptions of Japanese settler colonialism is. One discursive strategy that I’ve noticed, right back from the Meiji government’s justifying the annexation of Hokkaido through criticisms of the Matsumae domain’s cruel treatment of the Ainu, is assertions that new assimilation/colonization policies are needed to fix injustices the Ainu have faced in the past. Katō Masanosuke in the first bill’s reading in 1892 and Shirani Takeshi in the second bill’s reading in 1899 both claim that the Protection Act is needed to protect the Ainu from the predations of Japanese settlers on Ainu land. Sekiba, however, only mentions the concrete effects of Japanese settler colonialism once throughout his text, in describing the unhygienic Ainu diet, by stating that as Ainu hunting and fishing was banned (using a passive verb without a clear actor) and that they would need to be significantly more ‘hygienic’ in their eating habits to survive. This seems like a clear allusion to Ainu famines in the 1880s and 1890s, though Sekiba declines to go into any detail.

Notes: Rousseau - The Social Contract

I've re-read book one of the Social Contract by Rousseau as a sort of refresher, misremembering it as having advocated the protection of people in a "state of nature". Or in other words, based on the Hobbesian definition that Rousseau uses, Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

While my memory apparently doesn't serve me well, it was interesting re-reading this after going through a number of primary documents related to the Former Natives Protection Act as there were other points which are directly relevant. Mainly, partly because of the intense wartime fascist propaganda, there's a tendency in academia to look at Japanese Nihonjinron discourses of the "family state" as something far-right and uniquely Japanese. It's interesting to see Rousseau draw the same analogy of the sovereign as the head, the people as the body, and whatnot, more than a century earlier. What's more interesting, however, is Rousseau's assertion that unlike the father in an actual family, the sovereign cannot but look dispassionately about his subjects. This is interesting because of characterizations of the love and empathy that the Emperor has for his subjects. The Ainu are characterized as his "babies" (akago) which he must protect as members of the nation-state. As Rousseau put it himself, the "father may, in their name, make certain rules for their protection and their welfare, but" -- and this is where things deviate a little -- "cannot give away their liberty irrevocably and unconditionally, for such a gift would be contrary to the ends of nature and an abuse of paternal right." I suspect that part of the reason for this deviation from European conceptualizations of the family state is that this metaphor is rooted in both Confucianist or European political thought. However, we might remember Agamben's discussion of jus vitae ac necis, the Roman law which gives a father the power over life and death over his children, as one of the foundations of European sovereign discourse.

We might also consider, however, Rousseau's understanding of man in a state of nature as having a certain shelf life that civilized man does not. Without saying how or why, he states "the primitive condition cannot endure, for then the human race will perish if it does not change its mode of existence". And here, perhaps, Rousseau is much closer to Hobbes view of "Americans" than he's usually characterized as being. Hobbes view of the lives of those in a state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" and that of later supporters of the Former Natives Protection Act like John Batchelor viewing the drop in the Ainu population as being due to disease and infighting are perfectly compatible with Rousseau's conception of the natural evanescence of savages.

Rousseau, more than Hobbes, argues against Grotius, the Dutch jurist who defined the limits of the sovereign state in the context of Dutch colonial expansion into southeast Asia whereby sovereign kingdoms were invaded and annexed (though, mind you, without abolishing the full title of local kings). Despite arguing against Grotius' seeming despotism, colonialism forms the explicit backdrop of his own argument. Specifically, how an individual or a state and own private or public property.

One such example, just after criticizing Grotius' views on slavery, is the use of Robinson Crusoe, the "sole inhabitant of his island" as a metaphor, equivalent to "King Adam" or "Emperor Noah" in showing that the subjective position of the sovereign is not simply related to sovereignty over the land, but in relation to the sovereign's subjects over which they have power. Interestingly in this, Crusue was not the "sole occupant", but had Friday, who he had made a slave, and had rescued from cannibals. It's certainly possible Rousseau hadn't read the novel he was referencing, but it's also possible that in this equation, as with the inability of "stupid, limited animal[s]" in a state of nature to make war, the presence of Indigenous people does not count to Rousseau as actual inhabitation in any real sense. Or he simply forgot about them.

And while Rousseau gives an interesting analysis to "right" and "might" as it were, similar to Benjamin's discussion of law-making violence. But it's interesting how easily the "right of the strongest" becomes the "survival of the fittest", historically. And while Rousseau is, much to his credit, careful not to equate force with morality, he does see morality as something simply not possessed by man in a state of nature. Or, in other words, Rousseau sees a social evolution based on man's unequal elevation out of a state of nature and into civil society where the most civilized segments have both, it would seem, the strength of arms as well as the most developed morality. It would be worth looking into social evolutionism in liberal thought as related to social Darwinism and biological racism. It seems in many ways to be more of a redefinition of terms than a radical shift in ideology.

It's also important to consider Rousseau, and those who were inspired by him, as progenitors of the liberal movement as it existed in countries including Japan in the late 19th century. How much were people like Fukuzawa influenced by Rousseau? Would he have been commonly read by all liberals, or simply those particularly interested in Euro-American thought?

Source analysis: Rule in the Name of "Protection" - On the Former Natives Protection Act

From Sasaki, Masao. Genshi Suru "Ainu". Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 2008.

Written during the heated debate over the future of the Former Natives Protection Act, Sasaki's Asahi Newspaper article, included in the anthology of his work Genshi Suru "Ainu", provides an extremely sharp and concise critique of this law.

Sasaki attacks the law from two angles: one is how the law played a role in racializing the Ainu. The term "Ainu" itself is questioned throughout the article, put into quotation marks along with terms like "kaitaku" (colonizing/'opening up' the land), "Wajin" (ethnic Japanese settlers), or "Nihon" (Japan). This doesn't simply give the impression that Sasaki is trying to express, as one often does with scare quotes, a hesitation to use these terms literally. But rather, he seems to be suggesting that these terms are mutually constitutive ideological constructions and can only exist on conjunction with each other. The imagined community of the Japanese ethnic nation-state is, in other words, constituted in part through the abjection of racialized groups like the Ainu, and vice versa. Moreover, while Sasaki is not entirely clear in his intentions, he appears very self-conscious of the fact that many ethnic Japanese, in or out of Hokkaido, have a particular image of terms like "Ainu" or, worse still perhaps,"kyūdojin" (former natives) as signifying primitive, inferior barbarians. The stigma around the term "Ainu" as it was used by Japanese in the early and mid 20th century led many in Sasaki's generation to reject it outright as an ethnic slur. In this, the Former Natives Protection Act played a key role in racialized subjectification. Those to whom this law applied to could be said to be legally "former natives"/Ainu and those to whom this law did not apply were thereby legally "Wajin"/Japanese. But this isn't to say that there were clear cut understandings of what constituted an "Ainu" at the time this law passed. After all, the first bill of the Former Natives Protection Act failed to pass in 1892 because it wasn't clear to the committee members assessing the bill who and who wasn't Ainu. This shouldn't be overstated, especially given the presence of Japanese descendants of Tokugawa-era settlers whose lineage may not have been clearly traceable by the state, and who themselves may have been, in some cases, quite hybridized in terms of obvious cultural markers such as clothing or language. There was no clear line between Ainu and Japanese, in other words. And, the fear was, most likely, more about labeling Japanese as Ainu than wrongfully labelling Ainu as Japanese. But curiously, in the reading of the second Former Natives Protection Act in the Diet, as Sasaki alludes to, the question of children of unclear lineage came, and how the law would apply to them. When asked whether these children would be considered Japanese or Ainu, Shirani Takeshi simply replies that if the child looks Ainu, they're Ainu. Or in other words, if a child meets the physiognomy of a cliched racist image of an Ainu, that's good enough for the state. Sasaki rightly sees this almost arbitrary racialization as consequentially applying to all Ainu, children or not.

The second key argument Sasaki makes is to attack the enduring idea that the Ainu race had simply lost the survival of the fittest to the Japanese race on an even playing field. This was a key rationale for the need for 'protection': that the Ainu were natural inferior and needed their lives to be directly managed by the state in order to protect them from natural processes by which they would eventually face extinction simply through contact with the racially superior Japanese settlers. Sasaki responds to this by looking directly at laws targeting Ainu hunting and fishing, the basis of their economy and a major source of food for them, as having an absolutely devastating effect on their community. The other effect of these bans on Ainu hunting as well as the encroachment of the forestry industry was that many Ainu lost access to furs and birch bark used to make clothing. This effectively meant the Ainu could no longer easily make their own clothing needed to survive in the frigid northern winters. These laws produced the precarity that many Ainu found themselves in. And the Former Natives Protection Law, in addressing this precarity as rooted in Ainu inferiority rather than the effects of colonial policy, not only did nothing to change the conditions of this precarity, but naturalized and normalized the Japanese settler colonial presence which led to these laws being passed in the first place.

Sasaki is equally critical of the land 'grants' given to Ainu households as based on the precondition that they farm the land and that the land remains in the family, and can't be transferred outside of the family without government approval. This is both because many Ainu, who were primarily hunters and fishers, were simply not easily able to sustain themselves with vegetables gown on family farms. Moreover, settlers usurping Ainu land continued. As the land was leasable through civil law, many lessees used loopholes to claim the land and, according to Sasaki, and had great success in continuing the land theft that the Protection Act ostensibly aimed to curb.

In all of this, Sasaki is arguing for the abolition of the Former Aborigines Protection Act by attacking the basis on which it was enacted. As an Ainu writing in the late 1960s, he describes the law as "humiliating" for Ainu, and preserving the the racist assumptions from the 19th century that the law is predicated on.

This source is the first of several Ainu critiques of the Japanese settler colonial law targeting the Ainu that I'll be looking at. Sasaki is in some ways the most radical of this group of Ainu writers, but as Mark Winchester demonstrated with his brilliant analysis of Sasaki's long form essays, his almost deconstructive approach to his own racial subjectivity in many ways anticipates post-structuralist and post-colonial politics and can be used quite effectively in critiquing Japanese settler colonialism.

Moreover, Sasaki's discussion of such simple, matter of fact things as the Ainu not being able to collect birch bark to make clothes because of the forestry industry is extremely relevant in any discussion of the effects of these laws on the Ainu ability to sustain their own communities without relying on the Japanese state or, for that matter, becoming more and more integrated into the Japanese capitalist economy as a matter of contingency. Sakaki illuminates in a short article how these processes worked. Cutting Ainu off from resources, or greatly restricting access they had to resources, also freed them up for economic exploitation by both small time capitalist settlers, or more often, it seems, large conglomerates from the mainland. Ainu land, of course, was and remained the object desire of the colonization of Hokkaido, and putting them onto small parcels of farmland kept them off the great majority of their former territories. These laws were just as much about removing the limits of Japanese exploitation of the natural resources of Hokkaido as they were about limiting the Ainu. Sasaki Masao is a powerful voice in revealing this power relationship.

Source analysis: Itinerary of Hokkaido (日本北海道案内記)

Very briefly, I've been going through a bilingual pamphlet on Hokkaido prepared by Rev. John Batchelor and published bilingually for a Japanese and American audience, respectively. While Batchelor garnered a reputation for being a champion of the Ainu, and is still defended by academics for his high moral character, a number of his descriptions of the Ainu are remarkably condescending and extremely colonialistic. It constitutes, if nothing else, the racist abjection of the Ainu and apologism for the Japanese colonization of the Ainu territories in Hokkaido and, at the time this was published, in the Kuriles.

The great attraction in Hokkaidō to those who travel for pleasure and education combined, letting alone the peculiarly weird and wild scenery and the pleasures afforded to the sportsman, is in the Ainu race, or Aborigines of Japan, who, it appears, are gradually becoming extinct. Though this peculiar race of people was once very numerous and formerly inhabited the whole of Japan proper, they now number, as has been previously remarked, no more than 16,765 persons, and these are decreasing. Visitors to Japan should surely see something of them if possible. In a very few years they will, in all probability, become quite extinct, or at all events become so amalgamated with the immigrants as to become indistinguishable from the Japanese. Hokkaidō is the only place in the world where they can be seen untainted by European influence, for those who live in Russian Territory have now become quite Russianized. Here in Hokkaiddō may be seen the oldest and newest peoples of this Ancient Empire side by side, two distinct and very different races, the one superseding the other; — intelligence, fore-thought, and energetic enterprise triumphing over ignorance, improvidence, and inaction. Here one may actually see that process of the gradual extinction of the Ainus and the appropriation of their land which has been going on for years; not indeed by cruelty and slaughter or owing to unfeeling wantonness, but simply because the Ainus have not the self-reliance and steady energy by which they could, if they chose, work and live happily side by side with the Japanese. But the race, simple, kind, truthful and child-like as we have found it, seems destined to pass away in a few years. Something it is hoped will be done for these poor people in the future. The Japanese are now waking up to their duty towards, and responsibility with regard to the Ainus and a society has been established which has for its object the "rescue" of the race. It remains to be seen what will be done by this Society. Those people who desire to see the Ainus in their own homes can do so by going to Usu in Volcano Bay from Hakodate, or by visiting Chitose from Satporo. But a far better idea of them may be had by allowing one's self a little more time and going to Piratoru in the Province of Hidaka. // This is the old Ainu capital and is a most typical village; it is surrounded by the most lovely scenery. (pg. 14, 15)

From Itinerary of Hokkaido, Japan by the Rev. John Batchelor, presented by the Hakodate Chamber of Commerce to Visitors of the Columbian Exhibition Held at Chicago, U.S.A. in 1893 (Tokyo Tsujiki Type Foundry, Tokyo: 1893)

Besides playing the old game of victim-blaming, and not to mention the spurious logic behind this, we see strong overtones of progressivist discourses by which races around the world are segmented and isolated from each other in a universal competition toward an ill-defined "end of history" as Francis Fukuyama put it. According to this logic, which is very much in accordance with Batchelor's ethnic Japanese contemporaries who were involved in Ainu policy, and for that matter, colonial officials around the world, a race, depending on its inborn qualities, will either thrive by actively progressing towards this future or be doomed to die out if they fall behind. Aside from the obvious fact that "races" are not mutually exclusive, hermetically sealed entities that act collectively, the social Darwinist logic behind this racist view of the survival of the fittest negates any question of morals. A race, or individual, cannot be victimized: they can only let themselves by victimized. And by this same logic, one cannot be a victimizer. Rather, the assumption is that, as Hobbes argued, homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man. This renders violent, exploitative, hateful behaviour as natural and normal. This is a sociopathic logic, and given how deeply anti-social social Darwinism is, the most curious part of Batchelor's passage his muted appeal to "Society" to swoop in and "rescue" the Ainu from themselves. We see this seeming contradiction in the discourse surrounding the Former Natives Protection Act that Batchelor is vaguely referencing here. The assumption is it is a sign of modernity and high ethical development to be able to have the gumption to "rescue" a dying race.

One other important consideration here is that, as mentioned above, this pamphlet was published in the same year in English and Japanese. I knew that Batchelor wrote this sort of drivel about the Ainu already, but I had wondered, as he does have such a reputation for his work with the Ainu, if this wasn't a sort of race baiting to sell books in Great Britain or the United States where there was a veritable print industry focused on racist descriptions of colonized people. But, as the publication of this book for a Japanese market shows, this may not simply have been simply for foreign consumption.

Source overview: English language documents related to Hokkaido and the Ainu

Over the past year I have primarily been engaged in research for my PhD dissertation project, which has been interrupted intermittently by family obligations, including parental leave during the Spring semester of 2016.

During the Fall of 2015, I largely focused on English language documents related to the Ainu and the colonization of Hokkaido. Given that part of the focus of my dissertation is the presupposition that Japanese policy planners and colonial elites self-consciously viewed their colonization and economic development of Hokkaido as a distinctly modern, Western-style enterprise, as well as the fact that this colonization was bolstered by the active participation of Euro-Americans such as Horace Capron and John Batchelor, I felt it was important to look at Euro-American views of the Ainu and the Japanese during this time period.

I focused on three document collections in particular. The first of which was Kirsten Refsing's massive five volume set, Early European Writings on Ainu Culture: Travelogues and Descriptions. This collection includes English, French, and German primary documents dating from the early 19th century until to the beginning of the 20th century. Given the century long scope, this collection clearly shows an historical arc in which the Ainu were at first racialized as proto-Caucasoid, and then were increasingly racialized as primitive, barbaric, or animalistic and akin to abjected Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, or India. This change, as the editor notes, can clearly be traced to the longue durée of Japan’s place in so-called “international society”, by which a “Caucasian” Ainu race imbued with all of the positive qualities that Europeans imagined themselves as having could be contrastively used to denigrate the “Oriental” Japanese. Vice versa, as the Meiji state gained stature internationally in part due to the success of their aggressive colonization of the Ainu, the Ainu were increasingly imagined as akin to other colonized (or legally colonizable) Indigenous peoples.

The second collection was the Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, published by the Kaitakushi (the Hokkaido colonial government) in 1875. This sizable collection of English language reports was prepared by American employees of the Japanese government and was intended for use by the Japanese government in policy planning. Two main themes emerge, which have had an influence on the scope of my own research. The first is, similar to Refsing’s collection, the triangular colonial relations between the Ainu, Japanese, and white Euro-Americans present in Ainu territories. This dynamic is especially evident in the chief planner Horace Capron’s insistence on the superiority of all things American, which included his advocacy for allowing more “hardy” white settlers to colonize Hokkaido in place of Japanese, as well as pushing for American crops, farm animals, and foodstuffs to be prioritized in Hokkaido and Euro-American-style buildings to be constructed. While the Ainu appear only briefly, mostly serving as guides, we learn that Horace Capron recommended to Kaitakushi head Kuroda Kiyotaka to strictly ban “barbaric” Ainu hunting methods. This is significant, and merits further research, because, according to Yamada Shinichi, the sudden ban on Ainu hunting had a catastrophic effect on Ainu communities which were suddenly without a major food source. Local officials alerted the Kuroda to this, and requested the ban be overturned, but these warnings were disregarded. Secondly, a major theme of the Kaitakushi reports is a conflation of capitalist development and civilization. In a quasi-Hegelian gesture, A.G. Warfield goes so far as to equate the construction of roads into the interior of Hokkaido to the development of "history", "progress", and "civilization". Specifically, he argues that roads lead to commercial development, which leads to the integration of Hokkaido into larger networks of capital, which will help bring civilization to the island. It can even be surmised that, philosophically speaking, for Warfield, like other 19th century colonial planners, it is capital itself that produces "history" and "civilization".

Horace Capron

Finally, I read Horace Capron two-volume memoirs. The first of which details his role as a Texas Bureau of Indian Affairs special agent in the removal of Indigenous groups to make way for Anglo-American settlement shortly after the US annexation of the Republic of Texas. The second volume is entirely dedicated to his time in Japan, and largely consists of diaries, notes, and reports. It offers a more nuanced look at Capron’s time in Japan than the Kaitakushi-published volume, including his thoughts on the Japanese during his time in Tokyo, which are largely negative. Though not entirely, and he shows great satisfaction, with a sharply narcissistic tone present throughout both volumes, that it was partly his own influence that Japan Westernized as quickly as it did. It’s no doubt, either in his descriptions of Native Americans, Japanese, or Ainu that Capron was racist, however, he wasn’t racist in the way that one might think of a stereotypical 19th century “good old boy” white male American elite. In fact, Capron was unusually liberal, I would imagine, for the antebellum time period where he was most influential. During this time Capron was involved in the ethnic cleansing of parts of Texas which were targeted for Anglo-American settlement. What's interesting, however, is at a time when frontier genocide was still the rule and not the exception in many parts of the American West, Capron was in extremely quite critical of the brutal treatment of Indigenous people to the point where he expressed sympathy for a group of Indigenous men who had killed white settlers in self-defense. He also expressed his disapproval for policies forcing Indigenous people off their land without a clear sense of where they should go. Capron even considered the lower-class settlers to be a more negative influence on the Indigenous groups than vice versa (so much for "going native").

In all of this, Capron -- like Katō Masanosuke, Oyabe Zenichiro, Nitobe Inazō, or Shirani Takeshi later in Japan -- represented a distinctly liberal form of Indigenous land management where he sought to pacify groups as frontier buffers through to allow for settlement of whites, and aimed for blanket assimilation rather than simply pushing groups further and further out of American society. This is to say, there’s no evidence that he actually cared about Indigenous peoples under his care: he saw more “humanistic” policies as a means to an end, which was, white settlement on and American territorial sovereignty over Indigenous land. There are numerous examples of this there he personally had peaceful groups of Indigenous people who were peaceably living on agricultural settlements (Capron’s stated goal for Native Americans) removed because the land was not part of a reservation and was intended for white settlement. Even the goals for citizenship were predicated upon cultural genocide and their insertion into the American economy as surplus labourers, similar to his "rehabilitation" of lower class whites in Maryland. This, if anything, brings to mind critiques of liberalism itself not as a rejection of brutal colonial conquests, but rather a recalibration of power by which rather than being violently excluded, colonized people are put in a space somewhere in-between included and excluded.