Reading notes on Hokkaido Prefectural Office Education Division Social Section: the Main points of the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act and it's Future

北海道旧土人保護法の本旨と其の将来

While this pamphlet is undated, the author refers to it as being "almost 30 years" after the Former Aborigine Protection Act, so before 1929. However, the 1929 Relief Law is mentioned in the text, so it's probably published that year. The point of the pamphlet seems to be in reaction to a growing movement against the law, and the anonymous author is essentially trying to justify the law through racist apologism, while disavowing the very racist nature of the law. 

We learn, for example, that Ainu land was nationalized strictly to stop it from passing out of Ainu hands, which ad resulted in Ainu "leaving home" and "wandering aimlessly" around Hokkaido. While Ainu retained de facto ownership, the purpose of the protective nationalization of their land became a "forgotten history", and the legal position of ownership over their land became "extremely ambiguous". (pg. 2)

The author here excuses much of the land theft referred to earlier in this blog by explaining it away as "ambiguity", but is clear that land theft was the impetus for the Former Aborigines Protection Act. However, the author quickly adds that the Act was the continuation of a larger transition from "primitive lifestyles" (原始的な生活) to a "civilized economic life" (文化的な経済生活). But, by no means was this adding to the limits of the legal capacity of the Ainu as "incompetent people" (禁治産者). (pg. 3)

However, the author differentiates the Ainu by claiming that general laws are well and good for most people, however, the Act is intended for passive elements of the Ainu population, and goes on to compare the purpose of the law for the Ainu to the 1929 Relief Law (救護法) which "protected" the sick and poor. This comparison of the Ainu to physically ill people seems to have been a common theme. (pg. 5)

Finally, in the short space of the pamphlet, the author completely reverses their original argument saying that the Act was intended strictly to "protect" Ainu land to saying that the purpose of the Act was to "assimilate the Ainu until they're the same as ethnic Japanese (大和民族) in both name and reality". (pg. 6)

An interesting point in the pamphlet is the author's referring to "young people" (若者) who were demonstrating against the Act. It's not clear who they were, or why, but the author seems incensed and begs them to seek progress very, very gradually. In reality, he's taking a textbook conservativist position, which is interesting considering that it was progressive liberals in the Diet who passed the law in the first place, taking what was in Japan, as elsewhere, a 'radical' step of wanting to grant national citizenship to Indigenous people. This on the surface was anti-racist, since, Indigenous people faced not just social exclusion, but genocide in many countries, around the time this pamphlet was published, such as the Japanese "extermination strategy" against Indigenous people in Taiwan (See Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery). It would be interesting to see a true Japanese "conservative" point of view from the 1890s, since many of the proponents of the Former Aborigines Protection Act thought of themselves as dyed-in-the-wool liberals that felt like they were doing the Ainu a great service by unilaterally claiming them for the Japanese states as candidates for future inclusion as full Japanese citizens. While, like the author of this pamphlet, they clearly understood this to be cultural genocide, however, they saw that genocide itself as a benevolent act, in a "kill the Indian, save the man" sense. It's not coincidental that, as with Richard H. Pratt, who coined the phrase, was a liberal involved in Indian education in the United States in the 1870s-1880s. The attitude of liberals in settler colonies at the time strongly advocated for the differential inclusion of Indigenous people based on their ability to participate in the State's goals to colonize their own lands in a way that would exploit the the land economically. This took the role of laws like the Dawes Act in the United States or Former Aborigines Protection Act, as well as residential schools and other forms of assimilative schooling.

But with all that said, as I asked above, I would be genuinely interested in what conservatives thought of this sort of legislation. Not that conservatives were less racist, but for those that absolutely didn't want Indigenous people to be citizens in any capacity, or extreme racists who thought they didn't have the mental capacity to become "civilized", what was their reaction to these laws? And why did things change so quickly that in just 30 years, the conservative position would be one of deep entrenchment of these laws and a disavowal of the racist purpose of the laws?

Reading notes on Yomiuri Shinbun: "Hokkaido Ainu Representative Travels to Tokyo to Request Protection" (1895/2/5)

This article purports to be an overview of a meeting between an Ainu "chief" (酋長), Santotsutei, with unnamed Japanese officials in Tokyo. What we learn from this meeting is in some ways quite stunning. And, I say "purports" because the conclusion of the article, and the nature of the specific "request for protection" is suspicious in context.

But the key points that the Ainu representative makes are as follows:

1. The nature of Japanese settlement led by the Hokkaido government, and of making Hokkaido a new Japanese territory (新版図), is extremely aggressive, and akin to the invasion of one rival state by another. 
2. Hokkaido prefectural statistics clearly show that Ainu numbers are rapidly decreasing. These statistics, according to the article, are based on Ainu living in households located in towns and villages. However, as Ainu livelihood is assaulted, and their condition in villages worsens, many Ainu escape into the interior of the island, and outside of the purview of the Japanese state, and thereby not existing on paper. The Ainu representative argues that while official statistics show Ainu numbers as being as low as 8,400 people, actual numbers may have been closer to 26,000 people.
3. The Ainu economy before wide-scale Japanese settler colonialism was based on villages along the ocean shore. In the summer Ainu would fish and engage in agriculture, and in winter they would hunt. These villages were prosperous. However, as these villages were taken over by ethnic Japanese, Ainu were forced further into the interior, where they established villages along rivers, and continued a similar livelihood. However, settlers were encouraged by the government to move into these riverside areas too, taking more and more Ainu territory. 
4. Animal pelts became the only product that the Ainu produced. The yearly statistics between 1891 and 1893 show that on average the Ainu collected 56,000 furs on average per year. Each fur was worth around 1.5 yen, meaning the yearly total was worth around 80,000 yen. [Note: Here, it seems that the journalist editorializes by suggesting if given "encouragement" (奨励) and "protection" (保護), profits could be "not few indeed". Moreover, while 80,000 yen was a huge amount of money in those days, this number doesn't seem to account for hunting equipment, middle-men taking their cut, expensive licence fees that Ainu were subject to, or the simple fact that if there were 26,000 Ainu, and the 80,000 yen were to be divided up evenly, that's still only 3.5 yen per person per year, which is a tiny amount.]
5. A secondary industry for the Ainu was husbandry. Horses were seen as a "specialty product" for Hokkaido and this reputation stemmed originally from Ainu horse breeding. However, pastures were nationalized as crown land and from there, was divided up for use by the military, or given to "capitalists" (資本家). The loss of this industry caused considerable suffering.
6. Financial aid, or Ainu collective property "protected" by the Japanese government has either been mismanaged or siphoned off. We see an example of this such as a donation for schools of about 300 yen, or an donation from Japan's royal family of of about 3,000 yen, however, Ainu, according to the article, have no knowledge of where this money is, or how much of it remains. Moreover, in other cases, Ainu were pressured to sell their land on the pretense of rumours about the high prices of building houses. And, the amassed wealth of Ainu who were forcibly moved to Hokkaido from Karafuto and the Kuriles' by the Japanese government had a collective wealth of 12,000 yen, which has gone missing. The Karafuto and Kurile Ainu do not know where it's being kept or how much of it remains. [Note: All this is keeping in mind that Ainu at this time did not have control of their own assets, and it was being squandered, mismanaged, or stolen by Japanese officials.]

Strangely, after this brutally candid account of the effects of Japanese settler colonialism on the Ainu economy, we're told to pity and cry for the Ainu, and the article closes by stating that Santotsutei is requesting Ainu land to be parcelled into private lots to be protected by the government. I can't help but feel very suspicious that this is what Santotsutei would have actually concluded, especially since Ainu collective property being privatized, like with Aboriginal people elsewhere, was the colonial goal, and this process of privatization was effectively a form of primitive accumulation. Moreover, what would privatization have to do with the huge amount of missing Ainu money? It wouldn't, moreover, do anything to give back the vast majority of Hokkaido that was claimed in 1869 as crown land to the Ainu, including the vast pasture lands mentioned in the article. But it but would have legitimized this land theft. So, while I'm not denying the possibility that Santotsusei might have actually suggested this, since as David Howell showed, there were certainly Ainu who sought recognition as Japanese citizenship through assimilation as normative Japanese subjects. However, it's so removed from the rest of the critique that I can't help but be suspicious. The solution given, moreover, is coincidentally or uncoincidentally the explicit aim of the Former Aborigines Protection Act, which was being hotly debated at the time.

The question of private versus public property and how they relate to colonialism is a topic that comes up again and again in colonial era texts. The process is explored by Marx at length, and as related to settler colonialism more recently by scholars such as Glen Coulthard. But what's interesting, and I think missing from these other studies, is that Ainu land was not invaded and privatized. It was invaded and nationalized as crown land, and then privatized. This is to say, the path to privatization was through publicization. How would we consider this, legally? There were also in Hokkaido, as in any other settler colonies, numerous examples of settlers stealing Ainu land (which apparently was one of the reasons for the Former Aborigines Protection Act in the first place-- though suspiciously instead of just policing land theft more carefully). These land theft and the formally illegal settlements that came out of them is itself is interesting to consider, since the Japanese settlers were living on crown land, as Ainu land ownership was not recognized. Even after the Former Aborigines Protection Act, against Santotsutei's wishes apparently, Ainu land was not privatized, but was maintained as crown land parcelled out to families who became formally wards of the state until the land was adequately developed. 

Reading notes on Ogawa Masahito: "5th, 8th Imperial Diet 'Former Aborigines Protection Act' Examination Special Committee Records"

第5、8回帝国議会「北海道土人保護法案」審査特別委員会会議録

I'm working through a collection of documents edited by Ogawa Masahito related to the Lower House debate over the so-called Former Aborigines Protection Act (旧土人保護法) in the early 1890s. While this seems to have been originally prepared for his own use, the files he's included look extremely useful in that we get a glimpse of not just the process of drafting the law, but of the attitudes behind it.

One passage particularly stands out, which is a sharp criticism by Councilor Tsuzuki Keiroku:

土人ト内地人ノ区別明ラカナラズシテ如何ナル範囲マデハ土人トシテ本法ノ権利ヲ付与スベキヤヲ決定スルバ甚ダ難シイ戸籍簿ニハ土人モ内地人同様ノ氏名ヲ付シアルヲ以テ果タシテ純然タル土人ナルヤ又ハ内地人ノ久シク北海道ニ移住セルモノナルヤ否ハ戸籍簿ヲ以テ区別スル能ハス且ツ又特ニ土人タルノ名称ヲ付セラルルヲ嫌ヒ風俗習慣ナドモ漸ク内地人ヲ擬シ殆ント内地人ト異ナラザルモノ、存スルニ至レリ行政上ノ処分ニ於テハ内地人ト土人トヲ区別スルニハ甚タシキ困難ナシト雖モモ法律ヲ以テ一ノ権利ヲ一方ニ与ウルニハ此間確固タル区別ノ標準無ルヘカラス然ラサレハコレガ実施ノ上ニ於テ甚タシキ困難ヲ感スヘシ第二第四条ニ於テ第一件ノ効力ヲ保タシメタリト雖モ尚ホ養子緑組ヲ禁セザル以上ハ完全ノ効力ナシ第三土人ノ農業ヲ厭ウニアリ明治八年スイスカル（対雁）ノ土人明治十八年バルモシャ（幌筵）ノ土人ヲシコタンニ移住セシメシモ其結果甚タ佳ナラズコレ北海道土人ハ尚ホ未々狩漁時代ノ民ニシテ農耕時代ノ民ニアラザル如シ蓋シ数年又ハ数十年後ノ結果ヲ予想シテ未開ノ荒地ヲ開拓スル如キハ彼等能力ノ及ハザルトコロニシテ目前利益ノ顕ハルル狩漁ニ依リ生活ヲ営ミ水草ヲ逐ウテ移転スルニ過ザルナリ故ニ本案ニ依リ土人ニ保護ヨ与ウルモ却テ其利益ヲ他人ニ占メラル、ノ結果ナキヲ保スヘカラズコレ政府ガ本案ニ反対セザルヲ得ザルノ理由ナリ

Which is to say, Tsuzuki argues that:

1. Because because Ainu names were registered in a similar fashion as Japanese settlers on family registers
2. Because many Ainu -- who understandingly didn't like being called dojin/"the natives" -- tried to pass as Japanese using distinctly Japanese-sounding names on the their registers
3. Because some Japanese settlers had been in Hokkaido a long time (sometimes for generations)
4. Because many Ainu children were adopted into Japanese families (and, though Tsuzuki doesn't mention it, some Japanese children were adopted into Ainu families)

it, according to Tsuzuki, became increasingly difficult to distinguish between the Ainu and the Japanese in a way that would allow a law like the Protection Act to function properly.

This is not true, in the sense that (and I'm not sure how at this point) the Japanese state was efficiently able to separate family registers for Ainu and ethnic Japanese, and the applicability or unapplicability of the Protect Act to an individual itself became a racial marker or whether they were Ainu or Japanese. With that being said, Tsuzuki's other criticisms are sharp and prescient. For example, given that many or most Ainu preferred to hunt or fish instead of raise crops, and the Protection Act aimed to transform them into farmers within a generation as short term way of "colonizing undeveloped wasteland" (未開の荒地を開拓する),* the law was doomed to fail. Where Tsuzuki was wrong is the simple assumption that Ainu simply hated farming, as though it's something they're genetically predisposed to, as opposed to a question of resistance to assimilation and a simple preference for one's own lifeways rather than that of the colonizer. But, in large part, Tsuzuki's criticisms foreshadow the major problems that the Protection Act had, including both deepening the racial essentialization of dojin as a category distinct from Japanese, and the catastrophic effect that forced movement onto farms had on many Ainu.

The irony of this assumption that the Ainu, whose economy subsisted primarily of hunting and fishing, hated agriculture or were somehow lacking basic instincts that would allow them to thrive as farmers because they were "natives" is that England's first colony in what became the United States, the Roanoke colony, ended in absolute disaster, with British townsfolk with no experience in farming expected to sustain themselves on agriculture in a totally unknown environment. The settler discourse almost came full circle, of the dangers of the colonial space on the fragile bodies of the colonizers to the colonized as fragile and doomed for extinction.

What warrants further study are the questions of slippage: by the 1890s, how easy was it to distinguish an Ainu from a Japanese? Was this law designed in part to distinguish them on paper? Moreover, was it true that Ainu family registers were kept separate? I've found files with Ainu family registers-- were these separated by the archivists, or were they always kept separate? Moreover, if it was the case that Ainu family registers were completely merged into Japanese family registers, what criteria were used to determine if a family were Ainu? Was it geography? Were the original Ainu family registers from the 1870s kept on file and used in conjunction with the contemporary records in the 1890s to define a population of "aborigines" to be "protected"? Finally, if it wasn't clear who was and wasn't Ainu, there must have been many cases where Ainu were overlooked because they didn't match whatever criteria was set out. But there must have also been cases, if it was done from on high and if it was as vague as Tsuzuki claimed, where "old stock" settlers were mistaken as Indigenous. At any rate, I can't help but feel that the state or the Hokkaido government had a clear population that they had in mind defined as "dojin", or else it would have been absolute chaos trying to sort out who is who, confirm it, deal with cases of mistaken identity, deal with cases of non-Ainu who may have wanted to pose as Ainu to reap whatever benefits they may have thought they could get from the Protection Act. There are endless questions that can come out of this. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to read through the transcripts, start to go over Katō Masanosuke's Diet speeches, and try to hunt for clues.

* It's interesting that Tsuzuki was so clear and unambiguous about the purpose of the Protection Act as a way to mobilize the Ainu as stand-in Japanese settlers and effectively colonize their own land on behalf of the Japanese state. This was exactly what the first provision of early drafts of the Protection Act stated, and was cut from the final law which was passed.

Reading notes on Shinya Gyō

Source: A History of Ainu Resistance
(Ainu Minzoku Teikō Shi. Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō, 1977.)

This source, published during the surge of Ainu activism in the 1970s, represents a major break from traditional "Ainu studies" literature that knowingly or unknowingly took the side of the colonizer and articulated Ainu history through the lens of positivist cultural anthropologists. This being a bad thing because, as with native people around the world, anthropology tended to be based on a top-down, observer and observee, subject and object, civilized and savage, modern and ancient, otherwise condescending, universalizing, and overwhelmingly colonial paradigm. And (I strongly assume) is non-Ainu, his work is vital in that it takes a critical and confrontational look at the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido and the bodies and minds of Hokkaido, interrogating the violent, sometimes genocidal results of Japanese indigenous policy. He does this, for instance, by looking at the Former Aborigine Protection Law (北海道旧土人保護法), which was still on the books at the time he was writing, as it related to land theft and forced assimilation. This is of course laudable, but the book has interesting faults as well.

The chapter I focused on, on the Meiji period policies, is thorough and -- to be honest -- much better than a lot of more recent work because of this uncompromising critical edge, but nevertheless, Shinya argues over Meiji era land theft on the assumption that ”the Ainu were a people who innately had no concept of land ownership" (pg. 181). This becomes the leitmotif of the chapter, which is used to explain away what Shinya seems to characterize as a kind of Ainu patsyism. Three things about this:

1. Shinya doesn't distinguish between private and public property, or what "ownership" (所有) means in a legal or practical sense. Other than giving an anthropologically-rooted explanation about the Ainu worldview, he doesn't consider, for instance, individualized family dwellings that many Ainu -- according to most accounts -- lived in throughout at least the 19th century, or what public and private would mean regarding those dwellings, or anything else like that.
2. Whether true or not, the historical reality is, until the end of the Tokugawa period, Japanese people didn't have a "concept of property ownership" either, when it came to post-Enlightenment discourses of private property, or that 90-95% of Japanese people were landless peasants during this period, But there's absolutely an assumption that property was a defining difference between the Japanese and Ainu.
3. Regardless, this seems to be rooted on the assumption that Indigenous people live in a "state of nature". The assumption that "Indians" or "natives" or "savages" don't have a concept of property is exactly what the doctrine of terra nullius is rooted in, and, likewise, was mobilized by seemingly softer or more liberal forms of colonialism where the colonizing power declares they have the duty to "help" Indigenous people who need to be taught little things like this. 

It's fascinating in itself that an author, who I'm sure rattled a few cages with this overall confrontational book, nevertheless falls back on colonial-era stereotypes. I could write a lot about this, but I'll save it.

One major issue I have with Shinya's analysis of Meiji-period settler colonialism is that most of the laws, he argues, are throwbacks to earlier Japanese frontier policy, or a mere continuation of Matsumae policy. This simply isn't true, and this analysis lacks any international focus, except for a brief mention that the Japanese state was anxious about "Russified" Ainu on the Kuriles and mirrored this policy of cultural or linguistic assimilation in response. But there's no mention at all of how Indigenous people were treated, for instance, in the British settler colonies. Or that the Japanese Ainu policies reflected the aims or the modernizing/Westernizing state which were markedly different in both intention and execution from the Tokugawa period. Everything gets blurred, and we learn that the only interest that the Japanese government has in Hokkaido is as a buffer against Russia. While there's no doubt that the impetus to colonize as aggressively as the Japanese did was because of fears that the Russians would beat them to it, don't we see similar colonial competition (with the Russians no less!) in British Columbia? In all of this, it's not clear from the text why the Japanese state did what it did. It's left vague, and falls back on "use it or lose it" excuses at places. 

One great thing about this text is that it introduces an account of Ainu schools taken from a collection of personal accounts, 近代民衆の記録. This may be worth looking into.

Reading notes on Horace Capron

Source: Memoirs of Horace Capron
(Memoirs of Horace Capron. Vol. 1-2. N.p.: Unpublished, 1884.)

In the last years of his life, Horace Capron wrote his memoirs which consist of letters, newspaper clippings, diary entries, etc. Much of it is rambling and narcissistic, mostly either heaping praise on himself or quoting newspapers and magazines from across the eastern US to get praise from an unbiased source. He is clear that he has a sizable archive in his house of things people have said about him over the years. It seems almost to have been a hobby for the elderly Capron, like the 19th century equivalent of googling yourself. He, perhaps sincerely, presents his father as an ideal settler and quintessential American patriot, himself as the progenitor of industry and reclaimer of wasteland, pioneer of Hokkaido, and civilizer of the Japanese. Full of "firsts" and superlatives, most of which are not worth recording here.

Interestingly, he quotes an "American Farmer" article talking about his "intellectual, moral, and religious instruction" of "females" at his agricultural/industrial colony in Laurel (pg. 60). Elsewhere he describes an official policy of temperance. He brags about having turned lower class workers recruited for factory work at his colony into model middle class Americans (without using the word of course). This is interesting in a Foucauldien way, but also interesting considering the two major colonial projects Capron became directly involved in later. He states clearly his intention for Native Americans in Texas and Ainu in Hokkaido to be assimilated as economically productive citizens of the colonizing states. Like the idea of 未開地 and 未開人, there's an interesting dialogue between colonization of land and people, and places that subtly overlap between gender and class and race, indigenous and exogenous, and subjects who can be included into nation and subjects that must be excluded.

There's also a lot to say about his portrayal of the Ainu. I think most importantly is that he:

1. Follows a number of contemporary Euro-American writers in stereotyping them as gentle and intelligent, far more so than the Texas Delaware, or other American tribes he seemed to favour. The Ainu, while -- Capron states -- are savage, he portrays them as the noblest of all noble savages.
2. He does not consider how "Caucasian" they supposedly appear-- if anything, he refers to them as "swarthy" savages, which is quite unlike many European depictions of the Ainu from this time period. This may be linked to the racialization of the Ainu which accompanied the colonization of the Ainu. Which is to say, through this racist colonialist worldview, it would be hugely scandalous and crime against nature if "Caucasians" were colonized by "Mongoloids", and it's no coincidence that as the colonization of Hokkaido progressed, the Japanese were increasingly portrayed as Western-esque or in the 20th century parlance, "honourary whites" or "model minorities" while the Ainu were increasingly portrayed as Native Americans. 
3. While Capron thinks the Ainu should be assimilated and claims that they are overwhelmingly appreciative of Capron and the Kaitakushi's efforts to colonize them and take their land for some higher purpose, he ceases referring to the Ainu and portrays Hokkaido as "unpeopled". Interesting, because he comes across towns of 1,500 Ainu -- which is not an insignificant number in a mid-19th century rural area -- and has a clear understanding of the Ainu economy and their use of the land. This is clearly the logic of terra nullius.
4. Perhaps most importantly, while he compares the Ainu to Native Americans, he also compares the Japanese to Native Americans, and indirectly thereby equates the Ainu and Japanese. For example, he talks about the Westernization of the Japanese and Westernization/colonization of the Ainu in the exact same terms: he states that they seem like possess and almost childlike natural happiness, and wonders -- as racists often did in the colonial period -- if modern civilization will cause them to lose this trait. Later, Capron refers to Japanese castaways in the United States and theorizes that Native Americans are the descendants of shipwrecked Japanese. This is not an uncommon theory, as the Chinook-Scottish adventurer Ranald MacDonald himself theorized that as a Native American, his trip to Japan was something of a homecoming. 
5. Capron shows his disgust with Japanese agriculture by claiming that it should be more properly called "horticulture". Ie. the Japanese don't have farms, but gardens. In the Lockean view of property law, how land is used is important for rights of ownership. Having been written before widespread industrialization, the use of land for agricultural plots divided by fences guaranteed it being recognized as property, whereas land left unimproved "wasteland" was not. Indigenous land in Japan as around the world was taken as terra nullius on the basis that it was "wasteland" and thereby was not owned by the people living on it, and in cases -- such as agricultural peoples of the eastern United States and Canada -- the fact that they were farmers was disavowed, and their farms were deemed mere "gardens". This is all significant because Capron is "indigenizing" the Japanese much the same way that Europeans and Japanese would indigenize the Ainu (whose agriculture was similarly dismissed). 

But Capron's exact writing on the Ainu is perhaps not as important as his discussion of work in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Texas. He was directly involved in Indigenous removal. What's interesting, however, is he was not part of the efforts to force off their land at gunpoint, and was in fact quite critical of the nature of the American government's "Indian" policy as it existed at the time, especially what Patrick Wolfe identified in the "state of exception" where the American government knowingly turned a blind eye to non-state massacres of Indigenous people by settlers, or official US military extermination campaigns which followed inevitable reprisals for these settler massacres. For example, Capron expressed sympathy for Indigenous people who had killed whites in self-defense, or policies forcing indigenous people off their land without a clear sense of where they should go, feeling they would be forced to become raiders and thieves. In a weird twist, he considered the lower-class uneducated settlers to be a more negative influence on the Indigenous groups than vice versa (so much for "going native"). Capron represented the vanguard of a liberal form of Indigenous management where he sought to pacify groups as frontier buffers through to allow for settlement of whites, and aimed for blanket assimilation of these 'domesticated' tribes as (perhaps) worthy of American citizenship in the future.

However, as critical as Capron is of policies of not just frontier genocide, but of leaving Indigenous people absolutely destitute without any means of survival, is this not the policy he suggests in Hokkaido? I say this in reference to the published Kaitakushi reports where he refers to Ainu hunting methods as barbaric and calls on them to be banned. Kuroda Kiyotaka abides to this, and according to Yamada Shinichi, this leads to famine. With local officials warning Kuroda of this, perhaps based on Capron's insistence, he nevertheless refuses to change course. In effect, Capron is responsible for what amounts to genocide in Hokkaido.

Why would Capron do in Hokkaido precisely what he was so critical of in Texas? While this is no simple question, perhaps we should as if he barely respects the Japanese, why would he waste time to think about the consequences of his policies for the Ainu? Moreover, Capron didn't actually care about Native American peoples he feels he helped-- he saw it as a means to an end, which was white settlement on and American territorial sovereignty over Indigenous land in Texas. Proof of this when he came across a group of Indigenous refugees (which he refers to through the oxymoron "Indian immigrants") that started a settlement on a riverside and had were growing corn. In a Lockean sense of property, and in the sense of Capron's own stated desire for "Indians" to become normative US citizens, this should have been ideal. However, this was not a reservation, so Capron alerted the US army to ethnically cleanse them from their land. His whole view of his role in the BIA seems to have been typical of liberal modes of colonialism as they existed in his lifetime, which was not to oppose colonialism, but as a gesture of truly civilized man, to "soften the blow" of Indigenous peoples' extinction through contact with whites. Moreover, this seen as being a process that was borne not out of violence, but something natural and fated by nature.

Jane Lancaster clearly describes the nature of Capron's role:

The Texans continued to have problems with various other Indian tribes as well. By May 1853, Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles E. Mix informed Superintendent Thomas S. Drew at Van Buren, Arkansas, that Texas Special Agent Horace Capron had charge of a group of from three to four hundred Indians, including Seminoles, Delawares, Shawnees, Quapaws, and Cherokees, recently dispatched from Texas. These Indians had settled in Texas over a period of several years. Drew was instructed to have these agents in his superintendency accept the Indians turned over by Capron to their respective agencies. They were not to return to Texas.
From Lancaster, Jane F. Removal Aftershock: The Seminoles' Struggles to Survive in the West, 1836-1866. Knoxville: U of Tennessee, 1994. Pg. 90.

It should also be noted that these "Indian immigrants", such as the Delawares (Lenape), who were originally from the New York City area were groups who were ethnically cleansed by earlier white colonization, and were later forced into Oklahoma and Ontario, Canada. This term is not just an oxymoron, but is a discursive strategy to portray them as "Indians", but not indigenous. The effect of this is to legitimize white colonization of Texas while delegitimizing their own attempts at resettlement, even where -- like the Cherokee or other groups -- it took the form of normative European forms of "civilized" agricultural settlement.

Finally, Capron's portrayal of "Mexicans" who remained in Texas and directly assisted Capron in Indigenous removal is telling, in that he did not portray them as altogether uncivilized in a Donald Trump sense, but as effeminate, lacking agency or courage, and simply as extras in the drama that was unfolding. This is unlike how he portrayed "Indians", who were debased but brave and masculine, and the opposite of whie Americans who were portrayed as brave as well as exhalted. This portrayal of Mexicans is extremely similar to how Benjamin Lyman Smith portrayed Japanese in Hokkaido in their triangular relation to whites and Ainu.

Reading notes on Yasuoka Akio and Suzue Ei'ichi

Source 1: Soejima Taneomi by Yasuoka Akio
(Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2012.)

There's a chapter on Soejima Taneomi's involvement in the disputes with the Russian Empire over Karafuto/Sakhalin. Typically of positivist history on early Japanese colonialism, the author doesn't say a word about the indigenous people of southern Sakhalin whose land was being argued over by two competing imperial powers. For that matter, it doesn't say anything about the Ainu removal or motivations behind forcibly removing a people from their native land after giving up a land claim, or even a word about the Japanese settlers for that matter who, in some cases, had lived on Sakhalin for their entire lives and were largely forced to return to Japan. However, the chapter provides good background of the dispute from a (strictly) statist. top-down point of view.

What this book does very well is give a brief but interesting background of Tokugawa-period fears over a Russian push southward. While Morris-Suzuki does this in regards to the first decade of the 19th century, Yasuoka discusses the bakumatsu period fears over Russian colonization, and the founding of the 北門社/Hokumonsha: an organization that lobbied for more aggressive Japanese colonization of Ainu Moshir. There seems to be relatively little about the Hokumonsha, but this would be an interesting direction to look into.

Critically, we learn that Japanese-Russian negotiations took place partly in Hakodate and that the Japanese were aided by Ivan Dimitrovich Kastkin (St. Nicholas of Japan), who tutored Soejima's nephew in Russian studies. This immediately calls into question of whether -- by the Meiji period -- there were serious concerns over whether Russia had immediate plans to colonize Hokkaido itself. This is to say, if they held these negotiations in Hokkaido, the Russians likely recognized Japanese sovereignty over the island, calling into question the sense of crisis that seemed to push these negotiations forward. And, the anxiety over Japanese/Russian(/Ainu) "mixed residence" (雑居) areas is interesting but not explained fully. We learn about incidents that occurred in these areas, but the author doesn't go into it in detail. Is it a question of violence? Or were there other things happening that the Japanese state was anxious about?

Soejima himself, it seems, is a dead end, though I do have a copy of his writings in English and Japanese on the negotiations with the Russians. Still, other than the fact that he didn't feel the need to mention the Ainu or any other indigenous people of Sakhalin and that in and of itself being quite telling, there's not much there to work with.

Also, the Russian motivations were not that clear. Yasuoka argues they wanted it as a place to dump criminals (罪人放竄/zainin bouzan), but is that all?

Key points for future study:

• E.K. Byutsov (Butzow), the Russian diplomat who was stationed in Tokyo and then Beijing. He pressed the issue, apparently with great effectiveness.
• Harry Parkes is mentioned as spurring on Japanese negotiations, however, according to Horace Capron, he thought Hokkaido was a wasteland where nothing would grow-- what was his motivation for hoping the Japanese would take possession of Sakhalin if he thought it was useless land?
• Fukumoto Bunpei and Yamatoyo Ichiro, partly based on Fukumoto's tutor, Fujikawa Sankei's lectures on Sakhalin, founded the Hokumonsha and lobbied the Tokugawa and Meiji governments. Fukumoto himself lived on Sakhalin and toured the island by himself. His writing on the Ainu -- if there is any -- might be worth looking into.
• St. Nicholas, while not that interesting in and of himself, might be interesting if paired with John Batchelor, since -- as Oguma Eiji wrote -- there was a great deal of Japanese anxiety over the latter. What role did these missionaries play as exogenous others in relation to both the colonization of the Ainu and in regards to international politics?

Source 2: Kaitakushi Monjo wo Yomu by Suzue Ei'ichi.

(Tokyo: Yūzankaku Shuppan, 1989.)

Despite the name, this is not only not a source book, but is also not a detailed analysis of key Kaitakushi documents. If anything, this strange little book is a vague rumination over the nature of law and state sovereignty as Japan -- according to the author -- moved from the 近世 to 近代 periods ("early modern" to "modern"). The periodization as cause rather than effect is ridiculous. Not only because periodization is completely made up and ideologically driven and should never be treated as a metaphysical reality, but also because Suzue seems to say that because Japan was entering the "modern" period, legal institutions were dragged along with it. Rather than, for example, the Westernization of Japanese administrative and tort law as intimately linked to the changing nature of sovereignty and subjectivity in late Tokugawa and Meiji Japan (and as so many scholars have argued regarding the Japanese adoption of international law or the Westernization of Japanese criminal law). 

I read two chapters in full: (II-3) 北海道の特例 ("Hokkaido's Exceptionality") and (II-3)「勧農規則」の性格 ("The Nature of the 'Encouragement of Agriculture' Regulation"). The former is arguing that there was a slight difference in how Hokkaido adapted how new laws and ordinances were publicly announced, enacted, and enforced, apparently due to concerned over communication during Hokkaido's comparatively harsh winters. Nothing mind-blowing, though we learn that Okinawa was similarly treated as an exception. The Ainu and Ryukyuans were, of course, in what Agamben would call a "state of exception" during this period, where their rights as normal citizens were not recognized and in Hokkaido. In the case of the Ainu, especially, their rights to sovereignty over the land or private property were negated. Suzue ignores this legal "exceptionality" completely, and focuses on this small detail. Even where he does, I suspect the link with Ryukyu means there was more going on than harsh winters. 

The second chapter, and I suspect maybe the entire book, continues the basic thesis that the coming of the 近代 is the egg to the chicken that is the changing nature of public proclamation of laws. In this chapter in particular, however, Suzue characterizes the nature of this law which was designed to provide financial assistance to farmers as quintessentially "early modern", and seems surprised that the law was classified as a "development" (開墾) law rather than a "immigration" (移民) law, without going into how or why in any deeper way. To me, if you take a bunch of rice farmers from subtropical Kagoshima and drop them in eastern Hokkaido and expect them to grow wheat or raise cattle and deal with -20° winters, it seems reasonable and "modern" for the state to provide short-term financial aid. The Japanese government still subsidizes farmers when needed, so I truly to get this periodization scheme. 

Moreover, almost the entire section is not discussing this so much as it is discussing whether the law was promulgated or not, since the original manuscript doesn't exist and all we have left is copies. Yamada Shinichi's book, as far as I remember, went into the law in some detail and didn't treat is as a hypothetical as Suzue does.

The law itself is interesting as a counter-point to the 旧土人保護法 in that it is doing the same thing, basically, for the opposite ends. It's about accelerating the "development" of Ainu land, whereas the 旧土人保護法 was about ensuring Ainu would not gain normal property laws and that their land could be appropriated by the state.

All in all, Suzue is up front that this second chapter is conjecture, and it shows.

Key points for future study:

• It would be worth going back to Yamada Shinichi to see what he says about it. 
• Aside from Suzue's trivial discussion of periodization, the question of "法令公布制度の近代化" is very important-- the legal scope in which Hokkaido was developed was part of a wider drive to Westernize. At a later point, doing a detailed close reading and expanding on this argument might be useful.
• The author references Kaitakushi legal sourcebooks that might be worth looking at: 開拓使布令録, 開拓使事業報告, and 布令類聚, and 事業報告, and while he doesn't give specific names, he references the existence of internal Kaitakushi and public Hokkaido newspapers that were used to spread details about legal changes.