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.