Reading notes on Katō Masanosuke's speech on the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Bill

I've been going through Katō Masanosuke's December 1893 speech given in the Imperial Diet to promote the bill for the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act. The speech is densely packed and heavy on the rhetoric, so it's a bit more difficult than the already difficult texts I've been going through. I'm going to come back to it when I'm a bit further along. But, I did an extremely rough first draft translation of my reading. The key points are as follows:

• Appeals to the morality of the Japanese, indirectly linked purported Ainu decline 
• Criticizes racism, critiques previous Japanese treatment of the Ainu
• Disavows racism, promotes a view of the Ainu as improvable
• Pushes, in particular, the idea of the Ainu as an 'unhygienic race'
• This contradicts the insinuation that the Japanese are responsible for the Ainu decline

Without going through the entire translation, there are two points I will make notes on. The first is the contextualization of the law, and how Katō characterizes the Japanese settlers, and the second is how he characterizes the Ainu.

Katō opens his speech with an appeal to Japanese anti-racism. He described how "sacred" emperors have, generation after generation, treated their subjects with humanity and righteousness. Therefore, Japan's dealings with other countries are based on righteousness and are inspired by noble ideas such as the strong protecting the weak. This can be contrasted with Euro-American empires which aggressively invaded other nations and insulted other races, Katō notes. This righteousness, Katō tells his audience, is the Japanese national character.

With this set-up, Katō criticizes this self-image as having been sullied or betrayed in settler colonial Hokkaido:

I went to investigate up in Hokkaido twice with my own eyes, and the result is that I have discovered that we are truly neglecting our responsibilities as Japanese citizens. ... We should look at the Ainu race, who up until the early modern period occupied Hokkaido, ... one quarter of Japan. There is no doubt that they made their livelihood off the land, collecting resources for to live. However, when mainlanders started going to Hokkaido, they entered a competition [with the Japanese] for survival. The result of this struggle ... was that this ancient race could not endure, and retreated into the interior [of Hokkaido]. ... [T]he truth is, mainlanders took advantage of their weakness and took advantage of their ignorance and oppressed them, and this clearly manifests itself today. 

But to give one example, while we were travelling on foot around a place called Setana district, we were told that 100 or 150 years ago there were 3,000 of the natives living there. however, nowadays, it's said that they have fallen into a situation where [their population] shrunk down considerably, and now there are merely 10 families and around 200 people.

However, this is where this line argument ends, and Katō begins to pathologize the Ainu. Keeping in mind that this is the time when eugenics discourses are already flourishing in Japan, it should perhaps not be surprising, but we should pay close attention to how Katō then characterizes the Ainu:

And in the pitiful circumstance the Ainu are in today ... they don't respect hygiene laws and 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, and this race which is suffering from diseases is today in a state of decline. And, to ask about places where they live, on the edge of Tokachi and Hidaka, there are some people living in suitable houses, but there are very few of them, and a great many Ainu live as beggars in pathetic huts in bad places where they spend day after day. If we continue our non-interference like we practice today, I think the Ainu race will go extinct in some decades just as the Australian natives have gone extinct. 

There are three things which are important here to consider: (1) the characterization of the Ainu as a race as collectively "unhygienic", and this leading to their eventual "extinction", (2) the context of the Ainu thereby needing external "protection" in the form of this proposed law, and (3) the analogy, although factually untrue, between the Ainu and the not-actually-extinct Australian natives.

What to me is truly shocking about the first point is not simply the question of hygiene itself. This has been explored already by numerous scholars looking at colonial contexts and often damaging attempted outside interventions to improve the purportedly poor hygiene of the colonized group. Ruth Rogaski's "Hygienic Modernity" and Todd Henry's "Assimilating Seoul" have looked at Japanese colonial hygiene regimes already, and the only thing surprising about Katō pushing hygiene discourse in regards to Hokkaido is that it's a relatively early example of 'hygienic modernity' in the Japanese Empire. What's more interesting to me is that Katō is discussing an essentialized Ainu race as unhygienic, and this as being a fatal flaw that will result in extinction, and thereby in need of protection. This is stunningly similar to German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz's writings on "Rassenhygiene" (racial hygiene), which infamously became one of the central ideologies promoted by the Nazi German state, though not before having a major influence on eugenics and public health in states ranging from Sweden to the United States to Japan itself. However, Ploetz's famous book which introduced the phrase 'racial hygiene', 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), was published in 1895, two years after Katō's speech. This is not to suggest that Katō had anything to do with Ploetz's work, however, the strikingly similar analogy drawn between the two, and an analogy that has had enough staying power to inform much of eugenicist thinking into the present, clearly is not something that spring up spontaneously like a cancer at Ploetz's writing desk. For one, both Katō and Ploetz had something in common, which was time spent in the United States. It's in the context of the post-Civil War United States that there was wide scale interest in hygiene along racial lines, particularly African Americans and Native Americans, and it is also at this time that liberals in the United States began a protect which aimed to assimilate these two racialized groups into normative, 'productive' American citizens. This was also a preoccupation of Katō who similarly promoted education of the Ainu. What's critical about this is how much of a change it was to see African Americans or Native Americans as improvable, as opposed to entirely abject. It's based on the assumption that there is some critical racial handicap that can be cured by making them more and more white. But also, by seeing tentative acceptance as fellow citizens through the suppression of cultural, linguistic, and religious practices to facilitate assimilation and eventual disappearance into wider white society, there's an element of these discourses which is genocidal. This is exactly what, for Katō and generations of policy planners after him, the plan was for the Ainu. The link to Australian Aborigines is part of Katō's global vision, even if it's an entirely spurious point on his part. As I will discuss more at a later time, Australia was somewhat of a mirror of Hokkaido through the 19th century. This is both in early Tokugawa-era Japanese plans to colonize Australia drawn up at the same time that the plans to colonize Hokkaido were, and these plans were drawn up by the same people, but also in that Hokkaido was declared terra nullius in entirely the same manner that Australia was, and moreover, in the year that Hokkaido was first annexed by Japan as terra nullius, Australia had passed its own Aborigine Protection Act. All of this is to say that it is but isn't a coincidence that Katō had articulated Ploetz's vision of 'racial hygiene' before Ploetz did, and that the aims of the law were almost entirely the same as similar discourses and policies in the United States and British Empire.

Comment on the Japanese annexation of Hokkaido

I've come up against scholar after scholar that have strongly pressed the opinion that the 1869 Japanese annexation of Hokkaido was merely a formal de jure announcement of what had been long since the de facto reality of Japanese control of or the long-since completed Japanese "conquest" of Ainu Moshir. This reading of the history of the colonization of Hokkaido would understand the proclamation of the Japanese Empire's annexation of Hokkaido (May 1869/Meiji 2; reproduced in full below) as a mere formality.

蝦夷地開拓御下問書

「蝦夷地ノ儀ハ皇国ノ北門直ニ山丹満州ニ接シ給界粗定ルトイエドモ北部ニ至テハ中外雑居致処是迄官民ノ土人ヲ決設スル甚ダ苛酷ヲ極メ外国人ハ頗ル愛恤ヲ施シ候ヨリ土人往々我邦人ヲ怨離シ彼ヲ尊信スルニ至ル一且民苦ヲ救ウヲ名トシ土人ヲ煽動スル者有之時ハ其禍忽チ箱館松前ニ延及スルハ必然ニシテ禍ヲ未然ニ防グハ方今ノ要務ニ候箱館平定ノ上ハ速ニ開拓指導等ノ方法ヲ施設シ人民契殖ノ域ト為サシメラル可キニ付利害得失各意見ヲ忘憚ナク可申出候事」

While who could doubt the Tokugawa/Matsumae's hegemony of the Hokkaido (and to a lesser extent, the Kurile/Sakhalin) Ainu in as far as the efficacy of armed suppression of the Ainu, or the reality of the basho ukeoi slavery or the endemic sexual exploitation that accompanied this, I think we have to take Tessa Morris-Suzuki's stance in looking at the May 1869 annexation as representing a major break in the history of Hokkaido. Tokugawa-era Japanese hegemony over the Ainu, after all, was much more akin to the Ming/Qing tusi (土司) system of frontier management, where formal Indigenous sovereignty was maintained, as were Indigenous lifeways, on the basis of recognition of the imperial sovereignty of the central state. In effect, this was a form of the larger, so-called "Sinocentric tributary system" which exchanged recognition and monetary tribute from the weaker state to that of the stronger imperial state, whether it be China or Japan. At times, this took the form of a grotesque farce, like the spectacle of local Japanese officials kowtowing to Ainu headmen to demonstrate formal recognition of Ainu sovereignty over their land, and despite the fact that, as some perplexed European observers described in the 1850s and '60s wrly observed, the same Ainu who went out to greet the kowtowing Japanese officials were themselves obviously terrified of the same kowtowing Japanese. In other words, even as the Japanese physically dominated the Hokkaido Ainu throughout the Tokugawa period, they took special care to performatively demonstrate recognition of Ainu sovereignty over Ainu land. Why? The reason is, the Japanese state gained legitimacy from the tributary relationship with neighbouring states and the symbolic capital from the formal recognition of Ainu autonomy was worth than the expected from outright annexation of the Ainu. This is similar to the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was formally was allowed to maintain its monarchy under armed Satsuma hegemony. And in both cases, the Ainu and Ryukyuans continued to formally recognize the hegemony of both the Qing and Japanese states. As Ronald Toby demonstrated with the Ryukyu Kingdom and Brett walker similarly showed with Ainu Moshir, at a time of total Japanese estrangement from the Qing Empire, an indirect relationship through these borderlands was vital.

But even out of the context of the "Sinocentric tributary system", we can find examples of this kind of relationship as a precursor to settler colonialism in Canada and the United States, with the Hudson Bay Company's Rupert's Land and Columbia District territories functioning in a similar way to the Matsumae domain in Ainu Moshir. Like Matsumae, which Brett Walker shows as unique amongst the Japanese domains in that they had an economy based primarily on trade rather than agriculture (and with the secondary role of border defense and exploration), the Hudson Bay Company territories were similarly based on trade with Indigenous peoples and surveying lands which would later be colonized by white settlers. While the Hudson Bay Company, for the most part, did not interfere in local Indigenous affairs, they indeed maintained their own laws and political order and represented a sort of "place holder" for future British (and as it happened, American) sovereignty, while maintaining a degree of sovereignty over the lands they administered.

And similar to the 1869 proclaimation as being spurred on over fears of Russian colonization of the Ainu territories, the formal transfer of control of the Hudson Bay Company's territories to the British Empire (as well as the push for white settlement of these territories, and the often violent suppression of Indigenous people's political sovereignty, lifeways, and economies that accompanied settlement) was based on fears over the westward push of the United States and southward push of the Russian Empire. For what at times borders on apologism over the Japanese colonization of Ainu Moshir as a necessary maneuver against the Russian threat, we should keep in mind that British/Canadian colonization of "the west" was spurred on by the exact same rationale. As was, for that matter, Euro-American colonial land appropriation globally under the guise of the "Great Game", "the Scramble for Africa", etc.

All this is to say that we have to be careful in how we frame the basic question of sovereign control of Indigenous territory means, either as this question applied to Indigenous people on their own land, to the settlers whose presence may have signified sovereign control of a territory, or as applied to the colonizing empire itself. The basic ability to enslave or kill people is not the same thing as "owning" their land, especially given discourses of land ownership central to territorial sovereignty as it is recognized by international law. Just as the British Empire took control of territories formally controlled by the Hudson Bay company and aggressively began to colonize these territories in a way recognizable to competing colonial states, Japanese control of lands formerly administered or managed by the Matsumae domain was part of the "use it or lose it" discourses of territorial sovereignty which have remained prevalent into the 21st century, as demonstrated by Japan's ongoing territorial disputes. And, moreover, while I haven't yet had a chance to look at 万国公法 and couldn't say for certain, I imagine if the Chinese/kango translation of Wheaton's Elements of International Law included the passage on internationally-recognized Russian sovereign control of the Kuriles, late Tokugawa period Japanese readers would have been extremely alarmed with the rug pulled out from under them.