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.