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.
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