Source overview: Kangoku Hōrei Ruisan - Ch. 20 Genpei Oyobi Tondenhei Kankei

This brief section of this wide-ranging book on criminal justice in Japan deals with the Tondenhei and the military police. The chapter consists of seven ordinances regarding military courts, six of which relate directly to the Tondenhei. While there is no commentary included, these provide something of a primer for further studies on the Tondenhei, as it clearly states the following:

• Tondenhei colonists, even while primarily working as farmers, were subject to military and not civilian law
• The Tondenhei was officially a branch of the Japanese army (rikugun)
• The Tondenhei was, at least as of 1899, a volunteer army
• Tondenhei members were recruited between the ages of 17 and 30
• A separate Tondenhei military court, subject to the ministry of defence, was established in Sapporo
• Graduates from the Sapporo Agricultural College (who under Clark's instructions, received basic military training) were fast-tracked into the officer corps when they joined the Tondenhei
• Tondenhei members with children could retire if family responsibilities became to much, and non-officers could retire and remain attached to the Tondenhei as reservists

It becomes exceptionally clear that the Tondenhei were highly integrated into the Japanese armed forces and were not colonists with a simple ceremonial connection to the army. In other words, while they were farmers that worked to clear the land, and presumably after being discharged from service were granted portions of this land to farm individually, they regularly trained for combat.

This certainly highlights Michele Mason's assertion that the Tondenhei were an occupying army on Ainu land. And, I wonder to what degree they were at the time officially regarded as such. The Tondenhei branch was abolished in 1904 but was resurrected in the 1930s in Manchukuo with much the same purpose. But, we simply don't see the Tondenhei active in Taiwan or Korea or Nan'yo or other Japanese colonies. It was, at least until the Japanese colonization of Manchuria, a system unique to Hokkaido.

Another consideration is the question of the origins of the Tondenhei. While the name itself is clearly an allusion to the ancient Han dynasty's Tuntian system of military colonies in borderlands, a major difference is that Chinese agri-colonies were borne out of logistical necessity as supplying large occupying armies with food was extremely difficult and it was easier for them to grow their own. With this in mind, some scholars have linked the actual Meiji Japanese system to the Russian Empire's Cossacks who lived semi-autonomously in the empire's borderlands and represented the first wave of settlement, though unlike the Tondenhei, shared a balance of power with the Russian imperial government. Moreover, the Hokkaido government's own museums show that the Tondenhei lived in balloon-frame housing based on models used by American frontier cavalry, and the Hokkaido settlers guidebook I wrote about in a previous post shows plans for log houses used by Tondenhei which were typical of first-wave colonists' housing on the American western frontier. It seems that the Tondenhei were extremely hybridized, though Michele Mason was absolutely correct.

Source overview: Kyūdojin Ishokujū Sonohoka Torishirabe-sho

This study was published in 1883 and combined an analysis of Ainu living conditions in (1) Sapporo district in general, (2) the village of Tsuishikari -- dominated by Karafuto Ainu forcibly brought from Hokkaido in 1875-6, and (3) in Muroran, just south of Sapporo. This study aimed to analyze the reasons for a decline in the Ainu population explicitly from on the basis of hygienic conditions as the state understood them. In this case, hygiene (eisei) referred not to pubic health, but seems to have been -- as expressed in other posts -- quite an anomalous concept that had more to do with lifeways than anything remotely scientific. 

The three sections of this report aim to find fault in Ainu hygiene by investigating clothing, food and drink, housing, as well as marriage, childbirth, work/employment, bathing, exchange with other Ainu communities, life expectancy, and funerals. With these analyses, the author(s) aimed to demonstrate how and why Ainu populations were dropping so sharply.

While the word "study" may apply to this document, it's not scientifically rigorous in any way. Areas where one might ordinarily consider hygiene -- either in the 'personal' or 'public' senses -- such as food preparation, for example, are not seriously considered in regards to the spread of disease. Even less so than Sekiba Fujihiko's writings which tend to simply inscribe any aspect of Ainu culture that Sekiba did not approve of as "unhygienic", there is nothing in this study that even approaches a medical analysis of hygiene in these Ainu communities. Instead, this study links -- with absolutely no evidence -- things such as the soily smell of earthen floors in Ainu houses to a decline in the Japanese population.

We do see much of the same deeply ethnocentric assimilationist discourse as Sekiba, however, and clearly much of the impetus for the eventual Former Natives Protection Act comes from this sort of pathologization of Ainu daily life. 

Sapporo District Ainu

The author of the report on Sapporo district appears to have learned enough about the Ainu in this region to give Ainu names for particular textiles and articles of clothing, though this may be based on second hand reading rather than observation. While at times the report is quite a matter of fact, other times he makes what appear to be sweeping generalizations and exaggerations. For example, in discussing childbirth, he writes:

Pregnant women, unlike during ordinary times, are given extremely simple clothes and plain food and just barely escape from destitution (tōtai). Moreover, these pregnant women, suffer through a livelihood without frills, without the time to make decisions about things such as their health, being sent to the mountains to gather kindling, and facing the elements out in the wasteland. And also, they're sent to fish on the seashore and made to do hard labour. And in regards to how this babies are nurtured after they're born, even if they don't grow up to be excellent (zenryō), the Ainu mothers tenderly nurture their children with emotion. I think even more than ordinary people (jōjin). 

This description of Ainu women as borderline slaves (not to mention the characterization of Ainu babies as collectively destined to grow up as less-than-excellent people) is reminiscent of Orientalist stereotypes of Asian/non-Western women as collectively devalued and abused, continuing today with the so-called "white savour complex". It's one of many references to Ainu women which take on a specifically gendered tone.

The author of the first report notes that statistics (likely the koseki) lists Ainu in this district as living upwards of 70 years -- which in reality is staggeringly high for the 1880s. The author wonders, then, why the population is decreasing year after year. Here he returns to his image of hard done by Ainu women, and states that women going barefoot, braving the elements and being exposed to the cold air damages their uteri and that these elements can also damage the health of already pregnant women. He further states that not having proper bedding and, mentioned above, the earthy smell of Ainu homes damages their bodies, and women have miscarriages (ninki wo ushinashi) as a result. Moreover, he lists the heavy labour that pregnant women supposedly perform as a reason for the population decline. The lack of choice of foods for pregnant women and eating uncooked food are further given as reasons.

While, even if his report was true, much of this might be attributed to the realities of deep poverty, what does the author think should be done? The author describes the Ainu, referring to colonialism in the most indirect terms, explains that,

compared to other races that live in mixed environments [with other races], they are slow in raising their level of civilization (kaika) and escaping from their old traditions and adopting new ways. They have been neglectful of all of the necessities of life, and this has caused great damage to their health.

He concludes his analysis by simply stating that there are "too many reasons for their population decline to count", and as if to say that the Ainu are truly doomed, closes this section by discussing Ainu funerals.

Tsuishikari Ainu

The second author (I'm assuming there were two or three authors because of major stylistic differences in the writing itself), in discussing Karafuto Ainu far away from their homeland in Tsuishikari is in some ways much more straightforward and compared to the first author. For example, the first author claims that Sapporo district Ainu have no real form of cooking, no real form of marriage ceremonies, no real form of funerals, and the second author gives whole recipes and discusses Ainu ceremonies in detail. While it's not clear how accurate these observations are, they are largely without obvious personal bias. And, there are places -- such as his description of Ainu textiles made from treated tree bark -- where he directly gives examples of close Japanese equivalents. This almost gives the impression that the author thinks of the Ainu as not so different from the Japanese. However, there are other areas where the analysis is crudely culturalist and not just deflects Japanese colonialism or the fact that the Karafuto Ainu were ethnically cleansed from their far off homeland, but disavows these things altogether. He states, for example, that "the Ainu custom of building homes on uncleared swampland (mikai shichi) is the reason for the spread of disease" as a key reason for the decline in population. Much more troubling, the only other reason that the author gives for the population decline is that "as their homes and food are quite crude, when [Ainu] women have friendly relations with Japanese (wajin), they come to hate [other] natives. For this reason, there are a lot of bachelors amongst Ainu men and women." He concludes, before discussing funerals, by declaring the value of human life and advocating "giving the sick medicine, improving homes, and changing eating habits". Or in other words, he pushes for assimilation on explicitly biopolitical terms; a phenomenon which we see much more intensely later. The focus on Ainu women, both in terms of the quasi-orientalist "saving Ainu women from Ainu men" trope as well as the assertion that "friendly relations" with Japanese men have turned them off to Ainu men are typical of gendered colonial writing. Other sources, like the aforementioned Sekiba, have a strong gendered approach to Ainu women as well, giving special/especially creepy focus on them while Ainu men are treated as default. Given that still most immigrants travelling alone to Hokkaido were men, the focus on Ainu women as objects of desire is perhaps unsurprising, but it's odd to repeatedly see these references embedded in biopolitical writing.

Muroran Ainu

Lastly, the Muroran section is by far the shortest, and compared to the other two, is the most clinical. It's precise, including both descriptions of how Ainu houses are built and measurements of typical structures, and describes Ainu diet in detail simply missing from the first author's account of Sapporo district Ainu. Outstandingly, the third author has nothing disparaging to say about the Ainu at all. The picture of Ainu domestic life is in fact just that-- it's presented in a way that does not Other them in any explicit way, regardless of the veracity of the information presented itself. Interestingly, however, the section on life expectancy, where the other two authors discussed their harebrained theories as to why the Ainu population was decreasing, is nowhere to be found. Given the brevity of the entire section, it's possible the author only gave a cursory account of their field work, though this seems somewhat unlikely given the precision with which the third author talked about Ainu cooking or carpentry. They simply do not given an opinion as to why the Ainu were supposedly disappearing. 

There is an overwhelming tendency in late 19th and early 20th century Japanese accounts of the Ainu to characterize them as a 'vanishing race'. This still persists today, particularly but not exclusively with the Japanese ethnic nationalist right who have a tendency to declare the Ainu as extinct. Ainu activists sometimes comment on how their people are viewed as semi-mythological by Japanese settlers in Hokkaido with no bearing in reality. Well known academics, even non-Japanese ones writing in English, describe them in past tense ('The Ainu were a people that lived in Hokkaido'). But, the idea that there was a major population drop in the late 19th century itself should be interrogated. The main thing to consider is there are Ainu accounts of a sort of exodus into the interior of the island, away from settlers. Similarly, some settlers mention Ainu running away as soon as they see them. Like today, during this time, the Japanese government kept track of births and deaths using the koseki (family registers), in which many Hokkaido Ainu were first recorded in the late 1870s, When someone changes their permanent address, they would have to move their koseki as well. Especially given the limited access to on-the-ground information in the 19th century, it's not impossible that there were Ainu who were tied to a particular address on their koseki who simply got up and left and  in a legal sense became missing persons, or were even declared dead. After all, there aren't accounts of huge numbers of Ainu dying at once, but of particular towns losing Ainu populations. This could very well account for at least part of this drop in population so widely reported.

The other thing to consider is the actual effects of Japanese and Russian settler colonialism in Ainu lands. The only references to the Japanese in these reports, the creepy 'once you go wajin you'll never go back' comment in the second report and a reference in the Muroran report that mentions trade, are incredibly oblique. There's absolutely no mention of the fact that Ainu lands were confiscated by the state and were redistributed to settlers and mainland corporations for economic exploitation. There's no mantion that Ainu were restricted in hunting and fishing as well as gathering daily use goods like tree barks used to make clothing, completely tanking their trade-based economy and severely restricting their access to the bare necessities of life. And there's no mention that many Ainu were forcibly moved from their homes and put into what for some were alien environments, like seaside Karafuto Ainu communities sent to interior swamp areas in southern Hokkaido. What impact did these things have on the Ainu populations? How many people simply weren't able to survive with these massive, catastrophic changes to their communities? Was there violence inflicted on Ainu communities, especially with individuals who refused or resisted colonization? Did settlers ever forcibly take land from Ainu or harm them in other ways? These questions remain unanswered, and at least partly it seems that this was on purpose. 

The fact that these reports or many others like them, including writings by supposed critics of the Japanese state's treatment of the Ainu like John Batchelor, do not mention colonialism at all and instead offer a thousand different excuses for Ainu population based on something lacking in the Ainu itself is very telling. It's certainly not that individuals didn't know or just missed it altogether. And it's not even that colonialism in Hokkaido was a taboo topic as it is now: colonialism itself was widely discussed and celebrated. Rather, there was a conscious choice to divorce Ainu precarity from the effects of settler colonialism. And the inevitable conclusion reached by these sorts of reports was simple: the essential faults with the Ainu as a culture or, worse, as a race could only be fixed through assimilation campaigns. So, in other words, the unspoken effects of colonialism could only be fixed with more, deeper colonialism. Domestic spaces were to be colonized, which is exactly what happened in the two decades after this report was published.

Comment: the presence/absence of Japanese colonialism/the Ainu in historical documents

Going through a number of historical descriptions of the Ainu and of Japanese colonialism itself in the 19th century, an interesting pattern emerges. In texts describing Japanese colonialism, such as guides for incoming settlers, official reports on the conditions of the colony, or as Ueki Tetsuya brilliantly showed, late 19th century Japanese academic studies of the process of colonizing Hokkaido, the Ainu are simply absent. And not absent in the sense that they were left out of these writings by accident, but rather, that there seems to have been a conscious decision in many cases to write them out of history.

The term "mujin no sakai" (unpeopled borderland) comes up frequently as a sort of romanticized trope of pioneering. As mentioned in an earlier post, where the Ainu are mentioned is purely where they are relevant to the economic development of the colony. Otherwise, less attention is paid to them than to what kind of fish or trees are native to Hokkaido. Where academic writing does focus on the Ainu, it's often to discuss how they're "vanishing" or how they can be "saved".

In this case, the Ainu are characterized as undergoing a process of a sort of racial evanescence, as though they're simply fated to disappear into the wilderness like a fog burning off the forest in the heat of the morning sun.

Even where some texts make allusions to the catastrophic effects settler colonialism has had on Indigenous communities as their economy was systemically dismantled (and with it, their access to the basic necessities of life), as their land was stolen from them by the state and sold private corporations and incoming settlers, and as their lifeways were stigmatized and banned, these references are often sideways, opaque, and ultimately disavowed. Where there are direct references to the Ainu, these depictions present them collectively in a sort of pure, unblemished, museumized state, or as European writers at the time might have put it, a state of nature, without the slightest mention of the Japanese settlers or settler colonial state. Indeed, these descriptions of Ainu primitivity often are used to demonstrate how and why the Ainu are in a state of sharp decline in a rapidly modernizing Hokkaido.

The result is writings on the Ainu and writings on the settlers form a pair of parallel lines. But what does this accomplish? What effect does it have?

The effect is that these texts disconnect the Indigenous people from their land. This both neutralizes the question of the morality of colonialism (a question that should be taken seriously when analyzing historical writings). This may very well have had a reassuring effect for settlers in Hokkaido while it literally pulled the Ainu out of history (with a capital "h"). The Ainu are rendered timeless, landless, and miserably primitive without the spiritual, cultural, or material means to elevate themselves. Their suffering is, according to these texts, not a material effect of settler colonialism, but simply based on their inability to progress collectively as a race.

This discourse, as Lorenzo Veracini writes, takes many forms in settler colonies throughout the global history of settler colonialism, and is by no means unique to Japan. The process of imagining Indigenous people as non-existent has obvious genocidal implications while it reinforces the romanic pioneering myth, or bringing industry and progress to a waste land. This myth seems to simply slip off the tongue, and is seen again and again in official documents and popular discourse alike. But, is there not an element of it which is self-consciously systematic and persistent. What are the roots of this discourse of Hokkaido as "unpeopled", besides, presumably, wishful thinking? It's clear who is benefited and who is disbenefited by it, but how does a discourse like this develop?

Source overview: Okamoto Bunpei - Hokumon Kyūmu ch. 4 - Dojin

Okamoto Bunpei was a member of what seems to have been essentially a lobby group, Hokumonsha (the Northern Gate Society). This group formed in the late Tokugawa period to advocate the aggressive colonization of Ainu lands to stop them, and perhaps Japan with them, from falling into the hands of the Russian Empire. Okamoto in particular was an early colonist in Karafuto, or Sakhalin, and wrote this text as a sort of treatise on how to effectively colonize the island. Southern Karafuto at this time was inhabited by in reality only a small number of permanent Japanese settlers, who were joined by Russian citizens of various nationalities -- many of them criminals and political prisoners. And, of course, the Karafuto Ainu are the Indigenous people of the southern half of the island, though today the vast majority of them, after waves of Japanese and Soviet ethnic cleansing campaigns, reside in Hokkaido and Honshu.

It seems that Okamoto moved to Karafuto in part to put his money where his mouth with some official government support. However, the situation was far from ideal with the colony teetering on collapse, which may have contributed to the decision to formally cede it to the Russian Empire. However, in this context, Okamoto's text may be interpreted as policy suggestions designed to develop the colony economically.

While I intend to read more later on, I quickly went through the short section on the Karafuto Ainu which, keeping in the spirit of the text, was both a critique of existing policies toward the Ainu as well as suggestions for future policies. Okamoto's views are interesting in part because of how differently things actually went, and in retrospect come across as in many ways a continuation of Tokugawa-era direct rule policies.

Taken as a whole, these retrograde policies can be understood as 'winning the hearts and minds' of the Ainu as part of a defense against Russian encroachment while at the same time, assimilating them to the degree that the would be understood internationally as firmly under Japanese suzerainty. As Russians were, according to the new Meiji government's own admission, comparatively kind to the Ainu, Okamoto felt that Japan would have to essentially bribe them, continuing the buiku system from a half century prior. For this, Okamoto suggests, alcohol is "incomparable" in its ability to "tame the barbarians (imin)". Moreover, he suggests keeping a clear distance from Ainu religious practice, going so far as to suggesting Japanese settlers from cutting down willow trees which are used for Ainu religious paraphernalia. One might wonder what Marx with his "opiate of the masses" view of organized religion would make of this pairing.

Okamoto then reaffirms the official Japanese policies of providing a brown rice stipend for the elderly, infants, the disabled, and the sick. He warns, however, that the "stupid (gumai)" Ainu are apt to lie to get more rice and recommends colonial administrators become well aware of the situation and be prepared to punish infractions. Okamoto further chastises the former shogunate for being overly generous with its rice stipends and recommends forcing the Ainu into unpaid labour to compensate for rice beyond what Okamoto imagines would be the right amount to win their loyalty.

With this aid, he warns against using underhanded methods to control the Ainu, and returning to similar policies such as his more 'liberal' stance toward Ainu religion, suggests that Japan would have to be fair in its dealings to properly defend against the Russians, and ends by suggesting teaching them handwriting, arithmetic, and farming and intermarrying poor (as in impoverished) Japanese women to the Ainu, and in turn Ainu women to Japanese settlers.

Source overview: Hokkaidō-chō Shokuminka-hen - Hokkaidō Imin Mondō

北海道庁植民課編: 北海道移民問答 [April 1891]

This book was compiled by the Hokkaido prefectural government as a sort of FAQ for incoming settlers. It largely is intended to help settlers establish themselves economically. And based on repeated warnings about coming unprepared, and the existence of settler protection policies in the previous decade, it's likely that a good number of settlers needed a guide like this.

A series of chapters divided by industry are book-ended by a chapter on climate and at the beginning and a miscellanea chapter at the end. Those chapters on industry are furthermore seemingly divided by the economic importance of the field as it stood in 1891, either by the volume or questions or importance placed on the fields by the government of Hokkaido. Most importance is placed on agriculture, which is subdivided into four chapters largely focusing on obtaining leases or buying crown land, clearing this land, and suitable crops for different regions within Hokkaido. From there there are descending chapters (with a smaller and smaller page count) on fisheries, stock farming, sericulture, forestry, mining, construction, salaries, commerce, and transportation. In effect, this book represents the economic life of the colony of Hokkaido, and likewise, with its focus on the distribution of crown land to private industry, reflects the process of primitive accumulation of Indigenous land.

Particularly relevant to the latter, given the widely-known presence of the Ainu, they go almost entirely unacknowledged. In fact, there are instead references to Hokkaido as an "unpeopled borderland", similar to Michele Mason's observations of the Hokkaido as a "virgin land" myths so prominent in Meiji-era popular fiction. However, strangely, given this conceptual erasure of the Ainu, there are two direct references to them as it relates to their employability. One states that their wages are by and large on par with settlers, and the other states that they are useful labourers for settlers to hire, especially as boatmen, leading horses, or as guides into the interior. As such we might understand the erasure of the Ainu in throughout the remainder of this text not simply as reflecting the romantic pioneer myth of settling land 'untouched by human hands', nor simply reflecting a genocidal vision of Hokkaido entirely bereft of its Indigenous population, but rather, as also reflecting the economic positioning of the Ainu vis-a-vis their land in the Hokkaido settler colony. Simply put, for the Japanese state, profits were maximized precisely through the appropriation of Ainu land and the ethnic cleansing of the Ainu from that land. This process continued (and arguably still continues as with examples such as the infamous Nibutani dam construction) through the Meiji period, and this book instructing mainland Japanese on how to properly settle "unpeopled" land in Hokkaido directly reflects this. Moreover, where Ainu enter the picture, as briefly as it is, it is in the context of their being used as labourers by settlers to maximize their profits. Indigenous people in settler colonies -- not just Hokkaido -- in this regard were/are treated as a sort of pure surplus labour. And, indeed, it was in the 1890s that the Former Natives Protection Act attempted in turn to mobilize the Ainu as settlers on their own land.

With that said, one thing which is unclear throughout this text is the term "capital" (資本). I say this because, as the foreign employees of the Kaitakushi wrote in their reports in the 1870s (which, it seems, the Hokkaido government followed to the letter), there was a huge emphasis on the exploitation of Hokkaido by private capital as soon as possible. Report after report chided the Japanese government for establishing state enterprise or building infrastructure itself, and the foreign advisors, like good capitalists, both argued that private industry would more efficiently settle the island, and would also be quicker to bring "civilization" to Hokkaido. We learn from the reports that by the 1890s, all state-own industry on the island had been sold off to private buyers and that the government had stopped funding (lit: "protecting"/保護) individual settlers in favour of pouring money into infrastructure and subsidies both to companies and individuals. Subsidies to the point where private individuals did not pay income tax, it appears. But, back to the question of capital, the term as used in this text is not precisely capital in the sense used in capitalism. At times, such as would-be farmers asking how much "capital" they'll need until the farm is fully functional, the term seems to be more in reference to having enough money to live day-to-day until the farm is productive enough to feed the farmer's family. While the development of Hokkaido at large was unambiguously capitalist, and we learn many farmers grew cash crops for export rather than food they would eat themselves, I wonder to what degree ordinary settlers were thinking about this. Was settlement understood as escaping poverty, was it a sense of adventure, was it patriotic duty, or were individuals seeing themselves as capitalist agents? It's not clear at all from the questions asked in this text.

Key points

Page 5, 6 discuss late March as the best time of year to immigrate, largely related to snowfall and maximizing the chances of clearing land and establishing a farm before the following winter. This is repeated in the miscellaneous section which discusses building a provisional shelter and then more permanent log cabin. In both cases, there's a warning of "bitter regret" if a strict timeline is not kept.

Pages 8-13 go into detail about how much land is developed, how much land is left, the types and quality of land, etc. It may be useful in creating a 'profile' of colonizable land.

Pages 19-29, in reference to the 北海道土地払下規則施行手続, discuss land grants, how to buy crown land, etc. Settlers are instructed to write a proposal of how they would use land and submit it to the Hokkaido government. A sample application is attached. Related to this, I wonder if Ainu had similar procedures during the promulgation of the Protection Act. Would land be surveyed on their behalf?

Page 35 indicates that about 70 km2 (7000町歩) are being developed per year and rising. This still seems rather small. Page 36 discusses the optimal use of different types/qualities of land.

Page 54 discusses large scale farming in an explicitly Euro-American fashion, including European farming tools (and a Sapporo-based factory to make them).

Page 65 describes Shorthorn, Ayrshire, and Devon as "most suitable" among "European-American cattle" (洋牛) for Hokkaido.

Page 67 describes Thoroughbred, "Arizerii" [Arabian?], and Percheron as "suitable" among the "Euro-American horses" (洋馬) for Hokkaido. Among these, the Thoroughbred was introduced by the Kaitakushi from America, and remains "most suitable for this prefecture".

Page 68 repeats this question regarding pigs. It provides a long list of Euro-American breeds and lists Berkshire and "Sabbuuku" [Saddleback?] as easiest to breed, but Essex as most profitable for small scale farmers.

Page 74 describes "imported" foreign grasses as suitable for Hokkaido.

Page 98 describes laws banning settlers [/Ainu] from freely cutting trees on crown land beginning in Meiji 21.

Page 106 describes Kaitakushi-era state own factories and convinced that they were all sold off but many of the buyers continue to operate them.

Page 108 introduces the term "拓地植民".

Pages 109-110 displays a table of wages by industry and metropolitan region including average wages for men and women.

Page 111 confirms (officially, though who knows) that Ainu wages are roughly 30 sen a day, so the same as "common employees" (参拾銭前後にして尋常の雇人と異ならず). The employment chart contradicts this claim, but I wonder if it doesn't refer to proletarian day-labourers. If so, that would be interesting it itself.

Page 134 discusses how mainlanders can get to different settlement sites (植民地). The answer discusses routes to various "wastelands" (原野). This may be interesting in relation to the government's settlement of Ainu populations as well as its relation to settler narratives (real or imagined).

Pages 142, 143 discusses "protection" (保護) of settlers, including transportation fees and subsidized wages. We learn that the Hokkaido government recently cut "protection" of individual settlers in favour of using this money to build roads and power lines to make transportation and communication easier, survey wasteland (原野を区画) and "protect industrial companies owned by settlers" (移民を持ち工業会社を保護).

Pages 143-145 discuss "indirect protection" (間接の保護) for settlers, including, (1) "region costs" coming from the national treasury, (2) government owned wastelands lent to settlers and then, when developed, sold at a flat rate of 1 yen/1000 tsubo (3300 m2), (3) tax exemption on this land for 20 years, (4) land that was taxable after Meiji 2 [the year Hokkaido was annexed] is tax exempt from Meiji 22 to 31 (1889-1898), (5) land tax as 1/100 of the lands value, (6) income tax as applying only to public servants [Really??], (7) breweries tax cut in half, (8) tax exemption for confectionery, soya sauce, and carriages [Why??], and (9) those living outside of Hakodate, Fukuyama, or Esa (ie. former Matsumae towns) are exempt from the draft.

Page 145 describes the "hardships" and the "matter of life and death" of settling an "unpeopled borderland" (無人の境) as farmers.

Page 148 discusses the Meiji 16 imperial decree: 明治十六年第拾号布達北海道転籍移住者手続.

Page 155 describes settler livelihoods as having more "elbow-room" (余裕) than mainlanders.

Page 156 describes a 50/50 split (五分 ... 五分) between settlers involved in industry and settlers involved in farming/fisheries.

Pages 160-163 describe 屯田兵/士族 houses and provides blueprints.

Pages 170 discusses Ainu (旧土人 glossed as あいぬ) as useful to hire for settlers living in close proximity, especially for guides into mountains and valleys, leading horses (馬追い), or boat rowers (船漕ぎ).

Page 172 gives population statistics by county.

Page 174 describes roads as "the most necessary addition/convenience to transportation for the purpose of colonization" (開拓に最も必要なるは交通の便にして道路). Very similar to Warfield's argument that roads lead to commerce and thus civilization.

Page 175 provides a bibliography of books which are usual for information on the colonization of Hokkaido. Of particular use are (1) 開拓使事業報告, (2) 北海道志, (3) 県統計書, (4) 北海道庁統計書, (7) 北海道庁勧業年報, (8) 北海道庁勧業月報, (9) 北海道農業手引草, (23) 北海道植民地選定報文, (24) 北海道移住案内.

Page 180 lists the best overviews of Hokkaido.

Page 181 lists the best periodical on production increases.

Source analysis: Sekiba Fujihiko - Ainu Ijidan

關場不二彥：あいぬ醫事談) [1896] 

Sekiba Fujihiko was trained as a medical doctor at Tokyo Imperial University, where he studied under the German physicians Julius Scriba and Erwin Bälz, and continued his studies at the University of Berlin. He immigrated to Hokkaido after completing his studies. Inspired by his meeting with the British missionary John Batchelor, Sekiba began offering pro bono medical treatment to Ainu, and eventually treated more than 400 Ainu patients. Also during his time in Hokkaido, he assisted his former mentor Erwin Bälz, a noted eugenicist and race theorist, in his own study of the Ainu. Ainu Ijidan is partly the result of his firsthand experience treating Ainu patients. However, it also relies heavily on John Batchelor's writings on the Ainu, as well as official Kaitakushi publications and Tokugawa-era travelogues of Japanese officials sent to survey Ainu territory. I have focused on the introduction as well as three chapters which analyze the hygiene of Ainu culture and living conditions, as well as Sekiba's own recommendations for Ainu protection. For the time being, I have skipped his survey of traditional Ainu medical knowledge.

This text clearly situates the Japanese attitudes toward the Ainu in transcolonial discourse regarding Indigenous/colonized people. Prominent throughout the text is a discourse of racial hygiene which characterizes the Ainu collectively as pathologically deficient in hygiene (衛生), and this leading to the eventual extinction of their race without direct, long-term Japanese intervention and the total assimilation of the Ainu down to the smallest rhythms of daily life. According to this line of thought, it was Ainu hygiene – not borderline genocidal restrictions on Ainu access to the basic necessities of life – which was the sole reason for the purported sharp decline in Ainu population the late 19th century.

This analogy of racial hygiene was drawn as early as the Katō Masanosuke's comments in the Japanese Diet 1892, where he appealed for Ainu protection by stating,

[The Ainu] don't respect the laws of hygiene. They 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. This diseased race is today in a state of decline. ... If we continue our practice of non-interference as we do today, I think the Ainu race will go extinct in some decades just as the Australian natives have gone extinct. 

What is perhaps most surprising is that Katō’s characterization of racial hygiene came a full year before the publication of German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz's infamous 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). This is not to suggest that Japanese politicians influenced German eugenicists, but rather that both can be traced to a longer genealogy of settler colonial Indigenous management. A major clue to this is a passage early in Sekiba's analysis of Ainu hygiene where he approvingly cites Charles Darwin. Darwin himself discusses the Ainu as a sort of missing link between modern man and a sub-human progenitor. And although this reference to Darwin is brief, his influence on Sekiba's view of the Ainu is clear throughout the rest of the text. While so-called ‘social Darwinism’ is often seen as a sort of perversion of the biologists' otherwise benign work on evolution, Darwin's 1871 publication The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex reads the devastating effects of European colonialism on Indigenous peoples worldwide as natural, inevitable, and directly linked both to different races' level of civilization. Civilization itself is understood by Darwin as a cultural expression of the concept of the survival of the fittest. Those like Sekiba who called for Ainu protection, far from resisting this sort of crude biological racism, seems to have crystallized it perfectly. Largely disavowing the effects of Japanese colonialism, they saw the Ainu as doomed to destroy themselves, and, as Sekiba, Katō, and others clearly state, only the morality (morality being an expression of the highest order of civilization) of the Japanese could save them. Indeed, for Sekiba, the Japanese colonization of the Ainu was “a great blessing for these suffering Ainu” and believes the Ainu “should be delighted to have come into contact with us”.

In his ‘diagnosis’ of the Ainu, Sekiba Fujihiko's Ainu Ijidan discusses both Ainu physiological and cultural defects, and thereby straddles biological racism and culturalism. This is notable, though I suspect not totally uncommon for this type of text, as biological racism and culturalism are understood as being to a large degree mutually exclusive. And indeed, in Sekiba's work, as in a lot of the Ainu protectionist discourse, there's an uneasy relationship between the widely held assumption that the Ainu are hopelessly inferior to the Japanese and assimilationsts' insistence that the Ainu as a race are improvable and are capable of being absorbed into the Japanese national body. In Ainu Ijidan, these two ideas are both present and are the two modes by which the author articulates his quantitative medical/anthropological and qualitative socio-cultural analyses. At times, such as his serious consideration of whether Ainu suffer collectively from hypertrichosis, his explanation of how to stop Ainu women from “smelling like dogs” (犬臭), or his assertion that some Ainu have a custom of cannibalism, his analysis is crudely and contemptuously biologically racist. At other times, however, such as his likening the Ainu to the Celts or Mongols who were brave and powerful but lacked the capacity to form a nation-state, the analysis much more geared to a sort of historicist culturalism. These seemingly opposing points of view overlap toward the end of the book where Sekiba, if only partially, disavows the idea of the decline in the Ainu population as strictly the result of their losing ground in the survival of the fittest (優勝劣敗) and instead argues that their decline is based largely on their lack of hygiene, and that fixing this would give them a fighting chance at survival in this arena. However, even this is contradicted elsewhere throughout the book, he describes the decline of “these naturally plain, stupid Ainu” as based on their natural susceptibility as barbarians to disease or their inability to live hygienically without assistance as based on their mental faculties.

But while Sekiba asserts that hygiene alone can cure the Ainu of their racial defects, it’s not entirely clear what “hygiene” (衛生) or “unhygienic” (不摂生) mean. This is perhaps not surprising, as scholars of the 19th century hygiene movement often comment on how slippery this term was in its use in Europe. For his part, Sekiba clearly is not talking about public health or sanitation. And while at times he talks about hygiene in the sense of personal hygiene, it’s unclear how this relates to the contraction of disease or racial extinction, and it seems to be little more than a way of slandering the Ainu, or, as alluded to above, reforming Ainu women, presumably to be suitable mates for the large number of bachelors who immigrated to Hokkaido during this time. By and large, Sekiba understands hygiene as related explicitly to lifestyle and sees banal patterns of daily life such as regular or irregular mealtimes or the quantity of food one consumes as hygienic or unhygienic and directly related to the contraction of disease. He accordingly sees the traditional Ainu economy based on hunting, fishing, and trade as fatally unhygienic in contrast to the more sedentary, modern, and civilized Japanese/Euro-American agrarian lifestyle. Elsewhere, he describes the supposed practice of Ainu going barefoot as unhygienic due to exposure to elements, or the architecture of Ainu houses itself as unhygienic. Indeed, any time Sekiba describes any aspect of Ainu domestic life, it’s to comment on how unhygienic it is. The only exception is Ainu straw raincoats which, after heaping praise on them, he mentions as closely resembling those of the Japanese.

In effect, Sekiba is pathologizing every aspect of Ainu cultural life. While he seems, like John Batchelor, largely unconcerned with Ainu language or outward displays of Ainu culture, Sekiba is perhaps going much further than many assimilationists by instead calling for total erasure of the smallest minutiae of Ainu cultural life through a regime of biopolitical disciplining of Ainu bodies.
Finally, one area where Sekiba stands out from virtually all other protectionist discourse is how muted his descriptions of Japanese settler colonialism is. One discursive strategy that I’ve noticed, right back from the Meiji government’s justifying the annexation of Hokkaido through criticisms of the Matsumae domain’s cruel treatment of the Ainu, is assertions that new assimilation/colonization policies are needed to fix injustices the Ainu have faced in the past. Katō Masanosuke in the first bill’s reading in 1892 and Shirani Takeshi in the second bill’s reading in 1899 both claim that the Protection Act is needed to protect the Ainu from the predations of Japanese settlers on Ainu land. Sekiba, however, only mentions the concrete effects of Japanese settler colonialism once throughout his text, in describing the unhygienic Ainu diet, by stating that as Ainu hunting and fishing was banned (using a passive verb without a clear actor) and that they would need to be significantly more ‘hygienic’ in their eating habits to survive. This seems like a clear allusion to Ainu famines in the 1880s and 1890s, though Sekiba declines to go into any detail.