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?
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