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.
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