Notes: Miscellaneous topics related to the Tondenhei

I'm currently in the early phases of research for a chapter on the Tondenhei. It's quickly becoming clear that it will be more difficult than I'd thought simply because of the lack of available sources. This is simply because my main focus is not the typical romantic settler narrative repeated ad nauseam, nor am I interested in the military history of the Tondenhei soldiers. I'm interested, rather, in the domestic life of Tondenhei (ie. the family structures which were integrated into the military) and the place of the Tondenhei in developing discourses of nationalism and citizenship. In both cases, subjectivity becomes a key theme, as do gender roles (soldiering as 'masculine', 'patriotic', etc.).

Why samurai?

From its establishment in 1874 to 1890, the Tondenhei exclusively recruited samurai/ex-samurai, primarily from the five loyalist prefectures of northern Honshu. What's the reason for recruiting only samurai at first, and then heavily favouring them?

• They were trained soldiers with, especially directly after the Meiji Restoration, combat experience.
• Simple classism: prejudice against commoners, commoners were not trusted as soliders.
• They were entrusted with national defence, and the right to kill was largely the exclusive domain of the samurai, and only slowly was expanded with the draft.
• Moving Aizu, etc., samurai to Hokkaido reduced the samurai population in Tohoku.
• It rehabilitated these Tokugawa loyalists as patriots.

Gender:

The Tondenhei also played a role in redefining family structures in the samurai class, by promoting gender roles more typical of nuclear families. Documents refer to the Tondenhei as 'manly' in defending his nation, while women would be effectively working for the Tondenhei as the subordinates. There's almost nothing, in fact, on Tondenhei women, and it's not clear how they were enveloped by this system except as the dutiful wives of soldiers. It would be fascinating to learn more, but there doesn't seem to be much out there. Male children, however, were indirectly subject to the Tondenhei system in that, by law, if their fathers die while still in the 20 year period of service, 'suitable' male children are to take over in their father's place. While totally antithetical to the spirit of civilian militaries, it's consistent with the samurai class as it operated in the Tokugawa period. But here too, there's a dearth of detailed information, but this could be a fascinating topic.

Class:

The Tondenhei represented a very 'safe' option for anyone who would want to immigrate to Hokkaido. They would have two years of generous material support, including a home and land, and would be placed into a high social position in settler society. For poor samurai, this would represent a second chance. In the 1890s and until the system as abolished with the coming of universal conscription in 1905, this would also be a significant step up in the world for many commoners. Interestingly, though, a short history of Tondenhei of local lineage published online by Aichi Prefecture mentions that high ranking samurai applied, and groups of retainers for the same lord applied together as a group. Here too, getting to the heart of this sort of dynamic would be interesting.

The same Aichi Prefecture essay discusses, un-self-consciously reflecting settler narratives, a literal fight against nature as the "conquest of the soul" for young, brave Tondenhei pioneers. Getting into this sort of discourse from the period would be interesting, especially as it relates larger settler myths.

Tondenhei and Ainu:

One frustrating thing is it's still entirely unclear how the Tondenhei were historically related to the Ainu, other than simply as settling land stolen from the latter. The only time I've seen these two groups overlap in scholarship is Shinya Gyō's description of the Tondenhei as driving Ainu off their land at gunpoint. While they certainly occupied Ainu land, and as Michele Mason pointed out, while they were tantamount to a military occupation of colonized Ainu land, I've not seen any evidence besides Shinya's unsourced claim that the Tokdenhei had anything to do with the Ainu at all. It seems to have been the prefectural police who were more directly connected to issues of oppression and relocation of the Ainu. But, the fact that the Ainu and Tondenhei are otherwise never talked about together is itself a bit suspicious.

References to look into:

明治18年屯田 兵条例
明治20年屯田 兵徴募手続き
明治26年11月 29日官報 (new orders for prefectures regarding Tondenhei recruitment)
明治41年３月 移住者成績調査 (from the Hokkaido 道庁)
屯田兵顧録

Comment: "homo homini lupus" and the "survival of the fittest"

Presenting the Ainu as naturally fading before the shining light of Japanese civilization, like a fog burning off the forest in the morning sun, Japanese protectionists discourses evoke John Gast’s famous 1872 painting “American Progress” showing white male settlers, wagons, and trains led by an armed frontiersman extending westward across the prairies.

This procession is led by a gigantic Goddess of Liberty, herself holding a string of telegraph wires in one hand and a tome entitled “School Book” in the other. The light emanating from the east sends half-naked, feathered Indians run fleeing, their heads turned back to watch in horror, together with buffalo, bears, and foxes. These beasts alongside the Native Americans at once serve to animalize their human companions while also celebrating the frontier practice, still quite common in the 1870s, of murdering any Indigenous people or native fauna alike which might interfere with white settlement. 

This image and what it is meant to represent – the marriage of civilization and enterprise, the corrosive effect this naturally has on inert, childlike primitives, and the triumph of the white race – would be familiar to anyone in the United States in the late 19^th century. 

These discourses migrated across the Pacific with white settlers replaced by the Japanese and Native Americans replaced by the Ainu. A powerfully normalizing discourse rooted in the time of the earliest Spanish colonialism of the ‘New World’, it is one that also fits comfortably with what in the late 19^th century was cutting edge Darwinist evolutionary theory. Darwin himself, writing from the H.M.S. Beagle as it circumnavigated the globe, stopping at European colonies in Africa, South America, Australia, and India, reflected the dominant discourses of the European colonial world in his work, with mass slaughter and inhumane oppression justified by a view of humanity as, by its very nature, wolf-like, cruel, and fiercely competitive. 

Those European colonizers understood as ‘natives’, ‘primitives’, ‘savages’, or ‘aborigines’, by definition, lacked the capacity for sovereignty, both in terms of territorial sovereignty as nations as well as personal sovereignty as sovereign subjects. Simply put, non-Europeans were imagined as having no right to defend themselves. It was an easy step from there to imagine Indigenous peoples as deserving, if not inviting, this violence, due to their purported inferiority.