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.