Still in the thick of writing, and back briefly to finish up some research. Some thoughts though: my last chapter discussed the role of Capron, Clark, Lyman, etc., in the colonization of Hokkaido. While unfinished/unpolished, the chapter fundamentally readers 'settlerness' or the ability to truly pioneer (rather than occupy) as a fundamentally white, Western possession which was bestowed upon Japan by these white American advisers. For example, Lyman's metaphor of Japan as 'sleeping beauty' and America, the handsome prince, or Capron's delight in breaking what he termed the 'virgin soil' around Tokyo.
Capron and Clark in particular served as conduits of American indigenous policy, and advised the Japanese government on the Homestead Act and the nationalization of the soil and any flora or fauna which resides upon it. Policy papers prepared at Kuroda Kiyotaka's request formed the cornerstone of policies which dispossessed the Ainu of their land and restricted them from hunting and fishing. They were forbidden from so much as cutting trees on their own land.
These laws, based on European and American equivalents, lead to famines in the 1880s. Somewhat troublingly, knowledge of these famines comes in the form of petitions and warnings to the Hokkaido and national governments, including Ainu community leaders who travelled to Tokyo. Policymakers were warned of Ainu so desperate for food that they waded into half-frozen marshes to collect molluscs or reduced to eating leather. Meanwhile, statistics show that Ainu populations were in a free fall.
I've found that the government response to this catastrophe was, in some cases, quite literally replying to members of the Ainu community who petitioned them by saying that the Ainu were simply losing the survival of the fittest, followed by a range of excuses, half-truths, and dismissals/self-apologetics. While it's a bit of a stretch, one could imagine that some bureaucrats and policy planners in the 1870s may have been unprepared for the human consequences that nationalization policies ostensibly designed to 'protect' Hokkaido's fish, its forests, and so on, would have on the Ainu. However, the subsequent state-level dismissal of warnings that large numbers of Ainu who were on the verge of starving to death as their productive land was stolen by settlers speaks to something else altogether. At some point, we have to question to what degree the famines in Ainu communities in the 1880s and 1890s were not simply conscious neglect, but the desired outcome of resource nationalization policies.
Moreover, the logic that it is the march of civilization which is naturally leading to the decline of Ainu populations and their eventually extinction as a race, besides naturalizing this larger colonial process, also renders Ainu biological life as antithetical to the very essence of civilization. Academic knowledges, spread from Europe and America to Japan from the 1860s to the 1890s, central to the 文明開化 movement of rendering Japan Westernesque and thereby 'civilized' made it its mission to observe the Ainu under the scientific gaze of the academy, and Ainu bones became the most authentic way to measure (sometimes quite literally) the worth of the Ainu. However, whether through mixed marriages, adoption, or rape, many Ainu communities were increasingly multi-racial, with many people who were raised Ainu having Japanese, or in the case of Karafuto Ainu, Russian roots. The skulls of long-dead Ainu were hunted by anthropologists, seen as a purer source of data by which the Ainu could be understood as a race than living Ainu. This was, moreover, a task seen as imperative given the imminent extinction of the Ainu as Hokkaido was settled/'civilized'. These skulls became increasingly valuable on the open market, sold to universities in Japan and overseas, especially as 'supplies' began to run out. Ainu life was rendered utterly useless, with communities left to starve to death, while the corpses of Ainu became valuable commodities.
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