Source analysis: "Fujimura Hisakaza and I" by Umehara Takeshi in Henka to ahachi

I'm working on a piece which details 1860s-70s Japanese sovereignty claims to Ainu land by the likes of Okamoto Bunpei. Okamoto fancifully described the contemporary Ainu as preserving the language, culture, customs, and religion of the very ancient Japanese. This creates a sense of kinship between the Ainu and Japanese in Okamoto's time, though, perhaps with two siblings at very different ages. I argue that this has the effect of rendering the Ainu proto-Japanese and thereby legitmizes Japanese colonial incursions into Ainu territory. Moreover, with the increasingly aggressive stance of the Russian Empire in the boundary dispute in Karafuto/Sakhalin, this would render Ainu territories across the island always-already Japanese territories. In other words, it de-legitimized the Karafuto Ainu as a distinct political or cultural entity, in effect de-indigenizing them, while, in turn, indigenizing the Japanese settlers who Okamoto hoped would settle the island in great numbers. And as it was, after all, a numbers game, rendering the thousands of Ainu present in southern Sakhalin "Japanese" would greatly bolster the settler body politic, then numbering in the hundreds.

Stunningly, this discourse has continued to recent times, co-existing with settlers' claims that the Ainu have "disappeared' through their forcible assimilation into the Japanese mainstream. In fact, I was astounded and troubled by the inclusion of a short essay by the 20th century Japanese philosopher Umehara Takeshi which was included in Henka to ahachi -- a book of interviews with Hokkaido-based Karafuto Ainu. The essay, acting as a forward, is stunning in how it reproduces Okamoto's colonialist discourse, with the philosopher asserting that the Ainu -- still in the 1980s when the book was published -- represent a truly ancient, primordial, and thereby pure/authentic form of Japanese culture left over from the Jomon period. Describing his great excitement as a nationalist in learning about (and hoping to "understand" (rikai)) Ainu culture, he stated that in more perfectly understanding the Ainu, he could more perfectly "understand" a timeless Japanese culture as well. Such Ainu culture was, according to Umehara, fundamentally anti-modernist and adopting it allowed him to overcome the Cartesian mind-body split which supposedly characterizes all modern philosophy. His proof for all of this? Exactly like Okamoto, he turns to the most superficial of linguistic and religious similarities (ie. Japanese kami = Ainu kamui). Essentially, this mode of categorization reproduces (or, perhaps it's better to say, "updates") the colonial discourse of Ainu as primitive, as unchanging, or as in a state of nature while erasing them as a distinct Indigenous people.

There's little more to say about this which I didn't write above about Okamoto, but what's even more curious than this discourse's own "essence" proving to be fundamentally changeless 150 years into the future is the efficacy in which Ainu themselves responded to it in the same volume. Henka to ahachi contains an incredible critique of such colonial de-indigenizations. The Karafuto Ainu man, Nishihira, describes Japanese legitmizing their own theft of Ainu land through creating histories of the Ainu consisting of "nothing but lies". Nishihira, in turn, claims that the Japanese themselves were from Thailand (comparing the Ainu epithet for settlers as "Shamo" to the medieval southeast Asian kingdom Cham) or from the northeast Asian mainland. All of Japan, he reminds his interlocutor, was originally Ainu land.

Editing notes: Karafuto Ainu

The first chapter of my dissertation will both be included in my publishable manuscript and will also be presented, in a highly condensed form, at this year's AAS conference.

Very briefly here, I will sketch out key revisions I need to make as well as what is most salient for public dissemination.

Book manuscript

1. I rely too much on too few secondary sources for Russian Sakhalin and Russian Kodiak Island. More into this would be extremely helpful, and help flesh out my own understanding. Plus, are there any translated documents, besides Chekhov?
2. More secondary literature on Japanese colonialism, including better incorporation of extant sources.
3. The bits on de-Indigenization/settler self-Indigenization should be tightened up. Ideally, based on comments during my defence, this should become a larger part of my central argument and the finer details should be moved to the introduction chapter. 
4. And, for that matter, the bit on Okamoto should be fleshed out. I should also stress that this discourse continued unabated.
5. More on the international system and imperialism. This is a good place to bring in literature on civilization discourse as it relates to imperialism and national sovereignty.
6. More on Taiwan and Korea? More on gunship diplomacy and Kuroda?
7. If possible, more on Enomoto and especially his plans for the Ainu, his activities in Russia.
8. Something direct from Kuroda Kiyotaka would also be essential here -- he features so heavily as the "villain" of the chapter, and rightly so, but is largely silent.
9. Really -- more from the Karafuto Ainu and their decedents, if possible. There may be memoirs, interviews, etc.
10. I should mention the violence inflicted upon the Karafuto Ainu in the introduction, and tighten that up too.
11. Footnotes on topics such as Canada's claim of Inuit (and their territories) as Canadian would be good, as would something on race shifting Japanese settlers in Hokkaido.

Basically, everything is good but not great. My argument is sound, the chapter organization is tight. There's nothing wrong with it, but it lacks theoretical depth and nuance which other chapters are rich with. 

AAS

1. A discussion about the concept of a "token of sovereignty"; both in the sense of material objects as well as (in this case) human bodies.
2. A brief history, and overview of relevant historiography (including popular representations).
3. Discussion of the Russo-Japanese rivalry, the situation in Sakhalin/Karafuto and the Kuriles/Chijima.
4. Discuss proposals for Japanese colonization hinged on the bodies of Ainu, with Ainu literally becoming tokens of sovereignty.
5. Talk about the Treaty of St. Petersburg, relatively generous terms for people who became permanent residents.
6. Talk about the state's rescinding of less-than-generous terms for Karafuto Ainu in Japan.
7. Give a brief overview of Matsumoto Juro's account, aftermath.
8. Conclusion.
9. ALSO, if space: multi-ethnic colonization and the Kuriles as Alaskan.

Source overview: Jodi Byrd et al - Predatory Value; A.G. Morise - Carriers and Ainos at Home

Introducing a special edition of Social Text, Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy discuss racial capitalism, or as Cedric Robinson argues in opposition to Marx's developmentalism, "the development of capitalism" as "historically inextricable from processes of racialization." They tie this into contemporary discussions of "financialization," or, through ongoing, disparate processes of "numeracy, abstractions, proceduralism," the "abstractability of humans as tools for capital." 

They write,

colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. Racialization and racism further colonial dispossession just as the colonization of Indigenous peoples and those subjected to colonial rule contribute to the specific conditions and practices through which racialized subordination are enacted. 

This is to say, that colonialism was/remains generative of racialized categories and racism, and that these "differential valuations," are tied to how subjective and economic categories are formed. This is most obviously visible in regimes of private property, which -- in a colonial setting, and subsequently in Europe in the transition from "feudalism" to "liberal capitalism") -- were/remain predicated on dispossession. Dispossession, they state (in reference to Denise Ferreira da Silva's discussion of "transparency versus affectability" and Elizabeth Povinelli's discussion of "the autological subject versus genealogical society"), is "insatiable predatory relation that entails a specific manner of world making that is at once predicated on and generative of a dialectic of biopolitical sorting." The authors describe the such property regimes as "economies of dispossession": "those multiple and intertwined genealogies of racialized property, subjection, and expropriation through which capitalism and colonialism take shape historically and change over time."

While evocative of David Harvey's famous critique of “accumulation by dispossession," the authors differentiate their own argument in that it is  not so much foundational (or "originary, or, in Marx's terms, "primitive") as it is ongoing, and how "colonization and racialization" are "constitutive and continuing" for capitalism itself. This is certainly true, and is demonstrably true that that. One need look only at the Dutch East India Company to find the roots of the modern corporation in extra-European colonialism. However, the authors stress that regimes of private property, and eventually, property relations between settlers and, before long, in Europe have their roots in the European dispossession of Indigenous land in the Americas. Indeed, "Imperialism provides the vectors of economic speculation and the enmeshment of administrative, plantation, and multiple colonial formations that have underpinned the rise of the world economy." Indeed, while many treat both "so-called original accumulation" as well as colonialism itself, "as merely a historical precursor to the subsequent depredations of racism rather than an ongoing relation of theft, displacement, foreclosure, and violence that cannot be reduced to one determinate relation to racialization," the authors stress that racial and colonial violence are "as ongoing conditions of possibility" for capitalist accumulation.

Indeed, and, as Glen Coulthard writes, "[s]ettler-colonialism is territorially acquisitive in perpetuity." The authors of this essay agree, writing,

Indigenous dispossession continues unabated to provide the logics that order power, violence, accumulation, and belonging for all those who find themselves on lands stripped from Indigenous peoples. ... Not only has land made territory made property in this sense provided the foundational relations of colonial accumulation and profit, but dispossession has also remained a perpetually incomplete project that continues to strive toward conforming and confirming these terms of value and belonging.

All of this is tied to property, and, as Hegel and others famously themselves argued, property is tied to conceptions of "proper" personhood, in that being propertied is to be human, and to be incapable of possessing property is to be (as Hegel put it) a "mere thing." Accordingly, "Colonization, Indigeneity, racialization, and chattel slavery and its afterlives, along with the heteropatriarchal household economy, are among the primary conditions of possibility for this proposition."

All this is enough to the Jordan Petersons of the world furrow their brows to the point of piercing muscle spasms, to be sure. But, in as much as (the authors stress) the conditions of racialized violence and settler colonialism are disavowed today, we can find direct and, indeed, celebratory references to this same dynamic in the recent past. 

Take, for example,  missionary and linguist A.G. Morice's short essay, "Carriers and Ainos at Home (The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal Vol. XXIV Jan-Nov 1902)," which has obvious applications for my own research project. The essay is, put simply, a crude attempt to compare the Carrier people (or the Dakelh) of what's today British Columbia and the Ainu of what is today Hokkaido. Unlike Berthold Laufer, Morice does not attempt to construct a grand theory of a shared trans-Pacific culture, but, instead, identifies the purported kinship between such "savages" and non-human animals such as dogs and bears to be central to Indigenous people's "psychology," distinct as it is from "the white man." This, for Morice, is all that links "savages" from opposite sides of the north Pacific, and explains seeming cultural similarities. Indeed, "the Indian ... does not possess to the same extent as the white race the idea of domination, or such a key sense of ownership." Of domesticated animals, Morice differentiated "the self-styled 'noble' Aryan" from the "humbler Indian" in that the former is "the 'master' of his dog and the 'proprietor' of his horse."