Okamoto Bunpei was a member of what seems to have been essentially a lobby group, Hokumonsha (the Northern Gate Society). This group formed in the late Tokugawa period to advocate the aggressive colonization of Ainu lands to stop them, and perhaps Japan with them, from falling into the hands of the Russian Empire. Okamoto in particular was an early colonist in Karafuto, or Sakhalin, and wrote this text as a sort of treatise on how to effectively colonize the island. Southern Karafuto at this time was inhabited by in reality only a small number of permanent Japanese settlers, who were joined by Russian citizens of various nationalities -- many of them criminals and political prisoners. And, of course, the Karafuto Ainu are the Indigenous people of the southern half of the island, though today the vast majority of them, after waves of Japanese and Soviet ethnic cleansing campaigns, reside in Hokkaido and Honshu.
It seems that Okamoto moved to Karafuto in part to put his money where his mouth with some official government support. However, the situation was far from ideal with the colony teetering on collapse, which may have contributed to the decision to formally cede it to the Russian Empire. However, in this context, Okamoto's text may be interpreted as policy suggestions designed to develop the colony economically.
While I intend to read more later on, I quickly went through the short section on the Karafuto Ainu which, keeping in the spirit of the text, was both a critique of existing policies toward the Ainu as well as suggestions for future policies. Okamoto's views are interesting in part because of how differently things actually went, and in retrospect come across as in many ways a continuation of Tokugawa-era direct rule policies.
Taken as a whole, these retrograde policies can be understood as 'winning the hearts and minds' of the Ainu as part of a defense against Russian encroachment while at the same time, assimilating them to the degree that the would be understood internationally as firmly under Japanese suzerainty. As Russians were, according to the new Meiji government's own admission, comparatively kind to the Ainu, Okamoto felt that Japan would have to essentially bribe them, continuing the buiku system from a half century prior. For this, Okamoto suggests, alcohol is "incomparable" in its ability to "tame the barbarians (imin)". Moreover, he suggests keeping a clear distance from Ainu religious practice, going so far as to suggesting Japanese settlers from cutting down willow trees which are used for Ainu religious paraphernalia. One might wonder what Marx with his "opiate of the masses" view of organized religion would make of this pairing.
Okamoto then reaffirms the official Japanese policies of providing a brown rice stipend for the elderly, infants, the disabled, and the sick. He warns, however, that the "stupid (gumai)" Ainu are apt to lie to get more rice and recommends colonial administrators become well aware of the situation and be prepared to punish infractions. Okamoto further chastises the former shogunate for being overly generous with its rice stipends and recommends forcing the Ainu into unpaid labour to compensate for rice beyond what Okamoto imagines would be the right amount to win their loyalty.
With this aid, he warns against using underhanded methods to control the Ainu, and returning to similar policies such as his more 'liberal' stance toward Ainu religion, suggests that Japan would have to be fair in its dealings to properly defend against the Russians, and ends by suggesting teaching them handwriting, arithmetic, and farming and intermarrying poor (as in impoverished) Japanese women to the Ainu, and in turn Ainu women to Japanese settlers.
Saturday, 17 September 2016
Thursday, 8 September 2016
Source overview: Hokkaidō-chō Shokuminka-hen - Hokkaidō Imin Mondō
北海道庁植民課編: 北海道移民問答 [April 1891]
This book was compiled by the Hokkaido prefectural government as a sort of FAQ for incoming settlers. It largely is intended to help settlers establish themselves economically. And based on repeated warnings about coming unprepared, and the existence of settler protection policies in the previous decade, it's likely that a good number of settlers needed a guide like this.
A series of chapters divided by industry are book-ended by a chapter on climate and at the beginning and a miscellanea chapter at the end. Those chapters on industry are furthermore seemingly divided by the economic importance of the field as it stood in 1891, either by the volume or questions or importance placed on the fields by the government of Hokkaido. Most importance is placed on agriculture, which is subdivided into four chapters largely focusing on obtaining leases or buying crown land, clearing this land, and suitable crops for different regions within Hokkaido. From there there are descending chapters (with a smaller and smaller page count) on fisheries, stock farming, sericulture, forestry, mining, construction, salaries, commerce, and transportation. In effect, this book represents the economic life of the colony of Hokkaido, and likewise, with its focus on the distribution of crown land to private industry, reflects the process of primitive accumulation of Indigenous land.
Particularly relevant to the latter, given the widely-known presence of the Ainu, they go almost entirely unacknowledged. In fact, there are instead references to Hokkaido as an "unpeopled borderland", similar to Michele Mason's observations of the Hokkaido as a "virgin land" myths so prominent in Meiji-era popular fiction. However, strangely, given this conceptual erasure of the Ainu, there are two direct references to them as it relates to their employability. One states that their wages are by and large on par with settlers, and the other states that they are useful labourers for settlers to hire, especially as boatmen, leading horses, or as guides into the interior. As such we might understand the erasure of the Ainu in throughout the remainder of this text not simply as reflecting the romantic pioneer myth of settling land 'untouched by human hands', nor simply reflecting a genocidal vision of Hokkaido entirely bereft of its Indigenous population, but rather, as also reflecting the economic positioning of the Ainu vis-a-vis their land in the Hokkaido settler colony. Simply put, for the Japanese state, profits were maximized precisely through the appropriation of Ainu land and the ethnic cleansing of the Ainu from that land. This process continued (and arguably still continues as with examples such as the infamous Nibutani dam construction) through the Meiji period, and this book instructing mainland Japanese on how to properly settle "unpeopled" land in Hokkaido directly reflects this. Moreover, where Ainu enter the picture, as briefly as it is, it is in the context of their being used as labourers by settlers to maximize their profits. Indigenous people in settler colonies -- not just Hokkaido -- in this regard were/are treated as a sort of pure surplus labour. And, indeed, it was in the 1890s that the Former Natives Protection Act attempted in turn to mobilize the Ainu as settlers on their own land.
With that said, one thing which is unclear throughout this text is the term "capital" (資本). I say this because, as the foreign employees of the Kaitakushi wrote in their reports in the 1870s (which, it seems, the Hokkaido government followed to the letter), there was a huge emphasis on the exploitation of Hokkaido by private capital as soon as possible. Report after report chided the Japanese government for establishing state enterprise or building infrastructure itself, and the foreign advisors, like good capitalists, both argued that private industry would more efficiently settle the island, and would also be quicker to bring "civilization" to Hokkaido. We learn from the reports that by the 1890s, all state-own industry on the island had been sold off to private buyers and that the government had stopped funding (lit: "protecting"/保護) individual settlers in favour of pouring money into infrastructure and subsidies both to companies and individuals. Subsidies to the point where private individuals did not pay income tax, it appears. But, back to the question of capital, the term as used in this text is not precisely capital in the sense used in capitalism. At times, such as would-be farmers asking how much "capital" they'll need until the farm is fully functional, the term seems to be more in reference to having enough money to live day-to-day until the farm is productive enough to feed the farmer's family. While the development of Hokkaido at large was unambiguously capitalist, and we learn many farmers grew cash crops for export rather than food they would eat themselves, I wonder to what degree ordinary settlers were thinking about this. Was settlement understood as escaping poverty, was it a sense of adventure, was it patriotic duty, or were individuals seeing themselves as capitalist agents? It's not clear at all from the questions asked in this text.
Key points
Page 5, 6 discuss late March as the best time of year to immigrate, largely related to snowfall and maximizing the chances of clearing land and establishing a farm before the following winter. This is repeated in the miscellaneous section which discusses building a provisional shelter and then more permanent log cabin. In both cases, there's a warning of "bitter regret" if a strict timeline is not kept.
Pages 8-13 go into detail about how much land is developed, how much land is left, the types and quality of land, etc. It may be useful in creating a 'profile' of colonizable land.
Pages 19-29, in reference to the 北海道土地払下規則施行手続, discuss land grants, how to buy crown land, etc. Settlers are instructed to write a proposal of how they would use land and submit it to the Hokkaido government. A sample application is attached. Related to this, I wonder if Ainu had similar procedures during the promulgation of the Protection Act. Would land be surveyed on their behalf?
Page 35 indicates that about 70 km2 (7000町歩) are being developed per year and rising. This still seems rather small. Page 36 discusses the optimal use of different types/qualities of land.
Page 54 discusses large scale farming in an explicitly Euro-American fashion, including European farming tools (and a Sapporo-based factory to make them).
Page 65 describes Shorthorn, Ayrshire, and Devon as "most suitable" among "European-American cattle" (洋牛) for Hokkaido.
Page 67 describes Thoroughbred, "Arizerii" [Arabian?], and Percheron as "suitable" among the "Euro-American horses" (洋馬) for Hokkaido. Among these, the Thoroughbred was introduced by the Kaitakushi from America, and remains "most suitable for this prefecture".
Page 68 repeats this question regarding pigs. It provides a long list of Euro-American breeds and lists Berkshire and "Sabbuuku" [Saddleback?] as easiest to breed, but Essex as most profitable for small scale farmers.
Page 74 describes "imported" foreign grasses as suitable for Hokkaido.
Page 98 describes laws banning settlers [/Ainu] from freely cutting trees on crown land beginning in Meiji 21.
Page 106 describes Kaitakushi-era state own factories and convinced that they were all sold off but many of the buyers continue to operate them.
Page 108 introduces the term "拓地植民".
Pages 109-110 displays a table of wages by industry and metropolitan region including average wages for men and women.
Page 111 confirms (officially, though who knows) that Ainu wages are roughly 30 sen a day, so the same as "common employees" (参拾銭前後にして尋常の雇人と異ならず). The employment chart contradicts this claim, but I wonder if it doesn't refer to proletarian day-labourers. If so, that would be interesting it itself.
Page 134 discusses how mainlanders can get to different settlement sites (植民地). The answer discusses routes to various "wastelands" (原野). This may be interesting in relation to the government's settlement of Ainu populations as well as its relation to settler narratives (real or imagined).
Pages 142, 143 discusses "protection" (保護) of settlers, including transportation fees and subsidized wages. We learn that the Hokkaido government recently cut "protection" of individual settlers in favour of using this money to build roads and power lines to make transportation and communication easier, survey wasteland (原野を区画) and "protect industrial companies owned by settlers" (移民を持ち工業会社を保護).
Pages 143-145 discuss "indirect protection" (間接の保護) for settlers, including, (1) "region costs" coming from the national treasury, (2) government owned wastelands lent to settlers and then, when developed, sold at a flat rate of 1 yen/1000 tsubo (3300 m2), (3) tax exemption on this land for 20 years, (4) land that was taxable after Meiji 2 [the year Hokkaido was annexed] is tax exempt from Meiji 22 to 31 (1889-1898), (5) land tax as 1/100 of the lands value, (6) income tax as applying only to public servants [Really??], (7) breweries tax cut in half, (8) tax exemption for confectionery, soya sauce, and carriages [Why??], and (9) those living outside of Hakodate, Fukuyama, or Esa (ie. former Matsumae towns) are exempt from the draft.
Page 145 describes the "hardships" and the "matter of life and death" of settling an "unpeopled borderland" (無人の境) as farmers.
Page 148 discusses the Meiji 16 imperial decree: 明治十六年第拾号布達北海道転籍移住者手続.
Page 155 describes settler livelihoods as having more "elbow-room" (余裕) than mainlanders.
Page 156 describes a 50/50 split (五分 ... 五分) between settlers involved in industry and settlers involved in farming/fisheries.
Pages 160-163 describe 屯田兵/士族 houses and provides blueprints.
Pages 170 discusses Ainu (旧土人 glossed as あいぬ) as useful to hire for settlers living in close proximity, especially for guides into mountains and valleys, leading horses (馬追い), or boat rowers (船漕ぎ).
Page 172 gives population statistics by county.
Page 174 describes roads as "the most necessary addition/convenience to transportation for the purpose of colonization" (開拓に最も必要なるは交通の便にして道路). Very similar to Warfield's argument that roads lead to commerce and thus civilization.
Page 175 provides a bibliography of books which are usual for information on the colonization of Hokkaido. Of particular use are (1) 開拓使事業報告, (2) 北海道志, (3) 県統計書, (4) 北海道庁統計書, (7) 北海道庁勧業年報, (8) 北海道庁勧業月報, (9) 北海道農業手引草, (23) 北海道植民地選定報文, (24) 北海道移住案内.
Page 180 lists the best overviews of Hokkaido.
Page 181 lists the best periodical on production increases.
This book was compiled by the Hokkaido prefectural government as a sort of FAQ for incoming settlers. It largely is intended to help settlers establish themselves economically. And based on repeated warnings about coming unprepared, and the existence of settler protection policies in the previous decade, it's likely that a good number of settlers needed a guide like this.
A series of chapters divided by industry are book-ended by a chapter on climate and at the beginning and a miscellanea chapter at the end. Those chapters on industry are furthermore seemingly divided by the economic importance of the field as it stood in 1891, either by the volume or questions or importance placed on the fields by the government of Hokkaido. Most importance is placed on agriculture, which is subdivided into four chapters largely focusing on obtaining leases or buying crown land, clearing this land, and suitable crops for different regions within Hokkaido. From there there are descending chapters (with a smaller and smaller page count) on fisheries, stock farming, sericulture, forestry, mining, construction, salaries, commerce, and transportation. In effect, this book represents the economic life of the colony of Hokkaido, and likewise, with its focus on the distribution of crown land to private industry, reflects the process of primitive accumulation of Indigenous land.
Particularly relevant to the latter, given the widely-known presence of the Ainu, they go almost entirely unacknowledged. In fact, there are instead references to Hokkaido as an "unpeopled borderland", similar to Michele Mason's observations of the Hokkaido as a "virgin land" myths so prominent in Meiji-era popular fiction. However, strangely, given this conceptual erasure of the Ainu, there are two direct references to them as it relates to their employability. One states that their wages are by and large on par with settlers, and the other states that they are useful labourers for settlers to hire, especially as boatmen, leading horses, or as guides into the interior. As such we might understand the erasure of the Ainu in throughout the remainder of this text not simply as reflecting the romantic pioneer myth of settling land 'untouched by human hands', nor simply reflecting a genocidal vision of Hokkaido entirely bereft of its Indigenous population, but rather, as also reflecting the economic positioning of the Ainu vis-a-vis their land in the Hokkaido settler colony. Simply put, for the Japanese state, profits were maximized precisely through the appropriation of Ainu land and the ethnic cleansing of the Ainu from that land. This process continued (and arguably still continues as with examples such as the infamous Nibutani dam construction) through the Meiji period, and this book instructing mainland Japanese on how to properly settle "unpeopled" land in Hokkaido directly reflects this. Moreover, where Ainu enter the picture, as briefly as it is, it is in the context of their being used as labourers by settlers to maximize their profits. Indigenous people in settler colonies -- not just Hokkaido -- in this regard were/are treated as a sort of pure surplus labour. And, indeed, it was in the 1890s that the Former Natives Protection Act attempted in turn to mobilize the Ainu as settlers on their own land.
With that said, one thing which is unclear throughout this text is the term "capital" (資本). I say this because, as the foreign employees of the Kaitakushi wrote in their reports in the 1870s (which, it seems, the Hokkaido government followed to the letter), there was a huge emphasis on the exploitation of Hokkaido by private capital as soon as possible. Report after report chided the Japanese government for establishing state enterprise or building infrastructure itself, and the foreign advisors, like good capitalists, both argued that private industry would more efficiently settle the island, and would also be quicker to bring "civilization" to Hokkaido. We learn from the reports that by the 1890s, all state-own industry on the island had been sold off to private buyers and that the government had stopped funding (lit: "protecting"/保護) individual settlers in favour of pouring money into infrastructure and subsidies both to companies and individuals. Subsidies to the point where private individuals did not pay income tax, it appears. But, back to the question of capital, the term as used in this text is not precisely capital in the sense used in capitalism. At times, such as would-be farmers asking how much "capital" they'll need until the farm is fully functional, the term seems to be more in reference to having enough money to live day-to-day until the farm is productive enough to feed the farmer's family. While the development of Hokkaido at large was unambiguously capitalist, and we learn many farmers grew cash crops for export rather than food they would eat themselves, I wonder to what degree ordinary settlers were thinking about this. Was settlement understood as escaping poverty, was it a sense of adventure, was it patriotic duty, or were individuals seeing themselves as capitalist agents? It's not clear at all from the questions asked in this text.
Key points
Page 5, 6 discuss late March as the best time of year to immigrate, largely related to snowfall and maximizing the chances of clearing land and establishing a farm before the following winter. This is repeated in the miscellaneous section which discusses building a provisional shelter and then more permanent log cabin. In both cases, there's a warning of "bitter regret" if a strict timeline is not kept.
Pages 8-13 go into detail about how much land is developed, how much land is left, the types and quality of land, etc. It may be useful in creating a 'profile' of colonizable land.
Pages 19-29, in reference to the 北海道土地払下規則施行手続, discuss land grants, how to buy crown land, etc. Settlers are instructed to write a proposal of how they would use land and submit it to the Hokkaido government. A sample application is attached. Related to this, I wonder if Ainu had similar procedures during the promulgation of the Protection Act. Would land be surveyed on their behalf?
Page 35 indicates that about 70 km2 (7000町歩) are being developed per year and rising. This still seems rather small. Page 36 discusses the optimal use of different types/qualities of land.
Page 54 discusses large scale farming in an explicitly Euro-American fashion, including European farming tools (and a Sapporo-based factory to make them).
Page 65 describes Shorthorn, Ayrshire, and Devon as "most suitable" among "European-American cattle" (洋牛) for Hokkaido.
Page 67 describes Thoroughbred, "Arizerii" [Arabian?], and Percheron as "suitable" among the "Euro-American horses" (洋馬) for Hokkaido. Among these, the Thoroughbred was introduced by the Kaitakushi from America, and remains "most suitable for this prefecture".
Page 68 repeats this question regarding pigs. It provides a long list of Euro-American breeds and lists Berkshire and "Sabbuuku" [Saddleback?] as easiest to breed, but Essex as most profitable for small scale farmers.
Page 74 describes "imported" foreign grasses as suitable for Hokkaido.
Page 98 describes laws banning settlers [/Ainu] from freely cutting trees on crown land beginning in Meiji 21.
Page 106 describes Kaitakushi-era state own factories and convinced that they were all sold off but many of the buyers continue to operate them.
Page 108 introduces the term "拓地植民".
Pages 109-110 displays a table of wages by industry and metropolitan region including average wages for men and women.
Page 111 confirms (officially, though who knows) that Ainu wages are roughly 30 sen a day, so the same as "common employees" (参拾銭前後にして尋常の雇人と異ならず). The employment chart contradicts this claim, but I wonder if it doesn't refer to proletarian day-labourers. If so, that would be interesting it itself.
Page 134 discusses how mainlanders can get to different settlement sites (植民地). The answer discusses routes to various "wastelands" (原野). This may be interesting in relation to the government's settlement of Ainu populations as well as its relation to settler narratives (real or imagined).
Pages 142, 143 discusses "protection" (保護) of settlers, including transportation fees and subsidized wages. We learn that the Hokkaido government recently cut "protection" of individual settlers in favour of using this money to build roads and power lines to make transportation and communication easier, survey wasteland (原野を区画) and "protect industrial companies owned by settlers" (移民を持ち工業会社を保護).
Pages 143-145 discuss "indirect protection" (間接の保護) for settlers, including, (1) "region costs" coming from the national treasury, (2) government owned wastelands lent to settlers and then, when developed, sold at a flat rate of 1 yen/1000 tsubo (3300 m2), (3) tax exemption on this land for 20 years, (4) land that was taxable after Meiji 2 [the year Hokkaido was annexed] is tax exempt from Meiji 22 to 31 (1889-1898), (5) land tax as 1/100 of the lands value, (6) income tax as applying only to public servants [Really??], (7) breweries tax cut in half, (8) tax exemption for confectionery, soya sauce, and carriages [Why??], and (9) those living outside of Hakodate, Fukuyama, or Esa (ie. former Matsumae towns) are exempt from the draft.
Page 145 describes the "hardships" and the "matter of life and death" of settling an "unpeopled borderland" (無人の境) as farmers.
Page 148 discusses the Meiji 16 imperial decree: 明治十六年第拾号布達北海道転籍移住者手続.
Page 155 describes settler livelihoods as having more "elbow-room" (余裕) than mainlanders.
Page 156 describes a 50/50 split (五分 ... 五分) between settlers involved in industry and settlers involved in farming/fisheries.
Pages 160-163 describe 屯田兵/士族 houses and provides blueprints.
Pages 170 discusses Ainu (旧土人 glossed as あいぬ) as useful to hire for settlers living in close proximity, especially for guides into mountains and valleys, leading horses (馬追い), or boat rowers (船漕ぎ).
Page 172 gives population statistics by county.
Page 174 describes roads as "the most necessary addition/convenience to transportation for the purpose of colonization" (開拓に最も必要なるは交通の便にして道路). Very similar to Warfield's argument that roads lead to commerce and thus civilization.
Page 175 provides a bibliography of books which are usual for information on the colonization of Hokkaido. Of particular use are (1) 開拓使事業報告, (2) 北海道志, (3) 県統計書, (4) 北海道庁統計書, (7) 北海道庁勧業年報, (8) 北海道庁勧業月報, (9) 北海道農業手引草, (23) 北海道植民地選定報文, (24) 北海道移住案内.
Page 180 lists the best overviews of Hokkaido.
Page 181 lists the best periodical on production increases.
Source analysis: Sekiba Fujihiko - Ainu Ijidan
關場不二彥：あいぬ醫事談) [1896]
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,
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.
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.
Tuesday, 23 August 2016
Notes: Rousseau - The Social Contract
I've re-read book one of the Social Contract by Rousseau as a sort of refresher, misremembering it as having advocated the protection of people in a "state of nature". Or in other words, based on the Hobbesian definition that Rousseau uses, Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
While my memory apparently doesn't serve me well, it was interesting re-reading this after going through a number of primary documents related to the Former Natives Protection Act as there were other points which are directly relevant. Mainly, partly because of the intense wartime fascist propaganda, there's a tendency in academia to look at Japanese Nihonjinron discourses of the "family state" as something far-right and uniquely Japanese. It's interesting to see Rousseau draw the same analogy of the sovereign as the head, the people as the body, and whatnot, more than a century earlier. What's more interesting, however, is Rousseau's assertion that unlike the father in an actual family, the sovereign cannot but look dispassionately about his subjects. This is interesting because of characterizations of the love and empathy that the Emperor has for his subjects. The Ainu are characterized as his "babies" (akago) which he must protect as members of the nation-state. As Rousseau put it himself, the "father may, in their name, make certain rules for their protection and their welfare, but" -- and this is where things deviate a little -- "cannot give away their liberty irrevocably and unconditionally, for such a gift would be contrary to the ends of nature and an abuse of paternal right." I suspect that part of the reason for this deviation from European conceptualizations of the family state is that this metaphor is rooted in both Confucianist or European political thought. However, we might remember Agamben's discussion of jus vitae ac necis, the Roman law which gives a father the power over life and death over his children, as one of the foundations of European sovereign discourse.
We might also consider, however, Rousseau's understanding of man in a state of nature as having a certain shelf life that civilized man does not. Without saying how or why, he states "the primitive condition cannot endure, for then the human race will perish if it does not change its mode of existence". And here, perhaps, Rousseau is much closer to Hobbes view of "Americans" than he's usually characterized as being. Hobbes view of the lives of those in a state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" and that of later supporters of the Former Natives Protection Act like John Batchelor viewing the drop in the Ainu population as being due to disease and infighting are perfectly compatible with Rousseau's conception of the natural evanescence of savages.
Rousseau, more than Hobbes, argues against Grotius, the Dutch jurist who defined the limits of the sovereign state in the context of Dutch colonial expansion into southeast Asia whereby sovereign kingdoms were invaded and annexed (though, mind you, without abolishing the full title of local kings). Despite arguing against Grotius' seeming despotism, colonialism forms the explicit backdrop of his own argument. Specifically, how an individual or a state and own private or public property.
One such example, just after criticizing Grotius' views on slavery, is the use of Robinson Crusoe, the "sole inhabitant of his island" as a metaphor, equivalent to "King Adam" or "Emperor Noah" in showing that the subjective position of the sovereign is not simply related to sovereignty over the land, but in relation to the sovereign's subjects over which they have power. Interestingly in this, Crusue was not the "sole occupant", but had Friday, who he had made a slave, and had rescued from cannibals. It's certainly possible Rousseau hadn't read the novel he was referencing, but it's also possible that in this equation, as with the inability of "stupid, limited animal[s]" in a state of nature to make war, the presence of Indigenous people does not count to Rousseau as actual inhabitation in any real sense. Or he simply forgot about them.
And while Rousseau gives an interesting analysis to "right" and "might" as it were, similar to Benjamin's discussion of law-making violence. But it's interesting how easily the "right of the strongest" becomes the "survival of the fittest", historically. And while Rousseau is, much to his credit, careful not to equate force with morality, he does see morality as something simply not possessed by man in a state of nature. Or, in other words, Rousseau sees a social evolution based on man's unequal elevation out of a state of nature and into civil society where the most civilized segments have both, it would seem, the strength of arms as well as the most developed morality. It would be worth looking into social evolutionism in liberal thought as related to social Darwinism and biological racism. It seems in many ways to be more of a redefinition of terms than a radical shift in ideology.
It's also important to consider Rousseau, and those who were inspired by him, as progenitors of the liberal movement as it existed in countries including Japan in the late 19th century. How much were people like Fukuzawa influenced by Rousseau? Would he have been commonly read by all liberals, or simply those particularly interested in Euro-American thought?
While my memory apparently doesn't serve me well, it was interesting re-reading this after going through a number of primary documents related to the Former Natives Protection Act as there were other points which are directly relevant. Mainly, partly because of the intense wartime fascist propaganda, there's a tendency in academia to look at Japanese Nihonjinron discourses of the "family state" as something far-right and uniquely Japanese. It's interesting to see Rousseau draw the same analogy of the sovereign as the head, the people as the body, and whatnot, more than a century earlier. What's more interesting, however, is Rousseau's assertion that unlike the father in an actual family, the sovereign cannot but look dispassionately about his subjects. This is interesting because of characterizations of the love and empathy that the Emperor has for his subjects. The Ainu are characterized as his "babies" (akago) which he must protect as members of the nation-state. As Rousseau put it himself, the "father may, in their name, make certain rules for their protection and their welfare, but" -- and this is where things deviate a little -- "cannot give away their liberty irrevocably and unconditionally, for such a gift would be contrary to the ends of nature and an abuse of paternal right." I suspect that part of the reason for this deviation from European conceptualizations of the family state is that this metaphor is rooted in both Confucianist or European political thought. However, we might remember Agamben's discussion of jus vitae ac necis, the Roman law which gives a father the power over life and death over his children, as one of the foundations of European sovereign discourse.
We might also consider, however, Rousseau's understanding of man in a state of nature as having a certain shelf life that civilized man does not. Without saying how or why, he states "the primitive condition cannot endure, for then the human race will perish if it does not change its mode of existence". And here, perhaps, Rousseau is much closer to Hobbes view of "Americans" than he's usually characterized as being. Hobbes view of the lives of those in a state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" and that of later supporters of the Former Natives Protection Act like John Batchelor viewing the drop in the Ainu population as being due to disease and infighting are perfectly compatible with Rousseau's conception of the natural evanescence of savages.
Rousseau, more than Hobbes, argues against Grotius, the Dutch jurist who defined the limits of the sovereign state in the context of Dutch colonial expansion into southeast Asia whereby sovereign kingdoms were invaded and annexed (though, mind you, without abolishing the full title of local kings). Despite arguing against Grotius' seeming despotism, colonialism forms the explicit backdrop of his own argument. Specifically, how an individual or a state and own private or public property.
One such example, just after criticizing Grotius' views on slavery, is the use of Robinson Crusoe, the "sole inhabitant of his island" as a metaphor, equivalent to "King Adam" or "Emperor Noah" in showing that the subjective position of the sovereign is not simply related to sovereignty over the land, but in relation to the sovereign's subjects over which they have power. Interestingly in this, Crusue was not the "sole occupant", but had Friday, who he had made a slave, and had rescued from cannibals. It's certainly possible Rousseau hadn't read the novel he was referencing, but it's also possible that in this equation, as with the inability of "stupid, limited animal[s]" in a state of nature to make war, the presence of Indigenous people does not count to Rousseau as actual inhabitation in any real sense. Or he simply forgot about them.
And while Rousseau gives an interesting analysis to "right" and "might" as it were, similar to Benjamin's discussion of law-making violence. But it's interesting how easily the "right of the strongest" becomes the "survival of the fittest", historically. And while Rousseau is, much to his credit, careful not to equate force with morality, he does see morality as something simply not possessed by man in a state of nature. Or, in other words, Rousseau sees a social evolution based on man's unequal elevation out of a state of nature and into civil society where the most civilized segments have both, it would seem, the strength of arms as well as the most developed morality. It would be worth looking into social evolutionism in liberal thought as related to social Darwinism and biological racism. It seems in many ways to be more of a redefinition of terms than a radical shift in ideology.
It's also important to consider Rousseau, and those who were inspired by him, as progenitors of the liberal movement as it existed in countries including Japan in the late 19th century. How much were people like Fukuzawa influenced by Rousseau? Would he have been commonly read by all liberals, or simply those particularly interested in Euro-American thought?
Thursday, 18 August 2016
Source analysis: Rule in the Name of "Protection" - On the Former Natives Protection Act
From Sasaki, Masao. Genshi Suru "Ainu". Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 2008.
Written during the heated debate over the future of the Former Natives Protection Act, Sasaki's Asahi Newspaper article, included in the anthology of his work Genshi Suru "Ainu", provides an extremely sharp and concise critique of this law.
Sasaki attacks the law from two angles: one is how the law played a role in racializing the Ainu. The term "Ainu" itself is questioned throughout the article, put into quotation marks along with terms like "kaitaku" (colonizing/'opening up' the land), "Wajin" (ethnic Japanese settlers), or "Nihon" (Japan). This doesn't simply give the impression that Sasaki is trying to express, as one often does with scare quotes, a hesitation to use these terms literally. But rather, he seems to be suggesting that these terms are mutually constitutive ideological constructions and can only exist on conjunction with each other. The imagined community of the Japanese ethnic nation-state is, in other words, constituted in part through the abjection of racialized groups like the Ainu, and vice versa. Moreover, while Sasaki is not entirely clear in his intentions, he appears very self-conscious of the fact that many ethnic Japanese, in or out of Hokkaido, have a particular image of terms like "Ainu" or, worse still perhaps,"kyūdojin" (former natives) as signifying primitive, inferior barbarians. The stigma around the term "Ainu" as it was used by Japanese in the early and mid 20th century led many in Sasaki's generation to reject it outright as an ethnic slur. In this, the Former Natives Protection Act played a key role in racialized subjectification. Those to whom this law applied to could be said to be legally "former natives"/Ainu and those to whom this law did not apply were thereby legally "Wajin"/Japanese. But this isn't to say that there were clear cut understandings of what constituted an "Ainu" at the time this law passed. After all, the first bill of the Former Natives Protection Act failed to pass in 1892 because it wasn't clear to the committee members assessing the bill who and who wasn't Ainu. This shouldn't be overstated, especially given the presence of Japanese descendants of Tokugawa-era settlers whose lineage may not have been clearly traceable by the state, and who themselves may have been, in some cases, quite hybridized in terms of obvious cultural markers such as clothing or language. There was no clear line between Ainu and Japanese, in other words. And, the fear was, most likely, more about labeling Japanese as Ainu than wrongfully labelling Ainu as Japanese. But curiously, in the reading of the second Former Natives Protection Act in the Diet, as Sasaki alludes to, the question of children of unclear lineage came, and how the law would apply to them. When asked whether these children would be considered Japanese or Ainu, Shirani Takeshi simply replies that if the child looks Ainu, they're Ainu. Or in other words, if a child meets the physiognomy of a cliched racist image of an Ainu, that's good enough for the state. Sasaki rightly sees this almost arbitrary racialization as consequentially applying to all Ainu, children or not.
The second key argument Sasaki makes is to attack the enduring idea that the Ainu race had simply lost the survival of the fittest to the Japanese race on an even playing field. This was a key rationale for the need for 'protection': that the Ainu were natural inferior and needed their lives to be directly managed by the state in order to protect them from natural processes by which they would eventually face extinction simply through contact with the racially superior Japanese settlers. Sasaki responds to this by looking directly at laws targeting Ainu hunting and fishing, the basis of their economy and a major source of food for them, as having an absolutely devastating effect on their community. The other effect of these bans on Ainu hunting as well as the encroachment of the forestry industry was that many Ainu lost access to furs and birch bark used to make clothing. This effectively meant the Ainu could no longer easily make their own clothing needed to survive in the frigid northern winters. These laws produced the precarity that many Ainu found themselves in. And the Former Natives Protection Law, in addressing this precarity as rooted in Ainu inferiority rather than the effects of colonial policy, not only did nothing to change the conditions of this precarity, but naturalized and normalized the Japanese settler colonial presence which led to these laws being passed in the first place.
Sasaki is equally critical of the land 'grants' given to Ainu households as based on the precondition that they farm the land and that the land remains in the family, and can't be transferred outside of the family without government approval. This is both because many Ainu, who were primarily hunters and fishers, were simply not easily able to sustain themselves with vegetables gown on family farms. Moreover, settlers usurping Ainu land continued. As the land was leasable through civil law, many lessees used loopholes to claim the land and, according to Sasaki, and had great success in continuing the land theft that the Protection Act ostensibly aimed to curb.
In all of this, Sasaki is arguing for the abolition of the Former Aborigines Protection Act by attacking the basis on which it was enacted. As an Ainu writing in the late 1960s, he describes the law as "humiliating" for Ainu, and preserving the the racist assumptions from the 19th century that the law is predicated on.
This source is the first of several Ainu critiques of the Japanese settler colonial law targeting the Ainu that I'll be looking at. Sasaki is in some ways the most radical of this group of Ainu writers, but as Mark Winchester demonstrated with his brilliant analysis of Sasaki's long form essays, his almost deconstructive approach to his own racial subjectivity in many ways anticipates post-structuralist and post-colonial politics and can be used quite effectively in critiquing Japanese settler colonialism.
Moreover, Sasaki's discussion of such simple, matter of fact things as the Ainu not being able to collect birch bark to make clothes because of the forestry industry is extremely relevant in any discussion of the effects of these laws on the Ainu ability to sustain their own communities without relying on the Japanese state or, for that matter, becoming more and more integrated into the Japanese capitalist economy as a matter of contingency. Sakaki illuminates in a short article how these processes worked. Cutting Ainu off from resources, or greatly restricting access they had to resources, also freed them up for economic exploitation by both small time capitalist settlers, or more often, it seems, large conglomerates from the mainland. Ainu land, of course, was and remained the object desire of the colonization of Hokkaido, and putting them onto small parcels of farmland kept them off the great majority of their former territories. These laws were just as much about removing the limits of Japanese exploitation of the natural resources of Hokkaido as they were about limiting the Ainu. Sasaki Masao is a powerful voice in revealing this power relationship.
Written during the heated debate over the future of the Former Natives Protection Act, Sasaki's Asahi Newspaper article, included in the anthology of his work Genshi Suru "Ainu", provides an extremely sharp and concise critique of this law.
Sasaki attacks the law from two angles: one is how the law played a role in racializing the Ainu. The term "Ainu" itself is questioned throughout the article, put into quotation marks along with terms like "kaitaku" (colonizing/'opening up' the land), "Wajin" (ethnic Japanese settlers), or "Nihon" (Japan). This doesn't simply give the impression that Sasaki is trying to express, as one often does with scare quotes, a hesitation to use these terms literally. But rather, he seems to be suggesting that these terms are mutually constitutive ideological constructions and can only exist on conjunction with each other. The imagined community of the Japanese ethnic nation-state is, in other words, constituted in part through the abjection of racialized groups like the Ainu, and vice versa. Moreover, while Sasaki is not entirely clear in his intentions, he appears very self-conscious of the fact that many ethnic Japanese, in or out of Hokkaido, have a particular image of terms like "Ainu" or, worse still perhaps,"kyūdojin" (former natives) as signifying primitive, inferior barbarians. The stigma around the term "Ainu" as it was used by Japanese in the early and mid 20th century led many in Sasaki's generation to reject it outright as an ethnic slur. In this, the Former Natives Protection Act played a key role in racialized subjectification. Those to whom this law applied to could be said to be legally "former natives"/Ainu and those to whom this law did not apply were thereby legally "Wajin"/Japanese. But this isn't to say that there were clear cut understandings of what constituted an "Ainu" at the time this law passed. After all, the first bill of the Former Natives Protection Act failed to pass in 1892 because it wasn't clear to the committee members assessing the bill who and who wasn't Ainu. This shouldn't be overstated, especially given the presence of Japanese descendants of Tokugawa-era settlers whose lineage may not have been clearly traceable by the state, and who themselves may have been, in some cases, quite hybridized in terms of obvious cultural markers such as clothing or language. There was no clear line between Ainu and Japanese, in other words. And, the fear was, most likely, more about labeling Japanese as Ainu than wrongfully labelling Ainu as Japanese. But curiously, in the reading of the second Former Natives Protection Act in the Diet, as Sasaki alludes to, the question of children of unclear lineage came, and how the law would apply to them. When asked whether these children would be considered Japanese or Ainu, Shirani Takeshi simply replies that if the child looks Ainu, they're Ainu. Or in other words, if a child meets the physiognomy of a cliched racist image of an Ainu, that's good enough for the state. Sasaki rightly sees this almost arbitrary racialization as consequentially applying to all Ainu, children or not.
The second key argument Sasaki makes is to attack the enduring idea that the Ainu race had simply lost the survival of the fittest to the Japanese race on an even playing field. This was a key rationale for the need for 'protection': that the Ainu were natural inferior and needed their lives to be directly managed by the state in order to protect them from natural processes by which they would eventually face extinction simply through contact with the racially superior Japanese settlers. Sasaki responds to this by looking directly at laws targeting Ainu hunting and fishing, the basis of their economy and a major source of food for them, as having an absolutely devastating effect on their community. The other effect of these bans on Ainu hunting as well as the encroachment of the forestry industry was that many Ainu lost access to furs and birch bark used to make clothing. This effectively meant the Ainu could no longer easily make their own clothing needed to survive in the frigid northern winters. These laws produced the precarity that many Ainu found themselves in. And the Former Natives Protection Law, in addressing this precarity as rooted in Ainu inferiority rather than the effects of colonial policy, not only did nothing to change the conditions of this precarity, but naturalized and normalized the Japanese settler colonial presence which led to these laws being passed in the first place.
Sasaki is equally critical of the land 'grants' given to Ainu households as based on the precondition that they farm the land and that the land remains in the family, and can't be transferred outside of the family without government approval. This is both because many Ainu, who were primarily hunters and fishers, were simply not easily able to sustain themselves with vegetables gown on family farms. Moreover, settlers usurping Ainu land continued. As the land was leasable through civil law, many lessees used loopholes to claim the land and, according to Sasaki, and had great success in continuing the land theft that the Protection Act ostensibly aimed to curb.
In all of this, Sasaki is arguing for the abolition of the Former Aborigines Protection Act by attacking the basis on which it was enacted. As an Ainu writing in the late 1960s, he describes the law as "humiliating" for Ainu, and preserving the the racist assumptions from the 19th century that the law is predicated on.
This source is the first of several Ainu critiques of the Japanese settler colonial law targeting the Ainu that I'll be looking at. Sasaki is in some ways the most radical of this group of Ainu writers, but as Mark Winchester demonstrated with his brilliant analysis of Sasaki's long form essays, his almost deconstructive approach to his own racial subjectivity in many ways anticipates post-structuralist and post-colonial politics and can be used quite effectively in critiquing Japanese settler colonialism.
Moreover, Sasaki's discussion of such simple, matter of fact things as the Ainu not being able to collect birch bark to make clothes because of the forestry industry is extremely relevant in any discussion of the effects of these laws on the Ainu ability to sustain their own communities without relying on the Japanese state or, for that matter, becoming more and more integrated into the Japanese capitalist economy as a matter of contingency. Sakaki illuminates in a short article how these processes worked. Cutting Ainu off from resources, or greatly restricting access they had to resources, also freed them up for economic exploitation by both small time capitalist settlers, or more often, it seems, large conglomerates from the mainland. Ainu land, of course, was and remained the object desire of the colonization of Hokkaido, and putting them onto small parcels of farmland kept them off the great majority of their former territories. These laws were just as much about removing the limits of Japanese exploitation of the natural resources of Hokkaido as they were about limiting the Ainu. Sasaki Masao is a powerful voice in revealing this power relationship.
Sunday, 31 July 2016
Source analysis: Itinerary of Hokkaido (日本北海道案内記)
Very briefly, I've been going through a bilingual pamphlet on Hokkaido prepared by Rev. John Batchelor and published bilingually for a Japanese and American audience, respectively. While Batchelor garnered a reputation for being a champion of the Ainu, and is still defended by academics for his high moral character, a number of his descriptions of the Ainu are remarkably condescending and extremely colonialistic. It constitutes, if nothing else, the racist abjection of the Ainu and apologism for the Japanese colonization of the Ainu territories in Hokkaido and, at the time this was published, in the Kuriles.
Besides playing the old game of victim-blaming, and not to mention the spurious logic behind this, we see strong overtones of progressivist discourses by which races around the world are segmented and isolated from each other in a universal competition toward an ill-defined "end of history" as Francis Fukuyama put it. According to this logic, which is very much in accordance with Batchelor's ethnic Japanese contemporaries who were involved in Ainu policy, and for that matter, colonial officials around the world, a race, depending on its inborn qualities, will either thrive by actively progressing towards this future or be doomed to die out if they fall behind. Aside from the obvious fact that "races" are not mutually exclusive, hermetically sealed entities that act collectively, the social Darwinist logic behind this racist view of the survival of the fittest negates any question of morals. A race, or individual, cannot be victimized: they can only let themselves by victimized. And by this same logic, one cannot be a victimizer. Rather, the assumption is that, as Hobbes argued, homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man. This renders violent, exploitative, hateful behaviour as natural and normal. This is a sociopathic logic, and given how deeply anti-social social Darwinism is, the most curious part of Batchelor's passage his muted appeal to "Society" to swoop in and "rescue" the Ainu from themselves. We see this seeming contradiction in the discourse surrounding the Former Natives Protection Act that Batchelor is vaguely referencing here. The assumption is it is a sign of modernity and high ethical development to be able to have the gumption to "rescue" a dying race.
One other important consideration here is that, as mentioned above, this pamphlet was published in the same year in English and Japanese. I knew that Batchelor wrote this sort of drivel about the Ainu already, but I had wondered, as he does have such a reputation for his work with the Ainu, if this wasn't a sort of race baiting to sell books in Great Britain or the United States where there was a veritable print industry focused on racist descriptions of colonized people. But, as the publication of this book for a Japanese market shows, this may not simply have been simply for foreign consumption.
The great attraction in Hokkaidō to those who travel for pleasure and education combined, letting alone the peculiarly weird and wild scenery and the pleasures afforded to the sportsman, is in the Ainu race, or Aborigines of Japan, who, it appears, are gradually becoming extinct. Though this peculiar race of people was once very numerous and formerly inhabited the whole of Japan proper, they now number, as has been previously remarked, no more than 16,765 persons, and these are decreasing. Visitors to Japan should surely see something of them if possible. In a very few years they will, in all probability, become quite extinct, or at all events become so amalgamated with the immigrants as to become indistinguishable from the Japanese. Hokkaidō is the only place in the world where they can be seen untainted by European influence, for those who live in Russian Territory have now become quite Russianized. Here in Hokkaiddō may be seen the oldest and newest peoples of this Ancient Empire side by side, two distinct and very different races, the one superseding the other; — intelligence, fore-thought, and energetic enterprise triumphing over ignorance, improvidence, and inaction. Here one may actually see that process of the gradual extinction of the Ainus and the appropriation of their land which has been going on for years; not indeed by cruelty and slaughter or owing to unfeeling wantonness, but simply because the Ainus have not the self-reliance and steady energy by which they could, if they chose, work and live happily side by side with the Japanese. But the race, simple, kind, truthful and child-like as we have found it, seems destined to pass away in a few years. Something it is hoped will be done for these poor people in the future. The Japanese are now waking up to their duty towards, and responsibility with regard to the Ainus and a society has been established which has for its object the "rescue" of the race. It remains to be seen what will be done by this Society. Those people who desire to see the Ainus in their own homes can do so by going to Usu in Volcano Bay from Hakodate, or by visiting Chitose from Satporo. But a far better idea of them may be had by allowing one's self a little more time and going to Piratoru in the Province of Hidaka. // This is the old Ainu capital and is a most typical village; it is surrounded by the most lovely scenery. (pg. 14, 15)From Itinerary of Hokkaido, Japan by the Rev. John Batchelor, presented by the Hakodate Chamber of Commerce to Visitors of the Columbian Exhibition Held at Chicago, U.S.A. in 1893 (Tokyo Tsujiki Type Foundry, Tokyo: 1893)
Besides playing the old game of victim-blaming, and not to mention the spurious logic behind this, we see strong overtones of progressivist discourses by which races around the world are segmented and isolated from each other in a universal competition toward an ill-defined "end of history" as Francis Fukuyama put it. According to this logic, which is very much in accordance with Batchelor's ethnic Japanese contemporaries who were involved in Ainu policy, and for that matter, colonial officials around the world, a race, depending on its inborn qualities, will either thrive by actively progressing towards this future or be doomed to die out if they fall behind. Aside from the obvious fact that "races" are not mutually exclusive, hermetically sealed entities that act collectively, the social Darwinist logic behind this racist view of the survival of the fittest negates any question of morals. A race, or individual, cannot be victimized: they can only let themselves by victimized. And by this same logic, one cannot be a victimizer. Rather, the assumption is that, as Hobbes argued, homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man. This renders violent, exploitative, hateful behaviour as natural and normal. This is a sociopathic logic, and given how deeply anti-social social Darwinism is, the most curious part of Batchelor's passage his muted appeal to "Society" to swoop in and "rescue" the Ainu from themselves. We see this seeming contradiction in the discourse surrounding the Former Natives Protection Act that Batchelor is vaguely referencing here. The assumption is it is a sign of modernity and high ethical development to be able to have the gumption to "rescue" a dying race.
One other important consideration here is that, as mentioned above, this pamphlet was published in the same year in English and Japanese. I knew that Batchelor wrote this sort of drivel about the Ainu already, but I had wondered, as he does have such a reputation for his work with the Ainu, if this wasn't a sort of race baiting to sell books in Great Britain or the United States where there was a veritable print industry focused on racist descriptions of colonized people. But, as the publication of this book for a Japanese market shows, this may not simply have been simply for foreign consumption.
Source overview: English language documents related to Hokkaido and the Ainu
Over the past year I have primarily been engaged in research for my PhD dissertation project, which has been interrupted intermittently by family obligations, including parental leave during the Spring semester of 2016.
During the Fall of 2015, I largely focused on English language documents related to the Ainu and the colonization of Hokkaido. Given that part of the focus of my dissertation is the presupposition that Japanese policy planners and colonial elites self-consciously viewed their colonization and economic development of Hokkaido as a distinctly modern, Western-style enterprise, as well as the fact that this colonization was bolstered by the active participation of Euro-Americans such as Horace Capron and John Batchelor, I felt it was important to look at Euro-American views of the Ainu and the Japanese during this time period.
I focused on three document collections in particular. The first of which was Kirsten Refsing's massive five volume set, Early European Writings on Ainu Culture: Travelogues and Descriptions. This collection includes English, French, and German primary documents dating from the early 19th century until to the beginning of the 20th century. Given the century long scope, this collection clearly shows an historical arc in which the Ainu were at first racialized as proto-Caucasoid, and then were increasingly racialized as primitive, barbaric, or animalistic and akin to abjected Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, or India. This change, as the editor notes, can clearly be traced to the longue durée of Japan’s place in so-called “international society”, by which a “Caucasian” Ainu race imbued with all of the positive qualities that Europeans imagined themselves as having could be contrastively used to denigrate the “Oriental” Japanese. Vice versa, as the Meiji state gained stature internationally in part due to the success of their aggressive colonization of the Ainu, the Ainu were increasingly imagined as akin to other colonized (or legally colonizable) Indigenous peoples.
The second collection was the Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, published by the Kaitakushi (the Hokkaido colonial government) in 1875. This sizable collection of English language reports was prepared by American employees of the Japanese government and was intended for use by the Japanese government in policy planning. Two main themes emerge, which have had an influence on the scope of my own research. The first is, similar to Refsing’s collection, the triangular colonial relations between the Ainu, Japanese, and white Euro-Americans present in Ainu territories. This dynamic is especially evident in the chief planner Horace Capron’s insistence on the superiority of all things American, which included his advocacy for allowing more “hardy” white settlers to colonize Hokkaido in place of Japanese, as well as pushing for American crops, farm animals, and foodstuffs to be prioritized in Hokkaido and Euro-American-style buildings to be constructed. While the Ainu appear only briefly, mostly serving as guides, we learn that Horace Capron recommended to Kaitakushi head Kuroda Kiyotaka to strictly ban “barbaric” Ainu hunting methods. This is significant, and merits further research, because, according to Yamada Shinichi, the sudden ban on Ainu hunting had a catastrophic effect on Ainu communities which were suddenly without a major food source. Local officials alerted the Kuroda to this, and requested the ban be overturned, but these warnings were disregarded. Secondly, a major theme of the Kaitakushi reports is a conflation of capitalist development and civilization. In a quasi-Hegelian gesture, A.G. Warfield goes so far as to equate the construction of roads into the interior of Hokkaido to the development of "history", "progress", and "civilization". Specifically, he argues that roads lead to commercial development, which leads to the integration of Hokkaido into larger networks of capital, which will help bring civilization to the island. It can even be surmised that, philosophically speaking, for Warfield, like other 19th century colonial planners, it is capital itself that produces "history" and "civilization".
Finally, I read Horace Capron two-volume memoirs. The first of which details his role as a Texas Bureau of Indian Affairs special agent in the removal of Indigenous groups to make way for Anglo-American settlement shortly after the US annexation of the Republic of Texas. The second volume is entirely dedicated to his time in Japan, and largely consists of diaries, notes, and reports. It offers a more nuanced look at Capron’s time in Japan than the Kaitakushi-published volume, including his thoughts on the Japanese during his time in Tokyo, which are largely negative. Though not entirely, and he shows great satisfaction, with a sharply narcissistic tone present throughout both volumes, that it was partly his own influence that Japan Westernized as quickly as it did. It’s no doubt, either in his descriptions of Native Americans, Japanese, or Ainu that Capron was racist, however, he wasn’t racist in the way that one might think of a stereotypical 19th century “good old boy” white male American elite. In fact, Capron was unusually liberal, I would imagine, for the antebellum time period where he was most influential. During this time Capron was involved in the ethnic cleansing of parts of Texas which were targeted for Anglo-American settlement. What's interesting, however, is at a time when frontier genocide was still the rule and not the exception in many parts of the American West, Capron was in extremely quite critical of the brutal treatment of Indigenous people to the point where he expressed sympathy for a group of Indigenous men who had killed white settlers in self-defense. He also expressed his disapproval for policies forcing Indigenous people off their land without a clear sense of where they should go. Capron even considered the lower-class settlers to be a more negative influence on the Indigenous groups than vice versa (so much for "going native").
In all of this, Capron -- like Katō Masanosuke, Oyabe Zenichiro, Nitobe Inazō, or Shirani Takeshi later in Japan -- represented a distinctly liberal form of Indigenous land management where he sought to pacify groups as frontier buffers through to allow for settlement of whites, and aimed for blanket assimilation rather than simply pushing groups further and further out of American society. This is to say, there’s no evidence that he actually cared about Indigenous peoples under his care: he saw more “humanistic” policies as a means to an end, which was, white settlement on and American territorial sovereignty over Indigenous land. There are numerous examples of this there he personally had peaceful groups of Indigenous people who were peaceably living on agricultural settlements (Capron’s stated goal for Native Americans) removed because the land was not part of a reservation and was intended for white settlement. Even the goals for citizenship were predicated upon cultural genocide and their insertion into the American economy as surplus labourers, similar to his "rehabilitation" of lower class whites in Maryland. This, if anything, brings to mind critiques of liberalism itself not as a rejection of brutal colonial conquests, but rather a recalibration of power by which rather than being violently excluded, colonized people are put in a space somewhere in-between included and excluded.
During the Fall of 2015, I largely focused on English language documents related to the Ainu and the colonization of Hokkaido. Given that part of the focus of my dissertation is the presupposition that Japanese policy planners and colonial elites self-consciously viewed their colonization and economic development of Hokkaido as a distinctly modern, Western-style enterprise, as well as the fact that this colonization was bolstered by the active participation of Euro-Americans such as Horace Capron and John Batchelor, I felt it was important to look at Euro-American views of the Ainu and the Japanese during this time period.
I focused on three document collections in particular. The first of which was Kirsten Refsing's massive five volume set, Early European Writings on Ainu Culture: Travelogues and Descriptions. This collection includes English, French, and German primary documents dating from the early 19th century until to the beginning of the 20th century. Given the century long scope, this collection clearly shows an historical arc in which the Ainu were at first racialized as proto-Caucasoid, and then were increasingly racialized as primitive, barbaric, or animalistic and akin to abjected Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, or India. This change, as the editor notes, can clearly be traced to the longue durée of Japan’s place in so-called “international society”, by which a “Caucasian” Ainu race imbued with all of the positive qualities that Europeans imagined themselves as having could be contrastively used to denigrate the “Oriental” Japanese. Vice versa, as the Meiji state gained stature internationally in part due to the success of their aggressive colonization of the Ainu, the Ainu were increasingly imagined as akin to other colonized (or legally colonizable) Indigenous peoples.
The second collection was the Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, published by the Kaitakushi (the Hokkaido colonial government) in 1875. This sizable collection of English language reports was prepared by American employees of the Japanese government and was intended for use by the Japanese government in policy planning. Two main themes emerge, which have had an influence on the scope of my own research. The first is, similar to Refsing’s collection, the triangular colonial relations between the Ainu, Japanese, and white Euro-Americans present in Ainu territories. This dynamic is especially evident in the chief planner Horace Capron’s insistence on the superiority of all things American, which included his advocacy for allowing more “hardy” white settlers to colonize Hokkaido in place of Japanese, as well as pushing for American crops, farm animals, and foodstuffs to be prioritized in Hokkaido and Euro-American-style buildings to be constructed. While the Ainu appear only briefly, mostly serving as guides, we learn that Horace Capron recommended to Kaitakushi head Kuroda Kiyotaka to strictly ban “barbaric” Ainu hunting methods. This is significant, and merits further research, because, according to Yamada Shinichi, the sudden ban on Ainu hunting had a catastrophic effect on Ainu communities which were suddenly without a major food source. Local officials alerted the Kuroda to this, and requested the ban be overturned, but these warnings were disregarded. Secondly, a major theme of the Kaitakushi reports is a conflation of capitalist development and civilization. In a quasi-Hegelian gesture, A.G. Warfield goes so far as to equate the construction of roads into the interior of Hokkaido to the development of "history", "progress", and "civilization". Specifically, he argues that roads lead to commercial development, which leads to the integration of Hokkaido into larger networks of capital, which will help bring civilization to the island. It can even be surmised that, philosophically speaking, for Warfield, like other 19th century colonial planners, it is capital itself that produces "history" and "civilization".
Horace Capron
Finally, I read Horace Capron two-volume memoirs. The first of which details his role as a Texas Bureau of Indian Affairs special agent in the removal of Indigenous groups to make way for Anglo-American settlement shortly after the US annexation of the Republic of Texas. The second volume is entirely dedicated to his time in Japan, and largely consists of diaries, notes, and reports. It offers a more nuanced look at Capron’s time in Japan than the Kaitakushi-published volume, including his thoughts on the Japanese during his time in Tokyo, which are largely negative. Though not entirely, and he shows great satisfaction, with a sharply narcissistic tone present throughout both volumes, that it was partly his own influence that Japan Westernized as quickly as it did. It’s no doubt, either in his descriptions of Native Americans, Japanese, or Ainu that Capron was racist, however, he wasn’t racist in the way that one might think of a stereotypical 19th century “good old boy” white male American elite. In fact, Capron was unusually liberal, I would imagine, for the antebellum time period where he was most influential. During this time Capron was involved in the ethnic cleansing of parts of Texas which were targeted for Anglo-American settlement. What's interesting, however, is at a time when frontier genocide was still the rule and not the exception in many parts of the American West, Capron was in extremely quite critical of the brutal treatment of Indigenous people to the point where he expressed sympathy for a group of Indigenous men who had killed white settlers in self-defense. He also expressed his disapproval for policies forcing Indigenous people off their land without a clear sense of where they should go. Capron even considered the lower-class settlers to be a more negative influence on the Indigenous groups than vice versa (so much for "going native").
In all of this, Capron -- like Katō Masanosuke, Oyabe Zenichiro, Nitobe Inazō, or Shirani Takeshi later in Japan -- represented a distinctly liberal form of Indigenous land management where he sought to pacify groups as frontier buffers through to allow for settlement of whites, and aimed for blanket assimilation rather than simply pushing groups further and further out of American society. This is to say, there’s no evidence that he actually cared about Indigenous peoples under his care: he saw more “humanistic” policies as a means to an end, which was, white settlement on and American territorial sovereignty over Indigenous land. There are numerous examples of this there he personally had peaceful groups of Indigenous people who were peaceably living on agricultural settlements (Capron’s stated goal for Native Americans) removed because the land was not part of a reservation and was intended for white settlement. Even the goals for citizenship were predicated upon cultural genocide and their insertion into the American economy as surplus labourers, similar to his "rehabilitation" of lower class whites in Maryland. This, if anything, brings to mind critiques of liberalism itself not as a rejection of brutal colonial conquests, but rather a recalibration of power by which rather than being violently excluded, colonized people are put in a space somewhere in-between included and excluded.
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