ON THE FRONTIERS OF HISTORY RETHINKING EAST ASIAN BORDERS ON THE FRONTIERS OF HISTORY RETHINKING EAST ASIAN BORDERS TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI GLOBAL THINKERS SERIES Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760463694 ISBN (online): 9781760463700 WorldCat (print): 1182556687 WorldCat (online): 1182556433 DOI: 10.22459/OFH.2020 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover image from Mamiya Rinzo’s ‘Tōdatsu Kikō’. This edition © 2020 ANU Press CONTENTS List of Illustrations . vii Introduction . 1 1 . Anti-Area Studies Revisited . 7 2 . Mapping Time and Space . 25 3 . ‘Tartary’ in the Reshaping of Historical Thought . 47 4 . Unthinking Civilisation: An Imbricated History of the Okhotsk Region . 71 5 . The Telescope and the Tinderbox: Rediscovering La Pérouse in the North Pacific . 107 6 . Lines in the Snow: The Making of the Russo–Japanese Frontier . 139 7 . Indigeneity and Modernity in Colonial Karafuto . 165 8 . Japan and its Region: From Tartary to the Emergence of the New Area Studies . 195 Concluding Thoughts: On the Value of Small Histories . 233 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Map 1.1. The Okhotsk region ...............................6 Figure 2.1. Japanese map and accompanying image of peoples of the world, 1671. 26 Figure 2.2. Fifteenth-century map of the Iberian Peninsula ........28 Figure 2.3. Hayashi Shihei’s Illustrated Outline of the Three Countries [Sankoku Tsūran Zusetsu], 1785 .........................33 Figure 2.4. Map of the Integrated Territory of Historical Countries and their Capitals [Honil gangni yeokdae gukto jido] (The Kangnido), 1402 ................................35 Figure 2.5. The Hereford wall map ...........................37 Figure 2.6. Abraham Ortelius’s world map, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1570 .....................................39 Figure 2.7. English world map based on Blumenbach’s classifications, 1849 ..................................43 Figure 3.1. Map of Tartary based on de Vries’ voyage, 1682 (Original by Giacomo Cantelli da Vignola) ................48 Figure 3.2. Illustration from Witsen, showing ‘Yakut, Kalmyk, Kyrgizian Ostiak and Daurian Tungus’ peoples .............52 Figure 3.3. Engraving of a ‘Kamchadale’ woman from Krasheninnikov’s Opisanie Zemli Kamchatki ................56 Figure 3.4. Thomsen expounding the ‘three age’ system, illustration by P Marquardt, 1846 .......................65 Figure 4.1. Okhotsk culture grave, Abashiri ....................85 Figure 4.2. Nivkh drying fish, early twentieth century ............91 vii ON THE FRONTIERS OF HISTORY Figure 4.3. 1807 map of Ezo ...............................93 Figure 4.4. Ainu with dog sleigh .............................95 Figure 4.5. Sakhalin Ainu blacksmiths .......................101 Figure 5.1. The Astrolabe and Boussole at anchor off the island of Maui ..........................................110 Figure 5.2. People of Tomarioro as seen by La Pérouse’s expedition ...111 Figure 5.3. Frontispiece from La Pérouse’s atlas ................114 Figure 5.4. Tsukinoe, an Ainu elder from Kunashir, wearing a brocade robe, painting by Kakizaki Hakyo ..............119 Figure 5.5. La Pérouse’s map of Sakhalin .....................127 Figure 5.6. The trading post at Deren ........................132 Figure 5.7. Portraits of Sakhalin Ainu ‘Niskani, Aoucanouri and Erougantoi’ of Tomarioro. .........................135 Figure 6.1. Golovnin being taken prisoner in Japan, c. 1811 ......145 Figure 6.2. Prisoners in the Sakhalin penal colony ..............152 Figure 6.3. Arsen’ev with Dersu Uzala, 1906 ..................153 Figure 6.4. A Japanese settlement in the Habomai Islands, c. 1920 ...156 Figure 6.5. ‘The Northern Region of East Asia’ .................158 Figure 7.1. Traditional Uilta summer houses on the outskirts of Otasu. .167 Figure 7.2. The Ainu ‘model’ village of Torandomari ............172 Figure 7.3. Colonial modern housing in Otasu. 175 Figure 7.4. A reindeer herd near Otasu .......................179 Figure 7.5. Kawamura Hideya teaching a class at the ‘native school’, Otasu ................................183 Figure 7.6. Indigenous people hunting marine mammals near Otasu. .187 Figure 7.7. Uilta needle case, early twentieth century ............188 Figure 8.1. Illustration from Charles MacFarlane’s Japan .........201 viii LIST OF Illustrations Figure 8.2. John George Bartholomew, ‘Maps of the Far East, Illustrating Russo–Japanese War’, 1905 ..................204 Figure 8.3. Memorial for convict labourers near Abashiri .........226 Figure 8.4. The Jakka Duxuni, Abashiri, 2011 .................229 Figure 8.5. Uilta embroidery: (above) by Kitagawa Aiko’s Japanese students; (below) by Kitagawa Aiko .....................231 ix INTRODUCTION The date is 1 August 1996, and I am aboard a ferry as it sets off from the northern Japanese port of Wakkanai on the sea crossing to Korsakov, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. It is a quiet, calm day and the sea is a silver- lead colour, with few waves in the bay, although my cabin companions warn me that it will get rough out in the straits. They remember the crossing 50 years ago, when the cups rolled around on the table, and people went down below decks to escape the storm, only to find that the heaving of the waves was even worse down there. On the quay, the scene is much as I had expected. A number of elderly couples, some with adult children, returning to visit their long-lost birthplaces; a few stray younger travellers, and one small party of Russian teenagers on a school exchange. But look more closely, and matters become more complicated. The young couple in front of me in the boarding queue – a skinny man in a loose black jacket and a girl in a pink trouser suit, whom I had automatically registered as Japanese – were speaking Russian as they said farewell to a very Japanese-looking elderly lady on the docks, and showed their Russian passports as they went through emigration. My Japanese cabin companions are going back on a nostalgia visit. They have been friends since childhood and meet every year to recall memories of Karafuto (the Japanese colony that occupied the southern half of Sakhalin Island from 1905 to 1945). Their other friends in Japan have no interest in sharing these memories. Until the end of the war, they lived in the ‘old city’ of Toyohara (now the Russian city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk). Their neighbours included a Russian, a Polish family and a German family who ran the local bakery. The children all went to school together, and they say that they had no sense of any of them being ‘foreigners’. Later, sitting on the upper deck, I find myself next to a woman with sadder memories. She went to Karafuto when she was five, and was nine when the war ended. Her family lived in Maoka (now Kholmsk), until the Russians came and burned everything. She remembers playing with her sister among the 1 ON THE FRONTIERS OF HISTORY burnt ruins, picking up broken cups and plates. They took shelter for a while in her grandmother’s house, which was still standing, but then the Russians came with rifles and took her father away. Sakhalin appears on the port side before I expect it: beautiful and mountainous, with fold upon fold of hills in different shades of blue-grey, and sometimes sharper peaks appearing behind. When I go to the stern of the ferry, I find, sheltering from the wind, three women: one small and elderly, one middle-aged and the third younger and dressed in a smart grey suit. I start talking to them in hesitant Russian. The woman in grey turns out to be Nivkh, and the other two are Uilta (members of the indigenous Sakhalin communities discussed later in this book). They have been on a visit to their relatives in Abashiri, in northern Hokkaido. Only the elderly lady speaks Japanese – though she explains that she can also speak Uilta and Russian, as well as some Nanai and Korean – so we make do with Russian. The Nivkh lady speaks no Nivkh, but mentions that there is a nursery school in their area that teaches the language. They say that few people have any interest in their culture, and the middle-aged Uilta lady laments that it is now too late for her people. Later, they are joined by her son, who is about 20 and works in a fish-processing factory in central Sakhalin. He is dressed in trendy denim and sports dark glasses. He is friendly and polite, and says that he has enjoyed his first visit to his relatives in Japan. He speaks some English and expresses and interest in coming to Australia. *** This book brings together thoughts and writings that span a period of 25 years, from the mid-1990s to the end of the 2010s. All journeys, of course, have multiple starting points, and the ideas that I explore here have grown out of hundreds, maybe thousands, of encounters with remarkable people in Japan, other parts of East Asia and beyond. But one crucial starting point for the journey of exploration undertaken in this book was the crossing from Hokkaido to Sakhalin, which I have described in the paragraphs above, using notes that I jotted down in my diary at the time. The people I met on that crossing gave me new insights into the complexities of history. Like many people who originate from the British Isles, I come from a family of border-crossers, though few of them have crossed frontiers in such traumatic circumstances as the people I met on the ferry to Korsakov. I had Irish relatives who served in the British army in India, 2 INTRODUCTION a half-Irish and half-Scottish mother who grew up in Istanbul, and today I have sisters who live in France, Italy and Greece and a son who lives in the United States, while I am an Australian.