Forced Labour in Imperial Japan's First Colony: Hokkaidō
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Volume 18 | Issue 20 | Number 6 | Article ID 5501 | Oct 15, 2020 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Forced Labour in Imperial Japan’s First Colony: Hokkaidō Pia M. Jolliffe convicts in forced labour campsninsoku ( Abstract: This article examines the role of yoseba). Colonial studies of the Japanese forced labour within the context ofEmpire have long neglected the Hokkaidō’s Ezo/Hokkaidō’s colonization. I draw attention colonial status5. Hokkaidō’s own local history to how in this process, different groups of activism and Western scholarship argue that subaltern people – the indigenous Ainu,Japanese imperialism started well before 1895 political convicts, indentured labourers and (annexation of Taiwan). For instance, Tessa Korean workers – contributed to the making of Morris-Suzuki’s work proves how “Tokugawa imperial Japan’s first colony and the building of colonialism” exercised control over Ezo, i.e. the modern Japanese nation state. Yet, even Ainu land, long before the Meiji state’s formal with their shared conditions of working under a colonization of these territories6. This research Japanese ruling class, these subalternnotwithstanding, the popular understanding of labourers were not united. My article highlights Hokkaidō’s Meiji history still gives the how their experiences were instead, largely impression that from 1868 onwards Japanese shaped along ethnic, gendered andsettlers engaged in the clearance of empty generational lines. land. These activities are typically described as kaitaku (colonization or land development) Keywords: Forced labor, Ainu, convicts, instead ofshokuminchika (colonization). Koreans, Ezo, Hokkaidō, gender, ethnicity, However, several authors have argued that the colonialism, subalternity term kaitaku is a euphemism that covers the colonization of Ainu land: 1 Prevailing national narratives Introduction weave Hokkaido’s complex and fraught history into a Japanese empire-building relied heavily on the seamless tale of Japan’s use of forced labour by politically marginalized modernization and favours a – subaltern – people. It is well-known that lexicon of development prisoners across Japan have contributed to (kaitaku) and progress 2 large-scale projects like the Miike coal mines (shinpō) over colonization 3 and road-building in Hokkaidō. This article and conquest”7 contributes to existing research on the relationship between forced labour and the building of modern Japan. It focuses on Hokkaidō and highlights how, from its onset in During the Meiji colonization of Hokkaidō the 18th century, the management of “Imperial political convicts in central prisons (shūjikan), Japan’s first colony”4 relied on exploiting the indentured labourers (tako), as well as workers labour of politically marginalized, subaltern from colonial Korea, were assigned hazardous groups, such as the indigenous Ainu and work such as road-building and coal mining. 1 18 | 20 | 6 APJ | JF Postcolonial studies pay particular attention to struggled to find personal accounts by the experiences of the subaltern. Antonio prisoners. Likewise, the editors ofWaga Gramsci described the “subaltern” or “low Yūbari, Shirarezaru yama no rekishi, a volume rank” as persons or groups of people who on the history of Hokkaidō’s Yūbari mine, experience hegemonic domination by a ruling mention that although there are records about class, one that denies them participation in the the development of the coal mining industry, making of local history and culture as active there are virtually no records about the actual individuals. In his Prison Notebooks, he writes: living conditions of the coal miners themselves.10 The scarcity of existing primary sources produced by these subaltern workers highlights how their lives were literally the historical unity of the regarded as disposable and irrelevant to ruling classes is realised in dominant historiography. It is only since the the State, and their history is late 1970s that Japanese grass-root activists essentially the history of started to “unearth” the history of these States and of groups of people, and thus to correct the historiography States (…) The subaltern of Hokkaidō’s colonization.11 classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a “State”: their history, Ezo/Hokkaidō and Japanese Empire- therefore, is intertwined with Building that of civil society, and thereby with the history of Although the formal colonization process of States and groups of States.8 Hokkaidō began in 1869, Ezo played such an important role during the early formation of the Japanese state that the Japanese historian This definition of the subaltern became a useful Takahashi Tomio writes: “The history of Ezo’s conceptual tool for groups like indigenous management is the history of state formation” 12 people, poor immigrants, or prisoners – the (Ezo keiei-shi wa kokka seiritsu-shi dearu). “losers” of empire- or state-building processes. Indeed, during the formation of the Yamato Importantly, as the definition points out, state in the 4th and 5th Centuries, Japanese diverse subaltern groups are not unitedauthorities were already concerned about the amongst themselves. They may, as in Hokkaidō, management of areas in the northeast. The come from different ethnic, political, national, peoples who inhabited these areas were or economic backgrounds, belong to different referred to as “Emishi.” Importantly, Emishi generations, or have different gendered or was not an ethnic or racial category. Instead, racial identities. Yet, all these men, women, the term referred to “crude and unrefined and children share the experience of being people,” who resisted Yamato control, and who politically marginalized and economically opposed the socio-cultural and political- 13 exploited by a dominant ruling class. In the economic practices of the Japanese elite. In absence of sufficient unity, the subaltern the 8th and 9th Centuries, the Heian court’s cannot, in fact, speak for “themselves.”9 And expansion into the north led to armed clashes indeed, Shigematsu Kazuyoshi noted a general with the Emishi, and from the 11th Century scarcity of sources onninsoku yoseba in onwards, the Emishi were increasingly pushed Ezo/Hokkaidō. In my own research on prisons back to the northernmost tip of Honshu, and forced labour during Ezo’s colonization, I Hokkaidō, the southern part of Sakhalin and 2 18 | 20 | 6 APJ | JF the Kuril Islands. It was also during this time Museum. that the Japanese bureaucracy began referring to Emishi as Ezogashima, which can be translated as “barbarian islands.” The term Ezo, in turn, is an abbreviation of Ezogashima.14 In 1604, a year after Japan’s unification under This system continually evolved and reached its Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1603, the Matsumae family peak by the 19th century. Ainu writer Kayano in southern Ezo was granted exclusive rights to Shigeru describes how in 1858, his trade with the Ainu. grandfather, a boy from Niputani (present-day Nibutani), had to work as a slave under the basho seido. The village head, Inisetet, had Exploitation of Ainu Labour tried in vain to prevent Japanese samurai from taking the young boy away: “Inisetet appealed The Matsumae han established a trade system to the samurai to leave the boy, only eleven (basho seido), under which the Ainu adults and years old and small for his age, saying that he children became contractors and workers for would only be in their way if they took him Japanese traders. Trade with the Ainu revolved along. The Japanese rejected Inisetet’s around exploitation across fishing grounds (see supplication, however, stating that even a child figure 1) was capable of carrying one salmon on his back.”15 The exploitation of labour in Ezo also went hand in hand with the development of prostitution. During the fishing season, Japanese sex workers would solicit Ainu men at the ports of Wajin-chi (i.e. the Japanese settlements across the Oshima peninsula), while in the island’s interior, Japanese men engaged Ainu prostitutes and/or violated married Ainu women. For example, in 1793, Kimura Kenji, a writer from the Mito domain, noted that Japanese sailors who travelled to Ezo often committed acts of rape against married Ainu women. These women’s husbands would then visit the sailors’ ships to ask for some form of compensation, which was usually Figure 1: Hand scroll depicting no more than a handful of tobacco. In the trade between Ainu and Japanese. 1850s, the Japanese explorer Matsuura Literally translated, the Takeshirō mentioned how a young Ainu woman inscription says:” When [the Ainu] in the Ishikari region had contracted syphilis come to the domain office and after intercourse with a fishery supervisor. The give a catch [of fish], [the supervisor had sent the woman’s husband away Japanese traders] give rice, first to work in a fishery in Otarunai, before clothes and tobacco [in advancing on his wife. Matsuura also observed exchange]”. Source: Ezoshina how out of the forty-one Japanese supervisors kikan (蝦夷島奇観) 1799 by Hata in Kusuri (present-day Kushiro), thirty-six men Awagimaro © Tokyo National had forced Ainu women to serve as concubines, 3 18 | 20 | 6 APJ | JF also after having sent their husbands away to Hokkaidō; second, to recruit new immigrants work at fisheries elsewhere.16 from other parts of Japan for agricultural settlements in Ezo; and third, to conduct Racism also thrived in Ezo, as many Japanese missionary work among these new immigrants, settlers regarded the Ainu as inhuman and the as well as among the