No Man's Land: De-Indigenization and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius in the Japanese Colonization of Hokkaido, 1869-1905
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No Man’s Land: De-Indigenization and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius in the Japanese Colonization of Hokkaido, 1869-1905 by Michael Randall Marcel Roellinghoff A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of History University of Toronto © Copyright by Michael Roellinghoff 2020 No Man’s Land: De-Indigenization and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius in the Japanese Colonization of Hokkaido, 1869-1905 Michael Roellinghoff Doctor of Philosophy Degree Department of History University of Toronto 2020 Abstract The former Tokugawa bakufu exercised varying degrees of suzerainty over the Indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido for centuries. However, increasingly direct challenges to Japanese territorial sovereignty by the rapidly expanding American, British, and Russian colonial empires pushed the new Meiji regime to formally annex Ainu territories across the northern island in 1869, claiming them as terra nullius (empty, ownerless land). Thereafter, with the support of a contingent of foreign advisors, educators, and diplomats, the modernizing Meiji state began to transform Hokkaido into an export-driven resource colony resembling not the Japanese mainland but New England. Settlers – many of them penniless former samurai – took on the role of white American frontiersmen, “breaking” a land re-imagined as uninhabited, primordial, and virginal. Meanwhile, colonialists began to re-cast the Ainu as akin to the “Indians” of the American frontier. These “Indian”-like Ainu were subjected to a series of discourses and policies which aimed to “de-Indigenize” them, conceptually rendering them non-native in their own colonized homeland. This facilitated the dispossession of their land, their resources, and ultimately, of their own bodies. A transnational settler colonial project, Hokkaido was not simply a “Westernized” region internal to Japan, but an outer territory which became “Japanese” precisely through its Westernization. And, far from an obscure outer periphery, settler colonial Hokkaido was central ii to the development of the modern Japanese nation-state and its wider colonial empire. Accordingly, the present study builds upon a growing wave of revisionist literature which challenges the conventional understanding that the Japanese colonial period began with the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895 and ended with Japan’s defeat in the Asia Pacific War in 1945. It instead understands Hokkaido as an ongoing settler colonial project. iii Acknowledgments I would like to extend my sincere thanks to my committee members Li Chen, Lisa Yoneyama, and especially to my doctoral supervisor, Takashi Fujitani. It was with their support, suggestions, and thoughtful criticisms that this project was possible. I would also like to thank the following people, in alphabetical order, for their help, support, criticisms, and advice at different stages of this project: Heidi Bohaker, Jodi Byrd, Andrea Geiger, Furukawa Hidefumi, Scott Harrison, Michael Hathaway, Mark Hudson, Hirano Katsuya, Ishihara Makoto, Ken McLeod, Ogawa Masahito, Ota Yoshinobu, Andre Schmid, Alison Smith, Fabiano Takashi Rocha, and Mark Watson. I would also like to thank the tireless staff of Hokkaido University Library's Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido Prefectural Library, Shiraoi Ainu Museum (Porotokotan), Otaru Municipal Library, Saga Prefectural Library, Saga Municipal Library, the National Diet Library, and the National Archives of Japan. I would like to extend my thanks to the many friends and comrades I have made along the way at the University of Toronto, including (though certainly not limited to) Na Sil Heo, Banu Kaygusuz, Sinhyeok Jung, Young Oh Jung, Michael Tseng, and Asako Masubuchi Watanabe. Finally, I would like to extend my deepest thanks to my family: Ikumi Yoshida, Kotaro (Yoshida) Roellinghoff, Suzu (Yoshida) Roellinghoff, Melba Roellinghoff Merriam, Michael Roellinghoff Sr., and Caroline Roellinghoff for their love, patience, and support through the long and sometimes arduous process of completing this dissertation. Research for this project would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, the Monbukagakusho (MEXT) Research Scholarship, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) the Konosuke Matsushita Memorial Scholarship, and the Dr. David Chu Scholarship in Asia Pacific Studies. In memory of Brian Barrett. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments ..................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... v Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1 Tokens of Sovereignty: Ainu Bodies Along the Russo-Japanese Frontier ..................46 Chapter 2 “Japanese Progress”: The Americanization of Settler Colonial Hokkaido ..................88 Chapter 3 “The Lock on the Northern Gate”: Life on a Militarized Borderland ........................ 130 Chapter 4 Where the Bones Lie: Head Hunters, Necromancers, and Settler Colonial Dispossession ..................................................................................................................... 178 Chapter 5 Corpus Alienum: Land and Racial Hygiene in the Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act ..................................................................................................................... 231 Epilogue: Performing Terra Nullius ........................................................................................ 279 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 290 v Introduction In 1869, the Meiji Japanese state (1868-1912) annexed territories belonging to the Indigenous Ainu people throughout the northern island of Hokkaido. In the years leading up to Hokkaido’s annexation, Ainu territories had become a contested borderland between Japan and the American, British, and Russian colonial empires as the latter three rapidly expanded into the north Pacific. Aiming to secure international recognition of Japanese sovereignty over Hokkaido – long under a loose system of indirect rule – the Meiji state began to colonize the island using settler colonial models adapted from these same imperial rivals. The United States, a settler-state, became a world power through its westward colonial expansion across the North American continent and into the Pacific. Accordingly, it provided an exemplary model for Japanese colonial planners. Under American tutelage, Japanese settlers began to transform Hokkaido from the ground up to economically, socially, and culturally resemble not the Japanese mainland but New England. Hokkaido’s rich natural resources, Meiji leaders hoped, would in turn enrich the nation, while desperately poor surplus populations and anti-Meiji rebels alike could be pushed into the new northern territories and away from the metropole. Even as Japan’s colonization of Hokkaido strengthened the new Meiji regime’s position domestically as well as internationally, Ainu territories remained a contested, indistinct no man’s 1 2 land between empires.1 The island was at once imagined as a natural extension of the national polity which, as early Meiji foreign minister Soejima Taneomi claimed, had “always belonged to Japan,” and an exotic, foreign country which felt like it could be “ten thousand ri away,” as journalist Hisamatsu Yoshinori elsewhere remarked.2 And, indeed, for many Japanese settlers, Hokkaido’s fields of wheat and corn, its ranches of Devon cows and Berkshire pigs, and its cities with imposing red brick buildings and balloon-framed houses no doubt produced a startling feeling of the uncanny: an American frontier within Japan. Beyond these Americanesque settlements, however, mainlanders dispatched to colonize increasingly remote, heavily wooded plots of land often felt like they had fallen off the edge of the world completely. Borders drawn between Japan and the neighbouring Russian Empire, as well as those drawn between Japanese settlers and the Indigenous Ainu people, generated a range of legal and discursive indistinctions and ambiguities. In this outer frontier within, the place of the Ainu become indistinct. Settlers began to imagine the Ainu, long a neighbouring people, as a strange if not detestably barbaric race akin to the “Indians” of the United States. As “Indians,” “savages,” or “barbarians,” they could be dismissed as categorically lacking the capacity for legal personhood and thereby sovereign ownership over their land and bodies as prescribed by 1 As Jodi Byrd writes, like the “state of nature” and “state of exception,” the “no man’s land,” too, constitutes the “boundaries between human and inhuman, legal and illegal, sacred and bare life.” The “no man’s land” of settler colonial Hokkaido – to which the title of this dissertation refers – is, then, a reference both to Japan’s annexation of Ainu territories as terra nullius as well as the place of the Ainu between empires, between sovereignties, and between the abandonment and “protection” of the Japanese settler colonial state. See Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 225. 2 Soejima Taneomi, “Japan’s Foreign