No Man's Land: De-Indigenization and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius in the Japanese Colonization of Hokkaido, 1869-1905

No Man’s Land: De-Indigenization and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius in the Japanese Colonization of Hokkaido, 1869-1905

Michael Randall Marcel Roellinghoff

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of History University of Toronto

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.

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

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 Relations,” trans. Marcus B. Huish, in Soejima Taneomi zenshū, ed. Shima Yoshitaka (Kyoto, 2007: Keibunsha), 3:464.; Hisamatsu Yoshinori, Hokkaidō shinsaku (Tokyo: Maeno Chōhatsu, 1892), 1-2.

3 international law.3 Accordingly, applying Euro-American settler colonial discourse to the Ainu allowed the Meiji state to extinguish their sovereign rights in one fell swoop. However, while many were fixated on the supposed “Indianness” of the Ainu, many others came to simply cease imagining them altogether, and instead imagined their land as “unpeopled” or “virginal,” with

Japanese settlers’ economic development of Hokkaido’s forests, fields, and mountains, many argued, constituting the first human activity ever undertaken on the island.

The Tokugawa bakufu, which ruled Japan for 265 years until its collapse in 1868, had long since asserted suzerainty over the Ainu. Through the Matsumae Domain, which occupied a small Japanese enclave in southwest Hokkaido, the bakufu forced Ainu communities, wherever they could so compel them, into a tributary relationship. This tribute was ritualized, with the bakufu recognizing Ainu sovereignty in order for Ainu leaders to, in turn, recognize the Shogun.4

As Ronald Toby argues of Edo’s foreign relations further south, by positing the Shogun as occupying the centre of a Sinocentric model transposed onto Japan from Imperial China, the

Tokugawa regime asserted its legitimacy domestically. Polities which paid tribute to the bakufu

− including not just Ainu kotan (self-governing village communities) but the Ryukyu Kingdom and, voluntarily, Korea and the Netherlands − would receive valuable trade benefits in return.

For the bakufu, presenting diplomatic emissaries and merchants as exotic peoples of the outer

3 See Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 4 See Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Nation, Culture, Identity Nation, Culture, Identity (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), especially chapter two.

4 periphery coming to pay homage to a Japanese centre served to reaffirm the sovereign legitimacy of the Tokugawa regime.5

Enabling this self-legitimizing tributary system, except during brief periods of Russian incursion, the bakufu sought to forcibly maintain the Ainu as an alien, distinctly non-Japanese people. Except on rare ceremonial occasions, Matsumae officials forbade the Ainu from using the Japanese language or wearing Japanese styles of dress in order to mark them as unmistakably foreign. And, to encourage the Ainu to continue to collect plant and animal products which had proven valuable in Japanese markets, the Matsumae Domain actively deterred the Ainu from engaging in sedentary agriculture.6 However, even while the bakufu aimed to subdue the Ainu, this system of indirect rule did not leave them untouched. Oftentimes commoditized “tribute” came in the form of Ainu captured by Matsumae slave hunters to labour in fisheries, including, as Ainu politician Kayano Shigeru recounted of his own grandfather, children quite literally pulled from their parents’ arms.7 Moreover, as the bakufu forbade Japanese women from entering Ainu territories, precluding multigenerational Japanese settlement, Ainu women were

5 Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Brett L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), especially chapter eight. This tribute was, at times, reciprocal. As Toby describes, the insular Japanese domain of Tsushima acted as an economic and diplomatic middleman between the bakufu and Korea, paying tribute to the Korean monarch as well as the Shogun. See Ibid, 40. 6 Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan, 18. 7 See chapter three of Kayano Shigeru, Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir, trans. Kyoko Selden and Lili Selden (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994) for details on the enslavement of Ainu during the Tokugawa period.

5 routinely subjected to sexual violence and forced marriage at the hands of Japanese soldiers, merchants, and slave-hunters.8

While deeply exploitative, the tributary system – partly by design and partly due to the inefficacity of the Matsumae Domain in enforcing these policies – largely left Ainu political, cultural, economic, and social autonomy intact.9 This soon changed. With news trickling in of the British Empire’s dramatic victory in the Opium War against the once-formidable Qing

Empire in 1842, the Matsumae Domain’s alarming discovery that the Russian Empire was actively colonizing northern Ainu territories from the late 1840s, and, finally, the “opening” of

Japan itself by the United States in 1853, the Japanese government abruptly abandoned this model of foreign relations. Fearing Japan’s national sovereignty was at stake, securing the country’s borders became a top priority for the late Tokugawa and early Meiji governments.

Early Meiji Japanese diplomats set out to lay claims to peripheral spaces such as Ainu territories against these would-be colonizers. The new regime began to colonize Hokkaido as an American- style settler colony, aiming to settle it with mainland Japanese and economically develop the island with the help of American foreign advisors. This unmistakably Euro-American style colonial venture would assert Japanese sovereignty over the increasingly contested Ainu territories while confirming Japanese national sovereignty internationally as a country capable of

8 For details on bans on Japanese women travelling into Ainu territories, see Shimizu Ichitarō, Nihon shinfugen (Tokyo: Kinkōdō, 1890), 164-165. For a discussion of sexual violence inflicted upon Ainu women, see ann-elise lewallen. The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016), 131-136. 9 Ainu territories across what are today the territories of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuriles occupy a space more than half the size of the Japanese mainland.

6 bringing civilization to a barbaric foreign land. Accordingly, the Meiji government annexed

Hokkaido in 1869, claiming it as terra nullius (empty, ownerless land, or figuratively, a no man’s land). The state began to push the Ainu off of their land in order to replace them with

Japanese settlers. While Matsumae officials forbade the Ainu from so much as wearing their hair in topknots, the Meiji state outright disregarded the sovereignty of Ainu communities and their title to the land. It actively worked to suppress the Ainu language as well as cultural and religious practices. Before long, the Meiji state also dispossessed the Ainu of their land and vital resources in the name of “civilizing” them.

This dissertation critically interrogates Meiji era Japanese discourses and policies, analyzing the place of the Ainu as an Indigenous people within settler colonial Hokkaido and the place of Japan within the wider transnational history of settler colonialism. Focusing on the doctrine of terra nullius, it will interrogate pioneer discourses meant to naturalize the Japanese presence in Ainu territories and denaturalize the Ainu. The following chapters will argue that the

Japanese colonization of Hokkaido functioned by “de-indigenizing” the Ainu, conceptually disconnecting them from the land and trapping them on the outer margins of the settler body politic. Central to this process was the land itself, and sometimes the very soil underfoot.

Accordingly, highlighting the indivisible relationship between the land and the body (both as physical bodies and as body politics) of the Ainu and Japanese settlers alike, this dissertation will critically re-examine the spatialization of biopolitics.

Moving beyond geopolitical theory, which dominated theories of power and sovereignty for the first half of the 20th century, and especially during the early Cold War, scholars such as

Michel Foucault have argued that the human body, and not land, is the primary site of politics.

Modern power, in other words, is power over the body. However, more recently, scholars such as

Giorgio Agamben in his work on the Nazi Lagers and Achille Mbembe in his writings on

European necropolitics have begun to re-engage with the question of the geographic spatialization of sovereign power as it relates to the body. For Agamben, even while arguing that

“the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power,” the camp, a physically delineated space in which internees are stripped of their rights, reflects the vacuous centre at the heart of systems of European sovereignty and of the law itself.10 Mbembe, influenced by anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, applies similar readings of European discourses of sovereignty and state power − most notably Foucauldian biopolitical theory − to the space of the extra-European colony. According to Mbembe, the “spatialization of colonial occupation,” physically separating those who are deemed “disposable” from those who are not, forms the basis of exogenous sovereignty over colonized territories. This exclusionary spatialization becomes the basis of what Mbembe calls “necropolitics”: extractive systems of racialized colonial order premised on the death – in both a social and physical sense – of the colonized.11

Applying such critiques to the space of the settler colony, the present study aims to disarticulate and reconsider the relationship between the segmented space of the colony and the body, particularly as it relates to land-intensive developmentalist schemes characteristic of settler colonialism. “Land,” as Patrick Wolfe wrote, “is life,” and accordingly, “contests for land can be

10 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 6. 11 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003).

... contests for life.”12 The exogenous settlement of Indigenous land or the destruction of that land through ecologically destructive resource exploitation can have catastrophic effects on those who rely on that same territory for food, for water, for shelter, and as the basis of cultural and religious practices. Even in the absence of mass violence inflicted upon the corporeal bodies of the colonized, such as in the case of Meiji era Hokkaido, territorial dispossession of Indigenous peoples or bans on economic self-sufficiency can amount to practices of genocide, which

Foucault saw as the inevitable trajectory of the biopolitical state.

Contrastively, in order to succeed in their task of colonizing Hokkaido, Japanese settlers received subsidized land, houses, food, and seeds to sow through biopolitical regimes of

“protection” (Japanese: hogo). The aim of such protection was to provide settlers with additional support needed to become self-sufficient land-owners. In other words, through the patronage of the state, often desperately poor settlers from the mainland could come to enrich themselves through their exploitation of the soil and become land-holding sovereign citizens. This came at the expense of the Ainu, whom the state dispossessed of the same land it “granted” to settlers.

With their autonomous survival criminalized, these dispossessed Ainu experienced severe privation and, in many cases, faced the prospect of famine. Accordingly, the “protection” of

Japanese settlers and the dispossession of the Ainu constituted a single strategy of colonial rule.

Meiji era settlement policies, as tied to the land, were accordingly inseparably biopolitical and necropolitical.

12 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, no. 4, (2006): 387-409.

Discussing settler colonial Australia, Aboriginal legal scholar Irene Watson writes that the “formation of a new social order” in the colony “was founded on the possibility of our disappearance.” Referring to the doctrine of terra nullius both legally and discursively as

“rubble,” Watson argues that oppressive settler colonial structures leave Indigenous peoples

“buried alive.”13 Similarly claiming Hokkaido as terra nullius, the Meiji state did not aim to assimilate Ainu Mosir (the sphere of Ainu political, social, and cultural life) as a foreign political entity into the Japanese national polity, as it later would with the Ryukyu Kingdom and Korean

Empire. While Japanese suzerainty over the Ainu during much of the Tokugawa period was predicated on mutual recognition between Ainu sovereign bodies and the Japanese bakufu, the

Japanese colonization of Ainu Mosir during the Meiji period was predicated on the categorical non-sovereignty of the Ainu, and, indeed, their collective disappearance. Accordingly, the Meiji state annexed Ainu territories outright. And, as these territories remain unceded land, Ainu Mosir as a socio-cultural or political entity tacitly remains “buried” underneath the Hokkaido settler colony. Accordingly, the present study will look at space of the Hokkaido settler colony as layered, resembling sediment, rather than segmented into more literal zones of inclusion and exclusion as described by Agamben or Mbembe. In effect, all of Hokkaido became a zone of exclusion, while simultaneously, all of Hokkaido remains unceded Ainu land.

Ainu(/Japanese) as “Indians”(/Europeans)

13 Irene Watson, “Buried Alive,” Law and Critique, 13, no. 3 (2002): 253-269.

Crossing the American continent and leapfrogging across the Pacific through the voyages of explorers such as James Cook, Jodi Byrd argues that “Indianness becomes a site through which U.S. empire orients and replicates itself by transforming those to be colonized into

“Indians” through continual reiterations of pioneer logics.”14 As discussed in chapter two, as early as 1854, when members of Matthew Perry’s party described encountering “Aino Indians” during an inaugural visit to Hokkaido, first American and then Japanese colonialists began to transpose onto the Ainu the spectre of the “Indian.”15 This marked them as lacking legal personality under international law and thereby without sovereignty. Thereafter, as Japan colonized Hokkaido under American settler colonial models, Japanese settlers came to adopt the subjective position of white settlers of the American frontier while the essential “Indianness” of the Ainu quickly became common sense for many Japanese. So much so that, before long, the

“Indians” of the far-off American continent became a referent for the Ainu living within the territorial bounds of the Japanese Empire. By the 1890s, for example, the popular magazine

Shōkokumin (Little Citizens) published an article introducing the Ainu to a generation of schoolchildren. Predicting that children from across the empire might never have so much as heard of the Ainu, the article explained to its young readers that “[t]he Ainu, the aborigines of our Hokkaido are like the “Indians” of the United States of America.”16

14 Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xiii. 15 Matthew Calbraith Perry, ed. Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan: Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854, under the Command of Commodore M.C. Perry, United States Navy, by Order of the Government of the United States, vol. 2 (Washington: Beverley Tucker, 1856), 118. While rarely, if ever, heard today, the spelling “Aino” was commonplace in 19th century English language writings related to the Ainu, and, to a lesser extent, pre-war Japanese academic writing. 16 “Ainu-jin,” Shōkokumin 5, no. 17 (1893): 42.

While becoming a matter of common sense by the late Meiji period, and in large part remaining so today, early on, it was not at all self-evident that the Ainu should necessarily act as stand-ins for “Indians,” or the Japanese for whites, on the Americanized frontier of Hokkaido.

Far from it. In the mid-19th century, in fact, supposed physiological similarities between the Ainu and Europeans caused a great deal of excitement in western Europe, with many believing that

European explorers had stumbled upon a group of “lost” Caucasians on the far side of the

Eurasian landmass. During the 1850s and roughly until the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, as Euro-American powers set their sights on Japan and began to assert “semi-colonial” hegemony over the country through a network of treaty ports, the Ainu became a convenient means by which Europeans could collectively debase the Japanese. Equating the Ainu with

Europeans allowed European writers to stress racial or civilizational gaps between Europe and

Japan. For some European observers, the Ainu were imbued with all of the positive qualities that

Europeans imagined themselves as having, becoming, as Kristen Refsing argues, “mirrors to reflect the superiority of the white race over all others.”17 For example, shortly after Perry’s visit to Japan, British Orientalist scholar Samuel Beal wrote that “Physically, the Ainos appear to be of an ancient stock, and certainly distinct from the Japanese. Their features are almost European, having straight and full eyes, prominent nose, and, as far as their beards would allow one to judge, the contour of the face oval” (emphasis in original). In stark contrast to “the cunning look

17 Kirsten Refsing. “Introduction,” in Early European Writings on Ainu Culture: Travelogues and Descriptions, ed. Kristen Refsing, vol. 1 (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000), 85.

12 and the slouching gait of their Japanese neighbours,” the quasi-European Ainu “[carry] themselves with full natural dignity and self-confidence.”18

Others, particularly in the United States, theorized that “Indians” were the direct racial descendants of the Japanese. Such theories were seemingly bolstered by early 19th century discoveries of Japanese castaways by British and American fur traders and colonial officials along the North American Pacific coast. Having drifted helplessly across the Pacific on disabled vessels, these sailors simply washed in with the tides. A topic of great excitement, especially at a time when theories of the evolutionary origins and racial divisions of mankind were widely proliferated by European scientific discourse, for many, it became easy to imagine that such castaways had washed ashore on the Pacific coast for millennia, slowly populating the Americas with their stock. American folklorist Charles Leland, for example, claimed that “driven by the terrible typhoons that sweep over their waters, [ancient Japanese navigators] ... reached the coasts of California and Mexico.” According to Leland, “the Japanese were the first discoverers and founders of America.” This, he further claimed, was not lost on the more “intelligent natives from Japan,” who immediately recognized the “Indians” as the “descendants of their ancestors.”19 And, as Urata Kōhan notes, some early Japanese travellers to the United States such as Kume Kunitake of the Iwakura Mission did indeed make this connection. Kume mused that the “Indians” he spotted out the window of his train car are “probably the descendants (ryūei) of

18 Samuel Beal, “Remarks on the Island of Yezo,” in Early European Writings on Ainu Culture: Travelogues and Descriptions, ed. Kristen Refsing, vol. 1 (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000), 8. Paginated separately from main text. 19 Charles G. Leland, Fusang or the Discovery of America by Chinese Buddhist Priests in the Fifth Century (London: Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, 1875), 191.

13 the Japanese.”20 Working both ways, however, others still came to imbue the Japanese, too, with

“Indianness.” The London Quarterly Review, for example, calqued the then-unfamiliar term

“samourai (sic)” as “braves.”21 In light of attacks on foreigners in treaty ports across Japan by sword-wielding assassins, for many readers, this no doubt evoked (and was perhaps meant to evoke) popular racist imagery of “savage” warriors slaughtering otherwise peaceful white settlers and momentarily halting their much-touted “peaceful conquest” of the west.

However, associations of the Japanese and “Indians” were made even before Perry’s

“opening” of Japan, and not always so pejoratively. The last North American known to have travelled to Japan before Perry was, in fact, an Indigenous man from what is today Oregon. In his memoirs, Ranald Macdonald characterized his voyage to Japan as a racial homecoming.22 Like the shipwrecked Japanese on the far side of the Pacific, MacDonald set himself adrift along the northeast shore of Hokkaido with little more than a cask of cured meat and a Bible. Before long, he was found by local Ainu villagers. They handed him over to a nearby Japanese garrison which had been established precisely to keep watch of the foreign vessels which had come to frequent

Hokkaido’s eastern shores. Matsumae officials brought him to Hakodate, and from there, to

Nagasaki, far to the south of the Japanese archipelago. There, MacDonald was interrogated and

20 Quoted in Urata Kōhan, Meiji no Ainu-Indian ninshiki: Meiji-ki no chishikijin to senjū minzoku (Kushiro: self- published, 1990), 1. 21 “Japan,” The London Quarterly Review, 42, (1874): 83-120. 22 Born in Fort Astoria, a trading post meant to foster commercial ties between British North America with Hawai’i and the Qing Empire, MacDonald was the son of Archibald McDonald (sic), a Hudson Bay Company fur trader, and Koale’xoa, the daughter of the Chinook leader Comcomly. With his mother dying shortly after his birth and Macdonald soon after moving with his father to Kamloops in what is today British Columbia, his own Indigenous ancestry was not made clear to him until much later. This revelation appears to have been part of his motivation for travelling to Japan.

14 then kept under house arrest for a year while waiting to be deported on a Dutch vessel. While it remains somewhat of a mystery as to why, given gruesome tales of the brutality of the Japanese against shipwrecked foreigners, MacDonald would risk life and limb to smuggle himself into

Japan, the reason he stated in his memoirs was that as an “Indian,” he wanted to return to the

“land of his ancestors.”23 And, indeed, MacDonald attributed his skill in quickly picking up spoken Japanese to his “maternal ancestry.”24

In the decades that followed, respective associations between white Americans, Japanese,

Indians, and Ainu slowly congealed, in no small part due to the role of American observers, pundits, advisors, and educators in early Meiji Hokkaido. Most notably in this regard were the

American advisors to the Kaitakushi (the Colonial Office) such as Horace Capron who tutored the Japanese government in American practices of colonization, settlement, and free market developmentalism. And, not limited to policy suggestions, they worked to adapt the explicitly white supremacist and evolutionist discursive underpinnings of American settler colonialism to the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido and, in effect, to the Japanese. This dissertation will show that, in this regard, the United States, together with the British and Russian empires, were not merely colonial rivals threatening to colonize Hokkaido in Japan’s stead, but were also co- imperialists in the Japanese colonization of the Ainu.

Settler Colonialism

23 Ranald MacDonald, Ranald MacDonald: The Narrative of His Life, 1824-1894, ed. Naojirō Murakami and William S. Lewis (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1990), 39. 24 Ibid, 227.

Settler colonialism is premised not on the foreign domination or co-option of autochthonous socio-political formations, such as, for example, in British India or Japanese

Korea, but rather, on the explicit and systematic non-recognition of the sovereignty and often the very humanity of Indigenous peoples.25 Rather than exploited, Indigenous peoples are to be replaced on the land (as well as in all facets of social and political life) by invading settlers.

While all colonialisms are fundamentally premised on the rapacious domination of the land of the colonized by the colonizer, what is often glossed as “exploitation” colonialism is characterized by colonizers battening off the labour of the colonized. On the other hand, “settler” colonialism is premised on what Wolfe referred to as the “logic of elimination”: the “negative articulation between invaders and the land” which, in colonies such as British Australia or

Japanese Hokkaido, was aimed at “vacating Indigenous country and rendering it available for pastoral settlement.”26

“Elimination” frequently included (and in some places, continues to include) the large- scale slaughter of Indigenous peoples in order to gain access to their land and resources. Such

25 Jun Uchida argues that Japanese colonial-era discourse which described Korea as “Japan’s Algeria” has largely been forgotten and that “the full implications of Korea as a colony of settlement have not been probed.” Writing against convention that typically portrays Korea as having been an “occupation” or “exploitation” colony, Uchida understands colonial Korea as “effectively comprising a mixture between” exploitation and settler colonialism (though clearly leaning towards the latter). Troublingly, however, Uchida all but ignores the spectre of settler colonialism in regions such as the Americas, Oceania, and Hokkaido, writing in the past tense that “Japanese and European settlers of all places and periods shared the ‘demographic imperative’: being a tiny minority, they lived in fear of being ‘swamped’ by the natives who vastly outnumbered them.” Accordingly, while alluding to “sparse indigenous population[s]” being “displaced or decimated by colonists” in “British white dominions,” Uchida has little to say about the phenomenon of “natives” being “swamped” by settlers in places like Hokkaido. See Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 2011), 18-20. 26 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 27, 29.

16 eliminatory violence can, however, also take the form of less direct policies which knowingly cut

Indigenous peoples off from the bare necessities of life, such as the state-sponsored slaughter of the once vast buffalo herds in Canada and the United States.27 Not always so outwardly violent, the forceful removal of Indigenous peoples from tracts of productive land or the criminalization of their autonomous food procurement often produces the same results. As Lorenzo Veracini notes, settlers’ elimination of Indigenous bodies can also take the form of purely legal or discursive processes which de-indigenize them.28 Or, in other words, strategies which conceptually erase Indigenous peoples in order to extinguish their title to the land. This includes

− as Veracini notes of the state’s re-definition of the Hokkaido Ainu as “former aborigines” through a sovereign decision − the “executive termination” of Indigenous peoples.29

Seemingly contradictorily, strategies of physical elimination and conceptual erasure are frequently supplemented with biopolitical regimes aimed at improving the physical health of

Indigenous populations, causing these populations to grow rather than disappear. This can be a simple self-legitimizing gesture, with settlers asserting that the colonized benefit from their own colonization. Settlers can revel in self-satisfaction at their own “civilized” benevolence in reviving moribund “savage” races and celebrate colonialism itself as a desirable thing for abjected Indigenous peoples. However, the biopolitical “improvement” of Indigenous

27 For example, Carolyn Merchant notes that, ordered to slaughter any buffalo they saw, American soldiers were told, “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” See Carolyn Merchant, American Environmental History: An Introduction (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2007), 20. 28 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 35-50. 29 Ibid, 49. Veracini notes that “‘Aborigines’ – literally, people who have no other origin – becom[ing] ‘former Aborigines’ without moving” is “a logical impossibility.”

17 populations is frequently aimed at their eventual elimination. As with regimes of protection enforced upon the Ainu by the Meiji state, Indigenous culture becomes a noxious or corrupting agent responsible for the withering away of Indigenous bodies. Such cultural practices must be wiped clean in order for Indigenous peoples to be “saved.” Stripped of culture, language, or anything else distinguishing them from exogenous populations, the targets of such campaigns of cultural genocide might in time demonstrate their fitness for biological absorption into the settler body politic, disappearing completely.

In academic writing, the term “settler colony” has come into use due to the widespread disavowal of colonies of settlement as colonies. While scholars have only in the past two decades begun to discuss epistemological differences between more orthodox “exploitation” colonies and “settler” colonies in earnest, until the turn of the 20th century European and

Japanese theorists alike almost exclusively defined colonialism as settler colonialism. As Tadhg

Foley writes, in the 19th century, what we might understand today as settler colonies were primarily referred to simply as “colonies,” “colonizations,” or by the more economistic term

“plantations.” For example, England, the metropole, “was to ‘plant’ ‘New Englands’, new

English nations abroad.”30 Eventually, the term colony began to slip “from official into general usage” and, as the perturbed 19th century colonial theorist Herman Merivale complained, came to refer to “every species of foreign possession, military stations, such as Gibraltar and Malta; conquered districts, possessed by native inhabitants with a slight admixture of the conquerors,

30 Tadhg Foley, “‘An Unknown and Feeble Body’: How Settler Colonialism Was Theorized in the Nineteenth Century,” in Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture, ed. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13.

18 such as Ceylon; mercantile emporia, such as the factories of European powers on the coast of

Africa,” and so on. Merivale reaffirmed that a colony should only be understood as “a territory of which the soil is entirely or principally owned by settlers from the mother country.”31 And, indeed, when Kaitakushi director Kuroda Kiyotaka asked his chief American advisor Horace

Capron to provide him with “a history of the laws and regulations enforced under the British system for the Government of foreign settlers in Australia and India” to assist in developing policies for Hokkaido, Capron replied to correct him, writing that “India was never, in the proper sense of the word, colonized.”32 British historian Hugh Egerton echoed this sentiment, arguing that a colony can be defined as a body politic of settlers permanently residing on what was hitherto foreign soil and, in principal, expanding to make up the majority of the population.

Territories such as British India, Egerton specified, were not colonies because the relatively small number of British colonists had an “animus revertendi”: an intention to return home.33 In stark contrast, settler colonial invaders, as Wolfe argued, “come to stay.”34

Japanese definitions of colonialism have likewise slipped over time from exclusively describing settler colonies to definitions which disavow the very coloniality of such spaces.

Informed by Egerton and other European colonial theorists, Nitobe Inazō explained that the

English word “colony” corresponds to two separate Japanese terms: shokuminchi, referring to a colonial territory, and shokumin, referring to a population of colonists. These Japanese terms,

31 Quoted in Ibid, 11. 32 Horace Capron, ed., Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi (Tokyo: Kaitakushi, 1975), 638, 648. 33 Hugh Edward Eagerton, A Short History of British Colonial Policy (London: Methuen & Co., 1897), 8-9. 34 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2.

19 moreover, are of relatively recent origin. Strongly influenced by European colonial discourse trickling into Tokugawa Japan through Nagasaki and coming into use in Japanese as a loan translation for the Dutch word Volksplanting, the Japanese neologism shokumin was coined to translate the European concept in Dutch-Japanese dictionaries. The Japanese term was, in turn, an inversion of the Zhou Dynasty era Chinese word “民殖” (minshoku in Japanese, mínzhí in

Chinese), which, Nitobe explained, was itself coined by Guan Zhong of the State of Qi to describe policies meant to encourage population growth, with no reference to territory. By the early Meiji period, however, the Chinese character “殖” (shoku) had largely been replaced by its homonym “植,” changing the meaning from growing a population to, more in line with the

Dutch term, literally “planting people” like seeds into the soil of a new territory.35 Becoming entangled in a wide array of European discourses which equated “settlement” with “colonization proper,” as Nitobe put it, shokumin was paired with a second term, shokuminchi. The latter came to refer to the space of the colony rather than a community of settlers. Viewing colonialism in biological terms, Nitobe concluded, “The shokuminchi is a new ‘species’ within the genus of

‘territory’” (Shokuminchi wa ryōdo [genus] no naka atarashiki mono [species] wo iu).36

Based on such definitions, one might assume that Nitobe understood Hokkaido as a colony par excellence. However, before long he disavowed the coloniality of the Hokkaido settler colony altogether. In his 1912 text, The Japanese Nation, Nitobe claimed that Japan only

35 Nitobe Inazō, Shokumin seisaku kōgi oyobi ronbunshū, ed. Yanaihara Tadao (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1943), 40- 41. 36 Ibid, 49. Both “genus” and “species” are rendered in English in the original.

“joined the ranks of colonial powers” in 1895 with the annexation of Taiwan, disingenuously remarking that Taiwan “served the purpose of educating us in the art of colonialism.”37 This was disingenuous because Nitobe was chosen to act as a colonial official in Taiwan on the basis of his experience in Hokkaido, where he was educated, where he began his career teaching colonial studies (shokumingaku), and where he actively participated in the drafting of Ainu policy. It was

Hokkaido which was the colonial “laboratory” in which Japanese planners could test policies which were later widely applied to the Empire’s “blue water” colonies, such as Taiwan.

Hardly unique to Nitobe, as Ueki Tetsuya argues, this disavowal is reflective of the wider historiography of Hokkaido. This historiography, remains deeply indebted to German discourses of “internal colonization” (German: innere Kolonisation, Japanese: naikoku shokuminchi), referring to the German Empire’s colonization of Polish territories.38 Troublingly, far from a relic of Japan’s imperial past, the narrative of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido as a form of

“internal colonialism” remains commonplace and continues to legitimize the Japanese settler colonial presence on Ainu land. Reading the colony as an always-already natural extension of the

Japanese national polity, we are meant to assume that Ainu territories were merely redeemed by

37 Nitobe Inazō, The Japanese Nation (New York City: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 231-232. Written in English, this is one of several increasingly propagandistic texts written by Nitobe as part of his efforts to justify Japanese colonial expansionism to an American readership. As Kanakura Yoshiei shows, Nitobe was far from naïve in regard to the coloniality of Hokkaido or the impact that Japanese settlement of Ainu territories on displaced Ainu communities, referring to the latter as an “invasion (shin’nyū). See Kanakura Yoshiei, Asahikawa - Ainu minzoku no kingendaishi (Tokyo: Kōbunken, 2006), 55-56. 38 Ueki Tetsuya, Shokumingaku no kioku: Ainu sabetsu to gakumon no sekinin (Tokyo: Ryokufū, 2015), 86-108. For details on German “internal colonization” and its own lasting influence on German (as well as Anglophone) academic scholarship, see Andrew Zimmerman, “German Sociology and Empire: From Internal Colonization to Overseas Colonization and Back Again,” in Sociology and Empire: Colonial Studies and the Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline, ed: George Steinmetz (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013), 166- 187.

21 the Meiji state in 1869 rather than annexed and colonized. Through such discourses, the history of the Japanese colonization of Ainu Mosir, the sovereignty of the Ainu, and more often than not, the Ainu themselves are made to disappear.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the modern field of Ainu studies (Ainu-gaku) can be directly traced back to the colonial studies program at the former Hokkaido Imperial University

(previously called Sapporo Agricultural College, and today, Hokkaido University) where Nitobe studied and briefly taught. While the colonial studies program was formally abolished in 1948, having outlived the formal collapse of the Japanese Empire by three years, mainstream scholarship on the Ainu remains highly indebted to this field − sometimes explicitly, though more often through sources quietly nestled in bibliographies.39 However, there has been growing pushback to such historiographical frameworks. Within Japanese scholarship, a generation of radical post-war historians, most notably Shin’ya Gyō, aimed to radicalize (if not abolish) the field of Ainu studies by attacking its colonial origins head-on. Shin’ya became known as a prominent left-wing revisionist historian following the publication of The History of Ainu

Resistance: Towards Fomenting the Ainu Republic (Ainu minzoku teikōshi: Ainu Kyōwakoku e no taidō) in 1972.40

Not content to simply write against colonialism, Shin’ya became involved in activist circles and became acquainted with the abovementioned Yūki Shōji, one of many Ainu activists influenced by the American Indian Movement (AIM). Shin’ya stood by Yūki’s side during his

39 Ueki, Shokumingaku no kioku, 68. 40 See Shin’ya Gyō, Ainu minzoku teikōshi: Ainu Kyōwakoku he no taidō (Tokyo: Sanichi shobō, 1972).

22 fiery denunciation of Takakura Shin’ichirō, the celebrated “father” of Ainu studies, at an academic conference at which Takakura was present.41 Rejecting colonial epistemologies rooted in the doctrine of terra nullius, which, as Yūki wrote, treat the Ainu as “a bygone race which should be buried and forgotten (hōmurisaru),” Shin’ya’s work is notable for taking an Ainu- centred approach with a commitment to, both historically and in the contemporary moment, the political viability of a decolonized Ainu nation-state.42 Shin’ya, in turn, denaturalized the

Japanese presence on Ainu territories, steadfastly referring to Hokkaido as Ainu Mosir. Meaning

“the peaceful land of the people,” the term Ainu Mosir has long been used by the Ainu to refer to the wider sphere of Ainu cultural and political life. In Shin’ya’s time, however, this same term came to be adopted by Ainu sovereigntists to refer to a tentative decolonized nation-state.43 To these ends, The History of Ainu Resistance was a direct challenge to Takakura’s seminal text,

The History of Ainu Policy (Ainu seisakushi). While Takakura privileged the self-evidence of a

Japanese entity known as “Hokkaido” and shows a “primitive” Ainu progressively subsumed into the “modern” Japanese nation-state and, as by fate, vanishing, Shin’ya instead stressed that

Hokkaido remains a Japanese colony, and positioned contemporary Ainu activism as part of a larger tradition of anti-Japanese resistance. And, if Takakura did indeed treat the Ainu as a

“bygone” race, Shin’ya’s text, on the other hand, was future-oriented, asserting that this

41 Ibid, 43. For more on Shin’ya’s influence and his association with Yūki, see Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), 236. 42 Yūki Shōji, Ainu sengen (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1980), 207. 43 Mark Watson, Japan’s Ainu Minority in Tokyo: Diasporic Indigeneity and Urban Politics (London: Routledge, 2014), 90-91.

23 resistance would lead to the teleological moment of the reclamation of Ainu sovereign nationhood.

Assertions of the completion, if not the non-coloniality, of settler colonies is no doubt in part based on the settler colonial logic of elimination, where settlers are to entirely supplant those they colonize. And, the widespread non-recognition of settler colonial Hokkaido as a colony may very well be, as Adele Perry writes of colonial amnesia in British Columbia, “more an artefact of the success of imperialism than a sign of its absence.”44 On the other hand, writing of the sovereignty claims of Kahnawà:ke Mohawks straddling the settler-drawn Canada-United States border, Audra Simpson argues that the continued existence (and resistance) of Indigenous peoples in the face of totalizing colonial structures is a sign not of the success but of the continued “failure” of the settler colonial project.45 Indigenous peoples worldwide, including the

Ainu, continue to assert sovereignty over their land, and their very survival challenges the myth at the heart of discourses of terra nullius: the non-existence of a colonized people.

Unearthing Terra Nullius

By the 19th century, the United States and United Kingdom had largely ceased signing treaties with Indigenous nations, and instead claimed Indigenous land as terra nullius on the basis that “Indians” categorically remain in a state of nature and accordingly lack rights to

44 Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 6. 45Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2014), 7-8.

24 sovereignty and property. Appropriated by the new Meiji regime, as Michele Mason writes, the doctrine of terra nullius “facilitated” the “colonizing and settling [of] Hokkaido and the greater goal of extending the territorial and expropriatory economic boundaries of the Japanese empire.”46 According to Andrew Fitzmaurice, the roots of the doctrine of terra nullius, while a relatively new juridical concept, run deep into the history of settler colonialism and from early on were tied directly to the exploitation of the soil. Since the earliest development of what became international law, such as the widely influential writings of Francisco de Vitoria, the ability of a colonial occupier to “exploit nature” was what granted them sovereign rights to Indigenous territory.47 Before long, however, English, French, and Dutch jurists, while not always denying the literal presence of those inhabiting the colonized land, began to systematically deny

Indigenous peoples title to their own territories, claiming that it simply “belonged to nobody.”48

Accordingly, “conquerors” came to re-imagine themselves as “settlers,” coming into possession of land otherwise unoccupied.49 Made explicit in the writing of John Locke and his successors who denied sovereign rights to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas – especially as it pertained to property ownership – colonialists increasingly formalized such discourses in the late

46 Michele M. Mason, Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation-State (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 69. This legal understanding of Ainu sovereign rights continues to form the basis of Japanese claims to Ainu land in the southern Kurile Islands to this day. See Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The Northern Territories Dispute and Russo-Japanese Relations Vol 2. Neither War nor Peace, 1985-1998, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 513. For a more recent discussion of terra nullius as related to the colonization of Hokkaido, see Katsuya Hirano in Tristan R. Grunow et al., “Hokkaidō 150: Settler Colonialism and Indigeneity in Modern Japan and Beyond,” Critical Asian Studies 51, no. 4 (February 2019): 597- 636. 47 Andrew Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 10, 44. 48 Ibid, 8. 49 Ibid, 22.

18th century, and into the present, through the doctrine of terra nullius. With colonizers eschewing the customary signing of treaties with Indigenous political leaders, an act which formally – if only formally – recognized Indigenous political formations and sovereignty, they instead claimed the land as ownerless.50 Rendered little more than fauna, as Fitzmaurice succinctly put it, terra nullius is the “antithesis of self-determination” and a doctrine of colonialism under which Indigenous “claims to property and sovereignty [are] almost entirely buried.”51

The Japanese Empire annexed Hokkaido in 1869 in total disregard of autonomous Ainu communities across the island on the premise that the Ainu had no territories to cede. This annulment of Ainu sovereignty was confirmed with the enactment of the Hokkaido Estates

Regulation (Hokkaidō jisho kisoku) in 1872 by which the Japanese government formally claimed all Ainu land across Hokkaido as Crown land on the basis that it was ownerless or unoccupied.

This claim was replicated by other laws throughout the Meiji period, most notably the 1899

Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act (Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo-hō), which “protected” the

Ainu by giving the state unprecedented control over the Crown land on which they lived.

However, regardless of the declarative power of such laws and ordinances, this dissertation stresses the performative rather than declarative nature of the doctrine of terra nullius.

50 For example, Great Britain in Australia and British Columbia, the United States in California, and Japan in Hokkaido. 51 Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 31.

Terra nullius is at its core a denial of Indigenous sovereignty. It is a conceptual erasure of

Indigenous bodies from the purportedly empty territory to be colonized. It is fundamentally a denial of the humanity of Indigenous peoples, and thereby universal rights afforded to them, either as individuals or as communities, under both domestic and international law. However, with the legitimacy of the colony premised on the non-existence of a colonized people, their continued presence on the land threatens to destabilize and delegitimize the settler colonial project. Accordingly, the doctrine of terra nullius must be reaffirmed in perpetuity. For example, while Tokugawa era narratives of Ezo actively highlighted the presence of the Ainu and their

“foreignness” or “exoticness” to establish Japanese legitimacy as a hegemon, in stark contrast,

Meiji era narratives overwhelmingly focused on the land itself as empty. Japanese settlers widely adopted Anglo-American pioneer narratives of Ainu land as “virgin soil,” as a rugged, unpeopled outland, or, as Nitobe himself wrote of Hokkaido, as land “untouched by human hand.”52

Accordingly, through discourses of terra nullius, the land itself became the object of settler colonial desire, not the colonized people. Reflecting this, one anonymous historian approvingly wrote that Tondenhei settler-soldiers – an occupying army on Ainu land – “day by day, spadeful by spadeful, subjugated the earth” (emphasis added).53 And, indeed, from the earliest phases of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido, settlers were actively encouraged to form a cathectic attachment to the soil underfoot, such as the Kaitakushi magistrate Matsumoto Jūrō’s assertion that,

Colonization cannot simply be said to be the opening of fields. Nor, for that

52 Quoted in Mason, Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan, 57. 53 Ehime-ken shihen-san i’inkai, Ehime kenshi shakai keizai, vol. 5, Shakai (Matsuyama: Ehime-ken, 1988), 640.

matter, can it be said to be expanding the profits of our fisheries. These two are but one aspect of colonization. From the beginning, the foundation of colonization is planting our hearts into Hokkaido (emphasis added).54

While the conceptual transformation of Ainu territories into untouched virgin soil may appear to be a flight of fancy, this conceptual displacement had profound material consequences for Ainu across Hokkaido. Yūki Shōji called the formal rendering of Ainu land terra nullius with the 1872 Hokkaido Estates Regulation a “concrete Ainu extinction strategy” (gutaiteki na Ainu minzoku metsubō seisaku).55 Rather than the gun, or for that matter, makeshift chemical or biological weapons such as strychnine-laced flour or smallpox-infested blankets, genocidal violence in Hokkaido took the form of wrestling control of the land away from those who depended on it for survival. The 1872 reconfiguration of Ainu land into Crown land gave the state unfettered control over Ainu activity on what were hitherto their own territories. As Yūki noted, immediately after the Hokkaido Estates Regulation was enacted, the Kaitakushi announced a series of ordinances which severely limited (and in some cases outright banned) unsanctioned hunting, fishing, and logging on this land on the basis that the flora and fauna of

Hokkaido was the exclusive property of the Crown. Cutting the Ainu off from the bare necessities of life predictably led to famines in communities across Hokkaido in the years to come. To avoid dying of hunger, Ainu were to conform to the norms of Japanese economic and cultural life. This included not only becoming smallholder farmers and, in effect, taking part in the agrarian colonization of their own homeland, but acquiescing to cultural and linguistic

54 Matsumoto Jūrō, Ezo mokuzugami, Dōshahon 027, 0A019200000000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan. 55 Yūki, Ainu Sengen, 70.

28 assimilation campaigns. Thus, it is impossible to disentangle policies of settlement from policies of dispossession, colonialism from developmentalism, assimilation from genocide, and the land from the body.

Protection: A Matter of Life and Death

The early Meiji state claimed authority over a disparate group of people from across the newly founded Japanese Empire and transformed them into a population of citizens by promising to “protect” them. So, too, was the land, and all things on it, to be protected by the state.

Throughout Japan, the basis of the Meiji state’s political legitimacy and territorial sovereignty explicitly took the form of a Hobbesian security state, with a strong central regime forcibly bringing, as Carl Schmitt put it, “peace, security, and order” to a population re-defined as national “citizens.”56 The primary way the Meiji state defined the body of citizens to be protected was through koseki (family registers). These family tree-like documents, according to David

Chapman, “acted as an historical map etching out the contours of the limits and delimits of a demographically defined ... Japanese self.”57 Koseki were not only the means by which the state conferred citizenship on what was rendered a cohesive, discrete population within the boundaries of the national territories that the new Meiji regime claimed, but also allowed the state to both geographically and demographically map out the national population and develop policies based on its distribution. Making the Japanese population visible enabled the state to more effectively

56 Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 31. 57 David Chapman, “Geographies of the Self and Other: Mapping Japan through the Koseki,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 9, no. 29 (2011): n.p.

29 engage in such activities as collecting taxes and drafting commoners into Japan’s new civilian army. Moreover, by explicitly defining the head of a family as male, koseki also reorganized disparate and idiosyncratic familial groupings across the empire into explicitly heteronormative, patriarchal nuclear units. These units became microcosms of the great national family, headed by the Meiji emperor: the patriarch of his many children. And, as they pertained to Hokkaido, by tying koseki to permanent domiciles (honseki) and forcing citizens to seek government approval before moving their place of residence, the Meiji state gained greater control over the geographic distribution and movement of the mainland Japanese population into and out of the colony.58 In other words, household registration through koseki during the early Meiji period aimed to define a body of citizens, create stratifications of state power from the Meiji Emperor down to the household, and control movement. Anticipating that many would resist the interpellative registration process, the 1871 Family Registration Law (koseki-hō) warned that for “the people ... to be protected,” they must be “recorded in detail.” Those not registered in koseki, “cannot receive this protection and are as if placed outside the nation.”59

As Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow argue, it is especially in “zones of ambiguous control” that discourses of protection become explicit. Promises of protection constitute a key element in projecting claims of legitimacy over a disputed territory against rivals.60 Perhaps

58 Ōkurasho, ed., Kaitakushi jigyō hōkoku dai’ippen, vol. 1, Enkaku-chiri-koseki (Tokyo: Ōkurashō, 1885), 543. 59 Quoted in Mori Kenji, “The Development of the Modern Koseki,” trans. Karl Jacob Krogness in Japan’s Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki, Identification and Documentation, eds: David Chapman and Karl Jacob Krogness, 59-75 (Abingdon: Routledge). 60 Adam Clulow and Lauren Benton, “Introduction: The Long, Strange History of Protection,” in Protection and Empire: A Global History, eds. Bain Attwood et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xiii-xiv.

30 unsurprisingly, then, promises of the protection of both Japanese settlers and the Ainu were central to how the Meiji state claimed territorial sovereignty over Hokkaido. As Shirani Takeshi, best known as the spokesperson for the 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act, noted in a 1900 editorial for the magazine Taiyō (The Sun), from the time Hokkaido was annexed in

1869, the Kaitakushi granted protection to those willing to move their permanent domiciles to the island by providing them with essential staples such as rice, salt, and miso for three years following their arrival. In addition to these life-sustaining supplies, they would receive land grants, materials for building houses, free transportation to the colony, low interest government loans, and subsidized healthcare. Those who settled as farmers would receive farming tools and seeds to sow, while those who arrived with the intention to fish would be granted exclusive fishing grounds. This aid was initially intended, Shirani noted, to attract permanent settlers to

Soya, Nemuro, and Hakodate: not coincidentally the northern, south-eastern, and south-western extremes of the triangle-shaped island of Hokkaido. Populating these outer regions with Japanese settlers would strengthen the Meiji state’s claims of sovereignty over the whole of the island, and this was achieved precisely by “protecting” colonists from the hardships of life in what the state itself claimed was a primordial wilderness. Even after the Kaitakushi was abolished in 1882 the

Japanese government continued to target particular areas for colonization by “protecting” those colonists agreeing to permanently settle increasingly remote tracts of land.61 As discussed in chapter three, this was made most explicit with the Tondenhei settler-soldiers, whom the state

61 Shirani Takeshi, “Hokkaidō imin hogo no enkaku,” Taiyō, 6, no. 6. (1900): 123-125.

31 instructed to give up their lives at but a moment’s notice. The emperor, they learned, gave them this responsibility in exchange for receiving “protection without parallel in this world.”62

However, as Isabell Lorey argues, the projection of sovereign power through security can be superseded by or supplemented with rule through insecurity. According to Lorey, this has indeed been true of the biopolitical state and even more explicitly into the present with the rise of neoliberal forms of governance. Not unlike Foucault, who traced the “juridico-political structures of the West” to the early modern European colonization of the Americas, Lorey argues that neoliberal governmentality through precarization has been applied to the metropole from

“extreme conditions of exploitation” in what she vaguely refers to as “the colonies.”63 Also like

Foucault, however, Lorey does not interrogate this question any further. Nor, in discussing the

Hobbesian security state, does she consider what, exactly, Hobbes believed the state must protect citizens from. That is, the sovereign should not simply protect citizens from foreign armies at the gate, but from the “state of nature” itself: the staggeringly violent primordial chaos which

Hobbes supposed humanity to have been trapped in before the advent of systems of government, property, and civil society resembling those of 17th century Europe. According to Hobbes, in a state of nature

there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of

62 Tonden hohei daiyondaitai, Tondenhei oyobi kazoku kyōrei, 1898, Hokushi panfu 164-02, 0F001640020000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library. Sapporo, Japan. 63 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 103.; Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. Aileen Derieg (London: Verso, 2015), 36.

moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.64

Evidenced by fierce European civil wars such as that which shook England between 1642 and 1651 (during which Hobbes wrote Leviathan), the state of nature threatened to bubble up to the surface through the cracks and fissures in European society, submerging the continent into chaos. According to Hobbes, such a state was demonstrable for all to see in the as-yet uncolonized parts of the North American continent. He claimed that the “savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner.”65 Lacking in government, society, commerce, and culture, and locked into a state of unending bloodshed,

Hobbes, James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson argues, “created a spectacular repository of negative values attributed to Indigenous peoples.”66 Highly influential in the development of modern European conceptions of property and the state, Hobbes’ work produced a version of indigeneity which marks those who purportedly remain in a state of nature as categorically unable to own property, as lacking rights to welfare over their communities and their own bodies, and as endlessly colonizable. Accordingly, the modern security state which protects a body of national citizens is precisely that which also dispossesses and thereby precarizes colonized peoples.

64 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed: Christopher Brooke (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 186. 65 Ibid. 66 James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson, “The Context of the State of Nature,” in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed: Marie Battiste (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000), 11-38.

Dispossession, as Athena Athanasiou writes, describes the “processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers that define cultural intelligibility and that regulate the distribution of vulnerability.” This includes not simply the “loss of land and community,” but also the loss of “ownership of one’s living body” and other forms of de/re-subjectifying violence and dislocation.67 Developed in dialogue with

Judith Butler, Athanasiou’s definition hinges on Hobbesian and Lockean discourses of what C.B.

MacPherson referred to as “possessive individualism,” equating the sovereign subjecthood of an individual person with the possession of private property. This thereby equates “the human” with

(in explicitly gendered terms) “a man with property and propriety.”68 Those excluded from such frameworks are “exposed to injury, violence, poverty, indebtedness, and death.”69 Indigenous peoples who are made to disappear under pervasive discourses of terra nullius become what

Butler calls “those whose proper place is non-being.”70

According to Aileen Moreton-Robinson, who writes of settler colonial Australia, discourses of possessive individualism are both gendered and racialized through what she refers to as “white possessiveness.” From the time James Cook first claimed Australia for the British

Crown in 1770 until the present day, narratives of Aboriginal peoples as trapped in a state of nature have formed the basis of European claims to sovereignty over the whole of the Australian

67 Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession the Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 2. 68 Ibid, 8, 32. 69 Ibid, 19. 70 Ibid, 2.

34 landmass.71 Accordingly, “being perceived as living in a state of nature relegates one’s existence to being an inseparable part of nature and therefore incapable of possessing it.”72 This assumption continues to structure the institution of Crown land in Australia today, Moreton-

Robinson writes, and justifies the Australian government in denying Indigenous peoples access to their own territories under the administration of the settler colonial state.

To help explain this dynamic, we might look to the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio

Agamben. This may be counter-intuitive, as Agamben is widely criticized for his inattention to

Europe’s history of colonial violence, notably breaking with influences such as Hannah Arendt who herself traced the genocidal racism of the Nazi regime to European colonial practices overseas. However, while muted, the history of settler colonialism lies at the very heart of

Agamben’s theoretical framework, particularly through his critical engagement with the work of

Hobbes, Locke, and Schmitt. In Homo Sacer, Agamben suggests that the state of nature, by which all three thinkers characterized the pre-colonial Americas, is analogous with the alegality at the heart of European sovereign and juridical formations.73 This connection is further explicated in his book State of Exception, where Agamben ties the state of nature to his own descriptions of the modern biopolitical state’s legal capacity for murderous violence against those pushed outside of the legal order. He refers to this state of exception as “a kenomatic state, an emptiness of law ... a legal mythologeme analogous to the idea of a state of nature”

71 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015), 114. 72 Ibid, 117-119. 73 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 27.

(emphasis added).74 And, while Agamben doesn’t dwell on what becomes of human beings imagined to be in such a state, we might surmise that they become reduced to what he calls “bare life”: those bereft of rights, abandoned by the state, de-subjectified, and forcibly held on the very edge of not just the political order, but on the border between human and animal life.75 In other words, the enfranchisement of sovereign citizens, protected by the state, is ineluctably linked to the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples in settler colonies. Accordingly, like the state of exception, the state of nature, too, is produced by the sovereign rather than, as Hobbes argued, something which merely reflects the observable conditions of the world.

Seemingly paradoxically, however, from the early Meiji period, the Japanese dispossession of the Ainu took the form of state protection. While settlers were “protected” by the state through grants of land which had been stolen from the Ainu, tying the protection of settlers to the precarization of the Ainu, such policies of dispossession were intertwined with policies which explicitly claimed to protect the Ainu as quasi-citizens of the Japanese nation- state, worthy of life. Marking them as wards of the state, the Japanese sovereign became something of a fatherly captor. Accordingly, regimes of biopolitical protection further legitimized Japanese sovereignty over Ainu land. For example, in 1870, the Japanese government began to develop policies which enforced post-natal care for Ainu mothers and their babies. Aimed at decreasing the allegedly high post-natal mortality rates in Ainu communities, the state asserted that such intervention could make a stagnant Ainu population thrive.76 In other

74 Ibid, 6. 75 Ibid. 76 Kōno Motomichi, ed., Tai Ainu seisaku hōki ruishū (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 1981), 50.

36 words, the Meiji state claimed that it could produce better Ainu than the Ainu could themselves.

As discussed in chapter four, it was over the next decade, however, that the Kaitakushi so severely limited Ainu hunting and fishing, leading to famines in Ainu communities across

Hokkaido. The rationale of such bans was, incredulously, the “protection” of animals which the

Ainu depended on as life-sustaining staples of their diet, such as salmon. Commoditized as precious finite resources to be reserved for private industry and otherwise the exclusive property of the Crown, these animals were to be “protected” by law, even as it was Kaitakushi policy that endangered salmon and deer stocks through commercial overexploitation.77

Meanwhile, Ainu customs were to be “cleaned,” setting them on “the path to being human,” as an imperial edict put it. Those who resisted assimilation faced “corporal punishment”

(chōbatsu).78 Moreover, during famines which were a result of Japanese colonial policy, the state provided subsidies and fostered and protected Ainu life on the basis that the famished Ainu would voluntarily assimilate into Japanese agrarian society. Only those who acquiesced would receive similar (if downgraded) material subsidies which Japanese settlers enjoyed. In other words, while bans on Ainu food procurement were meant to cut the Ainu off from the land, Ainu protection measures were aimed at the blanket assimilation of survivors, transforming Ainu bodies into raw biological material, free of Ainu culture, language, religion, or anything else which might sully them.

Decolonizing the History of Settler Colonial Hokkaido

77 Ōkurasho, ed., Kaitakushi jigyō hōkoku furoku furei ruiju jō (Tokyo: Ōkurashō, 1885), 858-859. 78 Kōno, Tai Ainu seisaku hōki ruishū, 49.

The present study builds upon a growing field of critical scholarship on the Ainu which aims to historically examine Hokkaido as a settler colony. In this task, this dissertation draws much from in-depth thematic analyses of Meiji era assimilation policies such as Ogawa

Masahito’s 1997 analysis of Ainu education and Yamada Shin’ichi’s 2011 study of Japanese policy regarding Ainu hunting and fishing.79 Taken together, Ogawa and Yamada’s work might be understood as histories of Meiji era assimilation policies targeting, respectively, Ainu minds and Ainu bodies. By grounding such policy within the political economy and discursive field of colonial Hokkaido, these studies are highly effective in denaturalizing the ideological assumptions on which Hokkaido was colonized. In this regard, complementing such work greatly is the scholarship of Oguma Eiji, whose early historical studies have made a wide and lasting impact on the fields of Japanese history and cultural studies. Particularly, in his 1995 book A

Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-Images (Tan'itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen) and his 1998 book The

Boundaries of the ‘Japanese’ (“Nihonjin” no kyōkai), Oguma aims to historicize the contentious concepts of “Japan” or the “Japanese,” writing in opposition to widespread late modern amnesia of Japan’s imperialist past and assertions of post-war Japan as a racially, ethnically, or linguistically homogeneous society.80 Oguma’s work critically explores imperial Japan’s subsumption of peoples across the Japanese colonial empire into the category of “Japanese”

79 See and Ogawa Masahito, Kindai Ainu kyōiku seidoshi kenkyū (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Daigaku Tosho Kankōkai, 1997) and Yamada Shin’ichi, Kindai Hokkaidō to Ainu minzoku: shuryō kisei to tochi mondai (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Daigaku Shuppankai, 2011). 80 In Japanese, see Oguma Eiji, Tan'itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen: ‘Nihonjin’ no jigazō no keifu (Tokyo: Shin'yōsha, 1995) and Oguma Eiji, ‘Nihonjin’ no kyōkai: Okinawa Ainu Taiwan Chōsen shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undo made (Tokyo: Shin'yōsha, 1998). In English, see Oguma Eiji, A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-images, trans. David Askew (Melbourne: Trans Pacific, 2002), and Oguma Eiji, The Boundaries of the Japanese: Korea, Taiwan and the Ainu 1868-1945, trans. Leonie R. Strickland (Melbourne: Trans Pacific, 2017).

38 subjects, and the role of racialized (or, conversely, “Japanified”) groups in the discursive bordering process by which a “Japanese” empire/nation-state historically emerged. However, as the present study examines the discursive and institutional structures of Hokkaido within the global history of settler colonialism, perhaps the most valuable element of Oguma’s work is his transcolonial scope. While historians have long-since heaped praise on the activities of Euro-

Americans in Hokkaido, Oguma provides a more nuanced and critical reading of this same colonial history. Seeing the ambivalent triangular relations between Japanese settlers, the Ainu, and Euro-Americans as central to the formation of Japanese settler colonial policy, Oguma’s analysis allows for a new reading of the colonial history of Hokkaido. He argues that the presence of Euro-American imperialists, alternatively as colonizers of Japan’s Asian neighbours

(and potential colonizers of Japan), as direct competitors in the conquest of Ainu territories or the spiritual conquest of Ainu minds, and, perhaps most importantly, as settler colonial tutors, was central to Japanese colonial discourse and policy in both form and content.

In addition to the above scholars, the present dissertation also draws inspiration from the recent anthology Beyond Ainu Studies, edited by Mark Hudson, ann-elise lewallen, and Mark

Watson. Building upon the shift towards more critical scholarship of the colonization of

Hokkaido beginning in the 1970s, the editors of this volume advocate forms of participatory research aimed at treating the Ainu as active subjects rather than de-subjectified “research objects.”81 Reflecting Indigenous research frameworks developed in Anglophone settler

81 Hudson, Mark, et al., eds. Beyond Ainu Studies: Changing Academic and Public Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014), 2.

39 colonies, such as those outlined by Linda Tuhiwai Smith in her influential monograph

Decolonizing Methodologies, this approach aims to produce knowledge based upon the needs of individual Ainu communities.82 And, not simply analyzing the Ainu from the outside, this volume also includes essays written by Ainu scholars and activists. Some of these Ainu essayists themselves are involved in transcolonial Indigenous activism outside of Hokkaido. This volume accordingly beckons readers to question clear subjective assumptions about the Ainu as passive victims or as strictly tied to the territorial space of Hokkaido, just as it challenges the traditional role of the academic researcher.

This Ainu-centered approach to research begs the question of how to approach history writing. Historical studies of places such as Hokkaido overwhelmingly rely on written materials kept under lock and key in colonial archives. Moreover, with few exceptions, the Ainu language itself only began to be written down in the early 20th century. And, even then, such as in the work of Chiri Yukie, many of these texts were produced in an effort to preserve for posterity

Ainu oral traditions at a time when the Ainu language was targeted by the state for campaigns of linguicide. However, there is simply a dearth of texts within the archive produced by Ainu who lived through the events described throughout this dissertation. Even while numerous texts which claim to speak on behalf of the Ainu by Japanese or European interlocutors exist, the exact relationship between these texts and the intentions of the communities which they claim to represent is often unclear.

82 See Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012).

However, particularly during the growing Ainu nationalist movement of the 1960s and

1970s, the children and grandchildren of Meiji era Ainu wrote extensively on the experiences of their families and ancestral communities. Even when written in the context of 20th century Ainu activism, many of these texts are firmly rooted in personal experiences and family histories, such as the abovementioned writings of Kayano or Yūki. They provide sharp, uncompromising critiques of discursive and institutional racisms established in the Meiji period which, most pertinent to these writers (though often much less obvious to historians), continue to structure the deeply asymmetrical relationship between the Ainu, Japanese settlers, and the settler colonial state to this day. The present study utilizes such texts in better understanding the effects of settler colonial discourse and policy on Ainu communities in the longue durée of the history of

Japanese Hokkaido. Sometimes ignored by historians, these texts also highlight the Ainu tradition of resistance to Japanese settler colonial practices.

With this being said, this dissertation is not a history of the Ainu. It is, rather, a history of

Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido, focusing on exogenous strategies of dispossession of the Ainu as an Indigenous people. Broadly speaking, surveys of Ainu history (Ainu-shi or derivatives thereof in Japanese), often by otherwise well-meaning authors, tend to fall into the trap of equating Ainu history with the history of Japanese colonialism. This inevitably reads

Ainu history prior to Japanese colonization as prehistory, and thereby understands the Ainu prior to their own colonization by the Japanese (or the Russians) as prehistoric. This tendency is hardly unique to the history of the Ainu. Generations of historical, archeological, and anthropological writing on pre-contact “New World” Indigenous peoples have been explicitly published under the rubric of “prehistory.” Ian McNiven and Lynette Russel comment that such rubrics in Anglophone scholarship, whatever disclaimers modern scholars might apply to them,

41 are “colonial products of social evolutionism” which “create both a temporal and cultural disjuncture” between Indigenous peoples and their colonizers.83 Within the context of Hokkaido, the equation of history and colonization reflects the historicist underpinning of developmental schemes favoured particularly by American advisors to the Kaitakushi such as A.G. Warfield. In his reports, Warfield directly equated capitalism, colonization, civilization, and history, writing that the development of infrastructure, such as roads into Hokkaido’s interior, was critically important in the process of capitalist accumulation. He added that “when commerce penetrates, it invariably creates a civilization and leaves a history.”84 Often reproduced unwittingly by historians, this quasi-Hegelian view sees the nation-state formation and capitalist development as productive of history itself. Such claims lie at the heart of discourses of terra nullius. The Ainu are rendered simply non-existent outside of the interconnected development of the Japanese nation-state and the free market capitalist economy, and unimaginable (or unknowable) outside of the view of the colonizer. The Meiji era Japanese colonization of Hokkaido was premised on interconnected historicist, evolutionist, and capitalist logics which discursively re-configured the

Ainu as anterior, as primitive, or as a disposable population. Accordingly, even while the present study draws from anti-colonial Indigenous critiques, including those of the Ainu, it does not seek to make a previously unknown pre-colonial Ainu knowable. Rather, the focus of the present study is precisely to interrogate pervasive settler colonial discourses and policies which render the Ainu invisible within their colonized homeland.

83 Ian J. McNiven and Lynette Russell, Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology (Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 2005), 220. 84 Capron, Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, 30-31.

Chapter Breakdown

This dissertation is divided into five chapters, covering the period roughly from Japan’s annexation of Hokkaido in 1869 to its victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Common throughout is the question of biopolitics as it relates to the land (and often literally, the soil) and sovereignty as tied to bodies of both Japanese settlers and the Ainu. And, while readers are encouraged to re-consider biopolitical theory as it relates to the body, they are also encouraged to reconsider a colony as it relates to national sovereignty. These chapters also read the Japanese colonization of Ainu Mosir as a transnational process. Early Japanese imperial expansion was both a form of competition and collaboration with supposed imperial rivals such as the Russian,

British, and American empires. Amidst “Great Game” rivalries between the British and Russian

Empires, post-Civil War Anglo-American tensions, and the ascension of American power in the

Pacific, the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido as an imperialist power in its own right was a transnational process. Very roughly ordered chronologically and divided thematically, the chapters encircle the nebulous space of the Ainu within the terra nullius of Japanese Hokkaido and Hokkaido within the north Pacific.

Chapter one, “Tokens of Sovereignty: Ainu Bodies Along the Russo-Japanese Frontier,” discusses contestation between the expanding Japanese and Russian empires over Ainu territories north of Hokkaido in Karafuto (Russian: Sakhalin) and the Kurile chain during the early-mid 1870s. In opposition to Russian claims to Ainu territory, the Japanese government asserted their own sovereignty on the basis that the Ainu, wherever they might be found, were collectively Japanese citizens and, accordingly, were under the protection of the Japanese state.

Not unlike crowns or other symbolic representations of the monarch or state, the Ainu became

“tokens of sovereignty.” However, immediately following the resolution of Japan’s territorial

43 dispute with Russia, the Ainu reverted to categorically non-sovereign “savages” in the eyes of colonial administrators such as Kuroda Kiyotaka. The Kaitakushi then moved the Karafuto Ainu at gunpoint to pestilent conditions in the inland southern Hokkaido village of Tsuishikari.

Chapter two, “‘Japanese Progress’: The Americanization of Settler Colonial Hokkaido,” describes the role of American advisors as what Emily Rosenberg (1982) terms “liberal- developmentalists” − with deep faith in both the uniqueness and replicability of Anglo-American productivity − in the colonization of Hokkaido.85 Policies established during their tenure formed the basis of the Japanese colonial project. Critically reading memoirs, reports, and letters, this chapter goes beyond received understandings of these figures as simple “advisors” and argues instead that they not only carried pioneer discourses of the American frontier with them to

Hokkaido and “Indianness” to the Ainu, but also saw their developmentalist mission as transferring their own whiteness and, with it, rights of sovereignty and property to the Japanese.

While Japanese-American interactions in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji period are often characterized as antagonistic, this chapter demonstrates an ambiguous partnership in the colonization of Hokkaido that formed between these two countries. This chapter also highlights the concrete ways in which these advisors influenced Japanese colonial policy, such as the administration of Ainu land as Crown land, the transformation of Hokkaido’s flora and fauna into state-administered commodities, and the training of a class of Japanese colonial elites who would continue to Americanize Hokkaido in their wake.

85 See Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890- 1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).

Chapter three, “‘The Lock on the Northern Gate’: Life on a Militarized Borderland” discusses daily life under regimes of military law in villages settled by Tondenhei settler-soldiers and their families. A hybridized system combining Heian Japanese tonden garrisons, American frontier militias, and most significantly, Russian Cossack hosts, the strict and sometimes oppressive environment in which Tondenhei families lived transformed them into highly effective agrarian settlers, as well as an occupying army enforcing Japanese claims to Ainu land.

While ostensibly anti-Russian, Japanese planners actively sought to “Russify” the Tondenhei, adopting institutional structures from the Don Cossacks and going so far as to hire Russian carpenters to build houses for these soldiers and their families.

Chapter four, “Where the Bones Lie: Head Hunters, Necromancers, and Settler Colonial

Dispossession,” examines the widespread European/Japanese phenomenon of the desecration of

Ainu graves and the commodification and global exchange of Ainu remains − especially the cranium. Treated as corpora nullius (ownerless bodies), stolen Ainu bones became valuable commodities on international markets and were utilized by Japanese physical anthropologists to define a “pure” Ainu race and dismiss racially mixed living Ainu as non-Ainu. Simultaneously, as a result of Japanese land use policies and bans on Ainu hunting and fishing, living Ainu across

Hokkaido experienced severe and often deadly famines beginning in the 1870s. This chapter closes by tracing the roots of the modern Ainu protest movement to this period as Ainu communities organized to halt the theft of human remains from their communities and recover land rights and economic self-sufficiency.

Chapter five, “Corpus Alienum: Land and Racial Hygiene in the Hokkaido Former

Aborigine Protection Act,” discusses discourses of race and hygiene surrounding the Hokkaido

Former Aborigine Protection Act of 1899. Largely the product of disavowals of the

45 overwhelmingly negative impact of Japanese colonial policy on Ainu communities,

“protectionist” discourses saw the Ainu as a race tragically unable to catch up to rapidly changing conditions of a modernizing Japanese Hokkaido and, as a result, doomed to extinction.

Many protectionists argued that collectively poor Ainu hygiene was the root cause of their impending extinction and argued that they were desperately in need of direct Japanese intervention into their daily lives. However, some also argued that these pestilent Ainu had themselves become a sort of “foreign body” biologically threatening the health of the settler body politic. The only way to “protect” both the Ainu and Japanese settlers alike was the suspension of Ainu civil rights and the assimilation of all aspects of Ainu daily life, particularly as it pertained to their relationship to the soil.

Chapter 1 Tokens of Sovereignty: Ainu Bodies Along the Russo- Japanese Frontier

As the Russian Empire pressed south into northeast Asia in the mid-19th century,

Japanese leaders were increasingly forced to contend with the prospect of the Russian annexation of Ainu Mosir, then loosely under Japanese suzerainty. This matter came to the forefront after

Matthew Perry’s “opening” of Japan in 1853, which forcibly drew the Japanese state into the

Eurocentric international system and thereby into bilateral diplomatic relations with St.

Petersburg. As the border with Russia inched closer to the Japanese mainland, the bakufu scrambled to react. The 1855 Russo-Japanese Treaty of Shimoda had left the troublesome question of the border unanswered. Thereafter, Ainu, Nivkh, and Orok lands on Karafuto

(Russian: Sakhalin) came to be co-administered and competitively colonized as an international condominium by the two rival powers, with Japanese and Russian settlers living side-by-side, though in two different countries.1 However, by the early Meiji period, this arrangement quickly proved untenable. As tensions rose, Japanese irredentists and colonialists anxiously pondered this contested borderland and wondered just how far south the Russo-Japanese border might fall when all was settled. Many pushed for Japan to aggressively assert its claims internationally, by force if necessary. However, the dispute was resolved with the signing of the Russo-Japanese

1 While this territory is widely referred to as Sakhalin today (including in Japanese as Saharin), this chapter will utilize the former Japanese name Karafuto in discussing historical Meiji era discourse and policy. 46 47

Treaty of St. Petersburg in 1875. The treaty ceded Karafuto to Russia in exchange for exclusive

Japanese sovereignty over the adjacent Kurile chain. One of the last sovereign acts of the

Japanese state over Karafuto before the treaty was ratified was to pressure the Ainu from across the island to accept Japanese subjecthood. Over 800 “loyalist” Karafuto Ainu made the ostensibly free choice to emigrate across the narrow Soya Strait to northern Hokkaido. Even while having formally become “Japanese,” upon their arrival the Karafuto Ainu were almost immediately put into a state of unfreedom. Dismissed as “savages” by Kuroda Kiyotaka, the head of the Kaitakushi, they were stripped of their rights as Japanese citizens that they may have hoped to enjoy. Placed into conditions little different from those experienced by Japanese criminals and exiles forced to settle Hokkaido around them, the Kaitakushi forcibly moved the

Karafuto Ainu away from their new settlement along the northern coast of Hokkaido and into isolation and pestilence in the southern village of Tsuishikari.

Japanese claims of sovereignty over Ainu land came to be tied to Japanese claims to the

Ainu. During negotiations that dragged on for two decades, the Japanese state treated the Ainu – especially in disputed territories across Karafuto – as “tokens of sovereignty.” Not unlike royal crowns, scepters, thrones, or currency bearing the image of the sovereign, for Japanese irredentists, Ainu bodies, too, became emblematic of Japanese sovereignty. In this regard, no matter where they reside and no matter how fleeting the historical links between a particular group of Ainu and the Japanese state, whatever territories on which the Ainu happen to be found could be claimed a rightful Japanese territory in the present day. The Ainu thus, as Achille

Mbembe writes of the place of the colonized within violent systems of power inherent to colonial occupation, enter a “third zone between subjecthood and objecthood.”

The international condominium of Japanese Karafuto/Russian Sakhalin itself became what Jorge Núñez appropriately calls a “third territory” between rival claimants.2 Even if meant to maintain peace between two rivals, as two distinct political entities claim their own exclusive jurisdiction over a given territory while simultaneously recognizing the sovereignty of the other, such arrangements quickly become destabilizing. For this reason, northward-facing Japanese irredentists held up the very presence of the Ainu across the disputed territories as, sometimes subjects of the Japanese sovereign: proof of their nation’s sovereignty over Ainu land. However, by the same merit, the Ainu were simultaneously objectified when it was advantageous, becoming inherently rightless and stateless “savages.” The Ainu as “savages” gave the Japanese state unfettered power over the bodies of these explicitly non-Japanese Ainu and, above all, their land. Placing the Karafuto Ainu between the hammer and the anvil, Japanese state claimed Ainu territories as “Japanese” internationally while denying the Ainu their rights as Japanese citizens domestically.

Sakhalin Fever

In his travelogue Sakhalin Island, the famous Russian novelist and playwright Anton

Chekhov played Virgil to his European readers’ Dante, guiding them through the dark forests of

Siberia, across the murky waters of the Tatar Strait, and into the bleak extremes of human existence on what for many was the largely unknown, limbo-like island of Sakhalin. While

Chekhov stayed on Sakhalin for a mere three months, for most this journey was a one way trip,

2 Jorge E. Núñez, Sovereignty Conflicts and International Law and Politics: A Distributive Justice Issue (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 91-92.

49 with the exiles and convicts who made up virtually the entire settler body having little hope of ever again returning to their homes or seeing their loved ones. As Cathy Popkin notes, as a result, over time hierarchies which structured the body of the mostly forced settlers became disjointed, with “[d]istinction ... between corrigible and incorrigible convicts ... eroded by the fact that none of them [could] ever return to Russia.”3 Likewise, distinctions between Sakhalin’s small civilian population, the guards, and the exiles and convicts themselves became increasingly blurred, as did distinctions between Indigenous and exogenous populations. Popkin contrasts the peculiar carceral apparatus on the island of Sakhalin with panoptic prison systems famously envisioned by Jeremy Bentham, including those found elsewhere in the Russian Empire. If, as Michel

Foucault argued, modern carceral systems are predicated on the transformation of “human bodies

... into objects of knowledge,” subject to the “ruthless curiosity of an examination,” quite a different phenomenon occurred on Sakhalin, where exiles and prisoners were transmuted into an unknowable, undifferentiated mass.4 Rather than being removed from “society” to be reformed and eventually reintegrated, those prisoners and exiles were pushed out of Europe altogether, across Siberia, off the very continent, and onto the island of Sakhalin. Or, in other words, they were pushed into the extreme east of what was for Chekhov an already unknowable East,

“10,000 versts from home.”5 There they were trapped in a place where “no term ever ends, no

3 Popkin, Cathy, “Chekhov as Ethnographer: Epistemological Crisis on Sakhalin Island,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (1992), 43. 4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York City: Vintage Books, 2011), 28, 227. 5 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, trans. Brian Reeve (London: Alma Classics, 2007), 157.

50 classifications are applied and no sentence is recorded since no one really knows why anyone is on Sakhalin.”6

While celebrated as an author and playwright, Chekhov was also a trained hygienist and presented his travelogue as an academic treatise. To these ends, he theorized that the damp chill of Sakhalin combined with the physically tolling and ultimately Sisyphean task of breaking ground and settling the island so hopelessly distant from the Empire’s Baltic capital produced a new kind of pathology. Like anxieties amongst Chekhov’s European and American colleagues about the noxious effects of the air of the tropics on the delicate lungs of European colonists,

Chekhov, too, believed that the extremities of the island of Sakhalin had a harmful effect on the bodies of the European prisoners and exiles forced to settle there. A disease unique to Sakhalin, symptoms included “a headache, and rheumatic pains throughout the whole body.” These derived, however, “not from infection” but simply “from climatic influences.” It was as though the island itself was a pathogen slowly killing the settlers. Chekhov called this disease “febris sachalinensis,” or “Sakhalin fever.”7

In Japan, an entirely different strain of Sakhalin fever ran rampant. For northward- looking politicians, diplomats, imperialists, and nationalists, Japan’s slipping position in its territorial dispute with Russia over Ainu land in Karafuto was at once a major security concern, as the northern island was distressingly close to the mainland, as well as the cause of a moral panic amongst nationalists, with many seeing Russia’s domineering stance as an affront to the

6 Popkin, “Chekhov as Ethnographer,” 42. 7 Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, 216.

51 pride of the nation. This led some to push for the more aggressive Japanese colonization of

Karafuto, even at risk of a violent clash with the formidable, rapidly expanding Russian Empire.

One sufferer of febris sachalinensis japonicas was Okamoto Bunpei, who briefly led

Japan’s colonization efforts as the director of the Karafuto Kaitakushi after years of privately promoting Japanese settlement of the previously unincorporated territory.8 While, as Sho

Konishi demonstrates, many forcibly settled Russian exiles and convicts abhorred life on

Sakhalin and escaped whenever possible, sometimes smuggling themselves south onto the

Japanese mainland in the first step in a long journey back to Europe, Okamoto moved north, attempting to settle Karafuto with Japanese volunteers.9 Seeing himself as the vanguard of coming waves, he personally led hundreds of mainlanders to settle to the south of Karafuto.10 For

Okamoto, a hardliner who John Stephan writes “upheld a determination to fight and die for the island,” the Tokugawa government’s negligence in the defense of what he believed was rightfully Japanese territory was a grievous, shameful error. He asserted that it was precisely the bakufu’s lapsed attention to the north in the decades leading up to the fall of the Tokugawa regime that had allowed for the relentless Russian colonization of Karafuto at the beginning of the Meiji period. This critical situation reflected Japan’s uncertain position internationally, with

Japanese territorial sovereignty challenged and at times outright disregarded by Euro-American imperialist powers then rapidly colonizing the north Pacific. The Russian Empire was no

8 While this book is published under the personal name Bunpei, the author was also known as Kansuke. 9 Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013), 33. 10 John J. Stephan, Sakhalin: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 60.

52 exception, and Russian designs on Ainu territories, if not Russian designs on Japan itself, became a source of gnawing anxiety for Okamoto and the many others who shared his views.

Indeed, for Okamoto, the territorial dispute over the northern border had become “our national affliction” (wagakuni no wazurai).11 He hoped to rectify this grim situation himself, writing The

Urgent Business of the Northern Gate in 1871 as a nostrum for Japan’s territorial ills. The only way to shake off Sakhalin fever, Okamoto believed, was to overtake Russian colonization efforts, quickly settling Karafuto with mainland Japanese and thereby reconfirming Karafuto as a

Japanese, and not Russian – and certainly not Ainu, Nivkh, or Orok – territory.

Central to Okamoto’s vision of exclusive Japanese sovereignty over Karafuto were the bodies of the 3,000 Ainu who lived in villages dotting the south coast. In stark contrast to

Japanese claims to Hokkaido, premised on the corporeal non-being of the Ainu or their political irrelevance, Okamoto explicitly based his assertions of Japanese sovereignty over Karafuto on the active presence and indigeneity of the resident Ainu. This was undoubtedly because the disputed borderland of Karafuto had been, despite Okamoto’s efforts, settled by a miniscule number of Japanese, numbering in the mere hundreds. By defining the Karafuto Ainu as an offshoot of the ancient Japanese polity, the presence of the 3,000 Ainu could be made to bolster

Japanese claims. However, not unlike the doctrine of terra nullius, they could also be subsumed into the settler body politic. In other words, by claiming the Ainu as Japanese, they could be made to disappear, emptying Karafuto of the Ainu entirely. This conceptual transfer, highlighting the presence of Ainu bodies but erasing their “Ainuness,” enhanced their political

11 Okaomto Bunpei, Hokumon Kyūmu (Tokyo: Hokumonsha, 1871). Unpaginated.

53 utility for Okamoto and other irredentists. By rendering “proto-Japanese,” Ainu land could become Japanese land.

However, unlike other “Japanese”, the Karafuto Ainu did not historically progress.

Entirely inert, Okamoto argued that they had maintained a form of ancient Japanese culture that remained unchanged for countless centuries. Their southern cousins, meanwhile, had progressed to the extent that they might appear entirely unrelated to the Ainu to those not as learned and observant as Okamoto. To bolster his claims he cited examples such as a small glossary of shared vocabulary between the Ainu and Japanese languages, particularly terms related to religious matters, and similar styles of religious and military dress between the contemporary

Ainu and the ancient Japanese.12 Accordingly, rather than a colonial invasion of foreign lands,

Japanese northward expansion into Ainu Mosir was, for Okamoto and his followers, merely a rejoining of two kindred bloodlines. For Japanese mainlanders, the act of settlement on Karafuto was, then, something of a homecoming. To establish claims to Japanese sovereignty over a given territory and legitimize the act of settlement, it was simply a matter of finding Ainu, or at least historical traces of Ainu habitancy.

Okamoto attempted to do exactly this, having made a private expedition in 1865 to survey Ainu settlements throughout northern Karafuto (sometimes noting the presence of but a

12 Chief among these terms was kamuy, or god(s), thought to be a cognate with the Japanese term kami. However, despite numerous Japanese cognates in Ainu and, for that matter, Ainu cognates in Japanese, there is little else in common between the two languages. As Oguma Eiji shows, well into the 20th century, for colonialists, academics, and ethnic nationalists alike, the assertion that the Ainu language or culture represent a picture of the “proto- Japanese” provided (and, for some, continues to provide) a powerful legitimizing discourse for the Japanese colonization of Ainu territories. See Oguma Eiji, A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-Images, trans. David Askew (Melbourne: Trans Pacific, 2002).

54 few individuals). Not limiting himself to Ainu territories, he surveyed toponyms across Nivkh and Orok territories as well and used his findings to argue that the whole of the island was once entirely Ainu/proto-Japanese, and therefore should become/remain the territory of the Japanese

Empire in the present day.13 The bold Okamoto argued Ainu place names could be found as far north as Kamchatka, as well, effectively claiming the entire Russian-controlled peninsula, too, as

Japanese. Likewise, he referred his readers to unnamed “historical sources” to claim that ancient kingdoms such as Bohai and peoples such as the Amur Mohe had once paid tribute to the

Japanese sovereign, and thereby the Russian-administered lands they occupied were the rightful territory of the modern Japanese nation-state some ten centuries after such tribute was paid.

Japanese sovereignty over the Amur River region was, Okamoto stressed, common knowledge across northeast Asia, and alleged that “the Chinese” (Shinajin), who had recently ceded Outer

Manchuria to Russia, “say that Northern Wa begins at the mouth of the Amur River.” “The

Koreans,” too, we learn, claim that “the land of Great Japan” stretches northwards from the

Amur riverbanks. While Okamoto’s historical claims were, of course, dubious, the formal

Japanese annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 was similarly justified by Ryukyu’s longstanding tributary relationship with the by-then defunct Satsuma Domain. And, even while

Hokkaido was annexed as terra nullius, formally disavowing the bipartite political relationship between Japan and autonomous Ainu communities prior to 1869, Japan’s claim to Ainu Mosir was, too, bolstered by the tributary relationship between the bakufu and Ainu communities across Hokkaido via the Matsumae Domain. Okamoto’s audacious claims, in other words,

13 Okamoto Bunpei, Kitaezo Shinshi (Tokyo: Hokumonsha, 1867). Unpaginated.

55 followed the same pattern by which early Japanese leaders justified early Meiji colonial expansion.14

In stark contrast, for Okamoto, not only were Russian claims to Ainu Mosir illegitimate, but also Russian claims to virtually all of eastern Siberia. This effectively transformed the Sea of

Okhotsk into a Japanese lake. What Okamoto envisioned was, in other words, a Japanese colonial empire hinged upon the bodies of the Ainu. The very presence of Ainu bodies legitimized their own colonization by Japan. Naturalizing Ainu territories on which they lived as always-already belong to Japan, this framework served to disavow the coloniality of Japanese settler colonialism. De-indigenizing the “proto-Japanese” Ainu, Okamoto likewise exogenized

Karafuto’s two other Indigenous peoples, the Nivkhs and the Oroks (both largely Russian imperial subjects by Okamoto’s time), by claiming that both were relative newcomers to

Karafuto and thereby were illegitimate foreign usurpers. The indigenized ethnic Japanese settlers were, by contrast, ancestrally tied to the land since times immemorial and were thereby simply moving home. The Ainu could then be dispossessed, dominated, and replaced by settlers.

Okamoto mobilized the Ainu as proto-Japanese strictly as far as it was advantageous for

Japanese foreign policy. This contrasted sharply with the place of the Ainu within his proposals for the colonization of Karafuto, presented as domestic policy. Namely, he stressed that the Ainu

14 Perhaps on the basis of these Japanese claims, beginning in the late Qing Dynasty, Chinese claims to Aboriginal lands such as in Taiwan or states such as Mongolia or Tibet were similarly based on historical tributary relationships, rather than direct rule of these territories as Chinese. In other words, Okamoto’s fanciful claims anticipated the wider process by which Japan and China annexed former tributary and vassal states as part of the larger national territory as they both transitioned from a centre-periphery Sinocentric model (Japanese: ka’i chitsujo, Chinese: huáyí zhìxù) to a centralized Eurocentric nation-state model in the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries.

56 are not, in fact, Japanese but “outlanders” (imin).15 These “outlanders” would be simultaneously dominated by and placed under the protective care of the Japanese state, with little distinction between these two prerogatives. Okamoto pushed the Meiji state to largely continue Matsumae policies of providing aid (buiku) and autonomy to the Ainu in exchange for their formal recognition of the Japanese sovereign. The primary beneficiaries of Japanese aid were to be the infants, elderly, the disabled, and the sick, who would receive brown rice stipends. However,

Okamoto warned that the “stupid” (gumai) Ainu were apt to lie to receive more rice than allotted. The same colonial administrators who were to provide the Ainu with aid were then to strictly police its distribution, severely punishing any infractions. And, chastising the Matsumae

Domain for its over-indulgent treatment of the Ainu, Okamoto stated that the Ainu would be forced to perform regular labour for their self-styled benefactors as repayment for this protection.

And, if this was not enough, administrators would pacify and incapacitate the Ainu. For this,

“alcohol,” Okamoto stated, is “incomparable” in its ability to “tame the outlanders.”16

15 Imin (夷民) is a cognate with the Chinese yímín, which itself is rooted in yí (夷): one of many terms historically used to refer to non-Chinese peoples. In the context of the Ainu, imin eludes clear translation. In Japanese, the character i (夷), while generally referring to foreigners, can be read as ebisu, a synonym with Ezo. Or, in other words, i as ebisu can refer to Hokkaido or other Ainu territories such as Karafuto and the Kuriles. However, the compound phrase imin more literally means a “stranger,” a “foreigner,” or, in its usage in the colonial era, a “barbarian” or a “savage.” In regards to the latter two, Lydia Liu argues that the British insistence on translating yí as “barbarian” in the years leading up to the Second Opium War reflected distinctly asymmetrical imperial epistemologies between the British and Qing empires and, indeed, served to justify British imperialist aggression against China. In light of such ambiguities, I have chosen to translate imin as “outlander,” a term which reflects both the Otherness of the Ainu in late Tokugawa political thought and Meiji era discourses which marked the Ainu as interlopers in the mainland-born settler body politic and “savages” in the modern Japanese nation-state. See Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006). 16 Perhaps cynically, Okamoto suggested taking a permissive stance towards Ainu religion, arguing that settlers should be forbidden from so much as cutting down willow trees which the Ainu used to construct religious paraphernalia.

As it related to the “urgent business” of colonizing Karafuto, this protection was meant to inspire the loyalty of the Ainu as part of a wider anti-Russian strategy. However, perhaps sensing that brown rice and alcohol would not be enough, Okamoto outlined a program of assimilation by which the Ainu were to be taught the rudiments of the Japanese language, arithmetic, and agriculture. Similar to the Australian promotion of intermarriage between Aborigines and white settlers as a means of “breeding out the colour,” Okamoto moreover urged the settler colonial state to absorb the Karafuto Ainu biologically by having Ainu men intermarry with (he specified) impoverished Japanese women dispatched from the mainland, with Ainu women left as mates for male Japanese settlers.17 In other words, strictly as it related to the Japanese territorial dispute with the Russian Empire, the Ainu were “Japanese.” Within Japan’s territorial boundaries, they were “outlanders.” These “outlanders” could perhaps, in time, become Japanese through a strict program of discipline and assimilation. In either event, subsumed into the settler body politic, they were to be made to disappear entirely as a distinct population.

While, unlike the Matsumae Domain, Okamoto was pro-assimilationist, he otherwise largely urged the Meiji government to simply continue late Tokugawa era policies of physically exploiting the Ainu. However, by the 1870s, such retrograde, increasingly unpopular policies were widely dismissed by Japanese colonialists as disaffecting the Ainu, thereby inadvertently aiding Russian designs on them. Nabeshima Naomasa, the first director of the Kaitakushi, explicitly condemned such practices as potentially having a disastrous effect on Japanese settler

17 Birthe Kundrus, “Transgressing the Colour Line. Policing Colonial ‘Miscegenation,’” in Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders, ed. Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 226.

58 colonial efforts throughout all of Ainu Mosir, writing, “Up until now, the governor has put the aborigines to work. The foreigners have seen this as excessively cruel ... and give a great deal of aid to the Ainu. Because of this, the aborigines have often come to resent us and revere the

Russians.”18 And, perhaps owing to his contrarian views, just a year after the government established the Karafuto Kaitakushi under Okamoto, jurisdiction over Karafuto was transferred to the Hokkaido Kaitakushi and thereby to Kuroda Kiyotaka. Keenly aware of the significant threat that the Russian Empire posed, Kuroda believed that the Japanese colonization of Karafuto was a lost cause and had already made plans to cede the island. With his efforts as a colonialist coming to naught, Okamoto ceased his endeavors and returned home.

Imperial Civilization

Even while Okamoto’s Ainu management policies perhaps better reflected those of the late Tokugawa period than Anglo-American settler colonial policies widely adopted during the

Meiji period for use in Hokkaido, his views towards Russia would have undoubtedly been met with far more sympathy in Tokyo. He was one of many in Japan who was deeply unnerved by the Russian non-recognition of Japanese claims to sovereignty over Ainu territories. And, even for those who didn’t put such weight on the importance of Karafuto itself, many feared that

Russia’s refusal to recognize Japanese sovereignty could have serious ramifications for not just newly-annexed Hokkaido, but for Japanese mainland as well. For Meiji politicians such as

Soejima Taneomi and Ōkuma Shigenobu, it was necessary that Japan ardently assert itself in line

18 Kaitakushi, “Kaitakushi nisshi jō (1869-73),” Nikai sankōshitu bunko, 210.08, Sapporo Municipal Library, Sapporo, Japan.

59 with international law in its dispute with Russia. Japan’s handling of the dispute was, in turn, part of a larger diplomatic strategy by which Japanese leaders could demonstrate their country’s legal commensurability with Euro-American imperialist powers such as the British Empire, the

Russian Empire, and the United States. This would reaffirm Japanese sovereignty internationally and, as a result, would mitigate the threat of the Japanese mainland itself becoming a colonial possession. To do this, Soejima strongly implied, Japan must become an imperialist power in its own right.

Beginning in 1854 with the Convention of Kanagawa, the United States, followed by

France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia, forced a series of unequal treaties on Japan on the basis that the country was “semi-civilized” and thereby “semi-sovereign.” Derogating

Japanese sovereignty by granting foreign residents rights to extraterritoriality, these treaties were, for early Meiji diplomats like Soejima, “detrimental to the dignity of the empire.”19 By demonstrating the Japanese capacity for Euro-American “civilization” and actively practicing national sovereignty, early Meiji diplomats hoped, Japan would be able to revise the unequal treaties. Even while it quickly proved to be unrealistic to revise the treaties so soon after they had been signed, this became a top priority for the Meiji government. In as far as this went, Soejima tied Japan’s eventual success in regaining full national sovereignty with the establishment of its own colonial empire on a Euro-American model. Perhaps owing to Japan’s ambiguous position internationally, for Soejima there was an unresolved tension between the Westphalian nation-

19 Soejima Taneomi, “Japan’s Foreign Relations,” trans. Marcus B. Huish, in Soejima Taneomi zenshū, ed. Shima Yoshitaka (Kyoto, 2007: Keibunsha), 3:460.

60 state formation (based on mutual recognition of formally equal states) and imperialism (based on the non-recognition of the sovereignty of “uncivilized” nations or non-state political formations).

And, while Soejima, writing during the Russo-Japanese War, condemned the vast Russian

Empire as fundamentally immoral in its expansionist behaviour across Eurasia, he nevertheless characterized what we would today term “blue water” colonialism as an economic necessity and thereby permissible, even if somewhat unsavory. Colonial expansion into “portions of the earth’s surface which were inhabited by races less civilized than Europeans, or less endowed with force of mind and character” became a means to relieve the unprecedented rise in population in Europe following the Industrial Revolution and “that economic distress called ‘overproduction.’”20

Spreading out into northeast Asia from all directions, the Euro-American powers turned their attention to Japan, leading to a protracted crisis of sovereignty. With the power of the

Shogun as the “de facto sovereign ... tottering to its fall” even before the arrival of Perry in Edo

Bay in 1853, the bakufu was unable “to resist the imperative strangers.”21 This led to Japan signing the unequal treaties, even if against the country’s own best interests. Similar to the weak, ineffectual bakufu in Edo, the Matsumae Domain in Ezo (consisting of not only Hokkaido, but implicitly Karafuto and the Kuriles), too, Soejima argued, acted as little more than a tribute collector rather than in a manner befitting a vice-regal suzerain. As such, they ruled over the

20 Ibid, 457-458. 21 Ibid, 459. This chapter cites an official English translation of Soejima’s essay Meiji no gaikō prepared for the Meiji government under the oversight of Ōkuma Shigenobu. In some places, the English text deviates somewhat from the Japanese original. The phrase “imperative strangers,” for example, is translated from “gaijin no kyōsei.” This might be more accurately translated as “the persistent demands of the foreigners” or even “the blackmail of the foreigners.” The latter is perhaps more appropriate given the realities of gunboat democracy, in which Soejima was well-versed in both theory and practice. See page 399 of the same volume for the above-quoted Japanese text.

Ainu “in name only.” Echoing Okamoto, Soejima condemned both the bakufu and Matsumae

Domain for their ineffectual rule of Ainu territories – territories which “had always belonged to

Japan” – leading to Russia colonizing Karafuto under the bakufu’s nose.22 However, quickly rectifying this situation, according to Soejima, the early Meiji government developed a somewhat improvisational strategy, firmly rooted in international law, to “strengthen [Japan’s] position as an independent nation” and demonstrate its “fitness to enter into the family of

Christian Powers on terms of equality.”23

Soejima held up the María Luz Incident, in which he had direct personal involvement as foreign minister, as a demonstration of Japan’s capacity for national sovereignty. In 1872, port authorities freed “200 Chinese slaves” aboard the María Luz, a Peruvian ship docked in

Yokohama. The Japanese government, represented by Soejima, successfully appealed to a neutral Russian tribunal to settle a dispute which subsequently arose with the Peruvian government. Soejima also pointed, too, to the 1874 Japanese invasion of Taiwan which he himself engineered under American tutelage. Landing troops in southern Taiwan, then loosely under Qing control, the Japanese government sought to avenge a group of Ryukyuan sailors killed years before by Taiwanese Aborigines. The punitive mission was, accordingly, a challenge to the Sinocentric order, by which the Qing Empire maintained suzerainty over self-governing

Indigenous peoples in Taiwan in a manner not unlike the former Tokugawa regime’s suzerainty over the Ainu. Delegitimizing this mode of sovereignty would allow Japanese diplomats to assert

22 Ibid, 464. 23 Ibid, 462, 467.

62 their country’s commitment to the Eurocentric international system. However, unilaterally claiming that the murdered Ryukyuan sailors were Japanese, the Japanese invasion was by design an assertion of Japanese sovereignty over the Ryukyu Kingdom. This was, moreover, not the only incident of gunboat diplomacy which contributed to the revision of the unequal treaties.

Soejima pointed to the 1876 Japanese “opening” of Korea as well. Perhaps chosen for his experience sacking Hakodate during the Boshin War or his prominent role in negotiations with the Russian Empire on behalf of the Meiji government, the mission was led by none other than

Kuroda. Unambiguously modelled after the 1853 American “opening” of Japan, Kuroda – who took on the role of Matthew Perry – forced an unequal treaty upon Korea, signed under the shadow of Japanese guns. The treaty was similar to those still in effect in Japan, complete with

Japanese rights to extraterritoriality.24 These were not, Soejima stressed, a series of discrete, unrelated incidents, but were integral parts of a larger diplomatic manoeuvre by which Japan could demonstrate its capacity for sovereignty internationally, leading to the long-awaited moment – coming at last in 1895 – when Japanese diplomats succeeded in amending the unequal treaties forced upon Japan.25

24 Ibid, 462. 25 Many commentators in the early Meiji period were well aware that what are today usually characterized by historians as discreet events formed a single, larger strategy. For example, explicitly linking Japanese foreign policy strategy in Karafuto and the Kuriles with the 1874 invasion of Taiwan and the 1876 “opening” of Korea, Mikuni Kei, writing for the Yomiuri shinbun newspaper, downplayed widespread dissatisfaction in Japan over the Japanese compromise with Russia. He argued that “[w]hile Sakhalin is large, it’s also cold, so it is very inappropriate for Japanese bodies. Therefore, we haven’t been able to develop it or make much of a profit. On the other hand, Chijima (the Kuriles) is small but the climate is warm and it’s well suited to Japanese bodies and is more profitable. It’s good that we exchanged the two.” Mikuni lamented a lack of appreciation over what he saw as Enomoto’s achievement, and states that between the successes of Taiwan, Karafuto, and Korea, it was enough for him to want to “sing a song of jubilee,” adding that he “respectfully celebrated (uyauyashiku iwaimashita).” Mikuni Kei, “Karafuto: Chijima kōkan wa Enomoto Takeaki kōshi no tegara, Taiwan ya Chōsen no ken to dōyō ni iwaitai,” Yomiuri shinbun, March 25, 1876.

However, despite these many diplomatic successes, the question of Karafuto went unanswered. In 1869, William Seward, who had gained international notoriety for his central role in the American purchase of Russian Alaska, visited Japan. During his stay, the newly established Meiji government petitioned him for advice on what they might do about the lingering question of Karafuto. Seward suggested that Japan might follow suit and buy the island from the Russian government outright.26 This was evidentially in the back of Soejima’s mind when he penned a memorandum on Karafuto two years later in 1871. Worried that the increasingly volatile mixed settlement system would inevitably lead to war, he suggested that

Japan might look to the United States for mediation as a neutral third party, and, for the sake of maintaining “perpetual amenity,” should move to buy the island.27 The Japanese government subsequently offered two million yen but was refused.28 Soejima’s acquisitive stance towards

Karafuto was strongly rebuked by Kuroda who stressed, in Soejima’s own words, “the inadvisability of coming into possession of a ‘worthless island.’”29

Despite his influence, Kuroda’s position was far from uncontroversial. Anticipating

Japan’s concession of Karafuto to Russia, Ōkuma Shigenobu, a close associate of Soejima, condemned Kuroda. He feared that the Kaitakushi head’s “soft” stance against Russia was not only an affront to the Japan’s dignity but also threatened to become a national security concern.

26 Hiroshi Kimura, The Kurillian Knot: A History of Japanese-Russian Border Negotiations (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008), 30. 27 Soejima Taneomi, “Soejima Taneomi ikensho,” 1871, Sanjōke busho shorui no bu, 47-6, 10.11501/9979755, National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan. 28 Stephan, Sakhalin, 61. 29 Soejima, Soejima Taneomi zenshū, 464.

In 1873, he wrote to Kuroda to warn him that Japan must take a stand against the “outrageous” behaviour of its powerful northern neighbour to “wipe away our great shame” and “assert our rights as a nation.”30 Ōkuma lamented the “attacks” and “abuse” that the Ainu faced at the hands of Russian settlers. However, perhaps suspecting that this alone would not be enough to move

Kuroda, Ōkuma reminded him that Japanese settlers, too, were coming under attack. The

Russians were, we learn, robbing travellers, barging into official residences, raping Japanese women, trampling farmers’ fields, murdering settlers, burning their homes, and stealing their food, drink, and even cookware. For Ōkuma, such attacks on Japanese settlers were not simply a matter of shame or humiliation but were a challenge to Japanese sovereignty writ large. They were certainly not something to be taken lightly.31

Ōkuma also harshly criticized proposals, described above, to dispatch Japanese troops to

Taiwan and Korea. He dismissed these widely-reviled injustices allegedly committed against

Japan by the Qing or Korean states as minor incidents caused by “venomous snakes in the grass” which had occurred “outside” of the country. A military response would “not be worth the cost of our soldier’s rations” when compared to the much more urgent problem of Russian behaviour towards Japanese settlers in Karafuto, a territory Ōkuma claimed was “inside” Japanese borders.

For Ōkuma, the long-standing compromise of mixed settlement in Karafuto was like “many

30 Ōkuma Shigenobu, “Karafuto taisaku ikensho sōkō: Kaitaku jikan Kuroda Kiyotaka ate / Sangi Ōkuma Shigenobu,” 1873, i14 A0003, Waseda University Library, Tokyo, Japan. 31 As the head of the Kaitakushi, Kuroda was undoubtedly well aware of reports of arson, murder, rape, and assault targeting both Japanese settlers and Ainu and committed by Russian imperial subjects. Far from ignorant of such matters, the threat of further violence may have been Kuroda’s motivation for abandoning Japanese claims to the island. See “Karafutoshu jiken no. 1-17,” Betsu-Kara 327-Gai, 0A026510000000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan.

65 strangers in one room.” Conflict was inevitable. And, believing that Russia’s encouragement for

Japan to accept joint sovereignty over Karafuto had been a bait-and-switch strategy, he feared that Japan had already “played into the hands of the enemy.” Worse, Ōkuma insinuated that violence by Russian convicts and exiles against Japanese settlers was state-sponsored and intended to provoke a response, dragging Japan into an unwinnable war. If not resolved swiftly, this problem would be like a “strong flow of water ... becoming the Yangtze,” and before long swelling to become “a flood that reaches the heavens,” swallowing up the entire nation. What did

Ōkuma propose Japan should do? Far from shying away from a fight, he appealed to the names of 14th century imperial restorationist Kusunoki Masashige and British rebel-turned-American president George Washington: figures who used their moral fortitude to defeat a militaristically superior enemy. Invoking such figures, Ōkuma insinuated that Japan must be prepared to go to war with the Russian Empire to enforce its claims.

Russo-Japanese Co-Imperium

While perhaps dangerously bellicose given the tenuous international position of Japan as a “semi-civilized” country, Ōkuma’s perspectives reflected European doctrines of national sovereignty on which the Meiji state was founded. Reformers such as Soejima and Ōkuma tirelessly worked to transform what, in the Tokugawa era, had been a loose-knit network of domains, as well as the hitherto foreign territories of the Ryukyu Kingdom and Ainu Mosir, into a modern state on a European model. As such, Japan was to be unified as a nation-state with a discursively delineated body of national citizen-subjects enclosed within a stable, internationally recognized border. Karafuto, then, became a potentially destabilizing anomaly, as Japan and

Russia simultaneously administered the same territory as an international condominium. This was all the more problematic because Karafuto was a settler colony, and like other such colonies,

66 the territorial sovereignty of the colonizing power was directly tied to the bodies of their settlers on the land. As Veracini argues, the sovereignty of the metropole “travels with” settlers to the space of the colony.32 The presence of outsiders, especially subjects of rival colonial powers, thereby becomes potentially destabilizing. Indeed, along the Pacific coast of North America as well, the closing of the frontier was driven by anxieties about how the unpoliced movement of

Russian, British, and American settlers across vaguely defined borders might unsettle territorial claims. Henry Wheaton’s influential legal text Elements of International Law, a staple for a generation of Japanese diplomats, including Soejima and Ōkuma, directly alluded to this in describing the Russian Empire’s reaction to the uninvited arrival of American fishing fleets in

Alaskan waters:

By an ukase [edict] of the Emperor Alexander of Russia ... an exclusive territorial right on the north-west coast of America was asserted as belonging to the Russian empire, from the Behring’s Straits to the 51st degree of north latitude, and in the Aleutian Islands, on the east coast of Siberia, and the Kurile Islands, from the same straits to the South Cape in the island of Ooroop (sic).33

While asserting the exclusivity of Russian territorial claims in North America, the decree alluded to the geographic indistinction between Russian-controlled territories in Alaska and in northeast

Asia, asserting claims to Ainu territories stretching from Urup Island, just north of Hokkaido, to

32 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 53. 33 Henry Wheaton, Elements of International Law: With a Sketch of the History of Science, vol. 1 (London: B. Fellowes, Ludgate Street, 1836), 212. The American missionary Guido Verbeck tutored Soejima, Ōkuma, and other influential Meiji figures in international law using Wheaton’s text. Read even more widely in classical Chinese translation, texts such as Wheaton’s, as Lydia Liu argues, had a powerful influence on young reformers and intellectuals in the years leading up to the Meiji Restoration and helped shape early Meiji foreign policy. See Liu, The Clash of Empires, 108-109; Duus Peter, The Abacus and the Sword: the Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895- 1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 37; Douglas Howland, International Law and Japanese Sovereignty: The Emerging Global Order in the 19th Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 30.

Atlasov Island off the coast of Kamchatka as part of Russian Alaska. This left the Matsumae- administered Habomai Islands, Kunashir, Iturup, and Shikotan for Japan, while formally denying the Japanese access to Ainu territories further north.

Entirely nullifying the Ainu capacity for sovereignty, Russian diplomats claimed sovereignty over Ainu territories on the legal basis of, as Wheaton wrote, “the title of first discovery; ... the title of first occupation; and ... peaceful and uncontested possession of more than half a century.”34 While no doubt acting as a warning to American whaling fleets which had begun frequenting the seas around the Kuriles, such an assertion created a geographic indistinction between “New World” settler colonialism and Russian expansionism in northeast

Asia. Japan was just on the very edge of this continental divide, and, like Alaska, early 19th century Russian interest in Japan curiously fell under the purview of the Russian-American

Company – a nominally independent for-profit joint-stock company – rather than Russian colonial administrators in Siberia. This included Company director Nikolai Rezanov’s failed

“opening” of Japan in 1806 directly following his expedition to Alta California, and the violent reprisals against Japanese garrisons on Karafuto and in the Kuriles carried out by Company officers following this diplomatic failure.35

This indistinction between the Kuriles and Alaska was, moreover, an administrative fact.

At the time of the decree, the Kuriles had been administrated as part of Alaska by the Russian-

34 Wheaton, Elements of International Law, vol. 1, 213. 35 Stephan, Sakhalin, 46. Stephan notes that the Russian-American Company officers carrying out the raids against the Japanese garrisons justified their attacks by claiming that they were “protecting” the Ainu.

American Company, and they only became an “Asian” colonial holding following the Russian sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, after which the chain came under the administration of Russian authorities in Siberia. And, still somewhat out of place, as if cutting loose threads, the length of the archipelago was ceded to Japan in 1875 in exchange for exclusive Russian sovereignty over Karafuto.

While for Ōkuma and many others, the Japanese cession of Karafuto to Russia was a potentially disastrous misstep, the resolution of the dispute through the signing of the Treaty of

St. Petersburg served to enhance Japanese national sovereignty. For example, it played a crucial role in making the Meiji Emperor – erstwhile widely characterized by Europeans as an exotic

“Mikado” or “spiritual emperor” – commensurable with European monarchs. Significantly, the treaty defined the Japanese and Russian emperors as mirroring each other by using identical terms to refer to both. In the Russian version, written in French, both were referred to as “Sa

Majesté l’Empereur,” or, “His Majesty the Emperor.”36 Negotiated on the Japanese side by

Enomoto Takeaki, a close confidant of Kuroda and the former president of the short-lived

Republic of Ezo, the Japanese version referred to both as “kōtei heika,” a term largely devoid of the theocratic undertones of tennō. And, by signing the Treaty of St. Petersburg, the frontier between Japan and Russia was formally closed. This meant that exclusive Japanese territorial sovereignty over Hokkaido (which from 1875, came to include the Kuriles) was explicitly recognized by the Russian Crown. Moreover, while Japan “lost” Karafuto, the treaty, in effect,

36 The Foreign Office [Gaimushō], ed., Treaties and Conventions Between the Empire of Japan and Other Powers Together with Universal Conventions, Regulations and Communications, since March 1854 (Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 1884), 629.

69 permitted the continuation of the mixed settlement system in both Karafuto and the Kuriles by granting rights to permanent residence for those who wished to remain in the ceded territories.

The fifth article of the treaty stated that these residents “will be maintained and protected

(French: maintenus et protégés, Japanese: hozen suru ... hogo wo ukeru) in the full exercise of their industry, their rights of property and religion on the same footing as the nationals.”37

However, this was on the condition that they become subject to Russian and Japanese law, respectively. In light of the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the subjects of Euro-American powers in Japan, including those of the Russian Empire, this provision was exceptional. It, in effect, created a model of Japanese jurisdiction over foreign residents in Japan that could later be applied to treaty ports farther south.

While Japanese subjects were granted special rights to permanent residency in Karafuto, supplementary regulations signed in August of the same year in Tokyo annulled many of these rights as they applied to the Ainu. Ainu living in the exchanged territories were forced to align themselves with either Japan or Russia, becoming national subjects of one empire or the other.

Karafuto Ainu who adopted Japanese subjecthood/Kurile Ainu who adopted Russian subjecthood were forced to “leave their home and go to the territory belonging to their sovereign” within three years.38 While such treaties, needless to say, had the effect of further degrading the sovereignty of the Ainu by treating them as mere appendages of either colonizing empire, even the three year grace period was ignored by the Kaitakushi, and rights to live in

37 Ibid, 631. 38 Ibid, 638.

Karafuto as Japanese nationals was made inapplicable to the Ainu. However, before these limitations became clear, the Japanese state had already began to heavily pressure Ainu across southern Karafuto to accept Japanese subjecthood. Those who did were forcibly moved as a group to the Soya region on the northern coast of Hokkaido.39

Immediately after the treaty was signed, Enomoto, still in Moscow, had already begun planning for the Japanese colonization of the Kuriles, basing his plans for the development of the islands on the by-then defunct Russian-American Company’s administration of Alaska. Having acquired a set of Russian-American Company reports, Enomoto arranged for them to be translated into Japanese and sent back to Tokyo. The reports were to inform Japanese planners about the Russian management of Indigenous peoples as well as the fur and ice trades centred on

Kodiak Island, all of which – he hoped – could be neatly transposed onto the Kuriles.

As Sonja Luehrmann describes, the Russian-American Company’s early administration of Kodiak Island depended on the coercive mobilization of Alutiiq labour. Skilled sea-faring hunters, the Alutiiq harvested the pelts of animals such as sea otters. Highly valuable in Qing fur markets, and yet out of the reach of the Russians, who “never acquired the necessary skills to hunt the clever animals from baidarkas [kayaks] at sea,” the Russian-American Company pressed able-bodied Alutiiq men into hunting parties.40 In exchange for a yearly tribute of otter pelts, they received Russian “protection” and material aid.41 Early in the formation of this system

39 Emori Susumu, Ainu minzoku no rekishi (Urayasu: Sōfūkan, 2007), 405-406. 40 Sonja Luehrmann, Alutiiq Villages under Russian and U.S. Rule (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2009), 66. 41 Ibid, 66-67.

71 of rule, the handful of well-armed Russians on Kodiak Island, Luehrmann notes, beat those “who brought in fewer fox pelts than required” with sticks. Others were forced to join hunting parties

“at gunpoint and with threats of putting them into chains.”42 Whole villages were gathered to watch Company officials blow up boulders with gunpowder: a demonstration of what might become of Alutiiq bodies should they resist.43

In time, this violence was normalized, coming to invisibly form the basis of administrative systems which functioned not through physical violence but material dependence.

Partly due to their own sometimes critical lack of food or other tradable items, the Russian administrators managed intra-Alutiiq trade with an absolute bare minimum of Russian inputs while extracting and exporting the lion’s share of the furs to markets in Guangzhou. What remained was redistributed amongst the Indigenous communities, joining other local goods which the Russians circulated between the villages. According to Luehrmann, Russian-American

Company officials showed little interest in assimilating the Alutiiq where it would not enhance the profitability of the Company. With the exception of the spread of Christianity, rather than attempt to “Russify” the Alutiiq, Russian-American Company policies instead largely took the form of indirect rule of this population. Central to this system were Company-appointed toion

(headmen) who would represent the Russian-American Company locally, ensuring that

Company policy was enforced. This would include “ensuring the punctual attendance at church services and the cleanliness of the village and keeping village statistics ... to organizing hunting

42 Ibid, 71. 43 Ibid, 76.

72 parties, keeping communal stores, assigning orphans to reliable Alutiiq families, and taking care that no one left the village or settled there without authorization.”44

While Russian colonial policy pressed most of the Alutiiq on Kodiak Island into permanent village communities, in their capacity as hunters bound to the Russian-American

Company, others were forcibly resettled in areas sometimes extremely far removed from their home island if deemed more profitable, such as Fort Ross in northern California or the Kurile

Islands. For decades, the Alutiiq had been forcibly re-settled on Ainu territory as Russian proxies, continuing to hunt for valuable otter pelts and in some cases building permanent, multigenerational villages. This created a crescent-shaped territory across the north Pacific from

Ainu Mosir to Pomo, Coast Miwok and Wappo territories in northern California, linking the

Kuriles to nascent global circuits. However, while the Alutiiq had lived in the Kuriles since the late 18th century, the Russian government simply abandoned them on the new Japanese territories after signing the Treaty of St. Petersburg in 1875. Japanese officials surveying their new colonial possession were surprised to find villages full of Alutiiq hunters – having been cut off from essential supplies and left for dead – in a state of distress.45 Seeing the Kurile Alutiiq as

44 Ibid, 88-89. 45 Ōkurasho, ed., Kaitakushi jigyō hōkoku dai’ippen, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Ōkurashō, 1885), 606. Confusingly, Japanese sources from this period largely follow Russian convention in conflating the Alutiit of Kodiak Island with the Aleuts of the Aleutian Islands. However, Luehrmann, who is careful to differentiate the two distinct peoples, specifies that it was Alutiit who had been moved to the Kuriles by the Russian-American Company. See Luehrmann, Alutiiq Villages under Russian and U.S. Rule, 34, 82. References to Aleuts rather than Alutiit in the Kuriles in English literature, moreover, appear to be largely based on Baba Osamu’s 1943 study. While not to discount the possibility that Aleuts, too, may have been present in the Kuriles during or even before the period of Imperial Russian control, Baba specifies the “Aleuts” he refers to were from Kodiak Island, or in other words, that they were Alutiqs. See Osamu Baba. “Chijima ni okeru Aryūto-zoku.” Minzokugaku Kenkyū 9, no. 8 (1943): 773–794; “Chijima ni okeru Aryūto-zoku (2).” Minzokugaku Kenkyū 9, no. 9 (1943): 887-890.

73 embodying the sovereignty of the Russian Empire, Japanese authorities simply deported them to

Russian-administered territories in 1878.46

Indirect Japanese suzerainty over Ainu Mosir in the late Tokugawa era through the semi- autonomous Matsumae Domain strikingly resembled Russian-American Company administration structures in some ways. These structures were predicated on the semi-autonomy of Ainu headmen, the prohibition of cultural assimilation, tribute paid to the Japanese sovereign through local officials, and forced labour.47 And, as alluded to above, while this system was abolished by the Meiji state precisely as a reaction to Russian encroachment, Enomoto Takeaki saw the defunct Russian-American Company’s policies as potentially useful for Japan’s own future colonial planning. Introducing the translated reports in Kaitaku zasshi (Colonization

Magazine), Enomoto stated that Russian models could be utilized for the economic development of the Kuriles.48 To these ends, the translated reports spent considerable space discussing the toion system, for the most part not straying far from Luehrmann’s own descriptions.

46 Ōkurasho, ed., Kaitakushi jigyō hōkoku dai’ippen, vol. 1, 609. While it is unclear what the wishes of the Alutiit found by Japanese surveyors were, Kaitakushi records state that they were moved because they were “the Russian government’s Aleuts (Rōseifu no ‘Areūto’jin),” collectively tying them as a “race” (jinshu) to the Russian sovereign. 47 We might look back to Okamoto’s proposed Ainu policies meant to inspire “loyalty” on part of the Ainu which so resembled buiku policies put into place in Ainu territories following the early 19th century Russian incursions. Such policies, in which the Matsumae Domain at once nurtured and brutally dominated the otherwise self-governing Ainu, may understandably appear distinctly pre-modern or non-Western, such as Brett Walker’s assertion that these policies represent a “more Confucian approach to projecting [the bakufu’s] benevolent rule over the native inhabitants.” However, Japanese Indigenous management policies in the north Pacific came to increasingly resemble Russian policy amidst Japanese fears of the Russian annexation of Ainu territories. This push-and-pull dynamic suggests a more complex relationship between Japanese and Russian Indigenous policy. And, while one can only speculate to what degree Japanese Ainu policies were influenced by, or perhaps developed dialectically with Siberian or Russian-American Company policy, it is telling that as the two states vied for control of Ainu territory throughout the 19th century, as noted above, each explicitly claimed to “protect” the Ainu from the other. See Brett L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 231. 48 Enomoto Takeaki, “Ajia hokubu no gyoryō bōeki no gaikyō,” Kaitaku Zasshi, July 17, 1880, 293-295.

However, while Leuhrmann stresses the Russian disinterest in assimilating the Alutiiq,

Enomoto’s reports highlighted the role of the toions in constructing a regime of disciplinary and biopolitical control which was explicitly assimilative, pushing the Alutiqs to abandon their pre- colonial lifeways and work and live in permanent communities under Russian jurisdiction.

Adopting a stable, relatively sedentary lifestyle would increase the individual output of Alutiiq hunters and maximize Russian-American Company profits.49 In stark contrast to the apparent anarchy of Russian Sakhalin, these local headmen allowed the Company to indirectly monitor their Alutiiq subjects and discipline them from afar. They were to “observe the people” (shū wo kanbō) on behalf of the Company, push them to “work diligently,” and punish those who failed to do so. Not simply repressive, Enomoto’s reports stated that the role of the toions included everything from mapping out local populations through census-taking to inspecting Alutiiq houses in order to detect “dirty air and injurious substances.” If toions discovered anything deemed a threat to the health of the community, they must quickly remove it and throw it into the sea. These headmen were charged with ensuring proper burials, seeing to it that corpses would not be buried just anywhere, but outside of the limits of the villages in proper graveyards, as to avoid the spread of disease through miasma emanating from the bodies of the dead. As a coercive force, in other words, toions took the place of sticks, chains, and gunpowder.

The report ended by stating that the “happiness and prosperity” (kōfuku to zōeki) of

Alutiiq villages was intimately tied to the profitability of the Russian-American Company.

Therefore, the Alutiiq should be encouraged to live together in permanent villages, rather than in

49 Enomoto Takeaki, “Ajia hokubu gyoryō bōeki no gaikyō,” Kaitaku Zasshi, July 3, 1880, 276-277.

75 a “scattered and nomadic” manner and must assimilate to the norms of village life as presented to them by the Russian-American Company. As the “fathers” of their villages, the toions should work hard to help their “children” abolish the “evil customs” of pre-colonial Alutiiq life and punish anyone “stubbornly sticking to old ways.”50 Indeed, the reports directly equated the

“happiness” of each village with enhanced profitability for the Company. Such an economically productive state of cheer could only be produced by the biopolitical and disciplinary management of Alutiiq village life. This was, if anything, a more insidious form of assimilation than simply having the Alutiiq don Russian garb or abandon their baidarkas in favour of Russian watercraft. And, one might remember that this profitable system of colonial management, purported to produce such joyous results, was structured around threats of grave physical violence against any Alutiiq who resisted.

Perhaps due to lingering anxieties over residual Russian sovereignty as tied to the bodies of the “Russified” Kurile Ainu, Enomoto’s plans never materialized. In the years immediately following the signing of the Treaty of St. Petersburg, Japanese Buddhist missionaries began to preach amongst the Kurile Ainu, many of whom had been converted to Russian Orthodox

Christianity, in an effort to “Japanize” them.51 Despite such efforts towards “de-Russification,” and perhaps to Enomoto’s chagrin, the Japanese government began to forcibly move Ainu from the northern Kuriles south in what amounted to a campaign of ethnic cleansing, eventually resettling them in Shikotan where they were forced into agriculture.52 Nevertheless, Enomoto

50 Enomoto, “Ajia hokubu no gyoryō bōeki no gaikyō.” 51 “Untitled,” Asahi Shinbun, April 16, 1881, Osaka edition. 52 Emori, Ainu minzoku no rekishi, 417-418.

76 continued his series of reports in Kaitaku zasshi with an article describing the early Japanese exploitation of the Kurile chain’s otter population and his plan for selling these furs directly to markets in London or St. Petersburg on a trial basis, putting the Japanese products into direct competition with American and Canadian furs from Alaska and British Columbia. No doubt contrary to Enomoto’s initial intentions, sea otter hunting quickly became the domain of non- native hunters and was, in fact, dominated by foreigners, including large numbers of British,

American, Danish, and Chinese poachers. The situation became such that it garnered international attention, with the New York-based Fur Trade Review reporting that from 1875

“otter hunters and other sea-faring foreigners,” together with Japanese nationals, formed the crews of “poaching vessels fitted out for the purpose at Yokohama and Shanghai.” This taxed the

Kurile otter population so heavily that the Japanese government feared that the valuable species would go extinct.53 To make matters worse, some of these poachers simply stole what supplies they needed from local Ainu.54

While the Japanese government struggled to keep foreign poachers out of the Kuriles, in accordance to the Treaty of St. Petersburg, Japanese fishermen operating out of Hokkaido were legally permitted to continue fishing along the coasts of what had become Russian Sakhalin.

Sentoku Tarōji, an early 20th century Ainuologist, noted that throughout the 30 years of exclusive

Imperial Russian rule, “Japanese fisherman from Hakodate in Hokkaido were hired every year in

53 No author. “Washington Letter,” Fur Trade Review. August 1894. 236-237. For a description in Japanese, see “Hon’nen no rakkoryō,” Yomiuri shinbun, March 7, 1889. 54 Nemuro-ken keisatsu honcho, “Chijima no kuni dojin higai ikken shorui,” Betsu-Chijima, 351.2-Shi, 0A024570000000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan.

77 mid-April,” swelling the local population considerably. According to Sentoku, the Japanese would, in turn, hire Koreans or local Ainu to gather konbu (kelp) and to fish for salmon.55 As many as 7,000 Japanese worked in fisheries in southern Sakhalin/Karafuto on the eve of the

Russo-Japanese War: a number far exceeding the mere hundreds of settlers who had trickled in by 1875.56 And, to return for just a moment to Chekhov, the famous author, too, described the

Japanese émigré community in what had become the Russian town of Korsakov in considerable detail. Korsakov became home to a small population of Japanese merchants and had a consulate staffed by what he called “elegantly polite” Japanese. Conversant and literate in not just Russian but French, they impressed him with their “European-style education.” For homesick Russian officials so far from the Baltic capital, the pocket of Japanese social life located within the walls of the consulate became an escape: “a nice, cosy corner where they can forget the prison, forced labour and the petty squabbles and unpleasantries of service, and consequently can relax.”57 The pocket of Japanese settlement on the island, then, had become a nexus of European high culture.

Or, to put it another way, struck by the otherworldliness of Sakhalin, for Chekhov, it was the

Japanese who first began to truly “Europeanize” the remote Asian island.

Karafuto Ainu in Hokkaido

The same dynamic which linked Japanese jurisdiction over the bodies of the Karafuto

Ainu to sovereignty over the land undoubtedly influenced their treatment by the Kaitakushi

55 Sentoku Tarōji, Karafuto Ainu sōwa (Tokyo: Shikōdō, 1929), 18. 56 Stephan, Sakhalin, 66. 57 Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, 210.

78 following the signing of the Treaty of St. Petersburg in 1875. While Japanese settlers living in

Karafuto were given subsidies to re-establish themselves wherever they wished in Hokkaido, the

Kaitakushi denied the Karafuto Ainu this privilege and forcibly moved them to a cluster of hamlets in the Soya region in September of 1876.58 The Kaitakushi had promised these Ainu

“loyalists” that they would be able to quite literally see their homeland across the narrow Soya

Strait and could even visit Karafuto on occasion to visit relatives or pay respects at family graves if they so wished. These terms undoubtedly pushed some Ainu who may have, for example, simply spoken Japanese better than Russian, to agree to emigrate to Hokkaido. However, not long after arriving in Soya, the Kaitakushi abruptly moved the Karafuto Ainu again. This time they were moved to the state-managed inland village of Tsuishikari in southern Hokkaido. Like the Kurile Ainu, the forced movement of the Karafuto Ainu from Soya to Tsuishikari was undoubtedly influenced by similar anxieties about their ability to freely return home if desired, creating a destabilizing fluidity along the border. Indeed, the ostensibly voluntary migration of

Ainu from Karafuto to Hokkaido was, for Japanese officials, a form of “foot voting” in that it seemingly confirmed the legitimacy of Japanese – rather than Russian – sovereignty over Ainu land. Accordingly, the possibility of Karafuto Ainu returning home may have sparked fears of not only losing any latent Japanese claims to Karafuto, but also compromising Japanese legitimacy over Ainu territories across Hokkaido as well. As the presence of the Ainu on the land had formed the basis of Japanese sovereignty claims to Karafuto, maintaining the population of

Karafuto Ainu in a controlled, hermetic environment amounted to treating them as though they

58 Kōno Motomichi, Tai Ainu seisaku hōki ruishū (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 1981), 50-52.

79 remained tied to the Russian island. This would, in turn, allow the Japanese government to keep residual claims to Russian Sakhalin afloat.59 And, while the Karafuto Ainu resisted this treatment as best as they could, as we shall see, Kuroda showed an absolute unwillingness to compromise, using the threat of massacre to quite literally put them in their place.

Central to this process was Matsumoto Jūrō, one of Kuroda’s trusted administrators.

Matsumoto acted as an intermediary between the Ainu and Kuroda as Hokkaido’s chief magistrate. Rising rapidly through the ranks in a few short years, he had proven himself worthy of Kuroda’s trust during the period in which he acted as the magistrate of Muroran in eastern

Hokkaido. There, he managed the town’s rowdy, fluctuating settler population together with local Ainu. Matsumoto is popularly remembered for his comparatively open and inclusive attitude towards the Ainu, having boasted in his memoirs about earning the nickname “the atsushi magistrate” due to his fondness for wearing the Ainu attus (Japanese: atsushi) robes while making his rounds. He likewise is remembered for treating the Ainu under his watch with a degree of common decency evidentially unusual for colonial authorities in Hokkaido at the time by routinely affixing the honorific suffix “-san” to their names.60 This may have reflected

Matsumoto’s famously affable personality. It was also, undoubtedly, a practical matter of

59 The repatriation the Karafuto Ainu survivors in Hokkaido to the newly established Karafuto Prefecture following Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the deportation of the majority of the Karafuto Ainu by the Soviet Union in 1945 show that the “use value” of the Ainu as tokens of sovereignty could rapidly fluctuate. 60 Matsumoto Jūrō, Nemuro mo shiogusa: Matsumoto Jūrō daihangan kō, ed. Yoshinobu Matsu’ura (Sapporo: Miyama Shobō, 1974), 31-32.

80 building a rapport with the colonial subjects he was tasked with administering. As Matsumoto noted, “If you lose trust, how could you govern people?”61

Regardless, the Ainu were not Matsumoto’s main concern: the Japanese settlers were. In his memoirs, Matsumoto wrote of his efforts to “clean up” the rough frontier town of Nemuro, which swelled with settlers after 1869 when the municipal government of Tokyo began to send vagrant populations north. Many were sent to Nemuro, while others were dispatched to the Soya region, and, prior to its succession to Russia, southern Karafuto. In Nemuro, this population struggled to settle on the land and, before long, became so raucous that Matsumoto resorted to having carpenters build a jail for the small settlement. Perhaps only half-joking, he wrote that he was surprised that the settlers hadn’t rolled him up in a mat and thrown him into the sea as revenge.62 However, it quickly became apparent that facing arrest was the least of the troubles the wayward Tokyoites faced. Like their peers in Karafuto who had became so sick that they had to be recalled to the capital, disease soon spread through Muroran.63 Many became deathly ill, with a quarter of them succumbing to disease. Matsumoto – aware from the start of the inappropriateness of Nemuro for this urban population – successfully petitioned to have them moved to more salubrious conditions in Sapporo.

Proving himself to be a fair-minded and pragmatic administrator, Matsumoto was handpicked by Kuroda to become the Kaitakushi’s chief magistrate in 1873. However,

61 Ibid, 31. 62 Ibid, 59-63. 63 For details on the Tokyoites in Karafuto, see Daijōkan, “Karafuto he ijū no kyūmin Tōkyō-fu e fukuseki,” 1870, Main building-2A-009-00, Dai 00080100, National Archives of Japan, Tokyo, Japan.

Matsumoto resigned three years later in protest over the forced movement of the Karafuto Ainu.

In a letter to Kuroda, he stated that his reason for resigning was his deep indignation over the

Kaitakushi’s gross mistreatment of the Ainu, and his intense shame for his own complacency in the affair. The formally free choice of the Karafuto Ainu to choose Japanese as opposed to

Russian nationality was important to the Japanese state as it claimed legitimacy over the Ainu and their land as their sovereign protector. However, for Matsumoto, this free choice carried a much deeper symbolic weight. By making the conscious choice to accept Japanese nationality and consequently abandon their ancestral homeland, those Karafuto Ainu had proven themselves

“loyal citizens (ryōmin) of our empire.”64 This was evidentially the view of at least some of the

Karafuto Ainu themselves. One such Ainu loyalist was Yamabe Yasunosuke, who told the linguist and ethnographer Kindaichi Kyōsuke that through the conscious act of leaving their homeland for Hokkaido, he and his compatriots were, in fact, “no longer aborigines (dojin) as we had been from the earliest times until that moment. We had become true imperial subjects (hontō no kōmin).”65

64 Matsumoto, Nemuro mo shiogusa,170. 65 Yamabe Yasunosuke, Ainu monogatari: fu ainugo tai’i oyobi goi, ed. Kindaichi Kyōsuke (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1913), 14. Yamabe’s account, given in Ainu and translated into Japanese and edited by Kindaichi, describes having received a stipend of rice from Kuroda Kiyotaka as proof of their imperial subjecthood. However, the description of the Karafuto Ainu’s forced movement from Soya to Tsuishikari is exceedingly brief and ignores the extremely coercive nature by which the Kaitakushi moved the Ainu. This may be on account of the fact that Yamabe was a child at the time or may be influenced by Yamabe’s noted highly assimilationist stance as an adult. Moreover, while there is no particular reason to think that the Ainu language text was heavily edited or even fabricated by Kindaichi, its use as ruby text to the right of Kindaichi’s Japanese translation interestingly reveals key places where the meaning is likely consciously skewed with clear ideological motivations. For example, the Japanese term dojin (aborigine, native) is rubied with the Ainu term Ainu, written in katakana. This creates a forced semantic equivalence between the – by Kindaichi’s time – explicitly colonial, racialized term dojin and the Ainu endonym. Kindaichi, moreover, collapsed the Ainu language into the Japanese language, spacing out the rubied Ainu text to better fit the Japanese (which is treated as the authentic text). Even while the two are linguistically dissimilar, perhaps with similar intentions to Okamoto Bunpei, Kindaichi seemed to claim the Ainu language for the Japanese.

In stark contrast, Kuroda dismissed the same “loyal” Ainu as “savages” (banmin). This, in Matsumoto’s eyes, violated the emperor’s directive that all subjects of the empire should be treated with absolute equality, and moreover was a grave insult to the Karafuto Ainu who, for

Matsumoto, had proven themselves to be so much more.66 Even worse, Matsumoto alluded to a plan concocted by Enomoto. Ever eager to exploit Ainu labour, Enomoto had proposed to force the Karafuto Ainu into the coal mines around Sorachi – a site infamous for its use of prison labour – where they would toil in the dark alongside Japanese criminals and exiles. In Kuroda’s eyes, the “savage” Ainu were no better than a rabble of murderers and traitors. He reminded

Kuroda that they had “left the land of their ancestors and abandoned the graves of their mothers and fathers” to resettle in Soya and now “longed for a parent’s love from our empire” in place of their lost families. Matsumoto added rhetorically, “Do not these people deserve our love?”67

While the forced movement of the Karafuto Ainu must have been a shock to Matsumoto, who learned about it only after the fact, it could not have been a surprise. Matsumoto had visited the Ainu in Soya shortly before they were moved, and reportedly was so relieved by their success in quickly resettling themselves in the area around the town of Kitami on the Soya peninsula that, during an inspection tour, he took the liberty of naming one of their hamlets Ando

(lit: relief). However, learning about proposals to move them to Tsuishikari, the Karafuto Ainu quickly lost any sense of relief they, too, may have felt. Delegates from the group had been asked by the Kaitakushi to accompany officials to inspect the proposed site and were deeply alarmed

66 Matsumoto, Nemuro mo shiogusa, 170. 67 Ibid, 171.

83 by what they saw. They contacted Matsumoto soon after to ask him to intervene on their behalf.

Matsumoto redirected a petition written by the Ainu to the Kaitakushi headquarters. The petition explicitly stated their non-compliance with proposals that they, once again, be forcibly moved.

Their displeasure in the suggestion of being moved from satisfactory conditions in Soya is itself understandable, especially as it was in violation of both the Treaty of St. Petersburg as well as informal promises made to them by the Kaitakushi. However, the petition outlined specific concerns. The Karafuto Ainu, above all, were deeply anxious about being cut off from coastal fisheries and the effect this would have on their communities, having fished and traded at sea for generations. Famine couldn’t have been far from their minds. Moreover, the Karafuto Ainu, who had lived in small hamlets spread out across hundreds of kilometres of coastline, were acutely aware of the dangers of living clustered together in one village as this would leave them vulnerable to the spread of communicable disease. Given the fate of so many Japanese and

Russian settlers across the north, this was not at all an unrealistic concern. The sense of anger and foreboding in the Karafuto Ainu community in Soya over the Kaitakushi’s plan to relocate them was so intense that if it came down to it, they simply would build boats and return to

Karafuto, even if it meant the haphazardly built craft would be torn apart by waves. “Dying at sea” (kaishi), the petition concluded, was preferable to dying in Tsuishikari.68

Perhaps because of this expression of resistance, when the Kaitakushi finally made the decision to move Karafuto Ainu, they did so without warning and with a squadron of armed

68 Emori, Ainu minzoku no rekishi, 410-411. See also Karafuto Ainu-shi kenkyūkai, ed, Tsuishikari no Ishibumi: Ainu kyōsei ijū no rekishi (Sapporo: Hokkaido Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 1992), 100-102.

84 police brought in from Sapporo for the task. At the sight of the police on their shores, guns drawn, the terrified Ainu began to flee into the woods. The police took aim, threatening to shoot anyone who resisted. At this moment, the Japanese ship the Genbun Maru fired a blank shot from its cannons, sending a thunderous blast echoing against the mountains and the surface of the water. Matsumoto noted that, with this, the “Karafuto immigrants groveled on the ground with their hands together. There wasn’t a single person who wasn’t trembling.”69 Then, “like rounding up sheep and pigs,” Matsumoto wrote, the police grouped the Karafuto Ainu together and loaded them onto the Genbun Maru. The ship promptly set sail for Otaru, where the Ainu were disembarked and loaded aboard the Hiroaki Maru, a river craft, and brought up the Ishikari

River to Ebetsubuto. From there, they were moved overland to Tsuishikari. Thus treated, many

Ainu were livid. Matsumoto reported that the Ainu leader Atsuyaēku (who took the Japanese name Denbei, no doubt as a signal of his willingness to become Japanese) had become so distressed that, in a fit of rage, he coughed up blood and collapsed, dying on the spot.70

In his letter of resignation, Matsumoto alluded to the fact that Kuroda had “special rights”

(tokken) as the director of the Kaitakushi which allowed him to disregard even the emperor’s orders.71 However, Matsumoto concluded, he will unbendingly follow the orders of the emperor

69 Matsumoto, Nemuro mo shiogusa, 171. 70 Ibid. Some of the finer details of Matsumoto’s second-hand account are inaccurate. For example, Tazaki Isamu notes the presence of two other ships, the Kyōryū Maru and the Raiden Maru, and that the Genbun Maru was forced to make a return trip to Soya to pick up the remaining what Tazaki calls the “immigrants (imin).” Tazaki, however, does not contradict Matsumoto’s overall characterization of the Kaitakushi’s movement of the Karafuto Ainu to Tsuishikari as highly coercive in nature. Karafuto Ainu-shi kenkyūkai, Tsuishikari no ishibumi, 107-114. 71 Matsumoto, Nemuro mo shiogusa, 170. Broadly speaking, Kuroda’s autocratic rule over Hokkaido remains a startling counterexample to the rest of Japan. Across mainland Japan, political and martial power was rapidly becoming monopolized by the Meiji government during this same period, with the abolition of the domains in 1871 and the samurai class in 1873. The legal exceptionality of Kuroda’s directorship can be further highlighted by the

85 in treating the Ainu as Japanese, even if the Japanese sovereign’s will is contradicted by the

Kaitakushi director. Nevertheless, Matsumoto may have been ignorant of the realities of the place of the Ainu as “savages” in the legal and discursive structures by which Hokkaido was colonized. Indeed, the very language used in Matsumoto’s letter reveals the nebulous space which the Karafuto Ainu occupied juridically. Matsumoto himself never actually referred to the

Karafuto Ainu as “Ainu,” or some derivative thereof. Rather, throughout his letter to Kuroda, he interchangeably called them “immigrants” (imin), which explicitly defined them as exogenous to the colonial space of Hokkaido, and “aborigines” (dojin), which defined them, albeit more ambiguously, as Indigenous to that very same space. Likewise, he contrasted the terms “loyal citizen” (ryōmin) with “savages” (banmin), treating the two as antonyms. Matsumoto thereby created a dichotomy between Indigenous peoples who fully submit to colonial rule as deserving of inclusion and equal standing under the law, and those who resist, who were rendered abject savages outside of it.

Nevertheless, Matsumoto resigned in disgust and – having lost his taste for the colonial project – left Hokkaido altogether, writing that he felt so ashamed that he “couldn’t look people in the eye” after what happened. He noted, however, that he was leaving with grave reservations

role of Enomoto, Kuroda’s trusted lieutenant. Enomoto had served as the president of the short-lived Republic of Ezo, a French-backed independent settler state claiming sovereignty over Hokkaido. As the head of state of the Republic of Ezo, Enomoto implicitly rivaled the Meiji Emperor during the months that he and his group of Tokugawa holdouts occupied the Republic’s capital of Hakodate before the city was sacked by forces led by Kuroda himself. While branded a pirate, through Kuroda’s efforts, Enomoto was ultimately pardoned while so many other Tokugawa loyalists were executed, as if afforded the dignity deserved by a head of state. While annexed by Japan, Hokkaido continued to operate as an independent entity under the Kaitakushi, including Enomoto negotiating the abovementioned Treaty of St. Petersburg on behalf of Tokyo.

86 over the future of the Karafuto Ainu in Tsuishikari.72 These fears were well founded. As the

Karafuto Ainu themselves predicted, just a decade after their forced movement to Tsuishikari, the Karafuto Ainu community was devastated by an outbreak of syphilis and cholera. The cholera epidemic that swept Tsuishikari was part of the fifth cholera pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands worldwide, including 90,000 people across Japan.73 The living conditions in Tsuishikari were such that within the space of just one year, close to 400 Ainu died, representing nearly half of the village’s population.74 This horrific event had predictably negative and protracted effects on the survivors, including far worsening the already deep poverty that residents lived in as a large portion of the workforce had perished. In part as a result of economic contingency and, for many, simply as the result of having nothing left, the survivors abandoned Tsuishikari altogether. Some escaped back to Karafuto, smuggling themselves across the Soya Strait and back into the Russian Empire. Others simply wandered throughout Hokkaido as vagrants.75 However, most simply abandoned the village, moving to the adjacent predominantly Japanese town of Ishikari. Tsuishikari had become a ghost town, with little left other than the bones of those who had died in the epidemics. And, before long, even these were dug up and hauled away by bone thieves.76

72 Ibid, 179. 73 Pratik Chakrabarti, Medicine and Empire: 1600-1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 170. 74 In other words, at 800 people, Karafuto Ainu constituted less than 0.002% of the national population while those who died represented over 0.4% of all Japanese victims of the epidemic. 75 “Karafuto Ainu fukki no ken,” in Ainu-shi shiryōshū 2-5 Abe Masaki bunko hen (2) [5 of 6], ed. Kōno Motomichi (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 1984), 26-27; Karafuto Ainu-shi kenkyūkai, Tsuishikari no Ishibumi, 171-187. 76 Karafuto Ainu-shi kenkyūkai, Tsuishikari no Ishibumi, 187. Also see chapter four of this dissertation.

Conclusion

In the sometimes heated debates throughout the 1860s and early 1870s between such figures as Okamoto Bunpei, Soejima Taneomi, Ōkuma Shigenobu, Enomoto Takeaki, Kuroda

Kiyotaka, and Matsumoto Jūrō, the bodies of the Ainu played a central role in establishing

Japanese claims to sovereignty over the northern borderlands with the Russian Empire. This territorial dispute was widely seen as a matter of national security, rallying many to the cause of the colonization of Ainu land who may otherwise not given these outer territories a second thought. For many early Meiji leaders, the Ainu could be mobilized as tokens of sovereignty.

Accordingly, they could be imbued with any positive or negative value that the state wished. For some, such as Okamoto or Kuroda, the Karafuto Ainu were useful to their colonizers only in as far as they could be used to assert Japanese territorial sovereignty over their homeland.

Otherwise, they became an unwanted and perhaps dangerous excess.

The contradictory nature of how the Karafuto Ainu were defined within the settler-drawn boundary between Japan and Russia reveals the liminal space which Indigenous peoples were/are compelled to occupy within doctrines of international law and national sovereignty. The Ainu were treated by settlers as simultaneously Indigenous and exogenous, claimed as members of the national community while trapped on the outside as stateless “outlanders.” Within the locality of the Russo-Japanese borderland, this dynamic was central to negotiators who worked to draw firm, mutually recognized borders between the two empires.

Chapter 2 “Japanese Progress”: The Americanization of Settler Colonial Hokkaido

In the summer of 1854, the American East India Squadron, under the command of

Commodore Matthew Perry, made landfall on the island the bakufu then called Ezo. Having signed the Convention of Kanagawa that March, “opening” Japan to “the world,” Perry took the

East India Squadron north where it dropped anchor just outside of Hakodate, the principal

Japanese settlement on the island. While Ezo was remote and largely unknown, even to the bakufu, the island – and especially the port of Hakodate – attracted the intense interest of the

Americans, who knew of the area from reports compiled by British explorer William Broughton half a century earlier. Such was their interest that, together with Shimoda, the port of Hakodate was chosen, sight unseen, by the Americans as one of just two Japanese ports to be opened to

American vessels. There, the USS Mississippi and the USS Southampton broke off from the squadron and began their mission to find “interesting and useful information” about the surrounding environs which could be “added to science.”1 These ships in turn dispatched smaller survey expeditions to produce accurate, updated maps, collect samples of native flora and fauna, find sources of fresh water, and search for possible coal deposits. Reverend George Jones, a

United States navy chaplain aboard the Mississippi, was tasked with producing a geological

1 Matthew Calbraith Perry, ed. Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan: Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854, under the Command of Commodore M.C. Perry, United States Navy, by Order of the Government of the United States, vol. 2 (Washington: Beverley Tucker, 1856), Introduction. 88 89 report of the area directly around Hakodate. Meanwhile Lieutenant Commander Junius Boyle aboard the Southampton was dispatched to scout the area surrounding Uchiura Bay, just to the north of the Oshima Peninsula where Hakodate sits. While surveying the area around Hakodate,

Jones found a distinctly European landscape reminiscent of the rugged coastlines of Italy or

Ireland. In the area around Uchiura Bay, however, Boyle seemed to be on a different continent altogether, describing a group of what he referred to as “Aino Indians.”2 On shore, Boyle only discovered more of these “Indians,” finding that all of the local villagers and fishermen he encountered were not Japanese but Ainu. Boyle coolly noted with a mix of admiration and contempt that the “Aino Indians” were “well-proportioned, with intelligent features; their color dark, with very black, coarse hair, cut short behind, locks long and bushy, beard and moustaches undipped and uncombed, and altogether filthy in their appearance.”3

Two decades later, the Kaitakushi brought a group of largely American foreign advisors into its employment; specialists who could help fulfill the then-acting director Kuroda

Kiyotaka’s vision of transforming all of Ezo, by then renamed Hokkaido, into a colony resembling New England. This foreign contingent − most notably Horace Capron, Benjamin

Smith Lyman, and William Clark − dug the foundation on which the structures of settler colonial

Hokkaido were built. This included the transformation of Ainu territories into Crown land, the construction of transportation infrastructure which brought settlers into the colony and

2 Ibid, 118. 3 Ibid, 119.

90 commodities out, and the creation of the Sapporo Agricultural College which trained generations of colonial officials.

Colonial policies enacted under their tutelage transformed the flora and fauna of

Hokkaido into state-owned commodities to be exploited under licence by private enterprise and instigated a period of agrarian settlement which saw forest cut to make room for orchards of

European and American fruit trees or fields of potatoes, wheat, corn, and so on. This project entirely transformed not only the landscape, but the economy and demographics of Hokkaido, and in the years that followed, pushed the Ainu – who were still very much at the centre of the economic life of Hokkaido in the early 1870s – to the very margins of colonial society, where they seemed to disappear from sight. To be sure, it was the Japanese government which hired these advisors with the express purpose of colonizing Hokkaido on an American model.

However, the impact of their role in policy planning transformed Hokkaido into something of an extension of the American frontier on the far side of the Pacific with, indeed, many of the same colonial institutions and policies which continued to devastate Indigenous peoples in the United

States.

While these Americans gladly took the role of pioneers, the indigeneity of the Ainu and the Japanese settlers became at times indistinct. While the Ainu seemed to fit comfortably into the subject position of “Indians,” especially for Horace Capron, the Japanese too, at times, came to occupy this same space, becoming the very ancestors of the Indigenous peoples of the

Americas. More generally, in contrast to the contingent of white Americans who “pioneered”

Hokkaido as foreigners, the Japanese became what Capron called “native immigrant[s],” or, as

91 the New York Times even more cryptically put it, “aboriginal settlers.”4 The subjective positioning of the Japanese, the Ainu, and the spectre of “Indians” alike in the colonial space of

Hokkaido became a thickly entangled mass, like a Gordian knot blocking Capron’s success in the capitalist development of not just Hokkaido, but all of Japan.

As we shall see, for Capron this ambiguity meant escape into the fantasy of terra nullius, imagining himself as a lone pioneer in the empty wilds of Hokkaido or breaking what he claimed was the “virgin soil” of the Japanese mainland itself on behalf of the Meiji state. For Lyman this meant seeing Japan as a “Sleeping Beauty,” destined to be woken out of slumber by a princely

America with settler colonial Hokkaido as the fruit of this union. Finally, for Clark this meant the transformation of students put under his tutelage at Sapporo Agricultural College from the sons of samurai into English-speaking, Christian, developmental capitalists who at times seemed more

American than his American students. Indeed, these men were early examples of what Emily

Rosenberg terms “liberal-developmentalists.” With an almost evangelical fervor, which

Rosenberg argues stems both from nativist American Protestantism and from faith in the uniqueness of Anglo-Saxon productivity, they deeply believed that Japan, like all nations, “could and should replicate America’s own developmental experience.”5 In this sense, Capron, Lyman,

Clark and other American advisors self-consciously helped colonize Hokkaido as Americans for the Japanese government and accordingly considered it their task to reform the Japanese so that

4 Horace Capron, ed., Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi (Tokyo: Kaitakushi, 1975), 46; “New Evidence of the Intelligent Progress of the Japanese,” The New York Times, 22 June 1871. 5 Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 7.

92 they could continue to colonize Hokkaido on American models in their wake, particularly by promoting private enterprise and private property. Moreover, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson notes of settler colonial Australia, property, sovereignty, and the nation-state formation itself are posited as exclusively white possessions explicitly at the expense of Indigenous people, who are dispossessed.6 In this regard, this chapter will argue that Capron, Lyman, and Smith, understood their role as not just promoting American models of colonization but transferring their own whiteness to the Japanese so that Hokkaido could effectively be colonized as the uncontested sovereign territory of the Japanese nation-state.

Horace Capron in America

Throughout his two volume memoirs – an edited and annotated personal archive of diaries, correspondence, and newspaper articles – Capron presented himself as an ideal settler with an almost preternatural knack for industry and development. Mourning the fact that so many of his once-celebrated achievements had already been forgotten, Capron hoped his memoirs would serve as proof of his and his family’s enormous contributions to early American industrialization, commercial agriculture, and the colonization of Indigenous land from Texas to

Hokkaido. Presented as though needing to prove himself to a skeptical reader, Capron’s memoirs very clearly demonstrate his views on what he saw as the inseparable categories of developmentalism and colonialism, which informed his views of his work in Japan.

6 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015), xiii.

First among Capron’s many achievements, according to his memoirs, was the manner in which he reclaimed Maryland farmland in the vicinity of the township of Laurel. The grounds of

Capron’s property had been reduced to a desert-like wasteland through the mismanagement of previous farmers. The former tenants had overexploited the soil without fertilizing it, turning it barren. The reclamation of this wasteland into productive farmland, which he undertook at first for purely aesthetic reasons, made him famous, attracting the attention of the free press from

Maine to Georgia. And, however fleeting his fame may have been, Capron’s success in Laurel was so great that it attracted the attention of President John Taylor, who visited Capron for several days, becoming one of several heads of state with whom Capron would make personal acquaintance. While boasting of receiving such high profile visitors, in his memoirs Capron named only three close friends living nearby, with whom he also shared familial bonds: John

Contee Sr., who was married to Capron’s cousin and “owned 400 negroes,” Charles Hill, who was married to Capron’s wife’s sister and “counted his slaves by the hundreds,” and W.W.W.

Bowie, who “married another sister” and owned “large numbers of slaves.”7

While happily keeping such company, reflecting his view of human development, Capron had an entirely different plan for his free pool of white tenant labour. He boasted of his almost

Arthurian ability to “convert a noxious, unwholesome morass, into a beautiful productive meadow.” Not limited to the soil, Capron strived to transform the “half starved and idle population of Virginia and Maryland ... deprived of everything beyond a bare existence” into

7 Horace Capron, “Memoirs of Horace Capron [Volume 1: Autobiography],” [1884] United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, Maryland, United States of America, 81.

94 happy, industrious farmers and millworkers.8 With a schoolhouse and Catholic, Methodist, and

Episcopal churches within the grounds of his compound, these workers would, according to the

Baltimore-based journal The American Farmer, “not be without the means of intellectual, moral, and religious instruction.”9 Capron claimed that through this program of moral cultivation, combined with his strict bans on alcohol, crime was virtually eliminated. And, when trouble did arise, Capron would step in to act as an adjudicator.10 Nurtured and uplifted through hard work and strict discipline, much like the new life arising from the once-barren soil of Laurel, what once was a population of vagrants would emerge as a new middle class.11

However, after the sudden death of his first wife and the “unprecedented financial typhoon” of 1847 which bottomed out Capron’s investments, he sought refuge from the “call for money.” Selling his holdings at Laurel for a pittance, Capron became a special agent in the

Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1852, where he was charged with overseeing “certain tribes of

Indians in Texas, and along the Rio Grande borders.”12 In this role, which would later inform his approach to settlement and land use policies in Hokkaido, Capron helped facilitate the process by which Texas would transition to a naturalized American territory predominantly populated by

8 Ibid, 63, 67, 77. While nominally free, given that many of his workers were employed in cotton mills, it is very likely that Capron’s manufactories were processing centres for cotton derived from the surrounding slave plantations. This is also to say that – at least as Capron presents it – the social and economic “uplifting” of his pool of lower-class whites was facilitated by the extreme exploitation of slave labour. 9 Quoted in Ibid, 60. During a period of fierce anti-Catholic nativism and Hibernophobia, Capron’s educated workforce notably not only included a large number of women, but the construction of a Catholic church in Laurel strongly suggests a sizable community of Irish immigrants as well. 10 Ibid, 68. 11 Even if Capron’s staff most likely was entirely white, this program of human development was a precursor to experiments in assimilative education aimed at transforming African Americans and Indigenous peoples of the United States into a new middle class that can be absorbed by mainstream white society. This is reflected in part by Capron’s descriptions, elaborated upon below, of “Indians” and Ainu as improvable with proper guidance. 12 Ibid, 79.

95 white Anglophone protestants. His role in the management of Indigenous people – including chaperoning groups to reservations for their resettlement – was strategic and indirect, rather than openly violent. Capron was restricted in his use of force and was made to appeal to the American army should the need arise. He otherwise relied on other forms of persuasion to complete his work. This suited Capron, since, despite his often dismissive, paternalistic, and contemptuous attitude towards Indigenous peoples under his watch, he nevertheless expressed deep opposition to the actions of the American army. Stationed throughout the new territories, the army primarily enforced American rule through the use of genocidal violence against any who resisted. In part to avoid such violence, Capron believed that temperance was the key to the peaceful rule of the

Indigenous peoples in Texas, including the Cherokee, the Lenni Lenape (Delawares), and others who had been forcibly uprooted from the eastern United States.

Capron was, then, extremely frustrated that the “emigrant Indians” under his watch were drinking.13 More troubling was that lower class white settlers and what he called “wild

Cherokees” were approaching his camp at night and selling whiskey to his wards when Capron was travelling with them to sites where they were to be relocated.14 His extreme displeasure in witnessing this was due to his belief that alcohol had the unique power to transform even the most docile group of “Indians” into “a howling mass of uncontrollable savages.”15 Like the working class whites in Maryland who he hoped to uplift through strict discipline and moral education, Capron’s goal for Indigenous peoples in Texas, too, was their eventual assimilation

13 Ibid, 120. 14 Ibid, 104-107. 15 Ibid, 108.

96 into the norms of white bourgeois society. Despite deep misgivings, Capron believed in the improvability and assimilability of the “Indians,” and thought that only through fair and honest dealings with settlers could they avoid a “war of extermination” and could instead be “reconciled

... to the gradual change, which our civilization required to fit them for the position of useful citizenship.”16

In the midst of this, Capron opaquely described the American army’s violence against the

Lipan Apache, writing that those of them who had not been killed had been scattered, and that their camps had been burned. Some Lipan women and children had been captured alive, Capron noted. However, he added ominously that “in strict conformity to orders,” Bureau of Indian

Affairs agents such as himself “cannot issue rations to the women and children taken captive in this onslaught.”17 Capron did not totally dehumanize the Lipan Apache or other Indigenous peoples he encountered, and, in fact, expressed some sympathy towards even those who, in self defence, had resorted to violence. However, these feelings were not inspired by a sense of moral outrage over what transpired, concern for the lives of those targeted by such genocidal violence, or even, for that matter, a feeling that potentially “useful” people were being put to waste.

Rather, Capron’s condemnation of the American campaigns of genocide was pragmatic: he feared widespread reprisals against white settlers and thought that the American army would better aid in the colonization of Texas through more subtle forms of persuasion. To these ends,

Capron believed that the “soft” approach taken by Bureau of Indian Affairs agents such as

16 Ibid, 127, 94. 17 Ibid, 113.

97 himself was simply better suited in achieving the goal of the white settlement of Texas than the blatant liquidation of Indigenous peoples. In other words, he and his colleagues attempted to

“peaceably” continue the process of removing Indigenous peoples which had began at gunpoint.

Regardless, like other Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, Capron was never more than a step away from resorting to violent means to achieve these same results. Proof of this, and a demonstration of the limits of his belief in human developmentalism, came when Capron discovered that a number of Lenni Lenape under his watch had vanished. Eventually, he tracked them down, finding that they had joined a larger Indigenous settlement on the banks of the Red

River. There, he learned that the group had established a village, growing corn along the riverside. Even while Capron’s stated goal was the assimilation of Indigenous peoples across

Texas into white society – still in the 19th century largely sedentary and agrarian – the farming village sat atop land that was to be granted to white settlers. Accordingly, Capron ordered the villagers to disperse. After it became clear they had no intention of abandoning their new home,

Capron sent an immediate request to Fort Washita to have soldiers come and clear this group from their land.18 What happened to them is left unstated.

Horace Capron in Japan

As it happened, the spoils of the Mexican-American War extended far beyond Texas, with the United States annexing territories extending as far west as California, and thereby

18 Ibid, 119.

98 giving Washington direct access to the Pacific. This immense, sudden expansion of territory shifted the American focus westward, with interest in Asia amongst politicians, missionaries, and capitalists alike greatly intensifying. Moreover, the Gold Rush of 1848-1855, beginning before the war even ended, caused a sudden population boom in California, transforming what was the small Mexican town of San Francisco into a major American port. For many in the United States,

Asia came to represent a new land of opportunity – a new frontier.

One agent of American expansionism was Matthew Perry, himself a veteran of the

Mexican-American War. Perry believed American expansionism was the natural outcome of the territorial gains won through the war, stating that America cannot “escape from the responsibilities which our growing wealth and power must inevitably fasten upon us.”

Accordingly, Perry believed that the United States has the responsibility to protect “our vast and rapidly growing commerce” and should prepare “for events which must ... transpire in the east.”19 Perry characterized colonialism as a “vice” afflicting all powerful nations, and one that

America, in becoming a major power through its annexation of northern Mexico, could not escape. Indeed, Asian markets represented an important outlet for the “constantly accumulating capital” derived from the Californian mines, and, according to Perry, represented a solution to the growing problem of surplus capital which came as a result of America’s victory over its southern neighbour.20

19 Perry, 177. 20 Ibid, 173.

Perry argued that countries such as Japan were “not intended to be closed forever,” and believed the opening of these countries through “the display of a respectable armed force,” followed by the domination, and coercive Europeanization of Japan (and other Asian nations) was vital to the growth of American commerce.21 These nations, Perry further stated, should be continuously dominated and made to further Europeanize until America’s commercial advantage was maximized. Nevertheless, in front of this backdrop of violence was the creation of small

American commercial settlements within the territorial space of the host nation. These commercial settlements, he argued, could be integrated into the sovereign space of that nation, and would not necessitate the formal annexation of the territory, or even a military garrison; they would be purely commercial.

Perry was ostensibly critical of the European annexation of entire countries across Asia and Africa. However, ports such as those Perry proposed were nothing new, with Great Britain having already established treaty ports in China, and chartered companies establishing commercial factories across the Americas, Africa, and Asia ahead of formal colonization. Perry intended, however, to highlight the comparative benignness of American colonialism in Asia.

And, writing of the “responsibilities” which America “cannot escape,” the coming wave of

American settlement across the Pacific was an historical inevitability. Perry − who himself had purchased land on the Japanese-claimed Bonin Islands − conflated Asia with the American frontier, stating that should “a few Americans determine to congregate and sit down together,

21 Ibid, 177, 175. Perry believed that gunship diplomacy was necessary in Asia, given what he characterized as the arrogant, despotic, and besotted nature of Asian rulers.

100 whether in the western wilds or upon some remote island in the Pacific, there must be some insurmountable obstacle, indeed, which will ever prevent the accomplishment of their designs.”22

Nearly two decades later, after a third career as a cattle rancher in Illinois, a fourth as an officer in the Union Army, and a fifth as the Commissioner of Agriculture under presidents

Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, Capron was approached in Washington by Kuroda

Kiyotaka with an offer to serve as a special advisor to the Kaitakushi. With a salary of his choosing and a retinue of servants and assistants, Capron heartily accepted the offer, and soon after left for Japan. Preparing himself for a journey late in life to “a far off and semi-barbarous country,” Capron was sent off from San Francisco by a large crowd. Amongst them, Capron spotted a friend: the Massachusetts congressman Henry Dawes, who would later become famous for the Dawes Act of 1887.23 During his four years in Japan, working between the Kaitakushi’s branch office in Tokyo and in the backcountry of Japan’s new northern territories, Capron was tasked with the development of Hokkaido, penetrating industry deep into the largely uncolonized inland of the island: a place Kuroda told Capron was yet a “wild land” (kōbu). Though, comparing it favourably to New England, Kuroda added that it had enormous economic potential with wide swaths of what could become agricultural land and large deposits of minerals, which

Capron and the other advisors would be tasked with developing.24

22 Ibid, 181. For details of Perry’s purchase, see United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, ed. Commercial Relations of the United States with Foreign Countries, Issues 22-26 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882), 523. 23 Capron, “Memoirs of Horace Capron [Volume 2: Expedition to Japan],” 10. 24 Karafuto Kaitakushi [Kuroda Kiyotaka], Kepuron yatoiire bunsho, 1871, Betsu 920-Ca, 0A018780000000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan.

101

In contrast to the view of his employers, however, Capron did not see his role in

Hokkaido as limited to the development of agriculture or mining. Nor did he have any intention of assisting the Japanese government in “Japanizing” Ainu territories. Rather, what Capron referred to as his “Mission” (with a capital “m”) was nothing short of the economic, agricultural, and cultural Americanization of the Japanese Empire, for which Hokkaido would merely act as a springboard. This would include not simply the adoption of American methods of resource exploitation or export-driven models of agrarian development, but the promotion of all things

American, ranging from foodstuffs and patterns of consumption to styles of architecture to the development of an explicitly American spirit of enterprise, with the American models meant not simply to supplement but to entirely supplant those of Japan. Indeed, Capron would later refer with self-satisfaction to his contributions to Japan, writing that “the good effects of [the

Kaitakushi’s] operations [have not] been confined exclusively to that Island. The sphere of their influence has gradually and naturally widened, until to day they have proved the benefit to

Niphon (sic). ... [T]hey have been of incalculable value to the Japanese as a nation modifying and improving, as in the course of events that they must, the habits and conditions of the people.”25

While believing that the Japanese nation should be “modified” and “improved” in the course of his Mission of capitalist evangelicalism, Capron nevertheless had a few brief moments of doubt. Observing a festival shortly after his arrival in Tokyo, and moving as one with the crowd, he described feeling “cheer[ed] beyond expression, to pass through the throngs which

25 Capron, “Memoirs of Horace Capron [Volume 2: Expedition to Japan],” 309.

102 filled the streets, and witness so much happiness.” Indeed, for Capron, Japan was so far behind

America that it took on an almost Eden-like quality, with Capron observing that “these ... happy people [have] few wants ... and many, very many sources of innocent amusement.” He asked himself if the “happiness” of these childlike, almost prelapsarian Japanese “will be augmented by their intercourse with ‘outside barbarians.’”26 This thought quickly passed, however, and throughout his four years in Japan, Capron’s collective view of the Japanese seemed to ebb and flow depending on the degree to which Kaitakushi planners followed his orders. This was particularly the case during his trips to Hokkaido when he witnessed just a few of the innumerable examples of the corruption with which the Kaitakushi was famously rife, as well as costly mistakes in the development of infrastructure. Capron did not attribute this corruption and incompetence to the Kaitakushi as an institution. Rather, it reflected the Japanese national character. Any deviation from his strict orders was a sign of the “ignorant prejudices of the

Japanese,” while any error was the result of their “perfectly unreliable ... judgement.”27 Capron unironically condemned his hosts for the “grave defect” in their character which gave them “over bearing confidence in their own judgement, and overweening vanity.”28 The thought that he would be blamed personally for problems that arose from this only added to this resentment.

Extremely self-conscious, he feared it would make him the object of ridicule amongst the foreign community and tarnish his legacy.29 Indeed, before long, the quaintly childlike Japanese he

26 Ibid, 51. 27 Ibid, 163, 183. 28 Ibid, 208. 29 Ibid, 210, 241

103 witnessed in Tokyo became “children with a rattle” in Hokkaido, unable (or perhaps simply unwilling) to grasp Capron’s demands and easily distracted from their task at hand.30

The only Japanese who seem to have escaped Capron’s ire were the Meiji Emperor and his family. Seemingly taking pleasure in the fact that the American Minister to Japan, Charles De

Long, was refused admittance, Capron proudly boasted of being the first foreign civilian to be granted an audience with the emperor.31 So taken was Capron with the Japanese monarch – for

Capron, the personification of a new wave of Westernizing progressivism – and with the fabulous honour of an imperial audience bestowed uniquely upon him that once again he seemed to forget about his Mission to recreate Japan in America’s image. Observing the gardens between the imperial palace and the Meiji Emperor’s teahouse, Capron was briefly overcome by something approaching Stendhal syndrome, writing that the “landscape of surpassing beauty ... laid out and improved over two hundred years” could not be further “improved upon at present day, with all our boasted scientific knowledge and experience.”32 Snapping out of it, however,

Capron returned to form and noted that the grasses throughout the imperial garden were “very objectionable.”33

Capron did not simply see Japanese grasses as inferior to their American equivalents, but virtually all of the products of Japanese agriculture. Above all, he despised daikon radishes. So hated were they that Capron made frequent reference to them in his memoirs, calling them “a

30 Ibid, 149. 31 Ibid, 22. 32 Ibid, 23. 33 Ibid.

104 poor apology for a food plant” which “would be ... unprofitable for any purpose for food for either man or beast” in the United Sates.34 Hating them to the point of disgust, he wrote that the daikon “not only smells of ... but tastes of” the night soil used to fertilize them. Japanese fruit disappointed Capron as well, with, perhaps, the exception of “one variety of tolerably good grape.”35 Indeed, for Capron, nothing in Japan could even truly be called agriculture. Capron wrote that what he observed “can hardly aspire to the dignity of farming,” calling it instead

“horticulture.”36 This was much like Locke’s famous condemnation of Indigenous forms of agriculture in the United States, which he argued fell far short of “Industrious and Rational.” As

Bruce Buchan argues, for Locke this consequently left the “Indians with nothing more than a limited title of possession” to their own farmland.37 Capron’s assessment of Japanese land use was similarly negative. Shocked at what he saw as lacklustre results coming from “an enormous expenditure of human labour,” he concluded: “Everything in Japan is to me a mystery; how it is that a people naturally so intelligent, ingenious, appreciative, and so capable of imitating everything they see, should remain so long in a state of semibarbarism, is perfectly incomprehensible.” Based on European schemes of property, the failure of Japanese farmers to rationally “improve” the land could have dire consequences for the territorial sovereignty of

Japan. Capron saw it as central to his Mission to remedy this situation, and arranged to have

American fruits, vegetables, grains, grasses, and livestock imported. For Capron, their mere

34 Ibid, 35. 35 Ibid, 36. 36 Ibid, 37. 37 Bruce Buchan, Empire of Political Thought: Indigenous Australians and the Language of Colonial Government (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 40.

105 arrival in port was “another advance step” in what he called “the Japanese progress.”38 He was so confident in both himself and the superiority of all things American that he concluded that “[i]f there is a failure, it must be a defect in the Japanese themselves.”39

However, if the Japanese remained, as by fate, semi-barbarous, the Ainu were “the wildest looking savages the eye ever rested upon.”40 After several meetings with the Ainu,

Capron observed that “these benighted Ainos” are similar “in many ways to ... our North

American Indians,” though nevertheless “a very superior race of beings in every respect, having none of their savage brutality.”41 For Capron, the Ainu, unlike the “wild” Indians, became the perfect patsies on account of their purportedly gentle nature. He claimed that “they fully understand and appreciate the object of our Mission, and seem to think us from a superior race of mortals.” Perhaps due to their supposed thankful acceptance of Japanese colonization, Capron claimed, they possessed “a real natural grace ... that is never seen amongst even semi-civilized nations.” By consequence, we might then assume that they were then in fact closer in spirit to

Europeans than his “semi-barbarous” Japanese hosts. This led Capron to conclude that very much unlike “the warlike dispositions of the North American savage,” the Ainu “will readily assimilate in all the good traits of civilized life, and resist to a great extent the bad.”42 With this thought, they began to favourably compare to the Japanese as well. For example, while imperfect, Ainu dwellings and fishery buildings were far more suitable for the northern climate

38 Capron, “Memoirs of Horace Capron [Volume 2: Expedition to Japan],” 157. 39 Ibid, 187. 40 Ibid, 98. 41 Ibid, 92, 93. 42 Ibid, 93.

106 than the “chronic architecture of Japan.”43 Capron likewise glowingly wrote of the unmatched beauty of Ainu boats and the “wonderful skill displayed by these Aino fishermen in the management” of their watercraft.44 Indeed, just as the Japanese slipped in Capron’s estimation, the Ainu, as noble savages, seemed to represent untapped potential, like clay that could be molded into a beautiful form. And, exactly like the view of the Japanese whose merriment on the streets of Tokyo briefly lifted Capron’s spirits, he again took pause to consider what spiritual benefit his Mission could possibly have for the Ainu he encountered in southern Hokkaido.

Described as “a people so free from guile, and so little prone to do evil,” the Ainu seemed to replace the Japanese as innocent and childlike.45

In time, however, the barriers between Capron and his Japanese hosts seemed to mount while those between the Ainu, the Japanese, and “Indians,” began to break down altogether. The transcolonial fantasy of the Ainu-as-Indians started to permeate Capron’s vision of the Japanese as well. Referring to the history of Japanese sailors being swept eastward during the Tokugawa period, with their boats washing ashore on the west coast of North America, Capron concluded that the “striking resemblance between the aborigines of America and the pure Japanese is too great to admit of a doubt of their being the same people.”46 In this regard, both the Japanese and

Ainu had become “Indians.” However, the Ainu – who remained incomprehensible due to a lack of a mutual language and therefore unknowable to Capron – became little more than vague

43 Capron, ed. Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi. 260. 44 Capron. “Memoirs of Horace Capron [Volume 2: Expedition to Japan],” 92-93. 45 Ibid, 94. 46 Ibid, 142-3.

107 abstractions. There they dwelled in the background, almost decoratively, with “their dark swarthy figures [giving] to the scene a very wild and peculiarly interesting character.”47 Even while writing of his visits to Ainu villages of upwards of 1,500 people – towns about the size of

Sapporo at the time – the Ainu nevertheless came to fade into the wilderness to such a degree that, at times, they seemed to disappear completely.48 Territories Capron knew to be Ainu lands were reimagined as places “never been passed over by man.”49 He was amazed that “rich and beautiful” Ainu territories, too, “should have remained so long unoccupied and almost as unknown as the African deserts.”50 Indeed, with the Ainu dimly fading into the forests, the

Japanese in Hokkaido, too, began to disappear. Capron came to imagine himself as virtually alone in the wilderness, writing,

On this wild coast, in this almost unpeopled Island thus remote, I stand solitary and alone, a pioneer, as it were, upon the outpost of civilization. I often ask myself what is to compensate me for this great sacrifice, these great fatigues, and very great hazards at my time of life – 70 years – and answer myself thus, without success in your great Mission, nothing. It is not the exposure and hardships of this frontier life, the exposure to the elements, the hazards upon the sea, the danger to be apprehended from the denizens of the forest, or a strange and uncivilized people, nor the deprivation of all the comforts and conventionalities of a highly civilized society that make up the sum of obstacles to be surmounted, or the annoyances to be thrust aside.51

For Capron, this frontier of civilization was not limited to Hokkaido. It stretched southward across the length of the Japanese archipelago. The American fruit trees and grains

47 Ibid, 240. 48 Ibid, 249. 49 Ibid, 240. 50 Ibid, 101, 102. 51 Ibid, 80-90.

108 planted on the Kaitakushi’s model farm in Tokyo became the first true agriculture in the history of Japan. Pioneering this new field of agrarian science not only for the Kaitakushi, but for the

Japanese nation, Capron took immense pleasure in operating a newly imported breaking plough and “cut[ting] a straight handsome furrow in the virgin soil of Japan.”52 With this, mainland

Japan, too, became a sort of terra nullius, occupied by some 30,000,000 people but chronically undeveloped to the degree that the very soil underfoot could be imagined as untouched. By breaking the soil, Capron could claim it back for Japan.

Japan as “Sleeping Beauty”

Capron was not the only American employee of the Kaitakushi to claim land on behalf of

Japan. Indeed, this seemed to come naturally to Benjamin Lyman, who was dispatched to

Hokkaido in the summer of 1874 to engage in a geographical survey to find exploitable mineral resources. Joined by a small party of Japanese and Ainu, he scouted out the area around the

Ishikari River, in the vicinity of what is today the city of Ashikawa. Lyman’s party consisted of himself, a Japanese interpreter, one Mr. Akiyama (an “assistant geologist, quarter-master, entomological collector and sounder of rivers”), several unnamed assistants, two Japanese

“coolies,” and a number of Ainu, who functioned both as guides and general labourers.53 Despite the large number of Japanese, the party relied heavily upon the Ainu, treating them like beasts of burden. Indeed, even though the Ainu were already carrying the bulk of the party’s food, their tents, their tools, and so on, Lyman increasingly relied upon them to carry him as well, opting to

52 Ibid, 188. 53 Capron, ed. Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, 339.

109 be carried across rivers on the back of one unlucky Ainu guide. At first, Lyman claimed, this occurred due to an innocent misunderstanding. However, happy to keep his feet dry and “almost dead with fatigue,” the American geologist was carried across rivers on this Ainu man’s back, sat on his shoulders if the water was too deep, held his or other Ainu guides’ hands as they crossed rapids, and at one point had himself hauled by rope up a mountainside.54

Lyman was, in a word, helpless, and happily reaped the benefits of his position. The Ainu were far from helpless, however. The guides, much quicker on their feet through familiar territory than the Japanese or the American, scouted ahead through the forests, up mountains, and over rivers, laying out the path ahead. These same Ainu also skillfully caught fish, adding greatly to the group’s meagre rations. Having found the Japanese map which the party had been using increasingly unreliable as they treaded further and further into the backcountry, Lyman came to rely entirely on the Ainu for guidance as well.55 Despite this, the American dismissed their knowledge of their own land, and mid-way through the trip, began renaming the topography his guides hauled him across as though they were new discoveries. Lyman did this on the pretense that the lands they traversed were terra incognita to everyone in the party, including the

Ainu. He initially claimed to do so in a joking manner, at least at first, explaining to Horace

Capron that this ostensibly playful act “added zest to our work.”56 However, knowing full well that “the Ainos go almost everywhere and give names to all the streams and places,” Lyman

54 Ibid, 377. 55 The map which the Kaitakushi provided Lyman was based on an earlier map prepared by Matsuura Takeshirō. It was Matsuura who famously renamed the island Hokkaido in 1868. 56 Capron, Horace, ed., Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, 357.

110 nevertheless began to imagine his group as “the discoverers of new land” and thereby “entitled to give names to our discoveries.”57 He began to rename Ainu land wherever he went. Akiyama,

Lyman’s right hand man in the party, was blessed to have been the namesake of not only two groups of hot springs, but also the river “Akiyamagawa.” The group passed “Capron Canyon,” and knowing that the area they were in had already been explored, “at least by Ainos,” he named a stream “Araigawa” (or Arai River, after the name of a Kaitakushi official), and then

“discovered” “Yamauchigawa” (Yamauchi River, after another official), “Nishimuragawa”

(Nishimura River, after yet another official), and both the “Kaitakugawa” (Kaitaku River) and

“Kaitakutoge” (Kaitaku Pass).58 At last, their journey complete, Lyman, Akiyama, and their party bid farewell to the Ainu. However, apparently having become something more than a source of much-needed zest, Lyman stated in his report that before parting ways, the Ainu group’s own interpreter had “the new names of the streams and places of the Ishcari (sic) headwaters explained to him, and a rough sketch given to him, so that the Ainos should know the places by their right names.”59

Why did this become so important for Lyman? However grotesque a charade, Lyman’s renaming of the landscape was anything but innocent. While it is unclear whether it was

Lyman’s conscious intention or it simply had become second nature for Euro-American colonizers, by renaming Ainu topography Lyman conceptually severed the lands he surveyed from their Ainu past, allowing him to “discover” them anew. Like the then ongoing process of

57 Ibid. 58 Ibid, 359, 360. 59 Ibid, 380.

111 renaming Indigenous territories in the United States, Lyman’s renaming of Ainu topography was an assertion of exogenous sovereignty over Indigenous territory. Just as in the Bible when God granted Adam the right to create names for everything over which he held dominion, replacing

Indigenous names with those chosen by settlers fulfilled this same purpose. It erased Indigenous sovereignty over the land while asserting that of the colonizer. In other words, through the performative act of renaming Ainu land, Lyman transformed the supposed terra incognita of

Ainu land into terra nullius. This land could then be (re)discovered and (re)claimed by settlers.

And, by renaming the land after Kaitakushi officials and, indeed, the Kaitakushi itself, Lyman sought to transform the natural surroundings of Hokkaido – the rivers, canyons, mountain passes, and so on – into objects commemorating the colonization of Hokkaido and the conquest of the

Ainu. This begs the question: if Lyman, an American, was indeed asserting exogenous sovereignty over Ainu land through the act of renaming the island’s topography, whose sovereignty was it?

With the notable exception of “Capron Canyon,” Lyman’s careful use of Japanese topographic vocabulary strongly suggests that he meant to claim this land on behalf of the

Japanese Empire. Indeed, in a later report, Lyman declared to Capron his “sincere desire to be of service to the Kaitakushi ... of service to the Government in general and above all to Japan.”60

However, Lyman was quite happy to do this as an American, rather than as a Japanese proxy.

And, like Capron, the target of Lyman’s “desire” was not the backwoods of Hokkaido which he was tasked with surveying, but Japan itself. In his reports to the Kaitakushi, the geologist

60 Ibid, 430.

112 described Japan as “the Sleeping Beauty that the young Prince (America) came to awaken to fresh life and renewed loveliness.”61 The country of his employers became explicitly feminized and bound as by betrothal to a masculinized United States. And, just as the “virgin soil” of

Hokkaido was to be read as explicitly feminine, for Capron, Lyman, and others, it was to be the entirely male, largely white American foreign contingent of the Kaitakushi who would push forward the developmentalist colonial project, transforming the very landscape of Hokkaido to resemble that of the United States. This was certainly not limited to the renaming of topography, but included turning forests into farmland, mountains into mines, bays into ports, and so on. In other words, Lyman and his compatriots worked to masculinize the soil of Hokkaido on behalf of a feminine Japan. The Japanese colonization of Hokkaido was, then, a joint enterprise between

Japanese and American imperialists.

Curiously, Lyman’s characterization of Japan as “sleeping beauty” is startlingly evocative of post-war modernization theory, which, indeed, American historian John Hall referred to as “sleeping beauty theory.”62 Modernization theory imagined a long dormant feudal

Japan as benevolently awoken by America/‘the West’ and consequently driven towards modernity, and thereby reaping economic, political, social, and cultural benefits from this encounter. From the 1950s until the early 1970s, modernization theory remained virtually unopposed in the American academy, and served as the ideological basis of both the American occupation of Japan and continued American hegemony post-occupation. As Harry Harootunian

61 Ibid. 62 Hall, John Whitney. “New Look of Tokugawa History.” Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan, edited by John Whitney Hall and Marius B. Jansen, Princeton University Press, 1968, 68-77.

113 observes, alluding to Edwin Reischauer’s description of America and Japan’s “skillful blending,” post-war modernization theory posited America as the groom and Japan the bride, with “the

Occupation ... seen as a bourgeois wedding.”63 However, Harootunian notes, “the actual intent of the coupling was to transform the bride by bringing her into the groom’s household; through marriage the bride would be resocialized into the groom’s world of middle-class values and the standards of civilized life.”64 Three quarters of a century before the dramatic collapse of the

Japanese Empire, Capron’s and Lyman’s musings regarding a femininized and sexualized Japan suggests a similar view as to the nature of their professional engagement. The product of such a union was, then, the Americanized settler colony of Hokkaido: a colony which, for Hokkaido- trained colonial planners such as Nitobe Inazō, provided a model for Japan’s later “blue water” colonies. Despite this, American modernization theorists would later claim that Japan’s period of aggressive colonial expansion was, far from the product of a period of “progressive”

Americanization, indicative of a still half-sleeping Japan’s lingering feudal tendencies.

This was not lost on the American press in the late 1870s. Nor was the ambiguity between the Americanization of Japanese colonialism and an American Japan, with the New

York-based Daily Graphic referring to Hokkaido as “Eastern America.” The Daily Graphic glowingly referred to Capron’s efforts by name, praising him for leaving behind Euro-American architecture and institutions, livestock, and crops as he triumphantly returned to Washington.

This Americanized colonial apparatus was, the article noted, a self-perpetuating system, with

63 Harry Harootunian, “America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan,” Japan in the World, ed: Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993), 1993, 186-221. 64 Ibid.

114

Japanese settlers in Hokkaido themselves reproducing the American models. The article suggested that “America ought to cultivate more intimate relations with the great empire of the

Pacific.” However, drawing into question for whom Hokkaido was being colonized, it ominously ended by suggesting that with the growing British domination over China and Russian expansion into Manchuria, “[i]f America is to hold her own in this march of peaceful conquest she must promptly take a hand.”65

White Settlement of Hokkaido

The Japanese government sought to settle Hokkaido as quickly as possible, prompting the employment of these foreign experts. Doing so would ensure that the territory would be recognized internationally as firmly under Japanese sovereignty and not fall into Russian,

British, or even American hands. To these ends, the Kaitakushi considered settling the island with foreigners. In one of his first meetings with Kuroda in Tokyo, Capron was surprised by the

“extraordinary proposition of throwing the Island open to foreign immigration.”66 This proposal was perhaps inspired by the Russian success in settling Sakhalin with ethnic Poles, Germans,

Finns, Cossacks, Tatars, and other peoples who would settle the disputed territory as Russians.

Evidence suggests that the Kaitakushi may have originally had Asian immigration in mind, such as a group of Qing subjects who were allowed to immigrate to Hokkaido as farmers, receiving

Japanese citizenship upon arrival.67 Capron, however, interpreted “foreign” as explicitly meaning

65 “The Eastern America,” The Daily Graphic, 31 July 1875. 66 Capron, “Memoirs of Horace Capron [Volume 2: Expedition to Japan],” 43. 67 Ōkurasho, ed., Kaitakushi jigyō hōkoku dai’ippen, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Ōkurashō, 1885), 210.

115 white Americans such as himself. Accordingly, he enthusiastically endorsed this proposal, broaching the topic in his First Annual Report, submitted directly to Kuroda. Trying to convince

Kuroda of the desirability of white settlers over Japanese, Capron told Kuroda, “the settlement of

Yesso [would be] an easy matter, had we to deal with the hardy people who settled America. If thrown open to settlement on the liberal terms offered by the government of the United States in similar cases every available acre would at once be occupied.”68 While Capron viewed European stock as culturally if not racially more appropriate for the temperate climate of Hokkaido, he felt that the Japanese, on the other hand, must “become gradually inured” to the “more rigorous climate.”69 And, just as Capron believed that foreign settlements in places such as Yokohama had a positive, civilizing effect on resident Japanese populations, Capron argued that white settlers in Hokkaido could likewise “teach the native immigrant by example, the methods of best meeting and overcoming the difficulties of his new situation.”70 Indeed, Capron argued that the

“infusion of foreign energy and skill [would] quicken into life and activity the forces upon which depend the prosperity of Yesso,” signifying that the mere presence of foreigners in Hokkaido would stimulate Japanese settlement of the island.71 Japanese emigration to Hokkaido would have a biologically positive effect on Japanese settlers as well, improving their stock, with

Capron claiming that “the invigorating influences of such a climate, together with a partial change of food, will strengthen the system and enable it to resist the influences of the cold.”72

68 Capron, ed., Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, 45-46. 69 Ibid, 46. 70 Ibid, 48. 71 Ibid, 577. 72 Ibid, 46.

116

Pushed by Kuroda to provide a more thorough proposal, however, and having apparently given it more thought, Capron conceded that laws of extraterritoriality enforced upon Japan through the signing of the unequal treaties represented a major barrier to the foreign settlement of Hokkaido because this territory – with the exception of the treaty port of Hakodate – remained formally off-limits to foreigners. While seeing the acquisition of “the labour and skill and capital of foreign nations” as vital to the development of Hokkaido, especially for capital and labour intensive mineral extraction, Capron recommended against a program that would promote the naturalization of foreigners as a solution to the problem of extraterritoriality. The unequal treaties granted rights to the subjects of the signatory countries to settle in treaty ports while remaining exclusively subject to the laws of and answerable only to the authorities of their home countries.

However, travel outside of those zones was strictly prohibited, except – as with Capron – by special permission of the Japanese government. While the naturalization of foreigners as

Japanese would provide a solution to this problem, and indeed may have been the Kaitakushi’s initial intention given the naturalization of the Qing immigrants, Capron suggested that it would be impossible to attract foreign immigration under such terms. Warning Kuroda that “capital is naturally suspicious and examines with closest scrutiny the guarantees and safeguards of law,” foreign capitalists would not, he claimed, be willing to subject themselves to Japanese law or to lose privileges associated with extraterritoriality as a condition for settling in Hokkaido.73

Insisting that “ex-territorial jurisdiction ... is a right to which even the most liberal Powers still jealously cling,” and that foreign settlement in Hokkaido must accordingly be planned around the

73 Ibid, 576.

117 conditions of unequal treaties, however “distasteful and repugnant” the Japanese government may find them, Capron suggested a compromise.74 Hokkaido itself would become a gigantic treaty port, though more firmly under Japanese sovereignty than the ports already opened to foreign residence. The Japanese government would be allowed to screen foreign applicants who would then be granted special passports, and once in Hokkaido, they would be obliged to follow

Japanese law. However, should they break the law, they would be spared the apparent indignity of being put in front of a Japanese judge, and would instead face trial in foreign tribunals located in the treaty ports. With the immigration of white Americans to Hokkaido under such conditions, he concluded, “it seems to me that the problem as to the development of that Island will be solved.”75

The thought of settling foreigners in Hokkaido was still on Kuroda’s mind when he met a year later with William Clark, who replaced Capron as Kuroda’s main foreign confidant. Kuroda informed Clark that he believed “a colony of Americans would make a most desirable addition to the population of Hokkaido,” and asked Clark for his opinion.76 Before formally replying to

Kuroda on the matter, Clark wrote in a letter to his sister that she should tell her husband that “if he wants to emigrate, I will give him 200 acres of the best land he ever saw in the valley of the

Ishkari (sic).” He joked that in Hokkaido, “salmon and deer will come to his door and ask to be eaten, and magnificent bears will bring him their skins for robes.” Somehow, the letter began to

74 Ibid, 576, 577. 75 Ibid, 578. 76 Kuroda Kiyotaka, Kaitakushi Sapporo kanen no nōgakkō e no ikan tsūchi (wabun-eibun), 1876, Clark, William Smith UM4-6,4-7, 0C010870000000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan.

118 take on the tone of a serious immigration proposal, with descriptions of high quality wood and coal, a better climate than New England, and the beautiful forests and fields of flowers before descending again into silliness, with Clark adding that in addition to self-skinning brown bears, the Ishikari Valley offers “[v]olcanos (sic) and earthquakes made to order.”77 Regardless, Clark largely concurred with Kuroda, and in a letter dated September 12th of the same year, outlined a plan for American settlement through a series of questions and suggestions. Chief among this list was the question of whether American immigrants in Hokkaido would be required to “abjure their American citizenship and become subjects of the Japanese government.” Rather than

Capron’s suspicious capitalists, however, Clark envisioned farmers, shipwrights, carriage makers, and other skilled craftsmen who would move to the Ishikari Valley with their families, making Hokkaido their home. To attract American settlers, the Japanese government might –

Clark suggested – provide conditions favourable to settlement, such as providing the Americans with allotments of Crown land on which to live, building houses there which would be rented or bought outright by the American settlers, giving them special draft and tax exemptions, and granting them a degree of self-government. While Clark didn’t provide a breakdown of costs, he estimated that a colony of 30 men and their families should collectively bring 10,000 dollars with them (or about 333 dollars per family). Whatever reservations Americans might have had about settlement in Japan, Clark concluded that the depression brought on by the Panic of 1873

“renders the present an exceedingly favorable time for attempting such an enterprise.” And, also

77 W.S. Kurāku [William Smith Clark], Gakuseitachi no koto, Kuroda chōkan no koto, Tondenhei-sha no secchi basho, 1876, Kurāku shokan utsushi UM6-10, 0C012600000000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan, 51.

119 like Capron, Clark suggested that the presence of “active, enterprising and intelligent”

Americans “would be of inestimable service to the Japanese settlers, and they would be certain to make their influence felt in many ways in various parts of the Empire.”78

On the basis of this proposal, Kuroda arranged to have the matter discussed in cabinet.

However, this was as far as the matter went. Nevertheless, under Clark’s tutelage, the Sapporo

Agricultural college (SAC) would soon produce its own Americanized Japanese settlers. Clark had been hired to establish SAC on the model of the Massachusetts Agricultural College (MAC).

Acting as both an educator and administrator, he produced a generation of graduates who filled this knowledge gap and, as Kuroda put it, ensured that the largely agrarian Hokkaido would not

“relapse into the Japanese manner of farming.”79 Trained in subjects ranging from scientific agriculture to the history of colonialism, subjected to the same daily military drills as their MAC counterparts, advancing to high proficiency in English, and many of them converting to

Christianity through Clark’s evangelical efforts, the “hybrid” generation produced by the

Sapporo Agricultural College under Clark and his successors took over the role of foreign advisors in the continued colonization of Hokkaido and rendered Kuroda’s proposed American immigrants, flouted for their potential, largely superfluous. So happy was Clark with his students, in fact, that in a letter home, he commented that his SAC students were “as good and enthusiastic as possible and so polite and grateful for instruction as to make American students seem like savages.”80

78 Kuroda, Kaitakushi Sapporo kanen no nōgakkō e no ikan tsūchi (wabun-eibun), 1876. 79 Ibid. 80 Kurāku [Clark], Gakuseitachi no koto, Kuroda chōkan no koto, Tondenhei-sha no secchi basho, 23.

120

Most famous among the SAC graduates was undoubtedly Nitobe Inazō, who went on to teach Colonial Studies (shokumingaku) at both SAC and Tokyo Imperial University while applying colonial theory “pioneered” in Hokkaido as a colonial official in Taiwan.81 Nitobe believed that Kuroda had demonstrated his great wisdom when he travelled to the United States in 1870 to seek out foreign advisors. This was critical, according to Nitobe, as “[t]he simple adoption of American methods without trained hands to rightly direct them, would merely amount to an apeish trick.”82 And, as Clark was later hired to help establish the SAC, a pilot project was started to “train select young men for civil service and ... make their residence in the

Island.” In exchange for this education as well as room and board, “successful candidates for admission were required to sign an agreement with the authorities to serve in the Colonial Office

[Kaitakushi] for five years after graduation,” and have their koseki (family registers) formally moved from their home prefectures to Hokkaido.83 The curriculum of the school was designed to provide theoretical, practical, and military training “deemed necessary to make efficient officials and exemplary pioneers.”84 This would, according to the SAC’s Plan of Organization, “qualify its students” to act as administrators in business and government “pertaining to agriculture and the development of natural resources, manufactures, and the maintenance of an advanced civilization; also to promote conceptions of their relations to the state and society, and of self-

81 Ueki Tetsuya, Shokumingaku no kioku: Ainu sabetsu to gakumon no sekinin (Tokyo: Ryokufū, 2015), 57-58. See Alexis Dudden, Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 133-140 for more on Nitobe. 82 Nitobe Inazō, Imperial Agricultural College of Sapporo, Japan (English) (Sapporo: Imperial College of Agriculture Sapporo, 1893), 3. 83 Ibid, 7. 84 Ibid.

121 culture befitting their prospective stations.”85 Under Clark, according to Nitobe, the SAC instilled “[t]hat manly spirit ... into young students at the age when they were most susceptible to external influences.”86 Or, in other words, just as Capron and Lyman saw themselves as masculinizing the soil of Hokkaido, according to Nitobe, Clark masculinized presumably erstwhile feminine settlers in preparation for their “manly” task of colonizing Hokkaido.

Flora and Fauna as Property

With Capron’s at times comical curmudgeonliness, Lyman’s seemingly innocent buffoonery, and Clark’s good-natured joviality, it can be easy to lose sight of the impact these men and their colleagues had on the Ainu, the Indigenous people of the land they sought to colonize. They were central to the process by which Hokkaido was transformed into a thriving settler colony, influencing policy which continues unabated to structure relations between the

Japanese, the Ainu, and the land up until the present. Most of these policies would prove devastating to the Ainu. However, during these advisors’ tenure, the Ainu remained central to the economic life of the colony. Indeed, Capron’s descriptions of Hokkaido were – like those of the

Perry expedition twenty years before – filled with references to economically productive Ainu living in large, well-organized villages along the coasts. These same Ainu were also heavily relied upon as guides and navigators by the Kaitakushi, including contracted employees like

85 Quoted in Ibid, 2. 86 Ibid, 10. See also 35-42 of this same volume for an outline of the curriculum of the college from the year 1876 under Clark. The four-year agricultural program included everything from chemical physics to military drills. Moreover, it included extensive training in spoken and written English as well as in English-Japanese translation. In the years following, this curriculum was expanded to include such subjects as the German language, Agrarpolitik, Political Economy, and the History of Colonization.

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Lyman. Nevertheless, colonial structures erected during the tenure of these advisors had a devastating impact on the Ainu, just as similar colonial structures had on Indigenous peoples in the United States. In just a few short years, the Ainu were driven off the coasts by Japanese settlers and pushed increasingly out of the economy of Hokkaido, becoming landless and increasingly desperate. Laws designed to settle Hokkaido and grow its export-driven resource economy dispossessed them, cutting them off from the natural resources they depended upon as necessities of life.

These colonial structures largely related to the transformation of Hokkaido, including any flora and fauna which could be commoditized into property. By default, Hokkaido and everything in it became the exclusive property of the Japanese sovereign. However, it was increasingly parcelled out into units of private property owned and “improved” by individual settlers as self-governing sovereign citizens. In a letter to Kuroda in 1875, Capron impressed upon the Kaitakushi head that America’s financial success was due to its “liberal policy extended to all of its great national industries.” To begin to catch up with the United States will require, he warned, “a thorough and complete departure from all its ancient laws and usages ... to a condition more in harmony with that of more civilized nations.”87 While Capron was highly opposed to the establishment of Crown corporations, and repeatedly criticized the Kaitakushi for such foolish endeavors, he nevertheless believed that the colonization of Hokkaido required greater state intervention in the promotion of colonization through the institution of public property and the redistribution of this property to settlers in a targeted manner designed to

87 Capron, ed., Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, 565.

123 develop particular industries to their maximum profitability. The land would be provided free of charge. Title to the land would be transferred to the settler upon evidence of successful development after an arbitrarily specified period of time (Capron suggested two years). Capron based his recommendations in this regard directly on the American Homestead Act of 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War, which provided 160 acres of government land to private citizens in America’s new western territories.88 However, while outlining a program of the appropriation of Ainu land, Capron pushed for greater state intervention into Hokkaido’s resource economy, particularly in the protection of game from overhunting. Capron alluded to the development of such laws in England, where they “originated in their ancient forest laws for the preservation of the King’s deer, under which the penalty for killing a deer was death.”89 While not recommending such lethal measures, Capron called for

“[s]tringent laws” which were to be “rigidly enforced” to protect Crown land.90 To these ends,

Capron was fully aware that Hokkaido’s hunting industry, which produced large amounts of venison as well as furs and other animal products, was then still dominated by the Ainu. In spite of this, Capron urged the Japanese government to establish and enforce rules and regulations both to ensure that the deer did not go extinct through overhunting and to prohibit Ainu hunting practices. Namely, he urged the Japanese government to outlaw poison arrow traps used by the

88 Ibid, 652-653. 89 Ibid, 569. 90 Ibid, 570.

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Ainu, which he called “not only a wasteful but a barbarous practice.”91 On the basis of this recommendation, the Kaitakushi promptly banned Ainu hunting practices.92

Just a year later, Kuroda once again asked William Clark to confirm Capron’s policy suggestions. In his reply to Kuroda, Clark recommended nearly identical policies for the protection of flora and fauna located on Crown land, which, on account of the annexation of

Hokkaido as terra nullius, included virtually all of Hokkaido. Clark recommended, like Capron, that the state should imitate the British institution of Crown land enacted in England for “the protection of deer and other wild game.” He added that France and Germany had nationalized forests and appointed rangers to protect these lands while compiling detailed surveys of state forests and statistics which could be used to estimate the value of the timber. While Clark was careful to note that trees have “no value, except in some market,” he stated that “anyone who injures or cuts a tree should be treated as a trespasser.”93 Fauna, too, was to be treated in much the same manner, with Kuroda tasking Clark with “experiments in canning salmon with which all the streams here are filled.94 Clark gladly passed on his recommendations for how to develop an export-driven salmon canning industry in Hokkaido. This included suggesting that the

Kaitakushi might import American varieties to release into Hokkaido’s rivers.95 In 1878, the

91 Ibid, 571. 92 Yamada Shin’ichi, Kindai Hokkaidō to Ainu minzoku: shuryō kisei to tochi mondai (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Daigaku Shuppankai, 2011), 27-32, 48-54. While Yamada contextualizes this ban within discourses of “civilizing (bunmeika)” the Ainu, he also situates Japanese discourse surrounding the proposed ban, and indeed, even the tone of official Japanese translation of Capron’s reports, within early assimilation policies which condemned Ainu cultural practices as “dirty” and needing to be “cleaned.” 93 Kuroda, Kaitakushi Sapporo kanen no nōgakkō e no ikan tsūchi (wabun-eibun). 94 Kurāku [Clark], Gakuseitachi no koto, Kuroda chōkan no koto, Tondenhei-sha no secchi basho, 24 95 Ibid.

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Kaitakushi issued a decree calling for a ban on the free fishing of salmon and trout by not only

Japanese settlers but by the Ainu as well, who relied on the salmon for sustenance. The rationale behind this ban was that “As salmon and trout are the most profitable of Hokkaido’s products, we should pay close attention to their breeding. They should be protected.”96

In other words, the land itself, as well as any flora or fauna on that land, became the exclusive property of the state. It was accordingly to be either granted or sold to private concerns, including settlers and corporations. And, while in Europe, according to both Capron and Clark, preservation laws were enacted to protect Crown lands for reasons ranging from the personal enjoyment of monarchs to the state management of resource-based economies, the same institution in settler colonies, such as the United States or Hokkaido, allowed the state to facilitate the expropriation of Indigenous peoples from their land by transforming it and all things on it into the exclusive property of the state. The state would then redistribute the vast majority of that same land to settlers. The Ainu who continued to make use of natural resources on these territories, or in other words, continued to live as they had prior to their colonization, were criminalized. Ainu communities faced the prospect of famine as a result.

In the United States, the Homestead Act, enabled by an unprecedented push of American soldiers to the west during the Civil War, had a similarly devastating effect on Indigenous peoples who lost not only territory but access to resources used to satisfy the most basic necessities of life. As Capron himself described, armed resistance to such a deep incursion was

96 Ōkurasho, ed., Kaitakushi jigyō hōkoku furoku furei ruiju jō (Tokyo: Ōkurashō, 1885),858-859.

126 often met with a military response of genocidal intensity. Capron, having also worked as the

Commissioner of the Department of Agriculture, would undoubtedly have known this, as his department oversaw the legal process by which Indigenous territories were transferred to

American homesteaders. Moreover, as Matthew Crow argues, having been enacted during the

Civil War, the Homestead Act was not only part of an ongoing, increasingly bureaucratized effort to replace Indigenous peoples in the ever-expanding American west with white settlers, it was also a crucial step in the production of a new kind of American subject. This subject would be a “laboring, self-possessing” and “self-governing citizen,” who would independently settle a homestead on the western frontier in direct contrast with chattel slavery plantations more typical of the Confederacy. According to Crow, not unlike Capron’s project of human developmentalism in Maryland, for Abraham Lincoln the “goal of policy in a democratic country ... should be to nurture the mutually reinforcing relationship between the farmer’s cultivation of the land with his body.”97 Soil and settler became inseparable. This same developmentalist philosophy made up both the content and character of Capron’s Mission in Japan. And, indeed, as the industrialist

Iwahashi Kinjirō observed two decades later, it was in no small part thanks to Capron’s influence that Hokkaido became a colony of self-governing sovereign citizens defending their private property from the encroachments of foreign powers, thereby collectively strengthening the sovereignty of the entire nation.98

97 Matthew Crow, “Atlantic North America from Contact to the Late Nineteenth Century,” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, ed: Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 95–108. 98 Iwahashi Kinjirō, Hokkaidō kaitaku shinron (Tokyo: Kōjunsha, 1892), 136-137.

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However, with the Japanese northern frontier coming to resemble that of the American west, the Ainu – made to occupy the subject position of the “Indian” since the first official

American expedition to Hokkaido – became subject to many of the same genocidal laws as the

Indigenous peoples of the United States. Losing free access to the basic necessities of life, as will be explored in detail in chapters four and five, the Ainu faced the prospect of famine. Not only had deer and salmon long been the main staples of the Ainu diet, they had also been valuable trade items with the Japanese. Such animal products brought in high calorie foods such as rice into Ainu villages. Laws that banned hunting and fishing had a ruinous effect on the Ainu economy and left the Ainu starving as a direct result. Laws ostensibly aimed at the protection of forests on Crown land, and the subsequent destruction of these forests by private industry, likewise had a major impact on the Ainu. As the Ainu essayist Sasaki Masao notes, the Ainu wore clothing made from tree bark and lived in log frame houses. With so much as peeling bark off trees criminalized, the state effectively banned the Ainu from collecting resources needed for surviving Hokkaido’s long, cold winters.99 In other words, through the adoption of American settler colonial policy, the autonomous survival of the Ainu was banned.

Conclusion

Records in the decades following show the clear influence of Capron and Clark’s proposed colonial policies on Hokkaido. For example, Hokkaidō ijū mondō (Questions and

99 Sasaki Masao, Genshi suru ‘Ainu’ (Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 2008), 190. For details on the ban on logging and peeling bark from trees on Crown land see Ōkurasho (Editor). Ōkurasho, ed., Kaitakushi jigyō hōkoku dai’ippen, vol. 1, Enkaku-chiri-koseki, 518. While unspecified who this quite specific ban is meant to target, it is very possible it was meant to target the Ainu specifically and “encourage” them to adopt Japanese clothing styles.

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Answers About Immigration to Hokkaido), an 1893 publication of the Hokkaido Prefectural government’s Colonial Department, discusses the cultivation of imported American (or more often, Euro-American) crops, the planting of imported fruit trees, the raising of imported cattle, pigs, and horses, imported pasture grasses, the widespread use of American tools, the existence of factories established in Sapporo and Hakodate to make these tools, and even the establishment of fish farms built on American models, all in extensive detail.100 Present throughout is the assertion that crops, livestock, and farming methods imported from the United States were more

“appropriate for Hokkaido” (Hokkaidō ni teki suru) than their Japanese equivalents.101 What’s more, while the guidebook – a publication meant to attract settlers – stated that the vast majority of Hokkaido remained as-yet unsettled, it emphasized the success of the early phase of the colonization of the island, noting, “With the coming of many people from other prefectures year by year, what were once desolate, uninhabited borderlands (kōbaku mujin no sakai) have been transformed into open fields and towns.”102

Presenting the Ainu as naturally fading before the shining light of civilization, the writings of those such as Capron, Lyman, and Clark evoke John Gast’s famous 1872 painting

“American Progress.” The painting shows a procession of white male settlers, some of them

100 Horace Capron was instrumental in bringing many of these breeds to Hokkaido. He personally ordered, on behalf of the Japanese government, “our finest breeds of cattle, horses, sheep and swine,” in addition to “American fruits, grains, vegetables and flowers.” Capron, “Memoirs of Horace Capron [Volume 2: Expedition to Japan],” 58, 158. 101 See, for example, Hokkaidō-chō shokuminka, ed., Hokkaidō ijū mondō (Sapporo: Hokkaidō-chō, 1891), 65-68 for descriptions of European/American breeds of cows, horses, or pigs as more “appropriate” for Hokkaido. The chief exceptions presented in the guide are weather-resistant strains of rice developed in the early Meiji period, with rice remaining the favored staple of settlers, and the expansion of the thriving, export-driven sericulture industry in Hokkaido. 102 Ibid, 18.

129 armed, as well as their wagons and trains extending westward across the prairies. This procession was joined by a gigantic Goddess of Liberty holding a string of telegraph wires in one hand and a tome entitled “School Book” in the other. The light emanating from the east sends half-naked, feathered Indians fleeing, with their heads turned back to watch in horror. They are portrayed as fleeing further to the west, away from the settlers, alongside buffalo, bears, and foxes.103 No doubt meant to bestialize Indigenous peoples, for many in the 1870s, this pairing undoubtedly conjured up the image of what was still the common phenomenon of removing or exterminating any native peoples or fauna alike (including animals Indigenous peoples depended on for survival such as buffalo) that might interfere with white settlement. This slaughter made way for fields of wheat and corn and grazing land for cattle. However, this painting also represents the marriage of civilization and enterprise, or developmentalism and colonialism. Pushing westward and finding “Indians” everywhere they went, those same settlers crossed the Pacific in search of new frontiers onto which American civilization and enterprise alike could be spread. And, there, too, in Hokkaido, Americans found “Indians.”

103 John Gast, American Progress, 1872, Oil on Canvas, Griffith Park, California, Museum of the American West.

Chapter 3 “The Lock on the Northern Gate”: Life on a Militarized Borderland

In 1890, Watanabe Tsuchitada enlisted with the Tondenhei. As his training documents explained, the Tondenhei was “a special kind of native army (dochakuhei) which combines military service and agriculture while dispatched to the vital soil of Hokkaido.”1 Applying with his family, who would provide the labour to clear and cultivate the land while he spent his days training, Tsuchitada was quickly accepted. Not long after, three generations of the Watanabe family travelled from the isolated hamlet of Tsuida in northeastern Fukuoka to the port of

Hakata. From there, they boarded a ship bound for the port of Otaru on Hokkaido’s southwest coast. Just before their departure, the Watanabe family stopped in at a photography studio to have a picture taken as a memento of the family’s final hours on the mainland, likely not expecting to ever see it again. Standing in the centre of the photograph and dressed in a suit,

Tsuchitada was flanked by his family who wore kimono. Picture in hand, they boarded the ship and slowly made their way up the coast before their final arrival in Otaru. Only after arriving did these families learn where they would be settled, with the farthest Tondenhei villages hundreds of kilometres away. Tsuchitada learned that he was assigned to the third company of the second infantry division in the village Minami Takikawa in central Hokkaido. The next day, the

Watanabe family, like so many others, made their way into the bush to begin their new life.

1 Tondenhei kyōkasho, NDC7 Han: 393.9, 1009510015547, Hokkaido Prefectural Library, Sapporo, Japan. 130 131

A few years into his service, Tsuchitada and his fellow soldiers received copies of the newly issued Tondenhei Handbooks (Tondenhei techō): palm-sized registers used both for identification and for calculating pensions and rations. The Handbooks opened with the Imperial

Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors (gunjin chokuyu) and the Rules to be Read oath (dokuhō), demanding the soldier’s loyalty in body and soul. Tsuchitada signed his name, making his

Handbook not simply a register for paperwork, but something of a personal contract between him and his sovereign. In the pages that follow, he entered his family’s class status and provide personal details about his grandparents, parents, wife, children, and siblings. He then profiled himself, describing his facial features, as though providing instructions for a composite sketch, so that the Handbook could be used to identify him. In all of this, Tondenhei soldiers were required to make themselves and their families visible to the state.

While required to carry his Tondenhei Handbook with him wherever he went – a potent symbol of the power of the state over him and his family – Tsuchitada slipped the family photograph he brought with him from Hakata in the back cover, putting his family in a parallel position to the Imperial Rescript and Rules to be Read. There, he paired it with a second photograph, taken four years into his service and just prior to his mobilization during the Sino-

Japanese War. In that second photo, his family still wore kimono, although under padded hanten coats and with scarves to protect against the cold. There they sat while Tsuchitada stood stern- faced off to the side in his Tondenhei uniform, separated from his family. He was altogether

132 apart from them, save for his arm, which was outstretched to hold his Hokkaido-born daughter’s hand.2

This chapter will analyze the mobilization and disciplinization of the Tondenhei within the context of the Russo-Japanese imperial rivalry. As an ostensibly anti-Russian force, the

Todnenhei was an engine of settler colonialism that existed at the intersection of state militarism and patriarchal domesticity. This form of power which regulated life in Tondenhei villages took shape following a series of reforms in the 1880s and early 1890s. These reforms allowed commoners (heimin) to enlist with the Tondenhei, remodelled Tondenhei villages after those of the Russian Cossacks, and inundated the largely commoner recruits with a flurry of nationalist propaganda. The private, domestic life of Tondenhei soldiers and their families became increasingly indistinguishable from the strict militarist disciplinary regime under which they trained and worked. Whether clutching a rifle or a shovel, the state beckoned the soldiers and their families to imagine themselves as vanguards “digging in” on the front line, selflessly giving themselves up in both the conquest of the soil and defense of Japan against the shadowy machinations of the Russian Empire. All the while, as agronomist Uehara Tetsusaburō noted in

1914, the Tondenhei also secured the colony of Hokkaido against “domestic threats” (tainaiteki) by providing “defence against the aborigines (dojin),” or in other words, against the Ainu.3

2 Watanabe Tsuchitada, “Tondenhei techō,” Betsu 355-Wa, 0A017750000000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan. 3 Uehara Tetsusaburō, Hokkaido Tondenhei seido (Sapporo: Hokkaidō-chō takushokubu, 1914), 369.

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And, while the state’s mobilization of the Tondenhei was clearly meant to buttress the

Japanese claims to Ainu territories, the lives of Tondenhei soldiers and their families was characterized by indistinction, be it indistinction between inside and outside, public and private, work and home, peacetime and wartime, indigenous and exogenous, and even “civilized” and

“barbarous.” It was precisely these indistinctions which allowed the state to transform the often ambivalent Tondenhei recruits and their families into effective multigenerational settlers and clearly demarcate the dangerously unstable borders between the Japanese and Russian empires.

Accordingly, the very marginality of the Tondenhei maximized Japanese sovereign power over the Ainu and their territories.

This chapter will analyze the nature of that power, its limits, and how the very liminality of the Tondenhei villages in relation to the Japanese state and its rivals was a potent tactic of colonization. It will discuss this topic from two vantage points. The first will investigate the microphysics of power in Tondenhei villages, looking at how disciplinary and biopolitical forms of power intersected in forming stratified social relations between Tondenhei village residents, with a focus on gendered labour. Tondenhei institutional structures rendered men like Watanabe

Tsuchitada as the breadwinning heads of heteronormative nuclear family units, while these same structures regulated their wives, children, and other family members to subservient domestic roles which were, in contrast, largely coded as feminine.4 Through the act of settlement in

4 Paradoxically, the work that Tondenhei officers considered the domain of women often included activities such as cutting trees and cleaning rifles. However, such labour having been performed by women has been overwhelmingly disavowed. For example, Meiji era recruitment and training documents, as well as widely published Meiji era books and articles on the Tondenhei, frame not only soldiering but farming too as having been entirely the domain of men, and accordingly, quintessentially masculine. With notable exceptions, such as Ōgiya Chieko’s study on the wives of

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Hokkaido, the state demanded that Tondenhei soldiers become homosocial, patriotic, economically productive, and willing to heroically sacrifice their lives to the state as personified by the Meiji Emperor. This was paired with the parallel demand that their wives become frugal, hard working, biologically reproductive, and willing to quietly place the needs of their often- absent husbands ahead of their own no matter how adverse the situation. Such demands were not in and of themselves atypical of hegemonic gender norms in mid-late Meiji Japan. These were typified by the jingoistic slogans “rich country, strong army” (fukoku kyōhei) and “good wife, wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo).5 However, while reflecting such norms, the manner in which these norms were hegemonized set the Tondenhei apart from the general Japanese population. Within

Tondenhei villages, the ordinary restraints on the power that the state had over residents (both soldier and civilian) had become virtually unfettered. As this chapter will demonstrate, even while resting in the domestic spaces of their homes, commanders expected soldiers to be in a state of eternal readiness, day or night, always on duty. Their civilian wives, children, and other formally dependent family members were similarly subjected to military rule. Tondenhei officers regularly “invaded” such private places such as the home, policing gendered labour there, while village schools were frequently co-opted by soldiers for military use.

Tondenhei soldiers, 20th and 21st century Tondenhei historiography largely reproduces this disavowal, with both academic and popular writing on the Tondenhei relegating the role of women to short chapters on the domestic life of Tondenhei soldiers, if they mention women in Tondenhei villages at all. See Ōgiya Chieko, Hagi no ne wa fukaku: Tondenhei no tsumatachi (Tokyo: Domesu shuppan, 1986). 5 For a useful analysis of how these terms are historically paired, see Yoshiko Miyake. “Doubling Expectations: Motherhood and Women’s Factory Work Under State Management in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 269.

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Secondly, this chapter will analyze the Tondenhei system on a macro-level. Cognizant of the geopolitical situation under which Hokkaido was colonized, this chapter will analyze the

Tondenhei as both an instrument of state sovereignty and an apparatus of settler colonialism.

This chapter will problematize the “siege mentality” that government-published materials promoted from the formation of the Tondenhei in 1875, the year that the Treaty of Saint

Petersburg was signed, ceding Sakhalin (Japanese: Karafuto) to Russia, until the Tondenhei’s dissolution in 1905, the year that the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed, ending the Russo-

Japanese War and ceding the southern half of Sakhalin to Japan. For example, from the mid-

1890s, Tondenhei recruits received Tondenhei Textbooks (Tondenhei kyōkasho) which taught recruits about military discipline and proper decorum, hygiene and eating habits, mapping and triangulation, and so on. In describing the purpose of the Tondenhei, the textbook informed the recruits that:

Hokkaido is just across a narrow strip of water from Kamchatka, Karafuto, and Vladivostok, and other borderlines with Russia. And what’s more, in the seas all around us, you can spot the fleets of every nation. Indeed, we Tondenhei soldiers, the lock on the Northern Gate, are invested with the authority of Great Japan. See how those of us who can be called Tondenhei, besides opening up and cultivating the vast, fertile fields, [have] splendid military power and strive day and night to temper our military prowess. We must strive to sacrifice our lives to enhance the glory of the nation.6

Perhaps intended to demonstrate the necessity of the state of siege under which soldiers and their families lived, such descriptions beckoned Tondenhei village residents to understand themselves as standing between Japan and not just Russia, but an untold number of shadowy

6 Tondenhei kyōkasho.

136 military threats. Defending Japan was a duty that equalled or perhaps even superseded the task of breaking new ground as agrarian settlers. Critically, however, the undated textbooks included references to the Sino-Japanese War, which had concluded in 1895. This was the same year that

Japanese diplomats succeeded in the long-desired revision of the unequal treaties which had been forced upon Japan by the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands, thus ending “semi-colonial” power relations with these imperialist powers in treaty ports across the archipelago. By the late 1890s, then, far from being surrounded by the gunboats of these Euro-

American colonial powers, Japan’s place in the international community was largely secure.

Japan had become just one more colonial power. Nevertheless, these textbooks and other official publications from the 1880s and 1890s framed the role of the Tondenhei as defending the nation during a prolonged crisis of national sovereignty. And, it is no doubt because of this unending state of siege, even if fictitious, that civilian life in Tondenhei villages was militarized.

Despite the Russophobic nature of such publications, during this same period, the militarized domestic space of Tondenhei villages was increasingly influenced by the Japanese government’s understanding of the Russian Cossacks. This restructuring saw a seemingly contradictory mingling of semi-autonomy in these villages with the institutional rigors of military law. State power over the bodies of military and civilian residents alike in Tondenhei villages was most strongly felt through autonomous military village associations (heisonkai) and the institution of public property. The collectivist Tondenhei villages existed in a normalized state of siege, almost certainly intended by planners such as Tondenhei commander General

Nagayama Takeshirō to maximize both the military and economic potential of these villages.

Until its dissolution in 1904, the formidable Russian Empire, which seemingly necessitated the expansion of the Tondenhei system across Hokkaido as an anti-Russian garrison, provided the

137 model on which the Tondenhei could expand. As we shall see, planners and pundits alike came to imagine the Tondenhei as Japanese Cossacks, the Ainu as assimilable by being transformed into Tondenhei/Cossacks, and the Cossacks – for some a barbaric Steppe horde – as simultaneously an existential threat to the Japanese national polity and an exemplar model of settler colonial expansionism by which Japan could compete with, and perhaps eventually overtake, its enormous neighbour.7 In time, a triangular relationship formed between the

Tondenhei as idealized settlers, the Cossacks as what Lorenzo Veracini describes as “exogenous

Others,” and the Ainu as “indigenous Others.” Discursively, the “reflexive tension” of insideness and outsideness/sameness and difference between these three groups – like the very real, volatile tension between the Russian and Japanese empires as they competed with each other for access to Ainu territories – drove the Japanese colonization efforts in Hokkaido.8

The Making of the Tondenhei

According to the “History of the Tondenhei” (Tondenhei enkaku), a government- published chronological retrospective, the Tondenhei was formed as an answer to the problems

7 In discussing these interrelated topics, this chapter will utilize testimonies by late 19th/early 20th century Tondenhei soldiers and their families regarding their experiences as settlers primarily published in the books The History of Nopporo Military Village (Nopporo heison-shi, 1934), The History Shinkotoni Military Village (Shinkotoni heison- shi, 1936), and Tondenhei: The System and Life as Seen by Families (Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 1968). These testimonies were compiled between the 1930s and the 1960s in an effort to preserve the memories of the Tondenhei settlers and their children for future generations. The former two collections were included in local histories and exclusively represented the viewpoints of the universally male Tondenhei soldiers. These texts were published shortly after the founding of the Japanese settler colonial puppet state of Manchukuo. The publication of these testimonies was no doubt the result of rekindled interest in the systems by which Hokkaido was colonized in the late 19th century which could be replicated in Japan’s second large-scale settler colonial project. The latter volume, in turn, was published in the decades following Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, during the “people’s history” (minshūshi) movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Reflective of this democratized historiography, the latter collection was one of the very first which gave equal voice to the wives and children of Tondenhei soldiers. 8 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 23-24.

138 of the worsening poverty of samurai across the northeast, particularly in Hakodate, Aomori,

Sakata, and Miyagi, and the pressing issue of the “security” (shuei) of the contested northern borders and the protection of the Japanese populace at large.9 The Tondenhei was accordingly designed by Kaitakushi leaders to address both of these problems at once by providing sheltered employment to samurai from Japan’s Tohoku region and have this same group guard against a potential Russian invasion. To these ends, however, the still unstable Meiji government saw the wellbeing of the potentially rebellious Tohoku samurai and the looming Russian “menace” as pressingly urgent crises requiring immediate action rather than problems that could be solved through careful planning and deliberation. A petition was thus submitted to the Meiji Emperor in

1874 requesting that he establish the Tondenhei through an emergency order:

As desperate times call for desperate measures, it is truly unavoidable that we thus raise this issue today. Oh, must we adhere to the ordinary course of things? Could we not as an exception quickly receive His Majesty’s approval through an order to the Ministry of Finance?10

The result of this petition was the establishment of the first Tondenhei villages the following year.

For planners in early Meiji Japan, the term Tondenhei itself may have been evocative of romantic classical imagery such as the túntián soldiers of late Han China or the tonden soldiers of Heian Japan who defended the unstable northern borderlands against “barbaric” threats while

9 Tondenhei honbu, Tondenhei enkaku (tsuketari sentōki), 1892, Betsu 355-To, 0A017530000000000, Shibusawa Keizō Kinen Bunko, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan. 10 Ibid.

139 breaking new ground as hardy farmers.11 However, the Tondenhei were not – as they often portrayed today – a group of Cincinnatus-like farmers who would rise to the call of duty in times of crisis before returning to the plough. Rather, by the end of the 19th century, the Tondenhei were a group of rigorously trained professional soldiers who drilled daily and participated in large scale bi-yearly war games.12 As such, they were soldiers who sometimes farmed rather than farmers who sometimes soldiered. The degree to which they farmed depended on the situation of the individual household. Typically training from 6:00 AM until 1:00 PM, some spent their afternoons farming while others, especially officers, rarely set foot in the fields.13 In either case, the majority of fieldwork was relegated to formally dependant civilian family members. This, in some cases, left elderly parents or young children to assist the wives of Tondenhei soldiers in often dangerous tasks such as felling and burning trees, draining bogs, and sowing fields while their husbands conducted training exercises. In doing so, civilian family members of Tondenhei soldiers continued the work of “priming” the land for agrarian settlement previously undertaken by forced prison labour.14 On a day-to-day basis, this placed most of the responsibility of agricultural/economic output, and thereby the wellbeing of the household, on legal dependents in the Tondenhei villages.

11 Sapporo-shi kyōiku i’inkai bunka shiryōshitsu, ed., Tondenhei (Sapporo: Hokkaidō shinbunsha, 1985), 11. In the case of the Heian period Tonden, the “threats” they defended against were the Emishi, an historical ethnic group in northern Honshu often thought to be directly related to the modern Ainu. 12 “Rokoku no heisei (shōzen),” Heiji Shinpō, May 1891, 28. 13 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu (Sapporo: Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, 1968), 130-133. 14 Tamai Kenkichi, Tondenheison ni ikiru (Sapporo: Hokkaidō shuppan kikaku sentā. 1984), 12-14.

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While former samurai (shizoku) made up most of the Tondenhei for the first 15 years of its existence, in 1890 the state began to recruit commoners (heimin).15 Together with this transition, the military established a Tondenhei military court and jail in Sapporo and published an array of propagandistic materials with which Tondenhei soldiers had to intimately familiarize themselves.16 Perhaps indicative of the military’s lingering distrust for commoners, these materials were to instill a sense of loyalty in the Tondenhei, of which the state jealously demanded a monopoly. As we shall see, commanding officers forced family members to abide by the same rules as the head of the household, who was invariably a Tondenhei soldier. Thus disciplined, they would have little choice but to manage their lives in accordance to military rhythms, including assembling for daily roll calls and submitting Tondenhei property for inspection, which included not only rifles but such domestic items as bedding and cookware.

Initially, however, it remained unclear to what degree the families of soldiers were formally integrated institutionally into the Tondenhei. For example, in 1876, controversy arose when a Tondenhei soldier by the name of Watanabe Masakichi was killed during training, leaving his surviving family members in a state of severe poverty and effectively stranded in

Hokkaido. The state amended inheritance laws, providing three years of aid to family members of soldiers who had died.17 Further regulations automatically drafted male children of deceased

Tondenhei soldiers should they be of or near military age, ensnaring the entire male line into the

15 Tondenhei honbu, Tondenhei enkaku (tsuketari sentōki). 16 Kangoku hōrei ruisan (Tokyo: Chūaisha, 1890), 1015-1019. 17 Daijōkan, Kaitakushi Tondenhei Watanabe Masakichi shibō shishi yōshō ni tsuki sono haha e gofu wo mukau, 6 September 1876, Dai 00556100, National Archives of Japan, Tokyo, Japan.

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Tondenhei system.18 Nevertheless, regulations which maintained military law (gunpō) in

Tondenhei villages failed to specify how family members of Tondenhei soldiers were to be integrated into this system of military rule.19 Published retrospective interviews with Tondenhei soldiers and their family members, discussed below, clearly demonstrate that in most if not all cases, every resident of these villages, whether soldier or civilian, were subject to the same rules and required to follow the same standards of decorum.

And, not to overstate the importance of the Tondenhei as a military force rather than an engine of agrarian settlement, the Tondenhei represented the “front line” of experimental agricultural production in Hokkaido as well. As colonial planners remained not entirely convinced of the feasibility of profitable, large-scale commercial agriculture in Hokkaido, the

Tondenhei villages, as one settler put it, were an “agricultural laboratory” (nōgyō no shikenjo).

There was no single crop that the Tondenhei farmed, nor were they limited to food crops such as potatoes, beans, or corn. Rather, they participated in experiments in making paper from locally grown mulberry and Oriental paper bush (mitsumata), making candles, making lacquer, and so on. While not all of these experiments failed, the most profitable products produced by the

Tondenhei remained hemp and silk. Silk in particular represented a major cash crop in Hokkaido and one of Meiji Japan’s most profitable export commodities and was promoted in Tondenhei villages as a cottage industry. And, while wheat was also commonly grown, it was typically

18 Tondenhei honbu, Tondenhei shigansha kokoroe, 1889, Betsu 355-To, 0A017500000000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan. 19 Kangoku hōrei ruisan, 1015-1019.

142 bought up by beer manufacturers operating out of Sapporo rather than consumed locally.20 Most

Tondenhei families had little to eat outside of their brown rice rations, and as the Nopporo-based

Tondenhei soldier Yutani Genzō put it, after their three year rice stipends expired, they were

“like babies who were forcibly weaned, leaving us totally hopeless.”21

On a day to day basis, most Tondenhei villagers subsisted on an extremely simple diet of buckwheat, flax, and chestnuts. Children were no exception. Tamai Kenkichi, the son of a

Tondenhei soldier in Asahikawa, recalled, “I spent my childhood without so much as knowing the word ‘snack.’”22 And, while many settlers preferred rice as their main staple, the cultivation of rice was formally banned in Tondenhei villages, despite the successful cultivation of cold- resistant strains of rice elsewhere in Hokkaido. This was most likely part of a wider effort to encourage the production of more typically American rather than Japanese staples such as potatoes, wheat, or corn. However, some Tondenhei family members reported to that they or others in their villages grew contraband rice, with residents of Takikawa, for example, converting flood-prone lowlands into paddies after one such flood destroyed several Tondenhei houses.23 As much as an overabundance of water led to problems in some villages, other

Tondenhei villages, however, had major deficiencies of clean water. Water taken from wells in

Tondenhei villages was often brackish or metallic, leading some residents to avoid using what

20 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 4. 21 Satō Yoshiya, Nopporo heison-shi (Ebetsu: Kaison gojūnen kinen saiten i’inkai, 1934), 1. The term sekishi, literally meaning “baby,” is often translated as “subject” in relation to the emperor’s role as patriarch of the Imperial Japanese family-state. Yutani’s comments were likely an implicit criticism of the imperial government’s treatment of the Tondenhei settlers. 22 Tamai, Tondenheison ni ikiru, 125. 23 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 38.

143 quickly proved to be undrinkable water to so much as wash their clothes. This would sometimes mean settlers would have to move for access to clean drinking water.24 All of this is to suggest that as central as agriculture was to Tondenhei village life and as important as the Tondenhei villages themselves were as agricultural “laboratories” in the planning of wider settlement policies, on a day to day basis, many residents in Tondenhei villages struggled to find enough to eat or drink.

In-between the spaces of military and agricultural life in Tondenhei villages were the houses. While encouraged to emigrate with families from the Tondenhei’s inception, from 1885, recruiters required soldiers to be accompanied by a spouse, children, and as many able-bodied family members as possible with no official upward limit.25 Groups of five would live in one small, unpartitioned Japanese-style house, with any additional family members who accompanied them receiving a second residence. Wherever they existed, however, Tondenhei families favoured Russian-style log cabins which were better suited for the harsh winters of

Hokkaido.26 Despite their relative comforts, these proved to be prohibitively expensive and the project of building them across the colony was quickly abandoned. It was not simply for want of luxury that Tondenhei settlers preferred the Russian cabins. Rather, the Japanese-built houses, built not by carpenters but by prison labour, were not properly winterized and were infamously drafty.27 This would let snow in during the not infrequent blizzards of the long Hokkaido winters

24 Ibid, 44; Kenkichi, Tondenheison ni ikiru, 123. 25 Sasaki Toshirō, Shinkotoni heison-shi (Shinkotoni: Shinkotoni heison gojūnen kinenkai, 1936), 36. 26 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 124, 126. 27 Incidentally, the Tondenhei Textbooks informed recruits that given that because Japanese-style houses are well ventilated, they are thereby excellent for air circulation. Tondenhei village residents living in Western-style houses

144 and let insects in during the muggy summers, including malaria-carrying mosquitoes. As the houses remained government property, Tondenhei regulations strictly prohibited any renovation or modification by residents. Unable to renovate their houses, some settlers laid mats on the roofs to shield them from the snow. This, however, trapped smoke inside, leading to children suffering from trachoma.28

Becoming Soldiers

In principle, all Tondenhei recruits were volunteers. As Japan’s military grew exponentially year by year through the widening of the draft, with a largely civilian army eventually replacing the samurai who had inherited their positions, the existence of an all- volunteer army was something of a novelty. This was, at least in part, undoubtedly reflective of the immense personal sacrifice that the state expected Tondenhei soldiers to make: leaving home with little prospect of ever returning, settling deep in the woods of Hokkaido – still very much imagined as an empty and desolate country far from the comforts of the mainland – and eking out a living by transforming swamps and forests into farmland. Planners may have believed that it was simply unfeasible to forcibly draft the Tondenhei ranks. More than this, however, the state called on soldiers – like embodiments of the phrase “rich country, strong army” – to participate in the arduous but critical task of “protecting the lock to the northern gate” while “opening up undeveloped land and expanding the wealth and power (fukyō) of the nation.” The state required

are warned that if they do not take extra care to ventilate their houses, they may become “dizzy,” “faint,” or may even “suffocate.” See Tondenhei kyōkasho. 28 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 16.

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Tondenhei soldiers to develop a spirit of “loyalty and patriotism” (chūkun aikoku), as defined by both a voluntary willingness to kill or be killed for the nation as well as having an entrepreneurial spirit by which one could both enrich their families and help fill the nation’s coffers.29 In this task, an army of volunteers would simply better meet the challenges of settlement and represent the goals of the government as agents of the state.

As Takashi Fujitani notes, the widening of the draft in the Meiji period gave rise to widespread draft evasion. This, ironically, led to many young men who were otherwise of

“sound body and mind,” and thereby fully eligible for military duty, to follow the Tondenhei in fleeing to Hokkaido. Still to a large degree outside of the visibility and thereby power of the state, immigration to Hokkaido was one of the few avenues to escape the draft for many. While the Meiji state doggedly policed this population of draft evaders, they increasingly sought to do so by internalizing “the positive deployment of power into the soul of the individual” and transform military conscripts and civilians alike into “self-disciplining subjects so that they would begin to participate in their own domination.”30 Commoners were to adopt a patriotic spirit by which they would gladly join the Imperial Army, seeing it as a meritorious deed, even if put into great personal danger.

The purpose of the Tondenhei was to extend the power of the state to Hokkaido. For this task, the same basic qualification of the soundness of mind and body of the individual applicants

29 Tondenhei honbu. Tondenhei shigansha kokoroe. 30 T. Fujitani, “Kindai Nihon ni okeru kenryoku no tekunorojī: guntai, ‘chihō,’ shintai,” trans. Umemori Naoyuki, Shisō no. 845 (November 1994): 148–164. Quoted from original English manuscript provided by author.

146 applied to Tondenhei soldiers as regular draftees. Tondenhei Textbooks stated that not only were common criminals barred from serving, but also “idiots” (hakuchi) and “cripples” (fugusha).

However, Tondenhei application procedures placed heavy emphasis on the examination of the applicant’s family as well.31 Recruiters demanded that applicants submit their koseki (family registers). They inspected these patrilineal documents to determine not only the physical but the moral fitness of the applicant and their extended families. Through these registers, the state would be able to survey not only the applicant, but their parents, siblings, and other close relatives, alive or dead, for signs of debt or bankruptcy, criminal activity, patterns of disease, or any other personal deficiencies that the state deemed undesirable. As such scrutiny was meant to police the moral order of the colony, having family members who did not meet such standards reflected poorly on the applicant himself, who in many cases would be turned away regardless of his individual suitability. As dependent civilian family members were largely responsible for clearing and cultivating the land, effectively providing unpaid labour to the army, recruiters would turn away Tondenhei applicants without enough physically able family members by default. For example, the February 1891 issue of the military affairs magazine Heiji shinpō reported that in Kōchi Prefecture, out of 270 Tondenhei applicants, 180 had too few able-bodied family members, automatically disqualifying them. This left only 90 applicants to be fully examined. Of those 90, 13 failed their “examinations” (kensa), while the remainder were accepted into the Tondenhei and were split largely between infantry and cavalry, with the small remainder being assigned to artillery.32

31 Tondenhei kyōkasho. 32 “Tondenhei shigansha kazu,” Heiji Shinpō, 31 February 1891, 37.

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Arriving in Hokkaido, General Nagayama Takeshirō greeted the Tondenhei recruits.

There, Nagayama’s son later recalled, he would sternly warn them, “You aren’t going to go back to the mainland part way through! Colonizing Hokkaido is no easy task, but both me and you are the same: we’re going to become soil here.”33 While remembered as “extremely strict” (hijō ni genkaku), if not outright terrifying by his children, who Nagayama seemed to treat as troops under his command, he was widely reportedly well liked and respected by Tondenhei soldiers who he led from 1878 until his death in 1904.34 He stayed on as the leader of the Tondenhei even while becoming the governor of Hokkaido in 1888.35 Through this dual role, Nagayama was instrumental in reshaping the Tondenhei structurally and ideologically into a professionalized fighting force who could simultaneously play a leading role in economically developing Japan’s northern colony.

While one might assume that the Tondenhei, which functioned through the conscious choice of carefully chosen voluntary recruits, was indeed an army of self-reflexive subjects, inspired by deep belief in patriotic ideals demanded of them by the state, of those who

Nagayama addressed, personal accounts suggest that there was great diversity in motivations for volunteering to become Tondenhei soldiers. While some certainly did – at least initially – demonstrate patriotic fervor of the kind government materials hoped to inspire, others show that economic contingency was a major factor.

33 Hōkkaido sōmubu bunshoka, ed., Kaitaku ni tsukushita hitobito, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Rironsha, 1965), 10. 34 Ibid, 3; Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 4. 35 Tondenhei honbu, Tondenhei enkaku (tsuketari sentōki); Hokkaidō kaisōroku, 5.

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One of those who enlisted for patriotic reasons was Ōkubo Ki’ichirō, a Tondenhei soldier in Shinkotoni. Having seen descriptions of Hokkaido as an unpeopled outland with incredible economic potential in school textbooks as a boy in Kagoshima, Ōkubo stated that he had longed to settle there. This feeling stayed with him until he finally enlisted with the Tondenhei. A wave of patriotic pride washed over him as he was told in a farewell address by a Kagoshima official:

You are all descendants of samurai. That is to say, you are of the shizoku class. So, it must be hard to get used to the peasants. I know that you’re well aware of how military duty works, so I don’t think I need to explain it, but please take plenty of care to follow the rules and work hard for the nation. Of course, our nation is prepared to give some special rewards, so demonstrate your ancient samurai spirit (bushiteki seishin) and serve the nation while taking good care of your health.

On the eve of their departure, Ōkubo and his fellow recruits received axes engraved with the four character idiom “忠君愛国,” or, “loyalty and patriotism.” As though he had literally internalized this spirit of state militarism, Ōkubo described not having been able to “stop my chest from throbbing with the indescribable joy in my heart” when thinking that “it was me who had been chosen for the defense of the north.” However, like many others, his mood quickly darkened as the road into the woods became rough and he caught sight of the “primeval forest” in which he would be living. He was “struck by an unexpected feeling,” saying, “Never in a million years had I imagined that I would be living in such a terrible wilderness.”36

One of Ōkubo’s neighbours in Shinkotoni, Nakayama Takeo, echoed this, saying he was inspired by his father to take on the “important task of locking the northern gate” and “breaking

36 Shinkotoni heison-shi, 7-9. Note that Tondenhei soldier testimonies are paginated separately from the main text.

149 new ground.” His initial enthusiasm similarly faded as he saw the same dense forest as Ōkubo, leaving him feeling “disgusted” (unzari shite shimatta).37 Like Ōkubo and many others, he simply did his best to make do. And, when his account was recorded, Nakayama showed no trace of the patriotic fervor that led him to Hokkaido. Instead, he reported that, decades later, he still physically trembled when thinking of how close to death he came when clearing the land. He and his fellow recruits cut the massive trees by hand – a difficult task no matter what’s written on one’s axe handle – and were nearly crushed as the ancient trees, hacked down haphazardly, fell unpredictably in every which direction.

Many others came as economic migrants. One such soldier was Suinaga Ikutarō, who described his motivation for joining the Tondenhei as rooted in both his “boring life” in Fukuoka and his hope that, if he’d be willing to put up with Tondenhei life for just a few short years, he could come home with 300 yen; then a considerable sum. However, quickly learning that this would not be the case, Suinaga described wanting to escape, fantasizing about desertion day after day.38 And, indeed, he was evidentially not alone with this feeling. Tsuruda Itarō, the family member of a soldier in Wanishi, alluded to families in his village who outright deserted.39 For some, like Igo Kisaburō, who was raised in an impoverished single parent household, emigration to Hokkaido as a Tondenhei soldier represented an escape from everyday struggles and from the shadows of an uncertain future.40 For other economic migrants still, it was not poor personal

37 Ibid, 5-7. 38 Ibid, 11. 39 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 133. 40 Sasaki, Shinkotoni heison-shi, 9-11.

150 prospects than ecological catastrophes which rendered them surplus populations in their home regions and motivated them to join the Tondenhei. For example, Yamamoto Shūhei, a family member of a soldier, described severe flooding following a massive typhoon which hit his native

Wakayama Prefecture in 1889. Killing hundreds, the flooding was so severe that survivors such as Yamamoto found it almost impossible to recover their livelihoods in its wake. While

Yamamoto had no more desire to go to Hokkaido than “I would want to go to South America now,” the Wakayama prefectural government urged his family to emigrate, which they eventually did with seven other families from the same town.41 The newspaper The Japan

Weekly Mail, quoting the British consul to Hakodate Frank Playfair, described these families as part of a much larger group of 2,446 people from the region who emigrated to Hokkaido following the typhoon. According to the article, “the able-bodied of these immigrants” were enlisted into the Tondenhei, “add[ing] greatly to the value of that body of soldiers.”42

For others still, the act of voluntarily joining the Tondenhei could also have a redemptive element and for some represented acceptance into the national community. For example, Abiko

Kōji, the son of an Aizu Tondenhei soldier and a noted agronomist and politician, claimed his father joined the Tondenhei due to a sense of shame over what, for him, was unintentional treason on the part of Aizu samurai. Described by Abiko as “honest to a fault” (baka shōjiki), their loyalty to the old Tokugawa regime cast the defeated Aizu samurai as traitors to the restorationist Meiji government. To prove his penitence, moral innocence, and loyalty to the

41 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 31. 42 The Japan Weekly Mail: A Review of Japanese Commerce, Politics, Literature, and Art, vol. 14 (Yokohama: A. H. Blackwell, 1890), 312.

151 emperor, Abiko’s father enlisted with the Tondenhei, travelling to Hokkaido at age 18. At this point, virtually all low ranking Tondenhei were still from Tohoku, while most officers were from the victorious Satsuma domain. While Abiko and others reported a sense of harmony between these former enemies, in 1878, the Satsuma Rebellion broke out and the Tondenhei were mobilized and dispatched to Kagoshima. Fighting against the former Satsuma samurai as part of a larger army of commoner conscripts, for Abiko, the Aizu-born Tondenhei soldiers’ “honour was vindicated (setsujoku)” while the Satsuma rebels replaced the Aizu samurai as “traitors of the court” (chōteki).43

The Militarization of Domestic Life

Regardless of the personal motivations of the head of the household for enlisting, civilian family members who travelled together with them to Hokkaido found themselves subjected to the militarized life of Tondenhei villages. For example, Sasaki Yotsu, the Ishikawa-born wife of a Tondenhei soldier in Takikawa, recalled a Tondenhei master sergeant coming into her home while he was out on patrol. There, the master sergeant would observe how she would clean and wash, only to tell her that how she cleaned her husband’s rifle was “bad,” or how she washed his clothing was “bad,” and would force her to do it again, creating a great deal of anxiety for

Sasaki.44 Low ranking soldiers in modern armies, including Japan’s, were typically expected to maintain their own equipment as part of the very disciplinary regime under which they are

43 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 1. 44 Ibid, 41.

152 trained, which demands, as John Hockey notes, “neatness, cleanliness and uniformity.”45 This being rendered the Tondenhei soldier’s wife’s domestic duty and placed under the scrutiny of her husband’s commanding officer is indicative of the indeterminacy of public and private, military and civilian, and wartime and peacetime that existed in Tondenhei villages. In other words, gender roles were constituted precisely through the militarization of domestic life. However, the formation of gender roles through militarization is not unique to the Tondenhei. As Marsha

Henry and Katherine Natanel have argued, militarization is not “a homogenous and complete exercise of spatial power.” It is, rather, “a process which is constantly in flux as well as continually negotiated, reiterated and resisted by those subjects both inside and outside of the military.” Through this continuous process in which “men and women participate in both a shoring up and a breaking down of military values,” militarization then “emerges as a gendered project rooted in diverse social practices and beliefs, which simultaneously unfold within and give rise to particular spaces, places and cultures.”46

In Tondenhei villages, as commanders played no small part in the creation and policing of gendered labour, it was military institutions which hegemonized normatively “masculine” and

“feminine” work – thereby establishing the home as a space of gendered labour. It was, through the institutional framework of the Tondenhei, possible for military officers to quite literally give orders to the civilian residents and, accordingly, cavalierly define or redefine what was to be

45 Quoted in Atherton, Stephen, “The Geographies of Military Inculcation and Domesticity: Reconceptualising Masculinities in the Home,” Masculinities and Place, ed. Andrew Gorman-Murray and Peter Hopkins (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 143–157, 147. 46 Marsha Henry and Katherine Natanel, “Militarisation as Diffusion: The Politics of Gender, Space and the Everyday,” Gender, Place & Culture 23, no. 6 (2016), 852, 853.

153 considered “feminine” domestic work. These normalized gender roles to some extent reflected the emerging bourgeois order in urban centres such as Tokyo which, as Jordan Sand describes, came to define a biological male as an often-absent breadwinner and biological female as an often cordoned off domestic worker. However, the manner in which these roles were normalized met the demands of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido.47 As Richard Phillips writes of family and sexuality throughout the British Empire, the institution of the nuclear family “not only reflected but actively defined the colonial order.” Such family structures were, moreover, institutionally generated in part by “social and legal mechanisms and institutional contexts and frameworks” within the colony, meeting the needs of the settler colonial project, rather than transplanted wholesale from the metropole.48 Unlike the emerging bourgeois domestic order in the metropole, in Tondenhei villages, the wives of soldiers remained the primary economic producers in the nuclear family unit, all the while maximizing their husbands’ martial potential by taking on some of his duties as a soldier as well.

Despite this, they remained their husbands’ legal dependents. This dynamic was codified in the 1890s by the Hokkaido government through the Tondenhei and Family Decree (Tondenhei oyobi kazoku kyōrei). Calling for a spartan, militaristic domestic life, the order simultaneously aimed to transform the relationship between individual Tondenhei soldiers and the state as well as those soldiers and their families into a stratified hierarchical order based on obligations to

47 See Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005). 48 Richard Phillips, “Settler Colonialism and the Nuclear Family,” The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien 53, no. 2 (2009): 243.

154 one’s superiors, rooted in personal sacrifice. For their part, Tondenhei soldiers were told that in taking on the twin duties of “defense of the nation” and the “colonization” (takuchi shokusan) of

Hokkaido, they must absolutely uphold government laws and respect the tenets of the decree. All the more, as they will receive “government protection (hogo) without parallel in this world,” soldiers should feel personally obliged to behave with a spirit of loyalty, bravery, and humility as repayment of the heavy debt they owe to the state. Their family members, the decree added, should follow suit and behave with much the same decorum. And, just as soldiers are called on to take the greatest care in maintaining their hygiene and behaviour as, they were reminded,

“your life is not your own life; it is an offering to be given to His Majesty the Emperor,” so too must family members offer themselves up in service to the family patriarch. They must strive to create an environment where the soldier’s physical health is maintained and be ready for his absence at but a moment’s notice, ready to take over all farming duties when he, seemingly inevitably, is sent off to war. Children were to be treated like little soldiers, raised to “respect the way of filial piety, to be valorous and loyal, to maintain their manners, and to become excellent and vigorous people,” and presumably to grow up to make fine soldiers themselves.

The decree called on Tondenhei soldiers and their families to be faithful and resolute, both inside and outside of the domestic space of the home while duplicating hierarchical duties transgenerationally. They were to maintain an environment of cleanliness and order, to be zealously industrious and self-sufficient irrespective of personal situations, and to be extremely frugal and avoid “being infected by the evils of the extravagances of the north sea (hokkai).”

This was especially the case, the decree specified, in arranging major life events such as marriages and funerals. Tondenhei soldiers and their family members, in sum, should treat their role in Hokkaido as not a short-term tour of duty, but should effectively indigenize themselves

155 on the land, having chosen the Tondenhei villages as their “graves” (funbo). Their personal conduct should foster an environment of filiality, prosperity, and brotherhood for the sake of future generations who would inherit the Tondenhei villages from their forefathers.49

Official recruitment documents echoed the spirit of this call, such as the pamphlet

Tondenhei shigansha kokoroe (Things to Keep in Mind for Tondenhei Applicants). Such discourse was also disseminated through the popular press, such as an article related to the

Tondenhei household economy in the Heiji shinpō magazine. Both address the Tondenhei household immediately after settlement. Undoubtedly cognizant of the deep poverty in which many Tondenhei soldiers lived, both texts encouraged members of Tondenhei households to begin actively saving for lean times. This would include such things as saving portions of rice subsidies for times of famine, or selling this rice, saving the money, and collecting interest on it.

While there is little evidence that frequently underfed Tondenhei families had rice to spare, the

Heiji shinpō article promoted self-sufficient frugality amongst the Tondenhei soldiers and their families and encouraged entrepreneurism in a way that recast them as incipient capitalists. The recruitment document went one step further in promising that – albeit less concretely – thriftiness today could mean richness tomorrow.50

The decree, moreover, effectively “domesticated” the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and

Sailors (gunjin chokuyu). The Imperial Rescript, printed in full in the first pages of Tondenhei

49 Tonden hohei daiyondaitai, Tondenhei oyobi kazoku kyōrei, Hokushi panfu 164-02, 0F001640020000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan. 50 Tondenhei honbu, Tondenhei shigansha kokoroe; “Hokkaido Tondenhei ijū ato no kakei,” Heiji Shinpō, 24 January 1891, 10.

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Handbooks, in the opening pages of the Tondenhei Textbooks, and posted on the walls of

Tondenhei houses, was to be constantly reviewed by soldiers (and presumably their family members). It called on soldiers to elevate themselves above “a rabble” when the nation is put into a state of “emergency” by developing a spirit of “grateful service” to the state. They should elevate themselves above “wild beasts” through acting in a spirit of “true valor.” They should avoid conflicts of interest and “highly value faithfulness and righteousness” lest they leave a

“tarnished name to posterity.” Lastly, they should avoid becoming “luxurious and frivolous” by

“mak[ing] simplicity their aim.”51 In this sense, the Tondenhei and Family Decree was a tool of normalization, transforming civilian residents of Tondenhei villages into obedient, loyal, frugal, industrious subjects through the militarization of daily life. It also sought to reproduce the hierarchical relationship between soldiers and the sovereign within the home, with the Tondenhei soldiers placed in an equivalent subject position to the emperor.

The Tondenhei and Family Decree, the Imperial Script to Soldiers and Sailors, and surrounding discourse provided an ideological buttress to the institutionalized militarism prevalent in Tondenhei villages. Undoubtedly designed to transform Tondenhei soldiers and their families into self-disciplining subjects, further analysis of the rigors of domestic life under military rule in Tondenhei villages helps reveal how individuals responded to this mode of interpellation and manoeuvred – sometimes literally – around the militarized space of Tondenhei villages. For soldiers such as Igo Kisaburō, military law (gunritsu) had a disciplining effect, in

51 Translation adapted from Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 705-707.

157 his case leaving him no other recourse to injustices committed against him than to, he reported,

“cry myself to sleep.”52 However, for the family members of soldiers, it meant their daily lives were regulated and segmented in much the same way by Tondenhei officers. Ōmura Motokichi, a Tondenhei soldier in Nopporo, described how difficult it was for his family, with constant inspections of communal property down to the last sewing needle, and meals set at exact times daily, regardless of how hungry, for example, young children may have been.53 Similarly,

Ōgama Tsutomu, who grew up in the same village, described his dreary life as a child structured by a Tondenhei soldier signalling he and his family with a bugle call when it was time to “get up and go to the field, or come from the field and sleep.”54 In other words, in Tondenhei villages, the chronological structuring of the daily lives of soldiers and civilians was identical. This echoes 20th century Marxian analyses of “time discipline,” most notably E. P. Thompson’s classic essay in which he argued that daily life structured around clocks, schedules, and calendars plays a critical role in the functioning of capitalist economies as well as the emergence of disciplined, modern subjects.55 More recently, Stefan Tanaka, in his monograph New Times in

Modern Japan, argues that chronologies and temporalities which structured virtually all economic and social relations in Europe and its colonies had an immensely transformative effect in Meiji Japan, where “a historical consciousness emerged that had transmuted the heterogeneous communities of the archipelago into a unified nation-state.”56 As Fujitani argues,

52 Sasaki, Shinkotoni heison-shi, 10. 53 Satō, Nopporo heison-shi, 17. 54 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 127. 55 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38, no. 1 (1967): 56–97. 56 Tanaka Stefan, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3.

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Japan’s military, too, came to be disciplined through time. Conscripts were forced to learn to eat, to sleep, and even to relieve themselves in time with military rhythms.57 In the hermetic space of the Tondenhei villages, the state subjected civilians to such chronological structuring explicitly designed to discipline soldiers. Accordingly, civilian residents faced military disciplinary action should they, for example, be late for their daily work in their own fields. This simultaneously had a normalizing effect on soldiers while driving civilians towards maximized economic output.

The indistinction between soldier and civilian characteristic of this disciplinary regime also had the effect of transforming Tondenhei households into cohesive units; microcosms of the military units which constituted the villages themselves.

One example of this is the inspection of Tondenhei households by commanding officers.

This included impromptu inspections such as those described above by Sasaki Yotsu, weekly inspections by resident officers, as well as monthly inspections by officers visiting from the

Tondenhei headquarters in Sapporo. Koguma Fuki, the child of a Tondenhei soldier, recalled monthly inspections by a Tondenhei “bigwig” (erai hito) who would thoroughly inspect all common property. The common property, including things such as bedding or kitchenware, would have to be lined up in a row inside the house. Formally remaining government property merely on loan to Tondenhei families, if something had gone missing or was dirty or broken, there would be hell to pay. Koguma recalled inspectees who had lost or damaged government property sending children as runners to sneak through the woods out of view of the “bigwig” to a

57 T. Fujitani, “Kindai Nihon ni okeru kenryoku no tekunorojī: guntai, ‘chihō,’ shintai.”

159 house that had already finished their inspection to borrow the item. She was, moreover, strictly forbidden from so much as looking at the officer during the inspections, saying the visiting officer was “truly more overbearing than the emperor himself.”58 Similarly, another settler,

Tanaka Riyo, described the same monthly inspections in her village with families and their collective property lined up not inside but outside by a flagpole. Seven Tondenhei officers, she recalled, would arrive in the village to inspect families and the collective property in their possession while menacingly “holding their guns like they were going off to war.”59

Apart from these inspections, Tondenhei soldiers such as the Kagoshima-born Suzuki

Katsuji reported that a soldier would wake up all members of the village daily with a bugle call at four o’clock in the morning. Thereafter, not just soldiers but their entire families were inspected by the squad leader. The squad leader would send details of each family to the company commander.60 Their strictly enforced regimen of fieldwork was, moreover, at times interrupted by unplanned calls for assemblies. Officers would send anyone late for these assemblies, regardless of whether they were soldiers or civilians, to the detention barracks.61

And, not simply limited to the home, the lives of civilian family members were also regulated by the Tondenhei throughout the villages. Koguma, who described running out of sight of the

“bigwig,” also recalled a guard with a fixed bayonet rifle in hand stopping her as a child on the edge of town while she was on her way to a neighbouring village on an errand. Asked bluntly,

58 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 140. 59 Ōgiya, Hagi no ne wa fukaku: Tondenhei no tsumatachi, 48-49. 60 Satō, Nopporo heison-shi, 12. 61 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 126.

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“Where are you going?” (doko ni iku), she remembered replying, “I’m going to such and such a place to buy oil” (XX he sekiyu kai ni). With this, the guard would order the child, “Pass!” On the way back into town she would again be inspected.62 The borders in and out of the Tondenhei villages were not so much defended, then, as they were policed. Many of them initially built by prison labour, these villages remained carceral in that they were equally designed to keep residents in as they were to keep strangers out. Individuals would need special permission when travelling to larger towns such as Sapporo to do necessary, everyday things such as see a doctor or sell their agricultural products. And, even while Sapporo was far from many of the Tondenhei villages, it was difficult for many to get permission to spend the night there.63 This also greatly limited the ability of off-duty Tondenhei soldiers or their family members to seek seasonal work outside the village, and often had the effect of keeping Tondenhei families in a state of deep poverty.64

So, too, were personal intimacies policed by the Tondenhei. Romantic relationships were often strictly regulated within and between Tondenhei villages by heisonkai village associations.

While many people in Tondenhei villages married people from their own home towns or same prefectures, no doubt in part because of social ties and dialectical similarities, relationships between individuals in different Tondenhei villages were regulated by the heisonkai.65 Besides playing matchmaker, the Tondenhei kept official statistics of marriages, including the respective

62 Ibid, 140-141. 63 Ibid, 125. 64 Satō, Nopporo heison-shi, 1. 65 Ni’idate, Chōji, Nopporo Tondenheison-shi (Ebetsu: Ebetsu-shi, 1969), 134-135.

161 ages of the bride and groom by year. These statistics also measured the ratio of things such as live births to stillbirths and the average weight of babies.66 The role of the Tondenhei in arranging marriages and the detailed compilation of statistics suggests the existence of natalist policies internal to the Tondenhei. Taken together with the recruiter’s inspection of prospective recruits’ koseki, we might conclude that the Tondenhei served a larger biopolitical role as a breeding program aimed to settle Hokkaido with colonists from carefully chosen bloodlines.

The settlement of multigenerational families of exemplary citizens strengthened Japan’s territorial claims to Hokkaido which depended on the “peopling” of Hokkaido with Japanese settlers. Even after the Meiji Restoration, when the Japanese government began actively encouraging mainlanders to settle the island, a large number of those who came to Hokkaido were young bachelors who often returned to the mainland after a short period of time. Or, as one

Tondenhei soldier put it, most were short term residents who lacked “an indigenous spirit

(dochakushin).”67 Referred to above, this group included large numbers of those who resisted or the new Meiji regime, such as natives of the former Satsuma and Aizu domains. It also included economic refugees, transients, common criminals, and so on, who drifted in. Natalist policies, and indeed the existence of the nuclear Tondenhei family units themselves, discouraged transience by creating a domestic breeding stock by which Hokkaido could be settled by multigenerational settlers hand-picked by the state. The Tondenhei settler-soldiers, both as agents of state sovereignty and a reproductive force, also strengthened Japan’s territorial claims

66 “Tondenheison kazoku eisei chōsahyō (zoku),” Hokkaidō iji kōdankai zasshi, November 1894, 21-23. 67 Satō, Nopporo heison-shi, 5.

162 to Hokkaido in opposition to any lingering Russian interest in the island. Having conceptually erased the Ainu by claiming Ainu Mosir as terra nullius, Japanese colonial planners faced the dilemma of their own territorial sovereignty over Hokkaido being dependent on their ability to quickly settle the island with colonists. Failing to do so, it would remain terra nullius. The

Tondenhei as a permanent settler population which could produce “native-born” children helped negate any potential Russian claims – such as those previously levied against Japan in the dispute over Sakhalin – that the short-term presence of a sprinkling of young, unmarried, impoverished, and overwhelmingly male sojourners does not constitute Japanese sovereign control. In all of this, through the Tondenhei, Japanese sovereignty over Hokkaido straddled a thin division between life and death. The presence of the Tondenhei in the space of the colony as a breeding population was as potent a weapon in strengthening Japanese claims over Hokkaido as the rifles the Tondenhei soldiers wielded.

However, regardless of the effect of regimes of military discipline or the existence of biopolitical institutions such as the heisonkai on residents of Tondenhei villages, social relations in the villages remained internally fractious. As soldiers and their family members were not evenly incorporated into the disciplinary regime of the militarized Tondenhei villages, a social discrepancy between spouses emerged in some families. Tondenhei soldiers trained daily in a homosocial environment while their wives were sometimes isolated in the fields, with far fewer opportunities to interact with neighbours. Evidence suggests that this created a gendered linguistic divide in many households. As one Tondenhei soldier, Yoshihara Heijirō, put it,

“Today [the Japanese language] is spread through education, but back then each prefecture’s words were not mutually understood.” Families grouped together from far-flung regions of the empire struggled to find ways to communicate as they discovered that their varieties of

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“Japanese” were not always mutually intelligible. This was especially the case with high concentrations of Tondenhei immigrating to Hokkaido from regions on opposite sides of the country known for their linguistic idiosyncrasies such as Tohoku or Kyushu. As the soldiers would spend day in and day out together, most would quickly learn how to communicate effectively. However, personal accounts suggest that for the spouses of Tondenhei soldiers, this was not always the case. Yoshihara recalled, “Especially for [our] wives, they would come here and not understand what others were saying at all and would be troubled.” Yoshihara claimed that this situation caused the wives of Tondenhei soldiers to “do nothing every day but cry.”68

While Yoshihara’s condescending description of women in Tondenhei villages is not reflective of the testimony of the wives of soldiers, who frequently described hard work in absence of their husbands, other accounts corroborate the presence of such linguistic divides between and sometimes within households. For example, Hiraki Akira, the wife of a Tondenhei soldier in

Numagai, described “not understanding a single word” that neighbours were saying.69 Likewise,

Nosawa Fukushige, a Tondenhei soldier from Yamanashi Prefecture, stated that he initially had great trouble understanding his fellow soldiers from other regions, especially people from

Aomori and Sendai. However, while he quickly learned to speak what he called “army language”

(guntai kotoba), his family did not, and they didn’t understand neighbours from Tohoku at all.70

68 Satō, Nopporo heison-shi, 5. 69 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 43. While no doubt isolating, dialectical incommensurability was also a found memory for some. For example, Shirozu Tsutomu, the child of a Yamaguchi Prefecture-born Tondenhei soldier, recalled going to retrieve a strainer their family had leant to a neighbour from Saga Prefecture. Asking for it back, the neighbour simply replied “Na-i,” or in other words, “I don’t have it!” It turned out to be a local pronunciation of an affirmative “Ha-i.” See Ibid, 19-20. 70 Ibid, 146.

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What this “army language” sounded like is unclear. However, one clue comes from the account of the son of a Tohoku-born Tondenhei soldier, Mikami Sukezō. Mikami’s father had a great deal of trouble getting accustomed to the dialects of his fellow soldiers. As Tondenhei officers were still largely from Kagoshima, not understanding the Satsugu dialect in which his commanding officers spoke to him rendered Mikami often unable to follow orders. Always somewhat unclear about what he was supposed to be doing and in the habit of responding with an affirmative “Got it” (sō da ne shī) whether he understood or not, his superiors would slap him in the face whenever he didn’t promptly do as he was told.71 While his father struggled, for the younger Mikami, this incommensurability of dialects was less a matter of facing disciplinary violence than social ostracization. Describing feeling a geographical and emotional closeness to

Hokkaido in connection to his family’s native Aomori Prefecture, Mikami stated that he did not share this feeling with “the various people from the other regions.” We find out why: Mikami remembered that many of these “people from far off places” had a great deal of trouble understanding his Aomori dialect, telling him that it sounded like he was speaking in Ainu rather than Japanese. While Mikami’s strong discomfort to his speech being referred to as sounding like Ainu was no doubt rooted in widespread animosity towards Hokkaido’s colonized

Indigenous people, historian Kawanashi Hidemichi notes that in the years following the Meiji

Restoration, people in the Tohoku region were increasingly coded by modernizing elites as somehow culturally akin to the Ainu. This was especially the case in relation to their purported

“primitivity” as loyalists to the bakufu in stark contrast to a “progressive,” modernizing Japanese

71 Ibid, 254.

165 southwest.72 This progressive nexus included Kagoshima, the home of many of the Tondenhei officers.

Triangular Relations

The relationship between the Ainu and the Tondenhei remains poorly understood. In fact, with some exceptions, very little work has been done to investigate the relations between the

Tondenhei and the Ainu. Within the historiography of Hokkaido, they seem to have inhabited different worlds despite living side by side. This disconnection reflects their respective subjective positioning in the space of the colony. As colonial planners expected the Ainu to simply disappear from the land and wrote policy based on this assumption, they simultaneously expected the Tondenhei to remain there permanently and become part of the very soil of

Hokkaido. Duty-bound to die in the space of the colony, their bodies would be transformed into part of the very land which they set out to colonize, thus indigenizing those dead Tondenhei soldiers, while the exogeneity of the bodies of the soldiers committed to the soil would work to conceptually transform Ainu Mosir into a naturalized part of Japan.

One of the few instances, however brief, in which the Ainu and Tondenhei have been analyzed together was in the Ainu Minzoku teikō-shi (The History of the Resistance of the Ainu

People) by 20th century activist and historian, Shin’ya Gyō. Writing that the newly-established

Meiji state sought to “kill three birds with one stone,” disaffected samurai – “molecules of

72 See Kawanishi Hidemichi, Tohoku: Japan’s Constructed Outland, trans. Nanyan Guo and Raquel Hill (Boston: Brill, 2016), especially chapters 1-3.

166 dissatisfaction” (fuman bunshi) – were pushed to the north while the state utilized their labour power in the colonization of Hokkaido and their military strength to provide security along the frontier. “In this way,” he continued, “the Ainu people were driven into the backcountry” and into lives of destitution.73 Curiously, this reference to the Ainu, in-between two much longer descriptions of the Tondenhei, is written in a passive voice, leaving it somewhat unclear – even if obvious from context – who, exactly, drove the Ainu off their land.

This ambiguity is perhaps appropriate. Even while the Tondenhei were an occupying army which enforced Japanese claims to Ainu Mosir, and as such, remained a constant – if tacit

– threat against any Ainu who aspired to throw off their colonizers, there is little evidence of much of any direct interaction between the Ainu and Tondenhei soldiers outside of day to day relations between individuals living in neighbouring villages.74 Rather, evidence suggests that

Tondenhei soldiers largely remained in their villages where they trained and farmed. These villages were spaces of exception where civilian law did not apply, and accordingly, as the jurisdiction of the civilian police force stopped at the Tondenhei village borders, except during emergencies, the jurisdiction of the Tondenhei soldiers did not extend outside the borders of the villages.75 Instead, as suggested by frequent references to the ruins of dug-out canoes or religious paraphernalia left scattered around Tondenhei villages in personal accounts, the violent dispossession of the Ainu occurred before the settler-soldiers even arrived. Namely, police and

73 Shin’ya Gyō, Ainu minzoku teikōshi: Ainu Kyōwakoku he no taidō (Tokyo: Sanichi shobō, 1972), 177-78. 74 In addition to Uehara, as quoted above, see Michele M. Mason, Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation-State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), especially chapter one. 75 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 158.

167 regular soldiers forced Ainu off of land which was thereafter transferred to the Tondenhei. As described at length in chapter four, some Ainu, such as those forced off of land which became a

Tondenhei village in the Asahikawa area, faced the prospect of famine as a direct result.76 All of this is to suggest that while the Tondenhei were deeply implicated in violence inflicted upon the

Ainu, the dispossession of Ainu land and resources was the precondition for, and not the result of, the creation of the Tondenhei villages.

It is then ironic that in some villages, local Ainu helped poorly equipped and underprepared Tondenhei soldiers and their families survive their first winters. For example, in their accounts, some Tondenhei village residents remember Ainu teaching the extremely poorly equipped Tondenhei how to make climate-appropriate clothing, coming into villages to sell fish, or in some cases, forming friendships with Tondenhei family members. Some, such as Kaza’ana

Kan, the family member of a soldier from Tokyo, recalled that the Tondenhei provided no provisions for winter clothing for family members. Ainu from the Tsurunuma area taught the

Tondenhei settlers how to make salmon-skinned boots (Ainu: cep-keri) which provided excellent protection in bad weather. These became prevalent in many Tondenhei communities, replacing boots made from paper or straw used previously.77

Others, however, transparently demonstrated colonial racisms which formed the basis of the antagonistic relationship between the Ainu (who were, without exception, spoken of in the

76 Inoue Katsuo, “‘Hokkaidō dojin chinjutsusho’ - Ainu chinjutsu ni tai Suru Hokkaidō-chō benmeisho,” Hokkaidōritsu Ainu minzoku bunka kenkyū sentā kenkyū kiyō - Bulletin of the Hokkaido Ainu Research Center 5 (1999): 170-228. For more on this, see chapter four. 77 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 24.

168 past tense) and the larger Japanese settler population. For example, likely demonstrating stern warnings from parents, many who were children in the villages describe their fear and astonishment when encountering an Ainu person. Ota Matsu, the son of a Tondenhei soldier, described his terror when seeing a bearded Ainu man, saying he immediately ran away to hide.78

Similarly, another Tondenhei family member recalled many Ainu around their village. “They would say things like ‘nishipa yankarapute’ (sic), but I thought they were somewhat dreadful.”79

Others were more sympathetic, though spoke to the day to day exploitation and discrimination the Ainu faced as Japanese settlers increasingly occupied their land. One settler in a Tondenhei village, for example, reports that their household had a lot of Ainu friends. They operated a small starch factory and would trade starch to local Ainu in exchange for fish. One of these Ainu confided in them one day, saying, “Shamo zurui, shamo zurui” (cheating Japanese, cheating

Japanese), and explained that a settler had given them fabric labels, presumably in exchange for the fish they traded, claiming that the labels could be used as currency.80

As ambiguous as the relationship between the Ainu and Tondenhei settlers was, the nature of this relationship is only further complicated when we consider it within the context of

Japan’s ongoing competition over the colonization of Ainu Mosir with the Russian Empire. The conventional understanding of the Tondenhei and their role in the colonization of the Ainu remains today – as described in 19th century recruitment and training materials – that the

78 Ibid, 124. 79 Ibid, 139. This is a corruption of the polite Ainu greeting “Nispa iramkarapte,” which might translate to “How do you do?” 80 Ibid, 136. At this time, many or most Ainu were non-native speakers of Japanese and fewer still were literate in Japanese. The person who “bought” fish with fabric tags was clearly taking advantage of this.

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Tondenhei soldiers functioned as a “lock” keeping Russian wolf from the door. However, the simple narrative that the Tondenhei were “the lock on the northern gate” defending the national community from this grave foreign threat greatly oversimplifies the complicated, fraught relationship between the Japanese and Russian empires, as they acted in both competition as well as collaboration in the colonization of Ainu Mosir. As Andrew Gentes notes, for example, the popular liberal Russian newspaper Golos described Sakhalin in startlingly similar terms that contemporary Japanese colonialists used to describe Hokkaido. While Hokkaido was Japan’s

“northern gate” upon which the Tondenhei were a “lock,” Sakhalin was “an enormous fortress” that would “guard the entrance to the Amur River.”81 In other words, as much as the Japanese colonization of Ainu territory was legitimized by the perceived need for defense against Russia, the Russian colonization of Ainu territory was legitimized by the perceived need for defense against Japan.

Moreover, in the 1880s and 1890s, the institutional structuring of the Tondenhei was increasingly amended to mirror the Russian settler colonial occupation of the Russian Far East, including parts of Ainu Mosir.82 This restructuring of the Tondenhei was achieved with direct

Russian assistance, speaking to a much more complex relationship – if not a colonial partnership

– between these two empires than simplistic nationalist platitudes would imply. Referred to above, this “restructuring” is sometimes literal, such as in 1880 when Russian carpenters from

Korsakov in Sakhalin were hired by Nagayama Takeshirō himself to travel to Hokkaido to build

81 Andrew Gentes, “The Institution of Russia’s Sakhalin Policy, from 1868 to 1917,” Journal of Asian History vol. 36, no. 1 (2002), 1. 82 Sapporo-shi kyōiku i’inkai bunka shiryōshitsu, ed., Tondenhei, 179.

170 houses for incoming waves of ostensibly anti-Russian Tondenhei soldiers.83 This reflexive dynamic breaks down even further outside of the realm of ideology when we look to the Russo-

Japanese War (1904-1905), when the two empires finally clashed. Despite the raison d’être of the Tondenhei to protect Hokkaido, as Michele Mason points out, the Tondenhei villages which dotted the interior of Hokkaido were a considerable distance overland from the island’s vulnerable northern coast, which itself is, at its closest point, less than 50 kilometres from

Sakhalin: a short distance for a landing party.84 For Mason, this casts doubt on the claim that the

Tondenhei were meant to protect Hokkaido from the Russians. Evidentially confirming this suspicion, when open war finally did break out, the Tondenhei were mobilized to fight in

Manchuria and northern Korea, some 1,500 kilometres away from Sapporo. And, when Japanese troops finally invaded and occupied Sakhalin in 1905, it was not members of the Tondenhei but the Niigata Prefecture-based 13th Division. They quickly overcame the sparse Russian garrison, who evidentially had not expected to be invaded.85

The ambiguity of the relationship between the two colonial rivals is even more starkly visible when observing the remodeling of the Tondenhei to resemble the Cossacks, who in the late 19th century still comprised a significant portion of the Russian armed forces in eastern

Siberia. The “Cossackization” of the Tondenhei was in part the result of Nagayama’s travels throughout the Russian Empire to inspect respective policies towards settler colonial land

83 Tondenhei honbu, Tondenhei enkaku (tsuketari sentōki). 84 Mason, Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan, 40. 85 Rotem Kowner. The A to Z of the Russo-Japanese War (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 339.

171 management and cold weather agriculture.86 This tour included a stay in the home of a Cossack major general. There, Nagayama’s host readily provided him with details of the jurisdictional and legislative structuring of the semi-autonomous, militarized, collectivist Cossack villages.87

From the significant part of his travelogue dedicated to the Cossacks, it is clear that Nagayama understood them as an army of settler-soldiers very much like his own. Nagayama’s findings had a strong influence on the increased logistical centralization of the Tondenhei, as well as the collectivist and militarist nature of the villages, and led to the establishment of the heisonkai which, in addition to arranging marriages, managed collective property.88

Concurrent to the publication of Nagayama’s travelogue, the 1890s saw a swell of articles in Japan’s popular press about the Cossacks. This no doubt reflected the fermenting tensions between the Russian and Japanese empires as they competed for influence and territory not only in Ainu Mosir, but throughout northeast Asia. However, as much as these articles might be understood as an attempt to better understand forces that the Japanese Imperial Army, including the Tondenhei, might one day soon face on the battlefield, the Cossacks as portrayed in these articles also provided a model of colonial control and development which could be replicated on

Japan’s own frontiers. Given the geographical proximity, they may have been presented as a better model for Hokkaido – or for that matter, for future colonial efforts in Manchuria, Korea, or even Siberia – than northwestern European or American colonial models.

86 Hōkkaido sōmubu bunshoka, ed., Kaitaku ni tsukushita hitobito, vol. 3, 55. 87 Nagayama Takeshirō, Shūyū nikki, vol. 1 (Self-published, 1889), 138-153. 88 Murao Motonaga, Hokumon no kagi: ijū annai (Self-published, 1891), 91.

172

One such article was published in Heiji shinpō. Unlike Nagayama, the author didn’t understand the Cossacks strictly as a branch of the Russian army, but instead referred to them interchangeably as the “Cossack army” (Kossakku-hei) and the “Cossack race” (Kossakku shuzoku). As such, for the author they were less military colonists like the Tondenhei than they are akin to other Steppe peoples, such as “the Circassian tribe” (Chorukessu-zoku), “the Turkmen tribe” (Torukoman-zoku), or other Central Asian “Mohammedans” (Mahometto kyōto). To these ends, the article characterized the Cossacks almost as supersoldiers, pointedly attacking their enemies with the speed of a “flash of lightening” (hiden), like apparitions barely seen. The author added that should the Cossacks come across a militarily superior enemy force, they “fall in all directions like leaves from a tree, and then after some time come flying back from every which direction like lightening to harass the enemy.” Fighting vigorously to protect their fields and with “little need for education other than to learn to ride horses or learn to handle a gun,” the

Cossacks seemed to embody stereotypes of barbaric Steppe hordes rather than modern professional soldiers.89 And, demonstrating how widespread this characterization of the Cossacks as semi-barbarous was, the tone and content of this article was largely replicated in an article published in Shōnen’en, a magazine intended for children. The Shōnen’en article alluded to the then-recent adoption of standardized military uniforms for Cossack cavalry, describing the

“barbaric ornaments” and “barbaric, strange costumes” they previously adorned themselves with as a thing of the (very) recent past.90 Such descriptions presented the Cossacks as a curious, exotic, and (semi-)barbarous race, not dissimilar to Orientalist writings produced in other

89 “Rokoku no heisei (shōzen),” 28-30. 90 “Kosakkuhei,” Shōnen’en, 18 February 1895, 18-22.

173 metropolitan centres, including those of Russia itself. In this regard, the Cossacks as European demi-savages in Asia could destabilize Orientalist logics of a central “civilized” Russia and a peripheralized “semi-civilized” Japan.

For some Japanese planners, such an image of the Cossacks was of more utility than details of command and control structures or village organization. The logic that, on the semi- barbarous northern frontier, semi-barbarous soldiers are the most effective was, in fact, reproduced in proposals for Ainu management. The influential socialist journalist, politician, and civil rights activist Hisamatsu Yoshinori, for example, envisioned the Ainu as weaponized into a highly effective fighting force as a cavalry branch of the Tondenhei. Believing both that the Ainu were on the verge of “racial extinction” (shuzoku shōmetsu) and that Cape Soya, just across a narrow body of water from a Russian military buildup in Sakhalin, was critically underdeveloped and thus vulnerable, Hisamatsu sought to kill two birds with one stone by training the Ainu into

“elite troops not inferior to the Siberian Cossacks.”91 For Hisamatsu, their superior knowledge of the backwoods terrain of Hokkaido and their purported ability to traverse this terrain at great speed, be it through forests, across rivers, or up mountains, on foot or on horseback, made the

Ainu ideal soldiers in the defense of Japanese territorial claims to their own homeland.92

Furthermore, according to Hisamatsu, while the Ainu are typically obsequious and servile towards the Japanese, this was the result of decades of conditioning and not some “innate quality” (seishitsu). Their fearlessness in the face of death while hunting dangerous animals such

91 Hisamatsu Yoshinori, Hokkaidō shinsaku (Tokyo: Maeno chōhatsu, 1892), 175. 92 Ibid, 176.

174 as Hokkaido’s enormous brown bears could be harnessed in order to turn them into stunningly effective killers on the battlefield while the rigor, industriousness, and discipline of Tondenhei life would pull them back from the brink of extinction.93

While Hisamatsu’s plan never materialized, Ainu management policies such as the

Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act (Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo-hō) in 1899 were almost certainly influenced by the structuring of the collectivist Tondenhei villages. As will be discussed in detail in chapter five, this included the government’s amalgamation of the Ainu into collectivist villages on Crown land, identical acreage of public land allotted to the Ainu as was given to Tondenhei families, provisions of food aid given to residents for a period of three years, the conditional use of state-owned houses, houseware, and farming equipment, and perhaps most importantly, the suspension of basic rights as Japanese citizens for residents of the collectivized villages. Just as the Cossack villages provided a model for communal property in the Tondenhei villages, the Japanese government sought to use the “Cossackized” Tondenhei as a model to turn the Ainu into disciplined agrarian settlers.94

Conclusion

This chapter has analyzed the Tondenhei, a literal army of settlers in Hokkaido, at the micro and macro levels of state power. It has analyzed gendered social relations between settlers

93 Ibid, 177. 94 Perhaps indicative of this is a collection of documents prepared by the Yamagata Aritomo Cabinet related to the Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act (Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo-hō). Inexplicably, the compilers of these documents included a list of Tondenhei collective property regulations amidst similar legislation proposed for the Ainu. See Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo-hō wo sadamu, Rui-00868100, National Archives of Japan, Tokyo, Japan.

175 in Tondenhei villages as existing at the axis of state militarism and patriarchical nuclear family units, and the role of the Tondenhei geopolitically. Residents of Tondenhei villages, both soldiers and their legally dependent civilian family members accordingly became subject to disciplinary and biopolitical forms of power. Existing in a permanent state of siege, state power threatened to permeate every level of their day to day existence, with soldiers expected to be on duty when sleeping, eating, bathing, and so on, and their wife and children subject to much the same form of militarist discipline. Gendered social relations became militarized, with work defined as feminine within the hermetic spaces of Tondenhei villages at times quite literally policed by officers. Perhaps reflecting the liminal nature of life in Tondenhei villages, the Tondenhei as an institution, too, became increasingly indistinct in its role as an anti-Russian line of defense on the border zone of Hokkaido, as it institutionally and discursively came to mirror the function of the

Russian Cossacks in Siberia. The Japanese and Russian empires, moreover, in competition over the colonization of the same Ainu territories, came to increasingly mirror one another. Despite the Russophobic nature of Tondenhei training and propaganda materials, the two nations at times collaborated over the colonization of Ainu territories, including instances where Russian carpenters built the ostensibly anti-Russian Tondenhei villages on behalf of the Japanese government. Into the 1890s, modelling the Tondenhei after the Cossacks and the Ainu after the

Tondenhei became central to Japanese colonial efforts in Hokkaido.

While celebrated today in Hokkaido as emblematic of heroic, unmistakably masculine pioneer life, interviews left behind by Tondenhei soldiers and their families reveal a distinctly unromantic, marginal existence. In their accounts, Tondenhei soldiers and their family members often characterized the almost dreamlike period in their lives spent in the heterotopic Tondenhei villages as unpleasant, if not traumatic, with some former soldiers and their family members

176 describing, many decades later, involuntarily shaking with emotion or experiencing heart palpitations when recalling their day-to-day existence.95 Few looked back with a sense of nostalgia, and certainly fewer still described their struggles of life in Tondenhei villages as an act of glorious personal sacrifice for the nation as portrayed by state propaganda. Even while there were cases of Tondenhei families who simply deserted their posts, most – regardless of personal motivations – did the jobs expected of them. Nevertheless, for those who made their lives in these villages, there were few material or spiritual rewards. As one settler put it, “There was absolutely nothing enjoyable; it was all rough.”96

While both soldiers and civilian residents of Tondenhei villages widely reported having found ways of subverting state power, most nevertheless effectively fulfilled their role in the colonization of Hokkaido even if few subscribed to the narrative of self-sacrifice in the name of

“loyalty and patriotism.” Accordingly, this chapter has shown that there was little difference in the efficacy of Tondenhei soldiers who enlisted for patriotic reasons and those who enlisted simply to escape personal, environmental, or economic catastrophes in their home prefectures.

These soldiers and their families went on to form the backbone of the much larger body of

Japanese settlers in Hokkaido. For example, whatever his motivations for enlisting, the soldier

Watanabe Tsuchitada described in the introduction of this chapter thrived in this environment, having quickly been promoted to sergeant and then master sergeant before working as a public

95 Aside from the testimony of the abovementioned Nakayama Takeo, see also Ōgiya, Hagi no ne wa fukaku: Tondenhei no tsumatachi, 63. 96 Sapporo Chūō Hōsōkyoku hōsōbu, ed., Tondenhei: Kazoku no mita seido to seikatsu, 144.

177 servant at the Hokkaido Prefectural Office during his years as a reservist.97 Just as the liminality of these militarized villages was what allowed the Tondenhei to function so effectively in the colonization of Hokkaido, the uncertain place of soldiers and dependent civilians in Tondenhei villages, too, maximized their economic and military potential and, in the process, enforced – violently if necessary – Japanese territorial claims to Ainu land.

97 Watanabe, “Tondenhei techō.”

Chapter 4 Where the Bones Lie: Head Hunters, Necromancers, and Settler Colonial Dispossession

The Meiji government hoped to attract a generation of permanent settlers who would live and die in the space of the Hokkaido settler colony. As discussed in the previous chapter, some settlers such as the Tondenhei soldiers were quite literally ordered to make Hokkaido their graves, with their bodies decomposing to become part of the very soil of the island. Committed to the earth, they would help transform Ainu Mosir into Japanese Hokkaido, with their very corpses acting as the agents of the settler colonial state. Far from necropolitical, however, such efforts to have settlers spend the rest of their mortal lives in the colony were bolstered by biopolitical “protection” programs, such as the distribution of food aid and low-interest loans on the sale of arable land directly from the government to those committed to become lifelong settlers. Rather than returning from the harsh frontier to the comforts of home, aid provided by the state would ensure that otherwise impoverished settlers would not only survive, but before long, thrive in the northern colony of Hokkaido. These settlers would put down roots, raising a new generation of children born in the colony.

At the same time, from the waning days of the Tokugawa period, a parallel project began to take shape. Grave robbers began to expunge the bones of the Ainu from the soil, exporting them as highly prized commodities to imperial capitals, beginning with London, Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, and before long, Tokyo. As the colonization of Hokkaido advanced, many of these stolen bones didn’t even leave the island and were transferred instead to the prefectural capital of Sapporo. As the bodies of settlers worked to transform the very soil of Hokkaido into a naturalized Japanese territory, conversely, expunging the bodies of the Ainu served the same

178 179 purpose: “Japanizing” Hokkaido by de-indigenizing the soil, exiling the ancestors of the living

Ainu from their homeland, and claiming the Ainu – in body and soul, alive and dead – for the

Japanese state. The Ainu themselves thus not only became unwilling citizens of the new Meiji state, but in death, became fetishized commodity objects, highly valued as specimens of a strange, remote, and – many believed – doomed race.

With the Ainu population believed to be plummeting, Ainu crania only increased in value. Treated as corpora nullius, Ainu remains were stolen from gravesites and became the private property of comparative anatomists, ethnographers, and physical anthropologists, lying in rest in the offices of academics like Thomas Huxley, Koganei Yoshikiyo, Kodama Sakuzaemon, and many others. These scholars applied a sort of “osteo-hermeneutics” to stolen Ainu crania to serve the cause of colonial anthropology. Physical damage told tales of cannibalism while slight craniometrical differences from the skulls of neighbouring peoples spoke of great ancient migrations, marking the Ainu as non-native to the space of the colony. In short, quantitative measurements of cranial girth, the shape of the nose bridge, or the volume of the cranium allowed researchers, they believed, to order, to classify, and to understand the Ainu as a race and learn their history.

However, late 19th century European models of the racial subclassifications of mankind often divided the whole of Eurasia between just two races: “Caucasians” and “Mongols.” For many scholars, the Ainu did not neatly fit into either category, with the Yomiuri shinbun newspaper reporting in 1895 that the racial classification of the Ainu “has long been a big

180 question for anthropologists around the world.”1 It was precisely this ambiguity that seemed to make the Ainu the exception to the racial rule and generated interest in the Ainu and demand for their skulls. And, with more and more Ainu bones expunged from the earth, there were ever fewer untouched Ainu gravesites left to desecrate and prices of Ainu crania skyrocketed in the

1890s.2

Meanwhile, in the name of “civilizing” the Ainu and incorporating them into the new modernizing state, the still-living Ainu were cut off from the barest necessities of life. With the establishment of policies in the 1870s which claimed both the flora and fauna of Hokkaido as the exclusive property of the Japanese sovereign, the state attacked Ainu food sovereignty – autochthonous systems of food procurement outside of the emerging capitalist economy – by banning Ainu hunting and fishing. Ainu communities, especially along the Saru River valley, experienced severe and often deadly famines as early as 1882. Petitioned by affected communities, the state provided aid on the condition that survivors take to agriculture to become self-sufficient, avoiding death by famine in the future through assimilation into the norms of the agrarian life of Japanese settlers. However, even those who did just this soon found that their farms were stolen by settlers and prospectors. In response, an Ainu redress movement began to take shape aiming to protect Ainu land rights and food sovereignty.

With the shocks of the famines and the widespread land theft which left survivors scattered, as well as the increasing blending of the Japanese and Ainu populations through

1 “Aino hogo no katsudō: Saru Kotan shūchō no seigan,” Yomiuri shinbun, February 8 1895, morning edition, 3. 2 “Aino no dokuro ōi ni tōki wo,” Yomiuri shinbun, July 14 1890, morning edition, 3.

181 unprecedented intermarriage and adoption, those who put faith in the existence of an a priori

“pure” Ainu racial type often understood the subjects of their research to be rapidly disappearing, leading to their seemingly inevitable racial extinction in the near future. For physical anthropologists in particular, this rendered the bones of long dead Ainu better representatives of their race than actual living Ainu. And, even as the bones of dead Ainu became highly prized commodities, Ainu lives became blatantly devalued; so much so that the settler colonial state allowed them to die.

This chapter mobilizes the English legal term corpus nullius – meaning, literally, a body with no owner – to discuss the theft and study of Ainu bones, the egregious mistreatment of living Ainu, and the role these practices had in establishing Japanese sovereignty over Ainu lands claimed as terra nullius. In doing so, this chapter joins a growing body of critical scholarship which has applied this term to analyze the legal dehumanization of racialized populations. Most notably, Patrick Wolfe repurposed this term to describe the nullified subject position of the “Indian” in United States constitutional discourse. The United States government,

Wolfe argued, transformed Indigenous peoples (as well as enslaved Africans and their descendants, interned Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, Guantanamo Bay detainees, and others) into legally nullified subjects, without constitutional protections. As applied to Indigenous peoples across the continent, this allowed the ever-expanding American state to streamline “the removal of indigenous humans from the land” by rendering them legally incapable of sovereign ownership of land or property and lacking legal protections that would

182 otherwise ensure their physical wellbeing.3 Referring to Wolfe, Jodi Byrd stresses that this places

Indigenous bodies (as well as those of others so affected by state power) in a space between

“human and inhuman, legal and illegal, sacred and bare life,” marking them as “the living dead.”4 Most recently, building on these critiques and inverting purely corporeal legal definitions of English common law, Joseph Pugliese defines corpus nullius as “a non-body that is merely animal carcass.”5 In these regards, this chapter understands both the robbery of Ainu bones from their gravesites and necropolitical practices which led to famines in Ainu communities as predicated on the transformation of Ainu into corpora nullius. In effect, the living Ainu were treated as an undead race while dead Ainu became highly sought-after commodity objects.

In discussing this topic, however, this chapter contains something of a countercurrent.

From the time of the first robberies of Ainu graves in the mid-1860s until the present, the Ainu have consistently resisted the legal nullification of their bodies, individually or collectively, alive or dead, which render them corpora nullius. Ainu activists have never tired from efforts which began as early as 1865 to have the bones of their ancestors returned to the soil, and the Ainu redress movement today, which has its roots in the 19th century, continues to fight to have these stolen bones returned from collections around the world. Ainu activists, likewise, continue to fight for rights to land, as well as against persistent, pernicious attempts to de-indigenize them by

3 Patrick Wolfe, “Corpus Nullius: The Exception of Indians and Other Aliens in US Constitutional Discourse,” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147. 4 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques Of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 225-226. 5 Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 168.

183 politicians, academics, and ethno-nationalists who claim that the Ainu have long since gone extinct as a discrete race and are thereby undeserving of collective rights. This chapter can accordingly also be read as an early history of Ainu land-body defense.

The Head Hunters

In 1865, three British consular officers, Henry Whitely, Henry Trone, and George

Kemish, together with their young Japanese servant Shōtaro, left the treaty port of Hakodate, made their way to the village of Otoshibe, and set to work digging up skeletons from a local

Ainu graveyard. Whitely, the leader of the group, had been dispatched to the British consulate at

Hakodate in his capacity as a naturalist in order to collect fauna samples of exotic Asian wildlife.

They travelled to Otoshibe on the pretense of shooting birds. However, instead of returning with birds, the four dug up bones from Ainu gravesites and hauled them back to Hakodate, hidden in baskets. From there, the bones the thieves intended to ship the bones to London and sell them for a considerable profit to museums and universities, given, as the British ambassador Harry Parkes put it, intense demand “in the scientific world for specimens of skulls or skeletons of this interesting race of men.”6 While Ainu bodily remains had quickly become a valuable commodity in Europe, the question of their utility for their buyers was not immediately clear for many

6 Case of Capt. Vyse - Aino Bones, 1866-1867, MS British Foreign Office: Japan Correspondence, 1856-1905 Volume 88:1, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom, 2. British demand for all things Ainu was considerable. Besides Ainu skulls, the British government sought to acquire Ainu specimens to be displayed in British museums through legal means. For example, in 1868, just two years after the Vyse affair was settled, the British diplomatic mission in Japan made a formal request for specimens of Ainu weapons or household items to be displayed at an exposition in London. See Rondon nite hakurankai no tame Ezochi dojin no buki-kagu-kibutsu-rui shūshū ni joryoku-kata shojō, 1872, Bosho 115, Kenbangō 135, Hokkaido Prefectural Archives, Sapporo, Japan.

184

Japanese. As Parkes later explained to a curious official, buyers would use the bones “for the purpose of racial classification and medicine.”7

At the time of the theft many of the village’s resident Ainu were camping in the mountains and the neighborhood around the graveyard was practically deserted, undoubtedly emboldening the thieves. However, unbeknownst to the four grave robbers, they were being watched. A local Japanese resident peered at the ghoulish scene from behind a tree, afraid to intervene as one of the grave robbers stood on guard, brandishing a gun. The Japanese witness told an Ainu child what he saw, and the child ran to the mountains to tell the others. The villagers raced back home to find that a total of thirteen graves had been desecrated, including the graves of what British case documents described as “children.”8 While some entire skeletons were taken, the robbers were far more interested in Ainu skulls.

While the grave robbers were by then long gone, two of the Otoshibe Ainu, Itakisan and

Torikisan, followed their trail back to Hakodate. There, they submitted a formal complaint with the Japanese magistrate, Koide Hozumi. In his interview with Koide, Torikisan, whose grandparent’s grave had been desecrated, described how he and his fellow villagers returned to

Otoshibe to “find that the skeletons of our parents, children, and siblings had been dug up.” He added defiantly, “No matter what, we want those skeletons returned.”9 Itakisan, who also had a

7 “Eikokujin Ainu Funbo Hakkutsu Jiken,” in Ainu-shi shiryōshū 2-4 Abe Masaki bunko hen (1) [1 of 5], ed. Kōno Motomichi (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 1983), 13. 8 Vyse, Case of Capt. Vyse - Aino Bones, 11. British records on the case provide a list of the names of the Ainu whose bones were stolen and specify their relation to specific (presumably living) members of the Otoshibe Ainu community. Besides three described as “children,” three more of the 13 are described as a resident’s “daughter,” and one as a resident’s “son.” 9 Koida Takeru, Ainu funbo tōkutsu jiken (Tokyo: Miyama Shobō, 1987), 50.

185 grandparent’s grave robbed, concurred, and – to give some sense of the mood in the village – reported that they had “held a town meeting in tears,” trying to decide what course of action to take.10

Koide took the complaints seriously. The magistrate immediately petitioned the British consul, Francis Howard Vyse, to have the skulls returned and the thieves punished. This was, however, easier said than done. As Hakodate was a treaty port, British subjects were bound to

British and not Japanese law. This extended the jurisdiction of the Crown into Japan, compromising Japanese sovereignty over these port cities and transforming the bodies of the treaty-bound foreign residents into pockets of alegality moving about territories otherwise administered as Japanese.11 This meant that Koide was forced to approach Vyse as a complainant, not dissimilarly to how the Ainu themselves had approached him. He had no choice but to rely on the British consul to prosecute the accused at his own discretion.

Unsurprisingly, Vyse showed little interest in prosecuting anyone. In his initial dealings with Koide, he went out of his way to demonstrate his indifference, simply demanding that the magistrate give up the names of the “foreigners” who he believed had informed the magistrate of the grave robbery and dismissed the Ainu testimony outright as hearsay. Entirely unsubtle,

Vyse’s uncooperativeness was such that Koide immediately suspected conspiracy amongst the members of the British legation. Vyse simply repeatedly demanded the names of the “foreigners”

10 Ibid. 11 Other nations with extraterritoriality in Japan by 1865 included the United States, Russia, the Netherlands, France, and Prussia.

186 who “gave information” to Koide regarding the theft of the Ainu skulls. Frustrated, Koide – much to Vyse’s astonishment – “got up suddenly without making any reply ... and left the room.”12

With a second complaint about the theft of bones from four more Ainu graves by the same British consular officers in the village of Mori, just south Otoshibe, pressure began to mount. Koide notified the other foreign consulates of his investigation of the British consular officers and ordered the arrest of the Japanese servant Shōtaro, who was, of course, not under extraterritorial protection. His arrest was met with protests by members of the British consulate.

Two of the three suspects, Kemish and Trone, went so far as to threaten to shoot the police officers who came to arrest Shōtaro at Hakodate’s Russian hospital where he was being hidden, backing down only when the police drew their swords.

Indicative of European assumptions of Japanese judicial barbarity, which were, after all, what drove demands for extraterritorial protection for European and American residents of

Japan, “rumors” began to fly about the British legation that Shōtaro “has undergone extreme torture on account of the offense of the three prisoners.”13 Whatever the veracity of such rumors,

Koide was able to extract a confession from Shōtaro almost immediately. However, he kept this close to his chest in subsequent dealings with Vyse, undoubtedly seeing the consul’s continued

12 Vyse, Case of Capt. Vyse - Aino Bones, 33-34. 13 Idib, 74. For in-depth analyses of how culturalist stereotyping drove European and American demands for extraterritoriality in East Asia, see Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Li Chen, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2016); and Shogo Suzuki, Civilization and Empire: China and Japan’s Encounter with the European International Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).

187 foot-dragging as proof of his complicity. Indeed, Vyse was more than complicit in the theft of the Ainu bones, as the skulls taken from Mori had been shipped to Vyse’s own brother in

England. More than this, however, and unbeknownst even to Koide, Vyse himself had also taken part in an expedition to steal bones from Ainu graves the year before, together with Whitely and one Dr. Zalesky, a physician at the Russian hospital.14

Even as Vyse continued to protect Whitely, Kemish, and Trone, they eventually confessed, ostensibly based on the assumption that Shōtaro was undergoing brutal torture in their names.15 As the skulls from Otoshibe and Mori remained in British possession, even with the three British grave robbers imprisoned, the question of the return of the bones remained unanswered. As did the question of indemnities paid to the Ainu in Otoshibe and Mori, as well as, Koide suggested, to the Japanese government. In the thick of his negotiations with the ever evasive Vyse, who claimed to have no knowledge of the bones’ whereabouts, Koide was handed a gift of sorts when visited by the British interpreter J.J. Enslie. Enslie offered to turn in the bones to the magistrate in exchange for the release of Shōtaro, who remained in police custody.16

Koide refused, but took the offer to mean that the bones were in Enslie’s possession. This wouldn’t have surprised Koide, as Shōtaro had already confessed to delivering them directly to

Enslie’s house. However, taken together, this gave Koide firm evidence of conspiracy amongst

14 See Perez, Louis G. “An Incident of Extraterritoriality in Japan: The Vyse Affair.” Asian Culture Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1990): 65–85. 15 While it is certainly possible that Whitely, Trone, and Kemish felt genuinely concerned and personally responsible for Shōtaro’s situation – whatever it may have been – British case documents nevertheless referred to him as a “servant,” a “coolie,” a “Jap.,” and so on. 16 Vyse, Case of Capt. Vyse - Aino Bones, 107.

188 members of the British legation. And, like Shōtaro’s confession itself, Koide did not immediately divulge knowledge of Enslie’s offer to Vyse. Instead he would later use this evidence to steer

Vyse into a trap.

While the theft of the Ainu bones was traumatic to affected Ainu communities and an outrage to Japanese officials in Hakodate, British residents were increasingly concerned that the controversy would contribute to both Japanese and Ainu feelings of contempt towards foreign residents. This, they feared, might even lead to violent reprisals. This was of real concern, given a string of assassinations of foreigners on the Japanese mainland, including the attempted murder of Harry Parkes himself. As a result, even with the Ainu bones remaining in British hands, Vyse feigned sympathy and stressed “the deep repugnance which ... all Foreigners (sic) regard this violation.”17 On Parke’s advice, he hoped to “mark the sympathies of the English government and in fact all my countrymen,” and in the process, put an end to the affair by offering a cash indemnity of 1,000 ichibu (or roughly 350 Spanish dollars) to the Ainu.18 Koide refused, remarking that this amount would be spread thin when split among the families of the 17 people whose bones were stolen. Moreover, aware that little more than 20 dollars per skull was a small price to pay in comparison to British museums, which bought them for upwards of 2,000 dollars each, Koide was concerned that this was an insultingly low sum to pay to the Ainu as an indemnity. Worse, agreeing to such terms would establish legal precedent, encouraging rather

17 Ibid, 129. 18 Ibid, 148.

189 than deterring such crimes.19 Regardless, he refused to even consider an indemnity without the return of the skulls.20 Vaguely alluding to Enslie’s offer, Koide indirectly accused Vyse by telling him that he believed that Enslie and his companion Robertson, “are members of the

English Consulate” and accordingly “must have been fully aware of the whole matter before the three prisoners were proved guilty.”21 Ignoring this, Vyse continued to push Koide to accept the indemnity, suggesting without a hint of irony that the money could be used to build a fence around the Ainu cemetery. Koide rejected this and a variety of other equally flippant suggestions on how to spend the money. He told the consul that in addition to returning the bones, only a cash indemnity would do as the Ainu themselves made the multi-day journey to and from

Hakodate to report the crime at their own expense. Koide added that the exact amount of the indemnity would have to be approved by the Ainu.

Vyse was infuriated. In a letter to Harry Parkes, he fumed that the Japanese magistrate was “unseemly and indecorous,” acting “as the judge ... whereas he was only the Plaintiff.”22

Vyse went so far as to suggest that Parkes might file a formal complaint to the Japanese Foreign

Affairs office demanding Koide’s termination. Vyse no doubt also felt personally threatened, given his own role in the affair, which had yet to be made clear. However, Koide’s brash,

19 Ibid, 153. For a discussion of rumors circulating amongst Japanese officials regarding the high price of British skulls and estimates of their selling price derived from Anglo-Japanese negotiations, see Ueki, Tetsuya. Gakumon no bōryoku: Ainu bochi wa naze abakaretaka. Shunpūsha, 2017. 22. Potentially exceeding the estimate of 1000- 2000 dollars per skull, an 1872 issue of the British newspaper The Graphic reported that in England, skeletons derived from unclaimed bodies at morgues would fetch only around £10, while so-called “extraordinary skeletons” could fetch upwards of £800. See “Skeletons and the Skeleton Trade.” The Graphic [London], 30 March 1872, 14. 20 Vyse, Case of Capt. Vyse - Aino Bones, 153. 21 Ibid, 149. 22 Ibid, 63.

190 assertive negotiation style, which upset the asymmetrical power relations between Japan and

Great Britain, irked Vyse more than anything. These relations were based on the premise of

European superiority. Giving the Ainu − who Vyse saw as a detestable subject race − veto power over the proposed British indemnity seemed to flip this hierarchy on its head.

However, Koide did not intend to empower the Ainu in Otoshibe and Mori. Instead, his defense of the Ainu asserted Japanese sovereignty in Hakodate, pushing it to its very limits against the unequal treaties. Which is to say, just as Vyse sought to assert extraterritorial British sovereignty over Hakodate, and to an unclear degree over the Ainu, Koide also attempted to maximize Japanese sovereignty over both Ainu territories and the Ainu who lived there on behalf of the bakufu. He reminded Vyse that not only should the British think of the Ainu as “subjects of the Japanese” but, as far as British interactions with the Ainu went, they should be thought of as “the same as Japanese” (emphasis added).23 Koide’s motive was not entirely lost on Vyse, who warned that the Japanese magistrate’s actions were “upset[ting] British jurisdiction in

Japan.”24 Reporting on the case in Britain reflected this as well, with the Dundee Courier, for example, claiming that the case against the defendants was “more political than moral.”25

Accordingly, Koide’s interactions with Vyse, as well as his successor Abel Gower, were part and parcel with his earlier negotiations with the Russian government, with whom Koide had asserted

23 Ibid, 152. 24 Ibid, 47. 25 “Removing Skulls in China,” Dundee Courier, June 8 1866, 2. The title betrays a high degree of geographical uncertainty.

191

Japan’s exclusive sovereignty over Ainu territories farther north in Karafuto.26 This is to say, steering the British government to prosecute the three accused consular officers on behalf of the bakufu and seeing to it that the bones were returned to the Ainu through Japanese officials was a strategy to force the British government to explicitly recognize Japanese sovereignty over Ainu territories.

The strategy worked. Armed with information garnered from Enslie’s unexpected visit and Shōtaro’s confession, Koide was able to confront Vyse directly, telling him, “I know very well where the skulls are.”27 Vyse, not deviating from his standard negotiating stance, feigned ignorance and assured Koide, whom he likely thought knew nothing, that he would cooperate in any way he could if Koide had any new information about the whereabouts of the bones. Koide, fed up with the charade, told Vyse that negotiating with him was a “waste of time.” He proceeded to accuse Vyse directly of knowing full well where the skulls were, telling the consul that Shōtaro had already confessed to taking them to Enslie’s house.28 So bluntly confronted,

Vyse had little recourse but to promptly arrange to have the bones of the 13 Ainu from Otoshibe returned.

However, the question of the bones stolen from Mori was far more difficult, as they had already been shipped to London. The three British defendants claimed that due to the noxious smell of the skulls, they had thrown them into the sea. However, at this point suspicious of any

26 Mori was the southernmost of the traditionally Ainu villages while southern Karafuto was the northwestern extreme of traditional Ainu territories. Essentially, Koide was claiming all Ainu territories for Japan. 27 Vyse, Case of Capt. Vyse - Aino Bones, 170. 28 Ibid, 172.

192 claims coming from the consulate, Koide outright disregarded this and continued to push to have the bones returned. Even with Vyse recalled to London as a result of his role in the shameful affair and replaced by the new consul, Abel Gower, Koide did not let up. In an interview, Gower claimed to know nothing about the whereabouts of the skulls from Mori and sarcastically asked the Japanese magistrate, “Would it be acceptable to compensate you with British bones?” To

Gower’s shock, Koide responded in kind, saying, “If it’s Trone, Kemish, and Whitely’s skeletons, that would be acceptable compensation.”29

Not long after, Koide himself was recalled to Edo. His replacement, Sugiura Baitan, quickly accepted the cash indemnity. Before long, a package of bones believed to be those stolen from Mori was returned from England, and the British indemnity was used to build a new grave for the Otoshibe Ainu. Sugiura did not return the bones to the community as Koide seems to have hoped, however, and placed them instead in the care of the local Tōryūji Buddhist temple.

This, in effect, claimed them for an institution affiliated with the Japanese rather than the Ainu.

There, a simple grave marker was erected listing the names of the 13 Ainu whose bones were interred in the Japanese katakana syllabary.30

The Necromancers

The bones of the Otoshibe Ainu remained at Tōryūji temple for 70 years until one day they were, once again, stolen. This time, they were not destined for London, or any other

29 Koida, Ainu funbo tōkutsu jiken, 223. 30 Ibid, 272-273.

193

European capital, but for the prefectural capital of Sapporo, which by then had grown from a hamlet no bigger than Otoshibe to one of the largest cities in Japan and the jewel in the crown of

Japan’s northern colonies. The thief was Kodama Sakuzaemon, a prominent anthropologist at

Hokkaido Imperial University, who led a team of students to re-excavate the Ainu skeletons from the grounds of Tōryūji temple. The team also desecrated an additional 30 Ainu graves in the village, returning with the bones of 43 Ainu in total to study. Also stolen was the grave marker itself, which was taken from the temple grounds and brought back with the skeletons as, we can only assume, a curio or a trophy.31

The skulls of the Otoshibe Ainu joined many hundreds of others which lined the walls of his Hokkaido Imperial University office, turning it into something of a charnel house. While it would be difficult to imagine what scholarly benefit Kodama could possibly derive from the additional 43 skulls than he was not able to extract from the many hundreds of others he and his colleagues had already stolen, Kodama announced that by measuring the cranial dimensions of the skulls from Otoshibe, he was able to conclude that the 13 skulls recovered from Enslie’s residence were Ainu skulls and not “fakes (nisemono),” as had long been suspected. Moreover, even while the skulls seized from Tōryūji temple belonged to Ainu, comparing them craniometrically with skulls stolen from northern Hokkaido, Kodama concluded that after centuries of intermarriage, the Ainu in southern Hokkaido were more “wajinified (wajinka shite

31 Ibid.

194 iru),” resembling Japanese settlers (wajin).32 Accordingly, for Kodama, they were less authentically Ainu.

While many centuries of contact had, it seems, caused the physiognomy of the Otoshibe

Ainu to deviate somewhat from their northern cousins, it was only after a few short decades of

Westernizing reforms that the once immense gap between Japanese and European attitudes towards the treatment of Ainu bodily remains closed completely. Indeed, in re-enacting the theft of the same bones stolen from Otoshibe, Kodama and his team of young students played the role of the British grave robbers. Meanwhile, local officials in what by the 1930s had become the overwhelmingly Japanese village of Otoshibe didn’t so much as bat an eye as the research team hauled away box after box of Ainu skulls. It had all become very routine.

Indeed, so much had this gap closed that Kodama understood his role as a Japanese physical anthropologist specializing in the study of Ainu as part of a distinctly European tradition. Accordingly, while Japanese writings describing the Ainu have a history stretched back many hundreds of years, Kodama largely dismissed such writings as simple narratives rather than proper studies in any academic sense. Strictly speaking, the study of the group designated by him and other scholars as the “Aino” began only with the arrival of Europeans in Hokkaido,

Sakhalin, and the Kuriles with the 19th century expansion of the European colonial empires into the north Pacific. No matter how fleeting or casual their descriptions, Kodama treated such writings as the forerunners of modern anthropological/ethnographic studies of the Ainu, rich

32 Ibid.

195 with scholarly value. Kodama’s overview of the history of Ainu studies suggests that Japanese researchers such as himself must position themselves as Europeans in order to properly study the

Ainu.33

While Japan formally annexed Ainu territories across Hokkaido in 1869, the first

Japanese craniometrical study of the Ainu only occurred more than two decades later in 1892. By then, many Ainu gravesites across Hokkaido and Sakhalin had been already picked over by

Europeans, many of them consular attachés, who brought back numerous “specimens” with them to study. According to Kodama, the first of these studies was completed by George Busk, a palaeontologist and zoologist, who in 1868 published his findings on a craniometrical analysis of an Ainu skull. Busk had borrowed the skull from Thomas Huxley, the famous biologist and racial theorist known for his fierce public support of Darwinian evolutionary theory, earning him the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog.” Huxley, in turn, had procured the prized skull from C.S.

Forbes, a British naval officer who had, in 1865, travelled to Hokkaido and stole the skull from

“a wild country of forest” north of Hakodate, in the vicinity of Otoshibe and Mori. This land was

“uninhabited,” he claimed, “except by a few charcoal-burners.”34 Forbes had absconded with

“this valuable relic” back to London “at great personal expense and trouble.”35 Before passing it

33 Kodama Sakuzaemon, “Aino” minzoku ni tsuite, 1938, Takakura panfu 024-11, 0G000240110000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan. 34 C.S Forbes, “The Western Shores of Volcano Bay, Yesso,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 10, no. 1-6 (1866): 169. 35 Ibid, 172.

196 on to Busk, Huxley performed a preliminary examination of the skull, noting that “the features are unlike those of adjacent tribes, whether Japanese or Chinese.”36

The skull was of immense interest to the famous Victorian biologist and his colleagues, to whom such “specimens” were invaluable to the larger project of the racial classification, subclassification, and hierarchization of mankind. For Huxley, the Ainu skull could accordingly be used to explain differences between the Japanese (who he believed had intermarried with the

Ainu since times immemorial and thus were “Ainuized”) and the “Mongolian skulls of Eastern

Asia.” Huxley hoped the Ainu skull could thereby establish the Japanese as a sort of missing link between the peoples of northeast Asia and the “Mongolian race” inhabiting the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. In other words, in addition to its value as an exotic curio – a value which we should not underestimate – the academic value of the Ainu skull was, for Huxley, in its utility in better articulating a greater transpacific Mongolian racial group.37 This, in effect, racially blended northeast Asians with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Soon after Huxley wrote up his findings, Busk set to work. Compared to Huxley’s grand racial theories, Busk’s analysis was much more clinical in tone, simply stating the “facts” as he saw them. Regardless, it created a wave of excitement and had a wide-ranging and lasting influence, having been cited approvingly by Kodama seven decades later. Busk’s study

36 Ibid, 171. Huxley was able to contrast the Ainu skull with a Japanese skull as he already had three Japanese skulls in his collection. While passing into Huxley’s hands from unknown origins, he noted that “the authenticity” of the Japanese skulls “was well certified,” likely alluding to the robbery of Japanese gravesites by British sojourners in Japan, such as consular staff. 37 Ibid.

197 compared the single Ainu skull to “an ordinary European cranium (English),” treating both individuals as representative of a racial whole. On the assumption that the larger the skull, the larger the brain, and thereby the higher intellect of the race to which a particular skull belongs

(and that Europeans have the largest skulls and are therefore most intelligent), the comparative analysis of the two skulls was meant to “size up” the Ainu using a skull Busk’s readers would understand as at the paragon of evolutionary development. However, the Ainu skull “present[ed] no very marked distinctive characters from those of the European with which it was compared.”

It was, in fact, “equal to, if not exceeding, the average dimension of European skulls.” Based on such rubrics, Busk was surprised to find that the Ainu skull Forbes had stolen was “enormously well developed.”38 While for some, these findings may have challenged assumptions of

European cranial superiority, for others, they were critical evidence supporting the popular belief that the Ainu, already known for their round eyes and body hair, were a race of “lost”

Caucasians.

While basing his own analysis on comparative research such as Busk’s, Kodama was equally indebted to Japanese predecessors such as Koganei Yoshikiyo (described in detail below) in attempting to situate the Ainu within the race(s) of northeast Asia while classifying them

38 George Busk, “Description of an Aino Skull,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 6 (1868): 110. Far from the exclusive domain of physical anthropologists, the craniometrical measurement of the Ainu became a leisure activity for European pleasure travellers. Amongst these was Isabella Bird, who visited Hokkaido in 1878. Bird took to work measuring the circumference of the heads of (living) Ainu villagers she met in Biratori. Demonstrating familiarity with such craniometrical research, she directly referred to studies which – like Busk’s – concluded that the Ainu have an extraordinary cranial volume and, accordingly, a large “mean brain weight,” exceeding that of “Asiatic races in general.” Indicative that even such strictly quantitative studies were nevertheless overdetermined by culturalist and racist stereotyping, Bird added, “Yet with all this the Ainos are a stupid people!” See Isabella Lucy Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrine of Nikkou, 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1888), 258.

198 subregionally across Hokkaido and outer territories such as Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands.

However, very much unlike their mutual forerunner, Busk, whose analysis seemed to elevate the

Ainu to the highest echelons of evolutionary development, Kodama also used data first collected by Koganei to argue that patterns of damage to skulls stolen from Ainu villages across Hokkaido showed evidence of cannibalism. Specifically, he claimed damage to the eye sockets of 16.7% of skulls stolen from across Hokkaido were indicative of a widespread custom, which appears to have abruptly stopped before the earliest written descriptions of the Ainu, of extracting the brains of the dead to eat as medicinal food. Kodama, likewise, argued that teeth missing from some skulls in his collection was the result of a purported Ainu custom of pulling the teeth from corpses, grinding them into a fine powder, and ingesting them. While Koganei had merely raised this possibility and was sharply contradicted by Ainu informants (whom he had the gall to interrogate over the matter), Kodama wrote about it as an obvious fact. Indeed, it seems that it took very little to convince Kodama that the Ainu were a race of cannibals. As cannibals they joined a much larger group of colonized peoples who had long been stereotyped as such. William

Arens, referring to English anthropologist A. H. Savage Landor’s writings on the Ainu during his

1893 visit to Hokkaido, argues that assertions that Indigenous peoples are cannibals served to push them unambiguously over the boundary “between civilized and savage.” Even though

Landor himself admitted the Ainu he encountered were merely “imaginary cannibals,” Arens asserts that colonial anthropologists had “a clear-cut vested interest in maintaining some cross cultural boundaries,” and, to these ends, the “cannibalistic boundary” is the starkest division

199 between peoples imagined as being civilized, who are deserving of rights, and peoples imagined as savage, who are not.39

Kodama’s interest in Koganei’s work was not simply due to his pet theory of Ainu cannibalism, but that he was the first Japanese researcher to conduct craniological research on the Ainu, and, to those ends, rob Ainu gravesites of their contents − particularly skulls − earning him the moniker “the father of Japanese physical anthropology.”40 From 1881, Koganei trained at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he studied alongside the famous Japanese novelist and surgeon (and his future brother-in-law) Mori Ōgai. Returning to Japan four years later,

Koganei directly applied cutting edge European craniometrical techniques in measuring, by

Kodama’s reckoning, the skulls of 158 Ainu stolen from villages across Hokkaido, the Kuriles, and Sakhalin.41 While the tone of his academic writing was analytical, if not dry, the theft of

Ainu bones was a lifelong passion for Koganei. As Richard Siddle describes, in a personal essay published in 1935, a by-then 76 year old Koganei reflected in “a tone of schoolboy enthusiasm” about his days of robbing Ainu graves in the dead of night “while joking with his labourers about ghosts.” Caught in the act by local Ainu, Koganei “hastily constructed a makeshift altar and went through the motions of appeasing the dead.” Another time, he bragged, he unearthed a fresh

39 W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 170-171; Arnold Henry Savage Landor, Alone with the Hairy Ainu: Or, 3800 Miles on a Pack Saddle in Yezo and a Cruise to the Kurile Islands (London: John Murray, 1893), 58. 40 Robert Thomas Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 80. 41 Kodama, “Aino” minzoku ni tsuite.

200 corpse, rather than bones, and washed it “clean of flesh and skin in a nearby stream” before hauling what remained away.42

While Kodama and Koganei are today best remembered for such grotesqueries, in his own day, Koganei was most famous in academic circles for advancing the theory that the Ainu are a “racial island” (written in German as Rasseninsel in the original Japanese text, calqued as jinshu no shima). According to this theory, the Ainu are an isolate Paleoasiatic race, even while sharing significant physiological, anatomical, and cultural similarities with other “primitives” around the world. Moreover, they are native not to Hokkaido, but to the area between the Amur

River and northern Korea. Koganei advanced his racial island theory in a lecture delivered to the

Tokyo Geographical Association (Tōkyō chirigaku kyōkai) in 1893 and expanded on it in an

1895 German language article in the influential journal Archiv für Anthropologie (Archive for

Anthropology). In both, Koganei provided a comprehensive overview of Ainu racial categorization, as theorized by leading European anthropologists and ethnographers, into which he situated his own theory. Like Kodama, who presented his readers with an extensive list of

European recipients of stolen Ainu skulls, it is clear from Koganei’s list of German, French,

English, and Russian names, including Dobrotworsky, Bickmore, von Siebold, Scheube, von

Brandt, von Schrenck, Richthofen, Brauns, and Kopernicki, to name but a few, that Koganei was deeply indebted to European academic research conducted on the Ainu. And, perhaps befitting a group of scholars who obsessively concerned themselves with forcing the Ainu into a fixed number of racial categories, Koganei carefully categorized these scholars in accordance to which

42 Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), 83.

201 race they themselves deemed the Ainu to be a member of. These can be broken down as follows: those who believe the Ainu (like the Japanese) belong to the Mongolian race, those who believe that the Ainu belong to the Caucasian race, those that believe that the Ainu belong to a pan-

Austronesian “Pacific race” (heiyō jinshu), and, finally, those that believe that the Ainu constitute a race in and of themselves. Koganei situated himself in the latter group, alongside

Leopold von Schrenck, who argued that the Ainu are the first people of not only Hokkaido, but certainly all of Japan and very likely northern Korea and the Amur River region as well.43

A Baltic German anthropologist, von Schrenck was famous for his study of the

Indigenous peoples of the Amur River region. On the merit of this seminal research, he was later appointed the director of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in the

Russian imperial capital of St. Petersburg.44 Amidst a global colonial project of the classification/subclassification of the world’s peoples which gave rise to academic fields such as anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics, the classification of the Ainu presented a problem to physical anthropologists as they seemed to display physiognomic features which did not clearly fall into any of the preconceived racial categories. As far as von Schrenck could tell, the Ainu are simply unclassifiable both racially and linguistically, showing nothing in common with any of their neighbours, be they Japanese, Nivkh, or Orok, that couldn’t be explained by centuries of

43 Koganei Yoshikiyo, Jinruigaku kenkyū (Tokyo: Ōkayama Shoten, 1926), 389-402. The categorization of the Ainu as Caucasians has both racial and classist implications. According to Koganei, Bickmore argues that the Ainu are members of the Caucasian race based on their supposedly close resemblance to “peasants from the backcountry of Europe.” Likewise, according to Koganei, von Siebold argues that they are Caucasian in part because they resemble “Europeans living under very unfortunate circumstances.” See Ibid, 390-391. 44 For a useful description of von Schrenck’s activities in the Amur region and on Sakhalin, see E. G. Ravenstein, The Russians on the Amur: Its Discovery, Conquest, and Colonization, with a Description of the Country, its Inhabitants, Productions, and Commercial Capabilities (London: Trübner and Co, 1861), 435-438.

202 contact. And, certainly, despite widespread titillation amongst European scholars that the Ainu are a race of Caucasians, according to von Schrenck, they bare no more relation to Europeans than they do to the Japanese. The Ainu, he concluded, are an isolate race and, regardless of their small numbers, should constitute a separate racial category.

However, while von Schrenck believed that the Ainu were the first people to have settled

Hokkaido, they are relative newcomers, he claimed, and are native not to the Japanese archipelago but to the Amur River region. Their migration from the Amur River basin, which lies just across the Strait of Tartary from Ainu territories in Sakhalin, was, however, circuitous.

The Ainu at first migrated into what is today the border area between Korea and China before moving further south and crossing the Korea Strait into western Japan and, from there, spreading out across the Japanese archipelago. At some point, a wave of ethnic Japanese invaders followed them across the Korea Strait. The Ainu were eventually, as Koganei put it in a muted tone,

“chased to the north.” Pushed north into Honshu and then across Tsugaru Strait into Hokkaido, with the Japanese hot on their heels, they fled even further north into the Kuriles and onto

Sakhalin. In Sakhalin, they, in turn, displaced the Nivkhs and Oroks, who were forced to resettle in the north of the island.45 This is to argue that the Ainu were only in Hokkaido because of their historical displacement by the Japanese and that they themselves invaded peoples native to southern Sakhalin.

45 Koganei, Jinruigaku kenkyū, 398-399.

203

For Koganei, this framework gave rise to an entirely different racial titillation than

European anthropologists stumbling into a race of Caucasians in the Far East. Referring to the work of Richthofen and Braums, Koganei suggested that the Ainu are related to the Korean population native to the far north of the country on the basis that Koreans in the north are more hirsute than their southern cousins, supposedly resembling the Ainu, and speak a dialect resembling the Ainu language. However superficial, Koganei held up these alleged physiognomic and linguistic similarities to support von Schrenck’s theory.46 Nevertheless,

Koganei put far more focus on Korea than his Russian predecessor, in effect displacing the Amur

River as the Ainu racial homeland, perhaps expediently pushing their racial origins outside of territories under the control of the Russian Empire while implicitly marking the Koreans as colonizable in much the same way as the Ainu. Whatever the implications for Korean sovereignty, the implications of von Schrenck’s theory of Ainu racial origins for the colonization of Hokkaido were exceptionally clear. In much the same way as expunging Ainu bones from the earth, this framework de-rooted the Ainu from the soil of Hokkaido, de-indigenizing them by pushing them entirely out of Japan and legitimizing the Japanese settler colonial invasion of their territories as nothing more than the closure of a cycle which began in times immemorial.

Compared to his Japanese writing, where Koganei maintained something of a scholarly distance, writing in German, he freed himself from such pretensions. Perhaps knowing that

European audiences were ever hungry for lurid details of a “strange” or “exotic” Ainu (or

“Aino”) race, Koganei opined on the “unattractive” noses of Ainu women, their “not exactly

46 Ibid, 399-400.

204 ugly” mouths, and their “beautiful” teeth.47 Besides such crude descriptions, his German analysis frequently slipped into culturalist stereotyping, such as describing Ainu tattooing in the same breath as skin pigmentation or Ainu hair styles alongside statistics of the size and shape of their crania underneath. Indeed, broad culturalist assumptions and scientifically precise anatomical measurements were never far apart, most notably in Koganei’s claim that “Aino” femurs do not resemble those of the Japanese but rather, the “prehistoric bones” of long-dead peoples as well as the bones of other “living primitive peoples (Naturvölker, lit: people in a state of nature).”48

Koganei thereby rendered his “Aino” subjects at once an isolate Paleoasiatic race as well as – on account of their membership in a universal “primitive” racial type – living fossils of a subhuman progenitor.

While “primitive” down to the bone, Koganei stressed, there was nothing about the Ainu which should necessarily render them incapable of assimilating into settler society. He alluded to

British missionary John Batchelor’s success in teaching Ainu children the rudiments of Japanese literacy and basic arithmetic, and – even if most Ainu lacked the “desire to work” – the presence of a small but growing number of Ainu artisans participating in Hokkaido’s emerging capitalist economy. Nevertheless, Koganei cited contemporaries who dismissed the Ainu as critically lacking the spiritual vigor needed to repel the Japanese settler colonial “invasion” (Eindringen) and thus doomed to die out. Whether Koganei concurred with this view is not entirely clear, as he stressed the improvability of the “Aino” race while also admitting that “the more the Japanese

47 J. Koganei, “Kurze Mittheilung Über Untersuchungen an Lebenden Aino,” Archiv Für Anthropologie: Zeitschrift Für Naturgeschichte Und Urgeschichte Des Menschen 24 (1897): 17. 48 Ibid, 30.

205 colonization progresses on [Hokkaido], the more bitter the struggle for survival (Kampf ums

Dasein) becomes for the Aino.” However, whatever the potential of an intellectually middling

“Aino” to rise to the lower stratums of settler society, it was ultimately the inborn biological primitivity of their bodies, not minds, which left them innately vulnerable to infectious diseases such as smallpox, measles, typhus, or cholera, “which, as we know, so cruelly decimate primitive peoples.”49 Accordingly, however successful the Ainu were in assimilating into settler society, they were doomed to extinction.

While obliquely alluding to the violence inherent to settler colonial land appropriation in his reference to the Ainu “struggle for survival,” Koganei stressed that it was not settlers or the settler colonial state but the “repeated and violent” effects of disease which most egregiously threatened the “Ainu” with extinction. And, even then, he disavowed the fact that many these diseases had been spread to Ainu communities during the Tokugawa period through what ann- elise lewallen argues was the “sexual enslavement” of Ainu women by Japanese soldiers, merchants, and fishery workers.50 For Koganei, these communicable diseases, origins unclear, could be made to stand in for Japanese settler colonial invaders. Rather than Ainu forced off their land by settlers, “whole villages,” he claimed, were simply left abandoned as the Ainu fled “deep into the woods” to escape the epidemics.51 These epidemics, in turn, provided homes for ostensibly guileless settlers who repopulated the villages they simply found abandoned. Koganei

49 Ibid, 37. 50 ann-elise lewallen. The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016), 133. 51 Koganei, “Kurze Mittheilung Über Untersuchungen an Lebenden Aino,” 37-38.

206 thereby rendered the deeply precarious conditions that the settler colonial state forced upon the

Ainu the result of an innate quality observable in their very bones, and, in effect, “naturalized” their unnatural deaths. The tiny Ainu “racial island,” then, was destined to submerge into the ever-deepening Japanese mainstream. Through intermarriage, Koganei claimed, the “Aino” would live on, but only in the “blood” of the Japanese.52

“Pure” Ainu

While grave robberies, which provided “specimens” for such research, were justified by the premise that Ainu bodies constitute a sort of corpora nullius – bodies which, by the merit of being Ainu, could be freely pulled from the soil and transformed into commodity objects – living

Ainu were likewise treated as bodies without sovereignty. The legal non-existence of the Ainu as rights-endowed human beings was the very basis of the legality of the Meiji government’s declaration of Ainu territory as terra nullius, which claimed Hokkaido as an empty, ownerless no man’s land. Accordingly, one of the first pieces of legislation which targeted the Ainu following the formal 1869 annexation of Hokkaido was their involuntary insertion into koseki (family registers), by which the state claimed the Ainu as Japanese.

The incorporation of the Ainu into koseki was accompanied with strict prohibitions against what the state understood as their traditional customs, including hunting techniques, in an

52 Ibid, 39. As abovementioned Ainu activist Yūki argued, the discourse of “pure blood” (junketsu shugi) favoured by the “shamo” (settlers) was exactly what gave rise to discrimination against Ainu who are consequentially rendered “mixed blood” (konketsu). With the rise of racial constructs tied to the immutable purity of blood, the Ainu had also come to be “sexually invaded” (seteki ni mo shinryaku sareteiru). See Yūki, Ainu sengen, 29.

207 effort to “cleanse (senjo) their customs” and set them “on the path towards being human (hito taru no michi ni).”53 Ainu across Hokkaido were forced to take Japanese names. In 1876, the

Nemuro branch of the Kaitakushi (the Colonial Office) led the charge, announcing that “There are former aborigines who have not used surnames in the past. They must henceforth adopt a general [Japanese] surname.”54 Unlike other Japanese “commoners” who were similarly registered, the state did not allow the Ainu to freely choose their Japanese surnames, and names which were bestowed upon Ainu families by colonial officials were sometimes assigned in an extremely haphazard manner. According to Kayano Shigeru, for example, in the Ainu village of

Pipaus, many families – regardless of blood relations – were assigned the name “Kaizawa” on their koseki. The official dispatched to the area, Kayano explained, “was a heavy drinker” and

“passed his time imbibing at the inn instead of doing his job.” With his deadline fast approaching, the official hastily adapted the village name into a single Japanese surname to be used by all residents, rather than complete the complicated process of surveying each family, constructing family trees to be adopted into koseki, and then assigning a name. The official, apparently having learned at least something about the Ainu, came to understand that the Ainu word pipa means “shellfish,” or kai in Japanese, and accordingly named all of the Pipaus villagers “Kaizawa.” Likewise, the name “Hiramura” was adopted from Biratori (Ainu:

Pirautur), “Nitani” was adopted from Nibutani (Ainu: Niputani), and so on.55 And, while Kayano emphasized that Ainu given the same family names did not necessarily share blood relations, the

53 Ōkurashō, ed, Kaitakushi jigyō hōkoku furoku furei ruiju jōhen (Tokyo: Ōkurashō, 1885), 449. 54 Kōno Motomichi, Tai Ainu seisaku hōki ruishū (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 1981), 50. 55 Kayano Shigeru, Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir, trans. Kyoko Selden and Lili Selden (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 44.

208 reverse is true, too, in that family members living in different towns (siblings, for instance) may well have been registered under entirely different family names and, in the eyes of the state, were understood as totally unrelated.

Despite such irregularities, the insertion of the Ainu into koseki was insidiously genocidal in that it aimed to liquidate the Ainu as a discrete population by amalgamating them into the larger ethnic Japanese population. However, paradoxically, the koseki quickly presented a barrier for the Meiji state in assimilating the Ainu. Cultural and linguistic assimilation campaigns meant to “humanize” the Ainu required a clear, consistent definition of who was and wasn’t Ainu in order to effectively operate, and the insertion of the targets of such assimilation campaigns into koseki as “commoners” threatened to obscure the very population which the state intended to erase. To these ends, Ainu koseki came to be maintained (as we shall see, quite literally) at arm’s length from those of the majority population and were supplemented with definitions of the Ainu initially developed by the state for internal bureaucratic use. Indeed, the official legal designation for the Ainu from 1878 was kyūdojin, or “former aborigines,” amalgamating people referred to as dojin (aborigines), kyūezojin (former Ezo), komin (ancient people), or for that matter “Aino” and, at least on paper, collectively de-indigenizing them.56 However, while it is clear that the

Kaitakushi had little trouble in finding a population to define as “former aborigines,” it remains something of a mystery how the state continued to maintain the Ainu as a separate racialized population over time at bureaucratic levels as the Ainu were rendered officially non-existent.

56 Ōkurashō, Kaitakushi jigyō hōkoku furoku furei ruiju jōhen, 450.

209

Arai Genjirō, a prominent 20th century Ainu activist who, it seems, was curious about this very question, provides us with a clue. Working as a public servant at the municipal office at

Asahikawa, Arai was able to access local koseki maintained there on behalf of the Japanese government. “I went in to take a look,” he wrote, “and was surprised that the Ainu and Japanese

(wajin) koseki registers were kept in separate volumes.”57 This appears to have been a long- established practice by Arai’s time. From as early as 1884, when a set of procedures was sent to local officials in preparation for the impending amalgamation of the three short-lived Hakodate,

Sapporo, and Nemuro prefectures into Hokkaido Prefecture, government records alluded to segregated Ainu koseki. With increasing trends of intermarriage between Ainu and Japanese and the widespread practice in Ainu communities of adopting ethnic Japanese orphans and raising them as Ainu, officials realized that koseki themselves – used to maintain the Ainu as a discrete population – had become increasingly unreliable for determining if someone could be considered

Ainu. This was a matter of considerable anxiety for these colonial officials. Intermarriage and adoption had added a level of confusion which necessitated supplementary population surveys to measure the size and geographic distribution of the Ainu in place of koseki. Surveyors soon after received instructions on how to complete a survey of the Ainu while avoiding the apparently serious problem of “racial confusion” (jinshu hanzatsu), minimizing the risk of misrecognizing

Ainu as Japanese, or perhaps more worryingly, Japanese as Ainu, while more clearly mapping out the small but widely distributed Ainu population. The instructions were as follows:

57 Quoted in Emori, Ainu minzoku no rekishi, 392.

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1. The number of [Ainu] households will be counted by those whose heads of households are former aborigines.

2. The population shall be surveyed according to race. Therefore, as far as former aborigines are concerned, in cases where they marry people belonging to non-former aborigine races, or, in the case of adoptees – even where, in reality, they are not on a former aborigine koseki – they will be counted as former aborigines on these surveys.

3. Those who aren’t former aborigines but are ... included in former aborigine koseki will not be counted in former aborigine population surveys.

4. When former aborigines and [members of] non-former aborigine races get married and have children, as not to become extremely easily confused when conducting these surveys, for the time being, add them to the family register without bringing up race.58

In demonstrating the very need to go beyond Ainu koseki to map out the Ainu race, such instructions nevertheless clearly refer to the existence of segregated Ainu koseki some six decades before Arai’s discovery. Indicative of a growing anxiety over who should (or should not) be counted as Ainu and how to maintain the Ainu as a distinct population, these supplementary surveys were ostensibly completed in order to give the state greater control in assimilating and absorbing the Ainu, causing them to disappear entirely, while preventing

“former aborigines” from bleeding unpredictably into the settler population. In as far as this goes, as much as the koseki were meant to merge the Ainu and Japanese into a singular body of citizens, these registers were what generated the very racial ambiguities which so disturbed colonial officials.

58 “Ainu sōsetsu (1)(2) - kyūdojin kokō chōsa,” in Ainu-shi shiryōshū 2-5: Abe Masaki bunko hen (2) [4 of 6], ed. Kōno Motomichi (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 1984), 40-41.

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While “former aborigine” koseki had proven to be troublingly fluid as, regardless of one’s bloodlines, all it took was a little crimson ink on a petty bureaucrat’s stamp of approval on a marriage or adoption certificate for one’s race to change, for scholars like Kodama, the ethnographic term “Aino” was concrete and precise, if not historically immutable. Curiously, however, outside of academia, “Aino” had largely fallen out of favour by Kodama’s time, and was replaced in popular discourse by the bureaucratic term “former aborigine” or simply “Ainu.”

The latter term in particular was promoted by the British missionary John Batchelor, whose writings were highly influential in both Japan and the Anglophone world. Batchelor’s use of this term was directly in opposition to the term “Aino,” which he condemned as an ethnic slur.59 At least on the surface, as used by Kodama, the term “Aino” was strictly ethnographic and was rooted in European scholarship. It created the illusion of a cohesive, discrete, and historically stable population, going above and beyond bureaucratic definitions of “former aborigines.”

Rather than population surveys which relied on cultural, linguistic, or geographic criteria to define an individual as a “former aborigine,” scholars believed that cranial measurements alone could define an individual as a member of the “Aino” race with scientific precision. They could thereby trace the racial history of the Ainu across geographical or temporal divides, and certainly through a few feet of topsoil, with pinpoint accuracy. Based on their assumption of the existence

59 In Batchelor’s monograph The Ainu of Japan: The Region, Superstitions, and General History of the Hairy Aborigines of Japan, the author, while himself commodifying the Ainu for a European readership, stated that “Aino is a Japanese nickname; and it is always applied by them to the Ainu when they speak of them. It is a term they anciently used to express their contempt for them and has by degrees come into common use. ... Such a term should be studiously avoided. English writers, of course, are not to be in any way blamed for using the form Aino, since it unavoidably came to them at second-hand through the Japanese.” See John Batchelor, The Ainu of Japan: The Religion, Superstitions, and General History of the Hairy Aborigines of Japan (London: Religious Tract Society, 1892), 16.

212 of a “pure” racial type, scholars accordingly believed they could classify and then subclassify an individual (living or dead) based on their craniometrical similarities alone. Such criteria could be used to determine if someone was “Aino” regardless of their legal status, as well as definitively racially categorize human remains when in doubt, such as the Otoshibe skulls recovered from the

British consulate.

Regardless of the wonders of this new field of study, koseki remained the primary way in which the Japanese government defined a discrete Ainu population. And, just as colonial officials across Hokkaido were troubled by the insufficiency of these registers, meant to help structure settler colonial relations in Hokkaido, in defining a living Ainu population, before long, physical anthropologists, too, became concerned that the koseki as reflective of true “facts” about the Ainu created a simulacrum of a pure-blooded race which they claimed was on the verge of extinction. Kodama’s complaint that there were “Japanese” (wajin) in what he called “‘Aino’ koseki” spoke not only to the inefficacy of koseki as the basis of racial classification, but also in his belief that the “Aino” race, too, was biologically unravelling through the same trends of intermarriage and adoption. According to Kodama, of those understood by the state as “former aborigines,” “only 20-30% are pure ‘Aino’ (junsui na ‘Aino’).”60 Ambiguities created through

60 Kodama, “Aino” minzoku ni tsuite. Compare, for example, to the work of Canadian eugenicist Reginald Ruggles Gates, a contemporary of Kodama. In the mid-1930s, Gates sampled the blood of Mi’kmaq from across the Nova Scotia, including blood samples taken from children at the infamously violent Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. Through this research, Gates sought to define the indigeneity of the Mi’kmaq using blood types as a referent. Defining “pure” Mi’kmaq as having an exclusively “O” blood type, Gates claimed that the high percentage of “A” blood amongst the children sampled was indicative of a long history of miscegenation. Based on such criteria, Gates concluded that it was “highly improbable that any pure-blooded Micmacs (sic) remain.” Quoted in William C. Wicken, The Colonization of Mi’kmaw Memory and History, 1794-1928: The King v. Gabriel Sylliboy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 230.

213 the equation of “former aborigine” koseki and the “Aino” race only intensified this problem.

Accordingly, the primeval “pure” Ainu stock which Kodama placed so much faith in was rapidly disappearing before his eyes, as he believed the children of Japanese-Ainu parents could not be properly called Ainu at all, let alone “pure” Ainu.

There is no suggestion in Kodama or Koganei’s work, or that of their European predecessors, however, that Ainu blood flowing in the veins of Japanese settlers might somehow make them less Japanese, or even make them Ainu. Nevertheless, the admixture of Japanese blood into Ainu communities, either through intermarriage or the adoption of Japanese children

(or, while never spoken of, as the result of widespread sexual assaults of Ainu women by

Japanese men) had a catastrophic effect, they argued, on the Ainu as a race.61 However, for physical anthropologists, their racial degeneration rendered the skulls of long-dead Ainu better examples of the “pure” Ainu race than most living Ainu. As popular discourse came to describe the Ainu as a race doomed to extinction, scholars increasingly defined the Ainu as “pure” or authentic, and for that matter, valuable by merit of their being already dead.

Famines and Resistance

Like the infamous Americanism “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” Japanese settler colonial policy treated the Ainu like a race of the undead. While physical anthropologists in

61 Indeed, as 20th century Ainu activist Yūki Shōji argued, the discourse of “pure blood” (junketsu shugi) favoured by the “shamo” (Japanese settlers) was exactly what gave rise to discrimination against Ainu who are consequentially rendered “mixed blood” (konketsu). Indeed, for Yūki, with the rise of racial constructs tied to the immutable purity of blood, the Ainu had also come to be “sexually invaded” (seiteki ni mo shinryaku sareteiru). See Yūki Shōji, Ainu sengen (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1980), 29.

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Europe and Japan treated the remains of long-dead Ainu as increasingly valuable relics of a doomed race, politicians and policy planners treated the lives of the Ainu as not worth living. As early as 1882, government policies aimed at the economic development of Hokkaido and large- scale land theft led to a series of famines which hit Ainu communities and marooned many survivors in the densely wooded, mountainous interior of the island.

In the 1870s and into the 1880s, the Kaitakushi (the Colonial Office) began to pass a series of laws which prohibited Ainu hunting techniques and eventually banned unlicensed (and thereby, untaxable) Ainu hunting and fishing, aiming to cut the Ainu off from these resources.

These bans were enacted, as historian Yamada Shin’ichi argues, in part as a reaction to rapid overexploitation of deer and salmon stocks by settlers: the result of policies which aimed to commoditize these animals as export products for mainland Japanese and international markets.

The Kaitakushi feared that, if left unchecked, these commercially valuable species – the valuable property of the state – would simply disappear.62 While ostensibly meant to save deer and salmon from extinction, the “protection” of these species from the Ainu both maximized profits for Japanese settlers by removing competition over natural resources and, perhaps more importantly, acted as a wedge meant to cut off the Ainu from the land. Or, in other words, forcibly cutting the Ainu off from resources they depended on for survival was intended to push them into Japanese systems of commercial hunting and fishing or, preferably, as will be explored

62 See Yamada Shin’ichi, Kindai Hokkaidō to Ainu minzoku: shuryō kisei to tochi mondai (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Daigaku Shuppankai, 2011), especially chapters 1 and 4. According to Yamada, Ainu immediately petitioned authorities to have these bans lifted. While some of these petitions reached Kaitakushi head Kuroda Kiyotaka directly, he refused to reverse any of the bans, ostensibly believing them to be critically necessary for “civilizing” the Ainu.

215 in detail in the next chapter, into agriculture. However, deer and salmon traditionally made up a large part of the Ainu diet and, during the Tokugawa period, were valuable trade goods to be exchanged with the Japanese for rice or other staples.63 Cutting off the Ainu from hunting and fishing had the predictable effect of devastating the Ainu economy, leaving them in a state of extreme privation. Indeed, as Kayano Shigeru put it, referring to the 1878 salmon fishing ban,

“The shamo [settler] law banning salmon fishing was as good as telling the Ainu, who had always lived on salmon, to die.”64

This is exactly what happened. By the early 1880s, reports began to surface that Ainu communities were experiencing severe famines. For example, in 1882 Uchimura Kanzō, a respected colonial official, submitted an alarming report to the Sapporo prefectural government warning that the then-recent ban on fishing raised the strong possibility of a famine in communities under his watch.65 In the winter of the following year, food again became scarce and Ainu living in the Tokachi area began to starve. Reports suggested that, while exacerbated by the collapse of the (infamously mismanaged) government-run Ainu fisheries, an economic slump which hit all of Hokkaido, and damage caused to crops that summer by swarms of rice grasshoppers, it was the sharp reduction in deer stocks and bans on river fishing which led to the

63 See Brett L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 64 Kayano, Our Land Was a Forest, 59. 65 Yamada, Kindai Hokkaidō to Ainu minzoku, 182.

216 famine. The bans on salmon fishing in particular meant that the Ainu had not been able to create adequate stores of salmon for the winter which might have held them over until spring.66

The starving Ainu, we learn, did whatever they could to survive. They boiled down deer bones to make broth. With these bones running out, they cut up strips of deer and salmon leather to eat. Risking hypothermia, some waded into frigid water to collect mollusks. Most worryingly, however, others, perhaps not knowing that the evergreen plant is highly toxic or simply too hungry to resist, consumed mistletoe leaves. In the small community, 10 people were reported to have outright starved to death while many more just barely made it through the winter. Petitioned by survivors, local officials provided them with petty cash to buy rice and salt. However, the government refused to lift bans on hunting or fishing and instead “encouraged” the survivors “to engage in agriculture” in order to ensure their own long-term survival, perhaps signalling that the state would not be so generous in the future.67

While the government attempted to force the Tokachi survivors into agriculture, other reports from the same period dismissively blamed the Ainu for the famines based on their unwillingness or inability to farm, seemingly as the result of some cultural or racial defect. For example, the same year, famines hit Ainu communities along the Saru River. A government report was compiled to assess how these famines affected various Ainu communities along the river valley and identify key causes. Besides saying that there were “few fish to catch,” the report

66 “Ainu kankei chosakushū,” in Ainu-shi shiryōshū 2-4 Abe Masaki bunko hen (1) [4 of 5], ed. Kōno Motomichi (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 1983), 96-97. 67 Ibid.

217 neglected to mention fishing bans which hit riverside communities particularly hard. The report stated, rather, that many young Ainu men from the Saru District were employed in Japanese commercial fisheries, taking them out of their communities. Dubiously, the report claimed that these men “completely squandered their salaries on alcohol and food.” Some allegedly spent so much that they sunk into debt to their employers, rendering them unable to send money home, effectively letting their loved ones starve as the result of their own gluttony. The report described how the women, children, and the elderly of the village were left to fend for themselves, and even while they had cultivated some crops, what little they grew was eaten up by the swarms of rice grasshoppers. With winter setting in and quickly running out of food, they were forced to eat the seeds which they had saved to sow the following spring and stores of dried fish which were to be used as fertilizer. These supplies, too, quickly ran out, and the starving Ainu crossed the mountains into neighbouring districts to sell their valuables just to feed themselves. The report outright blamed other starving Ainu for their own fate. Far from the result of government policies, the report claimed that it was a “common evil” (tsūhei) which afflicted the “former aborigines” living in the village of Yūfutsu that caused them to be “late sowing seeds.” Not having a large enough yield to last through the winter, many of the Yūfutsu Ainu were reduced to digging up the roots of plants from under the snow to survive.68

Ainu communities across Hokkaido continued to languish in famine or near-famine conditions for years to come. An article from the June 28th 1888 edition of the Hokkaidō

68 “Sapporoken kyūdojin enkaku chōsa,” in Ainu-shi shiryōshū 2-4 Abe Masaki bunko hen (1) [3 of 5], ed. Kōno Motomichi (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 1983), 5.

218

Nichinichi shinbun newspaper, for example, alerted its readers to a direct correlation between the increased Japanese settlement of Hokkaido and a yearly increase of what the article described as

Ainu “on the verge of starvation.”69 However, survivors – especially those from the hardest hit areas such as along the Saru River valley – quickly organized themselves and formed a redress movement which aimed to secure state recognition of Ainu property rights, allowing them both to legally resist land theft and to regain economic self-sufficiency. Ainu communities began to converge to discuss the problem of their treatment by the Japanese and how to address it, with the attendance of the largest of these public meetings reaching well over 1,000 participants. The result of these meetings was a written petition which both protested the dangerously precarious status of the Ainu across Hokkaido and reasserted their rights to land and their political subjectivity both as Japanese citizens and as Ainu. Written with the support of an anonymous

Japanese settler chosen by the Ainu as their representative, the petition was directed to the

Imperial Diet in Tokyo in 1891.70

The petition presented the Ainu as fundamentally hardworking, moral, and filial, and was careful to note that the Ainu are diligent in paying taxes through local “chiefs” (shūchō). These

“chiefs,” we learn, did not simply act as unofficial agents of the Japanese state in collecting taxes, but within Ainu communities, were objects of “cautious worship” like the Japanese emperor. This is to say, the petition presented the Ainu as loyal Japanese subjects, and thereby

69 “Kyūdojin kaikon no keikyō.” Hokkaidō Nichinichi Shinbun (Sapporo), June 28 1888. 70 As many or most Ainu in the 1890s, especially in rural areas, were still not fluent in Japanese, and fewer still were fully literate in Japanese, the Ainu were forced to employ Japanese intermediaries in their dealings with the government. This is in stark contrast to the former Matsumae Domain, which largely conducted its affairs with the Ainu in their own language during most of the Tokugawa period.

219 worthy of the rights and protections of citizens. It also, however, asserted the existence of autonomous Ainu political systems which − far from “primitive” or “barbaric” − resembled those of their colonizers.71

According to the petition, while the Ainu are a hardworking people, they had been robbed of fisheries by settlers, devastating their traditional economy. Their inland territories had been either stolen by settlers or appropriated by prospectors, including government officials, who in turn sold that land for a profit to settlers and “capitalists” (shihonka). Around Asahikawa, the report continued, Ainu land had been taken over by the state itself, such as land appropriated to build an imperial villa or Tondenhei military villages. Even as the state heavily pressured the

Ainu to abandon their autonomous modes of sustenance and become smallholder farmers, those who acquiesced and worked to “develop” (kaikon) the land as productive fields were nevertheless frequently robbed of their farms by settlers. “Almost 10 years of labour,” the petition stated, “[came] entirely to nothing.” These landless Ainu, the petition warned, had become “malnourished” and are “on the verge of starving to death.”

Even while describing the often-deadly famines, the petition problematized government statistics which seemed to show an Ainu population in steep decline. These statistics, based on koseki, were widely seen as evidence of the looming Ainu extinction. The petition stated that as

71 Inoue Katsuo, “‘Hokkaidō dojin chinjutsusho’ - Ainu chinjutsu ni tai Suru Hokkaidō-chō benmeisho,” Hokkaidōritsu Ainu minzoku bunka kenkyū sentā kenkyū kiyō - Bulletin of the Hokkaido Ainu Research Center 5 (1999): 170-228. This article contains a complete type-written copy of the Ainu petition and Japanese reply. For the original manuscript see Hokkaidō dojin kunjutsusho (kadai), 1895, Betsu-A 398-Ho, 0A023050000000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library. Sapporo, Japan.

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Japanese settlers “invaded” (shingai) land on which Ainu had lived for generations through the

“oppressive and incredibly cruel” state policies facilitating Ainu dispossession. Those forced off their land had little choice but to seek refuge in “deep mountain valleys” (shinzan yūkoku), away from the settlers and out of reach of the settler colonial state, but into a life of scarcity. Critically, with koseki tying individuals to permanent domiciles, escaping to obscure places out of reach of the state would mean that these marooned Ainu would drop off of government registers, formally becoming missing persons. The theft of Ainu land, in other words, would render koseki further inaccurate in defining and measuring the Ainu population, and would have the effect of greatly exaggerating statistics which seemed to show a freefalling Ainu population on the verge of extinction. And, critically, even while the state – which relied on koseki to monitor trends in the

Ainu population – believed that they were simply dying off as Japanese settled nearby, it nevertheless continued to encourage the theft of Ainu land.

The petition called for a formal response. It was, however, left unanswered. In the meantime, the Ainu redress movement continued to push for land rights, and an Ainu leader named Nabesawa Sanrottei travelled to Tokyo with the support of the sympathetic Hokkaidō mainichi shinbun newspaper reporter Tadako Kenkita. There, Nabesawa directly addressed metropolitan Japanese elites, including members of the upper and lower houses of the Imperial

Diet, about the devastating effects of settler colonial policy on the Ainu, outlining the serious concerns previously raised in the petition. Directly addressing lawmakers, Nabesawa called on them to enact concrete measures to protect Ainu property rights. Widely publicized, even the

Yomiuri shinbun newspaper – a national publication – relayed Nabesawa’s speech. The

221 conservative newspaper bluntly reported that the deep precarity in which the Ainu languished was a direct result of the Japanese “invasion” (shinryaku) of Ainu land.72

With pressure mounting, an official response to the Ainu petition from the Hokkaido prefectural government finally came. It was, in short, blanket denial. In a diary entry dated

March 8th, 1895, Kitagaki Kunimichi, the governor of Hokkaido, referred directly to

Nabesawa’s recent activism in Tokyo. He dismissed Nabesawa’s testimony outright, calling it a series of “baseless accusations.”73 However, Kitagaki felt compelled to respond to the increasingly vocal Ainu movement officially, and as Nabesawa spoke, the Hokkaido government completed an official response to the Ainu petition. In a diary entry the very next day, Kitagaki wrote that the report, focusing on the Ainu living in the Saru District, had been completed.

Copies were sent immediately to Ozawa Takeo and Tomita Tetsunosuke, prominent Diet members, to be used for the policy planning process regarding “aborigine protection” (dojin hogo).74

Even while rejecting the basic premise of the Ainu petition, the government report, in serving as an official response, reproduced the petition’s subsections, as if debunking it point by point. The report refused to accept even a semblance of culpability on part of the Sapporo or

Tokyo-based colonial governments. Instead, it either outright denied Ainu descriptions of the

72 “Hokkaidō shūchō no dojin jōkyōdan,” Yomiuri shinbun, January 5 1895, morning edition, 3. 73 Kitagaki Kunimichi, Kitagaki Kunimichi nikki ‘jinkai,’ ed. Jinkai Kenkyūkai (Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan, 2010), 449. Kitagaki renders Nabesawa’s entire name (including the Japanese surname) in katakana, as if to brand him utterly foreign. 74 Ibid, 450.

222 devastation wrought to their communities or, conversely, admitted that the Ainu were indeed in a state of extreme privation but argued that this was the fault of the Ainu themselves and was attributable to the inherent inferiority of the Ainu race rather than the result of colonial policy.

While the Ainu petition stressed that the alarmingly rapid population decrease in Ainu villages was due to famines and land theft, the government report, in response, simply attributed this drop to the way koseki documents were kept, saying that “even today in the metropolitan prefectures, it’s unavoidable that there are people who’ve escaped being registered (rōsekisha, lit: people who have ‘leaked’ from koseki).”75 In the space of a colony such as Hokkaido, then, the ability of the government to accurately map out populations was far from perfect. Moreover, because the Ainu were registered as “commoners” on koseki, the state’s ability to accurately estimate the Ainu population was further diminished. The state accordingly relied on additional surveys to produce a more accurate estimate of the Ainu population, and these surveys sometimes, the report claimed, produced strikingly different estimates of Ainu numbers. In other words, readers of the government report were to believe that the Ainu who had died in the famines or were marooned in the mountains were either in actuality alive and well in their homes, or, perhaps, had simply never existed in the first place. It was all simply a matter of badly kept books, and any suggestion otherwise was a lie.

Having denied the most basic assertions of the Ainu petition, much of the remainder of the report was little more than apologia. To these ends, even while the report was meant to deny

75 Inoue, “‘Hokkaidō dojin chinjutsusho’ - Ainu chinjutsu ni tai Suru Hokkaidō-chō benmeisho.”

223 government culpability, it nevertheless obliquely revealed the violent process by which the Ainu were dispossessed of land. For example, the report dismissed the rapid depopulation of Ainu villages as the “result of the struggle for survival.” This reflected social Darwinist rhetoric which permeated discourse surrounding the colonization of the Ainu during the 1890s. However, this was also an opaque acknowledgement of, if not a stamp of approval onto, government policies which had so gravely endangered the Ainu in the first place.

While, however indirectly, acknowledging the conditions which the Japanese state had forced upon the Ainu, the report proceeded to dismiss, to deny, and to deflect blame. And, when blame was deflected, it was deflected solely onto the Ainu themselves. For example, in direct response to the petition’s largely positive description of the Ainu work ethic, the government report instead characterized the Ainu as follows: “They are naturally lazy, have poor memories, and never tire of drinking alcohol and getting dead drunk. They can’t plan one day to the next and as a result are terrible at saving money.” Indeed, as “the strong are surpassed by the weak,” the report argued, the colonization of Hokkaido has been little more than a rude awakening for the inferior, hopelessly backwards Ainu who have simply been forced to exit the “age of relying on isolation and heavenly blessings.” And, as the report characterized whatever negative effects the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido had on the Ainu as the result of some inherent lack in the

Ainu race, it characterized the Japanese colonization itself as having had not a negative but a positive effect on the Ainu, as it forced them out of their primitive mode of living and into the modern world. The report presented the traditional Ainu economy of “harpoon fishing on the rivers and ocean and hunting with poison in the mountains and fields” as nothing more than

“narrowly eking out a living,” as if the Ainu as hunter-gatherers were always-already a form of bare life. And, even while it was undoubtedly well known to government officials in Hokkaido

224 that the Ainu had lived in permanent villages, the report characterized them as “savages” who perpetually must “move to follow pasturage with no permanent home.”

This, it seems, was the crux of the issue. Even while the report admitted that “petty officials” may have engaged in land theft, supposedly without government approval, the characterization of the Ainu as wandering nomads disassociated them with their sizable permanent villages which were increasingly robbed from them by settlers. It, accordingly, implied that settlers did not so much steal Ainu land as much as they simply left the already propertiless Ainu with fewer places to roam, seemingly nullifying the primary complaint of the

Ainu petition while also conceptually disconnecting them from their colonized territories. Losing whatever land on which they had to wander accordingly forced the Ainu into the Japanese labour market. And, as labourers, the report further claimed, the Ainu today are much better off than during the “age of isolation in ancient times.”

The stark difference in how the Ainu petition and official reply characterized Ainu villages should also be highlighted, as the former described diligent workers living in well- organized permanent villages – in other words, again, not so different than Japanese mainlanders

– while the latter forced the sedentary Ainu into the wider settler colonial trope of “lazy,”

“skulking” natives, without land to steal. The characterization of Ainu as “savages” who “follow pasturage,” however, was not simply a crude legitimization of the Japanese theft of Ainu land.

Nearly identical turns of phrase appear elsewhere in late 19th century Japanese political writing, such as the book Seiji shinron (New Discourse on Politics, 1889) by Tsuboya Zenshirō, the editor of the influential liberal magazine Taiyō (The Sun). Tsuboya mobilized the exact same image of “savages in ancient times chasing pasturage” as characteristic of man in a state of nature and antithetical to the rights-bearing subject-citizen living under a sovereign in a modern

225 nation-state.76 Revealingly, similar descriptions also appear in English language writing from the period. For example, an article by French politician and economist Léon Faucher in the

American Cyclopædia of Political Science, Political Economy (1882), in an unmistakably

Marxian inflection, described “man” in a “savage state” with a single right. The “primitive right” to labour off the land directly by “hunting, fishing, the picking of fruit, etc.” This “primitive right” is, in other words, simply the right to feed oneself. According to the Cyclopædia, this right has disappeared entirely as “industrial society” has “taken possession of the land,” transforming

“the savage” into “the proletarian” who “inherits nothing and possesses nothing.”77

This describes, in brief, the process which Marx referred to as “primitive accumulation.”78 Glen Coulthard concisely summarizes this process as the “gruesomely violent

... transition from feudal to capitalist social relations in western Europe” by which collective lands were privatized and peasants were forced off the land and into contingent wage labour.79

While Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation, Coulthard notes, was explicitly

Eurocentric, the Cyclopædia curiously mobilizes the trope of the “savage,” implicitly applying it to pre-capitalist Europeans as well, rather than referring to them as “peasants” or the like. This, by consequence, approximates the violent process of the privatization and commercial

76 Tsuboya Zenshirō, Seiji shinron (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1889), 68. 77 Léon Faucher, “Labour, the Right to (in French Politico-Economic History),” Cyclopædia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States, vol. 2. (Chicago: Melbert B. Cary & Company, 1883), 692. 78 While the Cyclopædia was published in 1883, Faucher’s death in 1854 – 13 years before the publication of the first volume of Marx’s Capital in 1867 – speaks to how widely understood the violently dispossessive nature of primitive accumulation was, even amongst liberal intellectuals, in the mid-19th century. 79 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 7.

226 exploitation of public lands in Europe and the ongoing process of dispossession of land belonging to those people colonizers deemed “savages” in Europe’s settler colonies. Coulthard – while in a starkly different analytic framework from the Cyclopædia – likewise connects the process of primitive accumulation in Europe with the practice of settler colonial land theft, equating “Indigenous societies” and “peasants,” as both were dispossessed of land which they depended upon for their autonomous subsistence.80 However, referring specifically to the theft of

Indigenous lands in settler colonies, rather than “some historically situated, inaugural set of events,” Coulthard argues, primitive accumulation is “an ongoing practice of dispossession that never ceases to structure capitalist and colonial social relations into the present. Settler colonialism is territorially acquisitive in perpetuity” (emphasis in original).81

Rather than simply denying the violence enacted by the state against Ainu communities, the government report strongly suggested that this violence was central to the functioning of the

Hokkaido settler colony. As such, policies which aimed to dispossess the Ainu and annul their food sovereignty were working as intended and were not aberrations, even as many Ainu starved to death as a result. Indeed, settler incursions which dispossessed the Ainu of land and bans on self-sufficient hunting and fishing would, eventually, proletarianize the Ainu by forcing them into the Japanese labour market, literally for their own survival. The government report not only admitted but celebrated this, presenting it as a breakthrough for the Ainu, who are presumably

80 Ibid. For an in-depth discussion of primitive accumulation as related to regimes of thanatopolitics in Meiji era Hokkaido, see Katsuya Hirano, “Thanatopolitics in the Making of Japan’s Hokkaido: Settler Colonialism and Primitive Accumulation.” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2015), 191-218. 81 Ibid, 152.

227 better off as day labourers than as roaming “savages.” However, this was predicated on the erasure of Ainu economic self-sufficiency, whatever the consequences. Famines in Ainu communities, it follows, were simply the result of policies which aimed to assimilate both Ainu land and Ainu bodies into the expanding Japanese nation-state, furthering the cause of the explicitly capitalist economic development of the Hokkaido settler colony. In other words, the report suggested that the state knowingly allowed the Ainu to starve for economic gain.

While the tone of the report, like other government-authored reports from this same period, was antipathetical towards Ainu suffering in the extreme, we might point to one last entry in Kitagaki’s diary, written just days before his dismissal of Nabesawa and his announcement of the completion of the report in response to the Ainu petition. In that entry, Kitagaki described a display of Ainu folk crafts at an industrial fair held in Sapporo. The fair’s crowning achievement was a topographical map of Hokkaido, a perfect symbol of the settlers’ mastery over the wild, rugged wilderness. The map itself was framed by a wooden carving made for the fair by Ainu from the Hidaka and Saru regions (regions, it bears repeating, hit particularly hard by the famines the previous decade). Regardless of his almost aggressive antipathy towards the Ainu, the carving greatly impressed Kitagaki. He was so amazed by the “natural” (shizen) artistic ability of these “ignorant aborigines” (muchi na dojin) that all he could write in response to seeing such beautiful art by a people he debased so egregiously was “How odd! How strange!”82

Conclusion

82 Kitagaki, Kitagaki Kunimichi nikki ‘jinkai,’ 438.

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While portraying the Ainu as a race of cannibals, extracting the brains from the skulls of the dead to be consumed as food, Kodama, Koganei, and many others themselves hungered for

Ainu crania. As physical anthropologists conducting craniometrical research on a professional basis, they made their livelihoods through the exploitation of the dead. But, what can we make of this intense interest in the cranium, the nexus of human intelligence, and thereby of thought, culture, language, and ultimately – for many of these racial theorists, craniometrists, and anatomists – of our very worth as human beings? What was it that drew these scholars, engaged in a “high brow” form of headhunting, to the skulls of Ainu which they unearthed from the ground with great interest, more often than not disregarding the remaining bones?

Through the work of Kodama in particular, the brain – the very source of the culture and language of the Ainu which the Meiji state sought to destroy – is rendered evidence of Ainu savagery through narratives, widely disseminated through academic circles, of the supposedly widespread Ainu “tradition” of eating the brains of their dead extracted from holes violently punched through the skull. Kodama needed no other information but damage to “specimens” in his collection to come to this conclusion, finding it strikingly easy to convince himself that the

Ainu were a race of cannibals in the very recent past. With that, the source of Ainu intelligence became the symbol of an absolute lack of thought, of bestial savagery to be suppressed through strict colonial discipline.

Like the desecrations of Ainu graves which enabled physical anthropological research, moreover, such academic exercises cannot be divorced from the larger context of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido. Such a rigid, asymmetrical binary between Ainu and Japanese or between “pure” Ainu “impure” quasi-Ainu defined a standard of authenticity, not unlike blood quantum laws in the United States, which worked to gradually de-indigenize mixed-race

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Indigenous people, allowing the larger settler body to biologically absorb them. As the Ainu (or

“Aino”) were defined by European and then Japanese physical anthropologists as a discrete race according to such arbitrary features as, for example, the basibregmatic height of the skull, and further defined as “pure” as based on having absolutely undiluted blood, scholars established an impossibly high standard which rapidly de-indigenized the Ainu, erasing them by rendering them

“impure” much more effectively than assimilation laws which were meant to help “clean” their customs. In other words, as Kodama and Koganei, like many others in their field, ruminated extensively about the racial extinction of the Ainu, it was through such frameworks of “pure”

Ainu that the Ainu could be made to disappear. Emptied of a native people, Hokkaido would be transformed into a true terra nullius, an ownerless no man’s land, ripe for the picking.

However, Koganei and Kodama, totally ignored the fact that the records of the famines of the 1880s and 1890s contained no indications that the starving Ainu engaged in cannibalism of any sort, even if only to survive. Few bureaucrats and scholars, in fact, directly acknowledged the occurrence of these famines at all in writings from this period. Many simply ignored their occurrence or, more often, deflected the blame onto the Ainu themselves, even while the famines were the direct result of Japanese attacks on Ainu territorial sovereignty and economic self- sufficiency. The Japanese government, supported by scholarly research, simply argued that the famines didn’t happen and that Ainu activists were, for whatever reason, willfully spreading disinformation. While individual settlers and the state alike aggressively dispossessed the Ainu of land and resources creating the very conditions for famine, the state maintained that the Ainu were disappearing as a result of their own primitivity. The settler colonial state treated living

Ainu as already dead; useful, perhaps, as surplus labour. Dead Ainu, on the other hand, became valuable commodities to be exchanged through worldwide circuits.

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As the next and final chapter will show, the subsequent government response to this period of crisis inflicted upon Ainu communities across Hokkaido was to further pathologize

Ainu culture and Ainu bodies alike, blaming Ainu culture or biology for the devastation Japanese settler colonial practices wrought to their communities. The Ainu, as a race of “savages,” were to be saved through stricter, more regimented, and more intrusive assimilation measures,

“protecting” them from themselves by civilizing them right down to the bone

Chapter 5 Corpus Alienum: Land and Racial Hygiene in the Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act

In 1899, the Japanese government passed the Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act

(Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo-hō). As the law’s spokesperson Shirani Takeshi put it, the Protection

Act was aimed at stopping Ainu from losing “the struggle for survival” and perishing collectively as a “race.”1 The Protection Act aimed to alienate the Ainu – or at least those who the state declared “former aborigines” (kyūdojin) – from their ancestral lands across Hokkaido and push them onto state-owned allotments where they would clear and cultivate “wasteland” as smallholder farmers under the direct supervision of the state. As a “protected” population, the state stripped the Ainu of rights they enjoyed as formally equal Japanese citizens. Chief among these was the right to private property, a cornerstone of legal personhood in post-Enlightenment thought, such as in the writing of Locke and Hegel. For Hegel, property was the “embodiment of personality.”2 Lacking property, “persons” become “mere things.”3 The Protection Act curbed

Ainu rights to property and self-determination on the rationale that, by managing the Ainu on

Crown land, the settler colonial state would be able to better protect them from the (ostensibly informal) robbery of Ainu land by settlers.

1 Shirani Takeshi, “Ainu hogo.” Ainu minzoku kindai no kiroku, ed. Masahito Ogawa and Shin’ichi Yamada (Urayasu-shi: Sōfūkan, 1998), 452. 2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel: Philosophy of Mind. Translated by Michael Inwood, Oxford: Clarendon, 2007. 220. 3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Ethics of Hegel: Translated Selections from His “Rechtsphilosophie,” trans. J. MacBride Sterrett (Boston: Ginn and Company Publishers, 1893), 33. 231 232

However, in suspending constitutionally guaranteed rights and limiting the self- determination of the Ainu, the Protection Act legally transformed them into wards of the state.4

This was an attack on Ainu political subjectivity, both communally as independent political communities which had long-predated the Meiji state, and individually as formally equal

Japanese citizens. Accordingly, even while the state officially disavowed discrimination against the Ainu and promised to provide them with subsistence and succor, in practice, the Ainu remained little more than what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”: bodies bereft of political status, treated purely as biological (zoē), and placed outside of normal legal boundaries.5 To be sure, the state did not aim to physically destroy Ainu bodies. Quite the opposite: the Protection

Act ostensibly aimed at transforming the Ainu, widely characterized by protectionists as a moribund race, into wards of the state in order to maintain their biological wellbeing. This was based on the premise that the Ainu are inherently inferior to their Japanese colonizers and, accordingly, would simply disappear without outside intervention when put into open competition for land and resources. The nullification of Ainu rights as Japanese citizens, then, allowed the state to intervene into the lives of the Ainu (both in the sense of their domestic day- to-day lives as well as their habilitation as wards). Or, in other words, protectionists such as Katō

4 This relationship is a logical necessity of the term “protection” (hogo). Typically used in Japanese today to describe things such as child welfare or nature preservation, the object of protection (hihogosha) must necessarily come under the guardianship and control of the “protector” (hogosha). While many scholars have previously discussed the role of the Hokkaido prefectural government as the “guardian” of the “protected land” (hogochi) on which Ainu subject to the law lived, relatively little has been written about the “wardship” of the Ainu themselves. For one notable example of scholarship on the Ainu wardship, see Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), 74. 5 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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Masanosuke, John Batchelor, Sekiba Fujihiko, Shirani Takeshi, and Oyabe Zen’ichirō, in advocating for the formal protection of the Ainu, alleged that only by reducing the Ainu to bare life could the settler colonial state bring them back from the brink of extinction. In doing so, some believed, the state could reconfigure them into normative citizens worthy of health and prosperity. Accordingly, by design, the Protection Act did not reverse three decades of colonial policy which dispossessed the Ainu of land, of resources, and of their own bodies, transforming them into corpora nullius. Instead, as Patrick Wolfe argued of Australian settler colonial discourse, it sought to transform the Ainu into a new kind of corpus nullius “that could legitimately be claimed for settler society.”6

Focusing on racialized hygiene which permeated protectionist discourse, this chapter will analyze debates surrounding the Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act. It will read the

Protection Act both for its symbolic value as a philanthropic tool to save or soothe a dying race, as well as a means of further dispossessing and de-indigenizing the Ainu. As previous chapters have demonstrated, Ainu precarity was the result of their dispossession through the Japanese settler colonial invasion of Ainu Mosir rather than, as protectionists alleged, some ingrained racial or cultural flaw. It follows that evolutionist, historicist, and eugenicist discourses which called for the protection of an inferior, retrograde, or diseased Ainu race were fundamentally disavowals of the material effects that the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido had on the Ainu.

Accordingly, even where protectionist discourses described, in some cases quite starkly, the

6 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 183.

234 devastating effects of this colonization on the Ainu, this disturbing fact could be disavowed by the counternarrative that the Ainu, as a listless or doomed race, were simply unfit to survive in open competition with a superior race of invaders such as the Japanese. Or, in other words, while protectionist discourses did not always outright deny that the Ainu were severely impacted by the

Japanese colonization of Ainu Mosir, they invariably stressed that the Ainu were colonized precisely because of their biological or cultural inferiority, characterized by many as a sickness which could perhaps be cured.

Thus, as we shall see, protectionists understood the Ainu as a wretched, inferior race on the verge of extinction as the result of their own thanatotic “self-destruction” (jimetsu), even in cases where there were clear causal links between the Japanese colonization of Ainu land and

Ainu precarity. Accordingly, their colonizers could only but act as benevolent saviors. The settler colony itself, premised on the physical or conceptual disappearance of Indigenous bodies from the land and their replacement with those of the exogenous bodies of settlers, became an entity that could lift the Ainu out of their collective misery. Indeed, whether protectionists saw the

Ainu as tragic or detestable, they frequently characterized Ainu protection as a powerfully moral act and a sign of the highest order of civilization. They argued that, even if it could not be stopped, lessening the misery of the looming Ainu extinction was an obligation that Japan must uphold as a modern, civilized state. We might, then, understand protectionist discourse as naturalizing the same settler colonial power relations which explicitly aimed at the physical disappearance and conceptual “exogenization” of the Ainu.

While the Protection Act co-existed with and acted in concert with cultural assimilation campaigns, the architects and supporters of the Protection Act were largely unconcerned with what settlers might have recognized as obvious outward cultural markers of “Ainuness” such as

235 religious practice, clothing, or body decorations. However, insofar as it related to the state’s efforts to reform the Ainu as normative Japanese subjects, especially through their biopolitical management, the Protection Act can also be understood as a set of zero-sum assimilation measures which attempted to transform the domesticity and interiority of Ainu subjects. For example, while the Protection Act didn’t reinforce or expand upon bans on markers of Ainu culture, it further segmented the Ainu into heteronormative patriarchal nuclear family units.

While it didn’t reinforce bans on collectivist self-sufficient hunting, fishing, and gathering lifestyles, Ainu adults were mandated to farm their allotted land while their children attended segregated vocational schools focused heavily on linguistic assimilation. Similar to foreign precursors such as the Canadian Indian Act (1876) or the American Dawes Act (1887), the only way for Ainu to regain civil rights as citizens, according to the very stipulations of the Protection

Act, was to adopt a lifestyle of agrarian settlement, with individual households forced by law to demonstrate to settlers that they could “improve” undeveloped small parcels of what was ultimately their own stolen land. It was only after a probationary period of 15 years of cultivation that those Ainu subject to this law could regain rights to private property and self-determination as Japanese citizens.

However, inasmuch as the Protection Act was designed to assimilate the Ainu population into the larger settler body, in defining the Ainu as “former aborigines,” setting them apart from the majority settler population, the Protection Act foreclosed the very possibility of their assimilation. This left the Ainu legally and socially in a state of indeterminacy. In other words, even as the Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act had a profoundly negative effect on the

Ainu, this was not, as is commonly argued, the result of the Hokkaido Former Aborigine

Protection Act’s “inadequacy” or “failure.” The Protection Act was simply never intended to

236 address the material conditions to which the state subjected the Ainu. Quite the opposite: it accelerated the settler colonial project which claimed Japanese sovereignty over both Ainu land and Ainu bodies and aimed to de-indigenize the Ainu, marking them as non-native to the space of their own homeland. Or, as Ainu critic Arai Genjirō put it, “This is not protection. It is terrible oppression (osorubeki yokuatsu). It puts us into a position of rightlessness and gives rise to conditions of severe social and economic discrimination. To boil it down, it treats the Ainu neither as Japanese nor as foreigners.”7

Ainu Protection as Racial Hygiene

As described in previous chapters, in the years leading to the Protection Act’s passage, articles in Sapporo or Tokyo-based newspapers as well as reports by colonial officials widely acknowledged that the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido dispossessed the Ainu of land and resources, creating conditions under which they experienced often deadly famines and epidemics. The Kaitakushi (the Colonial Office) nationalized essential staples such as deer and salmon as the exclusive property of the state. The state then diverted these resources to private canneries, operated by Japanese settlers, where they became export commodities. With the state banning unlicensed or off-season hunting and fishing, Ainu who continued to hunt or fish (or, in other words, live) autonomously were criminalized. The state also outlawed Ainu poison arrow traps, condemning Ainu hunting techniques as barbaric remnants of the distant past. Like

Hokkaido’s fauna, the early Meiji state likewise nationalized Ainu kotan (self-governing

7 Arai Genjirō, Ainu no sakebi (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 1984), 42.

237 villages) as Crown land. The state then transferred this “public” land to settlers, who occupied it as private property. Many other settlers simply forced the Ainu off of land which they directly appropriated as private property with the unspoken blessing of the state. At first, this ongoing process of dispossessive accumulation uprooted Ainu living in kotan along the coast, who lost their fisheries to settlers. Before long, settlers robbed the Ainu of their river- and lakeside communities as well. Hungry and landless, this marooned many Ainu in Hokkaido’s mountainous interior. Some starved while others eked out a living working as guides or general labourers for Japanese settlers.8

While it would have been clear to anyone reading these widely circulated reports that

Japanese colonial practice produced the precarious conditions which Ainu communities across

Hokkaido languished in, even with direct Ainu appeals, the state refused to reverse course and allow Ainu to continue to fish or hunt freely. Nor did it limit areas available for Japanese settlement to accommodate Ainu needs. Rather, the state entrenched restrictive, oppressive, and ultimately genocidal bans on Ainu autonomous subsistence and reasserted assimilative policies which aimed to push the Ainu into smallholder agriculture. As farmers, the Ainu would help

“open up” undeveloped “wasteland” in Hokkaido’s interior on behalf of the settler colonial state.

Or, in other words, prefectural and national level policy increasingly dictated that the Ainu were to regain self-sufficiency and, with it, access to the most basic necessities of life only through their voluntary assimilation into colonial society.

8 For details, see chapters two and four.

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By the end of the 1880s and into the 1890s, as the Ainu began to assert their collective rights, social Darwinist discourses of Ainu racial extinction became dominant amongst the emerging liberal bourgeoisie centered around the prefectural capital of Sapporo. Members of this new colonial elite, like prefectural and national-level policy planners, largely ignored reports and petitions which outlined the deleterious and sometimes fatal effects which settler colonial policy had on the Ainu. This is not, however, to say that they simply wished to see the Ainu perish – at least not physically. The morality of “protecting” a racialized Ainu population became a cause célèbre amongst the colony’s liberal elites. Opinions as to whether the Ainu could or even should be saved, whether they could be reformed, or whether they could be assimilated varied greatly.

Before long, however, a consensus emerged that the Ainu should be “protected” by the state, either as a philanthropic effort towards palliative care for a race doomed to extinction, or, more optimistically, to collectively transform the Ainu into economically productive and culturally normative subjects through the state’s intervention into Ainu domestic life. This culminated in the Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act. The first iteration of the Protection Act was proposed in 1893 by Katō Masanosuke and failed to pass. The second bill, championed by

Shirani Takeshi, became law in 1899 and remained so for almost a century until Ainu activists finally succeeded in having the hated law abolished in 1997.

The Japanese government drafted the Protection Act both to appease and subvert

Sapporo’s small but influential Christian community. Christian elites such as Suzuki Kunizō, the

Hokkaido-based British missionary John Batchelor, and Ōshima Masatake were important members of this community. Together they ran the North Sea Prohibition Union (Hokkai kinshukai)’s so-called Ainu Moral Reforms Division (Ainu kyōfūbu). Seeing the racial dereliction of the Ainu as self-inflicted, this organization pushed for the state to introduce Ainu

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“protection”/assimilation measures. Much like temperance societies throughout the United States and the British Empire, the North Sea Prohibition Union lobbied the state to ban alcoholic imbibement, believing alcohol to have a uniquely harmful effect on both the lower classes as well as racialized populations. Alcohol, they feared, would diminish the economic productivity of the lower classes and would only serve to encourage other immoral behaviours, while for

“savages,” it had an almost animalizing effect. While alcohol had long been a weapon the

Tokugawa state wielded against the Ainu, such as when Japanese officials supplied the famed

Ainu general Shakushain with copious amounts of sake during a peacemaking ceremony before murdering him, the North Sea Prohibition Union conversely promoted more “modern” or

“civilized” colonial policies which aimed at Ainu abstinence as a method of control.9

Neither Batchelor, Ōshima, nor Suzuki had direct connections to the settler colonial state.

On the contrary, as Oguma Eiji argues, foreign missionaries such as Batchelor were objects of suspicion due to their influence on the Ainu.10 However, the North Sea Prohibition Union remained extremely influential throughout the Protection Act’s drafting process. Their basic understanding of the Ainu and their platform of “moral reform” as the primary means to “save” them were largely replicated in state discourses and policies which followed. Indeed, this small group was influential enough in Hokkaido that Tokyo-based politician Shirani felt compelled to

9 See Brett L Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 67. 10 Oguma Eiji, Nihonjin no kyōkai: Okinawa Ainu Taiwan Chōsen shokuminchi shihai kara fukki undo made (Tokyo: Shin'yōsha, 1998), 59-63.

240 speak at the North Sea Prohibition Union in order to curry favour for the Protection Act. There, he cited Suzuki as having a major influence on his own thinking.11

The views of the Ainu Moral Reforms Division were explicated in a manifesto published in the Hokkaidō mainichi shinbun newspaper in 1891. The authors prefaced their proposal for the moral reform of the Ainu with a brief, stark description of the disastrous effects that the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido had on the Ainu. The Ainu, readers learned, had lost access to the basic necessities of life following wide scale land theft by settlers and official bans on autonomous fishing and hunting. However, the authors immediately disavowed this disturbing account by framing it through a starkly social Darwinist narrative, alleviating Japanese settlers of any responsibility for the plight of the Ainu. Rather than the intended result of colonial policy, it was simply the result of “the law of nature (shizen no tsūsoku)” by which “the inferior race will go extinct in the face of the superior race.” They asked pleadingly, “Even if nothing can be done to stop this, can we just sit idly by and watch them perish?” Without advocating for reversals of policies of dispossession, the authors instead praised recent efforts by the Hokkaido government to provide sheltered work and other forms of material aid to the Ainu. They warned, however, that this simply would not be enough. To “save” the Ainu from their impending extinction, the

Ainu Moral Reforms Division members argued that the state must “correct their barbaric customs” (yaban no rōshū wo kyōsei sen koto). Only by avoiding extinction through their assimilation could they become self-sufficient in colonial society. Paramount amongst these

“barbaric customs” was, unsurprisingly, alcohol: the “fiercest enemy” of the Ainu race. While

11 Shirani, “Ainu hogo.”

241 the authors failed to elaborate, this was, perhaps, to suggest that the ruinous effects of alcohol were the very precondition for the Ainu to be colonized by the presumably abstinent Japanese.

This shifted the blame from the colonial invaders to the Ainu themselves. More likely, however, was the possibility that the authors meant to say that alcohol was the largest obstacle to their successful assimilation into settler society as productive citizens.12

While busy with the Ainu Moral Reforms Division and his own missionary work, John

Batchelor nevertheless found the time to prepare a guide for tourists travelling to Hokkaido. The guide was published simultaneously in English and Japanese for the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, held in Chicago, which celebrated the quadricentennial of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America the year prior. While Batchelor introduced a variety of topics which he felt might be of interest to pleasure travellers in Hokkaido, he dedicated an entire section of the guidebook to the Ainu. Characterizing Ainu villages as little more than open-air human zoos, Batchelor encouraged visitors to come and gawk at the “vanishing” Ainu race before they disappeared completely.13 In this same section, Batchelor elaborated upon his views on Ainu protection efforts touched upon in the manifesto:

Here in Hokkaidō 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

12 John Batchelor, Masatake Ōshima and Suzuki Kunizō, “Hokkai kinshukai Ainu kyōfūbu,” Hokkaidō Mainichi Shinbun, July 31, 1891. 13 As Danika Medak-Saltzman shows, Batchelor later pressed Ainu under his care to participate in a transnational ethnographic display of Indigenous peoples at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. See Medak-Saltzman, Danika. “Transnational Indigenous Exchange: Rethinking Global Interactions of Indigenous Peoples at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition.” American Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2010): 591–615.

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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.14

As though in response to this call for action, the same year, Katō Masanosuke submitted the Hokkaido Aborigine Protection Bill (Hokkaidō dojin hogo-hōan) to the Imperial Diet.

Introducing the bill to the Lower House, Katō made an urgent appeal to what he characterized as the inherent benevolence of the Japanese nation to protect the Ainu. Describing how “sacred emperors” have treated their subjects with humanity and righteousness since ancient times, he pointed to Japan’s recent dealings with foreign nations as reflecting this gracious spirit.

Reminding his fellow Imperial Diet members that “noble ideas” such as “protecting the weak from the strong” constitute the Japanese “national character” (kunigara), Katō contrasted Japan with Euro-American empires which “aggressively invade weak nations and act outrageously towards races different from their own.” After this short preamble, Katō pointed to the egregious treatment of the Ainu by settlers as a shameful stain on the otherwise pristine national character.

Settlers dispatched to settle Hokkaido, he argued, were neglecting their national “duty” (gimu) as

Japanese citizens. They robbed the Ainu of their lands and livelihood, transforming the once- proud Ainu into “vagrants” with nothing to their names except for the “mountains and oceans.”15

14 John Batchelor, An Itinerary of Hokkaido, Japan (Tokyo: Tokyo Tsukiji Type Foundry, 1893), 14. 15 Katō Masanosuke, “Hokkaidō dojin hogo-hōan dai’ichidokkai,” Dai 5 kai teikoku gikai shūgi’in giji sokkiroku dai 5. It should be stressed that by “mainlanders,” Katō clearly meant individual settlers and not the Japanese state.

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Even while Katō alluded to concrete material conditions created by the Japanese state which had devastated Ainu communities across Hokkaido, ultimately their plight, we learn, was not entirely the fault of settlers (and much less the fault of the settler colonial state). The

“ignorant” Ainu were simply losing the “fight for survival.” And, what’s more, this was not due to land theft by settlers or strict bans on Ainu autonomous hunting and fishing. Instead, much like the North Sea Prohibition Union’s disavowal of the effects of Japanese settler colonialism,

Katō blamed the Ainu themselves, saying,

They do not know the laws of hygiene (eisei). They suffer from diseases but do not know to see a doctor to be cured and do not know to take medicine. Gradually their bodies have become unhealthy. This diseased race is today in a state of decline. ... If we continue our practice of non-interference ... I believe that in a few decades the Aino race (Aino jinshu) of Hokkaido will go extinct just as the Australian natives have already gone extinct (sic).

Katō was careful, however, to stress that the Ainu are not inherently inferior, or at least not inferior in the way that their present situation might suggest, urging his fellow Imperial Diet members not to think of the Ainu as a “person with an incurable disease” who could be left to die. While asserting that the Ainu would “go extinct” without Japanese state intervention, he appealed to the general public of Japan, “rich in benevolence and with a generous spirit,” to help elevate the suffering of the “weak” Ainu through a biopolitical program of protection so that they might be uplifted.16

16 Katō, “Hokkaidō dojin hogo-hōan dai’ichidokkai,”

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Where Katō stood on the broader question of the morality of the Japanese colonial presence in Hokkaido was unclear. However, his characterization of the Ainu race as collectively deficient in hygiene and this superseding – if not catalyzing – any extraneous/exogenous factors as the primary cause for their racial decline and impending extinction warrants further attention.

Katō’s call for the intervention of the Japanese state to biopolitically manage and improve the

Ainu as an explicitly racialized population was quintessential of the burgeoning eugenics movement. In calling for Ainu protection, Katō, then, was essentially proposing that the Japanese state commence a racial hygiene campaign in order to save the Ainu from their own self- destruction. This resonated strongly with the work of German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz, and in particular, his 1895 book Die Tüchtigkeit unsrer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (The

Efficiency of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak), a principal text for the bourgeoning racial hygiene movement.17 Much like Katō, Ploetz saw hygiene in its many forms as applicable not only to the individual, but also to larger racial populations (in Ploetz’s case, the “western

Aryan race”). Applied collectively, racial hygiene, which Ploetz defined as “the endeavor to keep the breed (Gattung) healthy and perfect its design” was explicitly future-oriented and aimed at encouraging the production of progressively superior generations.18 With “the weak” (der schwachen), by definition, requiring more hygienic “protection” than the “strong,” Ploetz feared that humanitarianism – a dangerous form of unnatural selection best represented by socialism –

17 Ploetz’s writings were, then, near contemporaneous with Katō’s tenure in the Imperial Diet. This is certainly not to suggest that the Katō’s proposals for Ainu protection in 1893 had any influence on Ploetz’s 1895 publication, as undoubtedly the two men had no knowledge of each other. Nor is it to suggest, however, that the tenets of racial hygiene, with all of their bio- and necropolitical applications, sprung up spontaneously from Ploetz’s writing desk. 18 Alfred Ploetz, Die Tüchtigkeit unsrer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1895), 13.

245 had become “increasingly opposed to the pure demands of the race.”19 While the hard-edged racial thinking of Ploetz later inspired Adolf Hitler, for the liberal politician Katō, who focused his attention on the Ainu as a minoritized population, it instead became a lofty ethical question of whether the Japanese state should protect the Ainu as an act of imperial grace.

Katō and Ploetz, nevertheless, had much in common. Both coming from bourgeoning colonial empires, they understood their respective nations’ place in the world through a lens heavily shaded by the four centuries of colonial history before them. By the late 19th century, this history was increasingly being rewritten to conform to Darwinist models which understood all living things as, by nature, locked into an endless struggle with only superior forms of life surviving. Their penchant for social Darwinist rhetoric was not all they shared. The trajectories of Katō and Ploetz briefly overlapped as both men travelled to the United States in hopes of better understanding the tremendous success of the American settler state. There, they became familiar with the racial structures of American society: a country which became wealthy and powerful through the horrifically violent process by which white settlers murdered Indigenous peoples or drove them off their land and transformed that land into plantations which operated through the exploitation of African slave labour. This land-centred process of necropolitical accumulation is widely described as having had a strong and lasting influence on the German racial hygiene movement, with Ploetz’s own experiences in America hardening him to unabashedly white supremacist and pan-Aryanist thinking. However, Katō, whose own

19 Ibid, 196. While Katō focused his efforts on the minoritized Ainu population, Ploetz, perhaps needless to say, applied these principals to Germany’s majority population. He later became an influence on and, in turn, enthusiastic supporter of Adolph Hitler.

246 positionality in American racial politics was far less clear, instead promoted a wide platform of liberalizing reforms, including his proposals for biopolitical protection of the Ainu, which, as

Tomita Torao notes, may have been inspired by the American Dawes Act of 1887.20

Even with his appeals to the benevolence of the Japanese nation, Katō’s bill failed to pass. This owed less to indifference towards the Ainu on part of his fellow Imperial Diet members than it did to continued concerns over ambiguities between those who the Japanese state understood as Ainu in contrast to those who it understood as Japanese. Councillor Tsuzuki

Keiroku, a member of a special committee which examined the bill, led the attack, arguing that because many Ainu were registered by Japanese colonial officials using Japanese and not Ainu names in their koseki (family registers), it had become difficult for the state to clearly distinguish between the two populations. He claimed many Ainu, in fact, intentionally attempted to escape discrimination by choosing unmistakably Japanese-sounding names, providing comically haughty-sounding examples such as “Kusunoki Masashige” (a famous Kamakura period samurai) and “Kinokuniya Bunzaemon” (a famous Tokugawa period merchant). True or not, the subtext was unmistakable: Tsuzuki feared that Ainu might be misrecognized by the state as

Japanese settlers. And, more worryingly, this worked both ways: Japanese settlers, such as descendants of people who arrived in Hokkaido sometimes generations before formal colonization, could just as easily be mistaken for Ainu. This would be especially true in cases of early settlers who lived near or with Ainu, fluently spoke the Ainu language (the lingua franca of

20 See Tomita Torao, “Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo-hō to dōzuhō: hikakushitei kenkyū no kokoromi,” Sapporo Gakuin Daigaku jinbungakkai kiyō, 45 (1989): 5-21.

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Tokugawa era Hokkaido) and may have adopted other outwardly recognizable aspects of Ainu culture. And, if it was the case that there were Ainu who knowingly attempted to “pass” as

Japanese, as Tsuzuki suggested, then it would follow that the claims of “Ainuized” Japanese as

Japanese would be called into question.

Moreover, as the Japanese state only began the difficult task of demographically and geographically mapping the national population through koseki in 1871, in cases where such ambiguities did exist, it would have been simply impossible to say for certain what one’s ancestry was prior to the establishment of these registers.21 And, Tsuzuki, who himself was an adoptee, added that Ainu children adopted into Japanese families would become invisible to the state as the koseki would officially render them ethnic Japanese. Accordingly, if the government was to use existing koseki to map an Ainu population to which the proposed Protection Act would apply, these measures would simply fail to function as intended. Tsuzuki further claimed that as the Ainu “hate farming” and prefer instead to reap “whatever benefits are in front of them through their hunting and fishing lifestyle,” any attempt to force them to “colonize undeveloped wasteland” would be little more than a fool’s errand. These criticisms were enough to bring

Katō’s efforts to a halt.22

21 As discussed at length in the previous chapter, the applicability of koseki to the Ainu or their use in either erasing or defining an Ainu population was, at best, highly problematic. While Tsuzuki may have underestimated the efforts of the state in creating and maintaining separate Ainu koseki, he was fundamentally correct in doubting the usefulness of these records in drafting policy. 22 Committee minutes reproduced in full in Ogawa Masahito, “Daigo, rokkai teikoku gikai ‘Hokkaidō dojin hogo- hōan’ shinsa tokubetsu iinkai kaigiroku,” Hokkaidōritsu Ainu minzoku bunka kenkyū sentā kenkyū kiyō, 8 (2002): 129-146. Considering characterizations such as this, one wonders why former samurai – famous for their aversion to agriculture – were preferred agricultural colonists in Hokkaido for much of the early Meiji period.

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While the second bill, tabled seven years later, would address these concerns in the manner of forcing a square peg through a round hole, in the meantime, Katō’s description of poor Ainu hygiene as responsible for their looming extinction quickly became common-sense in settler colonial Hokkaido. This view was replicated and greatly expanded upon by Sekiba

Fujihiko in his book Ainu ijidan (Discourse on Ainu Medical Matters). Trained in medicine at

Tokyo Imperial University where he studied under German physicians Julius Scriba and Erwin

Bälz, Sekiba continued his medical studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin.

Returning to Japan, he settled in Hokkaido. There he opened a private hospital and quickly established himself as a prominent member of the Sapporo colonial elite.23 While his patients included such powerful figures as Hokkaido governor Kitagaki Kunimichi, inspired by a meeting with John Batchelor, Sekiba began offering pro bono medical treatment to Ainu patients. While

Ainu ijidan was, in part, the product of Sekiba’s extensive personal experience treating Ainu patients, as is clear from the book’s bibliography, he also drew heavily from John Batchelor’s own writings.

In his diagnosis of the “naturally plain, stupid Ainu,” Sekiba, like Katō, characterized the

Ainu race as pathologically deficient in hygiene. This was, he argued, the primary factor responsible for their looming extinction. Accordingly, he called for direct, sustained Japanese state intervention and the total assimilation of the Ainu down to the smallest rhythms of everyday life. In arguing that it was Ainu hygiene which was the sole reason for the sharp

23 For a resumé of Sekiba’s early professional life, see Okazaki Kanjirō, Hokkaidō jinbutsu-shi, vol. 1 (Sapporo: Hokkaidō jinbutsu-shi hensanjo, 1893), 159-161.

249 decline in their population during the late 19th century, Sekiba almost entirely disavowed the material effects of Japanese colonialism on the Ainu. While this rhetorical mode should be by now familiar, unlike many of his contemporaries, Sekiba only but once referred to the conditions under which the Ainu were colonized and the effects this had on their wellbeing. To be precise, he stated that as Ainu hunting and fishing “were banned” (kinshi serare), without so much as saying who banned them, the Ainu would need to become significantly more “hygienic” in their eating habits to survive.24 Outside of this brief, askance reference to Japanese colonial policy, references to settlers are wholly absent from Ainu ijidan.

While ignoring conditions created by the settlers and the Japanese state in Hokkaido,

Sekiba’s vision was global in scope. He situated his writings on the Ainu within transcolonial discourses regarding colonized people throughout the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. Indeed, in opening his discussion of Ainu hygiene, Sekiba approvingly cited Charles Darwin’s 1871 publication The Descent of Man. There, the British biologist described the Ainu, whom he deemed “the hairiest men in the world,” as resembling “a lower animal type.”25 And, although this reference to Darwin is brief, his influence on Sekiba’s wider view of the Ainu is clear throughout the text. For Darwin, different races of men, or for that matter different “tribes” of

“savages,” are, like competing species, locked into eternal conflict with each other for survival.

This inevitably leads to the extinction of those groups who, relative to their conquerors, lack

24 Sekiba Fujihiko, Ainu ijidan (Sapporo: Self-Published, 1896), 152. 25 Charles R. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1882), 560, 601. See Sekiba, Ainu ijidan, 140-141 for Sekiba’s comments on Darwin.

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“patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy.”26 With “savages” lacking in all of these qualities, “[w]hen civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short.”27

Darwin gave an example: the British genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines in the 1820s and

1830s, which the biologist innocuously referred to as “the famous hunt by all the colonists.”

Demonstrating the unequaled morality and humaneness of the Anglo-Saxon race, 37 survivors of the “hunt” were forcibly moved from Tasmania to the isolated Flinders Island where they were

“well treated” by the British in hopes of rehabilitating them. Despite the supposed care of the

British, the population of the surviving Tasmanians continued to dwindle, leaving Darwin to conclude that death will follow whenever “savages” are “induced suddenly to change their habits of life.”28 Quoting a British official on Vancouver Island, “savages,” Darwin further asserted, become “bewildered and dull by the new life around them; they lose the motives for exertion, and get no new ones in their place.”29 Extinction in the face of modernity is, then, seemingly a biological inevitability.

However, for Darwin all life is improvable, even quasi-human “savages.” The very desire to help the weak is, moreover, a marker of the highest order of civilization. “Civilised men,” he wrote, “do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to

26 Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 132. 27 Ibid, 182. 28 Ibid, 190. 29 Ibid, 183.

251 save the life of every one to the last moment.”30 As such, “[t]he aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy.” This aid would include, in Hokkaido just as in European settler colonies, increasingly formalized legal apparatuses designed to “protect” colonized peoples based on the understanding that it is some biological or cultural inefficiency which causes them to seemingly fade away when “induced” to accept colonial assimilation measures.

While “social” Darwinism is popularly seen as a sort of perversion of the famous biologist’s otherwise benign work on evolution, The Descent of Man reads the devastating effects of European imperialism on colonized peoples worldwide as natural, inevitable, and directly linked to different races’ respective levels of civilization. In calling for the protection of the Ainu, Sekiba was very much in accord with this Darwinian view. Disavowing the intended results of Japanese settler colonial policy, he asserted that the Ainu were simply doomed to destroy themselves. They would eventually die out with or without the Japanese, and their colonization by Japan had merely hastened this decline. Only the sympathy of the Japanese – sympathy being an expression of the highest order of civilization – could save them from their collective fate. Accordingly, being colonized by the Japanese was, in fact, a “great blessing” for these “suffering Ainu.”31 Far from fleeing settler encroachment, Sekiba argued, the Ainu “should be delighted to have come into contact with us.”32

30 Ibid, 133-4. Referred to above, Ploetz’s condemnation of humanitarianism as a form of unnatural selection echoed Darwin’s comments in The Descent of Man. 31 Sekiba, Ainu ijidan, 4. 32 Ibid, 152.

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While, for Sekiba, the Ainu were inferior to the Japanese, they were not so inferior that they were incapable of being transformed into something more or less equivalent to their colonial saviours. This was, however, a difficult balancing act. At times, such as in his discussion of whether Ainu suffer from congenital hypertrichosis, comparing them to the “Dog-Faced Boy”

Fedor Jeftichew – the “savage” of the American sideshow circuit – or in his assertions that the

Ainu as a race are intrinsically more susceptible to disease than their Japanese neighbours,

Sekiba’s analysis suggested biological inferiority.33 However crude, Sekiba’s discussions in the same volume of why Ainu women “smell like dogs,” of the supposed Ainu tradition of cannibalism, or of similarities between the Ainu and the Celts and Mongols in that they were physically powerful but lacked an “independent spirit or culture” needed to form a nation, suggested, instead, cultural inferiority.34 Cultural inferiority could, perhaps, be corrected through outside intervention. The twin questions of biological and cultural racisms eventually overlapped towards the end of the volume where Sekiba, like Katō, concluded that the racial decline of the

Ainu was largely based on their pathologically poor hygiene. Accordingly, Sekiba argued, reforming this cultural trait could biologically uplift them.

Improvements to Ainu hygiene promised to cure the Ainu of their many racial shortcomings. However, it is not clear what this meant. As Ruth Rogaski notes, eisei, the

Japanese loan-translation of the European concept of hygiene, appeared early in the Meiji period.

33 For details of Jeftichew’s supposed “animalistic” savagery as tied to his hirsuteness, as well as Orientalist discourses used to publicize his performances in the United States, see Filip Herza, “Faces of Masculinity: Shaving Practices and Popular Exhibitions of ‘Hairy Wonders’ in Early Twentieth-Century Prague,” in Beauty and the Norm, ed. Claudia Liebelt, Sarah Böllinger and Ulf Vierke (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 29. 34 Sekiba, Ainu ijidan, 144, 209-210.

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Japanese modernizers imagined hygiene as “a key link in the creation of a wealthy and powerful nation,” with the emerging biopolitical state intervening into the lives of its unhygienic citizens in order “to protect the national body.”35 While Rogaski presents eisei discourse in Japan as cohesive and well-articulated from the time of its inception, other scholars of the hygiene movement, such as Bruno Latour, stress the “vagueness” of the “boundaries of hygiene” throughout the 19th century, with the term mobilized by European reformers to describe all sorts of both bodily and social ills. This conceptual plasticity, Latour argues, allowed hygienists “to express more or less anyone’s interests.”36

Sekiba’s discussion of Ainu hygiene demonstrates how protean this concept remained in

Japan by the 1890s. Sekiba simply mobilized the concept of hygiene wherever he sought to condemn the smallest minutiae of what he understood as Ainu daily life. Accordingly, banalities such as regular or irregular mealtimes or the quality, quantity of food one consumes, or habits of daily face washing can be critically “unhygienic” (fueisei), leading to the fatal contraction of disease. Sekiba condemned the Ainu economy, traditionally based on hunting, fishing, and trade, arguing that it is catastrophically unhygienic in contrast to the more sedentary, modern, and civilized Japanese/Euro-American agrarian lifestyle. And, echoing William Smith Clark’s near- identical assessment of Japanese houses, Sekiba claimed that Ainu dwellings, too, were breeding

35 Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004), 137. 36 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 19.

254 grounds for disease due to their poor ventilation.37 Leaving home, the Ainu fared no better, as their supposed practice of going barefoot was unhygienic due to direct exposure of naked skin to the elements. Some of these descriptions were explicitly gendered. Large sections of the text focused heavily on Ainu women, such as, alluded to above, Sekiba’s descriptions their body hair and odour in detail. While misogynistic in tone, these lurid descriptions seemed to outline how to reform Ainu women so that they could become suitable mates for the large number of bachelors who settled in Hokkaido year by year.38

However, Sekiba never elaborated on how a freshly-washed face or proper footwear related to one’s contraction of communicable disease or the prospect of racial extinction. And, no doubt simply meant to disavow the deleterious effects of Japanese colonial policy, Sekiba was not alone in producing vague though ostensibly scientific assessments of Ainu hygiene. For example, a series of government reports compiled by Sapporo Prefecture’s Hygiene Division in

1883, a decade before the publication of Ainu ijidan, similarly linked the numerical decline of the Ainu populations in the Sapporo, Tsuishikari, and Muroran districts to their allegedly poor hygiene. With no reference to Japanese colonial policy, the medically unrigorous reports alluded to “unhygienic” things such as Ainu women continuing to work through their pregnancies or the earthy smell of Ainu dwellings as responsible for their statistical decline.39

37 Sekiba, Ainu ijidan, 161-164; William S. W. S. Clark, Kurāku Hakase ronbunshū, ed. Yamamoto Tamaki (Sapporo: Hokkaidō Daigaku Rigakubu, 1993), 473-474. 38 Indeed, Sekiba described Ainu life, as he understood it, only to condemn it as unhygienic and requiring outside reform. The sole exception was the Ainu style of straw raincoats, which, having heaped uncharacteristic praise on them, Sekiba noted closely resembling those of the Japanese. See Sekiba, Ainu ijidan, 150. 39 Sapporo-ken eiseika, “Kyūdojin ishokujū sonota torishirabesho, 1883, 0A022990000000000. Betsu-A 390-Sap, 0A022990000000000, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan.

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Nevertheless, not unlike his associate John Batchelor, Sekiba was entirely unconcerned about the continued existence of the Ainu language or outward displays of Ainu culture. Sekiba, in fact, largely replicated Batchelor’s book Ainu Economic Plants, disseminating – rather than suppressing – knowledge of Ainu folk medicine. However, in targeting the quotidian, Sekiba went much further than many of his contemporary assimilationists who might have been satisfied with bans on Ainu tattoos and earrings. Instead, he called for the total erasure of the smallest minutiae of daily life in Ainu kotan through the strict biopolitical disciplining of Ainu bodies.

The “Emperor’s Babies”

While remaining an influential academic discourse well into the 20th century, the question of Ainu racial hygiene took a much more circuitous route in the drafting of the eventual

Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act. Hygiene was, in fact, entirely absent in the language of the law. This is somewhat surprising as Shirani, in promoting the bill, focused heavily on

Ainu hygiene in much the same way as his predecessor, Katō. In a speech given at a North Sea

Prohibition Union joint meeting in 1894 attended by fellow speakers Sekiba Fujihiko and John

Batchelor, Shirani laid out government plans for Ainu protection. He placed heavy emphasis on

Ainu hygiene as well as abstinence from alcohol. Together with education reforms and the conversion of remaining Ainu property into Crown land, Shirani stated, hygiene would form the cornerstone of revised Ainu protection legislation. Of hygiene in particular, we learn that because “this race is ignorant and has a low quality of life, they don’t have any form of public

256 health policy (isei) or hygiene.”40 To counteract this, Shirani advocated creating special hygienic regulations for the Ainu similar to those which “countries of the Americas and Europe have for their own subject barbarians (zokuhō banmin).” He expanded upon this to advocate emulating

Anglo-American policies that prohibited selling liquor to Indigenous people. Though, ominously, Shirani admitted that it would be difficult to protect these “subject barbarians” because they were Japanese “national subjects” (shinmin) and, as citizens, could not simply be forced to comply. However, referring to teams already dispatched to map out an Ainu population across Hokkaido to be “protected,” it was clear that Shirani was preparing to change this.

Shirani was hardly alone in his desire to see the Ainu reformed into an economically productive workforce. Shortly before the Protection Bill was tabled, an op-ed article appeared in the December 14th, 1898 edition of the Otaru shinbun newspaper, written as a critical response to the anticipated bill. The article urged the government not to simply pass the law as a formality, but properly apply it in order to fully reform the Ainu in both mind and body. The author’s stated hope was that they can be made to adopt a spirit of civilization and free enterprise and become normative members of settler society.41 Readers were told not to think of the Ainu as inherently flawed, but rather in a state of “inertia” (dasei). Or, in other words, the Ainu – whom the author disparaged as “naïve, ignorant brats” – are extremely retrograde and thereby childlike. Their thinking is correspondingly very simple, as is their lifestyle. Accordingly, as a race of children, they have no conception of the future, nor an ability to plan for the long term. It is for this reason

40 The obscure term isei (医政), used here by Shirani and elsewhere by Sekiba in reference to Ainu racial hygiene, could be almost literally be translated as “biopolitics.” 41 Hirano Susumu, “Kyūdojin hogo (yomi),” Otaru Shinbun, December 14, 1898.

257 that they are incapable of capitalist enterprise. As such, dividing the whole of humanity into two camps, the author argued that the Ainu have yet to join “progressive mankind” (shinpoteki jinrui). And, because of this, they have no capacity to “push through the tides of civilization” and live ordered, entrepreneurial lives. Lacking the noble spirit, “these stubborn, poor imbeciles” are unable to “bask in the light of civilization,” and as a result, their physical strength is withering.

“Without government protection” and instead “entrusted to [the law of] the survival of the fittest

(jakuniku kyōshoku), they will quickly succumb to self-destruction (jimetsu).” Seeing retrograde laziness and poor health as responsible for their racial decline, the article stated that the only way to remedy this was to reform Ainu “brains” (zunō) and “bodies” (tairyoku, lit: physical strength).

When the bill was finally submitted to the Imperial Diet, members received an explanatory document with their copies of the bill which similarly described the “former aborigines” losing the “struggle for survival.” The document stated that the Japanese government must do something on their behalf. It further outlined the intentions of the second Protection Bill as follows:

Regarding the protection of Hokkaido’s former aborigines, the emperor has given his instructions that he benevolently sees all of his subjects with impartiality (isshi dōjin) and, from the first year of the Meiji period, he has instructed us to these ends. However, we have still not reached this goal. Or perhaps, the former aborigines have yet to fully bask in the benign rule of the emperor, severely benighted as they are. With this, from ancient times they have depended on nature for their livelihood, but as the land has gradually come under the occupation of immigrants from the mainland, day and night, they have lost the means of survival. It appears that other than holding back privation, they are at a standstill. This is perhaps the result of the so-called survival of the fittest. However, is there nothing we can do? Indeed, they, too, are the emperor’s babies. We mustn’t simply bear witness as they sink into these sad circumstances. That is to say, it is indeed our national duty (kokka no gimu) to establish relief measures, to pull them out of calamity, to relieve their poverty, to put them in industries that suit them, to protect their lives, and to build houses for them. We believe that this will comply with the emperor’s instructions to see all of his subjects with impartiality. This is

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the reason that we have presented this bill.42

Critical to this appeal was the assertion that the Ainu are the “emperor’s babies” (ō no sekishi), or in other words, that they were Japanese. Like ethnic Japanese, Ryukyuans, and to a greater or lesser degree, both Chinese settlers in Taiwan and the island’s Indigenous peoples, by

1899, the Ainu had become the “babies” of the emperor: the patriarch of the great national family. While they were perhaps extremely junior members of the Japanese family-state, this characterization asserted that they are collectively deserving of the same basic protections as their colonizers. And, while reflecting the patriarchal language of Confucian ethics, this phrasing also re-asserted the sovereignty of Japan as a modern nation-state in a Eurocentric fashion. Post- enlightenment political philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau likewise asserted that the national sovereign is the father of the nation who should look dispassionately at his many subject-children.43 This characterization of the Ainu as “babies” was, in other words, an expression of Japanese sovereignty over the Ainu. However, in “protecting” the Ainu, the emperor had become also something akin to the parens patriae in English legal doctrine.

According to this doctrine, the sovereign, as the “parent of the nation,” has legal jurisdiction over his or her “children” when they are “in need of protection.”44 As Gavin Clarkson and David

DeKorte argue, the American government adopted the doctrine of parens patriae to “subjugate

42 “Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo-hō wo sadamu,” Administrative Records, Rui-00868100, Main building-2A-011-00, National Archives of Japan. Tokyo, Japan. 43 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right, trans. Henry John Tozer (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1998), 6-7. 44 Gavin Clarkson and David DeKorte, “Unguarded Indians: The Complete Failure of the Post-Oliphant Guardian and the Dual-Edged Nature of Parens Patriae,” University of Illinois Law Review 2010, no. 4 (2010): 1119, 1125.

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Indian Country” by transforming nations such as the Cherokee into “domestic dependent nations” under the “protection” of the state, “resemble[ing] ... a ward to his guardian.”45 The

Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act, too, transformed the Ainu not simply into not only metaphorical “babies” of the emperor but also into the legally infantalized wards of the state.

This reflected widely held assumptions in 19th century historicist and evolutionist thought that civilization and modernity are akin to maturity, with barbarism and primitivity akin to infantilism. For example, Herbert Spencer, the British biologist most famous today for coining the phrase “survival of the fittest,” claimed that “[t]he intellectual traits of the uncivilized ... are traits recurring in the children of the civilized.”46 Accordingly, like other “primitives,” the Ainu were increasingly stereotyped as at the very lowest levels of human development, and thereby morally and culturally childlike, even while being widely stereotyped as an “ancient” race. As with the Protection Act itself, this had serious ramifications for the legally infantilized Ainu as children lack legal personhood. As Caroline Sawyer argues, detached from the family, a child “is in a pathological state.” Lacking legal personality, and therefore rights typically afforded to citizens of modern states, children are unable to autonomously protect themselves from violations of their own best interests.47 As Sawyer argues, this is largely due to the equation in modern Europe (as in Meiji Japan) of rationality with humanity. This framework views children as, then, inherently irrational and thereby leaves them with limited rights to self-determination

45 Ibid, 1119, 1125. 46 Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1882), 102. 47 Caroline Sawyer, “The Child Is Not a Person: Family Law and Other Legal Cultures,” Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 28, no. 1 (2006): 1-14.

260 and formally dependent on guardians or, in their absence, the state itself for their protection.

Similarly, as with Spencer, colonizers who deem “the uncivilized” as comparatively childlike, supposedly lagging behind at an earlier stage of human development, argue that benighted peoples benefit from outside intervention into their own affairs, including governance, and require the help of more “civilized” peoples in progressing them towards a universal modernity.

The question of Indigenous non-sovereignty has its roots in the very earliest European colonial discourse. During the early Spanish colonization of the Americas, Spanish jurist

Francesco de Vitoria, presented with the then-controversial question of “Indian” humanity, stressed that the Indigenous peoples then subjected to campaigns of genocide throughout the

Caribbean are human, and thereby endowed with rights, even as non-Christians. Nevertheless,

Vitoria tautologically denied “Indians” the legal capacity for personhood as sovereign political communities on the basis that they are “Indians.” As such, they lack the capacity for just war, which was for Vitoria the mark of sovereignty. Accordingly, they could not legally resist their own colonization by force of arms. Their rights to life and property were only protected on the basis of peacefully accepting European colonizers across their borders.48 And, even then, as the historical record repeatedly demonstrates, the limited recognition of Indigenous rights, for which

Vitoria advocated, was piecemeal.

The assumption that the figure of the “Indian” is the antithesis of a sovereign subject, devoid of legal personhood, likewise formed the basis of the doctrine of terra nullius by which

48 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15-27.

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Meiji Japan annexed Hokkaido. And, besides the abovementioned Dawes Act, other legislative precursors to the Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act were based on this same basic premise. For example, the Canadian Indian Act of 1876, which aimed to nullify the sovereignty of Indigenous nations and transform their territories into Crown land, explicitly defined a

“person” as “an individual other than an Indian.”49 The Indian Act, together with the Dawes Act, transformed Indigenous residents on Crown land into wards, and only removed an individual’s legal status as “Indian,” implicitly rendering them legally white, should they demonstrate to settlers that they are “civilized” enough to become property owning citizens.50

The Ainu were put into a similar position under the Protection Act. In discussing the bill,

Shirani was asked directly about restrictions on Ainu use of the allotted land by a House of Peers member. Perhaps intending to be evasive, he vaguely alluded to the state of exception in which the bill would place the Ainu, saying, “If mainlanders and aborigines had the same procedures

(tetsuzuki), we would treat them equally. This law provides different procedures for the aborigines. This is how we can give them land for free.”51 What these “different procedures” were was unclear, and unsurprisingly, this answer was unsatisfactory for some members of the

House of Peers. Asked again why the Ainu would need the Hokkaido governor’s permission to sell or lease land which the state granted to them, presumably becoming their property, and if

49 Anne-Marie Cotter, Race Matters an International Legal Analysis of Race Discrimination (Aldershot, Hampshire, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2006), 148. 50 Besides the Dawes Act and Indian Act, other legislation which predated, and likely exerted an influence on, the Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act includes the 1869 Aboriginal Protection Act in the British colony of Victoria (today Australia) and the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians in California. The Protection Act, in other words, did not simply “mimic” the Dawes Act, as is sometimes alledged, but was one of many interrelated Indigenous “protection” laws. 51 Shirani Takeshi, “Hokkaidō dojin hogo-hōan,” Dai 13 kai teikoku gikai kizokuin giji sokkiroku dai 14.

262 this was in violation of Japanese law, Shirani replied, “Yes, this is a violation of their land rights.

However, this is because without legal restrictions, we can’t protect their land rights.”52

While seemingly struggling to articulate the basic functioning of the Protection Act, we might consider how Shirani’s circular line of reasoning, and, indeed, much of what we have learned about the second bill so far, is starkly reminiscent of Hegel’s writings on colonialism and slavery. As Alison Stone shows, Hegel argued that while the colonization of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the enslavement of Africans was a violation of their universal freedoms, it was ultimately, for Hegel, necessary for these inherently unfree people to “mature” so that they might become conscious of their own unfreedom and, so dispossessed, “acquire a sense of private property.” It is by their extreme exploitation by their European colonizers that both the

Indigenous peoples of the Americas and enslaved Africans could, in other words, become “free” historical subjects who are capable of the possession of property, and thereby become human beings and not themselves possessable things.53 In this regard, the Protection Act was Hegelian in both its aims and methods.

However, even while the Protection Act so clearly reflected European colonial discourse, the imprecision of the scant page-long bill and the confused way in which Shirani presented it merit more attention. The loosely defined Protection Act – with just 11 short provisions compared to the expansive American Dawes Act and Canadian Indian Act – could be used to govern the Ainu however the state saw fit. The manner in which the state chose the “former

52 Ibid. 53 Alison Stone, “Hegel and Colonialism,” Hegel Bulletin (2007): 8, 9.

263 aborigine” population which was to be governed was similarly haphazard, and thereby arbitrary.

This was clear in how the state defined the Ainu population which the law targeted. Making a firm break from the 1893 iteration of the bill, which would have relied on the koseki to precisely define an “aborigine” population, Shirani stated that in ambiguous cases, such as adoptees, the state would simply determine if an individual is or isn’t a “former aborigine” based upon their outward appearance alone. This would entirely circumvent the koseki while giving legal validity to often racist stereotypes of Ainu physiognomy. Or, in other words, the legal indistinction generated by the scant bill and the vaguely-defined population whom it applied was a feature, not a fault.

Also, to this effect, when asked about why Shirani’s bill referred to the Ainu as “former aborigines” while Katō Masanosuke’s bill referred to them merely as “aborigines” (dojin),

Shirani was unable to provide a clear explanation. He simply referred to the internal use of this term by Kaitakushi bureaucrats two decades earlier and stated that he personally preferred it.54

Even if Shirani simply enjoyed the way “former aborigine” rolls off the tongue, this arbitrariness, too, was not insignificant, and would have far-reaching consequences for those this law applied to. The Japanese term for “aborigine,” dojin, is a cognate of the Chinese term tǔrén, literally meaning a “soil person.” Like the Chinese term, dojin originally referred to a person native to a particular region or country (a “foreign soil”). However, not unlike the English term “native,” through the use of the term dojin in the colonial management of the Ainu, and with the influence of a flurry of historicist and evolutionist discourses then circulating throughout Meiji Japan, the

54 Shirani Takeshi, “Hokkaidō dojin hogo-hōan.”

264 term dojin quickly took on a distinctly pejorative nuance, coming to signify abject primitivity.

By labelling the Ainu as a particular type of “former” dojin, Nakamura Jun argues, the once generic marker dojin increasingly became synonymous with “Ainu,” particularly after the much- lauded passing of the Protection Act. The addition of “former” reflexively “exerted an influence on ‘dojin’.” Accordingly, “coupled with propagated descriptions of Ainu as ‘dojin’ in national textbooks, the image of dojin as barbaric (mikai) came to gradually permeate the understanding that ‘Ainu’ equals ‘dojin.’”55 Before long, the terms kyūdojin and dojin, and through a negation of negation, the Ainu population both terms came to signify became wrapped up in the belief that the Ainu “cannot be said to be completely human.”56

Shirani’s application of the term “former aborigines” to the Ainu also had the much more immediate effect, undoubtedly desired, of de-indigenizing them. Seemingly to cap off three decades of policies meant to physically remove the Ainu, starve them into submission, and conceptually erase them, the Meiji state simply declared that the surviving Ainu are non-

Indigenous through a sovereign decision. Thereby, in the eyes of the state, the “former aborigines” would necessarily lose any claims of residual sovereignty to their own land and resources. Moreover, on a social rather than political level, even as the nomenclature “former aborigine” was perhaps, for some, meant to signify a new era of equality between Japanese settlers and the Ainu, the term was quickly marred by stigma and, according to Tessa Morris-

55 Nakamura Jun, “‘Dojin’-ron – ‘dojin’ imēji no keisei to tenkai,” in Kindai Nihon no tashazō to jigazō, ed. Tōru Shinohara (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 2001), 87. 56 Ibid, 86.

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Suzuki, “helped to ensure the survival of prejudice and discrimination against the Ainu.”57 As a result, by negating difference while reasserting it, the legal appellation “former aborigine” placed the Ainu in an anomalous position between “subject barbarians” and “imperial subjects.” It was precisely this ambiguous subjective positioning that allowed the Hokkaido Former Aborigine

Protection Act, which relied on a suspension of the civil rights of Ainu as Japanese citizens, to function.

The state allotted land only to those “former aborigines” who agreed to take up farming.

The Protection Act stipulated that these Ainu would receive farming tools, though Shirani reassured the House of Peers that Ainu households would only receive “extremely basic” (goku kantan) implements befitting their station.58 Ainu could not choose the sites of their own allotments, and land granted to Ainu was often, as Richard Siddle writes, of “poor quality or unfit for cultivation.”59 Those who chose not to farm were still subject to the law. However, many of these Ainu remained landless, and whatever land they occupied was formally

“unprotected” from land theft. Only land that individual Ainu bought from Japanese settlers or directly from the state was recognizable as legitimate private property. Land allotted to the Ainu

57 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “The Ainu: Beyond the Politics of Cultural Coexistence,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1999): 19-23. 58 Shirani Takeshi, “Hokkaidō dojin hogo-hōan.” 59 Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan, 71. As described in chapter three, the size of typical Ainu allotments was identical to that of land granted to Tondenhei families. Tondenhei soldiers and their family members, privileged settlers in late 19th century Hokkaido, frequently complained that large portions of their land were flood- prone or otherwise uncultivatable. Moreover, another frequent complaint was that their land was divided to smaller plots which were sometimes spread out over several kilometres. As the Ainu occupied a place at the opposite extreme of colonial hierarchies in Hokkaido, and that the Ainu were allotted whatever land remained after three decades of agrarian colonization, it is unsurprising that the Ainu were allotted land which was extremely marginal, if not unworkable.

266 by the Protection Act remained government property for a minimum duration of 15 years. Ainu failure to “improve” the allotted land during this period would cause it to automatically be reverted back to the state. However, because of the negligible quality of the land given to the

Ainu, most of whom were inexperienced farmers equipped with – as Shirani divulged – poor tools, many or most “protected” Ainu were left, as David Howell argues, “decidedly worse off than they had been before.”60 However, by giving the Ainu the ostensibly free choice of becoming sedentary farmers or losing rights to allotted parcels of what was, after all, their own stolen land, the state aimed to legitimize the Japanese colonial appropriation of Ainu Mosir. The seemingly benevolent act of “granting” land to the Ainu was predicated on the claim that it was the state’s land to give. Likewise, the allotted Ainu would be mobilized as pioneers participating in the agrarian colonization of their own homeland. Accordingly, the Protection Act pushed the

Ainu to recognize the jurisdiction of Japan over the great majority of their territories by accepting the grants, thus – at least in the eyes of the state – legitimizing the theft of Ainu territories and the transfer of natural resources the Ainu relied on for survival to settlers. Or in other words, as Kayano Shigeru succinctly put it, by “providing” what he stressed was “inferior land” to the Ainu, “the Japanese also legitimated their plunder of the region.”61

This drive to have Ainu develop the “wasteland” of Hokkaido was paired by efforts to

“develop” Ainu children, who were integrated into public schools. This was not as simple as

60 David L Howell, “Making ‘Useful Citizens’ of Ainu Subjects in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” The Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 1 (2004): 7. 61 Kayano Shigeru, Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir, trans. Kyoko Selden and Lili Selden (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 60.

267 placing Ainu children into schools which were being built across Hokkaido for the children of settlers. Shirani pushed heavily for segregated Ainu schools to be built, arguing that as the Ainu are an “inferior race” (reppai no jinshu), Ainu children were incapable of competing on an academic level with presumably “superior” settler children. Worse, Shirani added, they would be unable to physically defend themselves against inevitable bullying by Japanese children, who presumably would immediately recognize their hapless Ainu classmates as their racial inferiors and seize upon them. To demonstrate their worthlessness in his eyes, Shirani referred to the

“ignorant and illiterate” Ainu schoolchildren as “wriggling insects” (shunji). But, what good would it be to educate such “insects”? According to Shirani, the segregated Ainu schools would teach the Ainu a modicum of literacy as well as basic skills required for manual labour and handicrafts. In other words, it would make them employable as unskilled labour.62

Curiously, the question of hygiene was almost entirely absent from Shirani’s comments.

Asked about this directly, Shirani answered that laws are already in place to manage the hygiene of Hokkaido residents, regardless of race, and thus no further legislation was necessary. This is somewhat astonishing given Shirani’s earlier arguments regarding Ainu hygiene in his speech to the North Sea Prohibition Union as well as wider proposals for racial hygiene policies outlined above. During this same period, Shirani himself was personally involved in hygiene campaigns in Tokyo, making this reversal all the more surprising. While drafting the Protection Act, Shirani

62 Shirani Takeshi, “Hokkaidō dojin hogo-hōan.” Shirani’s deeply contemptuous view of the Ainu, as well as the plans for schools aimed at nothing more than linguistic assimilation and teaching simple trades, demonstrate the clear influence of the pedagogist Iwatani Eitarō, to whom Shirani made direct reference to in his speech to the North Sea Prohibition Union years earlier. For more on Iwatani’s views of Ainu education, see Oguma,’Nihonjin’No Kyōkai, 62-63.

268 was a member of a special committee organizing hygiene regulations to be enforced upon residents of the metropolitan capital. This committee was formed under the auspices of none other than Kuroda Kiyotaka, the former Kaitakushi director who instigated the disastrous bans on

Ainu hunting and fishing in the 1870s.63 Indeed, except for provisions stating that medicine and disability benefits would be provided freely to the Ainu, there was very little, in fact, that contradicted Shirani’s claim that the Protection Act was not a hygiene law.

Nevertheless, we might return to the question of the ambiguity of hygiene discourse in

Meiji Japan. While the precarization of the Ainu was the direct result of the theft of Ainu land and resources by both settlers and the state – a phenomenon which protectionists frequently disavowed through assertions of the deleterious effects of poor Ainu hygiene – it is telling that the Protection Act focused so heavily on the land. In doing so, it ignored calls for the state to micromanage Ainu hygiene through a regime of biopolitical discipline. Or, in other words, while the state-sponsored Japanese theft of Ainu land and resources throughout the early Meiji period led to deadly famines in Ainu communities in the 1880s and early 1890s, the Protection Act aimed to “save” the Ainu from racial extinction by providing them with parcels of land on which they would grow their own food. This is to say, the granting or seizing of land can be tantamount to a form of biopower or necropower, even in the absence of direct policies targeting Ainu bodies. And, indeed, colonialists such as Nitobe Inazō directly alluded to this. In his 1898 book

Nōgyō honron (The Subject of Agriculture), Nitobe asserted that farming, statistically linked to

63 See “Ōkurashō sanjikan komai shigetada Tōkyō shiku kaisei i’in takushokumu shokikan Shirani Takeshi chūō eiseikai i’in ōsetsukerare no ken,” Administrative Records, Nin-B00104100, Main building-2A-018-00. National Archives of Japan, Tokyo, Japan.

269 longer life expectancies and stronger, healthier bodies, is the most “hygienic” of all professions.

The large number of Japanese engaged in agriculture from ancient times, he argued, was what allowed the nation to thrive. Agrarian hygiene was, moreover, responsible for the stunning success of Meiji Japan’s new civilian army, primarily made up not of sedentary, urbane samurai, but farmers: a class strictly banned from so much as carrying weapons during much of the

Tokugawa period.64

While Nitobe did not mention the Ainu, his view of agrarianism as it applies to the larger push to transform them into a race of farmers is significant. For one, as Tomita Torao shows, it is likely that Nitobe influenced Shirani Takeshi’s own thinking when he developed the Protection

Act. Namely, Tomita points to Nitobe being paired with Shirani in 1893 to conduct a survey of the Ainu early in the drafting process. Thereafter, the bilingual Nitobe interpreted for his fellow

Quaker, the American Henry Hartshorne, who addressed the Sapporo Education Association, of which Shirani was a member, on the topic of “Indian” protection policies in the United States.65

Regardless of to what degree Shirani internalized Nitobe’s views, if the Japanese dispossession of the Ainu was tantamount to letting them die, then it follows that the partial reversion of that land to the Ainu was a means to make them live. While certainly assimilative and economistic in intention, we might therefore also understand this attempt to push the Ainu into agriculture as biopolitical in aim, and itself a form of racial hygiene. As such, it called on Ainu to relinquish their rights to their territories and take part in the agrarian colonization of Hokkaido. Those who

64 Nitobe Inazō, Nōgyō honron (Tokyo: Shōkabō, 1898), 137-138. 65 Tomita, “Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo-hō to dōzuhō: hikakushitei kenkyū no kokoromi.”

270 refused, or in other words, those who attempted to uphold Ainu food sovereignty by living autonomously off the land, remained bare life. Activities such as autonomous hunting and fishing were criminalized, with Ainu “poachers” facing arrest.66

Salvation through Genocide

Perhaps owing to the tone in which he presented it, with its economistic utilitarianism and free of Katō’s moralizations, Shirani’s bill passed and became law in 1899. However, it immediately became an object of controversy and remained so until it was repealed nearly a century later. One of its sharpest early critics was Oyabe Zen’ichrō, who settled in Hokkaido immediately in its aftermath in order to work as a Christian educator among the Ainu.

Throughout the 1890s, Oyabe completed his university education in the United States.

Studying at two historically black institutions, the Hampton Institute (today Hampton University) and Howard University, Oyabe then went on to earn his doctorate in divinity at Yale University between 1894 and 1898. His doctoral studies were interrupted by a two year stay in the nominally independent (though white settler-dominated) Republic of Hawaii as a missionary.67

Throughout his time in America, Oyabe observed first hand drives for the assimilative education of African Americans and Indigenous peoples designed to insert these racialized populations into white American society as economically productive, normative citizens. For his part, having been subjected to this same curriculum, Oyabe would work to reproduce it in Hokkaido.

66 Kayano, Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir, 57. 67 Jenichiro Oyabe, A Japanese Robinson Crusoe, ed. Greg Robinson and Yujin Yaguchi (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 160.

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Just before returning to Japan, Oyabe published an English language autobiography, A

Japanese Robinson Crusoe, outlining his experiences in the United States and discussing at length the worth of racialized populations, himself included. Thinking ahead, he announced to his American readership his intention to devote his “life to the Ainu, the uncivilized race of

Japan, like the Indians of America.”68 Perhaps meant to be humorous, he at one point even fantasized, reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe’s dominion over his Indigenous slave Friday, about

“rul[ing] over them and set[ting] up my new kingdom” in “Manchuria or Siberia.”69 As most

Americans had absolutely no knowledge of the Ainu, Oyabe – who at this point had yet to set foot in Hokkaido – sketched an image of Ainu culture for his readers. In the process he demonstrated an understanding almost certainly informed by anthropological texts and travelogues. He wrote,

They seem incapable of advancement. After a century of contact with the Japanese, they have learned no arts, adopted no improvements. The hunter to-day shoots the bear with a poisoned arrow from a bow as primitive as early man himself, although the Japanese are famous for their archery and weapons.70

With this, Oyabe informed his readers of his decision to settle in Hokkaido as a farmer while working as a missionary and educator to save what he called “my poor Ainu people ... living in their rude cabins in the severe cold weather.”71

68 Ibid, 45. 69 Ibid, 46. 70 Ibid, 50. 71 Ibid, 125.

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Arriving in Hokkaido a year later, just as the Protection Act came into effect, Oyabe began raising money for his school and private residence. He wrote to the American physician and ethnographer Hiram Hiller to beckon him to “tell wealthy Philadelphia people ... about my work and my strange life with Ainu, ask him or her to help for this forgotten race of the world

(sic).” Presenting himself as “the only Japanese to undertake such work,” Oyabe claimed that without his stalwart efforts, “the poor Ainu race will die out surely.” In this he obliquely contrasted his own work to that of John Batchelor, “the English man,” who “preached the Gospel with the mouth only.”72 Instead, Oyabe intended his work amongst the Ainu to be both spiritual and practical. He quickly became involved in everything from the missionary schooling of Ainu children to gynecological research of Ainu women to high profile speaking tours on the subject of Ainu protection with none other than Katō Masanosuke.73 He also increasingly became critical of Japanese efforts towards aiding and assimilating the Ainu, viewing such efforts as laudable but not nearly ambitious enough in application to be effective. For Oyabe, these lacklustre or unenforced policies not only kept the Ainu on the path to racial extinction but put Japanese settlers at risk as well.

Writing about the Ainu for the Hokkaido maichini shinbun newspaper, Oyabe described travelling through the backcountry in the area around Muroran, just up the coast from where he

72 Oyabe Zen’ichirō, “Letter from Oyabe to Hiller: Feb 14, 1902,” 1902, Asia, East, 1060, The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 73 See Yuki Terazawa, “Racializing Bodies through Science in Meiji Japan: The Rise of Race-Based Research in Gynecology,” in Building a Modern Japan: Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Meiji Era and Beyond, ed. Morris Low (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 90-91. For a bulletin of Oyabe and Katō’s speech, see “Katō Oyabe nishi raison,” Otaru Shinbun, August 21, 1900, morning edition.

273 settled in Abuta, to gather information in his efforts towards Ainu education and physical welfare. He split his travelogue between describing the land, where Oyabe commented on the fertility of the soil, envisioning Japanese agrarian settlement, and the people, describing both the

Ainu and the Japanese settlers he encountered. With no medical training, Oyabe commented dispassionately about an Ainu man’s diseased eyes and rheumatism. Continuing his travels, he stopped to take measurements of the heads and physiques of local Ainu residents. Further along, he came across the village of Otena where he saw children running around freely and observed tattooed bodies: to Oyabe, unmistakable signs of Ainu. To his disgust, however, he learned that the villagers were in fact all Japanese settlers. He described the sight of them as “uncanny”

(fushigi). Commenting on the children in particular, Oyabe wrote, “these children were not originally aborigines but Japanese” (naichijin). As though they had somehow become Ainu, he commented, “no matter which angle I look at them from, they’re aborigines and simply can’t be thought of as mainlanders at all.” Oyabe blamed the racial degeneration of these Japanese settlers on contact with surrounding Ainu, and concluded, “I felt then that our aid (kyūsai) for the Ainu is not for the Ainu alone.”74

Such “aid” no doubt referred to ongoing assimilation campaigns, including things such as the education of Ainu children and the “improvement” of Ainu hygiene, rather than land grants.

Here we might consider Oyabe’s background in the United States, having closely studied and ideologically supported the education of Indigenous peoples. Like his American equivalents,

74 Oyabe Zen’ichirō, “Oyabe Hakase Ainodan,” Hokkaidō Mainichi Shinbun, June 13, 1901. The term kyūsai, moreover, has a distinctly religious (in Oyabe’s case, Christian) nuance, meaning “salvation.”

274

Oyabe saw the genocidal practice of blocking the transmission of Indigenous culture and language as a philanthropic act of the highest order. Or in other words, killing the Indian, as it were, to save the man. Neither Oyabe nor his contemporaries saw it fit to hide the goal of cultural genocide, leaving Ainu bodies, distinguishable from the Japanese only by whatever scientifically measurable physiological differences remained, to be absorbed into the larger settler body politic. Indeed, the journalist Itō Shōzō argued that the blanket assimilation of the

Ainu through education was a clear sign of the progress of civilization befitting the dawn of the new century. It was a far cry from the days when the “British murdered natives with hunting dogs.”75 The implication being, of course, that education is a more “modern” and “civilized” approach to the same goal: the elimination of Indigenous people.

There was also an element of imperative in Oyabe’s article. In his comments on what he saw as “Ainuized” Japanese settlers who he envisioned as co-beneficiaries of Ainu aid, there was a familiar fear, felt by colonialists worldwide, of mutual slippage between the colonizer and the colonized. The Ainu, for Oyabe, represented a threat to the moral health of the Japanese settler colony. Intensely noxious, if left unchecked, Ainu culture could spread through contact to

Japanese neighbours, upturning power relations. This risked expanding the Ainu population by

75 Itō Shōzō, “Kyūdojin Hogoron.” Ainu minzoku kindai no kiroku, ed. Masahito Ogawa and Shin’ichi Yamada (Urayasu-shi: Sōfūkan, 1998), 455. Itō almost certainly mistook the British for the Spanish, who used purpose- trained hunting dogs to kill people during the 16th century campaigns of genocide which resulted in the deaths of millions of people throughout the Caribbean.

275 transforming Japanese into Ainu. Effectively, “protecting” the Ainu then meant “protecting”

Japanese settlers from the Ainu.76

Oyabe further explicated his views nearly a decade after the promulgation of the

Protection Act in a proposal which he addressed to the prime minister’s office, with copies sent to the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Education, and the governor of Hokkaido. There he called for much more stringent applications of existing laws. This proposal was a moral rallying cry, meant to alert the national and prefectural governments to the impending racial extinction of the Ainu, who Oyabe referred to as “the oldest of the world’s imin,” or people bereft of their state or sovereign. This was only preventable through the complete erasure of

Ainu culture at the level of domestic, daily life and the annulment of Ainu rights to private property, as they were.77

While making approving reference to the largely segregated vocational schools the government had opened across Hokkaido, for Oyabe, this was hardly enough. Much like

Sekiba’s discourse on Ainu hygiene, he called for the totalized control of every aspect of Ainu existence in the name of protecting their biological wellbeing. This would include, he urged, the state seizing and selling off all Ainu land and property and collecting interest from money made

76 The famous Ainuologist Kindaichi Kyōsuke, visiting Oyabe and seeing his muddy children out playing with Oyabe’s young Ainu students, commented to his host, “playing with Ainu children, your children seem to be exactly the same as them” (emphasis removed). One wonders how Oyabe responded to this. See Oguma Eiji, A Genealogy of 'Japanese' Self-images, trans. David Askew (Melbourne: Trans Pacific, 2002),152. 77 Oyabe Zen’ichirō, “Hokkaidō kyūdojin ni kan suru kengi (utsushi),” 1909, 0F003960030000000, Hokushi panfu 396-03, Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan. Somewhat confusingly, the term imin (遺民) is a homophone with Japanese terms corresponding with “settler” (移民), “foreigner” (異民), and “barbarian” (夷民).

276 from these sales in order to fund further efforts towards education and hygiene. After this, the

Ainu would be concentrated into 12 reservation-like villages. Oyabe referred to his compound at

Abuta as a model. On these reservations, the Ainu would continue their vocational schooling, while being taught hygiene, housekeeping, cooking, and childrearing.

While Oyabe, like most other protectionists, argued that it was morally imperative for the state to intervene into the looming extinction of the Ainu, he made it clear that to do so was in

Japan’s own best interest. The biggest threat to the Ainu, he argued, was not the settler colonial invasion which bereft them of land and resources, but rampant syphilis and lung disease.

Showing clear dissatisfaction with the degree to which hygiene was downplayed in the

Protection Act, he warned that if these grievous diseases are not swiftly dealt with, they’ll, like

Ainu culture, quickly spread to the Japanese settlers. And, even when these diseases have consumed the entirety of the Ainu race, he warned, the viruses will survive in their place, spreading to the settlers and eventually transforming the Japanese, too, into a diseased, doomed race, just like the Ainu. This assertion that the Ainu are a threat to the health of the settlers while entirely negating the infinitely more serious threat settlers posed to the Ainu reversed the perceived power relations and, within the colony, the subjective positioning between colonizer and colonized. By rendering the Ainu an external threat to the health of the settler body, Oyabe, thereby, “exogenized” the Ainu. The Ainu race became a foreign body threatening not just the moral but physical health of the settlers, and, zombie-like, threatened to transform the Japanese race into their own image, even in death.78

78 Oyabe, “Hokkaidō kyūdojin ni kan suru kengi (utsushi).”

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Conclusion

By instigating a program to streamline the assimilation of the Ainu population into the

Japanese settler body, the Protection Act itself aimed at the political, social, cultural, and linguistic extinction of the Ainu in the name of the biological preservation of their bodies. This chapter has argued that the Meiji state developed and passed the Hokkaido Former Aborigine

Protection Act in response to prevalent historicist and evolutionist discourses which argued that the Ainu, as a hopelessly inferior race, teetered on the brink of “self-destruction.” These discourses understood their looming racial extinction as the natural result of their exposure to culturally and/or biologically superior Japanese settlers. The Ainu, protectionist discourses frequently argued, are wilting before “the light of civilization” and require the direct and sustained intervention of the benevolent settler colonial state to survive. To “save” the Ainu, the state sought to transform them into a race of farmers. Agriculture was the means by which

Hokkaido was colonized and remained the economic backbone of the island and normative lifestyle of most Japanese settlers. Accordingly, agriculture presented the Meiji state with a convenient model for assimilation. The “benevolent” gesture of providing the Ainu with land to farm further, moreover, legitimized the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido. However, some colonialists, such as Nitobe Inazō, presented agriculture as the most hygienic of lifestyles, and the most efficient means to produce modern citizen-subjects. Through the Protection Act, in other words, the state ostensibly aimed to pull the Ainu back from the brink of “self-destruction” by providing them with state-administered farmland on which to live and a normative, hygienically sound lifestyle.

However, while the Protection Act promised to, indeed, “protect” the Ainu from their own looming racial extinction, it was nevertheless aimed at their final disappearance. It aimed to

278 make the “vanishing” Ainu “disappear” not through mass violence or the continuation of policies which led to famine, but through the zero-sum assimilation of Ainu domestic life. This not only legitimized but accelerated the dispossession of “unprotected” Ainu across Hokkaido. The logic of Ainu “self-destruction” further rendered the precarity forced upon the Ainu as their normal or natural state. Accordingly, far from making the relationship between the Ainu and Japanese settlers less colonial, the Protection Act served only to advance the settler colonial project based upon their dispossession and disappearance.

Epilogue: Performing Terra Nullius

On the evening of September 18th, 1922, the 19-year-old Ainu linguist, translator, and poet Chiri Yukie’s heart stopped. Having made her final corrections to a typed manuscript of

Ainu Shin’yōshū, her bilingual Ainu-Japanese collection of yukar (Ainu epic poems), earlier the same day, she collapsed and died.1 Years earlier, Ainuologist Kindaichi Kyōsuke had convinced

Chiri to make the transcriptions of the yukar her “life mission.”2 Inviting her to work with him in

Tokyo, he stressed the “urgency” of the project of adapting what was hitherto an exclusively oral tradition into writing on the basis of “the Ainu’s status as a backward and hence vanishing race.”3 Both in awe of yukar as a living form of a truly ancient literature and, by the same merit, scornful of them as “key elements of an archaic and undeveloped culture,” Kindaichi wrote,

These things called narrative poems are the history of a people and at the same time they are literature. They were also treasured classics, sacred texts. With them, human life was maintained before there was writing. ... They are your people’s precious life. ... However, you people are different from me. You must not be left behind by the times. You need to absorb new things without heeding old things and become proper Japanese (emphasis in original).4

For Kindaichi, as Sarah Strong notes, while admiring what he later characterized as the almost

Homeric quality of the Ainu oral tradition and, on some level, Chiri’s own brilliance, the yukar

1 Sarah M. Strong, Ainu Spirits Singing: The Living World of Chiri Yukie's Ainu Shin’yōshū (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 3. 2 Ibid, 30. 3 Ibid, 29. 4 Quoted in ibid, 30-31. 279 280 as a living oral tradition were potentially deadly. Their very incitation held “the individual back from progress and assimilation” and thereby collectively threatened the Ainu with “physical extinction.”5 Chiri’s transcriptions, Kindaichi seems to have hoped, would serve to museumify the yukar, ushering in their death as a living oral tradition in order to preserve the biological life of the rapidly “vanishing” Ainu race.

Forty-six years later, in an interview with French literary critic Claude Bonnefoy, Michel

Foucault divulged that he “write[s] on the basis of the other’s already present death. It’s because the others are dead that I can write.”6 “For me,” he continued, “speech begins after death.” The act of writing about the past is thereby nothing more than a post-mortem “wandering.”7 In a moment of self-effacement, Foucault described his own scholarship as “dead and jabbering scribbling ... on the white sheet of paper.”8 Curiously, Chiri, too, described the physical act of writing in terms not dissimilar. In her private diaries, she described “writing letters in blue ink on white paper that look like the trails of crawling worms (mimizu no haiato).”9 However, while similarly modest in describing the act of putting ink on the page, her approach to writing itself could not have been more different to Foucault, who saw death as the precondition for writing, or

Kindaichi, for whom the transcription of Ainu speech was an act of killing.

5 Ibid, 31. 6 Michel Foucault, Speech Begins After Death, ed. Artières Philippe, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 42. 7 Ibid, 44. 8 Ibid, 67. 9 Togashi Toshikazu, Gin no shizuku omoi no mama: Chiri Yukie ikō yori. (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2002), 15.

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Far from a dead world, Chiri’s writings evoked an implicitly pre-colonial Hokkaido landscape inhabited by an entire “carpet of spirits.”10 Ainu Mosir was, for Chiri, a land reverberating – practically overflowing – with life, both animal and human, with little distinction between supposedly “higher” and “lower” forms of life or, for that matter, between living things and the “inanimate” geography. Written as much for her own “ancestors” (dōzoku sosen) as for posterity, Chiri produced her bilingual iterations of Ainu yukur not as a death knell for a vanishing people, but as Katsuya Hirano observes, “the hope of keeping the poetic form of oral tradition alive.”11 Her task was, then, a matter of life and death, with Chiri describing in her preface to Ainu Shin’yōshū the gradual physical destruction of Ainu Mosir through land- intensive resource exploitation – the very premise of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido. The destruction of the land, she stressed, was what led to the sharp decline of the Ainu. In stark contrast to Ainu survivors who barely eked out a living in the decades following Japan’s annexation of Hokkaido, Chiri – a devout Christian – described in strikingly Edenic terms a pre- colonial Ainu who lived paradisal lives of “freedom.” They lived “with ease and pleasure in the manner of innocent babes in the embrace of beautiful, vast nature,” with Chiri adding, “they were truly the beloved children of nature. Oh what happy people they must have been!”

However, she continued in muted terms, writing, “[t]his land has undergone rapid change as development goes on.” Most of those “who joyfully made their living in its fields and mountains” are no longer to be found. With “eyes ... filled with anxiety, burn[ing] with

10 Strong, Ainu Spirits Singing, 67. 11 Togashi, Gin no shizuku omoi no mama, 16; Katsuya Hirano, “Thanatopolitics in the Making of Japan’s Hokkaido: Settler Colonialism and Primitive Accumulation.” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2015), 213.

282 discontent,” she continued, the Ainu of today are “a pitiful sight. A dying people ... That is our name. What a sad name we bear!” Chiri described the longing of many Ainu for “two or three strong ones” who could help the Ainu “keep pace with the advancing world.” And, through her own efforts, she hoped that “the many beautiful, time-honored words” that “our beloved ancestors” had “passed down to us” could be not only preserved in the present, but passed down to future generations (including to non-Ainu) as a living tradition.12 In other words, as Strong argues, Chiri believed that the Ainu could successfully become “progressive” through such activities as the transcription of the yukar into a written form (for which Chiri created a purpose- built Ainu orthography). This created “forward-looking possibilities for the Ainu that gently refute the tenets of the prevailing assimilationist ideology.”13

Many scholars of modern Hokkaido would no doubt be far more sympathetic to

Foucault’s view of historical scholarship as an analysis of an irrevocably dead past than Chiri’s vision of fluid transmission. Indeed, especially in viewing the Japanese project of colonizing

Ainu Mosir as “historical” – that is, as something in the past – rather than an ongoing process, many writers reproduce the doctrine of terra nullius. Often well-intentioned, they nevertheless treat the Ainu as, in the above-quoted words of Ainu activist Yūki Shōji, “a bygone race which should be buried and forgotten.”14 While some write of the Ainu exclusively in the past tense or deny the coloniality of settler colonial Hokkaido, others simply reproduce Meiji era narratives which, as Michele Mason so aptly demonstrates, served to “write” the Ainu “out” of Hokkaido

12 Strong, Ainu Spirits Singing, 195-196. 13 Ibid, 35-36. 14 Yūki Shōji, Ainu sengen (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1980), 207.

283 altogether, treating the colonized island as an empty, primordial wilderness heroically broken by generations of pioneers.15 Such writers, whatever their intentions, render the Ainu dead on the page. Indeed, some write of Hokkaido’s Indigenous people in a manner little different from physical anthropologists’ craniometric examinations of Ainu remains: objects of intense academic scrutiny and yet historically acephalous. As Jodi Byrd writes of the Indigenous peoples of the United States, the Ainu, too, are often “evoked in such theorization as past tense presences,” becoming “spectral, implied and felt, but ... lamentable causalities of national progress ... destined to disappear with the frontier itself.”16

While tirelessly challenged by the Ainu and a growing network of Japanese allies, discourses of the non-being of the Ainu, especially as a colonized people, have seemingly succeeded in normalizing settler colonial Hokkaido as “Japanese.” Unlike Taiwan, Korea, or

Manchuria, Hokkaido’s status as a Japanese territory went virtually unquestioned during the

American-led dismantling of the Japanese Empire in 1945. Japanese Karafuto (Russian:

Sakhalin) and the Kuriles were “returned” to the Soviet Union rather than liberated. Today, the coloniality of such territories is rarely acknowledged outside of the Ainu community. However, strikingly resembling romantic pioneer narratives in Anglophone settler colonies, as it relates to

Indigenous land rather than Indigenous bodies, colonial “history” is widely celebrated. Civic monuments such as statues in the likeness of Kuroda Kiyotaka and Horace Capron – the

15 Michele M. Mason, “Writing Ainu Out/Writing Japanese In: The ‘Nature’ of Japanese Colonialism in Hokkaido,” in Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique, ed. Michele M. Mason and Helen Lee (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), 39-45. 16 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques Of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xx.

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“founding fathers” of Hokkaido – are displayed prominently across Sapporo. In nearby

Kitahiroshima, a statue of William Clark stands atop a hill, pointing off into the distance.

Labelled “BOYS BE AMBITIOUS” – his famous final words to his Japanese students – the statue is as much a monument to the American educator as it is to the resounding “success” of the grand settler colonial project. Such figures are potent symbols of the heroically masculinist

(and often sexualized) exogenous conquest of the “virgin soil” of Ainu Mosir.

Early Meiji Japanese claims of sovereignty over Hokkaido were predicated on the assertion that the Ainu are – like the “Indians” in Euro-American colonial thought – categorically non-sovereign and lack the capacity to own property. Claimed as terra nullius, Ainu territories became a legal vacuum. A grotesque inversion of Ainu worldviews expressed in Chiri’s yukar, the colonization of Hokkaido, in effect, “filled” the emptied space of this terra nullius with the sovereignty of the Japanese state. Not simply a matter of flag-planting, the establishment of exogenous sovereignty depended on, in accordance with international law, “peopling” the supposedly uninhabited island of Hokkaido with Japanese settlers and “improving” the

“wasteland” through its economic exploitation. The basis of the post-imperial Japanese state’s claims to Ainu land, however, remain tied to the same assertion that these territories were, prior to Japanese colonization, terra nullius.17 Such claims are predicated on the “non-being” of the

Ainu, or their lack of sovereignty and incapacity to hold property as “savages” or “primitives.”

17 See Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The Northern Territories Dispute and Russo-Japanese Relations Vol 2. Neither War nor Peace, 1985-1998, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 513. While the Japanese government’s direct assertions that Ainu land constituted terra nullius are today officially limited to Japanese claims to the Russian- administered southern Kuriles (Japanese: Chijima), administered by Japan as part of Hokkaido from 1869 to 1945, this claim implicitly extends to Ainu territories across mainland Hokkaido as well.

285

However, Ainu Mosir remains unceded territory, and the very Ainu presence, especially as autonomous political or socio-cultural communities, challenges what Glen Coulthard calls the

“racist legal fiction” of terra nullius.18 Belying the juridical emptiness at the heart of the

Hokkaido settler colony, the active presence of the Ainu as a sovereign body renders Japanese tenure to the land uncertain, if not illegitimate. Accordingly, from the beginning of the Meiji period until the present, the legitimacy of the Japanese settler colonial state on Ainu territory has depended on not just the removal of the Ainu from their territories or their assimilation into mainstream settler society, but also on legal and discursive de-indigenization of the Ainu, conceptually alienating them from the land.

However, the forever “vanishing” Ainu stubbornly refuse to vanish. The claim that Ainu

Mosir constitutes terra nullius, then, must be constantly reaffirmed in order for settlers to retain their title. Accordingly, terra nullius is not a single legal declaration on which the Japanese colony was founded, but a process without end. Central to this is the continual disavowal of the coloniality of Hokkaido, or what Ann Stoler calls a “stubborn colonial aphasia.”19 Not limited to descriptions of a “primitive” or “vanishing” Ainu, this disavowal is achieved through narratives, originating in the late Meiji period, of the colonization of Ainu Mosir as a form of “internal colonialism.” Sometimes taking on an almost Gramscian quality, the “internal colonization” of

Hokkaido reads the settler colony as a purely economistic project of the “development” of an

18 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 175. 19 Ann Stoler. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 14.

286 always-already Japanese territory. In this sense, the Japanese colonization of sovereign Ainu land is rendered silent and invisible. And, while ahistorical, traces of this discourse, too, can occasionally be seen in the work of otherwise critically minded historians today. Widely disseminated descriptions of the “development,” the “settlement,” or the “opening up” of

Hokkaido – rather than its colonization – risks lending legitimacy to discourses of terra nullius.

This, as Japanese literary scholar Komori Yōichi argues, masks the violence of the “Japanese colonial invasion.”20 For example, the root of the word Kaitakushi, kaitaku, has largely been purged of its colonial implications and today has a romantic nuance which evokes the image of hardy pioneers breaking new ground. Reflecting this, the term kaitaku is frequently translated by

Anglophone scholars as the “development” or “opening up” of a supposedly empty land. Even while official English language documents dating back to the early 1870s consistently referred to the Kaitakushi as the “Colonial Office,” today it is conventional in English language scholarship to re-translate the Kaitakushi as the “Hokkaido Development Agency.”21

While not all developmentalism is settler colonial, all settler colonialism is developmentalist. These colonies are not premised on the exploitation of Indigenous people as labour or captive markets, but on the ongoing exogenous seizure and economic “development”

20 Komori Yōichi, “Rule in the Name of ‘Protection’: The Vocabulary of Colonialism,” trans. Michele M. Mason, in Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context, and Critique, ed. Michele M. Mason and Helen Lee (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), 64, 72. As demonstrated throughout this dissertation, while highly polemical today, it was not uncommon for critics of the Meiji state’s treatment of the Ainu to refer to the Japanese settlement of Ainu land as an “invasion.” 21 See Horace Capron, ed., Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi (Tokyo: Kaitakushi, 1975). It was, moreover, a matter of common sense that the seemingly benign development or settlement of Ainu territories was an act of colonization in Meiji era colonial discourse. For example, an English-Japanese dictionary published by the Kaitakushi translated the English word “to colonize” as “to grow a population” (hito wo umawaru) as well as “to open up new land” (shinchi wo aku). Arai Ikunosuke ed., Eiwa taiyaku jisho (Tokyo: Kobayashi Shinbē, 1872), 85.

287 of Indigenous land. Accordingly, by suppressing or disavowing Ainu political, social, or cultural institutions, Japanese settlers developed the “empty,” “ownerless” terra nullius of Hokkaido as an export-driven resource colony. This depended on the Japanese dispossession of the Ainu, who, as a result, were violently pushed to the outer margins of settler society as corpus nullius: legally nullified bodies. Settlers grew rich by dispossessing the Ainu of resources which they depended on for survival, leaving displaced Ainu to starve. Far from benign and romantic, settler colonial developmentalism is, then, a violent if not an inherently genocidal process.

To this day, Japanese sovereignty over Hokkaido depends disavowal of the colony’s coloniality, just as it depends on the continuous de-indigenization of the Ainu. As we have seen, this has historically been achieved through narratives of the Ainu as “proto-Japanese,” as wandering nomads with no ties to the land, or as racially degenerated to the point of having lost their settler-defined “Ainuness.” Through the 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act

(Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo-hō), the Meiji government simply declared the Ainu non-Indigenous.

While the Japanese government abolished the Protection Act in 1997 and officially recognized the indigeneity of the Ainu in 2008, settlers’ claims of the non-being of the Ainu remain widespread. Okawada Akira and Mark Winchester call such assertions, spread today primarily through social media, “Ainu denialism” (Ainu hitei-ron). As a prime example, they point to a now infamous 2014 tweet by Sapporo municipal councilor Kaneko Yasuyuki in which he announced to his constituents, “The Ainu people simply don’t exist anymore today, do they? At best, we can call them Japanese of Ainu descent, but it’s absurd that they keep exercising their

288 rights as Indigenous people. I cannot explain this to the taxpayers.”22 Okawada and Winchester rightly label this and other attempts to de-indigenize the Ainu as a form of “hate speech,” and compare it to anti-Zainichi Korean rhetoric. However, we must also contextualize such utterances within Hokkaido as a settler colony. As a colonial discourse, “Ainu denialism” is doing the work of terra nullius. Such conceptual erasures of Ainu bodies on the land serve only to buttress Japanese claims of sovereignty. And, not limited to rhetoric, the Japanese state continues to treat Ainu human remains as corpora nullius as well. For example, under growing pressure by Ainu activists and Japanese allies, institutions in Japan and overseas have begun to return bones stolen from Ainu gravesites to their descendants. However, a great many of these bones have not been returned to Ainu communities, but have instead been transferred to purpose- built ossuaries on the grounds of Hokkaido University in Sapporo or the new Ainu museum (the so-called Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony) in nearby Shiraoi. Both institutions are public, meaning the bones will remain in the hands of the state as a form of property. A great many of the bones stolen from Ainu gravesites, in other words, have only “symbolically” been returned to

Ainu communities. Making matters worse, journalist Kayoko Kimura notes that “These bones may be made available for purposes such as academic research upon request.”23

Forming the basis of the doctrine of terra nullius, the physical and conceptual erasure of the Ainu, together with the settler colonial state’s appropriation of the land and all flora and

22 Okawada Akira and Māku Winchesutā [Mark Winchester], eds., Ainu minzoku hiteiron ni kō suru (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2015), 6-7. 23 Kayoko Kimura, “Japan's indigenous Ainu Sue to Bring Their Ancestors' Bones Back Home,” The Japan Times, July 25, 2018, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/07/25/national/japans-indigenous-ainu-sue-bring-ancestors- bones-back-home/#.XHme5IhKiHs

289 fauna thereon, facilitates the ongoing Japanese colonization of Hokkaido to this day.

Accordingly, exogenous sovereignty is remains predicated on the forever-deferred erasure of the

Ainu as an Indigenous people. However, just as Foucault described his terrible surprise when the objects of his research criticized his writing, comparing himself to a coroner whose incision is met with a scream, some, such as the abovementioned Kaneko Yasuyuki, become deeply unsettled by the continued presence of the purportedly non-existent Ainu on the land.24 Their very survival challenges narratives of their own disappearance as well as the purported non- coloniality of Japanese Hokkaido. More than this, however, the presence of the Ainu proves that the myth of terra nullius, upon which Japanese sovereignty over Hokkaido depends, is just that.

24 Foucault, Speech Begins After Death, 42.

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