Situating the Frontier in Hokkaido

Remote, cold, and inhabited by the aboriginal Ainu people, Hokkaido has always straddled a physical, political, and intellectual boundary, its status as Japanese territory both conditional and suspect. The specter of Russian claims to the island—potential, not real, and in any case predicated upon expansionist ambitions rather than actual economic engagement—have long accentuated this condition. This image of Hokkaido is a political as well as an intellectual construct: throughout the modern period policies of "development" (kaitaku, takushoku, kaihatsu ) have reinforced the island's frontier identity. Intellectually, these policies have relegated Hokkaido not merely to the edge of the map but to an inset, utterly detached from the social and economic history of the rest of Japan.

To be sure, Hokkaido in many respects deserves its reputation as an untamed wilderness. The British consul at Hakodate in 1859 aptly described Hokkaido as "a nutshell," with "innumerable fishing villages"

along the coast but not "a city, town, or village of importance five miles" inland.^[45] Even after a quarter century of colonization under the official auspices of the Meiji government, an English visitor, A. H. Savage Landor, considered his horseback ride around the circumference of the island so trying that he wrote a self-congratulatory travelogue to commemorate the feat.^[46] (Of course, sensible travelers went by steamship.) To this day, Hokkaido's sparse population and wide-open spaces (at least by Japanese standards) endow it in the popular imagination with qualities of youth and natural vigor but not a sense of history.

The frontier is a product of history. Any discussion of Hokkaido's history that starts with the assumption that it is and always has been Japan's northern frontier necessarily, even if inadvertently, distorts the process by which the island and its people were absorbed into the Japanese polity. The prevailing image of Hokkaido as a frontier was, in effect, superimposed upon the island by the Meiji state and its colonial policies. For discussions of agricultural immigration this superimposed imagery has an element of authenticity, but for our purposes it is misleading. A look below the surface of Hokkaido's uncertain sovereign status before the Meiji era illuminates the continuities that underlay the superficial disruptions of the nineteenth century and, consequently, places the economic processes that are the focus of this study into better perspective.

Reducing Hokkaido's history to its frontier nature, moreover, risks trivializing the impact of capitalist development on its residents, Wajin and Ainu alike. Wajin wage laborers in Hokkaido—whether in the fishing, mining, lumber, or other industries—had a tough and untamed image, not unlike that of Hokkaido itself. It is all too easy to ascribe the de-humanizing aspect of work in Hokkaido to the isolation and primitive conditions of the physical environment and, consequently, to overlook the exploitative nature of wage labor in a burgeoning capitalist economy. But the fact is that poor, tenant farmers from northeastern Honshu did not seek work in the fishery or other Hokkaido industries in response to a romantic call of the wild or out of a desire to further the expansion of the Meiji state; they went because they needed to make a living, and Hokkaido was the most reasonable place for them to seek that living. It was the work , not the place, that stripped them of an element of their humanity.

Likewise, the decline of Ainu culture and society was as much a by-product of centuries of economic dependency as a consequence of the Meiji state's aggressive policy of assimilation through deculturation. One important reason that the Meiji state's deculturation policies, which

sought to eliminate the Ainu language, religion, and other manifestations of the native culture, were so devastatingly effective was that the Ainu economy had long since been disabled beyond hope of recovery. Trade originating in the medieval period and the proto-industrial production that eventually evolved out of it made the Ainu dependent for their subsistence upon the Matsumae domain and its agents, the contract-fishery operators. By the end of the Tokugawa period labor in the commercial fishery was at least as important to the Ainu economy as traditional hunting and gathering activities. The Ainu people's tragic history, in other words, began long before the Meiji state imposed its will upon them in the context of its program of colonial development.

The frontier is less a place than a relationship. Invoking the frontier as an explanatory device is unsatisfactory because it skirts the question of how Hokkaido came to be a frontier in the first place.^[47] The emergence of Hokkaido as Japan's northern frontier was a product of hundreds of years of cultural, economic, and military intercourse. Before the Tokugawa era Hokkaido was not a frontier in part because it is difficult to posit the sort of dyadic relationship between a center and a periphery that the concept of the frontier demands. People in northeastern Honshu and Hokkaido, whether Wajin or Ainu—and it is problematic even to apply ethnic labels like these before the fifteenth century—did not consistently recognize the imperial court in Kyoto, or its proxies, the Kamakura and Ashikaga bakufu, as sources of authority and legitimacy. Nor did they perceive themselves to be on a frontier—and for good reason: throughout much of the medieval period the port of Tosaminato on the Tsugaru peninsula in northernmost Honshu (now a sleepy fishing village) was a lively center of trade linking the Japan Sea region with northeastern Asia. The Ando , who controlled Tosaminato, called themselves the "shoguns" of "Hinomoto," a country they distinguished from Japan, and on at least one occasion dispatched emissaries to the Korean court.^[48] For the people living there, northern Honshu and Hokkaido was a political, economic, and diplomatic center in its own right. It appears peripheral only in hindsight.^[49]

Hokkaido became a political frontier only as a consequence of the establishment of a coherent centralized regime in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Tokugawa Japan defined itself in relation to other East Asian countries in such a way as to allow the Matsumae domain to act as an intermediary between Japan and the Ainu people.^[50] Hokkaido served as a buffer between Japan and areas to the north and east, and Matsumae was the custodian of that buffer.^[51] Absorbing Hokkaido fully

into the Japanese polity was not a goal of the state; indeed Matsumae's legitimacy hinged on most of Hokkaido's remaining formally distinct from, yet bound securely and subordinately to, the Tokugawa state.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century Hokkaido's ambiguous sovereign status had become untenable in the face of mounting Western pressure to establish commercial and diplomatic ties. Urban intellectuals at this time "discovered" Europe and in the process "discovered" the Ezochi, which for them was a vaguely defined and decidedly uncivilized wasteland that included Hokkaido, the Kurils, Sakhalin, and other areas to the north. Later historians, concerned primarily with policymakers' perceptions of the Russian threat, have tended to accept the intellectuals' misconstrual of the social and economic realities of Hokkaido at face value.^[52]

After 1868 the Meiji state treated Hokkaido as a colony and implemented policies of development to ensure that the Western powers would respect its claims to the island. Its juridical status as a colony notwithstanding, Hokkaido's situation was quite different from that of Korea, Taiwan, the South Pacific islands, and other territories acquired as a result of Japan's foray into modern imperialism. Rather, it was analogous to that of Okinawa, which, before its annexation by Japan in 1879, had been formally independent yet subordinated to Japan through the Satsuma domain. Both Hokkaido and Okinawa had been incorporated into the Tokugawa state's version of the East Asian world order without being considered fully part of Japan.

In sum, Hokkaido's peripheral location raises intriguing questions concerning ethnicity and the nature of sovereignty in the Tokugawa state; regional development and economic expansion in both the Tokugawa and Meiji periods; and the formation of social and economic structures in areas unencumbered, as it were, by centuries of local custom and administrative precedent. In every case, however, the answers to these questions must be formulated in relation to conditions in Japan as a whole and not simply as a response to life on a generic frontier.