The Origins and Nature of the Matsumae Domain

Two characteristics of the Matsumae domain had a decisive influence on the formation of Hokkaido society and institutions, including, of course, the herring fishery. The first was the presence of a sizable indigenous ethnic group, the Ainu. The second was the lack of agriculture, particularly rice cultivation, on an economically significant scale. The two are more closely related than they might appear, for the ready availability of opportunities to trade with the Ainu gave domain leaders little incentive to promote farming. The domain's reliance on the Ainu trade and its consequent lack of an agricultural base meant that its institutions were founded

upon a set of mutual dependencies: the Ainu's dependence on Japanese commodities; its own dependence on the Ainu trade and the merchants who managed that trade; and the merchants' dependence on the domain for protection and privileges. The domain manipulated these dependencies to its own advantage by keeping the Wajin and Ainu populations separate and by reserving to itself the right to regulate trade and other contact between the two peoples. Matsumae institutions were thus not only highly conducive to commercialization, they were predicated upon it. Moreover, insofar as the Ezochi was left largely to the Ainu and the merchants sent to exploit them, the domain's position did not change even after trade was supplanted by fishing with Ainu labor.

The same institutions that were so well suited to commercialization, however, proved vulnerable in the face of the beginnings of capitalist development. Unlike the contract-fishery system, which worked to the mutual advantage of the domain and the contractors, the capitalist fishery developed outside Matsumae's network of dependencies. Rather, it emerged out of the household fishery and used Wajin instead of Ainu labor. As a result, large-scale fishing operations ceased to be the functional equivalent of the Ainu trade; and without the Ainu trade the domain had no legitimate reason to exist. Let us begin, then, with an examination of the institutional structure of the Ainu trade.

Bands of "armed merchants," as Kaiho Mineo calls them, began making incursions into Hokkaido from northern Honshu in the twelfth century, if not earlier.^[6] By the mid-fifteenth century about a dozen strongmen, most notably Takeda Nobuhiro (1431-94), progenitor of the Kakizaki (later Matsumae) house, had established forts (tate ) in the Oshima peninsula in southern Hokkaido. Although they maintained ties to the warlords fighting for hegemony in Honshu, they differed from other Sengoku-period military men in that control over trade, not land, was their principal goal. Between 1457 and 1672 Wajin intruders fought against the Ainu and among themselves; Ainu natives fought against the Wajin and among themselves ; and all the while Wajin fishers and merchants established footholds in places like Nobuhiro's base of Kaminokuni and the port of Usukeshi (later Hakodate).^[7]

The Matsumae domain became a part of the bakuhan state even before the Wajin-Ainu struggle had reached a decisive conclusion. The head of the Kakizaki house, renamed Matsumae Yoshihiro, received documents from the national hegemons Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1593) and Tokugawa leyasu (1604) affirming his right to trade with the Ainu.^[8] The documents gave the Matsumae neither specific territorial rights nor a fic-

tive rice income, although in practice the head of the Matsumae house was usually accorded treatment equivalent to an outside (tozama ) daimyo with a 10,000-koku income. Moreover, the Matsumae did not have formal authority over the Ainu. Ieyasu's letter, which provided the model for those issued at each shogunal succession, granted the Matsumae house the power to regulate all Wajin human and commercial traffic between Hokkaido and Honshu, and it prohibited mistreatment of the Ainu, but a proviso specifically stated that the Ainu were free to come and go as they pleased.

The Ainu retained their formal freedom of movement until the failure of a war against Matsumae in 1672; the document issued in 1682, on the accession of the fifth shogun, Tsunayoshi, guaranteed them mobility only within the Ezochi.^[9] Ainu boats in fact traded in ports in Tsugaru and the Shimokita peninsula through at least the 1640s, and the Ainu leaders of Shakushain's War (1669-72) clearly expected to secure steady supplies of necessary commodities from Tohoku domains had their struggle for independence from Matsumae been successful; evidence suggests that Tsugaru, at least, would have been happy to accommodate them. Even after 1672 Ainu in southern Hokkaido apparently maintained sporadic contact with the isolated Tohoku Ainu communities that survived in the Tsugaru and Shimokita peninsulas, and Ainu fishing boats, such as the one that landed near the Shimokita village of Shimofuro in 1833, occasionally drifted across the Tsugaru Strait. (In that instance the two Ainu fishers aboard were returned safely home after Nanbu domain officials first interrogated, then wined and dined, them.) These examples and the bakufu's formal guarantees of freedom notwithstanding, however, the Matsumae domain was generally successful in restricting Ainu access to markets outside of the Ezochi even before 1672.^[10]

Shakushain's War, put down in 1672 by the Matsumae domain with the help (at bakufu orders) of Tsugaru, was the final attempt by the Ainu to preserve their political independence and regain control over the terms of their economic relations with the Wajin.^[11] Shakushain, the chieftain of the Hidaka Ainu of eastern Hokkaido, led the struggle after the domain imposed a drastic reduction in the size of rice bales used for exchange, a move that made all Japanese commodities much more expensive for the Ainu. Shakushain's ultimate goal, however, was not simply to rectify the terms of trade but rather to eliminate the Wajin from Hokkaido entirely and thereby reestablish the Ainu's right to trade freely in Honshu.^[12]

Although a bakufu official reportedly countered Shakushain's vow to eliminate the Wajin from Hokkaido with a threat to "kill all the Ainu"

(Ezo nokorazu metsubo ),^[13] it would be a mistake to ascribe Shakushain's War primarily to ethnic hatred. Economic interest, rather than ethnic identity, motivated the actors in the conflict. This interest can be seen most readily in the presence of Ainu troops and spies in the Matsumae and Tsugaru forces, on the one hand, and in the participation of at least four Wajin on behalf of the Ainu, on the other hand. Indeed, one of the Wajin, Shodayu of Dewa province, was Shakushain's son-in-law.^[14] More significantly, the Ainu rebellion failed in large part because Shakushain was unable to forge a viable alliance among the five major Hokkaido Ainu groups, whose relations had long been characterized by competition and conflict. Indeed, in 1668, just a year before Ainu forces launched attacks upon Wajin gold miners and falconers in the Ezochi, Shakushain had arranged the murder of a rival leader, Onibishi, thus breaking a truce between the two groups that a leading Matsumae retainer, Shimonokuni Hirosue, had mediated in 1655. According to Kaiho, competition for access to fish and animal pelts to trade with the domain had caused the dispute between the two chieftains.^[15] Onibishi's supporters immediately approached the domain for weapons, provisions, and other assistance in their planned war of retribution. The domain did not provide support, and, thanks to apparently unfounded rumors that an emissary from Onibishi's group had been poisoned by domain officials, many of the slain chieftain's supporters eventually rallied around Shakushain's banner.^[16] 16 In any event, the incident reveals that the Ainu were anything but a monolithic group.

The Matsumae domain, fearful of losing its territory, chose to try to bring the war to a quick conclusion rather than pursue total victory. Nevertheless, it took nearly three years for the domain forces to win a compromise settlement, in which the Ainu retained formal autonomy throughout most of Hokkaido and won important concessions on the rice-bale issue that was the immediate cause of the conflict. Still, it was enough of a victory that by the time the smoke cleared the Ainu had been driven out of the Oshima peninsula and into subjugation and Hokkaido was clearly divided into an area for the Wajin (the Wajinchi) and another for the Ainu (the Ezochi).

Kaiho has argued that the area of exclusive Wajin residence, the Wajinchi,^[17] originally represented a Wajin sphere of influence, not unlike those held by a number of major Ainu chieftains. Shakushain's War resulted in both the defeat of politically powerful Ainu leaders and an expansion of the Wajin sphere, but the Matsumae victory was not nearly so complete as to permit the complete absorption of all of Hokkaido into

the domain. The domain instead ensured its monopoly over the Ainu-Wajin trade by formally segregating the two groups: Ainu could live and travel only within the Ezochi, and Wajin could enter the Ezochi only with domain permission and then only for limited periods. After the Ainu defeat in 1672 the Wajinchi was expanded to encompass most of the Oshima peninsula rather than the small district in the Matsumae peninsula that the Matsumae had controlled since 1550. As Kaiho has noted, the enlarged Wajinchi still comprised only about four percent of the area of Hokkaido, but, at 3,374 square kilometers (about the size of Rhode Island), it was larger than six modern prefectures and, of course, the overwhelming majority of early-modern domains. The effectiveness of the segregation policy can be seen, on the one hand, in the decline of the Ainu population of the Wajinchi from 152 in 1717 to 97 in 1761 and 12 in 1788, and, on the other hand, in the growth in the year-round Wajin population from 15,530 in 1716 to 26,564 in 1787.^[18] The separation of the Wajin and Ainu populations not only facilitated the domain's enforcement of its bakufu-sanctioned monopoly on contact between the two peoples but also assured domain control over the development of the fishery when it eventually emerged. Indeed, it worked so well that Emori Susumu has suggested that the creation of the Wajinchi was the product of deliberate domain policy, rather than an ad hoc response to the incomplete military victory of 1672.^[19]

The domain's segregation policy worked because the Ainu needed to trade. After their defeat by the Wajin, Ainu groups in southern and central Hokkaido could not simply retreat to the self-sufficiency of their ancestors. Centuries of contact with the Wajin had made the native people dependent on Japanese commodities, particularly ironware. Ainu leaders therefore had little choice but to continue their trade relationship with the Wajin. Moreover, because the war had resulted in the elimination of Ainu chieftains capable of commanding broad, regional loyalty, the native people succumbed to their exploitation without significant physical resistance, aside from a bloody uprising of mistreated fishery workers in northeastern Hokkaido in 1789.^[20]

The Matsumae domain organized the Ainu trade through the creation of some sixty trading posts (akinaiba ) along the Ezochi coast, each corresponding roughly to the area under the influence of a local Ainu leader.^[21] Under the system important retainers or the daimyo himself held exclusive rights to trade with local Ainu; a corollary, imposed after the failure of Shakushain's War, was that the Ainu had to trade with the retainer who held the nearest post. The system was functionally equivalent to en-

feoffment in other domains, although, as Kaiho has noted, it was predicated on exchange (however disadvantageous to the Ainu) rather than outright expropriation, and the retainers had no rights in the land per se.^[22]

The retainers were permitted an annual trading mission to the posts under their control. Trade took a corrupted form of the Ainu umsa ceremony, in which an exchange of "gifts" accompanied a ritual submission to Wajin "protection" by the Ainu. The samurai derived monetary income by marketing the tribute received in this manner in Honshu. The institution did not, however, survive long in its original form. Sometime in the early eighteenth century ranking samurai began turning operation of their trading posts over to merchants in exchange for an annual fee. Both sides benefited, as the retainers were assured of a stable income and the merchants could utilize their connections in Omi and Osaka to run the posts at a profit. This sort of arrangement became more or less universal by the middle of the eighteenth century, when it became known as the contracting system (basho ukeoisei ).

The position of merchants in the domain would have been strong even had the Ainu trade been their only area of influence. It was doubly so, then, because of their role in the economy of a domain almost devoid of agricultural production. The Matsumae domain, born of trade, never made a serious attempt to overcome the considerable (but perhaps not insurmountable) difficulties associated with creating an economy based on agriculture in Hokkaido's harsh, northern climate. Rice was in fact beyond the capabilities of the time, but hardier grains like barley and millet were grown and taxed and could have formed the basis of an agricultural economy. In northern Tohoku , where the climate was not much more favorable for farming than in southern Hokkaido, virtually all Ainu had been assimilated, expelled, or exterminated before the Edo period, with the result that medieval trade networks disintegrated and the Tsugaru and Nanbu domains were left to develop institutions predicated upon the centrality of rice cultivation, however impractical that might be.^[23]

The inability of the Matsumae domain to produce enough food to feed its population meant, of course, that the residents of the Wajinchi had to rely on trade with Honshu to acquire necessary commodities. Matsumae thus proved to be an especially congenial environment for merchant capital to dominate the domain and its population. Powerful merchant houses emerged in the three authorized ports of Fukuyama, Esashi, and Hakodate. The most influential merchants originated in the province of Omi and particularly the villages of Satsuma, Yanagawa, and Hachiman on the shores of Lake Biwa. The domain recognized their power by allowing them to form a special organization, the Ryohamagumi ,

which received preferential treatment in transactions involving the domain. The Ryohama merchants acted as shipping and marketing agents for samurai involved in the Ainu trade and dealt in marine products from the Wajinchi, buying either from small fishers or from the domain's stock of tax fish. They guided commodities entering and leaving Hokkai-do through the customs houses (okinokuchi bansho ) in the three authorized ports and either operated or were closely allied to the shipping agencies that carried merchandise down the Japan Sea coast and around to Osaka. Many of them eventually became involved in the contract fishery system.^[24]

Let us pause here to consider the Matsumae domain's position within the Tokugawa polity and how the unusual circumstances of its origins affect our understanding of the nature of that polity. First, the "state" here refers both narrowly to the Matsumae domain and more broadly to the bakuhan system as whole. The imprecise use of such a key term merely reflects the ambivalent nature of the Tokugawa polity. In principle, the 260 or so domains retained autonomous authority over their own lands and people, while the bakufu exercised power over matters of national concern. In fact, the functional autonomy of the domains varied greatly depending on their size, location, and the historical relationship of their lords to the Tokugawa shogun; and in any case the domains widely emulated bakufu policies even when they were not, strictly speaking, required to do so.^[25] In short, the domains articulated policies only within broad outlines established by the bakufu. Matsumae was no exception to this rule, its unique location, climate, and ethnic makeup notwithstanding. The contract-fishery system, like all of Matsumae's institutional responses to its unusual situation, was predicated upon the domain's participation as an integral part of the bakuhan system. Any reference to the policies of the Matsumae "state" must therefore carry with it at least an awareness of the sanctioning power of the bakufu.

Our discussion here is further complicated by the confusing administrative history of the island of Hokkaido. For most of the Tokugawa period Hokkaido was under the administration of the Matsumae domain, and the institutions of the commercial herring fishery all developed under its auspices. In that sense, the "state" with which fishers, contractors, and other participants in the fishing economy were most immediately concerned was the Matsumae domain. However, the bakufu twice assumed direct administration over large parts of Hokkaido, first between 1799 and 1821 and again from 1834 until the collapse of the Tokugawa regime in 1868; during the latter period, moreover, it assigned parcels of territory to six northeastern Honshu domains. Finally, both Matsumae

and the bakufu distinguished between the Wajinchi, seen as the "home" territory of the domain, and the Ezochi, which was ostensibly the autonomous realm of the Ainu, even if under the effective political control of Matsumae and the economic domination of the contract-fishery operators. Any ambiguities regarding Hokkaido's sovereignty concerned the Ezochi alone.

Asao Naohiro has argued that the three institutional pillars of the Tokugawa order were the policy of national "seclusion" (sakoku ), the use of putative rice yields (kokudaka ) to organize economic and political institutions, and the separation of the samurai and peasantry (heino bunri ).^[26] The case of Matsumae reveals how surprisingly supple Tokugawa political institutions were in practice. The domain, as Kaiho has pointed out, seemingly met none of Asao's criteria for participation in the bakuhan system: its relations with the Ainu undermined the principle of "seclusion"; its failure to conduct land surveys and extremely low agricultural productivity left it without even a nominal assessed yield; and, consequently, there was no agricultural peasantry from which to separate the samurai.^[27] Yet Matsumae was an integral part of the Tokugawa state. This apparent paradox can be resolved through a closer examination of each of these defining features of the early modern polity.

As the revisionist scholarship of Ronald Toby, Arano Yasunori, and others has demonstrated, the notion of national "seclusion" seriously misrepresents the Tokugawa bakufu's foreign policy.^[28] Arano instead writes of the bakufu's prohibition on foreign travel (kaikin ) in the context of a bifurcated international order of "civilized" and "barbarian" countries modeled after the traditional Sinocentric world view (ka-i chitsujo ). Seen in this way, the bakufu's ordering of foreign contacts conformed to practice elsewhere in East Asia.^[29] The prohibition of foreign travel did not isolate Japan but rather ensured that foreign relations would be conducted according to terms set by the bakufu. Inasmuch as the bakufu delegated responsibility for maintaining contacts with Korea, Ryukyu, and the Ainu to the Tsushima, Satsuma, and Matsumae domains as part of their respective feudal obligations, the fact that Matsumae was not "secluded" merely reflects its role as the bakufu's proxy.^[30] .

A major purpose of the kokudaka system was to make explicit the relative status of the daimyo and hence to order their feudal obligations to the shogun.^[31] Agricultural productivity was, at least in the early seventeenth century, a reasonable indicator of a domain's wealth and hence its ability to support the military potential that formed the core of its obligations to the bakufu. But there was never a necessary correlation between a domain's actual productivity—its "real" kokudaka —and its relative

standing in the institutional hierarchy of the bakuhan state, as reflected by its official kokudaka . In that respect, Matsumae's lack of agricultural production was not important so long as its obligations to the bakufu were clean Although it did in fact take more than a century for the bakufu finally to determine the value of Matsumae's contribution to the functioning of the Tokugawa state, its core obligation—maintenance of trade relations with the Ainu—remained unchanged throughout the early modern period.^[32]

Kitajima Masamoto, following Sasaki Junnosuke, distinguishes between the separation of the samurai and peasantry (heino bunri ) as an organic process—that is, as a by-product of the social division of labor in late-sixteenth-century central Honshu—and heino bunri as an institution of the Tokugawa state, imposed in areas where a clear distinction between warriors and cultivators had not yet emerged.^[33] In Matsumae the separation of the samurai from the merchants—the functional equivalent of heino bunri —was clearly an artificial imposition, and an incomplete one at that, considering the fact that the daimyo and his retainers traded with the Ainu^[34] The fact remains, however, that the same social distinctions between samurai and nonsamurai were observed in Matsumae as elsewhere. In this critical respect Matsumae was no exception to the rule. After all, the point of the process was to identify the samurai as a distinct and privileged class.

In sum, Matsumae was hardly a "typical" domain, yet it conformed, in function if not form, to the major institutional patterns of the Tokugawa state. Matsumae's participation in the bakuhan system ensured that in responding to its unique circumstances its point of reference would always be the institutions of the broader state. In other words, for our purposes, social and economic relations within the herring fishery developed securely within the context of Tokugawa feudalism. This observation by no means denies the importance of the Hokkaido environment for the development of proto-industrial and capitalist production. Rather, it simply reveals that the Tokugawa polity was organized around a set of universal principles, which could be adapted even to such an unlikely location as Hokkaido.