Subjecthood and Entrepreneurship

If they wanted to, small fishers "could make forty to fifty yen in just a month or two working at the pound-trap fisheries. They make no attempt to secure this attractive income, and instead spend their time scheming up ways to poach fish because of their unspeakably bad feelings toward the pound-trap operators and their contempt for working for others."^[95] In a world of market rationality, the fishers would have worked for the pound-trap operators. They would have been assured of steady employment and a reasonably stable—if not especially high—in-come. They would have been relieved of the need to set fire to the Odomari District Office building or to train their children to look out for police. And they would have remained wage laborers for the rest of their lives.

The family fishers of Karafuto were rational, but their rationality was not confined to the marketplace. They wanted steady employment and a stable income, and would have preferred to avoid poaching and arson, but not at the cost of remaining wage laborers for the rest of their lives. They valued independence over material security, especially because they understood that the material security of wage labor could be ephemeral without control over the processes of production.

Independence ultimately represented freedom, not from risk but from the business decisions of employers who had no long-term interest in

their workers' ability to earn a livelihood. Like the family fishers, the Ainu of southern Karafuto (who had preserved their traditional economy) understood what was at stake and tried to remain aloof from the exogenous dependency of the labor market. A 1910 newspaper article reported that only two Ainu fisheries actually employed Ainu because "the natives [dojin ] dislike working as fishing laborers." The problem was that the summer trout season interfered with their farming schedule, and the September salmon runs overlapped with the fall hunting season. Those who traded their self-sufficiency for cash incomes found themselves completely dependent on their employers for their livelihood, but the wages paid to Ainu—about thirty yen for a six-month period—were not enough to support a family through the winter.^[96]

Laborers from Honshu did not have the luxury of opting for self-sufficiency: "A poor harvest throughout the Tohoku region this year is expected to force an unusually large number of small farmers to seek work at fisheries [in Hokkaido and Karafuto] next season," reported a newspaper in 1913.^[97] They consequently had to accept whatever was offered in Karafuto. Typically, laborers received (and used) a large portion of their seasonal wage in advance, before New Year's, so that all they got after fishing was payment representing a share of the catch. If there was no catch, they received nothing. In 1915, a disastrous season on the east coast forced fishers to release their employees in June. Empty-handed and "empty-bellied laborers fill the road to Toyohara," where, "because they do not have money to get home, they have to find some kind of work. . . . This is by no means the first time, as this kind of thing is seen to a greater or lesser extent every year."^[98]

Still, getting paid to starve in Karafuto was better than starving for free in Aomori. Anyone willing to suffer abuse on top of that could do even better. "People say that the Sato fishery [in Kushunnai] differs from others in that it hires only exceptionally strong workers, and for wages thirty percent higher than elsewhere, but in return works them rather hard." In 1912, more than thirty laborers simultaneously got diarrhea from the poor water and tried to take time off. "The foreman thought it was their usual trick of feigning sickness to avoid work, so, using brute force, got the sick laborers out of bed and put them to work at an especially arduous task. Seeing this, their healthy coworkers became furious," declared a strike, and began wrecking the buildings at the fishery. Thirty-one workers were eventually arrested, and four were tried and sentenced to terms ranging from three months to a year.^[99]

Of course, most laborers made it through the fishing season without

being laid off or put into jail, and former gill-netters, as skilled workers, would have been in a better position than unskilled hands from Tohoku Nevertheless, lacking control over their work conditions and daily routine, they would have suffered the same fundamental vulnerability as other wage laborers.

Gill-netters, dependent on credit and markets, were in a precarious position themselves, but the measure of control they retained over their day-to-day affairs gave them an air of respectability that fishery workers lacked. In contrast, wage laborers, whether at fisheries, construction sites, mines, or lumberyards, occupied the lowest rung of the Karafuto social ladder. Their "betters" despised them: "Fishery workers from Aomori are, as a rule, lazy. . . but those from Nanbu [i.e., the Shimokita peninsula] and [the] Tsugaru [peninsula] are especially bad."^[100] Manual laborers from Tohoku were soft and prone to drink too much, said one newspaper editorial, and were therefore practically useless. Local labor was even worse. What Karafuto's construction sites and coal mines needed was cheap and sturdy Koreans.^[101] (The authorities eventually acted on the idea, with the result that thousands of Koreans were left stranded after World War II in Sakhalin, where they remain.)^[102]

A gill-netter who turned to wage labor was unlikely ever to become a gill-netter again. But a fisher who made the step down surrendered more than his means of production in the transition. He gave up his social status and his chance for material success. His peers, instead of being small fishers like himself, were now the younger sons of tenant farmers from the depressed hill country of northern Honshu, at best semiskilled workers with no special affinity for fishing. What for a Tohoku peasant was an attractive opportunity to supplement agricultural income with much-needed cash was for a former gill-net fisher the end of the road.

That was reason enough to cling to gill-net fishing, but independence offered something more—the chance to move up to pound-trap fishing and the world of the petty entrepreneur. As we have seen, by the turn of the twentieth century it was nearly impossible for gill-netters in Hokkaido to convert to pound-trap fishing. It was very expensive (it cost about 13,500 yen, exclusive of land, labor, and fees, to start a pound-trap fishery in 1913),^[103] and it was difficult to obtain good waterfront land at a reasonable price. But even in Hokkaido small fishers, if they were very lucky and well connected, could occasionally make the transition. The odds did not have to be good—so long as they were not nil—to keep hope alive. And the odds for small fishers were bound to be better in Karafuto than in Hokkaido.

The family fishers' decision to move to Karafuto was thus based on a rational assessment of the best way to realize their dreams of success. But more than just dreams, they also had a right to success or at least a right to a chance for success. When the Karafuto government tried to undercut the independence that was a prerequisite to social advancement, they resisted. Significantly, their resistance took the form of a movement to change the law—that is, to gain social affirmation of their right to independence. In this they differed from the small fishers who sailed up the west coast of Hokkaido in 18.55 cutting pound traps in a violent denial of the new technology and all that it implied.

The differences between the net slashers of 1855 and the petitioners of a half-century later were not simply fortuitous. Rather, they reflect a shift in political discourse that was itself a by-product of the economic changes Japan had seen during that period. As Andrew Gordon puts it, "The rise of Japan as a nation-state and a capitalist society led to important changes in popular thought and behaviour."^[104] Gordon characterizes the period between 1905 and 1918 as a transitional one in the history of urban disturbances, in which city dwellers, often influenced by organized interest groups—politicians, lawyers, journalists, small businessmen, and the like—demonstrated a new national political awareness. The years framed by the Hibiya riots of 1905 and the rice riots of 1918 are the starting point for Gordon's inquiry into the nature of "imperial democracy" during the first three decades of the twentieth century.^[105] By extension, the period marks the end of traditional political discourse characterized by a concern with moral economy.

The petit-bourgeois consciousness of the Karafuto fishers, combined with the presence of journalists and shopkeepers in the movement, gave their actions a tone very similar to that of crowds in Tokyo during the same period. The contrast with the traditional style of protest employed by participants in the rice riots on the Toyama coast in 1918 is striking.^[106] At first glance this contrast seems paradoxical since the Toyama protests not only occurred in fishing villages but in an area with strong ties to Hokkaido and Karafuto.^[107] However, the gill-net movement was an expression of the Karafuto fishers' desire for economic independence, while the rice riots of Toyama were motivated by the subsistence concerns of villagers still tied largely (but not wholly) to a household economy. In other words, the Toyama protests were about eating, while the Karafuto conflict was about the terms of participation in the new economic order.

The Toyama villagers' use of traditional forms of protest recalled a time when the relative social standing of peasant protesters was not the

focus of debate. During the Tokugawa period peasants could appeal to the benevolence of the lord only because all concerned parties understood the social and political distance between lord and peasant. Tokugawa peasants in effect manipulated their subordinate position to pressure the authorities into accommodating their demands.^[108] In Toyama the same strategy worked because the issue was the rectification of specific moral wrongs attributable to state policy and the rapacity of individual merchants.

In Karafuto, however, the ultimate issue—though the principals did not always realize it—was where people fit in the newly redefined social and economic hierarchy. A sort of moral economy was still operative, but instead of appealing for benevolence, protesters demanded fair treatment as imperial subjects. The protesters in Karafuto had in effect already posited for themselves a place in the new order—a place the state did not accept. As a result, the two groups worked at cross purposes: the small fishers considered themselves as entitled as anyone to reap the benefits of entrepreneurship, while officials were eager to see them resign themselves to a life of wage labor because that position better fit government plans for the economic development of Karafuto. Unlike Tokugawa peasant protests, or even the 1918 Toyama rice riots, critical mutual assumptions of social and economic roles and responsibilities were not operative in Karafuto.

This perspective sheds light on earlier conflicts, such as the Chichibu rebellion of 1884, as well. Scholars generally portray the Chichibu conflict as an important transitional event, but they differ on whether it was primarily the last gasp of the old moral economy or the first articulation of a new political consciousness. Herbert Bix and Irwin Scheiner arrive at the first view, albeit via very different routes, while Irokawa Daikichi and Roger Bowen both see Chichibu as an expression of grass-roots democracy—indigenous for Irokawa, imported from the West for Bowen—consistent with Japan's broader modern transformation.^[109] Perhaps Chichibu is so difficult to interpret because it combined elements of both old and new styles of protest: the rebels were fighting both for their right to subsistence in accordance with old notions of moral economy and for a new position as citizens in the Meiji state. It is suggestive that protoindustrial silk-thread production was the backbone of the Chichibu economy: on the eve of the rebellion up to eighty percent of the local people were involved in some way in sericulture.^[110] We might speculate that the Chichibu rebels' experience in rural manufacturing under the Toku-

gawa regime gave rise to a moral economy for rational peasants like that of the Karafuto fishers.

Ironically, once the family fishers of Karafuto had attained their hard-earned independence, they had to learn that, with the gradual collapse of the fishing industry, that kind of independence was becoming obsolete. Pound-trap operators all relied on the outside to keep themselves in business. Even those who financed their own fishing operations depended on fertilizer brokers in Hakodate and Osaka to market their produce, while the others had to throw themselves at the mercy of supply merchants every autumn.

Yonebayashi Isaburo , a former laborer who later rose to become a fishing tycoon in Karafuto, went bankrupt in a spectacular example of what could happen if the supply merchants' mercy was not forthcoming. In 1910 bad fishing and bad management forced him to run up a three or four hundred thousand yen tab with Hakodate merchants. He needed at least another quarter-million yen to finance his 1911 operations. Extending a total of a half-million yen or more of credit to a single fisher was out of Hakodate's league, so Yonebayashi was forced to approach the really big suppliers in Kobe . A Tamura Ichiro lent him 500,000 yen, but he had to put all his fisheries up as collateral (they normally would have been worth 800,000 yen). The 1911 season did not work out, and Yonebayashi lost everything. The last anyone heard, he had moved to Korea to make a new start, but the word in Hakodate was that no one would lend him as much as five hundred yen.^[111] At least no one suggested that he become a fishery laborer again.