Hokkaido: A History of Ethnic Transition and Development on Japan's Northern Island

Hokkaido

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Hokkaido A History of Ethnic Transition and Development on Japan’s Northern Island

ANN B. IRISH

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Irish, Ann B., 1934– Hokkaido : a history of ethnic transition and development on Japan’s northern island / Ann B. Irish. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4449-6 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Hokkaido (Japan)— History. 2. Hokkaido (Japan)— Discovery and exploration. 3. Hokkaido (Japan)— Ethnic relations. 4. Ainu — Japan — Hokkaido— History. 5. Ainu — Japan — Hokkaido— Social conditions. 6. Hokkaido (Japan)— Economic conditions. 7. Japan — Foreign relations— Russia. 8. Russia — Foreign relations— Japan. 9. Japan — Foreign relations— Soviet Union. 10. Soviet Union–Foreign relations— Japan. I. Title. DS894.25.I75 2009 952'.4 — dc22 2009028554 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2009 Ann B. Irish. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: (clockwise from upper left) Flag of Hokkaido prefecture; postcards of Ainu family in front of thatched-roof house and Ainu men in a bear ceremony (Hakodate Municipal Library); satellite image of Hokkaido, 2001 (NASA); view of Odori Park in Sapporo, 2004 (NKNS) Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

To Les

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Table of Contents 1

Preface

Part I. Becoming Hokkaido 1. The Place

7

2. The Ainu

23

3. The Matsumae Era

41

4. The Explorers

56

5. Hakodate

84

Part II. Development 6. The Pioneers

115

7. The Foreign Experts

143

8. Sapporo

160

9. Development and the Ainu

191

10. The Early Twentieth Century

216

11. War and Occupation

245

12. Hokkaido and Her Northern Neighbor

264

13. Recovery and Development

290

14. Hokkaido in the World Economy

307

Conclusion

327 333 337 341 343 352 361

Appendix 1. Hokkaido Chronology Appendix 2. Key Figures in Hokkaido History Appendix 3. Glossary Chapter Notes Bibliography Index

vii

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Preface When people think of Japan, Hokkaido may not usually come to mind. This work grew out of my desire to learn more about that northernmost island of the nation. In the country’s other three main islands— Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku — Japanese people have lived for many centuries, but ethnic Japanese, or Wajin, began coming to Hokkaido in large numbers only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Another people, the Ainu, long populated the island, but as more Wajin came, Ainu numbers fell appreciably and their way of life was forced to change. Knowing this, I began wondering about parallels between Hokkaido’s history and the history of the North American west, another frontier land, whose European settlers came at about the same time in history that the Wajin became dominant in Japan’s northern island. Thus I looked for a history of Hokkaido, only to learn that in the English language none apparently existed. I found many books on Ainu culture and not so many works on other aspects of Hokkaido. With some searching, however, one can find additional information about Hokkaido’s story in English language articles in journals, magazines and newspapers as well as internet sites. Hokkaido’s history differs significantly from the general history of Japan. The Japanese government promoted the expansion of Japanese influence and, later, settlement, in Hokkaido largely to keep the island out of the hands of the Russians, who held the land just across both the Japan Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk from Hokkaido, not many miles away. Hokkaido would be a natural stepping stone for Russians anxious to expand their territory, just as it was for Japanese. Hokkaido was influenced by other foreigners, too, including European and North American explorers and merchants. Anxious to develop this island whose climate differed so from the Japanese heartland, in the 1870s the Japanese government turned to Americans for expert assistance. One of the Americans, William S. Clark, who came to Sapporo to help start Hokkaido’s first college, is remembered even today in Japan for his parting words to his students: “Boys, be ambitious!”1 As I learned more about Hokkaido, my questions increased. The most insistent one involved the pioneers or colonists from other Japanese islands who settled in the northern island, often enduring much hardship. While many people have written in English about the Ainu, very little about the Wajin pioneers is available. Yet the story of Hokkaido— how it became the vigorous modern land it is today — is the story of the Ainu and the pioneering settlers, just as the story of the western United States and Canada is the story of Indians— Native Americans or First Peoples— and pioneers. Hokkaido’s story deserves to be better known to a western audience. The question

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PREFACE

was whether I could write the story, for my ability to read the Japanese language is limited. I have depended mainly on English language sources, but have also used a few in French and Japanese. Perhaps as an outsider — someone not a Hokkaido resident whether Ainu or not, nor a Japanese from another island — I can offer a useful perspective. In this book, I sometimes look at the island through eyes of the westerners, and specifically Americans, who came to Hokkaido. When describing Ainu life, for example, at times I report the perceptions of early travelers. I also center the book around aspects of the Hokkaido story that would be most meaningful and interesting to the western reader. However, by organizing each chapter around a particular theme of importance and choosing details that would resonate with a western audience, I may inadvertently leave the reader with a skewed view. For example, I have devoted a chapter to the westerners brought to Hokkaido in the nineteenth century to help with island development. This may unintentionally suggest that these outsiders had more influence than was actually the case. The reader should remember that Hokkaido, as part of Japan, reflects Japanese history and culture, as do other parts of the nation. It is important to remember that Japanese history is Hokkaido history. The northern island, though, also values its own unique story. One of the difficulties in writing about a region of a nation for a foreign audience is the need to include some national history for readers not well versed in it. This can help illustrate how the region’s history conforms, or does not conform, to the nation’s history as a whole. Which aspects of national history to address is a difficult decision; my goal has been neither to dwell long on the history of the Japanese people and nation nor to leave unexplained some aspects of the story of Japan which need elucidation in order to make Hokkaido’s story accurate and comprehensible. Anyone writing in English about Japan faces the problem of how to write Japanese names. I shall follow Japanese custom and write surnames first. Concerning Hokkaido, another problem emerges: what does one call the non–Ainu people of Hokkaido? If the word “Japanese” is used, the implication is that the Ainu are not Japanese. They are both people of Japan and citizens of Japan, however, and this makes them Japanese. For the non–Ainu Japanese, therefore, I have chosen to employ the Japanese word Wajin, which is often used to describe the settlers who came to Hokkaido from the other Japanese islands. (Wa means “Japanese,” and jin means “people.”) This usage creates a dilemma, however. Foreign words should be italicized, but Wajin appears so frequently, especially in Chapter 3, that I treat it as a well-known word and write it in roman type. Another problem is that Ainu words and names have been transliterated into English in different ways, so the reader should be aware that the variant I choose may not be the only one seen in print. (Shakushain sometimes appears as Samkusaynu, for example.) In addition, foreign travelers in the nineteenth century often used the spelling “Aino,” not “Ainu.” Some names of early European explorers also have variant spellings, and Russian names have been transliterated from Cyrillic to Roman script in various ways. Islands near Hokkaido now incorporated into Russia but formerly Japanese are important to the Hokkaido story. My usage is slightly inconsistent when writing about islands in the Kuril chain which Russians and Japanese call by different names. In most cases, I have used the names which appear on current international maps, which are Russian. However, I employ the Japanese name for the Habomai group (Khabomai in Russian) and for tiny Kaigara Island (Signal’nyy in Russian). When these islands have been

Preface

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noted in the international press, the Japanese names appear. Also note that “Kuril” is sometimes spelled “Kurile” in English language publications. Dates used in Japan (and Russia) in earlier times did not conform to the calendar in worldwide use today. I have tried to report all dates according to today’s calendar. While studying and writing about Hokkaido, I have had the help of many people. First, may I acknowledge the librarians and archivists who have responded to my many queries and requests. Most of my research in the United States was done at the libraries of the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu as well as the Seattle Public Library and the Vashon Island Branch of the King County (Washington) Public Library System. I particularly appreciate the interlibrary loan service provided by the King County Library as well as the librarians from other institutions who have made materials available to me through this service. I also want to acknowledge the useful attention I received at the Special Collections and Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, especially from Michael Milewski, and at Amherst College in the same city. My sister Sally Connerton made it possible for me to visit Amherst and to obtain some of the materials in these libraries. Staff members of the Clatsop County Historical Society in Astoria, Oregon helped me regarding Ranald MacDonald. At the University of Oregon in Eugene, my thanks go to the Special Collections staff, especially Normandy Helmer, and Jean Nattinger at the university’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. At the University of Washington, Professor Kenneth J. Pyle of the Jackson School of International Studies and Japanese Studies Librarian Keiko Yokota-Carter have been especially helpful. I am grateful to Professor Sarah Elwood of the Department of Geography for her advice on maps and to Josef Eckert for creating the maps as well as for other assistance. The University of Hawaii at Manoa has a collection rich in materials about Hokkaido; I especially appreciate the help of two librarians there, Japanese Specialist Tokiko Bazzell and Russian Bibliographer Patricia Polansky, who has been my main guide to using materials about Russia. Emeritus Professor John J. Stephan of the University of Hawaii encouraged me and has read much of the manuscript; his suggestions have greatly improved the book. Ian Stone has been especially helpful on the Russian Far East, and Mark Brazil of Rakuno Gakuen gave me invaluable assistance concerning the natural history of Hokkaido and nearby areas. I was able to visit Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands on a 2003 voyage undertaken by Society Expeditions, Seattle, Washington, and I thank everyone involved who made the trip possible as well as those on the voyage who responded to my innumerable queries. In Hokkaido, staff at the Hokkaido State Archives in Aka Renga (Old Government Building) went out of their way to help me despite the language barrier. I also owe thanks to librarians of the Hokkaido University Library, especially Ideue Keiko of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies (Hoppo Shiryoshitsu) for helping me obtain copies of photographs in the library’s collection as well as for other assistance. At the Hakodate Municipal Library, Hirasawa Yoshiko spent a lot of time finding materials that would interest me. William Kay of Sapporo has shared details about life in Hokkaido. My friends Kobayashi Sachi and Mayumi Kayoko traveled from their homes in Osaka and Himeji to Hokkaido to help me with my research and I owe endless thanks to them for using their bilingual skills to ease my efforts. Mayumi Kayoko has contributed in many ways, and both she and Otsuki Sachiko have helped with translations. Family members have made important contributions to this work, especially my

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husband Les, who spent many hours surfing the web in search of information about Hokkaido and who has been my mentor in digital photography. He also prepared the photographs for publication. Thanks also to my sister Mary Mullen, my daughter Ellen Irish, and Mike Mullen, who were the first people to read the manuscript, and to my daughter Rosemary Shattuck for computer assistance. I would also like to acknowledge all those who have written of Hokkaido before me. Their reporting and their analysis of the island and its history have helped shaped my perceptions. I am responsible, of course, for the choice of what is and what is not included in the book as well as for any mistakes or misinterpretations in the text. Finally, thanks to the people of Hokkaido, familiarly known as Dosanko, those who have helped me during my visits to the island as well as all the others— the Ainu, the pioneers and the people living there now — who make the island the wonderful place it is.

PART I

Becoming Hokkaido

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1

The Place

“How amazing it is that this rich and beautiful country, the property of one of the oldest and most densely populated nations of the world and in such near proximity, approachable on all sides by water, with harbors innumerable, should have remained so long unoccupied and almost as unknown as the African deserts.” Thus wrote American Horace Capron about Hokkaido in 1872.1 Foreigners visualize a Japan full of people and full of contrasts, a land of enduring tradition but also modernity. Temples and shrines, kabuki and koto, sushi and sukiyaki, samurai and sumo, flower arrangement, tea ceremony and an esoteric writing system represent tradition, while modernity features high-tech electronics but crowded cities where people have tiny apartments and long commutes, well-designed cars but horrendous traffic jams, manga and the yakuza. Hokkaido includes all of these, but Japanese settlement of the island came late in history, and Hokkaido still has a comparatively sparse settlement pattern, traces of pioneer attitudes and a reputation as an exotic place. While all the characteristics outsiders perceive as “Japan” are found on the northern island, tradition has been brought there relatively recently and the island’s greater roominess mitigates some of the less pleasant aspects of modernity. Other Japanese see Hokkaido as remote, spacious and distinct. Many tourists travel on Hokkaido each year, some in summer, some in winter; for a Japanese from the nation’s heartland, taking a holiday in Hokkaido seems like going to a foreign country while avoiding the problems of international travel. Until the mid–nineteenth century, this northern island’s story featured the land’s first people — we know them as the Ainu — and the gradual influx of the outer world in the form of ethnic Japanese from their nation’s heartland and explorers and adventurers from the wider world. Since then, development has in many ways dominated the island’s story as the land became more and more an integral part of Japan. But even today many Japanese have misconceptions about Hokkaido. Donald Keene, eminent scholar of things Japanese, wrote in 1981 that people in Japan had told him about “the vast stretches of tundra in the north” on the island.2 Though it does get very cold in the winter and the snow lies late, the only tundra in Hokkaido is high in its mountains, hardly in “vast stretches.” Most Americans, too, know little about Hokkaido, despite strong American influence in its development. A foreign visitor in 1965 wrote of Hokkaido’s “atmosphere of a frontier territory — of a land with a future rather than a past.”3 Hokkaido’s history and geography as well as its friendly people make it a rewarding place both to live in and to visit, and far from not having a past, the island has a remarkable one.

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I. BECOMING HOKKAIDO

NORTHEAST ASIA (map by Josef Eckert)

1. The Place

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Land, climate and settlement Hokkaido is Japan’s northernmost land, with a short written history compared to that of the Japanese heartland. Japanese people often do not perceive the island as part of the naichi, the “real” Japan. “Hokkaido” means “northern sea route” and the government of Japan bestowed this name upon the island in 1868, determined upon incorporating this area into Japan through colonization and development. Before then, Hokkaido was known as Ezo, or Yezo, a name sometimes applied to Ainu people in ancient times and sometimes used merely to denote a northern boundary beyond which lived barbarians. Thus the geographical meaning of Ezo was inexact, as was the name. Variant western language spellings in early years include Yesso, Iesso, Jedso, Jesso and Yeso. The name “Ezochi,” meaning “Ainu land,” sometimes appeared; it often also included the parts of northern Honshu where Ainu once lived. Neither Japanese nor Europeans definitely recognized Hokkaido, or Ezo, as a separate island until almost 1600. Even after that, some maps of Japan showed Ezo connected to the mainland or as an island of unknown dimensions that extended beyond the border of the map. Frequent ocean fog kept explorers from easily gaining an accurate idea of Ezo and other nearby islands; geographical mistakes circulated long after Japanese from Honshu had taken over Ezo’s southern tip. Hokkaido, with an area of 31,200 square miles, is very close in size to Austria and almost twice as big as Denmark, Switzerland or the Netherlands. Hokkaido is a little larger than Maine or South Carolina but a bit smaller than Indiana or Virginia. From north to south the island extends for three hundred miles, more or less, and from east to west a few more. By far the largest of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures (provinces or states), Hokkaido has about twenty percent of Japan’s land area and is more than five times the size of the next largest prefecture in area. The island is just seventh in population, though, with only about 5,600,000 people, about five percent of Japan’s inhabitants. Hokkaido is a large prefecture in area simply because it is not divided into smaller ones as are the other islands. (Even the smallest of Japan’s four major islands, Shikoku, contains four different prefectures.) A better way to think about Hokkaido’s area is to note that while it has less than half the area of Honshu, Japan’s main island, it approaches twice the size of Kyushu and is more than four times as large as Shikoku. And even though Hokkaido’s population seems relatively small and the island has lots of empty space, the density of population (170 people per square mile) is more than twice as great as that of the United States (84 per square mile) and much much greater than Canada’s (nine per square mile). Compare all of these to Japan’s 838 per square mile. Because of Hokkaido’s shape and size, its rivers are longer than most in Japan. The Ishikari, which waters the island’s largest plain, is, at about 160 miles, Japan’s third longest river. Hokkaido’s second longest river, at 155 miles, is the Teshio, which drains much of the island’s far north before flowing into the Japan Sea. Third comes the Tokachi River, not quite 100 miles long, which flows south and east out of Hokkaido’s central knot of mountains. Beyond the Hokkaido lowlands are hills rising to mountain peaks, a scenic landscape offering challenging but not discouraging hikes and climbs. Mountains lie along the central spine of Hokkaido’s Oshima Peninsula in the island’s far southwest, and an outlier, straight north from Hakodate on the island’s southern tip and on the opposite shore of the peninsula, is Komagatake, a volcanic peak (3673 feet) which erupts every

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PHYSICAL FEATURES OF HOKKAIDO (map by Josef Eckert)

now and then. Just southwest of Hokkaido’s capital city, Sapporo, is a knot of mountains, much of it preserved in Shikotsu-Toya National Park. In the main part of the island a cluster of volcanic peaks, including the island’s highest, Asahidake (7557 feet), offer scenery, skiing and hiking. The mountains extend north toward the island’s northern tip and, more prominently, south, all the way to Cape Erimo. Hokkaido’s most unspoiled land is along another mountain ridge that extends out the Shiretoko Peninsula to the northeast. All these mountain ranges separate the island’s various lowland plains from each other, making transportation systems difficult to build. Moreover, volcanic eruptions sometimes send falls of ash and rock or streams of lava, mud or gravel and sometimes even floods into settled lowlands, causing destruction, injury, and sometimes death. Hokkaido’s wild landscape also includes many thermal vents, pools of boiling mud, and — especially important to the Japanese — natural hot springs. In Hokkaido, streams rush down steep mountain valleys, and a century ago the mining industry established prosperous communities in these valleys. The general picture is

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SELECTED CITIES AND RAILWAYS OF HOKKAIDO (map by Josef Eckert)

*Northeast of the Boundary are the southern Kurils, or Northern Territories, which Russia administers, but Japan also claims.

one of folds in the earth wrinkling up eons ago to make mountains. The volcanoes came later and are young enough to remain active today. They are part of the Pacific rim of fire — volcanic peaks that ring the Pacific, from Japan through the Aleutian Islands in Alaska and then south in western America, including Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Shasta. Hokkaido suffers earthquakes and typhoons, though perhaps not as many as do areas farther south in Japan. Nonetheless, the number of these events is startling. An earthquake in 1952 and its accompanying tsunami killed at least thirty people and caused serious damage in the Kushiro and Obihiro regions. A 1968 quake caused fifty deaths on Hokkaido and northern Honshu. More recently, an earthquake and tsunami devastated the island of Okushiri off Hokkaido’s west coast in July 1993; over two hundred people died and thirty foot waves destroyed many homes and businesses. Typhoons sometimes strike, too, and one in 1954 led to Japan’s worst maritime disaster ever, just off Hakodate, when the ferry Toya Maru and other ships sank, more than one thousand people dying.

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Japanese often think of Hokkaido as the frontier; it has been called Japan’s wild west. Some have suggested that it is Japan’s Alaska. The heartland of Japan — the area surrounding Tokyo and Kyoto— is far to the south. Looking at Hokkaido on a globe, one sees that its latitude is comparable to that of Oregon or Massachusetts or northern Spain. It is true that the farther one ventures from the equator, the colder the weather, but water and air current patterns cause climate to vary widely, and while coastal Oregon rarely sees snow, winters on the island of Hokkaido are long and the snow lies deep, as in Massachusetts. One writer notes that by temperature, Hakodate, at Hokkaido’s southern tip, resembles Boston and centrally located Sapporo is more like Toronto.4 Climate varies considerably on the island, both from south to north and from east to west, winters on the west — the Japan Sea side — being warmer but featuring much more snowfall than those on the east. Snow does not remain year round anywhere on the island despite the cold and snowy winters and the mountainous landscape. There are no glaciers here. (There are none in Japan.) Thanks to climate, Hokkaido gives the feeling of being much further north than it actually is. In the heartland of Japan, lifestyles developed around the need to cope with long, hot, wet and humid summers; the relative cold of winter was an afterthought. Thus as people ventured north, the cold and snowy Hokkaido winters were a strong disincentive, discouraging many pioneers and retarding the development of the large island. Because climate and the changing seasons play a significant role in Japanese thought, the very climate in Hokkaido, so unlike that of the heartland, makes this island seem different. William Smith Clark called the island’s climate “salubrious and agreeable,” but he had been living in Massachusetts. Several months after he arrived in Sapporo in 1876, Clark wrote a Japanese official, “We are delighted with the scenery, the climate and the natural resources of Hokkaido, which seem superior even to those of our beloved New England.”5 Spring and fall are the showy seasons in Japan, with springtime cherry blossoms and the brilliant momiji, or maple trees, of autumn. Hokkaido cities, parks, temple grounds and even historic fortresses feature these, but the spring flowers appear later and the fall shades earlier than elsewhere in Japan. Sapporo’s cherry trees burst into bloom about a month after those in Tokyo, and in southern Hokkaido the flowers often coincide with Japan’s Golden Week holiday period during the first week of May. Summer brings many tourists from the other islands of Japan while the heartland is experiencing a hot and sultry rainy season. Hokkaido has no definite rainy season and on average receives less yearly precipitation than the rest of the country. Torrential rains do occasionally cause flooding, especially along the rivers in the southwestern part of the island, and flooding can also occur with the spring thaw. Later, with high temperatures on Sapporo August days hovering around eighty degrees F., the days are pleasant, though it does sometimes get much warmer. Along much of Hokkaido’s southeastern coast, frequent summer fogs keep temperatures low. Meanwhile, farther south, in Tokyo or Osaka, the heat and humidity are oppressive. Hokkaido winters are cold, with temperatures well below freezing. Sapporo’s mean January temperature is about 24.6 degrees F. and the city receives an average twenty feet of snow during a winter. Some winters are not so cold or snowy, though. During W. S. Clark’s winter in Sapporo, he wrote an American relative that the autumn had been lovely but that on November 15, “by a snow storm which spread a soft

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white blanket over the unfrozen earth” more than two feet thick, winter had come.6 While snow covered the land, the rivers froze. When spring came, Americans working to develop agriculture in Hokkaido found that because the ground was protected by snow all winter, it had not frozen, and potatoes and turnips which had remained buried since fall were still edible. Belle Stockbridge, an American who went to Hokkaido in 1885, wrote of the Hokkaido climate: Those who have tried it, say it is the finest climate in the world. The winters last about eight months; and the snow lies four feet thick from the middle of December till the last of April. The autumns are long and hazy — a real Indian summer — and the snow comes before the ground is frozen more than three or four inches, so that in spring there is no mud, for the snow melts at the bottom first and sinks into the warm earth; and before the last layer of snow is gone, ploughing can be done on the unfrozen ground.7

Some would disagree with her about the mud, for in the years before roads were commonly paved, a Hokkaido route for travel could deteriorate into a slimy springtime morass. In places, Hokkaido can get very, very cold. The inland city of Asahikawa sells souvenirs to tourists featuring “-41 degrees C,” a temperature that has been recorded there. (The Fahrenheit and Celsius scales have practically the same reading at that temperature, so the Fahrenheit reading would also be -41.) In January 2008, the city’s mean daily minimum temperature was only 8.1 degrees F., while the maximum was 23.5. Bifuka, an inland town half way between Asahikawa and the northern tip of the island, boasts Japan’s coldest twentieth century temperature reading, slightly below Asahikawa’s. In Nayoro, not quite as far north as Bifuka, farming, as well as life itself, presents a daunting challenge, with 158 Fahrenheit degrees (or 70 Celsius degrees) difference between the summer and winter temperatures. And today, though citizens and communities are well-prepared for cold and snow, blizzard conditions still sometimes close schools and roads. In late January 2003, as eastern Hokkaido coped with blowing snow, rain fell in Sapporo, causing difficulties for those building the giant snow sculptures for the early February winter festival. A celebration at that time of year can raise spirits, for it is the length of the Hokkaido winter — which seems to go on and on and on — rather than the actual coldness which becomes depressing. Stockbridge praised the winter. The sleighing is superb... We had sleighs made to order on the Russian pattern, of stout oak, with high back, a body filled with straw, and wide-spread outriggers; so that we were independent of beaten roads, but went over the hard crust at will. The sun was so dazzling over the absolutely unbroken expanse of white, that we could never sleigh with any comfort to our eyes till the middle of the afternoon. Then we used to go miles and miles, returning in the beginning of the snow lit long twilight.

Approaching town they would see people on their way home from the public bath, walking slowly, comfortable in the cold air because of the warmth their bodies still held. But at the end of the century another traveler, Henry Finck, called Hokkaido “the Japanese Siberia.”8 Hokkaido’s challenging winter weather has made it seem a remote place in the Japanese consciousness, but its island status has made it physically remote. The dangerous Tsugaru Strait — often called the Straits of Sangar by nineteenth century Europeans— separates Hokkaido from Honshu, and a ferry crossing from Aomori to Hakodate added

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hours to one’s trip from the heartland. The strait itself varies in width from fifteen to twenty-five miles, but the distance from one sheltered harbor to the other made the ferry’s route close to seventy miles long. Wind always seems to blow through the strait. The crossing is often rough, sometimes impossible — and, as when the Toya Maru sank, even deadly. Now the train crosses from Honshu to Hokkaido in a tunnel, bringing the northern island closer to the rest of Japan. Most people fly, though. From Tokyo’s airports one can get to Chitose, Sapporo’s airport, in less than an hour and a half. Not only is Tsugaru Strait treacherous, so is La Perouse Strait —called Soya Strait in Japan — at Hokkaido’s northern tip. Here, as at Tsugaru Strait, warmer waters from the Sea of Japan clash with the Pacific Ocean’s colder ones. Moreover, the sweep of the tides and the direction of the current make navigation difficult in fog compounded often with stormy seas. La Perouse Strait, unlike Tsugaru Strait, can be partly icebound in the winter. Hokkaido’s development might have proceeded more quickly had the island had more good harbors. A nineteenth century traveler, British naval commander H. C. St. John, claimed that there were only four good harbors on the island, Hakodate, Muroran, Akkeshi and Otaru, if one considers Otaru a harbor, he said.9 (In the nineteenth century, Otaru was an adequate port, though high winds could prevent entrance.) These harbors were the places foreign ships were most likely to approach in the 1800s. Nowadays, improvements have made shipping safer and more efficient, notably at modern harbor facilities developed at Tomakomai and the mouth of the Ishikari River. In order to escape poverty, many people went north to live in Hokkaido in the late nineteenth century despite winter weather and remoteness. They were encouraged by the government, which wanted to ensure that Hokkaido be part of Japan; Hokkaido is a borderland and a frontier, with the Russian Far East to the west, north, and northwest. Directly west of Sapporo is Russia’s best-known far eastern city, Vladivostok. The city of Wakkanai is almost at the northern tip of Hokkaido, which is only twenty-six miles from Russia’s Sakhalin Island directly north across La Perouse Strait. Just off Hokkaido’s east coast begins the Russian-held Kuril Island chain, which extends about seven hundred miles, all the way north to Siberia’s Kamtchatka peninsula. In fact, the channel between Hokkaido and tiny Russian-held Kaigara Island has sometimes iced over in the winter, enabling one to walk the two and one-half miles from Japan to Russia were it allowed. Both Sakhalin and the Kurils have at times come into Japanese possession and both have Japanese names along with their Russian names: Sakhalin is “Karafuto” in Japan and the Kurils are to Japanese the Chishima Archipelago (one thousand islands). To this very day, Japanese-Russian relations are overshadowed by discord over where the border between the two nations should lie; the southern Kuril Islands remain in dispute. Because of this disagreement, the two nations have not signed a peace treaty with each other after World War II. Hokkaido today differs from the Japanese heartland not only in climate. Countryside and towns and cities have a distinct character. Unlike almost everywhere else in Japan, Hokkaido streets and farmers’ fields are usually laid out in rectangular grids; the network of squares formed by the farm roads around the town of Shari on the Sea of Okhotsk is one striking example. City blocks are numbered, east-west and north-south from a city’s center, making addresses easy to find. This is because Hokkaido’s towns and cities are rather recently planned and most were laid out by government surveyors. In the rest of Japan, streets and roads grew naturally from ancient animal trails into paths for people and, finally, roads.

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Look beyond the rectangular blocks, and Hokkaido towns and cities are clearly Japanese. A foreign tourist heading to Hokkaido after travel elsewhere in Japan will not see much in urban areas that is distinctive. The shops are the same (including many Japanese chains and even some foreign ones, like McDonald’s), the people look the same and dress the same (except for wearing heavier outer clothing in the winter), the vehicles are the same, the sounds the same. A Hokkaido city is a Japanese city; a Hokkaido town is a Japanese town, but in Hokkaido, the towns and cities tend to be more spread out. Also, they are farther apart than elsewhere in Japan. And in winter, of course, Hokkaido communities with their sharp, cold air and deep snow cover seem much different than those of Japan’s heartland. Hokkaido’s countryside is unique in Japan. For comparison, let us start with a look at the Japanese heartland where the settled land is flat or leveled into rice-paddy stepping stones. Beyond, forested hills or mountains are always visible. The nearly level land between the hills is totally tamed — into cities, small clusters of village homes, or flat fields with occasional buildings here and there. Hokkaido has flat land with hills beyond it too, but the flat is much more extensive than elsewhere in Japan. Farms and individual fields are larger, too. On Hokkaido, farm houses and outbuildings are located among the fields, as in North America, rather than clustered in villages as they are elsewhere in Japan. And in Hokkaido one can see flat or nearly flat land that remains forested, something not common elsewhere in Japan. In Hokkaido some of the terrain is rolling and developed into dry fields, not rice paddies. In Hokkaido too are pastures, barns reminiscent of America, silos, bales of hay, herds of cows, orchards— in other words, one sees a non–Japanese landscape. There are even Japanese cowboys who work on Hokkaido’s large spreads. Hokkaido farms are different from other Japanese farms in another way: the harsh climate allows successful harvest of just one crop annually while in much of the rest of Japan, two and in some places even three crops can be grown each year. Hokkaido farms have a shorter growing season than those in the heartland. Some Hokkaido land, especially in the north and east, is unsuitable for growing crops because of frequent summer cold or fog, but this land makes good pasture. A sizable amount of lowland is covered by peat bogs, as in the Ishikari Valley, and thus is not productive agricultural land, but in recent years a lot of it has been reclaimed, often at considerable expense.

Flora, fauna and natural resources Belle Stockbridge noted Hokkaido’s “fine growth of timber, and an abundance of running streams.” Hokkaido is beautiful, a place of wide landscapes that lure the nature photographer, and that is not all. When William Wheeler arrived from New England in August 1876, he exclaimed over the beauty of the sunsets night after night.10 If the farms in the countryside are reminiscent of America, the dwarf bamboo is not. It grows wild seemingly everywhere. The Americans who came to Hokkaido one hundred or more years ago were surprised at the amount of bamboo they found in the forest along with trees that were similar to well-known American maple, pine, cedar, elm and so forth. These days many non-native plants also grow on the island. Among flowers, for example, are the American brown-eyed daisy, goldenrod and, of course, the dandelion. Among trees, the Ezo matsu, usually translated as Ezo pine, has become the symbol

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I. BECOMING HOKKAIDO

of Hokkaido. In reality, however, it is a spruce. The Japanese yew is also widely found. In the lowlands, many types of deciduous trees predominate, including oak and ash. In the southern part of the island beeches grow. Most of Hokkaido was naturally forested. Southwestern Hokkaido features deciduous forests fairly similar to those in the northeastern United States. Deciduous trees, which make up about seventy percent of the island’s trees, abound in lower lands, while in the mountains and farther north and east more evergreens, mainly spruce and fir, appear. The early Americans found heavily forested land around Sapporo. William Wheeler wrote in 1876, The forests are truly primeval, consisting of huge trees of strange varieties, twined with numerous kinds of climbing vines, hung with parasitic ferns and lichens, and an undergrowth of dense shrubs and bamboo grass from five to eight feet high. Huge trunks of fallen trees lay in delightful confusion, and gulches and ravines lent their charm to the variety of our experience. Now your horse leaps a fallen trunk; or passes under an inclined one, nearly sweeping you from your seat; descends an almost vertical incline into some gulch, and ascends the opposite side in a way to make you wish that you were secured fore and aft in your saddle; while the whole party might be lost to sight in the trackless undergrowth if a hundred feet away.11

Despite development, forest still covers about seventy percent of the island, mostly with deciduous trees, and tree plantations have been created to grow timber for harvest. Natural vegetation can be seen in Hokkaido’s large national parks. One of the bestknown plants is the marimo, a green, velvety, spherical alga that grows large, up to a foot in diameter, in Lake Akan in the island’s mountains. To early visitors, the plant seemed so interesting and unusual that too many people gathered them and marimo almost became extinct. By the 1940s, local people became concerned about the plant’s future and began to work to protect it. Since 1950, the Lake Akan community has hosted an annual marimo festival highlighting the need for protection, and tourists can visit the Marimo Exhibition and Observation Station. They can buy small, cultivated marimo at Hokkaido gift shops. The natural flora of a northern mountainous region attracts tourists from farther south to Hokkaido. Wildflowers native to Hokkaido vary from the very early-blooming skunk cabbage and the lovely trillium of the spring to the azalea, iris and hydrangea. And when a Japanese garden was created in Moscow in the late twentieth century, plants were brought from Hokkaido rather than the Japanese heartland to ensure that they could withstand Moscow’s rigorous climate. During periods of lower sea levels in prehistoric times, Hokkaido was attached to the Asian mainland through Sakhalin. As a result, some of the world’s greatest animals migrated to Hokkaido. An almost complete set of a mammoth’s bones from perhaps 120,000 years ago has been found on the island. Also living on Hokkaido then was Naumann’s elephant, similar to the mammoth in size but with relatively straight tusks. Bison also roamed Hokkaido long ago. There may also have been a land bridge to Honshu, but the depth of Tsugaru Strait between Hokkaido and Honshu, over 450 feet, makes this questionable. (When the sea was at its lowest, however, even if there was no land connection the strait would have been considerably narrower, and people may have crossed the channel on small boats.) With global warming perhaps ten thousand years ago, Hokkaido became an island, but evidence shows that humans have lived there for at least twenty thousand years.

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Hokkaido is the home of many wild animals. Wolves once roamed the island but were hunted and poisoned to extinction in the late nineteenth century. Today Hokkaido boasts Japan’s largest animal, the brown bear (called the grizzly in North America). The bearskin on display at the museum in Sapporo’s Botanical Garden is astonishingly large; some of the bears weigh six hundred pounds or more. Farmers and townsfolk dislike or fear the bears that make Hokkaido their home. Farmers are allowed to shoot a bear that has damaged crops. An eastern Hokkaido village offered a bounty in 1960 for bears killed because of one called a man-eater that was seen in the community. Even bears penned up for tourists to see have occasionally mauled people, bitten off an arm or a hand. Bears killed two people in Hokkaido in 2006 and one in 2008. Deer are prominent on Hokkaido. Overhunting in the late nineteenth century almost led to their disappearance, but the native sika deer have rebounded thanks to more recent protection policies. The island boasts perhaps two hundred thousand deer now, so many that they have become a nuisance. In the national parks in Hokkaido’s mountainous center one can see deer as well as fox, badger and weasel. In all Japan, only in Hokkaido is the small pika found. Hokkaido also is home to the Blakiston’s fish owl, which has been called the world’s largest owl. It is now designated as a Japanese National Treasure, but is on the endangered list. The Steller’s sea eagle, also a National Treasure, is large and impressive. Perhaps most important to the Japanese people, more than a thousand beautiful cranes winter and breed in Hokkaido marshes, and some live there year round. This bird is the red-crested crane, or tancho, Japan’s national bird. It is nearly five feet in height and has a tiny patch of bright red feathers atop its white head. It chooses one lifelong mate. The Japanese crane symbolizes long life; it can live for fifty years or more. To the Japanese it also suggests good luck. Many other birds, too, make Hokkaido their home, and swans migrating to and from Sakhalin stop at several Hokkaido lakes in March and again in November. Squirrels, beaver, sables, chipmunk, wild boar and the serow, a wild animal similar both to the goat and the antelope, live in Hokkaido, but unlike Japan’s other islands, Hokkaido has no monkeys. There are non-native animals, though, that have made Hokkaido their home. Mink brought from America have multiplied and these days devour small animals. Raccoons bought as pets have caused substantial damage to farm fields and there is concern that the European bumblebee, introduced to pollinate hothouse tomatoes, might injure native plants. Meanwhile, some Hokkaido animals in addition to the wolf have become extinct. One is the river otter. Hokkaido is known for agriculture, mining, forestry and fishing. All of these activities take advantage of the island’s location, climate and natural characteristics. In the 1870s when serious development of Hokkaido began, American advisers were brought in because they had experience with climate and resources comparable to Hokkaido’s. The foreign experts were impressed with the potential of the predominant farming region, the Ishikari plain, whose flat profile makes large-scale farming suitable. The agricultural advisers encouraged cultivation of crops like wheat and barley. More recently, research has led to development of strains of rice that can be raised efficiently in Hokkaido, and rice now predominates among Hokkaido’s crops. Dairy products were not important in the traditional Japanese diet, but usage has increased; almost half of Japan’s dairy cattle are on Hokkaido. The prefecture grows some seventy

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percent of Japan’s wheat and potatoes. There is some advantage to raising several types of crops, for if a year’s weather is bad for one crop — being too cold for rice, for example — it might not harm the northern latitude crops such as wheat. Many communities, including Obihiro and Kitami, have grown up inland to serve the farming population. Mineral extraction led to the founding of a number of the island’s towns, but mining’s importance to Hokkaido’s economy lasted only for about a century. Foreign experts surveyed and gave advice on development of the mineral resources. Centuries earlier, a few men came to Hokkaido in search of gold. A number of minerals, including gold, have been found in small amounts. Coal has been by far the most abundant mineral resource of the island, and Hokkaido’s coal long supplied a sizable portion of Japan’s energy. Now, though, the coal mines are gone and the mining towns changed out of all recognition — in some cases a majority of a town’s people have had to leave as the mines closed and jobs disappeared. Mine workings and workers’ houses are gone. Here and there tourist attractions have been created in their stead. Forestry has been an important part of Hokkaido’s economy since the pioneer era. As the railroads extended into the forests, trees were harvested, and as early as 1907 legislators acted to protect the forests. Logging has changed the landscape, leaving large fields and meadows in place of much of the forest. Even today, however, Hokkaido has more than one-fifth of Japan’s forested land. New, artificial forests planted for future harvesting have changed the look of the island, but many places in the mountains appear as they always have. Another prime Hokkaido industry is facing hard times: fishing. The abundance of life in Hokkaido’s waters was an important factor in the island’s development. In addition to fish, both squid and kombu (kelp, or seaweed) are important Hokkaido products and in the old days men hunted fur seals and otter for their valuable pelts. Harvesting marine wealth has been a mainstay for Hokkaido’s people, given the rich fishing and whaling grounds off the island’s coastlines. Boats going after salmon would bring back huge catches, and herring for use in fertilizer were caught by the million. Some people used to say that you could tell by the particular smell of a fishing village which kind of fish were caught and dried or processed there. Settlements on the coast have always been fishing communities or ports, and some have died as fishing declined. Fishing boats and fishermen are still visible in Hokkaido’s ports, but not in the great numbers of earlier years. By now the North Pacific has been overfished, Russia limits access to the waters near the Kurils and Sakhalin, and worldwide the entire industry is severely restricted.

A tour around the island Hokkaido is vaguely diamond-shaped, with the addition of a peninsula jutting out from the southeast, an extrusion described, accurately, as fishtail-shaped. Hokkaido’s shape has been compared to that of a sting ray, a Japanese dragon, or a Japanese kite. The Oshima Peninsula looks like a foot or boot, similar to the Italian peninsula, with Hakodate on the base of the heel and Hakodate Bay separating the heel on the east from the toes on the west. Fodor’s guide to Japan has described the entire island as “shaped rather like a ratchet holding in place the wheel-like curve of the main Japanese archipelago.”12 Let us begin an island tour near the tip of the fishtail at Hakodate, the island’s first important city and its largest until well into the twentieth century. Just across Tsugaru

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Strait from Japan’s main island of Honshu, Hakodate used to be the most important Hokkaido terminus for ship traffic. After Japan became involved in worldwide commerce in the mid–nineteenth century, several western nations opened consulates in the city and many ships, especially those hunting whales or seals, used Hakodate’s port facilities. Here is by far Hokkaido’s best natural harbor, but because it is located on the island’s extreme southwestern tip, it is not well-placed to serve most of Hokkaido. Heading up the peninsula and turning east, the traveler winds around Uchiura Bay, which the early western visitors called Volcano Bay. On its north coast it is bounded by a headland where one finds Muroran, Hokkaido’s tenth largest city. A century and a half ago, travelers tended to opt for a water crossing from north of Hakodate to Muroran, though that could be risky if the wind came up. The track around the bay hit precipitous mountains on the north coast; trains following this route now run through many tunnels and today’s superhighway veers inland. Muroran is an industrial city; steel and cement manufacturing and ship construction are important there. As Muroran is on the sea, fishing also plays a part in its economy. Inland and north of Muroran is Shikotsu-Toya National Park, featuring mountains, lakes and volcanic scenery. Lake Shikotsu, in its eastern section, is easy to reach from Sapporo and from Hokkaido’s international airport at Chitose. In the northwestern section of the park is 6263 foot Mt. Yotei, often called Hokkaido’s Mt. Fuji. Lake Toya to the southwest is a beautiful round volcanic caldera lake surrounding a magical-looking island, rather like Crater Lake in Oregon. Mt. Usu, just east of the lake, is a volcano that has been very active recently, with eruptions in 1977–78 and 2000 in addition to the appearance of a subsidiary peak, Showa Shinzan, on its flank during World War II. The premier tourist destination in this area is Noboribetsu Hot Springs, set in a narrow valley where people come to bathe in the springs or to view Jigokudani (Hell Valley), a Yellowstone-like volcanic landscape of spewing mud and steam, sulfur and colorful rocks. Now the area is protected, but in the 1860s sulfur was mined there. From Hakodate our traveler has been following the main rail line to Sapporo. Continuing east along the coast, the line turns north at the port city of Tomakomai, an even larger industrial center than Muroran. For one continuing eastward, the road heads down the coast in an east-south-east direction. Inland is the Hidaka District, where Ainu culture remains most robust. The district is also known for horse breeding. Along the coast one finally comes to Cape Erimo; this headland, a cliff almost two hundred feet high, marks the end of the north-south Hidaka Mountain Range. Bisecting the island, these mountains are sometimes known as Hokkaido’s backbone. In earlier days, coastal sailors along this coast often had trouble rounding the cape because the current would suddenly be against them, the wind could be strong and the seas stormy. Cape Erimo itself is one of Japan’s windiest spots. From the cape, the road heads north again, to the Tokachi plain, a prosperous agricultural area. The traveler sees frequent rows of tall trees planted as windbreaks, since the area’s light volcanic soil is apt to blow in the wind. The Tokachi region’s hub is Obihiro, a city of some 170,000 residents. Back to the coast and eastward, the traveler often finds fog. Soon Kushiro appears. This major city, even larger than Obihiro, is important as the main port for eastern Hokkaido. Its waters are open throughout the year, while ports to the north can be icebound in the winter. Though fog lingers in this area during much of the summer, more and more tourists are coming to see the wildlife that abounds in the vast nearby marsh-

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lands largely preserved in the Kushiro-Shitsugen National Park. Most famous here are the elegant cranes; a crane reserve has been established here for their protection. Salmon, too, come to the marsh. As a fishing town dating from the seventeenth century, Kushiro is a center for deep sea fishing and has a longer history than most Hokkaido communities. Beyond Kushiro, one passes Akkeshi, located on a beautiful bay which English-speaking explorers named “Good Hope Bay.” Drift ice can accumulate offshore from February to April, but does not greatly impede shipping. The countryside beyond Akkeshi still looks remarkably like an 1874 description: “Light woods most of the time...; sometimes merely dwarf oaks, sometimes ... open land covered with low bamboo.”13 Finally one comes to the Nemuro peninsula only a few miles from the Habomai Islands now in Russia. The small city of Nemuro has a sister city in the Kuril chain; another of its sisters is Sitka, Alaska. Fishing is the economic base of often fog-shrouded Nemuro. In 1871, H. C. St. John reported that the local governor told him most of the summer days were foggy, and that “the Japanese never can wear summer clothes” in Nemuro, but he exaggerated. The crops that could be grown, St. John understood, were radishes, potatoes and turnips.14 Persistent fog that keeps the summers cool in the Kushiro-Nemuro region discouraged rice cultivation but in recent years dairying has been successful. Nemuro’s harbor, which faces north on the Sea of Okhotsk, freezes over in the winter, but ice fishing is carried on. Less than three miles away, across Nemuro’s long but narrow peninsula, is Nemuro’s Hanasaki community, where an ice-free harbor on the Pacific Ocean has been developed to handle more and more of the Nemuro region’s commerce. Our traveler continuing east along the peninsula from central Nemuro comes to Cape Nosappu, the easternmost point in all Japan and location of Hokkaido’s oldest lighthouse. It is from here that one can occasionally walk to Russian territory. North from Nemuro, across a wide plain, one comes to the Shiretoko Peninsula, whose headland is the end of Hokkaido’s eastern mountain range. Much of the peninsula is preserved as national park land, and it may be the prime wilderness area in Japan. To the west in the heart of the mountains at Hokkaido’s center is the best-known and some say most beautiful national park in Hokkaido, Akan National Park, a place of glistening lake and peaks. On a circle tour of the island, from the Shiretoko Peninsula one heads west through Shari to Abashiri, a small city best known for its nineteenth century prison, feared as the worst place in Japan to be incarcerated. Much of the old prison is now a museum. The coast sees ice build up during the winter, and icebreaker travel has become an option for winter tourists. Here, the formation of winter ice floes occurs farther south than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere. Between Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon, in latitude, Abashiri is the fisheries center of Japan’s Sea of Okhotsk region. Inland in the same region is the growing city of Kitami, its hinterland known for its peppermint production. Next on our circle tour is a long northwestern trek up the coast to the northernmost point of Japan, Cape Soya, called by at least one traveler “The Cape Horn of Japan.”15 Cold war antennas and domes dot the landscape near Cape Soya, just as they do on Sakhalin across La Perouse Strait. The nearby city of Wakkanai has prospered through trade with Sakhalin Island and the rest of Russia, but suffers when relations between Russia and Japan do not encourage commerce. This coast does not see the persistent summer fogs of Kushiro, and despite Wakkanai’s location at the far north of the island,

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its harbor remains open year-round due to the moderating effects of the Japanese current. Inland and about sixty miles south of Wakkanai is Hokkaido’s only sizable artificial lake, Lake Shumaranai (sometimes called Lake Uryu). Frozen throughout the long winter, it provides water for irrigation and hydroelectric power. It also serves as a reservoir to hold water during the spring thaw and prevent flooding. From Wakkanai the road leads south along Hokkaido’s west coast. At the small city of Rumoi, a main road leads inland and one can travel to Asahikawa, the most centrally located of Hokkaido’s larger cities and now the second most populous city on the island. Planned in 1890 to be the center of the farming area to be established in the wide and fertile Kamikawa Basin, Asahikawa also became the home of Japan’s elite Seventh Army Division at the end of the nineteenth century, and except for a few years after World War II, the city has had an important military connection. This industrial center is a western gateway to Hokkaido’s central mountains, including Asahidake, in Daisetsuzan National Park, the largest national park in Japan. Streams with headwaters in or near the park flow in three directions: northeast to the Okhotsk Sea, southeast to the Pacific Ocean or west to the Japan Sea. From Asahikawa, Sapporo to the southwest is only a ninety minute train journey. Sapporo itself is about ten miles from the coast. It is at the edge of the Ishikari plain, an extensive cultivated region drained by the river for which it is named. Approaching two million people, Sapporo is by far the island’s largest city —five times the size of Asahikawa. A third of the island’s people now live in Sapporo, which is the center for nearly everything in Hokkaido. As Japan’s cities go, Sapporo is new, its site purposely mapped out in 1871 to be the island’s capital. The venue for the 1972 Winter Olympics, Sapporo is famous for the huge and intricate ice sculptures fashioned each February for its winter festival. Nopporo Forest, on the city’s eastern outskirts, remains protected as an example of what the land was like before settlement. South and slightly west of Sapporo is the city’s airport, at Chitose, about twentyfive miles away. In pioneer days the countryside between Sapporo and its airport was heavily wooded, but today it is mostly urban. West of Sapporo, just thirty minutes by train, is Otaru, developed as the port for the capital city, and now a charming spot for a visit. From Otaru, the traveler can proceed down the fishhook to Hakodate, to complete a round-the-island tour. Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1892 that “an energetic tourist would have gone to Hakodate, seen Ainos at Sapporo, ridden across the northern island under the gigantic thistles, caught salmon, looked in at Vladivostok....”16 Today’s tourist itinerary is somewhat different and though the visitor these days rarely proceeds across the Japan Sea to Russia’s Vladivostok, Hokkaido’s seas are worth a look. Beyond the coastline are three very different seas. The coldest of these, the Sea of Okhotsk to Hokkaido’s northeast, brings floating ice to the Japanese coast. West of Hokkaido is the northern portion of the Japan Sea, where a warm current flows northward, and to the southeast is the great Pacific Ocean. West of Hokkaido in the Sea of Japan are seven small nearby islands administered as part of the prefecture. Near Wakkanai at the very north are Rebun and Rishiri, both now part of a national park; off the coast perhaps seventy miles south are tiny Teuri and Yagishiri. Off the Oshima Peninsula is the largest of the islands, Okushiri, and off the southern tip of the peninsula are two very small islands, Kojima and Oshima. A Japanese businessman transferred from Tokyo to Hokkaido may be apprehensive

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about living there, but the Dosanko work to make the island an inviting place. Various cities attract winter visitors with winter festivals and the mining towns work to create jobs in research or tourism to replace ones that are gone. This is the Hokkaido spirit. Hokkaido is a challenging place, slow to be developed because of its forbidding winters and distance from the Japanese heartland. The northern island also suffers more than other parts of the nation when times are hard. Over the years, loss of resources and industries has hurt. But Hokkaido’s people are resilient, and they remind the visitor that summer days are wonderful in this northern island and that in the winter, skiing in powder snow on the hills at the edge of Sapporo cannot be beat. In Hokkaido are wide-open spaces that one can only dream about in the heartland.

2

The Ainu

Long before ethnic Japanese settled on Hokkaido, another people inhabited the northern island: the Ainu. These people and their culture are an important component of the story of Hokkaido. Their history in Japan can be compared to that of the North American native peoples who have long been called Indians. As David Penhallow, an American scientist who lived in Hokkaido from 1876 to 1880, wrote in 1886, “The relations of the Aino to the Japanese were and are precisely those of the American Indian to the European.... It is the same story of pacific intentions, bold demands, aggressive acts, and continual wars, resulting in the final subjugation and extermination of a weaker race.” Penhallow was a bit wrong; wars in Hokkaido were not continual, and Native American and Ainu were not quite exterminated. Not only is history similar, cultural likenesses exist between Ainu, other peoples in the Russian Far East, and the North American Northwest Coast tribes. For example, fishing methods and ceremonies performed by Ainu and those of the Northwest Coast people to welcome the first salmon of the year bear a striking resemblance.1 In the old days, the Ainu lived by hunting and fishing, using the plants of the countryside and raising a few crops. Ainu did not develop a writing system for their language, also called Ainu, which apparently has little relationship to the Japanese language. The Ainu people looked different than the people farther south, in feature resembling Caucasians more than did Wajin. Most Ainu did not have the Japanese eye fold. Ainu had thick black hair, sometimes wavy, and tended to have much more body hair than Wajin. Ainu men grew luxuriant beards. Much of northern Honshu once contained people who later became known as Ainu, but over several centuries they were assimilated or pushed north, and by the twelfth century their communities were no longer found on the main island. Hokkaido has long been the center of Ainu culture, but Ainu also lived to the north and east of Hokkaido, on Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Almost all the remaining Ainu there were sent to Japan in 1945 after the end of World War II. On the Asian mainland, some Ainu possibly lived in Kamchatka and in the region near the mouth of the Amur River.

Origins The origin of people has always been an absorbing question, and perhaps it has interested Japanese people more than most others. By tradition, the Japanese people are the people of Japan, with an especially close relationship to that land. Only the Japanese — the

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Wajin — lived in Japan, and that was the only place they lived. By old belief, their imperial family was descended from the sun god, Amaterasu. Such a history can be contrasted to that of a nation like Canada or Australia or the United States, where the majority population emigrated from Europe in historic times. The Ainu were for a time thought of as the “ancient Japanese,” stimulating study and debate about origins.2 With the development of scientific understanding of prehistory, it became clear that the peoples of Japan probably migrated from somewhere else to the Japanese islands. Where did the Ainu fit into this picture and where did they come from? Language does not help answer the question of origins, for there is no clear relationship between the Ainu language and other languages, and recent language studies suggest that Ainu have lived in their present area, mostly isolated from other peoples, for a long period of time. Japanese study of the question of origins has had political implications, because of the concern that if Ainu are proven to be Japan’s first people, that could give them rights to land that would conflict with Wajin rights and desires. Scientists today still do not know the origin of the Ainu. Many theories have been proposed; years ago one even identified Ainu as descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. Some scholars used to think the Ainu were descended from American Indians and had traveled via the Aleutian Islands and then the Kurils to Hokkaido. Others have connected the Ainu to Polynesians, southeast Asians or the Australian aborigines. In the nineteenth century, David Penhallow wondered if Ainu and Eskimo could be related. He noted that Ainu lived on the Kuril Islands and the Kamchatka Peninsula, and suggested that it would not have been impossible for them to travel to the Aleutians.3 Another great question involves race: what race are the Ainu? Are they related to Caucasian peoples, as their eyes and the men’s beards might suggest? Some have suggested an Ainu–Pacific Islander connection. Most experts today agree that they are a Mongoloid people, related to Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Okinawans and the peoples native to the Russian Far East, and that the Ainu migrated from the Asian mainland at an early time. Just as many Americans have perceived American Indians as inferior, many Wajin have looked upon the Ainu as lesser beings. In the earliest contacts between the two peoples, Wajin identified Ainu as barbarians. Often told among Wajin was the story that a Japanese princess, the daughter of the nation’s first emperor, angered her father so much that he sent her off in a boat. She landed on the island of Ezo and mated with a dog — and from them came the Ainu people. One version of this tale extends the myth, claiming that some of the descendants of the princess and the dog coupled with bears, creating Ainu gods. Some Ainu may even have believed that their people originated after a marriage between a dog and a goddess, but such a belief could have passed from Wajin to Ainu. Another story relating Ainu to dogs notes that the word “Ainu” is similar to the Japanese word for dog: inu. Thus, upon seeing an Ainu, one might exclaim, “Ah! Inu!” The Ainu words for dog, seta and reyop, obviously have no relationship to the word “Ainu” or the “inu” of the Japanese language; “Ainu” clearly means “man” in the Ainu language. Ainu have used it to refer to themselves (but not to Wajin or other non–Ainu). Though Ainu are perceived as an aboriginal people, archaeologists and scientists have identified humans who preceded the Ainu in Hokkaido. According to archaeological evidence, Paleolithic, or Stone Age, settlements existed in Hokkaido about twenty thousand years ago. In 1997, archaeologists found stone tools estimated to be between seventeen and eighteen thousand years old in a Chitose site.4 Pottery some twelve thousand years old has been found in southern Japan, and as

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early centuries passed, pottery was produced farther and farther north, showing that some of the pottery-makers, called the Jomon people, migrated northwards. How the Jomon (whose era is called the Neolithic Period elsewhere in the world) might have come to Japan in the first place remains unknown, but they presumably came from the Asian continent. For many centuries the Jomon were the people of Japan, and remains of their settlements have been found in southern Hokkaido. They arrived in Hokkaido probably eight thousand to six thousand years ago and during that time made the earliest pottery discovered on the island. The Jomon were hunter-gatherers who lived in pit houses (perhaps only in the winter). They apparently felt no push to develop systematic agriculture because their environment was rich in animals and fish. Recently, however, archaeologists exploring in the Chitose area think they have found a farm site from the Jomon era. Resources of the sea were central to the Jomon, just as to the more recent Ainu. Archaeological digs have demonstrated that these people traded with others, from Sakhalin to Honshu. For example, Sakhalin amber has been found at Hokkaido Jomon sites, as has jade from Honshu’s Toyama Prefecture. Even bits of a fabric tentatively identified as Jomon era silk has been found in Hokkaido. Art historians have suggested that the decorative patterns found on Jomon pottery resemble those seen on Ainu clothing.5 Later, perhaps about 400 B.C., a new people appeared in Japan, probably from Korea. These people, the Yayoi, used iron tools and developed agriculture, spreading rice cultivation in Japan, but though they moved north, they did not enter Hokkaido. Scientists today generally think that the Ainu are descended from the earlier Jomon, while people farther south in Japan are a mixture of Jomon and Yayoi. Complicating the picture in Hokkaido, a different people moved south from Sakhalin Island into Hokkaido and settled along the northeastern coast. These people, the Okhotsk, apparently reached Hokkaido about the sixth or seventh century A.D. In the city of Abashiri, on Hokkaido’s northeast coast facing the Sea of Okhotsk, is an archaeological site preserving caves which sheltered these people. They had a maritime culture, dependent on sea mammals. The Okhotsk people probably were among the ancestors of the Ainu, whose culture thus included influences from the Okhotsk and Jomon and, to a much lesser extent, the Yayoi. Archaeologists have named different periods in Japan’s early history, identifying the Jomon Period as extending more or less from 10,000 B.C. until the second century B.C., and then continuing in Hokkaido as the Epi-Jomon Period while the Yayoi Period was emerging elsewhere in Japan. The Satsumon Period followed in Hokkaido at about the same time the Okhotsk culture developed along the island’s northeast coast. In Hokkaido, archaeologists have excavated Satsumon era pit houses, sited about a foot and a half below ground level. During the Satsumon era (from about the seventh until the thirteenth century) people in Hokkaido cultivated cereal crops, supplementing the foodstuffs they got through hunting, fishing and gathering. Satsumon and Okhotsk people apparently sometimes lived in the same places, though probably the Satsumon subsisted more on land animals while the Okhotsk people depended on food from the sea. By the twelfth century, however, the Okhotsk people seem to have disappeared, perhaps being absorbed by the Satsumon or else leaving Hokkaido and retreating north. On the basis of Ainu epics, Donald Philippi has suggested that they were defeated in war by the Ainu, the surviving Okhotsk people becoming part of the general population, and these people, Satsumon and Okhotsk, became the Ainu.6

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Early Japanese writings tell of a people called the Ebisu, or Emishi: barbarians who lived in the northern lands. By the twelfth or thirteenth century, Ezo replaced Emishi as the name of the northern people, and their island, Hokkaido, was called Ezogashima. These “northern” peoples had occupied northern Honshu at one time, but, say Wajin sources, were forced across Tsugaru Strait and by the eighth century, the strait was the recognized border between the Wajin and the Ezo. Were the Ezo people the Ainu? It seems so, though a debate continues over whether the Emishi and the Ezo were the same people. The term “shogun,” given in the late eighth century to the leading military official in Japan, meant “barbarian-conqueror” and the defeated barbarians were people who evolved into the Ainu. Ainu today have suggested that many of their ancestors were not forced to leave Honshu for Ezo Island. Meanwhile, those who stayed on Honshu were eventually absorbed into the general population.

Ainu daily life When the first Wajin came to Hokkaido, Ainu people had made the island their own, living mostly in the river valleys. In many ways, traditional Ainu culture resembled the culture of other native peoples in similar climates. Ainu had developed clothing from animal skins and shoes from seal skins, made homes that would protect them from the cold of winter and evolved ceremonies and celebrations and decorations for the human body. Anyone interested in the Ainu people must have wondered what their culture was like before it was influenced by Wajin. The question is unanswerable, of course, but also not very meaningful, because throughout many, many centuries, different peoples interacted. The Ainu of Hokkaido and their precursors traded with people of Sakhalin and the Russian mainland as well as Honshu. Thus Ainu culture developed and changed through the centuries just as does any culture, incorporating influences from other peoples and, in turn, influencing other peoples. Not only did Ainu culture change with time, it varied depending on its location, but the Ainu homeland — Ainu Moshir — has usually been recognized to be Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. It is possible to generalize and offer a broad view of Ainu life and culture, remembering that definite regional differences existed. Legends and stories preserved through oral tradition provide insight about Ainu practices. Archaeological study adds detail. In addition, some early travelers to Hokkaido recorded what they saw, what they were told and what they learned of the Ainu people and their language. The French explorer, the Count of La Perouse, who met Ainu in southern Sakhalin in 1787, wrote, “They are a very superior race to the Chinese, Japanese, and Mantschoos.” A. J. von Krusenstern, traveling for Russia at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, noted the kind welcome the Ainu gave to their strange visitors. Some later observers emphasized the characteristics of the Ainu that they considered strange, even bizarre, as they prophesied these people’s imminent disappearance from the scene.7 But if reports of early travelers are read with care, one can learn a lot about Ainu culture, for life in Ainu settlements before, say, 1900, would have given a much clearer picture of traditional Ainu life than do Ainu neighborhoods today, where the Ainu speak Japanese, watch television, dress in the same ways non–Ainu people do, eat the same foods and go to the same schools. (In reading early

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accounts of Ainu life, one must remember that the Wajin presence in Hokkaido had brought about many changes.) Ainu lived in small villages or kotan, and the kotan were located near rivers where the men fished. Each community had rights to fishing, hunting and gathering in a specific area. The kotan would have a headman (who might be responsible for more than one village.) He would supervise religious ceremonies, represent the kotan in relations with outsiders and make sure all families in his area had food to eat, as well as carrying out other duties associated with leadership. Different kotan were generally three to five miles apart, having as few as three or as many as twenty houses, each dwelling sheltering a single nuclear family. There was no concept of individual ownership of land. Occasionally, kotan members could decide to move the entire village to a new location in the search for, say, better sources of food, but Ainu were not a migratory people. The men might temporarily leave the village for hunting or fishing, but the village was a permanent Postcards showing Ainu scenes were popular in earlier days. Ainu would usually be pictured in traditional dress. home. Apparently, each family — Ainu men, unlike Japanese, sported heavy beards, and Ainu women were heavily tattooed around the mouth. usually father, mother and unmar- This group posed in front of a clapboard house, not a traried children — had its own house, ditional Ainu dwelling (courtesy Hakodate Municipal located at some distance from other Library). houses in the kotan, although E. A. Hammel holds that based on early nineteenth century census records, many Ainu, not necessarily related, typically lived in a single household.8 An Ainu house was rectangular, about twelve by eighteen feet, with a small anteroom at the entrance. Beyond was just one large room with a firepit or fireplace in the middle, smoke escaping through an opening in the roof above. Several layers of mats woven from reeds and cattails covered the floor; Ainu say the layers allowed heat from the fire to penetrate the space between the mats, bringing warmth to the entire floor. Men constructed houses with walls of thatch fastened to beams strengthened by wooden crosspieces tied to them. The peaked roof was similar; the men would build it on the ground

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This postcard shows Ainu wearing Japanese attire and standing in front of a house built in traditional Ainu style. Note the thatched roof and, next to the people, mats standing against the building. Mats such as these would be placed against the walls to help keep the house warm during the winter (courtesy Hakodate Municipal Library).

and raise the completed framework, then attaching it to the walls. The east side of the dwelling was sacred, with objects placed there to give thanks to the gods. A window on this side of the house was reserved for the gods, who could come into the house through it; two windows on the south side also gave light. The door was made of matting or similar material. Situated above the fireplace were racks where fish could be dried or smoked. Ainu did not use furniture, though they did have containers for keeping prized possessions. After trade with Wajin began, Ainu families treasured highly the Wajin-made lacquerware they used for storage. At one time, Ainu forged implements out of iron received in trade, but this forging later died out, people acquiring all their metal goods through trade. Ainu also made earthenware pottery items, but this ceased around the fifteenth century once people could obtain utensils from Wajin traders. Ainu houses stayed remarkably warm during the frigid winter. The fire in the central fire pit was never extinguished, and as the cold season approached, a pile of earth some two feet high could be constructed outside the walls of the house to shield them and screens made of reeds could be erected to protect the dwelling from snow and wind. Extra mats or deer skins would be hung on the inside of the walls. Also, the walls and roof of thatch were about a foot thick. Thatch shutters outside and curtains inside covered the window openings. Houses with these and other methods of protection from the cold were more comfortable in winter than houses built by many early Wajin in Hokkaido. Winter was a pleasant season, some Ainu have recollected, as it was a time of relative lei-

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sure. People found it easy to travel over hard-packed snow, and woodcutting kept workers warm. Ainu families built small outbuildings on stilts to store food supplies away from marauding animals. A well-known structure in the kotan is the bear cage. A young bear would be captured and raised here until it was used in a religious ceremony and one village task was gathering leaves and berries to feed to the cub. Men’s chores changed from season to season. Men went hunting and fishing as well as crafting the tools used in these pursuits. When hunting in the winter, the men often established temporary camps where they could stay for up to a month. To get around, the men made themselves snowshoes or skis. They sought bear, the animal most important to them, but also smaller animals, including deer and rabbits. In the springtime, one reason to hunt was to obtain the thick pelt an animal had grown for the winter. Men trained dogs to help in the hunting. (The Ainu dog was similar to today’s Akita breed.) Ainu hunters used bows and arrows, and in the arrow would place a bit of poison derived from aconite roots (monkshood). An animal killed this way could be safely eaten after the flesh was cut away from the area the arrow had penetrated. Men caught birds and small animals in traps or with bows and arrows and sometimes spears or knives crafted from readily available stone or bone. For river fishing, men killed salmon with specially designed clubs covered with spiritual carvings. At night men fished by torchlight. They also made nets and fish-traps, and even trained dogs to catch salmon. Men would fish for salmon late in the autumn when the fish left the ocean to swim upstream. Folktales tell of ocean fishing too. In the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin and on Uchiura Bay in Ezo, men also caught seals and other sea mammals, even an occasional whale. When fishing, the men paddled near the shore, hunting the sea animals only on calm days, using bows and arrows or harpoons. Men even fished through the ice in the winter. Men constructed dugout canoes to use in the rivers and larger ones for sea activities. A painting from around 1800 shows an Ainu seagoing boat shaped somewhat like a rowboat, with a sail, a steersman and six men rowing, three on a side. The vessel was carrying two Wajin passengers to the Kuril Islands.9 Some of the men’s activities did not involve hunting and fishing. Men were responsible for trade with other nearby Ainu communities and also with distant people, from Sakhalin or the Kurils and, later, with Russians, Chinese and Wajin who appeared in their land. The men were the wood carvers. Using knives, chisels and axes, they carved intricate patterns into eating vessels and implements as well as religious objects. Men carried out Ainu religious rituals, after preparing the items used in them. Men were the fighters, and warfare between separate Ainu communities was fairly common. Ainu epics suggest that at one time class differences existed between Ainu, with higher ranking men doing the fighting while servants carried out daily chores. At the top of the system were the men who were expert at hunting bears. Polygamy was once found among Ainu, as high-ranking or wealthy men could have several wives.10 Women’s duties were very different from men’s. In 1905, Missionary Annie Bradshaw described Ainu women as near-slaves to the men: “From morning till night and from one year’s end till another it is nothing but work, work, work, and their work is manual labor of the heaviest and most tiring kind.” One job women did not do, she tells us, is washing dishes, because they reasoned that the dishes would soon be used again in the same way, so there was no sense in cleaning them between uses. Another missionary, John Batchelor, noted that a woman was to her husband “too frequently his willing slave,”

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but wrote more than a quarter of a century later that Ainu men respected women, who were “treated as the equals of the men,” though their roles differed. Women cared for the children, of course, and except during the winter, roamed the plains and mountains gathering whatever plants would be useful —for eating, for medicine, for clothing. In springtime women planted small crops, mostly of millet. Gardens were not fertilized or weeded, though. In the spring women tapped maple trees for syrup. Ainu scholar Kayano Shigeru remembered licking the sweet icy syrup as a child.11 Just as with food, Ainu used available materials for clothing, and as trade grew with other peoples, more types of apparel became common. In earlier times, women made clothing from hides of many animals— bear, deer, rabbit and fox, for example. Ainu also used the skins of fish and other sea animals and, on the Kuril Islands, seabird feathers. From plants, both bark and grasses became raw materials. Garments were simply cut robes, rectangular in shape, with attached sleeves. Both men and women wore these, though it was women’s work to create them. In the summer women collected reeds and cattails that had reached their maximum growth but had not started to deteriorate with approaching cooler weather. The women went to the river bank to harvest the stalks and then prepared them for weaving by careful drying. Women did some fishing, too, but they trapped fish rather than spearing them. In the fall, women dried the salmon that the family would eat throughout the winter. In the winter women also hunted small animals and, occasionally, deer. All of these activities, hunting, fishing and gathering, were what sustained the Ainu. One study has estimated that Ainu were traditionally dependent for their subsistence about forty percent on fishing and thirty percent each on gathering and hunting.11 During deep winter, women created mats and clothing, weaving fabric called attush from elm bark. Making clothes meant hard work. Bark of the proper quality would be peeled in strips from the tree. Then women would separate the bark into inner and outer layers, using only the inner layer to make cloth. The women would soak this bark for perhaps a week, wash, dry, and painstakingly split it into fibers, then twist and gather these into a skein before weaving bark cloth on a loom. An Ainu legend tells that the first people in the world wore clothing made from bark in this way. The garments were somewhat coarse and could become a bit brittle as they dried. Women embroidered symmetrical geometric designs around the neck, sleeve and lower ends of ceremonial garments, sometimes over most of the surface. In more recent years, Ainu used new or used cotton received in trade to make robes with traditional cut and designs. Women also wove a secret belt to wear inside their clothes for special protection. Not even a woman’s husband was allowed to see the belt. In 1878, English traveler Isabella Bird described Ainu winter wear as “one, two, or more coats of skins, with hoods of the same.” She admired the bark-cloth dresses or kimonos worn in the summer.13 Several coats made from salmon skins have been found in Hokkaido; such a coat required fifty or more skins. Many examples of traditional Ainu clothing can be seen in museums today, along with shoes of seal fur or straw and boots of salmon skin. Fish scales could provide a non-slip surface for the sole. The boots were made large enough that they could be stuffed with straw for warmth. People wore woven leggings when going through underbrush or tall grass; the reed or rush fibers of the leggings would be left untrimmed at the ankle and as the weaver walked, the rustling reeds would help keep insects away. Ainu apparently did not wash themselves and travelers thus often mentioned their smell.

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Accompanying clothing is decoration, and in the days before extensive trade with other peoples, Ainu developed a distinctive mode of decorating women with tattoos, the most apparent feature being heavy coloring around the mouth, making the lips appear much larger than normal. This tattoo would keep evil spirits from entering a woman’s body through her mouth and nose. With a knife, a skilled older woman made cuts and filled them with specially-prepared soot, then applying juice from plants with medicinal properties in order to prevent infection. A girl’s forearms and wrists were often tattooed too. The first decorations might be applied as early as a girl’s seventh year, but over the years until maturity more tattooing would bring the pattern to perfection. Tattoos were not the only decorations. On ceremonial occasions, both women and men wore widely looped earrings decorated with beads in their pierced ears. Women often wore large and beautiful beads, obtained in trade, in elaborate necklaces. Women also wore woven headbands on special occasions, while men wore headdresses such as those still seen today at ceremonies. When men carried swords (received in trade), these were held in cloth straps featuring intricate designs. Traditional Ainu food — the gift of the gods— included all the edible resources, animal and vegetable, that one would expect to find in a northern land of forest, ocean and rivers. Hokkaido Ainu practiced cultivation on a small scale, raising small crops of grain — including barley, millet and wheat — and more recently growing beans and other vegetables, including onions, tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins and daikon. Long ago, before widespread trade developed with other peoples, Ainu may have carried on more extensive agriculture. Wajin introduced the above vegetables, but Ainu have apparently raised atane, a turnip, for centuries. Ainu women gathered additional native plants, including wild garlic, wild grapes, lily bulbs and even skunk cabbage. The women would dry these plants, sometimes after boiling them first. Women collected berries and nuts— acorns and also chestnuts, and if the chestnuts were buried, they would stay fresh all winter. Ainu rarely grew rice, for traditional varieties were not adapted to the Hokkaido climate, but traded with Wajin for it. Ainu preserved fish, meat and even some vegetables by drying. Preservation was important, and Ainu would kept stocks of preserved food on hand in case of famine as well as for winter use. During winter, people lived mostly on dried salmon, venison and vegetables. (Food can be preserved through salting as well as drying, but for Ainu the cost was prohibitive in more recent years because of a Wajin monopoly on salt.) To prepare food for eating, Ainu women would boil together whatever was available. In desperate times, even dogs could be a source of food. Salmon, caught in the fall, is the best-known fish that was part of the traditional Ainu diet and also the most important food for winter use. It is recorded that when the Ishikari River salmon run failed in 1725, several hundred Ainu died of starvation in the winter and spring.14 The importance of salmon to Ainu is indicated by the Ainu word for salmon, which also means “staple food.” After trout swam upriver in the springtime, Ainu caught the fish, preserving them in a natural spring with flowing fresh water. Covered with small stones, the fish could be kept for up to a month in this manner. Unlike salmon, trout did not dry or smoke well, so salmon were the fish eaten in winter. Ainu harvested ocean fish, too, as well as oysters, clams, crabs and kombu. The most highly prized food was meat, bear meat the most valuable of all, though venison was probably the meat eaten most often. Foods used by Ainu varied somewhat by area, with plants and animals of the sea a more important part of the diet in coastal communities.

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Some traditional implements used in obtaining and cooking food are visible in museums today, from bows and arrows to ladles made of shells attached by fiber to wooden handles. Shells had other uses too; their sharp edges were used to cut grain. Isabella Bird wrote that the chief ’s main wife would “cut wild roots, green beans, and seaweed, and shred dried fish and venison among them, adding millet, water, and some strong-smelling fish-oil, and set the whole to stew for three hours.” Only a few of the people smoked, she reported, but they drank a fair amount of sake which was, she wrote, “their curse,” although they drank it only after offering some to the gods.15 Presumably, this occurred only after Wajin introduced sake to the Ainu, though Ainu had traditionally made an alcoholic beverage from millet. Ainu serve a traditional soup at celebrations today. The soup flavors are subtle; Ainu like the taste of the actual foods, some say, and thus use little seasoning. In the soup broth are bits of salmon, quite a few chunks of potato and small amounts of carrot, cabbage and onion, making a filling fare.

Religion, ceremony and folklore To any culture or people, religion and ritual are a part of life. The Ainu belief system features animal, vegetable and mineral gods; anything can be a god, and after a person’s death, his or her spirit becomes a god. Everything has a life; everything is a god. The magnificent Blakiston’s fish owl is the god who created the world. This owl represents the Ainu village and protects Ainu, ensuring that they have fish and deer to eat. Natural phenomena, geographical features and things people make can also be gods. John Batchelor wrote that Ainu “believe that beasts, birds, fishes and growing trees and all plants have their own individual lives.... Hence the bubbling spring, the sparking, rippling rivulet, the gently gliding stream, the rushing torrent, the flying clouds, the whistling winds, the pouring rain, the roaring storm, the restless ocean, and all such phenomena have, in their opinion, real lives abounding in them.” Whenever thunder came, an Ainu woman reported, people would hurry home, sit in a special place and bow their heads until the thunder ended — to prevent the thunder god’s wrath.16 A god has greater powers than do people; some gods are good and some are evil. For life to prosper, gods and people must respect each other. Gods, or kamui, provide the things that make life possible. They are helpful, but can cause trouble when people do stupid or bad things. Humans must, in turn, treat the earth and other living things kindly. Natural disasters are signs of the gods’ displeasure, and to appease the gods and atone for bad behavior, people must conduct religious ceremonies. Perhaps the god of the fire is the most important god, for this god is present in so much of Ainu life, whenever there is a fire —for cooking or for warmth. Next most crucial is the god of food, then the “god of earth and natural things” and after this, the dragon god, who taught language to the people.17 All belief systems surely must include a story of the creation of earth and of mankind. Wide variations of this story appeared among the Ainu in different regions. In one version, the male god — thunder — struck the female god — elm — leading to the birth of Ainurakkur, the god who taught ways of life to the Ainu and safeguarded them from evil. Another account describes the Ainu coming from a wooden doll which floated across the sea from Korea to Japan.

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This early postcard view shows Ainu men preparing to kill a bear as part of the iyomante, or bear ceremony. The act of killing the bear is seen not as a sacrifice but as a way to return the bear’s spirit to the gods. The long ceremony includes praying, dancing and singing (courtesy Hakodate Municipal Library).

To an outsider, it is the unusual, visually impressive or dangerous practices of religion that excite the most interest. The importance of the bear ceremony in traditional Ainu culture has captured the attention of many who have written about the Ainu, whether serious scholars or people writing in popular magazines to a mass audience. The bear ceremony, or iyomante, is not only interesting to observers, it seems to be the most significant part of traditional Ainu worship. The ceremony, for which Ainu from different communities would come together, involved ritual killing of a bear cub which had been taken from its mother perhaps in February a year and a half earlier and raised carefully by the community. Ainu women occasionally nursed bear cubs raised for the ceremony; John Batchelor saw this being done. He noted that younger Ainu denied that the custom ever existed, since it did not conform to modern ways.18 Ainu performed iyomante in the winter, when men and women were not busy hunting, fishing or gathering food. The ritual enabled the return of the bear’s spirit to the heavens (gods come to earth temporarily as animals or objects), and people presented many items to the gods along with the bear’s spirit. This “sending away” is what iyomante means; Ainu do not perceive it as a sacrifice. Many people, dressed in their best, would gather for the ceremony. Women prepared special foods and millet beer. The people worshipped the still-caged cub and one of the men prayed to the cub while singing and dancing accompanied his prayers. He finally released the bear, securely fastened, from the cage. Men shot at it with blunt arrows to build up its rage and eventually, as the cub tired, tied it to a stake and throttled it to death. More dancing followed. The animal was skinned

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Many Ainu would gather for a bear ceremony, and a number of postcards depicting the occasion were produced during the early twentieth century.

and brought into the house through the sacred window. Some of the meat was cooked and offered to the now elaborately decorated bear’s head, which was prayed to again. Later, everyone ate. This was a ceremonial feast, at which the bear was the chief guest. Iyomante can be more or less detailed than this description. It may have developed into an elaborate ceremony in fairly recent times, perhaps about 1800. The ceremony was outlawed for a time by Wajin authorities, but it is now practiced again, sometimes in part for tourists and sometimes, for Ainu only, as a serious religious ceremony. Ainu men created several types of implements for specific religious purposes. One was the inau, a sacred stick made of wood perhaps a foot and a half or more long, partially shaved so that thin curls surrounded it on all sides. It was used to help send prayers and offerings to the gods. The inau had to be created from live wood, which had the ability to guard people from evil. Specially prepared inau would be placed at an outdoor site for an iyomante. Different was the ikupasuy, a flat stick about two or three inches wide and a foot long, carved with often complex patterns. Only on ikupasuy did Ainu ever create representations of animals or people. Ikupasuy were used with prayers and to make an offering of sake to the gods. Observers of the Ainu in the nineteenth century (and later) often referred to ikupasuy as “mustache lifters,” because men raised their thick mustaches with them. This was far from the ceremonial stick’s main function, though. Ainu did not have special structures for worship such as churches or temples. The

2. The Ainu house of the village chief, which was larger than other houses, had some ceremonial uses, as for portions of the bear ceremony, Traditional Ainu culture featured music and dance. One dance, at the bear ceremony, ensured that the spirit of the bear did return to the gods. In perhaps the best-known dance, the crane dance, women in a circle imitated the birds’ movements in their courtship ritual, especially the flapping of their wings. A dance traditional to the coastal community of Shiraoi was the stranded whale dance, in which the animal, portrayed by a dancer draped under a robe and huddled on the floor, was discovered by a blind woman, who alerted the villagers. The dance portrayed the actions of the people harvesting the whale’s blubber and meat. At the end, nothing was left but the whaleskin—the empty robe. Along with dance, Ainu had music, many songs, and a kind of Jew’s harp, the mukkuri, made of bamboo and a thread. Another instrument, the tonkori, was guitar-like but fretless, with four to six deer tendon strings above a flat sounding board. Each Ainu house featured religious objects. Even the fire pit had a spiritual significance, for when the god Okikurumi taught the Ainu how to use all the resources of their land to get food and shelter, he showed how to use fire. (He also gave Ainu the bow and arrow and demonstrated how to use poisoned arrows.) Annie Bradshaw’s study of the Ainu led her to think that Ainu women were excluded from religion by the men. John Batchelor described being told by an Ainu man that at one time women had participated in religious ceremonies, but that “our wise ancestors forbade them to do so, because it

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In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Japanese artists painted many pictures, called Ainu-e, of Ainu activities. Kawabata Gyokusho painted this Ainu-e during the second half of the nineteenth century to portray Ainu celebrating a bountiful salmon catch (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

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was thought they might use their prayers against the men.”19 Women, thus, were not supposed to pray. This does not mean that women were necessarily considered inferior. A woman could be a shaman and act as a medium, but men took a more active role in religion. Shamanism was important in healing, as were medicinal plants. Among Ainu beliefs was the importance of not naming a child at birth, not having a ceremony nor giving the newborn fancy clothes, for fear of evil spirits putting a spell on the child. Instead, a temporary name or nickname with a negative connotation would be used. Not until the child reached the age of seven or eight years would he or she be named. Moreover, no one was to be given the name of a person who had died, for that person’s spirit could be offended and possibly cause evil to occur. The Ainu feared death. Ainu communities did not have cemeteries. After the funeral ceremonies, two men would carry the person who died to a distant site marked with a simple stick, and Ainu would thereafter avoid the place. Allied to legends that underlie spiritual beliefs are traditional stories, whether uepeker— simple folk tales— or yukar —heroic epics. All were passed down by word of mouth. Mothers sang traditional songs to their children, who thus learned proper conduct from tales with morals— somewhat similar to Aesop’s Fables —as well as explanations about the world and the beings in it. The stories varied somewhat from vicinity to vicinity; one says that while creating the Ainu homeland, or Ainu Moshir, the creator placed it on the back of a giant fish, which he mistakenly thought was land. On discovering his mistake, he sent two gods to hold the fish steady, but occasionally the fish moves if a god relaxes temporarily or if a demon god interferes, and people feel an earthquake. (A similar tale occurs in Wajin lore as well as in other cultures far from Asia.) Seeing the sun rise in the east and set in the west, Ainu knew that the earth was round. One yukar sung by someone representing Okikurumi’s wife tells of an Ainu village where the people were starving, due to famine. Okikurumi went to the ocean, brought in whales and fish and made a stew from their meat to feed the villagers. Okikurumi’s wife took some stew to each house, but at one, a man began to stroke her arm. Irate, Okikurumi returned to the gods’ home with his wife. She was distressed at having to leave the village, though, and did not regain health and happiness until he created a picture of the village and its surroundings in the sky. As in other cultures, folk tales explain many aspects of the natural world. One Ainu legend explains why one hears the loud cry of the cicada only on hot summer days. It seems that an old woman’s cries were disturbing the gods; she would not stop crying after a tidal wave destroyed her village. To stem her tears, the gods turned the woman into a cicada and decreed that she would live with people in the summer and the gods in the winter. Still she cried, though, and a wise god finally told her that she could cry only on hot, sunny days. Many tales from different peoples are similar. An Ainu tale tells of a god creating food for a hungry family by taking one grain of rice which he made into enough to feed the family for as long as they lived. Another Ainu tale explains why men have only one wife. Long ago, a certain man was married to two women. After his second wife gave birth to a daughter, the first wife became jealous of the attention given to the new mother. So the first wife pretended to become very ill and proclaimed that in order to recover she had to eat the heart of the little girl. The husband sadly ordered two men to take the child to the woods, kill her and bring back her heart. The kind-hearted men killed a dog instead and secretly returned

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37

the child to her mother; then the pair fled. Eventually the evil wife was turned into a crow and the husband had a dream telling him to live again with his second wife and daughter. Since then, men only marry one wife. Among the tales drawing morals is a story recounting Hokkaido’s creation by a god and a goddess. The god carefully carried out his task and made the east coast, but the goddess neglected her work, instead gossiping away, and finally created the west coast in a hurry; thus it is mountainous and unproductive. Moral: carry out one’s tasks with care, instead of spending time in idle pursuits. A different kind of legend incorporates real people. The most famous of these involve Yoshitsune, a tragic Japanese hero, who lived in the twelfth century. Yoshitsune fought in Honshu with his brother’s forces against the Taira family. The brother ordered Yoshitsune killed, however, and he became a heroic martyr to common people. But legend tells that Yoshitsune escaped death and fled to Ezo where he became the Ainu god Okikurumi. In some stories Yoshitsune seems to be a hero, in some a villain, in others a god. A shrine to Yoshitsune exists where Ainu tradition says he is buried, in the Ainu community of Biratori in Nibutani Town. Japanese officials encouraged the legend in order to ensure Ainu cooperation with Wajin. Folk tales regarding Yoshitsune abound. One has it that he left Ezo for China and became Genghis Khan. The Ainu girl who loved him was so distraught at his departure that she threw herself into the sea near Cape Kamui, not too far from Otaru. A variant says that the Ainu girl stood on the shore watching forever for Yoshitsune, and eventually turned into a rock. Another legend about Yoshitsune is of relatively recent origin, because it explains why the Ainu had no written language. It seems that Yoshitsune married the daughter of an Ainu chief. This chief had one ancient book, which he obviously treasured. Yoshitsune deviously obtained it and fled, taking the knowledge of written language with him. Another version describes Yoshitsune fleeing with all the books and other treasures of the Ainu people. In the nineteenth century, when the first railroad train in Hokkaido began service, its engine received the name Yoshitsune. The second engine became Benkei, Yoshitsune’s aide, but at least one observer felt this was not a good choice, since Ainu heartily disliked Benkei for supposed pranks he carried out in Sakhalin. Some nineteenth century observers of the Ainu felt that at least some of the tales they heard from Ainu informants had come from Wajin tradition and had been adapted by Ainu. Certainly the assumption of Yoshitsune as a hero, even god, in Ainu lore is an example of this. Basil Hall Chamberlain, who learned the Ainu language, is one of the best-known early collectors of Ainu tales. He noted that though it was women who mainly told the tales, it was men who imparted them to him, because women were too shy to speak to an Englishman.20 A group of Ainu riddles collected about a century ago shows that Ainu used this form of humor. What has a puffed belly, but no legs, hands, eyes, or mouth? An egg. What goes up the river with a loud voice? Ice, which forms first at a river’s mouth and works its way upstream. Also, what rests during the day and works at night? Lamplight. Ainu had superstitions, too. Chamberlain recorded some of them: a man who obtains a cuckoo’s nest will become wealthy if he lets no one see the nest. But if a cuckoo lands on the roof of one’s house, it means that fire will destroy the house. It will rain if one dreams about rivers or liquids or swimming. If one dreams about meat, disease will follow.21

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Ainu beliefs led to interpretations of history somewhat different from Wajin explanations. Not only would Ainu say that their people were not driven out of Honshu but chose to leave, they would also say that some difficulties with the expansion of Wajin society on Ezo came about because the Ainu did not maintain the proper relationship with their own gods.

Language The Ainu language is a distinct language that had different dialects in different sections of Hokkaido as well as on Sakhalin and on the Kurils. Ainu is similar in some aspects to Japanese, for example in word order, and some linguists hold that Ainu is closer to Japanese than to any other language. Most experts today, however, generally agree that they cannot explain the origins of Ainu and its possible relationships to other languages, including Japanese. Japanese and Ainu may have developed from a common language perhaps as long as ten thousand years ago. On the other hand, the similarities between the two languages may be explained by proximity, that is, the borrowing of words and perhaps even grammatical structure from a language spoken nearby, as English incorporated many French words after the Norman Conquest of England. Illustrating this are the Ainu and Japanese words meaning “god”— the Ainu kamui and the Japanese kami. Note that without historical information, it is impossible to tell which language might have borrowed the word from the other. A number of Ainu words clearly come directly from Japanese, including tampaku from tabako (tobacco) and umma from uma (horse). A few Japanese words have come from Ainu; the Japanese word for reindeer, tonakai, comes from the Ainu tunakkay. Various other words in the two languages are similar, but whether they are related is unclear. The Japanese word for “black” is kuroi, while in Ainu it is kunne. Kurasi means “dark,” and the common Japanese word for “dark” is kurai. In the Ainu language as found in Hokkaido are just twelve consonant sounds and five vowel sounds. Ainu sentences follow a pattern closer to Japanese than to English: the verb comes last in the sentence, and instead of a preposition, Ainu uses a particle after the object of a phrase. But, unlike Japanese (and English), the verb does not include tense. One has to add a word to specify when the described action occurred (or will occur) or infer this from context. Also, though in Japanese a verb keeps the same form regardless of person (I go, you go, we go, they go, for example) and English has just slight variations (he goes), verb prefixes and endings in Ainu are different depending upon whether the subject is I, you (singular), he/she, we, you (plural) or they — as in Spanish or German. Like all languages, Ainu contains especially precise and colorful words. One is nibushi, meaning “the coldest place.” It is a compound of ni, or tree, and bushi, the sound one hears when a tree splits apart due to the pressure of the water in it freezing. The word is so evocative that it has been adopted for commercial use. Many, many Hokkaido cities and towns, and even some on Honshu, have names derived from Ainu. “Sapporo” comes from an ancient Ainu name for the river there, either from sat poro pet, which would mean “big dry river” or sari poro pet, a reedy area by the river. The name of Wakkanai evolved from the Ainu term “yam wakkanay,” meaning “cold water river.” Some people have thought that even Mt. Fuji’s name comes from an Ainu word, fuchi, the Ainu fire goddess, but linguists today generally dismiss this idea.

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39

Shiraoi, a town on the coast between Muroran and Tomakomai, has long included a sizable Ainu community and now features an Ainu village built for tourists. In Ainu, the town’s name may have meant “place with many horseflies.” John Batchelor wrote that it meant “the place where the tide comes out (over the land),” signifying high tides.22 When place names like this from the Ainu language have been adapted into Japanese, they have been given written characters that fit their pronunciation. Shira can mean “white” in Japanese and oi can mean “old age.” The two characters with these meanings and pronunciations are written today to indicate the town name “Shiraoi.” Near Shiraoi is the hot springs resort city of Noboribetsu. Nobori means “to ascend” or “to climb” in Japanese, and betsu is “special” or “different.” The Ainu name, pronounced in a somewhat similar way, meant merely “turbid river.” In this case, both Ainu and Japanese names are appropriate, for there are mountains in this town located along a river. Betsu, by the way, appears in many Hokkaido place names to represent the Ainu word pet, which means “river.” The Ainu counting system differs from the Japanese, the number twenty playing a prominent role. The numbers one to five have their own names, as does ten. Six through nine are expressed as ten minus a number and the teens by numbers added to ten. Larger numbers are expressed as multiples of twenty, subtracting any amounts needed. The Ainu language no longer plays a central role in the life of almost all Ainu people and Ainu culture has long been overwhelmed by Japan’s majority culture. Few people speak Ainu today, though in recent years activists have worked to revive the language and Ainu speakers offer classes in various communities, even Tokyo, for both adults and children. Texts and bilingual dictionaries are available for Japanese interested in studying the Ainu language.

The Ainu and the Wajin In the early days of contact, most Wajin considered Ainu uncivilized. Even Nitobe Inazu, a well-educated, cosmopolitan educator and thinker, described the Ainu in 1912 as a people “not yet emerged from the Stone Age.” About the same time, a western observer described Ainu as “ almost servile,” unlike the warriors who practiced “savage cruelty” in ages past. Both images, “servile” and “savage cruelty” are far from representative of Ainu culture. In the old days, Ainu fought other Ainu and later fought Japanese, but there is no evidence of excessive cruelty. If servility appeared later, it was in response to the increasing Wajin domination of Hokkaido. Among other mistaken beliefs, early observers commonly believed that the children of a mixed Ainu-Wajin couple could not be healthy, and that descendants of such a union would soon die out.22 Ask a Japanese today the question, “Are the Ainu Japanese?” and you may get the answer, “It depends what you mean by Japanese.” In the eighteenth century, when Japan held only an outpost on Hokkaido, Japanese definitely considered the Ainu a foreign people. Thus for Wajin, the question of who the Ainu are is most complex. Because Wajin think of themselves as the people native to their land, who can the Ainu be? They are citizens of Japan (though different laws have been applied to them) but ethnically some would count only Wajin as Japanese. In the Japanese language, “Ainu” is treated as a foreign word rather than a native Japanese word, so its foreignness is emphasized whenever one sees it in print. Wajin today will admit that they know little about Ainu. Scholar

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Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney has written that Ainu were “romantic but distant figures” to her, growing up as she did in western Japan, far from Hokkaido.23 This contrasts with the strong anti–Ainu prejudice sometimes found among Wajin living in close proximity to Ainu, where economic competition colors attitudes. Ainu people had developed a culture through which they could survive in the harsh northern conditions of Hokkaido. But over the years, Wajin came to increase their power in the island of Hokkaido, taking over the fisheries, making rules for the Ainu to follow, pushing the Ainu aside, and incidentally passing along diseases to this unprotected native people. But the Ainu survived, albeit in much smaller numbers than before the Wajin appeared. The coming of the Wajin led to a situation in which the Ainu no longer could control their environment, and inevitably their world and their lifestyle changed dramatically.

3

The Matsumae Era

Hokkaido, then called Ezo, was not part of Japan in early times, but this northern island could not remain merely the land of the Ainu. The story of the Matsumae era describes the decisions, policies and events that gradually brought the island more and more clearly into Japan. The tale contains several themes: the growth and development of Wajin activities on Ezo as well as Ainu life during this era. Records exist of clashes between Wajin and Ainu on Honshu from as early as the seventh century, and over the next few centuries Wajin conquest drove Ainu people farther and farther north and across Tsugaru Strait to Ezo. One account indicates that in A.D. 659 Wajin set up an observation post on Ezo’s west coast to monitor activities on the Asian mainland.1 In the twelfth century, Wajin refugees fleeing warfare in northern Honshu founded a few settlements around the southern tip of Ezo. Wajin power on Ezo slowly grew. Early Wajin who came to live in Ezo and begin trading with the Ainu protected their new settlements with simple fortifications. They hunted, fished and traded with nearby Ainu. By the fifteenth century, a formal Wajin government was in place in the Oshima Peninsula on Ezo’s southwestern tip. As contacts between Ainu and Wajin grew and the Wajin gained more and more sway over Ezo, a family that took the name Matsumae asserted control, and their headquarters town near the tip of the Oshima Peninsula came to be called Matsumae. (It was sometimes known as Fukuyama.) The era during which the Matsumae dominated the island lasted roughly from 1600 to 1800, when the shogunate, Japan’s central government, took control, later relinquishing it to the Matsumae from 1821 to 1854.

A Wajin presence in Ezo By the end of the twelfth century, a nation we call Japan prevailed in the islands of Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. This land, under military rule, was led by the shogun near Edo, as Tokyo was then known. The emperor, leader in name only, resided in Kyoto. Over the next few centuries, different clans vied for control, and at times some rebelled against shogunal authority. In the mid–sixteenth century, European explorers reached Japan. Christian missionaries soon followed, but less than a century later the religion was proscribed. In 1600, the Tokugawa family gained control of the shogunate and instituted a policy by which each of the country’s powerful lords, or daimyo, had to spend alternate years in the capital rather than their own domain in order to ensure their loyalty. Another policy closed Japan to foreigners except for minimal trade with the Chinese and Dutch

41

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I. BECOMING HOKKAIDO

at the port of Nagasaki in the far south. Meanwhile, in the distant north, Ezo was only marginally incorporated into Japan, and Wajin carried out trade with outsiders there, especially through Ainu as middlemen. Early Japanese legends and chronicles tell of Wajin who went to Ezo, the most famous being Yoshitsune. Wajin settlers fleeing from famine, warfare and unsettled conditions in northern Honshu came to the Oshima peninsula to live and traders came to exchange goods with the Ainu. Some of those Wajin whose twelfth century penetration of Ezo is documented were victims of storms at sea who landed on the northern shores. Others included undesirables sent into exile for political reasons, criminals deported there, or robbers or pirates out for wealth. One story tells of Wajin going to Ezo at that time to dig for gold. Winds carried a small boat out to sea from its Honshu port and it landed on Ezo, near Shiriuchi (southwest of Hakodate). The boat’s cook went searching for fresh water and found a sparkling nugget beneath a waterfall. His master, Araki Daikaku, sent the nugget to the rulers of Japan in Edo, and Araki received orders to survey the area for more gold. His men — he took more than one thousand to Ezo— built modest fortifications and stayed for thirteen years in the area, but enmity developed between the fortune-seekers and local Ainu. Ainu killed the Wajin and went on to cross over to Honshu, where they in turn were wiped out. Inevitably, informal trade developed between Wajin and Ainu. As more Wajin came to Ezo and Wajin-Ainu trade grew, Ainu life changed irrevocably. Ainu began to use Wajin goods and, over time, became dependent upon them. Sadly as well as surely, one of the Wajin trade items was sake, and its introduction to the Ainu led to predictable results. For many years, a Wajin clan called Ando controlled the territory both north and south of Tsugaru Strait, but in the third decade of the fifteenth century the Ando were forced to flee to the north, and as they settled down to rule the Oshima Peninsula, a fair number of other Wajin drifted into this realm. Most lived by fishing, and the Ando taxed their efforts. Meanwhile, Ainu in the area continued to live as they had in the past, but now they traded with the Ando. Ainu offered carved wooden items, feathers, skins, sea products and other such items and received from the Wajin mainly sake, tobacco, rice, cotton cloth and lacquerware, the beautiful storage containers Ainu used for important items. Trading between Ainu and Wajin began more or less on a basis of equality, though disputes inevitably arose. Despite some Ainu victories in conflicts, Wajin became more and more powerful and came to control the trade. Wajin perceived the Ainu as paying tribute, while Ainu thought they were merely trading or participating in a ceremony in which the two groups exchanged gifts. By the mid–fifteenth century, at least twelve small fortified Wajin communities sat along the coastline of the southern part of the Oshima Peninsula, but from the beginning, the presence of Ainu in and near this land now coveted and controlled by Wajin created tension and sometimes violence. Though Wajin and Ainu often lived peacefully in the peninsula, disputes between them led to intermittent warfare during the next several centuries. For defense, the Ando regime began placing Buddhist cemeteries around fortifications, as Ainu believed they could not enter a place of the dead. The first major confrontation between Ainu and Wajin, in 1456, led to a shift in power but not toward the Ainu, merely from one Wajin group to another. A dispute over the value of a sword sold by a Wajin to an Ainu touched off Koshamain’s War (named for the chieftain who led the Ainu forces). Fighting spread and Ainu fighters demolished

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Kimura Hako painted this nineteenth century Ainu-e showing Ainu appearing before officials of the Matsumae government. The Ainu are accompanied by an ethnic Japanese, who is at the left of the painting (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

several Wajin forts before being overcome. The large scale of this conflict suggests Ainu concern over increasing numbers of outsiders taking control of land the Ainu considered their own. The war also gives an indication that Ainu culture evolved due to the Wajin presence, for leaders such as Koshamain who had authority over a number of Ainu communities did not exist in earlier times. The scope of the confrontation also hints that the Ando did not yet dominate Ezo. Takeda Nobuhiro defended one of the very few Wajin forts not captured, Hanazawa on the west coast of the peninsula. He was an associate of the Kakizaki family, which by now ran Ando affairs in Ezo while the Ando stayed on northern Honshu. After Takeda’s exploit, the Kakizaki family adopted him. He inherited family leadership and, by 1514, won Ando authorization to rule over the clan’s holdings in Ezo. In 1516 the shogunate granted to the Kakizaki the right to claim tax payments from all ships that came to Ezo for trade goods. Because of the lucrative trade and the rich fishery, there was no impetus for Wajin to try to develop an agriculture suited to Ezo conditions; the Wajin living on Ezo could trade with merchants from the south for foods they needed. Though other regional Japanese daimyo measured their wealth in rice, this was not the case for the Ando. Trade between Ainu and Wajin grew, but conflicts peppered the sixteenth century — in 1515, 1525, 1529, 1531 and 1536. In 1550-51 the groups made peace, at least for awhile. Though the Kakizaki had carried the day in the various conflicts, they decided that a better

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Matsumae Castle was the last castle built in Japan’s traditional style. Erected in 1606, it marks the headquarters of the Matsumae clan, who settled on the southwestern tip of Ezo (Hokkaido) and gained their wealth from the island’s abundant fisheries. The castle has been restored and is open to visitors.

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policy might be one of cooperation with the Ainu. The peace included a trade accord; Ainu and Wajin alike would have income from the trade, but among the Wajin, the Kakizaki would have exclusive rights to this commerce. Also, the Kakizaki agreed on the delineation of a border between the Wajin land on the tip of the Oshima Peninsula and Ainu land on the rest of Ezo. Wajin began to recognize important Ainu chiefs and show them some respect. Perhaps these measures were adopted in order that Ezo could be controlled with fewer troops. About the end of the sixteenth century, the Tokugawa Shogunate officially recognized the Kakizaki area of the Oshima Peninsula as a domain, a part of Japan proper. Thus the Kakizaki won recognition of their freedom from Ando overlordship. The Kakizaki changed the family name to Matsumae, gave a map of Ezo to Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, and began some two hundred years of Matsumae control of Ezo, first consolidating their control over all the Wajin settlements on the peninsula. Matsumae Yoshihiro, Takeda’s grandson, became Ezo ruler as a direct vassal of the shogun of Japan. In 1606 the Matsumae clan built a small castle, the northernmost in all Japan, on high land in the town of Matsumae very near the southernmost tip of the Oshima Peninsula. This was at the time Japan was emerging from more than a century of warfare, united now under the Tokugawa, with individual daimyo holding power in their own domains. Matsumae Town was the center of Matsumae power, and with the castle, the Matsumae would strive to protect their domain, the northern frontier of Japan. The domain consisted of the toes of Ezo’s boot and came to be called Wajinchi, or the land of the Japanese. By far the greater part of the island was designated to be the Ezochi, or Ainu land. The shogunate authorized the Matsumae to control trade and entry to the Ezochi. The Matsumae set up trading posts in the Ezochi and gave important vassals the right to operate them. In 1604, the shogunate granted the Matsumae the privilege to prohibit Ainu trading except at the trading posts. Matsumae vassals more and more turned over the business of trade to experienced merchants, mainly from Osaka and Sendai and especially to traders from Omi, in today’s Shiga Prefecture near Kyoto. They brought goods from Honshu that the Matsumae needed, particularly rice. By the 1630s, the Honshu traders were establishing offices in Matsumae to facilitate this commerce. Until late in the seventeenth century, some Ainu were able to take their trade goods directly to Honshu, but most of the trade went through the Matsumae. Meanwhile, Wajin fishermen were allowed to fish all along the coast of Ezo and establish temporary camps but not spend the winter in the Ezochi. These camps eventually grew into today’s coastal cities and towns. It should be noted, too, that Wajin used Ainu in trading with the wider world. Ainu were part of a trade network that brought goods from China via the north Asian mainland to Sakhalin Island. Local Ainu then carried them to Ezo, where they could be transferred to Honshu merchants. China controlled Sakhalin until near the end of the eighteenth century and until the mid–nineteenth century held mainland territory north to the Amur River, which empties into the sea across from northern Sakhalin. In the trade from China, called the Santan trade, came cottons and brocades, beads, coins, pipes and other items. In the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, a Hokkaido Ainu chief showed John Batchelor money and decorative brass from Manchuria that had come in trade to the chief ’s ancestors.2 Ainu traded to the Wajin some of the goods from China. (Beautiful Chinese embroidered robes called Ezo brocade came via Sakhalin to Ezo and often finally to Edo. Some can be seen today in Hokkaido museums.) To the Chinese the

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Ainu supplied fur and dried fish but also goods made of iron, especially weapons, which they had received from Wajin, and sake and tobacco. Another trade route extended from Ezo through the Kuril Islands to the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia. Treasured goods obtained here for Wajin markets included feathers and otter pelts. By 1615 the Matsumae were trading with Ainu living as far away as Nemuro, and within a decade those Ainu were traveling through the Kurils to collect goods to barter to the Matsumae. The Matsumae needed the Ainu to legitimize the clan’s presence in Ezo: the Ainu trade was the source of Matsumae wealth. From the Wajin viewpoint, by regulating relations with the Ainu, the clan was protecting Japan from people considered to be savages. Wajin adventurers and settlers kept coming, especially after news came out in the early seventeenth century that a river basin north of Matsumae Town contained gold. Miners found the precious metal in several streams but their efforts at extraction interfered with spawning salmon, angering Ainu in the vicinity. Some Christian groups fleeing persecution on Honshu came to Matsumae for safety about that time, but later, with Christianity banned in all Japan, Matsumae rulers ruthlessly worked to wipe out the foreign creed. For most of the time they controlled the island, the Matsumae worked to keep other Wajin out, because a larger population would need more rice, which would have to be imported. Moreover, the more Wajin in Ezo, the more resistant the Ainu might become. Beginning in 1633, the shogunate periodically sent inspectors to Matsumae accompanied by large parties of retainers to investigate the domain, a practice extending throughout Japan and causing financial distress to the domains visited, which had to pay for the journeys. In 1635 the Matsumae opened the Kushiro area to fishing, and, seeing the need for a local work force, moved Ainu communities from upstream on the Kushiro River down to the coast. Ainu lifestyles inevitably changed as both men and women had to work under Wajin direction. A trading post in Kushiro dates from mid-century. Takakura Shinichiro has listed the goods which the Matsumae obtained in Ezo in these years, mostly from the Ainu: gold dust, sea products including seals, salted and dried fish, fish oil, herring roe, sea otter pelts, kombu, hawks, eagle feathers to be used in making arrows, deer and bear skins, and strings of shells.3 In addition to the Ainu trade, gold mining and falcon trapping contributed some income to the Matsumae. More than three hundred falconry estates were established, largely in the 1630s. Later these became more and more scarce, with gold dust running out by the mid–seventeenth century and only a few hawks available after 1800. Deer and seal both also became rare. Even the number of fish seemed to decrease. Though the Matsumae governed in Ezo, the rulers of Japan clearly maintained an interest in the northern island. Early in the seventeenth century, the shogunate commanded the Matsumae to create a map of Ezo, as part of a project to map all Japan. It took some years, but the map — not surprisingly, empty in the middle —finally arrived in Edo in 1644.

Collision of cultures As the Matsumae consolidated their control, severely disrupting Ainu traditional life, Ainu grew restive. In earlier years of Matsumae power in Ezo, it was other Wajin, not

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Ainu, who most heavily felt the weight of Matsumae control; the shogunate, moreover, had instructed the Matsumae that “injustice to the Ezo [Ainu] shall be strictly forbidden.”4 But greedy traders tended to cheat the Ainu —for example, by decreasing the amount of rice in sacks they traded to Ainu without changing the price. Some Matsumae officials, too, not surprisingly took advantage of Ainu, allowing Wajin to fish in Ainu fishing grounds as well as manipulating the values of trade goods both sold to and bought from the Ainu. In 1669 came a serious conflict, known as Shakushain’s War. It grew indirectly out of disputes between two Ainu leaders; different Ainu groups and leaders had rivalries that sometimes led to battle. Two clans, the Hae and the Shibuchari, argued over boundaries and who had rights to the fish and animals in specific areas. The Hae chief murdered the Shibuchari chief, Kamokutain, in revenge for Kamokutain’s father’s frequent poaching in Hae territory. Shakushain then became chief of the Shibuchari. He carried on the dispute over his predecessor’s killing, and intermittent fighting continued. The Matsumae became concerned when the warring seriously interfered with trade, and in 1655 two Matsumae officials convinced Shakushain and the Hae leader, Onibishi, to meet under Matsumae auspices and settle their differences. For about a decade, relations between the Ainu clans remained fairly peaceful, but hunting and fishing disputes eventually led to serious trouble. Also, Shakushain grew concerned that Onibishi might be getting assistance from certain Matsumae officials. In 1668 a group of ten men led by Shakushain killed Onibishi’s two younger brothers and, soon afterward, Onibishi himself. With their leadership now decimated, the Hae switched to guerrilla tactics in their conflict with the Shibuchari. Eventually, from weakness, the Hae turned to the Matsumae for help. Officials who recognized the seriousness of events sent emissaries to come up with an effective peace settlement. This one lasted no time at all, though, and Shakushain, irate at what he perceived as Matsumae assistance to the Hae, attacked Wajin ships. By promising land plus freedom from Wajin control, Shakushain rallied other Ainu groups and thus the war that had begun as a dispute between two Ainu clans became a fight between Ainu and Wajin. Trade regulations imposed on the Ainu by the Matsumae as well as general hatred of Wajin also motivated Shakushain and his men. Ainu leaders hoped to return to earlier times, when they could trade with whomever they wished and when no tariffs on trade existed; they may have hoped to free the island of Ezo from all Wajin. Other Ainu groups began to aid Shakushain because of frustration at Wajin dishonesty. These Ainu were facing poverty; they had no choice but to trade, even though they received much less than their goods were worth. In mid–1669, Shakushain launched an attack upon Wajin in Shiraoi, on the south coast of Ezo across Uchiura Bay from the Oshima Peninsula. Meanwhile, other Ainu attacked Wajin at Yoichi, across the peninsula on the island’s west coast. Learning of Shakushain’s presence, the Matsumae army marched to Kunnui on the western shore of Uchiura Bay, where Shakushain’s troops attacked, but bad weather and flooded streams halted the Ainu charge. Some say the opposing forces fought for twenty days at Kunnui.5 Apprised of the threat to the Japanese government’s vassals in Ezo, the shogunate sent a skilled military commander and supplies to the Matsumae, meanwhile warning northern Honshu domains to be ready to send troops if needed. The threat seemed serious, for during the fighting, Ainu assaulted nineteen ships and killed between two hundred and four hundred Wajin. Though Shakushain had hoped to be able to trade directly with northern Honshu Wajin should he defeat the Matsumae, the shogunate commanded

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these people to support the Matsumae. The eventual outcome of the war was not hard to predict, for the major Ainu weapon was the poisoned arrow, while Wajin fought with firearms. When serious proceedings against Shakushain began, different Wajin commanders took troops to different areas so that Shakushain’s forces were effectively surrounded. After much loss of life among Ainu and Wajin alike, Shakushain surrendered. He presented gifts to the winners, as was the custom. Not too long afterward, however, some Matsumae soldiers, after drinking too much sake, killed Shakushain and several other Ainu commanders. Matsumae soldiers then burned Shakushain’s fortress. To Ainu today, Shakushain remains an inspirational figure. His statue stands in Shizunai, the town on Hokkaido’s south coast that was the center of his territory. Each year Ainu gather near the statue to memorialize him and the other Ainu who perished in the war. (Shakushain is also the name of a late 1990s jazz group in Japan.) A cursory look at Shakushain’s War suggests that it was a battle of culture against culture, Ainu versus Wajin, but records indicate that at least a few Wajin fought for the Ainu, while some Ainu fought with the Matsumae and their allies. The war grew out of economic issues, and if the different Ainu groups had not had long rivalries with each other which kept some from supporting Shakushain, they could have presented a much more formidable threat to Matsumae domination. One outgrowth of the war was enlargement of the Wajin domain in Ezo to include almost all of the Oshima Peninsula. Moreover, the Matsumae enforced a strict policy of segregation: Wajin would stay on their lands, the Wajinchi, the Ainu in theirs, the Ezochi, except for the few Ainu whose homes were in the Wajinchi. Guards posted on this border separating the Oshima Peninsula from the rest of the island maintained the boundary and sometimes threatened with death any Ainu who tried to leave the Ezochi. The guards would, of course, let Matsumae officials travel freely, and since most travel in the area was by coastal ship, Wajin could bypass guardposts easily. Ainu leaders had to agree to Matsumae terms: one chief of the Ainu in the west had to promise that his people would carry out commerce to benefit the Matsumae as well as making people available for work. Even leaders of Ainu groups who had not participated in Shakushain’s War had to promise to uphold the peace. And thereafter the Matsumae required Ainu leaders to swear fealty. Other changes came, too. The Matsumae now prohibited Ainu use of metal or sharpedged tools; this regulation stunned Ainu communities. The Wajin overlords also attempted to systematize the situation by which they ruled in Ezo by seeking to “establish a tradition of Ainu subservience,” in Brett Walker’s words.6 The Matsumae tightened their control of trade; a Wajin presence in Ezo had existed long enough and trade between Wajin and Ainu had become extensive enough that both groups depended upon it. After this time, only very rarely could an individual Ainu trade successfully with other Wajin without going through the Matsumae, who oversaw additional trading posts set up on the Ezochi coast, as far as Cape Soya in 1684. Contractors who received fishing rights from the Matsumae naturally wanted the greatest possible profits— and to get them, they continued to cheat and overwork the Ainu. New regulations adopted after Shakushain’s War did not change this. The history of Ezo in the eighteenth century centers on two main topics: policy regarding the Russians, and economic matters, including relations between Wajin and Ainu. Chapter 4 examines the Russian effect upon Ezo. Meanwhile, Matsumae overlord-

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ship of the island continued and the wealth produced by the fishing industry became more important than the Ainu trade. By 1717, fifteen thousand Wajin but only 152 Ainu lived in the Wajinchi.7 The Wajin number kept growing, reaching more than twenty-six thousand in 1787. Matsumae family members ruled many villages directly, but the clan gave some villages to vassals to control, sometimes to reward men who had been effective in battles against the Ainu. Meanwhile, the Matsumae worked to further develop the Oshima Peninsula. For example, mines at this time were extracting lead, zinc, copper and sulfur. As Wajin population grew, so did the need for increased commerce, and herring contributed an important part of this. More and more fish meal made from Ezo herring found use on Honshu as fertilizer. The year 1716 was when the Matsumae lord officially became a full daimyo, or retainer to the shogunate. Unlike other daimyo, however, the Matsumae only had to come to Edo every three to five years and stay there for one month. Even this was difficult for them to do, given their limited economic resources. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Matsumae vassals who controlled the Ainu trade parceled out the trading posts one by one to merchants in exchange for fees, and thus began the contract labor system, or basho ukeoi, under which Ainu became seasonal laborers for the fishery managers. Omi traders ran some of the posts. Some family fisheries, meanwhile, continued. With a growing need to procure more and more trade goods, Wajin fishermen continued to go farther afield to take fish. The trading posts evolved into fishing centers. The contractors running the fishing business for the Matsumae introduced Ainu fishermen to more productive methods, for instance using nets instead of spears. More and more, Ainu became employees of a sort; rather than trading goods they did not use themselves, they were required to produce goods for trade. Under the basho ukeoi, Ainu were hired only for the fishing season and sometimes found their resources inadequate during the winter. As various products taken from land and sea became scarcer, hard times ensued during some years; In 1725-26 some two hundred Ainu died of starvation when the fall salmon run on the Ishikari River failed.8 The herring fishery became more and more important as Honshu farmers adopted the practice of fertilizing their fields with Ezo fish meal. As early as 1740, this Ezo product may have fertilized half the rice paddies in western Japan. Ships loaded with herring sailed from Ezo south in the Japan Sea to a port near Kyoto.9 By now the Omi were investing large monies to build up the fishing industry and expand the resources they controlled along Ezo’s coasts. During fishing season, Matsumae officials would be stationed at the trading posts while Ainu worked for the traders there. The Matsumae required Ainu leaders to be in charge of the Ainu working in the fishery, and the Ainu leaders received compensation, or, some would say, bribes, for doing this. The traders, of course, had to pay the Matsumae for licenses to trade in the area, and the Matsumae forbade the traders from living in these fishing centers year-round. Because of herring, Esashi, on the Oshima Peninsula’s west coast, grew to be one of the most important towns in the Matsumae domain, crowded with merchants and people who came to fish during the seasonal run. So many herring filled the sea that people of every kind, whatever their station, would wade into the water to claim part of the catch. Herring fishing was Esashi’s only industry, however, and the town, directly on the Japan Sea, has a very small harbor. The herring fishery in the vicinity peaked about 1900 and

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Esashi is a quiet town today. Matsumae and Hakodate were the other two towns where Honshu merchants ran their business; these men throve by extending credit to fishermen to finance their work until the catch could be sold. The Santan trade was at its strongest during the eighteenth century. The Matsumae persuaded Sakhalin Ainu to procure more and more Ezo brocade from China, for it could easily be traded to Honshu people who valued it highly. The Ainu traded fur to representatives of China’s Qing Dynasty, but Ainu found it harder and harder to obtain the fur required to get as much silk as Matsumae traders wanted. Ezo products also arrived in China through Wajin traders who took them to Nagasaki, where Chinese ships were allowed to call. Among the items from Ezo were dried sea cucumbers and abalone. A late eighteenth century report indicated more than 130,000 pounds of these items going to China in a single year.10 Exploitation of the Ainu continued. Many Wajin seasonal workers who came from northern Honshu for the fishing season temporarily took Ainu women. And though Shakushain’s War had come about partly because of Ainu unhappiness with unfair trade practices, these continued. Ainu coveted sake; unscrupulous merchants traded it to Ainu in barrels with false bottoms. Sometimes traders diluted the sake with water. Some merchants had the Ainu drink excessively, to muddle their thinking and be cheated more easily. Meanwhile, in order to force Ainu to work in the fishing industry, Matsumae rule prohibited Ainu from raising crops and buying seeds or the hoes to cultivate plants. Matsumae representatives sometimes even told Ainu that raising crops would displease the gods or cause illness— a real worry at a time when epidemics of diseases previously unknown to Ezo had invaded Ainu communities. Often Ainu would, however, grow food secretly in locations far from their community in order to keep the gardens from the prying eyes of Matsumae officials. The prohibition of grain raising of course led Ainu to want to purchase rice from the Wajin, thus increasing Ainu dependence on the Wajin economy, and, in turn, increasing the Wajin need for trade in order to procure more rice. Famine occurred among Ainu in several places in the late eighteenth century because of the lack of deer, which were so important to the diet. Sometimes Ainu anxious for pelts to trade overhunted the animals and sometimes the animals perished during especially hard winters. In a number of places, Ainu were prohibited from learning to read or even to speak Japanese, the idea being that the easiest way to cheat them was to keep them uninformed. So that Ainu could not be mistaken for Wajin, Wajin would not allow Ainu to wear the sandals and raincoats made of straw that Wajin farmers used. Occasionally Wajin even killed Ainu who would not do the work asked of them. Given practices and problems such as these, it is not surprising that Ainu rebellions continued to break out. Rivalry over hunting and fishing areas led Ainu clans to challenge each other, as they needed more and more goods to offer in trade. Writing in the 1780s, scholar Shihei Hayashi urged a conciliatory policy toward Ezo’s Ainu. He suggested that since Russians had been friendly to the Ainu, Japanese should act the same way to make sure the Ainu did not prefer Russian to Japanese rule and thus imperil Ezo’s security. He warned that Russia menaced Japan.11 Meanwhile, late in the eighteenth century came a series of bad years in the Wajinchi fishery, but this did not lead to widespread destitution because fish prices increased as the supply decreased. By this time, Matsumae overlords no longer prohibited Wajin immigration, even to the Ezochi, though no Wajin were officially allowed to reside perma-

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nently in that part of the island. In fact, Matsumae control became more and more tenuous. A frightening uprising with long-lasting ramifications erupted in 1789. Just as Shakushain remains a hero to many Ainu, the shocking Wajin response to the 1789 events makes them a continuing spur to Ainu nationalism. At that time, Ainu were restricted to trading at posts chartered to contractors by the Matsumae. It was often these contractors who cheated or injured the Ainu. One of the worst offenders was Hidaya Kyubei, who operated in southwest Hokkaido and on Kunashir Island in the Kurils. A Hidaya man had come to Ezo as early as 1702 and obtained permission from the Matsumae to set up a lumber business. He brought workers to Ezo with him, sent the lumber his workers cut to Honshu cities, and paid large amounts to the Matsumae for the privilege. In return, his family obtained trading posts and amassed wealth. His grandson, Hidaya Kyubei, expanded his operations, in 1774 opening a trading post on Kunashir. Over the next few years he gained more and more control over the Ainu there, until they were reduced from a self-reliant society living in a traditional manner to the near-slavery and near-starvation seen at Hidaya’s other posts. Wajin frequently threatened Ainu with death or drowned their dogs. Ainu who could no longer work were killed, it was reported. Women were raped and men who tried to resist Hidaya depredations poisoned. Even Aoshima Shunzo, an Edo official sent later to probe the conflict and its causes, found that some blame lay with the Hidaya family, who forced Ainu in their region to work at rates of remuneration impossible to support life. In 1789, a group of young Ainu, incensed because they believed that several Ainu died after Hidaya officials had given them poisoned sake, instigated hostilities, usually known today as the Menashi-Kunashir War. Ainu attacked Wajin at the Kunashir trading post, on the Ezo mainland, and on a ship in the area, leaving at least seventy-one dead. The young Ainu apparently planned their assault carefully, having prepared defensive measures, but local Ainu leaders who had been away at the time of the attack returned and persuaded the rebels to desist. To the elders, good relations with Wajin remained crucially important, as Ainu livelihood depended on them. Meanwhile, news got back to the Matsumae, who sent a large force to the affected region near Cape Nosappu east of Nemuro, including troops from other domains ordered by the shogunate to aid the Matsumae. The soldiers captured the eighty-seven Ainu they felt were responsible for the outbreak. Executions of the leaders began. One of the Ainu let out a war-cry; the Wajin soldiers reacted in panic and speared prisoners randomly, leaving thirty-seven dead. Their heads were taken for display at the Matsumae capital. Hidaya lost his contract and the Matsumae issued new regulations for trading with Ainu; some improvement may have resulted. This was the last serious Ainu challenge to the Matsumae, but as Wajin immigration continued, so did Ainu resentment. Not only were those in the far eastern ramparts of Ezo and the Kurils dissatisfied. More and more Wajin were moving to Ezo; for example, famine in northern Honshu in the 1780s had encouraged more migrants, many of whom settled around Uchiura Bay and became involved in the kombu trade, the economic mainstay of that area. Ainu throughout the island felt threatened. The Matsumae family had tried to keep as independent as possible from the central government, being fairly secretive about the Ezo economic base. However, the shogunate began to divert Ezo tax receipts to its own treasury. Kombu from Ezo, for example, was a prime commodity traded at Nagasaki to the Chinese, and the profit from the kombu

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trade now became a source of income for the center rather than for the Matsumae. Moreover, as early as 1717 the shogunate had created an office for Ainu affairs in Ezo, and supported it by taxing the northern fisheries. In the years near the end of the eighteenth century, some influential Japanese, such as geographical and political scholar Honda Toshiaki, were urging Ezo development. Not only did Honda back trade with Russia, he felt Ezo could be a source of food for the Japanese nation. He had traveled in northern Japan while northern Honshu districts suffered from famine at a time when Matsumae had abundant food supplies from the fishery. Russian explorer Adam Laxman, in Hakodate in 1793, made notes on food. The crops he saw planted at a nearby village included “rice, pulses, flax, hemp, beans and tobacco. There were vegetables growing in the kitchen gardens: turnips, radishes, carrots, beetroot, beans, cucumbers similar to Turkish cucumbers, and various sorts of peas. As the Japanese do not use four-legged animals for food, we saw no cattle, but only horses; we saw no fowls except chickens.”12 In two hundred years of Matsumae rule, Ezo had changed. In 1800, island population included an estimated twenty thousand Ainu and thirty thousand Wajin. This compares with thirty thousand Ainu and twenty thousand Wajin in 1700, and a century before that, in 1600, fifty thousand Ainu and only twelve thousand Wajin.13 It had been Matsumae policy not to share information about Ezo; the shogunate was not apprised of challenges such as Ainu violence and the appearance of Russian ships. No longer could such events remain hidden, though. Over several years, shogunal officials debated Ezo policy, and by the end of the century the shogunate assumed direct control of part of the island. Matsumae rule was to return later, however.

Ezo and the shogunate The shogunate had several reasons to assert more of the management of Ezo. Officials worried about the Ainu revolt and Russian plans and did not entirely trust the Matsumae. There were rumors that Russians had instigated the Menashi-Kunashir uprising and shogunate officials feared that the Matsumae simply were not strong enough to counter effectively any Russian threat. In 1799 Edo imposed direct rule in the eastern part of the island and ordered two northern Honshu clans, the Nambu of Iwate Prefecture and the Tsugaru clan of Aomori Prefecture, to police Ezo. After 1799, the trading posts assumed a military character, while trading also continued. The area of greatest concern was around Akkeshi, Nemuro and the southern Kurils, where Russians had just tried unsuccessfully to establish trading posts. Under the new regime, the shogunate appointed Habuto Masayasu to be a Hakodate bugyo, or magistrate. Habuto energetically supported Ezo development, and among his projects was a farming colony near Hakodate, where both climate and soil conditions were better than near Matsumae. He planned with care, seeing that the immigrants had adequate shelter and tools. Soon they were growing crops, including soy beans, millet, and even a bit of rice. Kamiiso, today part of the industrial city Hokuto just around the bay from Hakodate, was one of the settlements begun then. Inland from Hakodate and north of the city, Nanae counts its beginning from 1786, a census that year counting fifty homes and 265 people. Starting in 1802, the shogunate also saw that Buddhist temples

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were built in Hokkaido. Another venture begun at this time with the support of officials in Hakodate was the raising of horses near today’s towns of Abuta, near Lake Toya, and Urakawa, on the coast northwest of Cape Erimo. Some of Japan’s superior horses and their trainers were brought from the Nambu region of northern Honshu. The first colonization directly sponsored by the government came in 1800, when the shogunate, due to worry about Russian intentions, agreed to aid a settlement group. About 130 families headed by farmer-samurai headed north from their homes in Hachioji, near Edo, each with a small amount of rice and silver provided by the government, which also made available a horse and a gun for every two men. The settlers were to be a defensive force as well as farmers. Arriving at Ezo, part of the group headed eastward along the coast, settling in Shiranuka, near Kushiro, while the others located at Yufutsu, near today’s city of Tomakomai. But neither government nor settlers realized the harshness of conditions even on Ezo’s southern shore, and within three years, most of the colonists had died or left these settlements. In 1802, having decided that the government changes on Ezo were worthwhile, the shogunate moved the seat of Ezo government from Matsumae to Hakodate. This change seemed to emphasize the break between the Matsumae regime and shogunal control. It also signaled that Hakodate was overtaking the town of Matsumae in importance. The shogunate also established small military posts on the coast. A few years later, Edo took over direct control of all Ezo, resettling the lord of Matsumae and his retainers just north of Edo and making more administrative changes in Ezo’s government, moving various duties to an office in Hakodate. Shortly afterward, Russian raids in the Kurils and Japanese outposts on Sakhalin’s far south caused another policy shift; defense, not development, would now be the goal. The shogunate sent troops from Edo and the domains in northern Honshu, with different domains given responsibility for different sections of Ezo. Eight hundred men were stationed at Hakodate, two hundred at Matsumae, one hundred at Nemuro, more in other parts of the island and some in the South Kurils and Sakhalin. Ironically, soon after taking control of the entire island, the shogunate scaled back its defensive measures and ended its development policies in order to save funds. Military costs were higher than expected and many troops sent to garrison distant posts died during the winter for which they were not prepared. During the next few years, the Russian threat seemed to be lessening, and troops were gradually withdrawn. The shogunate reversed some Matsumae policies toward Ainu, who were now to be given some education and encouraged to adopt Japanese ways, to become farmers and to replace their meat-based diet with one centered on rice. The government brought medical care to Ainu at the fishing settlements and provided emergency food when needed. These policies were designed to make Ainu into people who would help defend Ezo against Russian threats. Cutting Ainu hair and shaving off beards were also important, for Russians seeing the shorn Ainu would, Wajin officials believed, perceive these Ainu as Japanese. Total Wajin population of Ezo increased markedly during direct rule from Edo. Perhaps as many as sixty thousand people moved to Ezo under the settlement program,14 and the shogunate instituted various efforts at development of the island, making some notable advances, almost all in its early period. One was in road building. The major road project was constructing a route from Hakodate along the coast all the way to Nemuro. Much of the route could be traversed already, but coastal cliffs and headlands were formidable barriers in some places. The route — more than seven hundred miles long — was

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completed after three years’ work. In addition to roads, by 1803, thirty-five inns for travelers were built. Not only did the bugyo construct roads, officials began reforestation and land reclamation efforts, also improving Hakodate’s harbor and organizing a postal system. During this period, exports from Ezo to the home islands increased dramatically. Finally, as John J. Stephan has suggested, this period of direct rule established the perception in Japan that Ezo was, indeed, part of the nation.15 While administering Ezo, the shogunate abolished the basho ukeoi in order to end the abuses of the old system. Officials planned to run the Ainu trade. The shogunate never fully implemented direct supervision, though. By 1815 practices resembled those under the Matsumae, including similar problems and injustices. The Matsumae were allowed to reinstate the basho ukeoi, with contractors running the industry. The contractors supposedly provided food for their Ainu workers as well as maintaining roads and way stations. They were to collect a tax from any independent fishermen who came into their area. They also, of course, had to pay a fee to obtain any contract. And with the introduction of the pound trap — a device whose operation required capital but which caught large numbers of fish — the fishing industry became more and more dominated by wealthy entrepreneurs. After some years of quiet, in 1821 the rulers in Edo returned Ezo to Matsumae control, probably for various reasons: financial retrenchment, lack of interest and perhaps even bribery by some in the Matsumae family, eager to resume their powerful role in Ezo. Most important, the Russians no longer seemed interested in Ezo. The announced reason for the change was that relations between Wajin and Ainu were now on a settled basis. The Matsumae, once more in a preeminent position in Ezo, resumed their policy of discouraging settlement, but a number of Wajin refugees sought protection from a northern Honshu famine between 1832 and 1838. This led to a great expansion of the fishing industry, as people looked for jobs and Honshu farmers wanted more and more herring fertilizer. The extensive trading network of the Matsumae kept Ezo well supplied with food. Island population grew, despite the Matsumae policy of interrogating and taxing all immigrants in an effort to discourage them. The number of Ainu was decreasing, though. Diseases new to them took a toll, at a time when and more and more Wajin arrived to work in the fisheries, establishing themselves independently and taking work formerly done by Ainu. Matsumae rule of the island brought no important initiatives and received little if any attention from Edo. In 1854, outside pressures compelled the shogunate to take control of Ezo once more, and the Matsumae epoch came to an close. A good picture of Ezo at the end of the Matsumae era comes from explorer Matsuura Takeshiro, who traveled on the island in 1856. One of the places he described, Yamakoshinai, was an outpost on the west shore of Uchiura Bay, near the boundary between the Wajinchi and the Ezochi. Yamakoshinai included a trading post, storehouse for rice, warehouses for lumber, a foundry, buildings for storage, two shrines, a temple, a fishing hut, an inn, a small military installation, eighty-four houses and a population of 374. Across the Oshima Peninsula on the Sea of Japan, the border was then at Kumaishi. Here, too, travelers were stopped. North from this village rugged mountains come out to the coast, meaning that travelers who planned to continue northward had to go by boat.16 In a few years the division between the Ezochi and the Wajinchi would be abol-

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ished, and no longer would travelers be checked at borders such as these. A replica of Matsuura’s map of Ezo can be seen in the Former Hokkaido Government Office Building, or Aka Renga, in Sapporo. And what of the town of Matsumae? In 1854, it suffered a catastrophe when all of its castle except the three-story central tower and the main gate burned down. The shogunate rebuilt the castle after resuming control of Ezo in 1855 and once again ordered northern Honshu clans to guard the island from foreign threats. This reconstructed castle became the final traditional-style castle to be built in all Japan. However, Matsumae Town irrevocably lost its importance to Hakodate, the capital designated by the shogunate, especially after Hakodate was opened to foreign commerce in 1855. For some years earlier, Hakodate — with its superior harbor — had surpassed Matsumae in trade. British ship’s officer J. M. Tronson left a description of Matsumae as his ship steamed past on its way to Hakodate in August 1855. “The city of Matsumae is very large, and situated on the side of a hill, which gradually rises above it to the height of seven hundred feet. Rugged ledges of rock, taking the bend of the coast, extend towards the shore in parallel lines. The houses are large, whitewashed, and contrast prettily with the dark green trees which shoot up in every open space. The temples are handsome, with projecting eaves and quaint roofs rising at each extremity into upright points.” Of the castle, he noted, “the dwelling of the Governor, who is a prince, is situated at a little distance right of the town; it is a large and handsome structure, snow-white, ... having turrets on either end; it is surrounded by gardens, full of evergreens, and sheltered in the rear by large trees: here also are the residences of the officials attending on the Prince. The whole is enclosed by a low white parapet with many embrasures, through which peeped some guns. Hundreds of junks were at anchor before the city. The anchorage is unsafe, being so much exposed to the south wind.”17 Breakwaters now protect the harbor, but it is still small and as it sits directly on Tsugaru Strait, it receives wind at full force. Further destruction came to Matsumae in 1869 in a battle between Japanese government forces and Wajin rebels which destroyed two-thirds of the town. Until then, Matsumae remained a thriving place, prosperous because most of the fishing entrepreneurs had kept their headquarters there. But Matsumae’s eclipse by Hakodate was perhaps inevitable because of Matsumae’s lack of a good harbor. When American William Wheeler traveled through Matsumae in 1877, he reported that the old castle’s walls had been used to build breakwaters in the harbor and that the outlying structures of the fortress were being used as schools and hospitals. H. A. Savage Landor visited in the 1890s and found the town “the most picturesque of all the towns in Hokkaido,” for it was old and others he had been in were modern. He admired Matsumae’s temples and Japanese gardens and found the town reminiscent of “old Japan,” as other Hokkaido towns were not. By his day, the castle had become a restaurant.18 Even as late as 1900, a large hole remained high in the castle tower from the 1869 bombardment. This castle burned down in 1949, but it was rebuilt again — though in concrete — and still stands, a symbol of Matsumae’s one-time importance. In the castle are historic exhibits. The town today, with castle, temples and cherry trees in abundance, also features a replica of an Edo era neighborhood recalling the days when the Matsumae family held power. Perhaps more than any other place in Hokkaido, Matsumae can evoke thoughts of traditional Japan.

4

The Explorers

Ainu and Wajin were not left alone to determine Ezo history and development. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while the Matsumae dominated Ezo and later, when the shogunate took direct control of the northern land, adventurers and explorers from the Japanese heartland and abroad appeared in the Ezo area; their presence helped direct the course of the island’s history. Earlier on, tales circulated around the world about elusive islands rich in silver or gold. An English trader in East Asia named John Saris reported “gold, silver and other riches” on Ezo in 1613.1 The island began appearing on foreign maps by the mid–seventeenth century, though not accurately. Even then, geography of the North Pacific area remained hazy to Europeans and Japanese alike. The earliest Europeans actually to visit Ezo appeared in the early seventeenth century. First came Jesuit missionary Jeronimo de Angelis, shortly before 1620, but he did not report any valuable minerals there and he mistakenly thought Ezo was a great continent. Like many later travelers, he was interested in the Ainu and described them in some detail, noting their earrings, embroidered robes and bamboo armor. Diogo Carvalho, another Jesuit, wrote that he entered Ezo, pretending to be a miner, in 1620. He described the process he saw people using to extract gold. When a group of men decided that gold would probably be washed down from the mountains into a particular river bed, they would purchase from the Matsumae the right to mine a certain part of that river. They would then divert the stream and look for gold dust or nuggets in the gravel and rock of the river bed. Carvalho wrote that fifty thousand gold seekers had appeared in Ezo in 1619; his guess is probably wildly mistaken but does suggest that a large number of prospectors came. In 1643, an expedition sent by the Dutch East India Company from Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) appeared in Ezo waters to look for the treasures of the east, though fabulous China was the expedition’s primary goal. Filled with items to trade, the expedition’s ship Castricom, commanded by Maerten Gerritsz Vries, sailed north as far as Ezo and anchored briefly at Akkeshi. Vries has been credited with being the earliest European seafarer in Ezo’s vicinity, thus “discovering” for Europe Ezo, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. But, as so often happened in the island’s vicinity, fog obscured much of the land, and, among his mistakes, Vries did not realize that Sakhalin and Ezo were separate islands. He did mention seeing Ainu forts on hilltops: palisades enclosing about two or three houses. Published with the journal of Vries’ first mate, C. J. Coen, is a description of “the island called by the Japanese Eso,” incorporating some details of Ainu life — including the claim that each Ainu man had two wives. Dutch officials reported that the expedition

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found “no trade of any importance” on Ezo.2 Vries’s geographical errors influenced future explorers, but many details of his expedition, including accurate readings of location, remained hidden in official files for a century.

The Russians The threat of Russian expansion offered a challenge perceived by the Japanese as different from that of the other nations, whose explorers merely brought alien ideas and the desire to trade. Hokkaido’s history has been directed again and again by the relationship between Japan and Russia (or, during most of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union), because the island lies between the Japanese heartland and the nation’s huge northern neighbor. In fact, the possibility that Russia might expand into Hokkaido was the spur to Japanese development of the island, and changes in Moscow’s politics and policies continue to affect Hokkaido just as do those in Tokyo. Japan first became known in Russia in the seventeenth century, but not until the eighteenth did the first significant contacts between the two nations come. In 1649, Russians exploring eastward through Siberia reached the Pacific Ocean, or more specifically, the Sea of Okhotsk. Russians showed growing interest in Japan because of hearsay accounts of her wealth in gold and other valuables. By the early eighteenth century Russians ventured beyond Kamchatka, eastward toward America and south along the Kuril Island chain. Looking for sea otters, a Cossack group from Kamchatka reached the northernmost of the Kurils in 1711, and within a few years, individual Russians came to the island chain for fur. In the 1730s, the Russians established a colony on the northernmost of the Kurils, Shumshu, and, over subsequent years, some Ainu living there adopted Orthodox Christianity while others moved south to avoid forced labor under the new residents. The first concerted Russian attempts to contact the Japanese came in the 1730s and 1740s. In 1738 Lieutenant Martin Spanberg, a Dane sailing with a Russian fleet commanded by Vitus Bering, sailed among the Kuril Islands. A year later, he was dispatched to Japan with four ships. While Bering pushed eastward toward Alaska, Spanberg sailed south from Kamchatka and entered the Bay of Sendai on Honshu’s northeast coast where he met local Japanese. Spanberg also landed briefly in Kunashir Island in the Kurils to obtain fresh water, and sailed past but did not land on Ezo, due to fog. Because of inaccuracies in maps of the time, Russian officials were unsure whether Spanberg had actually found Japan, thinking instead that he might have gone to Korea. What Spanberg’s voyage accomplished, however, was to alert Japanese officials that foreign explorers were near. Spanberg sailed to Japan again in 1742, but because of disease among his crew and fog over the land, this trip was unsuccessful. Meanwhile, one of Spanberg’s commanders, Aleksei Shelting, sailed along the east coast of Sakhalin, but in the fog thought he had reached Ezo. One of the Kuril Islands, Shikotan — part of Russia since 1945 but still claimed by the Japanese — was named Spanberg Island by a Soviet expedition in 1946, but the name has apparently not taken root. In 1759, the Matsumae had word that Russians were settling in the Kurils but kept the news from the shogunate. Twelve years later, the government in Edo first showed concern about a possible Russian threat, and this was due to a letter sent by a Hungarian, Mauritius Augustus Count of Benyovsky, who had escaped Russian capture and fled across the sea to Japan. His letter claimed that the Russians coveted Ezo. Benyovsky,

Part of map of Imperial Russia and its environs, made in 1739 by John Matthias Hase.

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however, was simply an adventurer, and though the shogunate believed him, the Russian government had no plans to threaten Japan. The weak Russian presence on the Pacific made such an attack out of the question. However, Russians— whom some Japanese called “Red Ainu” in those days— and Matsumae Wajin were probably trading with each other at that time through Ainu middlemen, though the Matsumae did not tell the shogunate of this. As John J. Stephan has pointed out, during the period from 1770 to 1813 the frontiers of the two nations came into contact.3 With population in Siberia growing, Russian officials there hoped trade with the Japanese would help improve their economy, especially by increasing the food supply. It would be much easier to obtain necessary goods from Japan than from distant European Russia. Russians were also interested in Ezo and the Kurils because of rumors of these islands’ fertility; perhaps they were superior to Russian territory. In 1778 and 1779 Russia sponsored approaches to Ezo, near Nemuro on the easternmost point of the island and at Akkeshi, a little more than thirty miles west of Nemuro. At Akkeshi, Russians asking to open trade with the Japanese were told that they could trade only through the Ainu on a specified island in the Kurils or far to the south in Nagasaki, where the Chinese and Dutch could trade. The Japanese officials returned the items the Russians had brought to Akkeshi as gifts, though the visitors were allowed to take on the provisions they needed to continue their voyage. Russians continued traveling to the region, however, and in 1783 first landed on Sakhalin. For many years, Japanese officials were hostile to their countrymen who had drifted to other nations after storms or accidents at sea. Russians living in the western Aleutians welcomed a group of castaways led by Kodayu Daikokuya, captain of a ship disabled in a storm off the east coast of Japan. The vessel had drifted for six months until spotting Amchitka Island in 1783. Its men spent several years on this Alaskan island and built a simple boat which they sailed away, landing on the Kamchatka Peninsula in 1787. Later, the six surviving Japanese were taken to Irkutsk and in 1791 Kodayu went to St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, where he even met Empress Catherine the Great. To return him and his compatriots to Japan, and to make another attempt to open trade, another Russian mission, this one carrying negotiator Adam Erikovich Laxman (of Finnish descent) headed for Japan. Strict instructions to the crew ordered the men not to get drunk, which would hurt Russia’s reputation in Japanese eyes, and not to display any symbols of Christianity, then prohibited in Japan. Laxman’s ship left Okhotsk on September 24, 1792 for the Kuril Islands and Ezo. The ship, Ekaterina, dropped anchor at Nemuro, then a tiny community of Ainu and Japanese, in mid–October and Laxman sent word to Matsumae that he planned to deliver castaways. Meanwhile, Wajin officials at Nemuro agreed that Laxman and his ship’s crew could winter there, as they had asked. The Japanese even arranged for barracks so the Russians could live ashore. Meanwhile, as many other foreigners found when they tried to come to Japan, the country’s officials were very slow in imparting decisions to unwelcome visitors. Only after about five months and much consultation among Japanese officials was Laxman’s party told to proceed to Matsumae. Ordered to travel by land, apparently because the Japanese considered the sea voyage too dangerous, Laxman’s group refused and finally received permission to sail their ship there. On the way, the ship stopped in Hakodate harbor where the governor welcomed Laxman with ceremony. Then it was on to Matsumae by land, in a party that included more than four hundred Japanese. Laxman himself was carried in a litter. He urged the Japanese to open a northern

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In 1772, Adam Laxman, sailing for Russia and hoping to open trade with Japan, landed at Nemuro, where officials agreed that he and his crew could spend the winter months. No trade privileges ensued, but Nemuro honors Laxman today with this roadside panorama.

port, preferably Matsumae, to foreigners, but he was told, as others had been in previous years, that only in Nagasaki was trading possible. He was given a document to show at Nagasaki, but instead of sailing southward, on August 6 Laxman left for Russia; he had carried out his orders. The Japanese castaways he had brought with him gained permission to stay in Japan and their leader, Kodayu, became a source of information about the west. Though he was kept under house arrest and did not succeed in establishing trade relations, he is commonly regarded as the father of Russian studies in Japan. Some historians have suggested that because Laxman was merely a lieutenant and not of higher rank, Japanese officials might not have taken him very seriously.4 These days, Nemuro honors Laxman’s sojourn as an important episode in city history and though Laxman did not achieve his objective, his journey did affect Ezo’s future. The fear of Russian influence in the Kurils and the possibility of secret trade between the lord of Matsumae and the Russians led to a shogunate decision to institute direct rule of the eastern part of Ezo. In 1795, Russian officials settled a small group of exiles on the Kuril Island of Urup, just northeast of Iturup, and this worried Japanese officials. The Russian idea was to carry out trade and establish agriculture; food crops that could be raised would be welcomed in Kamchatka. These Russians traded with Ainu, but the shogunate wanted the Russians gone, and therefore prohibited Ainu from the more southerly Kurils from traveling to Urup. Officials made a formal claim that Urup was Japanese territory, installing a marker pole there. With no trade now possible, many of the settlers from Russia left Urup; the others died on the island, and thus ended that perceived Russian threat. The next Russian attempt to open relations with Japan came in 1803. This was one objective of the first Russian round-the-world voyage, whose general purpose was to examine ways to better provision the Russian outposts in the far northeast of Asia and in North

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America. Captain A. J. von Krusenstern commanded the sloop Nadezhda, which set off from Europe in August 1803, carrying high-ranking diplomat Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov. One of the founders of the Russian-American company which was colonizing Alaska, Rezanov wanted to find a port where Russian ships could winter and wanted to trade with Japan to replenish supplies for the Russian colonies. He hoped to get permission to use a northern Japanese port to meet both these objectives. Rezanov had the document the Japanese had earlier given Laxman, granting permission to go to Nagasaki. Moreover, his ship carried another group of Japanese castaways, who had come to shore on an Aleutian Island and subsequently lived for nearly a decade in Russia. The Nadezhda proceeded to Nagasaki, but after six months of waiting and negotiation — amounting to house arrest for the Russians on shipboard, Krusenstern then left and sailed north, crossed Tsugaru Strait (which he called Sangar) and sailed past Matsumae, along Hokkaido’s west coast, through La Perouse Strait and on into the Sea of Okhotsk. He wrote an account of the voyage which was translated into English and published in London a few years later. He described his interest in finding an island called Karafuto. A chart that had appeared a few years earlier, based on Russian explorations in the area, had shown Karafuto between “Jesso and Sachalin.”5 While the Nadezhda was anchored near the northern part of Ezo in 1805, Krusenstern had a chance to discuss the geography of the area with a Japanese officer, who confirmed that the island north across the strait from Ezo was Karafuto, which, of course, is the Japanese name for Sakhalin. The officer did not have direct knowledge about northern Karafuto, which he said “the natives called Sandan,” though he had heard that there was another land north of it. Krusenstern did not learn anything definite about Sakhalin or Karafuto as he continued his voyage. He later attempted to sail south through the channel between Sakhalin and the mainland, but he gave up when he encountered obstructive sand bars. By the time he finished his voyage he did realize that Sakhalin and Karafuto were names of the same place; The map published with his account of the journey shows merely the “Peninsula of Sachalin,” apparently attached at its northern end to the Russian mainland. Krusenstern, by the way, wrote that the Japanese knowledge of geography was poor.6 The Japanese officer Krusenstern met in north Ezo indicated that he had known Laxman, and due to this, he knew a few Russian words. The officer was stationed in the far north of Ezo to supervise Ainu trade, he said, though he could spend the winters in Matsumae Town. The Ainu traded furs and dried fish, he explained, for tobacco and pipes, lacquerware and rice. Both a few Ainu and a few Wajin came to Krusenstern’s ship to trade, the Ainu exchanging dried herring for used clothing and buttons, and the Wajin bringing pipes, lacquerware and obscene pictures to sell. The Japanese officer asked Krusenstern to depart quickly, warning that as soon as Matsumae officials learned of the Russian vessel’s presence, they would send a fleet to attack. Krusenstern assured him that his ship would leave as soon as the fog dispersed. Krusenstern’s comments about Japan are interesting if not always accurate. He noted the difference in appearance of southern Ezo and what he referred to as Japan (south of Ezo). He wrote that in Japan even the hillsides were farmed, almost to their crests, except in the far north of Honshu. He suggested that Ezo’s wild appearance might indicate that the island suffered “frequent and terrible” earthquakes. The northern part of Ezo was better than the south because there was more flat land, he thought, and added that spring was very late in coming to the north of Ezo; he felt that parts of Kamchatka quite a bit farther north were more advanced in springtime than was northern Ezo.7

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Meanwhile, Rezanov had departed on another ship. Frustrated after having spent long months in Nagasaki trying to establish trade between Japan and Russia but to no avail and determined to compel the opening of trade between Russia and Japan, he ordered two young officers to raid Japanese settlements in the north. Rezanov also suggested that Russia establish a fort on Sakhalin, supporting it through hunting. Lieutenant Nikolai Alexandrovich Khvostov and Midshipman Gavril Ivanovich Davydov, both serving with the Russian-American Company, led the raids, Khvostov commanding the Yuna and Davydov the Avos. The Russian raiders torched several Japanese outposts on Sakhalin, Iturup and Rishiri Island as well as ravaging some Japanese junks at sea in 1806 and 1807. When Russians attacked Iturup, Japanese explorer and surveyor Mamiya Rinzo happened to be on the island. He urged the local Japanese garrison commander to fight the Russians, but instead, the commander and his troops fled inland. The Russians took away everything they could and burned what they left. Rumors abounded in Ezo that the Russians planned more attacks, even on Ezo itself, and that they had already landed at Cape Soya or Akkeshi. In reality, Rezanov had not received an answer from Emperor Alexander I regarding his proposals and had authorized only the Khvostov and Davydov raids. (Rezanov had died en route back to Moscow.) In Hakodate, fearing further attacks, bugyo Habuto Masayasu asked the lords of domains in northern Honshu to send assistance. Hakodate townsmen assumed guard duty and sent the city’s women and children away. The vessels that the Russians plundered and destroyed included one near Hakodate, but the Russians did not land in that vicinity. In July 1807 the shogunate sent a small delegation to Hakodate to see what was happening; meanwhile, several of the north Honshu domain lords had responded immediately to Habuto’s call, sending three thousand men to Ezo. Habuto arranged that these soldiers be divided, to guard Hakodate, Urakawa, Kunashir in the Kurils, Soya at the northern tip of Ezo, Esashi north of Matsumae, and other places. But because, according to the shogunate, Habuto did not have the right to request assistance from other daimyo, he lost his post despite all his work to develop Ezo. The Russian raids had been carried out by just two small ships, and rumors of further planned attacks turned out to be rumors only, but the shogunate decided it was time to take direct control of all Ezo. In addition to ordering better treatment of the Ainu — hoping to discourage them from aiding the Russians— Edo officials prohibited the clandestine trade between Wajin and Russians through Ainu intermediaries. Writing in the later nineteenth century, Thomas Blakiston reported another precaution taken against Russians, presumably after Khvostov-Davydov raids. Great piles of firewood were collected at intervals along Ezo’s west coast, from Cape Soya to Matsumae. Should the Russians attack, the northernmost fire would be lit and, proceeding southward, each fire would be a signal to light the next one, until the news reached the authorities.8 Another Russian sailor appeared in Japan a few years later and soon found himself imprisoned. This was Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin, a Russian naval captain from a noble family. Sailing around the world in 1811 on the ship Diana, his main task was to explore the North Pacific and to find and map areas of it near Russia. His plan called for sailing to La Perouse Strait between the island he called Matsmai and “the Peninsula of Sagaleen.”9 Ordered to survey the Sea of Okhotsk, Golovnin anchored near the southern tip of Kunashir, one of the Kurils closest to Ezo, desiring to obtain firewood and water from the Japanese. He led seven men ashore despite having been warned by Ainu that

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the Wajin were suspicious. Alarmed by the Davydov and Khvostov raids several years earlier, on July 23, 1811, the Wajin imprisoned Golovnin’s small party. Soon the captive Russians were on their way to Hakodate, partly by boat and part of the way by mountain trail, the journey taking almost a month. Golovnin was surprised at the number of large villages his group saw in eastern Ezo after they had been brought over from Kunashir; he estimated that there was a village every two miles or so. He observed men throwing sizable nets out from the shore, waiting until fish filled them, then, with many other men, pulling the nets full of fish to shore. Along the way Golovnin and his men received meals that varied little, usually rice with pickled radishes, soup, “a kind of maccaroni” and a piece of fish.10 Thus even in the early nineteenth century rice was available in Ezo for the Wajin who lived there. (And since rice had to be imported to Ezo, the Wajin felt they were treating Golovnin well by offering him this expensive food.) The ordinary people the Russians encountered on their difficult trip across Hokkaido were helpful. The Wajin guards were kind, too; they even drove bothersome flies away from the bound captives. They did keep the men roped up to prevent escape attempts, though. The men spent seven weeks in Hakodate in small cages undergoing interrogations. Next they were sent on to Matsumae, where they were again confined in secure cages in a barn-like structure apparently newly built to imprison them. After some months, they were moved to more spacious quarters which included even a garden. Aside from cramped confinement, the Russians received kind treatment in Hakodate and Matsumae. In both towns, Japanese who wanted to increase Japan’s knowledge of Russian language and conditions managed to ask the prisoners a great many questions despite the language difficulty, and the captives imparted a wealth of useful information. Golovnin helped compile a Russian-Japanese dictionary and helped the Japanese understand Russian grammar, but at times he and the other Russians purposely misled their interrogators. For example, the Russians exaggerated the superiority of Russian military forces. This may have been influential, for even after Russian power was humbled by Britain and France in the Crimean War more than forty years later, the Japanese believed that Russia was the strongest power in the world. Golovnin and his companions were imprisoned for over two years. They met explorer Mamiya Rinzo when he visited them in their quarters in Matsumae. He brought them citrus fruits to ward off scurvy and spent some effort to get the Russians to explain how various European astronomical instruments worked; he wanted to learn more about surveying, in preparation for an inspection trip in Ezo which he had been ordered to make. Mamiya did not trust Golovnin, and his opinion may have prolonged the imprisonment. Meanwhile, Golovnin thought Mamiya boastful and unsympathetic. While in Matsumae in February 1812, Golovnin and his men seriously considered trying to escape, hoping they could find some kind of boat to sail westward to the Asian mainland. In early May they made the attempt. Traveling northwest from Matsumae, they found villages at frequent intervals along the coast. It took them some time to find any suitable boats and when they did spot several on the shore, they were unable to push them off the beach. Eight days after their escape, the men were detained in the nearby hills and their imprisonment continued, in less pleasant conditions. While Golovnin’s party was kept captive, Petr Ivanovich Rikord, now the senior officer on the Diana, sailed the ship back to Russia, as he felt he did not have enough men to rescue the captives. In September 1812, he and the Diana crew, still anxious for their

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comrades, discovered a Japanese businessman on a ship at sea. He was Takadaya Kahei, the richest merchant in Ezo and also an explorer and surveyor. The Russians captured Takadaya and kept him over the winter in Petropavlovsk, on the Kamchatka peninsula, where he suffered from the frigid conditions. In June 1813, Rikord returned to the Kurils with Takadaya and began negotiations for the release of Golovnin’s party, asserting that the raids of Khvostov and Davydov had not been instigated by Russian authorities. Rikord had with him several Japanese to be repatriated. One, whom Khvostov had captured, later proved of great service to Hakodate and, indeed, to all Japan. Nakagawa Goroji had been living on Iturup when he was taken and was held in Russia for more than five years. While there he worked for a doctor and learned about vaccination to prevent smallpox. He brought this knowledge back to Hakodate, from which it percolated throughout Japan. He was not helpful during the negotiations between the Russians and the Japanese, however, for example reporting to Captain Rikord that Golovnin and his men had been killed. Takadaya meanwhile urged Japanese officials to free Golovnin. Rikord returned to Okhotsk to obtain an official statement, complete with seal, from the Russian commandant there, explaining that the government had not sanctioned the Khvostov-Davydov raids. With this, Rikord sailed to Hakodate. Finally, after he repeated his assurance that the Russian government had not sponsored and, in fact, had condemned the raids, Japanese officials liberated Golovnin and his companions in October 1813. Golovnin later noted that the group had been held captive for two years, two months and twenty-six days. In the letter that Russia’s commandant at Okhotsk wrote to the Japanese, he suggested that the release of the Russians was important to ensure both fishing and the smooth flow of trade along the Japanese seacoast. Fishing would again come to play a leading role in U.S.S.R.–Japan relations in the twentieth century. When Golovnin finally reached St. Petersburg, it was seven years since he had left the city on the journey that led to his captivity. Once home in Russia, he wrote an account of his experiences. Published in Russia and soon translated into English, his descriptions of Ezo were sought after, as he was one of very few Europeans who had penetrated the island. Based on his adventures, he urged that any negotiations with the Japanese be carried out with “prudence, patience, courtesy and candour.”11 His release began a period of good feeling between Japan and Russia, especially because despite his captivity, when he returned to Russia Golovnin spoke well of the Japanese. Takadaya Kahei, who had learned Russian, also worked to establish good relations between Russia and Japan, and in Hakodate today stands his statue, commemorating not only his role in helping develop the city but also his important part in resolving the Golovnin question. Golovnin is recognized today in the Kuril Islands, as a peak on Kunashir Island has been named for him. After Golovnin’s Ezo sojourn, Japan and Russia agreed to send representatives to meet on the Kuril island of Urup in to settle a border between the two nations. Both in 1814 and 1815 Russians sailed to the Kurils to make contact. The Russian officials also hoped to establish trade. The two nations’ envoys did not meet, however; in 1814, the Russian ship’s captain merely cruised near the island instead of landing, and in 1815 fog prevented contact. A generation after Golovnin’s experiences in Ezo, some shipwrecked Japanese benefited from acts of kindness that individual Japanese had shown to the Golovnin party. In 1838, a November storm blew eight sailors out of sight of Japan and also destroyed their ship’s rudder, mast and sail. The men drifted through the Pacific Ocean for five months

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before being rescued by an American whaler, which dropped them off when making port in Hawaii. The Japanese group wanted to return to their country; a British ship took them to Kamchatka. Later they were sent on to Okhotsk, where the Russian-American Company would be responsible for them. Okhotsk Governor Nikolai Vukovich saw to it that the Japanese were treated well, explaining that his uncle was Golovnin. Vukovich told the men that once when Golovnin feared he would starve to death, his Japanese guard secretly gave him a ball of rice. This was just one of many helpful acts; thus Golovnin and later his nephew wanted to repay the kindness. Eventually, via Sitka, Alaska, a Russian ship took the men towards Ezo. Because of previous conflicts between Russians and Japanese, the ship’s captain feared a possible Japanese attack, and he approached the Kurils and Ezo with care. Spotting an Ainu boat in which a Matsumae samurai, Kobayashi Chogoro, was riding, the Russians sent the shipwrecked Japanese with Kobayashi, who took them back to Matsumae. Here they were dispatched to Edo where they faced long interrogation. After several years of questions, only four of the Japanese fishermen were still living. Including their drifting, subsequent voyages on American, British and Russian ships, and interrogation in Japan, they were gone from home for eight years.

Other explorers The quest for better knowledge of Ezo increased during the seventeenth century among Japanese, but it was in the late eighteenth century that serious and sustained Japanese exploration of the northern island began. By that time, too, ships from western Europe were appearing, and when the whaling industry grew in the early nineteenth century, adventurers from around the world seemed to come to Ezo’s seas. Word of Shakushain’s war reached far beyond the Matsumae domain, stimulating interest in Ezo. During the seventeenth century, the Matsumae arranged for exploration of the island, having it mapped (with limited accuracy). Such maps and expedition records do not now exist however. Tokugawa Mitsukuni, who hoped to expand into the northern island from his domain — Mito, on northern Honshu — ordered construction of a ship, the Kaifu Maru, to explore Ezo. He outfitted it with navigational instruments modern for the time, which he had obtained from the west, and in 1687 the ship reached the Ishikari River. Here its men explored the wide Ishikari Plain, where the city of Sapporo now sits, and bartered items with Ainu they met in the vicinity. Policy in Edo was inconsistent. In 1722 the shogunate penalized one Fukami Genyu, who had had the audacity to formally urge the government to develop Ezo. A government-sponsored exploratory journey in 1737, however, sent Sakakura Genjiro to Ezo to look for gold and silver. Though he found no great deposits of precious metals, he brought back a good deal of information about the land as well as about the Ainu. In 1785 the shogunate sent a substantial expedition to Ezo and beyond. One of the aims was to learn the smuggling routes used to bring goods from Russia to Ezo; another was to continue to look for valuable resources in the northern lands. The expedition reported that the Matsumae had a policy of keeping the Ainu both indigent and uninformed. The explorers analyzed the farming possibilities of Ezo and reported that seventy thousand people could successfully live there — and grow rice. Though one of the expedition’s tasks was to study winter weather conditions in Ezo, the extreme cold and

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insufficient supplies led to illness and death of some of the members. In fact, all of the members who tried to spend the winter at Cape Soya, Hokkaido’s northernmost point, died. Honda Toshiaki, who thought Japan should take action to expand its power in the north, had urged that one of his students, Mogami Tokunai, be included on the expedition. Mogami, merely a farmer’s son, was hired to carry surveying equipment. He more than proved his abilities on this journey; he learned the Ainu language and played a crucial role the next year in producing charts of the Kurils. He claimed to be the first Wajin ever to land on Iturup. To his surprise, he found three Russians living among the Ainu there and he developed a friendship with the Russians. Mogami’s increasing knowledge of and interest in the north led him to take more trips there both on his own and as a shogunate official, and his skills as an Ainu interpreter proved crucial. All told, Mogami visited Ezo nine times. When the shogunate sent Aoshima Shunzo to investigate the Menashi-Kunashir revolt, Aoshima took Mogami along as guide and interpreter. Accused later of spying during the journey, Mogami was imprisoned, but after release and with Honda’s backing, he prepared an extensive report about northern regions for the shogunate. Officials sent him north again in an official capacity. His travels led Mogami to counsel fair treatment for the Ainu and recognition of their abilities and their rights to traditional practices. He also criticized the shogunate’s refusal even to discuss matters with Rezanov; Mogami wished that it were possible for Japanese and Russians to open trade relations. Scholar Donald Keene says of Mogami that his “life was one of discovery.”12 After Vries’ 1643 journey, not until 1787 did any western explorers other than the Russians arrive in the neighborhood of Ezo. European conception of the geography of the area was hazy; a 1754 European map, for example, labeled two separate islands as Matsumae and Ezo. French explorer Jean-Francois de Galaup, Count of La Perouse, explored in both the Atlantic and Pacific in the second half of the eighteenth century, visiting, among other places, Alaska, Hawaii, Australia and Hudson’s Bay in Canada before meeting his death on a South Pacific island. The name “La Perouse” now appears on the map in Hawaii; La Perouse Bay is off the southwest coast of Maui. Another La Perouse Bay (Bahia La Perouse) touches Easter Island’s northern coast, and, perhaps most important, the explorer has been commemorated in La Perouse Strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, which he discovered in 1787; Vries had missed it in the fog. What La Perouse missed, however, was discovering that Sakhalin was an Island. He had sailed northward from Korea along the coast but when off the west shore of Sakhalin, stormy seas, an accident injuring several sailors, and contradictory interpretations of what he heard from local people led him to turn back, fairly sure that he had seen a peninsula, not an island. Then he headed through the strait that bears his name, exploring the Kurils en route to Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula. La Perouse was mistaken in several ways; he thought that Rishiri Island off the northern extremity of Ezo’s west coast was a mountain rising on the main island and he also followed Vries’s belief that the strait between Honshu and Ezo was 110 miles wide. Only a few years later, Captain W. R. Broughton came to Ezo waters. (He had sailed earlier with Captain George Vancouver to the northwestern American coast. Broughton was the first British naval officer to sail into the Columbia River, which he claimed for Britain, not knowing that Robert Gray had earlier explored the region for the United

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British explorer William Broughton sailed in Hokkaido waters in 1796 and 1797. One of his crewmen died during the ship’s travels and was buried on Daikoku Island, in Uchiura Bay near Muroran. Here, on the Muroran shore, is a representation of Broughton’s ship and in the distance is Daikoku Island.

States.) In 1796, while Broughton was prospecting in the Northwest Pacific, Ainu saw his ship, the H.M.S. Providence, in southwest Ezo, sailed out to it and invited Broughton ashore. A local Wajin official discouraged the communication, though. Broughton’s goal was to map the coast of Japan more accurately, and several times he managed to have very brief contact with people on Ezo, in the vicinity of Uchiura Bay, which Broughton named Volcano Bay. (There are impressive volcanoes both north and south of the bay’s entrance.) Here he stopped to stock up on water and wood, as well as to learn what he could about Ezo and its people. He exchanged charts of the area with the Wajin. He had a chance to observe some Ainu, their attire, their homes and their foods, their boats and fishing implements.13 One of Broughton’s crew, a Dane named Hans Aldson, was killed when felling a tree for firewood. He was buried on Daikoku Island in Uchiura Bay just west of today’s city of Muroran. A small representation in granite of the ship Providence now stands in Muroran; visible beyond it is Daikoku Island. And when the American expedition led by Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry visited Ezo half a century after Broughton’s journey, the Americans referred to Daikoku Island as Olason’s Island. Lieutenant J. J. Boyle, commanding the ship sent by Perry to survey the bay, visited Aldson’s (or Olason’s) grave, and the official narrative of the Perry expedition noted that “the Japanese authorities had

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respected the remains, though they had been interred more than three-fourths of a century, and built on the spot where they rested one of the usual tombs of the country, with the ordinary marks of mourning.”14 (It was actually fifty-eight years later.) After wintering in Macao on China’s south coast, Broughton returned to Japan and arrived in Ezo in July but in a smaller ship. The Providence had sunk after encountering a coral reef off a small island between Okinawa and Taiwan. He reported that Wajin in Ezo were exceedingly anxious for his expedition to leave, but instead Broughton sailed his ship Swift to the town of Matsumae. For more than a century no English ship had approached a settlement of this size in Japan; the town’s samurai prepared for battle. But the ship sailed past. On this journey, by the way, Broughton sailed up the channel west of Sakhalin, going farther than La Perouse, but the British explorer also turned back, convinced Sakhalin was but a peninsula. As late as 1855, Commodore John Rodgers on a surveying expedition in the western Pacific for the United States, noted, “It is not certainly known whether Saghalien is an island or a peninsula.”15 Another Broughton error was estimating the width of Tsugaru Strait at sixteen miles, about ten miles short of the actual distance. Shogunate officials now worried both about Broughton’s visit to Uchiura Bay and the Russian settlement on Urup Island, of which they had recently learned. Thus the rulers began to pay more attention to Ezo. Moreover, Ohara Sakingo, who had traveled to Ezo in 1795, wrote a detailed analysis for the government of the reasons Ezo should be developed. He had taught painting in Edo and went to Matsumae to become a tutor for the young Matsumae who was then lord of the domain. While there, Ohara learned of secret Matsumae trading with Russians in the Kurils. Ohara determined to report all this to the shogunate, but before he could leave Ezo, Broughton sailed his ship into Uchiura Bay. Ohara heard that Broughton had given a map of the world to a Matsumae retainer in exchange for one of northern Japan. Such an act was most definitely prohibited. Feeling that his country had to make a concerted effort to secure Japan’s role in Ezo, Ohara claimed illness and left Ezo in November 1796 to return to Honshu and report his news to the shogunate. In response, in 1798 the shogunate sent a large expedition —180 members— to investigate conditions in Ezo, Sakhalin and the Kurils. Another achievement of the expedition was a journey up the Teshio River to its headwaters with a return to the coast via the Ishikari. Kondo Morishige worked in the Kurils with Mogami during the 1798 expedition. Investigating recent Russian activities on Iturup, he removed Russian markers and erected posts claiming Japanese sovereignty over the island. In 1807 he went to Ezo to assess the impact of the Khvostov and Davydov depredations. He traveled over a surprisingly large area and, perhaps most significant, visited the Ishikari River and the land it watered. In reporting to Edo, he had a personal audience with the shogun, and he urged expanded colonization of the north, particularly on the Ishikari plain which he envisioned as prosperous farmland. He noted that since this area was inland, it was not so apt to suffer raids by outsiders. But Kondo’s vision did not lead to action for more than half a century. In 1800 Ino Tadataka traveled from Edo to Ezo to carry out the first land survey of the island. Ino had become wealthy as a brewer, but when fifty years old, he retired and began to study astronomy and surveying and he is rightly honored today as a geographer and cartographer. In 1799 he requested permission from the shogunate to travel to Ezo to conduct a survey; he proposed to bear the expenses of the undertaking himself. He obtained permission (and a small subsidy) after some months, because the government

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thought the information to be gained could help defend Ezo from possible Russian incursions. Ino and several others plus two servants set out in June 1800, traveling overland in order to make measurements en route. Once on Ezo, the party journeyed east from Hakodate, accurately mapping the coastal region as far as Akkeshi and making preliminary observations from there to the Nemuro area. As the season progressed, they returned by the same route and checked their data. They also surveyed the route from Hakodate west and south to Matsumae. Ino intended to return later to Ezo for more surveying, but was directed to work instead on Honshu. He eventually surveyed much of Japan, walking more than 27,000 miles throughout the country. He is commemorated today by a plaque atop Mt. Hakodate, the Gibraltar-like eminence that shelters the city of Hakodate. In 1808, Mamiya Rinzo, with Matsuda Denjuro, determined through exploration that Sakhalin truly was an island. Unlike the westerners who had concluded that it Mogami Tokunai explored Ezo (Hokkaido) and was probably a peninsula, these men trav- the Kuril Islands in the late 1700s and early eled by land. But their knowledge was kept 1800s, making nine visits to Ezo. He submitted extensive reports to the shogunate. He learned from western nations and explorers. the language of the Ainu and urged that Ainu be Mamiya’s discovery was part of a treated fairly. He also suggested that Russians greater work: surveying all Ezo and nearby be allowed to trade with Japan (courtesy Hokterritory. Mamiya, like Mogami, was born kaido University Library). poor but rose through ability. Becoming interested in surveying while traveling in Ezo and the Kurils, he met Ino Tadataka and studied under him. Mamiya traveled extensively in Ezo, where he met Mogami. In 1808 and 1809 Mamiya visited Sakhalin and the mainland area near the Amur River. His accomplishments are impressive. For twenty years he traveled in the northern lands, and he is known today for the map of the island he produced. Other Japanese, too, brought knowledge of Ezo back to Edo. The shogunate dispatched Tani Buntan, a physician and artist, to Ezo even before 1800 to survey the vegetation of the island, looking for plants of possible medicinal value. And in 1810 botanist So Shokei wrote a work on Ezo flora. During these years, whaling interests around the world became interested in the waters near Hokkaido. The industry had grown since its mid–eighteenth century inception. Lamps used throughout the world burned whale-oil in pre-electricity days, and whalebone, or baleen, became important as the styles of European women’s clothing changed; it was used as corset stays as well as in umbrellas. Thus the number of the world’s

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1802 map of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and Kuril Islands assembled by Kondo Morishige (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

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A plaque atop Mt. Hakodate honors Ino Tadataka, who carried out the first land survey on Ezo (Hokkaido), at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A wealthy brewer, he abandoned commerce at the age of fifty, studied surveying and began his travels.

whaling ships grew, and those who sailed them learned of the rich pickings off northern Japan and Siberia. An American whaler appeared off the coast at Hakodate on June 24, 1807, but it did not attempt to land. This was the Eclipse, out of Boston, returning to the northwestern United States from China. The winds had been bad, its barrels were leaking, and desperate for food and water, the captain stopped at Nagasaki. Aware of Japanese regulations, he did not attempt to trade, and Japanese authorities provided him with what he needed. The ship passed through Tsugaru Straits on its way home, then, but in Hakodate it “was thought to be Russian,” wrote a Japanese chronicler.16 In 1820, a Massachusetts ship captain spotted sperm whales off the northern Japan coast, and soon whaling developed there in earnest. As more whalers operated near Japan, more and more accidents occurred. After the shogunate returned control of Ezo to the Matsumae in 1821, the Matsumae regime found it harder and harder to deal with foreign ships, both in supplying them with firewood and incarcerating, then transporting, stranded sailors— at Matsumae domain expense. In 1831 the whaler Lady Rowena, out of Clarence, near Hobart in the Australian island of Tasmania, put in to shore in southeast Hokkaido after many days in stormy seas. Accounts of the crewmen’s actions on land differ; the Australians traded goods, or stole from local people or carried out violent depredations. Another Australian contact in that area came in 1850 when the whaler Eamont was shipwrecked near Akkeshi, not far from where the Lady Rowena had landed. Local people sheltered the Eamont victims

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until they could be taken back to Australia. These two early meetings provided the impetus for twentieth century sister-city ties between Akkeshi and Clarence, Australia. Before the Eamont disaster, other encounters occurred when foreign ships had difficulties in Japanese waters. In 1843 a foreign vessel was spied off Ezo, but when the local official who boarded it could not communicate with anyone on board, the ship departed. A similar incident occurred at Muroran in 1844. Three years later, a German whaler rescued nine Osaka men near the Hawaiian Islands, and about a month later put them aboard a Japanese boat in Tsugaru Strait. Other whaling vessels ran into trouble in Japanese waters in those years. When the Poughkeepsie, New York, whaling ship Lawrence sank in May 1846 in heavy surf after smashing against rocks in the Kuril Islands, eight sailors, led by Second Mate George Howe, managed to get away in a small boat. The men rowed for a week. One died, but the others made it to Iturup Island, where they managed to capture a seal. They cooked its meat, two Ainu spotted them, and while the sailors ate, men armed with swords approached and took them captive, for the Ainu who had discovered the group reported this to Wajin officials a few miles away. Officials held the sailors in the guardhouse at Rubetsu, Iturup, and notified the district governor, who in turn contacted the shogunate. The decision was to bring them to Nagasaki via Ezo where they could be kept until transport south was convenient. By the time this information was reported from Edo to Matsumae, however, and then to the Kurils, it was mid–October, and early winter storms had already made transportation impossible. Finally, May 31, 1847, the group was escorted from Iturup, arriving at Nagasaki in August. After more than a year in confinement, the men were allowed to leave Japan on a Dutch vessel bound for Batavia, and on March 1, 1848, they left Batavia for the United States. In June 1848 another group of American seamen found themselves imprisoned in Japan, in worse conditions than the Lawrence crew. These fifteen men, including eight from Hawaii, fled in three small boats from the New Bedford, Massachusetts, whaler Lagoda under Captain John Finch after it struck rocks near Matsumae in the fog. Evidence suggests that the men were anxious for an excuse to escape harsh conditions on board and thus deserted at an opportune moment. (Not badly damaged, the ship returned to its home port the next year.) After two days, the fifteen men reached a small village, where they received water — but not food — and were not allowed sleep. As soon as possible, village officials gave over their prisoners to Matsumae officials. These men gave the sailors rice and firewood and commanded them to depart, but they soon landed again, on the Japan Sea coast several miles north of Matsumae. Here the men refused to leave, indicating that their boats were too small to handle the ocean, and that their ship had foundered. From then on, the castaways were kept under guard. Held near Matsumae, several of the men fled, but on recapture were placed in secure confinement until they agreed not to escape again. Like the Lawrence survivors, this group was sent to Nagasaki, arriving September 2. Here they were accused of spying, partly because of their attempts to escape. Unruly behavior and unsuccessful attempts at flight led to confinement in what they charged were inhumane conditions, and several of the men died. Hearing of the Lagoda men from Dutch officials in Nagasaki, American officials in China dispatched a ship to Nagasaki to rescue them. After applying some pressure, American envoys succeeded in arranging the men’s release. It was about this time that one of Japan’s great explorers, Matsuura Takeshiro, began his travels to the northern islands. A man with wanderlust, in his mid-twenties Matsuura

4. The Explorers headed by himself for Ezo. Formalities for entering Ezo were so strict that it was a year after he reached Tsugaru Strait before he was able to proceed to the northern island. He traveled extensively in Ezo and Sakhalin, returning to Honshu after about three years. Two years later he headed north again, this time ranging into the South Kurils. Matsuura believed that Wajin and Ainu were related long in the past. He learned the Ainu language and often traveled with Ainu guides. Unlike most Japanese, he thought well of Ainu and admired their generosity. He also felt strongly that Japan should keep Ezo and nearby islands safe from the Russians. As a result of his explorations, he produced a remarkably accurate map of Ezo based upon no more than counting his steps and consulting a small compass. His journeys enabled him to describe inland areas of Ezo that Mamiya and Ino had left blank. Matsuura also wrote extensively about the northern islands, including details about natural history, human habitation, geography and geology.

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Mamiya Rinzo traveled on Ezo (Hokkaido), Sakhalin and the Asian mainland for some twenty years early in the nineteenth century, producing a good map of Ezo. A museum near Tokyo celebrates this explorer (courtesy Museum of Rinzo Mamiya, Tsukuba-Mirai City, Japan).

Ranald MacDonald An unusual adventure ensued when a brave and curious young American made his personal attempt to penetrate the closed nation of Japan. Ranald MacDonald, born in Oregon to a Chinook Indian mother and a Scots father, shipped out on a whaler and arranged a seeming accident off the Ezo coast. He had been intrigued by the adventures of three Japanese who had drifted all the way across the Pacific Ocean after their ship had foundered off Japan in 1832, finally reaching land at the area now the northwest corner of Washington State. He wondered whether there were a racial connection between American Indians and Japanese, and even though he knew that Japanese policy kept foreigners away, he determined to go to Japan partly for the adventure but also to learn about the Japanese people. One of his shipmates wrote that MacDonald thought that he perhaps could learn the language, and, as an interpreter, do his part to help develop trade between Japan and America. In pursuit of his dream, Ranald MacDonald shipped out on the whaler Plymouth, and in 1848, twenty-four years old, he carried out his plan. The Plymouth at the time was just west of Ezo’s northern peninsula, and on June 27 MacDonald left in a twenty-seven

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foot boat, arranging things to look as though he had been shipwrecked. He managed to maneuver his craft to tiny Yagishiri Island. He stayed there three days, having brought some provisions to sustain him. He met no one and thought the island uninhabited, though a small Japanese settlement then existed on the opposite shore, out of sight. Since, apparently, no Japanese had spotted him and his goal was to meet Japanese, he left the island, sailing north to intercept another island he saw in the distance, which he estimated to be some ten miles away. This would have been Rishiri Island, actually some forty-five miles from Yagishiri. As he arrived at Rishiri, Ranald MacDonald purposely overturned his boat, to add credibility to his tale of foundering. Four Ainu men in a boat, “stroking their great beards,” met him. Once MacDonald was on shore, some hundred people watched the action on the beach as the young American was taken up to the only large house in sight, where a Wajin official, not an Ainu, met him. The official offered MacDonald dry clothes— a gown — and food: fish, pickles, preserved shellfish and ginger, as well as “grog-yes,” which turned out to be sake. MacDonald wrote about later learning that the survivors of the Lawrence, when proffered sake, had answered “Grog? Yes! fetch it on,” and thus the Wajin official called sake “grog-yes” for the foreigner’s benefit.17 MacDonald remained on Rishiri Island for several weeks. Visited by Ainu leaders interested in all his possessions, he began making a list of words from the Ainu language. Carefully he observed everything he saw. For example, he realized later that while Wajin worshipped at altars in their homes, the Ainu did not. The Ainu, he reported, really loved sake, but always offered a bit to the gods before partaking of it themselves. When he returned to America from Japan, he found that people were very interested in the Ainu. It was only on Rishiri that he had much contact with them, and Matsuura Takeshiro explored Ezo (Hokkaido) extensively in the mid–nineteenth century and created a map he wrote, “To me they seemed a of the island that described inland areas which earlier simple kindly people; and I shall cartographers had left blank. He visited Ainu commu- ever gratefully remember their nities and compiled records of the large numbers of Ainu Samaritan kindness to me.” (He who had been conscripted for forced labor far from their also noted that they appeared dirty homes. Also, Matsuura was the person who suggested a new name for Ezo: Hokkaido (courtesy Hokkaido Uni- and unkempt in comparison with the “clean, refined, and cultivated versity Library).

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Japanese.”)18 Several days after MacDonald’s arrival, a group of Rishiri men went to report the American’s presence to the nearest military officials at Soya, Japan’s northernmost cape and about thirty miles across the sea. For a few days, MacDonald waited for the return of the party. Meeting a Wajin on Rishiri who wanted to learn English, MacDonald began studying Japanese. He made a pen from a crow’s quill in order to compile a vocabulary list. One day his informant, whose name MacDonald remembered as Tangaro, secretly showed MacDonald a map of Japan. The visitor was impressed at the detail shown on the map, but remarked that it showed two islands where western maps showed one. Apparently, the maps used on the ships MacDonald had served on showed Sakhalin and Hokkaido as one island, whereas the Japanese map, more accurately, included La Perouse Strait. The emissaries to Soya returned, accompanied by Wajin officials who questioned MacDonald in detail and studied all his goods with care. They walked him to a house in another village some three miles away. Here, for a month, he was confined in a room some twelve by twelve feet, allowed out of it only to bathe, and that just three times. Next, three samurai escorted him to Soya, an eight hour journey across the water. Soya obviously was a military port, MacDonald could see, for many soldiers were about. Clearly, the Wajin were apprehensive of Russian aims. As soldiers marched Ranald MacDonald to his new prison, buildings along the route were all hidden by curtains, just as on Rishiri Island. He was taken to a specially prepared room, or cell, in Soya’s official building, and again all his belongings were carefully inspected. Once again, MacDonald’s prison proved temporary. After about two weeks, he was taken to a fairly large junk and allowed the freedom of the ship, as long as he behaved. MacDonald found that this vessel carried a cargo of kombu and salted fish. As the junk cruised southward, sailing just offshore toward Matsumae, MacDonald had a chance to look at Hokkaido’s west coast. The boat put in to shore just once during the voyage, in order to replenish its water and wood. After fifteen days— a long time for the distance, due to unfavorable winds— the ship arrived at Matsumae September 7, 1848. MacDonald was instructed to stay out of sight during docking. Here, officials more splendid than any MacDonald had yet seen boarded the junk and took the prisoner ashore, maneuvering through crowds of boats. Once on land, MacDonald traveled to his new prison in a sedan chair, curtains drawn. Not until the middle of the night did his procession reach its goal, a town he noted as “Erametz” some ten miles north of Matsumae and probably today’s Era Village. He estimated that Erametz had about fifty houses. To MacDonald’s surprise, he discovered that the room where he would now be confined had been the prison for other Americans; his Japanese host pointed out names, including “John Brady,” written on a beam, and said the word “American” as he gestured. The men had been the Lagoda escapees, and they had been moved on just a month before MacDonald was brought to the room. The plan was to send him on to Nagasaki as soon as possible, but the need to make arrangements— to repair the junk which would take him there, MacDonald understood — led to a three week stay near Matsumae. Again the Japanese treated the young adventurer leniently, though he was definitely a prisoner. He received ample food — rice, fish, kombu, pickles— and clothing: Japanese robes and trousers. He was watched while he ate — and, before he took a bite, an official taster tried the food. During MacDonald’s confinement here, he was allowed to read only his Bible among the several books he had, and he was given permission to do this only because he indicated it was a religious work.

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Finally, MacDonald was escorted to the nearby shore where a boat took him out to a large armed junk. On this he sailed October 1 for Nagasaki. He noted the grand ceremonial crowd attending his departure from Ezo: military officers wearing armor, and common soldiers in colorful formal attire as his boat drew up anchor in a harbor he estimated full of more than one thousand boats. And as MacDonald departed, the officer who had been in charge of him presented him with some apples. Thus ended his adventures in Ezo. Because of MacDonald’s imprisonment, he had seen little of Ezo and this continued in Nagasaki. Here, though, one attendant was a samurai, Moriyama Einosuke, who knew a little English. Though MacDonald was kept confined in Nagasaki, he gave daily English lessons to fourteen Japanese, including Moriyama. In 1848, an adventurous young man from the west coast In April 1849, more than six of North America, twenty-four-year-old Ranald Macmonths after he arrived in Nagasaki, Donald, arranged to be set adrift in a small boat off the Ranald MacDonald was released in Ezo (Hokkaido) coast. Ashore, he met Ainu and ethnic Japanese but soon was placed in confinement. He order to leave for America, and he tutored several Japanese in English, and these men met the Lagoda group, who were still acted as interpreters when Japan was opened to Americans in 1854. This stone appears at MacDonald’s grave confined. (MacDonald blamed the site in remote northeastern Washington State, near the Lagoda men for their own troubles, Canadian border. later writing that they were “young, violent, habitually quarreled amongst themselves, and gave much trouble.”)19 They all left Japan together on the American ship Preble. Ranald MacDonald did not accomplish all his desires during his sojourn in Japan but he played an important role in the developing relations between Japan and America. His polite manner and friendly interest in the people he met may have helped make possible his “school” for interpreters. His students became the interpreters for the Perry expedition to Japan several years later as well as for the first resident American consul in Japan. There has been a suggestion that the Japanese treated Ranald MacDonald sympathetically because his half–Indian heritage meant he did not look as foreign to them as did other westerners they saw. His story is told in a textbook used in Japanese junior high school English classes and today there is an organization called “Japan Friends of Ranald MacDonald,” with members both in the United States and Japan.

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Matthew C. Perry and opening up Japan Just a few years after Ranald MacDonald’s adventures, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry made his history-making voyages to Japan and gained credit for “opening up” the reclusive land. The Japanese decisions made after Perry appeared led to great changes in Ezo and, indeed, in all Japan. Western nations had become more and more interested in gaining access to Japan, especially for the whaling industry. As knowledge spread of the rich fishing grounds in the northwestern Pacific, nations wanted access to Japanese ports so that whalers could restock their supplies. Western nations also were anxious for trade opportunities, and an open port in northern Japan could even have military significance, enabling the different foreign nations to keep an eye on the North Pacific and the Sea of Japan. Moreover, western nations wanted to avoid imprisonment for their seamen unfortunate enough to be stranded in Japan. The frequent summertime fog over some of the waters around Hokkaido and the strong tidal currents around the Kuril Islands in addition to occasional severe storms meant that shipwreck was always possible. Each western nation was also anxious that the others not attain too powerful a position in Asia. From about 1842 Russians had considered making a new approach to Japan and in 1850 Petr Rikord, now an admiral, strongly urged this, but not until 1852, when they heard that the Americans were sending an expedition, did the Russians take action. In October 1852, four ships, under the command of Admiral Evfimii Vasilevich Putiatin, began the long trip from the Baltic Sea to Japan. The ships were not in good repair, however, and the voyage was slow. Putiatin spent three months in Nagasaki in 1853, unsuccessfully trying to negotiate. Talks in January 1854 also led nowhere, and soon European affairs dominated Russian policy, as usual, with the opening of hostilities against Britain and France in the conflict now known as the Crimean War. Meanwhile, the Russians claimed Sakhalin in 1853, despite the presence of some Japanese settlements there. In 1849 Russian Captain Genadii Ivanovich Nevelskoi in the Baikal had proven that Sakhalin was an island, and that the channel now called by his name is actually four miles wide. The Russians established a small outpost near the southernmost point of Sakhalin, where a detachment lived through the winter peacefully but somewhat uneasily with the local Ainu — who chafed under orders from the Japanese already established there. The Russians were withdrawn in 1854, though, largely because of the war. While Russians were active in and around Japan during these years, so were Americans. As American settlements in California and elsewhere in the west grew, the Japan trade beckoned. Missionaries and others who felt that the spread of American civilization would benefit Asia were also eager to open Japan. In addition to these motivations, the U.S. Navy, whose ships were changing from sail to steam at the time, was anxious to develop a number of coaling stations around the world for refueling. The United States government had contemplated action to open trade with Japan as early as 1815, and in 1846 actually sent an emissary across the Pacific, without success. In 1853, though, the U.S. dispatched a powerful expedition, led by Commodore Perry, to make a serious attempt. Thus, in July, five years after Ranald MacDonald’s adventures, American ships approached Edo and Perry submitted a letter from President Millard Fillmore urging that Japan be open to trade with the United States. The letter also requested the opportunity to reprovision American ships in Japan and, perhaps most important,

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pressed Japanese officials not to imprison foreign seamen rescued off Japan. Perry then withdrew his fleet, indicating that he would return the next year for the Japanese response. Perry’s ships— Japanese called them “black ships”— returned in February 1854 and the shogunate, feeling there was no choice but to accede, reluctantly agreed to open Japan a bit. In the previous decade, Britain and France had wrested privileges in China, and the Japanese knew that Russians in ships nearby led by Admiral Putiatin had the same goal as Perry. No longer could Japan resist pressure from western nations; moreover, concern about Russian plans helped convince the Japanese government to negotiate with Perry. The proposed treaty made two ports accessible to American ships for fueling, provisioning and dealing with emergencies: Shimoda, on the east coast of Honshu between Tokyo and Kyoto, and Hakodate on Ezo. The treaty also included provisions to ensure that shipwrecked foreigners could no longer be incarcerated while in Japan. Both of the ports to be opened seemed chosen to thwart the foreigners; Hakodate in particular was as distant as it could be from the centers of Japanese power. Treaty negotiations had been difficult. Perry had requested that Matsumae’s port be opened, but the Japanese commissioners replied that this question required more thought, because “Matsmai is also a very distant country, and belongs to its prince.” In other words, since the Matsumae lord had responsibility for the area, the shogunate supposedly could not make the decision. Perry pressed for an answer, and on March 23 the Japanese delegation presented a draft granting U.S. ships access not to Matsumae but to nearby Hakodate (spelled “Hakodadi” in Englishlanguage expedition documents) from Sept. 17, 1855. “Some time will be required to make preparations, inasmuch as this harbor is very distant,” the Japanese added.20 Representatives of Japan and the United States signed the historic Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854. Despite Japanese assurances Commodore Matthew C. Perry led the American expedition that Hakodate harbor was supeto Japan that succeeded in gaining access to the country for rior to Matsumae harbor, Perry ships needing fuel or provisions. Hakodate was one of two felt he had to see for himself. He ports to be open to Americans, and Perry sailed there in 1854 to inspect the city. This statue of Perry was installed thus sailed north and on May 17, 1854 Perry’s flagship Powhatan, in 2004 to commemorate his visit 150 years earlier.

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along with the Macedonian, Mississippi, Southampton and Vandalia, entered Hakodate harbor. This visit was not of major importance to Perry’s Japan mission, but it had a significant impact on Ezo and, specifically, Hakodate. The harbor was excellent, Perry found. Sheltered somewhat by a headland south of the city, it is much better protected from storms than Matsumae, which lies almost directly on Tsugaru Strait. The city’s bay “for accessibility and safety is one of the finest in the world,” says the official published account of the expedition prepared by Francis L. Hawks, but the narrative includes sailing instructions for finding the harbor should fog or cloud obstruct the view. Perry had his men chart the harbor. He wrote in his diary, “As to expansiveness and entire safety from all winds it has not its superior in the world, with anchorage in the inner harbor of five to seven fathoms, good holding ground and clear bottom, and room to moor a hundred sail. What more could be desired?” Perry compared the setting of Hakodate to Gibraltar. Lieutenant George H. Preble (later a rear admiral) also was reminded of Gibraltar, but he said the place was “as cold as Greenland” and clerk J. W. Spalding, after noting the resemblance to Gibraltar, said he was also reminded of Cape Town, South Africa, while Cabin Boy William B. Allen thought of Hong Kong.21 Officials at Hakodate told Perry they had not yet received word of the signed treaty, though this may not have been so. They ordered people to stay indoors, closing their shutters and not looking out at the visitors. Only in the outlying areas did women and children need to be sent away, the order specified, for if all of them in Hakodate tried to flee, they could not find haven. Storekeepers were ordered not to sell any sake to the foreigners, who were known to overimbibe, leading to misbehavior. Drinking establishments were to remain closed during any American visit. Memorial ceremonies were to be postponed; were a burial necessary, it should be carried out at night, with only men present. People were not to visit certain temples or even to play musical instruments during the American visit, nor could they put boats into the sea. When American ships appeared in the harbor, streams of panicky townspeople and horses headed for the hills. Some of Perry’s men thought the people were fleeing in fear because they thought these Americans, with their huge ships, were coming to get revenge for what they felt was poor treatment earlier American sailors had received from the Matsumae. Spalding compared the long file of laden horses to a “string of camels in a desert.”22 In addition to people fleeing into the hills, many of the Japanese vessels in the harbor sailed away. And when Hakodate officials followed Japanese law in resisting the Perry visit, Perry prepared a possible attack on the city. Luckily, this did not prove necessary, and Perry urged officials to bring back the fleeing populace. Americans reported that they saw no women during their stay in Hakodate. (This was reminiscent of the men of Hakodate sending women and children to the hills in fear of Russian attack in 1807.) To the Hakodate officials, the Americans presented a Japanese-language copy of the new treaty along with an explanatory letter from the Japanese negotiators in Edo. Consultations took many days. The top local official not unexpectedly wished to wait for emissaries from Edo before allowing the Americans any concessions. He explained the remoteness of the area, noting that the journey from Edo took thirty days during summer (and thirty-seven in the winter). But given the powerful vessels sitting at anchor in the harbor, the Japanese officials finally agreed to give temporary privileges to the Perry expedition. When Perry’s crew went ashore, tension arose from misunderstandings between men who wanted to buy souvenirs and shopkeepers who did not want to sell. (There was

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also a little out-and-out looting.) Also, “entering not only the shops but the parlors (mat covered) as well with their boots on, their manners were bad but that seemed to be the custom of their country,” wrote a Japanese resident of the city.23 Officials set up a special “bazaar” where items would be made available for the Americans to buy. The expedition’s agricultural expert, James Morrow, bought a number of ordinary tools, which are now in the Smithsonian Institution collection in Washington. These included chisels, nails, tacks, a hammer, several knives, saws, hooks and hinges. One question regarded the exchange rate of the money the Americans used to pay for the goods they bought. Value was set by weighing both the American and the local coins, and the estimate the Japanese decided on meant the dollar was worth four times as much in Hakodate as it was in Shimoda. Some of the crew members went beyond the city and tried hunting but only managed to shoot a few birds and other animals. While negotiations continued at Hakodate, Perry sent one of his vessels, the Southampton, to survey Uchiura Bay across the peninsula north of the city. It could prove a good harbor, purser’s clerk Thomas Dudley reported, though not as good as Hakodate’s. The explorers were able to see some Ainu, whom they described as being under the “absolute will” of their “Japanese taskmasters.”24 The Americans also saw impressive volcanoes smoking in the distance. Inspecting Hakodate as a trading station included an inquiry into diseases prevalent in the area, but the official report of the expedition notes “no sources of miasma” and a probable more healthful climate than American sailors found “on the China station.” On May 19, Commodore Perry received Matsumae Kageyu (or Matsmai Kangsayu, as the official’s name was spelled in the report, which described him as the representative of the “Prince of Matsmai”).25 Perry had hoped to meet the prince, or daimyo, himself, but finally agreed to discuss the treaty with his representative instead. The document restricted the Americans to a specific area in the Hakodate district but Matsumae Kageyu would not make an agreement with Perry specifying the exact boundaries. The two men did agree, finally, to refer the question to the Japanese officials who would meet Commodore Perry when he later proceeded to Shimoda. Finally, the commodore was able to meet briefly in Hakodate with officials from Edo, but they intimated that, as they were on their way to Karafuto, they were only making a courtesy call on Perry and could not officially discuss the treaty. Samuel Wells Williams, an American missionary in China who had been prevailed upon to join the expedition as an interpreter because of his knowledge of Japanese, noted, “Fortunately for the visitors the Commissioners from Yedo arrived too late to seriously interrupt by their objections or restrictions the amicable arrangements concluded between Commodore Perry and a delegate from the Prince of Matsmai.”26 In all, the visit to Hakodate had gone well, despite the surprise when Perry’s ships arrived and Ezo people first heard that the shogunate had agreed to let American ships use Hakodate’s port. Perry even arranged to provide entertainment for local officials by presenting a minstrel show for them on one of his ships. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison has suggested that the success of the Perry visit to Hakodate helped set the stage for Hokkaido’s future good feelings toward Americans.27 Not quite every memory of Hakodate the Americans kept was a good one, though: they bought a thousand eggs to supplement their food supplies, but out of the thousand, Spalding wrote, only one was not spoiled. When the expedition prepared to leave Hakodate, Americans and Japanese exchanged

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Explanatory signs in Japanese and English mark many sites in Hakodate that have historic significance. The building where Commodore Perry met Japanese officials in 1854 is long since gone, though. Note Mt. Hakodate in the distance.

farewell gifts, among them a block of granite for the Washington Monument then under construction in the District of Columbia. The Hokkaido stone is visible now along with other gift stones from states, foreign countries, individuals and organizations along the inner wall of the monument. The inscriptions on the stones can be read if one is able to climb the monument’s steps. One hundred fifty years later, the city of Hakodate raised a statue of Matthew Calbraith Perry to commemorate his visit. On June 3, 1854, the last of the American ships pulled away from Hakodate at daybreak — but at the mouth of the bay they put down their anchors to await the lifting of a thick fog. Later that day, they were able to resume their voyage.

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After Commodore Perry left Hakodate, the British soon appeared briefly, and Russian Admiral Putiatin stayed at Hakodate for just over a week in October 1854. He sailed back south to the Bay of Osaka, taking only one ship this time, because he feared possible British or French attack as the Crimean War continued. Most of the fighting in this conflict was far from Japanese waters, but opposing ships from the countries at war did seek out each other in other areas, including the Sea of Okhotsk and the Japan Sea. About six months after signing the Treaty of Kanagawa with Perry, the Japanese signed a similar one with Britain and the British found Hakodate harbor useful for reprovisioning their warships. A Russia-Japan treaty came in February 1855 with ratification the next year. Russian ships could now put in for repair and supplies at Hakodate, Nagasaki and Shimoda, one more port than was open to the Americans. The treaty with Russia included an agreement on the border between the two nations. There had previously been no such delineation (and the border would be changed several times in future years). The 1855 agreement put the line of demarcation in the middle of the Kuril Island chain, between Iturup and Urup. The process of boundary determination was not yet complete, however, for the negotiators agreed to postpone a border decision regarding Sakhalin, because both nations wanted all of that island. After the treaty was signed, the shogunate took several actions to strengthen its position in Ezo, sending more troops there and taking over from the Matsumae the small Japanese outposts on Sakhalin. After Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, the suggestion even surfaced in Japan that the government should sell the Kuril Islands to America, in order to gain a strong buffer in the north against Russia.28 Not until 1875 did Japan and Russia decide the Sakhalin question. Fearing violent incidents between Russians and Japanese there, Kuroda Kiyotaka, then the leading official in Hokkaido, counseled settlement. He argued that government resources would be better used to develop Hokkaido than the even more distant and unpromising Sakhalin. He even argued that Sakhalin promised to be unproductive, like Alaska; lack of promise was the reason Russia had sold Alaska to the United States. Soon the Japanese government decided that it should no longer claim Sakhalin, as there were no funds to provide for the island, and in 1875, Japan and Russia agreed that all of Sakhalin should belong to Russia and all the Kuril Islands to Japan. Japan was ready to give up claims to Sakhalin, partly because of financial problems, and partly because at that time the nation faced a probable war with Korea. Japan maintained the continuing right to fish in Sakhalin waters, however. Japan added the Kurils to Hokkaido Prefecture and, with this treaty in place, did not put so much emphasis on Hokkaido defense. The agreement also confirmed the Japanese claim to Hokkaido. Yet some observers felt Russia still coveted Hokkaido. When sailing his cutter Zephyr in Sakhalin waters in 1881, Patrick Hodnett noted in his diary that “all the Russians with whom I conversed made no secret that they hoped for and expected the speedy annexation of the island which the Japanese call also Hokkaido, or Northern Gate to the Empire.”29 The age of exploration had brought increased knowledge of Ezo to Japan, Russia and countries far beyond. For Japan, this era culminated in the Perry expedition, which changed history. The foreign explorers helped lead to the end of the shogunate in 1868 and certainly spurred the nation’s modernization as its leaders sought to learn everything they could about technology, education and forms of government in prominent western nations. Many have called Perry’s accomplishment the “opening up” of Japan. For Ezo as well as the rest of the nation, it meant change and development. But if Perry had not forced

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the issue, someone else soon would have. The Japanese government felt compelled to alter its policies, and one of the new programs was development of Ezo. The age of exploration had not only meant interesting and unusual meetings between visitors and Ezo’s people, it led inexorably to the transformation of the island.

5

Hakodate

With the coming of the Perry expedition, Hokkaido’s focus shifted to Hakodate. Once foreigners ventured to Ezo under the new treaties, Hakodate and events there dominated the island’s history for the next several decades. Located so near Ezo’s southernmost tip, this was for a long time the first city that travelers to Japan’s northern island would see, a bridge between the old Japan and the new. As one of only a few ports in the entire nation open to foreign travelers, its time in the sun came in the last half of the nineteenth century. Until the beginning of that century, Matsumae Town, about sixty miles southwest of Hakodate by road, outshone Hakodate, which slowly grew from a small fishing village. It supposedly got its name, meaning “box mansion,” because of a prominent, boxshaped house built in the fifteenth century, though John Batchelor thought the name referred to a fort shaped like a box. The town was important enough to have a Buddhist temple at least since the seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century more Wajin came, began businesses and built homes. But Hakodate remained a “frontier town” in the early nineteenth century, wrote John J. Stephan, though as Edo officials came to Ezo in connection with direct rule of the northern island, Hakodate became the commercial center of the north.1 Hakodate sits at the foot of a mountain measured at 1,136 feet by the Perry expedition (but, more accurately, it is 1,096 feet high). Today visitors can take an aerial lift to the mountaintop and gaze southwards, away from the city, toward the wide Tsugaru Strait in the direction of Japan’s main island, Honshu. Close by and to the north is the city, squeezed onto the narrow peninsula below. Eons ago, the mountain and its slopes were an island, and in the city’s early days part of its peninsula was marshland. Now, all is developed. The view from the top at sunset is prized as one of the best views in Japan, and at night during fishing season, boats’ lights twinkling in the distance add to the magic. When Mabel Loomis Todd traveled to Hokkaido to view a solar eclipse in 1896, her ship put in for a day in Hakodate harbor. Inspired by the beauty of the place, she struck out for the top of the mountain. She saw “scores of vessels at anchor, and the gray town climbing a short distance up the hillside. Surf was beating high on the sea side, fog drifting off to south and east, glints of sunlight turning the water here and there to silver.” William Heine, the Perry expedition artist who five times climbed to the peak, noted atop the mountain a statue of the Buddha twelve feet high in what the artist described as a shrine. In addition, he mentioned several small temples along the path to the summit.2 Also on the mountain was a lookout post from which Japanese officials could watch ship movements; some Japanese observers told Perry expedition members that men at the post

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had seen 161 American ships traverse Tsugaru Strait in the previous year (but perhaps they sometimes sighted the same ship more than once). For the first half of the twentieth century, most people were not allowed on the mountain; it was a military site. Nineteenth century photographs of Hakodate and its promontory show a denuded mountain, whereas today the slopes are forested from the highest of the city buildings to the summit. In the twentieth century, Sapporo usurped Hakodate’s role as Hokkaido’s principal city, and now that people can fly directly from Tokyo to Sapporo in little more than an hour, Hakodate’s location as the Hokkaido port closest to Honshu means little. The city charms visitors, however, with its remnants of a past when westerners helped bring a striking architecture and a commercial importance to this port.

An open port Before being opened to foreign ships, Hakodate had been a fishing town, its harbor full of junks involved in coastal trade, taking away sea products and bringing in rice and goods used in daily life. The export items most frequently shipped from there (usually via Nagasaki to China) were kombu and other ocean products. Opening the harbor to western ships brought change, though at first, briefly, the port was to be used by foreign vessels only for provisioning and in case of emergency. Later, some of the foreign whalers wintered in the city. Once the Perry expedition obtained permission for American ships to use Hakodate harbor, the city became the focus of western relations with Ezo. American shippers thought Hakodate’s location excellent, for it lies on the great circle — the shortest distance — between San Francisco and northern China. In the days when coal was powering ocean-going ships, having available coal was crucial, and Hakodate, near Ezo coal mines, would thus be a good location for a coaling station. To Japan, the city had another value. Writing in 1874, Sir Harry Parkes, British Minister to Japan, asserted, “The opening of the Hakodate port saved Yezo,”3 meaning that the Russians did not get control of the island. Writings of men on Perry’s ships give a vivid picture of Hakodate in 1854. At the direction of the U.S. secretary of the navy, Perry forbade members of his expedition from keeping diaries, perhaps because he did not want the Russians, whom he did not trust, to gain any information from his men. Some of the men disobeyed Perry’s order, however. The city’s bay and harbor impressed those who approached by sea, and J. W. Spalding wrote enthusiastically: “The bay of Hakodadi is most spacious and majestic in its sweep, and for facility of entrance and security of anchorage, it can scarcely be surpassed by any other in the world. The width at its mouth is so great that no two fortifications could command or protect it, yet the curvature of the high land around is such as to afford the greatest shelter.” While many others compared Hakodate to Gibraltar, Anna Hartshorne, who taught in Japan for some years, wrote in 1902 that Hakodate reminded her more of Naples, with Vesuvius as a backdrop, while Sir Rutherford Alcock, first British minister to Japan, compared the northern city to Hong Kong as well as Gibraltar. Neill James, an American travel writer who first glimpsed Hakodate from the Aomori ferry in 1940 wrote, “The harbor at Hakodate was like a tropical seascape without the fringe of palms,” and to a twenty-first century visitor, the city brought thoughts of San Francisco.4

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Not only its harbor and location impressed visitors. The Perry Expedition found a clean, quiet town of some eight thousand people (though William Heine estimated twenty thousand). William B. Allen thought Hakodate’s streets “finer and more regular than other ports of Japan.” Thomas Dudley wrote his sister that Hakodate: “is a very large city — abounding in fine houses and magnificent temples.” As expedition members ventured into the nearby countryside, some climbed Mt. Hakodate. On the summit Allen mused with pride that his nation had successfully and peacefully made an agreement to trade with Japan, contrasting his own circumstances with those of “the unfortunate Russian Captain Gowlowin [sic], I being free as air while he a poor tired prisoner almost wishing for his death, because his fate seemed to be that he should remain a prisoner for ever.” Some of Perry’s crew visited the different temples in Hakodate to find the one in which Golovnin had been incarcerated, but the Japanese would not say anything on this subject. The visitors had Golovnin’s detailed description of the temple where he was kept; “All of us were peering around trying to detect a resemblance to his description in hopes of seeing his prison.” But they never found it.5 Various members of the expedition had a chance to visit Hakodate temples or shrines. Lieutenant George H. Preble noted the representation of a goddess (Kannon) which reminded him very much of the way the Virgin Mary was portrayed in Roman Catholic churches. In this temple he also noted the many carvings of animals: “deer, dogs, monkeys, snakes, hawks and other animals and strange devices.”6 Lieutenant Preble may have been homesick when he wrote of the city: “Hakodadi — with its wooden houses shingled roofs board fences, stone wharves, wooden warehouses and sea and yellow hills— reminds me of a New England town, wanting however the pointed spires and pepper box bellfrys of our New England temples of worship.” Spalding noted that the houses had great overhanging eaves and, on the roofs, many stones. They held the roofing down in the severe winds that sometimes blew through the strait, but Spalding speculated that the stones would also make wonderful weapons to use in street fighting. He also noted that the city seemed to be doing everything possible to fight fire, with both brooms and water barrels kept at each house.7 When Perry’s ships visited, most of the city’s people lived along the very long main street in houses resembling those in the Japanese heartland. Often the front room of a house on the main street would be open to passersby, as the residents sold goods there. Spalding saw a few cross streets and parallel ones. The city’s four temples, the most notable structures in Hakodate, were built on land uphill from the houses. Expedition members enjoyed Hakodate, several indicating their warm feelings toward the city. Interpreter S. W. Williams, who had been living in China as a missionary, called the expedition’s stay in Hakodate “one of the pleasantest episodes in my life in Asia. I expected a dull visit at a miserable fishing village” but he found the people open-minded and friendly. (But a Japanese observer, Hakodate merchant and district head Kojima Matajiro, described Williams as “a bad and haughty person.”) “This is the best place we have visited yet in Japan,” wrote Thomas Dudley.8 In Hakodate, expedition daguerrotypist Eliphalet Brown, Jr. reportedly took the oldest surviving photograph ever made in Japan. Brown’s picture of his samurai guide is displayed today in Hakodate’s Museum of Photographic History. Brown and expedition artist William Heine stayed for a few days in a small temple which could serve as their studio, and Brown photographed various local people there. “In making the pictures,” a Japanese wrote, “they set up a mirror and the image of the person was reflected perfectly

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on it. When the mirror was taken to a different place the image still remained on it. This was rumored about the city to be magic.”9 One gracious action of Hakodate officials was to designate a small plot of ground as a cemetery for the foreigners’ use. The chosen site on the city’s outskirts sits on a gentle hillside with a view across Hakodate Bay to the west. Two members of Perry’s expedition, fifty-year-old James Wolfe and nineteen-year-old George Remick, are buried there. Wolfe had been ill for some time and Remick had suffered from typhoid fever for nine days; both died while the American ships were anchored at Hakodate. After memorial services held for the two on shipboard, and with all flags flying at half-staff, the bodies were taken to the new cemetery in processions marching “with slow step and muffled drums.”10 Here Chaplain George Jones read the Episcopal burial service. Jones, thinking of the strong anti–Christian sentiment which had been fostered by Japanese authorities for so many years, was struck by the respect that Hakodate officials showed for the American religious rituals. Many local people followed the sailors from the harbor to the cemetery. The crew of Wolfe and Remick’s ship arranged for a gravestone to be placed at the site and chose a poetic inscription for it. Japanese masons cut the words, in English letters that must have been meaningless to them. Later, Japanese authorities had a picket fence placed around the cemetery. The stone still stands, its letters still legible, in a corner at the top of the cemetery. On the opposite side of the stone is a text in Japanese. These days, the historic burial ground is neatly maintained, and includes graves of some westerners who have died in Hakodate since Perry’s visit. When eight United States Navy ships paid a visit to Hakodate in 1954 to commemorate Perry’s visit a century earlier, ceremonies included a visit to the two American seamen’s graves. On the hillside just above is the Russian cemetery and next to the Protestant cemetery where Wolfe and Remick are buried lies a Chinese one. Meanwhile, some American ship captains in the vicinity were eager to use the port of Hakodate. While Perry’s ships were there, the Massachusetts whaler Eliza F. Mason anchored in Hakodate harbor. Captain Nathaniel M. Jernegan had brought his wife and son on the journey. They all went ashore and stayed overnight in the city, the first American family to spend a night on Japanese soil. They left the city, then, for the whaling grounds. The first American ship to come to Hakodate after the port’s official opening was the whaler Brutus, which arrived just a few days after Perry’s treaty was signed, its captain requesting water and firewood. The Brutus departed a few days later but not before its sailors had a chance to visit the port. Several other American ships appeared briefly at Hakodate. Soon many whalers and navy ships from various nations began to appear in the harbor. Russian Admiral Putiatin landed in Hakodate in October 1854, and learned there about Perry’s recent visit as well as the new treaty between Japan and the United States. Despite Japanese reluctance, Putiatin and his men visited the city. Two months later, a great earthquake struck Japan’s heartland, destroying Putiatin’s ship Diana, then in the harbor at Shimoda. In Hakodate the townsfolk fled up the mountainside to escape the tsunami that left the mountain nearly an island. Luckily, Perry’s fleet had left Japan before the water rose. Three men who arrived on the U.S. whaler Leverett early in June 1855 tried to get permission to stay in Hakodate. As passengers from Honolulu the men had become known as troublemakers, and in Hakodate they wanted to sell liquor. This, not surprisingly, was not permitted; the men were sent away.

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In mid–June, the schooner Caroline E. Foote arrived. On it were six merchants, three of them with wives, and two children. This group proposed to live in Hakodate and establish a business to provision visiting ships. The group’s life there would be temporary, the merchants asserted, because the treaty allowed only temporary residence. To the Hakodate bugyo, however, the presence of wives and children clearly indicated that the sojourn in Hakodate would be anything but temporary. The Americans pressed their case and got the backing of Lieutenant John Rodgers, then in port with an official American surveying expedition; the bugyo wrote to Edo for instructions and, after waiting about two weeks without progress, the merchant families left on the Foote, their attempt to settle abandoned. Though commerce was technically forbidden, ship provisioning continued, and with the Perry treaty in force, the bugyo ordered that coal be mined in Shiranuka, a site near Kushiro, where surveyors had discovered coal deposits. Ainu and prisoners worked with four miners brought from Edo to operate the mine. This coal’s quality was poor, however, and after less than a year officials closed the mine and concentrated on the development of Kayanuma mine near the west coast of the Oshima Peninsula, in the vicinity of today’s Iwanai Town. Mining success was sporadic here, though, and several foreign experts spent some time working to modernize the facilities. Output remained small, partly due to the difficulty of getting the coal to the coast. Other foreigners appeared, and in 1855 four American sailors deserted in Hakodate, slipped away in a small boat and came ashore on the Korean coast, thus becoming the first Americans ever to be in Korea. Different accounts of these Americans’ adventures exist, but however the men happened to arrive in Korea, they were taken to nearby China and repatriated from there. French Admiral Nicolas-Francois Guerin approached Hakodate in his ship in May 1856 and reported that there were no Europeans in the town. The two missionaries traveling with him were grudgingly allowed to visit Hakodate briefly, and they noted that the townspeople were afraid of the government officials in Hakodate who, indeed, had police follow the missionaries. Commerce grew in Hakodate though foreign trade was not yet officially allowed. In 1856 J. M. Tronson noted these items in shops for the residents: “charcoal stoves, crockery of all descriptions, metals, sandals, umbrellas, calicoes, picture books, children’s toys, pipes, tobacco pouches, tobacco cut as fine as floss silk, knives, stewpans, coarse lacquerware, common silks and oiled paper garments.” Crewmen with Perry two years earlier had also seen cotton, tea and perfume. When Perry Collins’ ship stopped at Hakodate in September 1857, he found a bustling town, with “cooper shops, blacksmiths, tinkers, barbers, bath-houses, ... silk mercers, shoe stores, fruit and vegetable stalls, fancy shops, tea and tobacco vendors.” From shipboard he had noticed an American flag flying from a high pole, a surprise to all on the ship, who had not known of the appointment of an American consular agent. Collins’s ship obtained stores— and more: “We procured potatoes, onions, tomatoes, rice, eggs, chickens, fish, apples, pears, tea, lacquered ware and silks.”11 Russian visitors appeared, too. During the same decade, Sergei Maksimov thought Hakodate “a really remarkable town that stretches out before us on the slopes of the tall coastal mountain. Its external appearance is like nothing we have known or seen before. There is nothing that reminds us of Russian towns....”12 In 1857, American Minister to Japan Townsend Harris reached agreement with Japa-

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nese officials on a convention which would allow Americans to live in the two open ports, Shimoda and Hakodate, and the U.S. to station a consular official in Hakodate. Harris signed a second treaty with Japan in 1858 which included trading privileges. A month later, Japan agreed to similar treaties with Britain, France and Russia. Trade began in mid–1959 and in the first year, sixty-four ships from abroad came to Hakodate: thirteen military vessels, twenty-one whalers and thirty merchant ships.

Consuls, businessmen, mariners and adventurers Opening the port of Hakodate to foreign trade brought businessmen, ships and officials from Europe and America to the city, which in turn helped stimulate growth. The first foreign nation to establish representation in the northern city was the United States. On June 26, 1856, Elisha E. Rice received appointment as the first American consul at Hakodate. (Technically, he was called a commercial agent until 1865.) Visionary American merchants dreamed of opening commerce with the Russian Far East, using this northern Japan port as a convenient entrepot. More immediately, U.S. whaling ships might tie up for the winter at Hakodate, and given the propensities of sailors with free time on a foreign shore, the presence of a consul could help keep order. (Ill behavior of the foreigners appearing in Hakodate in that era helped lead to the dislike displayed by many Japanese.) A consular office had not been specified in Perry’s treaty, but the Hakodate bugyo could not induce Rice to leave the city and finally reluctantly allowed him to take up temporary quarters in a temple. (Large Japanese temples included extra rooms used on special occasions, and these could accommodate visitors.) Rice looked the role of an official, all of six-and-a-half feet tall and weighing perhaps 225 pounds, “with handsome long black whiskers, and a sharp, keen eye.” He kept his office for well more than a decade, serving under five American presidents. But Rice’s personality was not altogether suited to the job. He was a “loud talker,” thought Richard Henry Dana, Jr., author of Two Years Before the Mast, whose ship stopped in at Hakodate in 1860. At least once Rice fought physically with a rival merchant in Hakodate, shocking other foreign observers, who tut-tutted over what the Japanese might think.13 Aside from Townsend Harris, Rice was the first official from a foreign country to serve in Japan. Living in the premises of Jogenji Temple, he had Japanese soldiers for his servants. Since Rice was engaged in commerce while in Hakodate, though, he did not get as much respect as he had expected, because merchants did not have high status in Japan. Moreover, government officials kept an eye on him, sending an account of his activities to Edo every ten days. Rice’s activities varied. He arranged to have Hakodate harbor surveyed and buoys put into place to prevent shipping accidents. In the museum now operated in the Old British Consulate in Hakodate is a small model of Rice milking a cow, his action said to be the introduction of dairying in Hokkaido. (Meanwhile, the Hakodate bugyo arranged to have bullocks fattened up for American ships’ crews who were anxious for fresh meat.) For a short time, Rice was the one westerner living in Hakodate; then, in 1858, Dr. George M. Bates from Honolulu began a medical practice in the city. Hakodate today thrives on the buildings remaining in the city from the time it was a busy port for American and European whalers. If a building of important historical significance no longer exists, a bilingual commemorative sign at its location describes it.

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An example is the American consulate. In December 1879, fire destroyed the building housing the consulate (no longer in the temple), the American consular agent reporting that everything was gone, including letters and archives, except fifteen books. Consular functions were transferred to Yokohama in 1883, and in Hakodate the British Consulate had to deal — not always happily — with problems there involving American sailors. When a U.S. Consulate opened once again in Hakodate, it carried out business in the home or office of an American who happened to be in Hakodate in missionary work or commerce and in addition carried out the consul’s duties. An American consulate operated on and off in Hakodate until 1918. The Russians, who were very anxious for access to Japan, opened a consulate in Japan in 1858. They sited it at Hakodate, not Edo, for while other foreign nations were interested mostly in commerce with Japan, Russia’s purpose was to protect her own far eastern territory and secure a favorable border between the two nations. Thus Hakodate rather than Edo or Yokohama was the logical location for Russian interests in Japan. Japan for years had worried about Russian motives and plans, and Russia’s western rivals also expressed concern. At the end of 1857, Townsend Harris imparted his viewpoint to a Japanese official. Britain and Russia had recently signed a treaty ending the Crimean War, and Harris thought Russia had designs on Manchuria and possibly all of China. If Russia took this territory, he said, war between Russia and Britain could break out again and Britain could be expected to take over Sakhalin and all of Ezo. None of this happened, of course, and probably had not been seriously considered. A decade later, Sir Harry Parkes, acting on fear that Russia might threaten Hokkaido, arranged for a British warship to examine the situation; no reason for concern surfaced. It remained clear to the Japanese and foreigners alike, however, that Russia was anxious to develop Pacific Ocean ports that did not freeze in winter. American entrepreneur Francis Hall, visiting Hakodate in 1860 and writing about Russia, noted that “I felt within the sphere of this great power’s influence.” Pemberton Hodgson, British Consul in Hakodate, even suspected that Americans might be encouraging the Russians to take Hakodate; thus he was relieved when civil war broke out in the United States in 1861. Writing two decades later, British merchant Thomas Blakiston felt it would not be surprising if a European power took control of Hakodate, for its harbor, strategic location vis-a-vis Russia, and supplies of Japanese coal.14 During the 1860s, political turmoil erupted in the Japanese heartland as powerful southern clans challenged the shogunate’s control of the government. In Hakodate, E. E. Rice warned his nation’s State Department in August 1863 that “it is undoubtedly the intention of the Russian Gov’t to take possesion [sic] of, and hold this island [Ezo] etc. at no distant day,” especially if the political troubles in the Japanese heartland continued. Rice noted that the Russian consulate in Hakodate had a forty-man marine guard and a man-of-war in the harbor. “They can hold this island versus Japan with but a small force, and but very little difficulty, and can take Hakodadi in but one hour’s time.”15 Iosif Antonovich Goshkevich served as Russian consul in Hakodate, arriving in Japan in 1858. An Orthodox seminary graduate, he had been with the Russian Orthodox mission in Peking for nine years. Returning to Russia, he joined the foreign ministry and became Admiral Putiatin’s Chinese interpreter in 1852. For a time during the Crimean War, Goshkevich was a captive of the British. In Japan with the Putiatin expedition, he came into contact with an enterprising and daring Japanese named Tachibana Kosai, who taught Goshkevich Japanese despite Japanese law then prohibiting this. Tachibana was

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smuggled out of Japan, and Goshkevich and Tachibana together produced the first true Russian-Japanese dictionary. Published in Russia, the technical aspects of its creation are unusual. First the Russian part of the work was printed; next, the Japanese text was added by hand, and then the entire work was lithographed. When Consul Goshkevich came to Hakodate in 1858, with him came his own family, a priest, a naval officer, a medical doctor and his wife, and several servants. Goshkevich asked that the doctor, Mikhail Albrecht, be allowed to treat Japanese patients as well as the small Russian community. Receiving permission, the doctor did so and also taught western medical techniques. But this aroused controversy, and for a time his practice was closed down, though instruction in medicine continued. Soon, a Russian hospital opened in Hakodate and Dr. Albrecht again treated Japanese patients. In 1866, the hospital was moved to Nagasaki. Consul Goshkevich was probably the most effective nineteenth century consul in Hakodate. He introduced several technical advances to the city — the first barometer and the first light which gave out illumination throughout the night. This was installed at the harbor entrance. To local officials, the Russians were more important than the Americans. The bugyo visited Goshkevich and told him that the American consul had not received the honor of such a visit. Goshkevich introduced western tailoring to Hakodate when he arranged for a local tailor, Kizu Kokichi, to copy a suit of his. Kizu became interested in photography and asked Goshkevich to show him how to take pictures. Soon Kizu opened the first photographic studio in the city — in fact the first one in Ezo— about 1864. In the early years after Hakodate was opened to foreign trade, a considerable amount of Russian influence was visible in the city, as Rice had noted. “In Hakodate everybody understands Russian; the Japanese learn that language with great speed,” wrote a Dutch observer.16 This was not literally true, but Goshkevich had an advantage over the other consuls because he had some knowledge of the Japanese language. Moreover, he came with a larger number of his compatriots than had Rice and was clearly a man of greater importance. Goshkevich was instrumental in helping calm the city when word came in 1863 of an imperial edict ordering that all foreigners be expelled. Foreign officials were quietly told that this would not happen, but many people in Japan at the time wanted the foreigners gone. In Hakodate, some local people, fearing violence, began to gather necessities and flee the city when news of the expulsion order came, but Goshkevich walked the streets far and wide, calming folks and explaining that no hostilities would ensue. From 1874 to 1881 official Russian duties were shifted to Tokyo (as Edo was renamed in 1868). A consulate was reopened in Hakodate, however, and a consul or vice-consul remained in the city, representing Russia and later the Soviet Union, until 1938. One of the men who served as chaplain to the Russian Consulate had a lasting influence in Japan. The first chaplain, Vasilii Makhov, did not stay long, but during his short stay in the city oversaw construction of the first Orthodox church in Japan. His successor became known to the world as Father Nikolai. Born Ioann Dmitrievich Kasatkin, he gained appointment to Hakodate when just twenty-four years old, arriving in 1861. He served the church in Japan until his death in 1912 and deserves recognition as the person most responsible for the success of the Orthodox Church in Japan. Nikolai had read of Captain Golovnin’s experiences, and this made the priest want to go to Japan to spread the word about his religion. Arriving in Hakodate when conversion to Christianity was still against the law in Japan, he set about the study of Japanese

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language and culture. He published various works about Orthodox Christianity in Japanese and soon converted three well-educated men, who became known as Paul Sawabe, John Sakai and Jacob Urano. Hearing that the longtime prohibition against Christianity might be invoked against them, the three men fled Hakodate. Sawabe, however, soon returned and found that he no longer had to fear being known as a Christian. He became a teacher of Orthodox Christianity as did Sakai later. In 1872 officials in Hakodate arrested Sakai and two other Japanese orthodox teachers, but after a few months’ confinement they were released. The church has maintained its presence in Japan in all the years since, and at the end of the twentieth century had more than thirty thousand members. The Orthodox priests did much in Hakodate to gain respect for Russia. Father Nikolai left the city in 1872 to become the first Russian Orthodox bishop in Tokyo. Another Russian priest, Father Anatolii, was sent to take his place in Hakodate and he continued teaching as well as holding services. He introduced the beautiful choral music that one hears in Hakodate’s Orthodox Church today, for Japanese Orthodox priests and congregation continue services here. The church, a small building in Orthodox style inside and out, consists of a square room with an iconostasis, as in all Orthodox churches, separating the room from the small one beyond, where only priests may go. This being Japan, a visitor removes his shoes before entering, but once inside, except for the Japanese faces, one might be in eastern Europe. The church’s bells became famous for the distinctive beauty of their sound, and gave the church a nickname: gangandera (ding-dong temple). In 2002 the remains of Father Nikolai were returned from Tokyo to the Hakodate Orthodox Church. Another prominent Russian, botanist Carl Johann Maximowicz, came to Hakodate briefly and left his mark on Japan. He arrived in 1860 and for more than a year studied plants in the Hakodate vicinity before moving on to Yokohama and Nagasaki. His methods influenced later Japanese botanists. Dr. Albrecht was also interested in botany. A flower he discovered in the Hakodate area in 1860, the pink rhododendron albrechtii, is found in North American gardens today. Despite the opening of a Russian consulate in Japan, trade did not grow quickly between the two nations. The Russians lacked merchant ships in the Pacific, and given northern winter conditions, sea routes between Ezo and the Russian port at the mouth of the Amur River, Nikolaevsk, were closed in the winter. The Japanese had no particular desire for the products Russians could bring from Siberia: animal skins and wood. Russians wanted to buy rice and wheat from Japan, but the treaty between the two nations prohibited this. Despite the lack of significant trade, Russian signs and advertisements could be seen in Hakodate well into the twentieth century. Hokkaido did, however, prove a useful route for people who wanted to leave Russia. Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary who became the most prominent anarchist in Europe in the mid–nineteenth century, had been exiled to eastern Siberia in 1855, but in 1861 he escaped via Hakodate and made his way to western Europe. C. Pemberton Hodgson became the first British consul in Hakodate in 1859. (Before there was a British consul in Hakodate, U.S. Consul Rice had had to arrange passage on ships leaving the city for shipwrecked British seamen.) Rice expressed amusement at the pretentious formalities of Hodgson’s arrival, including firing of the ship’s guns and marching of marines in formation. Fourteen people made up Hodgson’s party, including, Rice wrote, a “crownbearer.”17 Hodgson had a number of responsibilities in Hakodate, for he represented France,

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the Netherlands and Portugal as well as Britain, though Jesuit Priest Jean Mermet de Cachon did carry out the duties of secretary for French consular matters. Japanese officials in Hakodate welcomed Hodgson graciously when he arrived. “The reception was much kinder, the welcome much warmer, than what I had experienced at Nagasaki,” he reported.18 But life in the city could be lonely, for he and his wife and daughter were the only Britons living there and his work in this northern consulate was far from onerous. Hodgson rented a space at Shomyoji temple, next to the temples where the American and Russian consuls lived; temples were the only places that seemed at all suitable for foreign consulates. Hodgson obtained temple accommodations only with difficulty, however. The city’s large temples were already in use by the Russian and American consuls except for one which was reserved for the use of the local magistrate. Eventually, the bugyo who was about to depart arranged for Hodgson to use the final temple, while smaller quarters were arranged for the new Japanese official. Hodgson’s understanding was that Hakodate was but “a poor insignificant fishing village” until the “Prince of Matsumai” transferred it (for a fee) to the shogunate so that it could offer the facility Perry (and, soon, representatives from other nations) required. Hodgson also noted that he had been informed that when he arrived, the city’s population was about eight thousand, but that in less than a year it tripled, reaching twenty-four thousand. His own career there lasted only a year; it was cut short because of concern both by the Japanese and other consular officials about his nasty temper and frequent inebriation.19 A new British Consulate opened for business in 1863, and Richard Eusden assumed consular duties in 1867, serving here until 1880. He was by far the most effective British consul in Hakodate. Both he and his wife became involved in the community; she helped create the city’s public garden. Over the years several fires damaged the consulate and it burned down in 1907. A few years later, the British government’s Shanghai Construction Bureau built a new consulate, a two-story-high tile-roofed structure on a site a few blocks away. This building still exists, looking rather like a large bungalow transplanted to Asia. Nowadays it is open to tourists, featuring interesting historical exhibits about early western experiences in Hakodate, an English tea room and a souvenir shop carrying articles from Britain. The British ceased consular operations in Hakodate in 1934. The foreign consuls in Hakodate acted as judicial officials. When an American, Charles H. Smith, was charged in the death of a Japanese, the American, English and Russian consuls, the Hakodate bugyo and other Japanese and western men sat at the court and agreed that the defendant was not guilty, for he had shot in the darkness at a burglar. Hakodate at different times had consulates representing not only Russia, the United States and Great Britain, but also France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Hungary and Spain, though these other nations were mostly represented by men who were consuls of other countries. Even Hawaii, when it was an independent nation, briefly had consular representation in Hokkaido. The foreigners perceived Hakodate as a safe, if sleepy place; while Americans carried swords in Shimoda, they did not feel the need for weapons in Hakodate. “We do not go armed as all foreigners do in Yedo,” wrote E. E. Rice20 and, while Yokohama had a specific area set aside for a foreign settlement, Hakodate featured no special area for foreigners, though the various consulates were not far from each other. In the first few years when Hakodate was open to foreign ships, about half of those

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calling at the northern port were American. They normally carried no cargo for Hakodate, merely taking on supplies there. When Richard Henry Dana, Jr. climbed to the top of Mt. Hakodate late in April 1860, he counted the “vessels at anchor in the Bay—180 junks, 10 Am[erican] ships, 1 Am. steamer, 1 Russian war steamer, & 2 Jap. war schooners.” Of the sixty-eight foreign vessels which stopped at Hakodate that year, twenty-four whalers and nine merchantmen were American, while thirteen merchantmen and eight naval vessels were British.21 Official Japanese trade figures were not trustworthy, because of smuggling (even by some Japanese officials). Any Japanese who sold goods for export was required to pay a tax; thus smuggling was common. Scottish shipmaster John Will later wrote that over half the items subject to a tax would be smuggled ashore whenever his ship came to Hakodate. Also, because Japanese cash could be bought cheaply in Hakodate and exchanged for more than three times that value in Shanghai, crews smuggled money aboard.22 Only ships carrying the flags of nations with which Japan had made treaties were allowed to trade, others being turned away after acquiring emergency provisions. Foreign, not Japanese, ships carried on almost all of the foreign trade, though Japanese interests were active in the coastal trade. For Hakodate officials and merchants, the opening of trade presented challenges. By 1860, many Hakodate merchants could speak enough English to carry on trade with foreign visitors. Few Japanese shops were allowed to carry foreign merchandise, though, and if foreigners wanted to exchange their money for Japanese currency, the procedure was difficult and time-consuming. Moreover, the goods desired for ships stopping at Hakodate were not all easy to obtain. Water was no problem, but foodstuffs were, for little was produced in the vicinity. This led the government to begin a farming operation, especially for raising beef cattle. Western seamen craved beef, which was not a regular part of the Japanese diet. Supplies of coal, too, had to be available. The government at Hakodate was hard-pressed to meet the new demands that resulted from the foreigners’ presence. Not the least of the problems was the need for interpreters. The Hakodate bugyo soon notified Nagasaki — long the foreigners’ center in Japan — of his problem, and one man who was then sent to Hakodate to act as interpreter was Iwase Yashiro, who had been a student of Ranald MacDonald during MacDonald’s detention in Nagasaki. John Will first came to Hakodate in 1860. He called the port “one of the finest harbours in Japan,” but he was surprised that the city was so small; “all or most of the houses were built close to the sea.” Despite Consul Rice’s report that Hakodate was a safe place, Will noted the “armed retainers,” samurai carrying two swords whom Japanese officials stationed in the city to see that no harm came to foreigners.23 Fearing the samurai, the townsfolk stayed away and any foreigner who came ashore carried a revolver. Moreover, the foreigners tried to arrange that there was always at least one foreign ship in the harbor, to offer refuge if necessary for the foreign community. Hakodate’s tranquility could be disturbed by boisterous or unhappy foreign sailors. Many sailors deserted and then would loaf around the city, perhaps shipping out willingly — or by force — on a later vessel. Some of the seamen who stopped at Hakodate were not impressed with the city. It may have been because he was unable to buy kombu to sell in China, but British Captain Henry Holmes thought Hakodate a “cold, cheerless place.”24 Despite the foreign presence, Hakodate usually remained quiet. One American visitor in 1860 felt that the city suffered less from the excesses of officialdom than did

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Nagasaki or Yokohama, perhaps because of distance from Edo and relatively minor trade. He thought Hakodate people were more apt to take the initiative and work to solve problems on their own.25 Other factors probably impeded business in Hakodate. Not yet had Hakodate harbor surveying begun, and high or adverse winds, erratic currents and fog in Tsugaru Strait meant that often a ship did not leave the city when planned. In January 1861 heavy wind and snow, a small American sailing ship foundered on rocks some fifteen miles from Hakodate. When news of the accident reached Hakodate two days later, the Caroline E. Foote, then in port, was sent to aid the stricken vessel, and with the help of about one hundred men provided by the Japanese government, rescued its crew, almost all of whom were frostbitten, and even managed to save a bit of the cargo. This was but one of many examples of vessels, from small fishing boats to ocean-going ships, wrecked in the Ezo seas. The Hakodate harbor had originally been opened for the convenience of whalers, but for trade it proved to be out of the way. Sir Rutherford Alcock, then British Minister to Japan, wrote that in Hakodate in 1861, “nothing deserving the name of trade had been found possible, and at this time not a single British merchant or agent was left on the spot, nor of residents of any other nation who could really be placed in the category of merchants.”26 But with Hakodate both the island capital and its commercial center, a number of Chinese came, looking for commercial opportunities. The city had become a sizable place, many Japanese appearing. Most of Hakodate’s local residents were poor, though, and houses were not built with the severe winter climate in mind. When American mining engineer Raphael Pumpelly was sent to Hokkaido in 1862 to survey the mines, Hakodate was his base. He taught mining techniques when he was not working in the field, but he had time for some relaxation. More entertainment for the foreigners must have been available than in Hodgson’s time just three years earlier. In his Reminiscences, Pumpelly reported upon a masked ball held at the Russian Consulate. He dressed as a Japanese warrior and approached the consulate on the back of a horse made skittish by the armored costume. Not knowing of a level side entrance to the building, Pumpelly rode the nervous horse up the front stairs of the building — the first horse ever to climb there.27 In these early days of foreign commerce, little was imported to Hakodate and the main export remained kombu sent to China; once the foreign ships were allowed to trade, they became involved in this commerce. Other sea products also important included dried squid, abalone and sea cucumber. In the 1860s, John Will’s ship sailed mainly between Shanghai and Hakodate; in addition to the kombu and other sea products he took to China, his ship carried other items, mainly timber. On some of the voyages to Hakodate the ship carried ballast as well as stores (and items to smuggle ashore). After the 1860s, whaling decreased in importance as the petroleum industry developed, and fewer American whaling vessels stopped at the port. Russian ships would sometimes winter in Hakodate, as unlike the ports in the Russian Far East at the time, it did not freeze over. One foreigner who lived in Hakodate in those years is best known for a scientific discovery. Thomas Wright Blakiston of Great Britain traveled extensively in northern Japan, residing in Hokkaido for twenty-three years. Blakiston penned detailed descriptions of Hakodate and of much of the rest of Edo. He came to Hakodate in 1861 hoping to open a lumber mill and sell his product in China. Upon his arrival in the city, he was overwhelmed by the “all-pervading stench of dried fish and seaweed.” He noted the “universal use of wood and paper in the manufacture of everything, from a house down to

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a toothpick or pocket-handkerchief.” He found the houses’ floors covered with mats which people could not walk on until they removed their shoes. In the middle of a room would be a fire pit, “filled with sand or shingle (coarse gravel),” and pots or kettles would be hung above the fire, from which smoke would rise through an opening in the roof.28 Blakiston wrote a scientific paper published in 1883 noting that animal species in Hokkaido and farther north differed from those in the south. Though monkeys lived in the wild in Honshu, he pointed out, they were not found in Hokkaido. Blakiston concluded that Tsugaru Strait separating Hokkaido from Honshu was much older geologically than La Perouse Strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin. Recognizing the importance of Blakiston’s discovery, scientists call this boundary between species the “Blakiston line.” At one time, a mountain on one of the northern Kuril islands carried his name, but no longer. Blakiston explored the country near Hakodate; during the first few years of open ports, foreigners were allowed to go only about twenty-five miles from the city. He commented on how many officials— samurai carrying two swords— and how many dogs he saw. He had a steam-powered mill brought to the city, where for the first time in Japan lumber was sawn not by hand but by machine. A few years later, though, Blakiston closed the mill because all the trees that could be brought to it using transportation methods then available had been cut down. For a time he ran another mill in Kushiro, but running out of trees there, he returned to Hakodate and opened a shipping business, Blakiston, Marr and Company, which ran three ships between ports on Ezo’s south coast, Yokohama, Kobe and Nagasaki and sometimes Chinese ports. Always interested in technological improvement in Hakodate, Blakiston planned the city’s water system. His influence led Fukushi Naritoyo to establish the first weather station in Japan; Blakiston provided up-to-date equipment from England. Today this installation is the Hakodate Marine Observatory. A monument to Thomas Blakiston now stands atop Mt. Hakodate and his collection of more than one thousand bird specimens is owned by Hokkaido University. He has been commemorated by the name of that magnificent bird, Blakiston’s fish owl. Domestic commerce in Hakodate included everything from local farmers bringing their produce into the city to shiploads of merchandise sent to heartland cities. Much of Hakodate’s food was grown in the flats around nearby Nanae, and villagers in tiny settlements scattered along the coast collected firewood and made charcoal, which they carried to Hakodate by boat or pack pony. Junks in the harbor often numbered in the hundreds; they carried goods farther. When winds and tide were favorable, as many as fifty of these coastal vessels might appear or leave on a single day. From other islands, boats brought mainly rice and manufactured goods to Hakodate, with marine and wood products and fur leaving the city. Daimyo in northern Honshu sent their agents to Hakodate, established warehouses, and entered the shipping trade, sending ships to Nikolaevsk and Shanghai. In 1858 the Hakodate Commodities Office opened in Edo and, later, in other cities, to help establish markets for Ezo products. Samuel Mossman wrote that in 1864 the goods bought in Hakodate for trade included mainly kombu to take to China, but also “silk, silkworm eggs, salmon, deer-skins, ginsing and other medicines, cuttle-fish, irico-fish, awabec oysters, hotadikaimi oysters, sulphur, oil, tobacco, and timber.” (He did not explain the unfamiliar words to the reader, but irico is dried sea slug, awabec probably abalone and hotadikaimi probably scallops.)

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Foreign traders found it difficult to identify goods to sell in Hakodate: “The Japanese do not want to purchase from us; all they crave is the money.”29 Hakodate played a small part in the life and adventures of Niijima Jo (westerners have anglicized his name in several ways and have referred to him as Joseph Hardy Neesima). He became a prominent Christian in nineteenth century Japan and is honored today as the founder of a distinguished private university in Kyoto, Doshisha. Niijima grew up in Edo. When he was a youth, a friend who knew of his interest in boats and seamanship told him of a vessel soon to sail to Hakodate. Niijima, who had a secret desire to visit a foreign land, thought he might be able to do so from Hakodate. He knew an influential man who obtained permission for the young man to take the trip north. After arrival in Hakodate in 1864, Niijima’s goal was to meet foreigners who could help him travel abroad. He soon met Father Nikolai, who engaged him as a Japanese language tutor. Meanwhile, an English trader agreed to teach the young Japanese man English. Niijima desperately wanted to travel outside Japan, despite the government prohibition of this. After several months in Hakodate, his dream took shape. He made arrangements to slip out of the city and secretly board an American ship. Arriving in the United States via China, he studied for some ten years and adopted Christianity. After being baptized, he chose his western name to honor Alpheus Hardy, owner of the ship that had taken him to America. Niijima graduated from Amherst College, the first Japanese student ever to obtain a college degree in the United States. Returning to Japan, he founded the school in 1875 which grew into Doshisha University. As Niijima’s story shows, because foreigners from several important nations lived in Hakodate, Japanese found the city a good place to study foreign languages and foreign ways, and a number of men who later served as interpreters learned languages there. Yet most Japanese continued to perceive Hakodate, indeed all Ezo, as distant, not a part of the naichi.

War The shogunate saw Hakodate as the northern bastion of the nation and because of the city’s increased importance, decided to construct a fort there to protect the city in case of conflict; the top officials in Hakodate would have their offices inside its walls. To build a fort in the 1850s the government turned to modern technology and decided upon a stronghold modeled on up-to-date European fortifications which could stand up to current weapons. By now the Japanese were designing structures that might repel foreign invaders— especially Russians— while the earlier castles built in customary Japanese style, like Matsumae, had been planned to cope with threats from elsewhere in Japan, the fighters using traditional Japanese weapons, not nineteenth century firearms. Hakodate’s defenses saw use not against a foreign threat, though, but in a brief but decisive domestic conflict which for a short time interrupted development of Japan’s north. A most unusual structure in Hakodate is the fort named Goryokaku. Built a few years after Commodore Perry’s visit, this western-style fortification is located on a site about three miles northeast of the compact city of that day. After Edo opened Hakodate to commerce with foreign nations, the government continued to fear possible conquest. American merchant Francis Hall wrote in 1861 that Hakodate’s defenses were intended

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mainly to deter Russian threats. He heard that at least one Russian ship was always in Hakodate’s harbor and that Russians were continuing to build new edifices in the city.30 Takeda Ayasaburo, who had studied western technology, based Goryokaku on designs of French architect Sebastian Vauban, who had built this style of fortress in Europe. Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Citadel in Halifax, Nova Scotia, are structures of this type. Goryokaku is unique in Japan. It is low to the ground — a necessary feature in the age of cannon — and is in the shape of a five pointed star, surrounded by a moat. The star’s extended points make it more difficult for ships’ guns to inflict major damage. Stone from Mt. Hakodate reinforced with iron was used to construct the fort and the embankments inside the moat were built of dirt excavated in digging out the water barrier. The name Goryokaku simply describes the fort’s shape. After seven years of construction, Goryokaku was completed in 1864. The nearby area, rural before the fort’s construction, soon became built up, with officials erecting residences in the neighborhood; some two hundred officials involved with Ezo government lived in Hakodate at that time. Bugyo headquarters was moved from the foot of Mt. Hakodate to a building constructed inside the fort. A smaller fort, Benten Cape Fort, was also built to strengthen Hakodate’s defenses. Located at the outside corner of Hakodate harbor where Hakodate dock now sits, it, too, dates from 1864. Installed here were four cannons, a gift to Japan from Admiral Putiatin; the cannon came from the Russian ship Diana. Benten Cape Fort only lasted for thirtytwo years. As the nineteenth century came to an end, this stronghold no longer seemed necessary and it was torn down in 1896 to be replaced by harbor improvements. Both of these forts saw military action in a historic 1869 battle, but not against the Russians. The Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Japan since 1600, was considerably weakened by the mid–nineteenth century. Two strong southern clans, Choshu and Satsuma, led opposition to the government and a number of influential men began to think about ending the shogunate system and returning authority to the emperor. Policy towards foreigners in Japan stimulated some of the opposition to the shogunate. Opening Japanese ports to foreign ships was extremely controversial; the factions supporting restoration of imperial rule generally wanted foreigners banished. Anti-foreign demonstrations and occasional acts of violence occurred in various parts of Japan. After an imperial death in 1867 and the accession of the fifteen-year-old who became known as the Meiji emperor, intensified struggle began between forces wanting the restoration of imperial power and those supporting the shogunate. In early 1868, imperial forces defeated the shogun’s troops in a battle near Kyoto, and this was the end of Tokugawa control of the government. The shogun asked that his family be allowed to go to Ezo with his retainers to settle and develop the island, but he was turned down. Assumption of power by the emperor’s supporters is known to history as the Meiji Opposite: The fortress called Goryokaku, completed in 1864, was built to protect Hakodate from possible foreign — mainly Russian — attack, but only once did it see warfare. In 1868, samurai who supported the recently deposed Tokugawa Shogunate fled to Hakodate, where they established their headquarters in Goryokaku. The next spring, forces of the new Meiji regime defeated the rebels in battle. This view of Hakodate shows forested Mt. Hakodate at the base of the picture. The city’s harbor is to the left of the isthmus and Goryokaku is the prominent star above. This NASA photograph was taken from the International Space Station, Aug. 22, 2002. Photo #ISS005E-10643, Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA–Johnson Space Center. “The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.” http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop.pl?mission=ISS005&roll= E&frame=10643.

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Restoration. New forces under the Meiji regime held the reins of government, but challenges to their rule continued. Hakodate felt the effects of the turmoil, for domestic trade dropped off precipitously and few of the junks appeared that usually sailed north with goods for the city’s residents. Meanwhile, the new regime replaced the Hakodate bugyo with a governor, Shimizudani Kinnaru. Some of the defeated Tokugawa men fled north, eventually to Ezo, where they hoped to establish an independent nation. Samurai who had been the shogun’s retainers had no purpose and no income now; perhaps they could establish a home on the northern island. Leader and most prominent member of this group, Enomoto Takeaki, was the first Japanese naval officer ever sent to a western nation to study. Enomoto learned about naval matters in the Netherlands, where he spent five years. He was thus certainly aware of modern military practice. He fled from the heartland with eight warships, but told the Meiji government that he intended to settle in Ezo and strengthen the island in order to keep the Russians away. His men had to fight their way to power on Ezo, however, facing opposition in several places, including Matsumae. After subduing their opponents in various settlements, the rebels moved on to Hakodate. These shogunate supporters landed in Uchiura Bay and easily marched to Hakodate, which Enomoto and several thousand troops reached in December 1868. After warning the foreign consuls in Hakodate that Enomoto’s forces would soon take over the city, Governor Shimizudani fled with his men from Goryokaku across Tsugaru Strait to Aomori, and the rebels peacefully entered Hakodate. Enomoto asked the Meiji government to send a Tokugawa family member to the island to govern. His request was refused, so he set up an alternative government, its headquarters at Goryokaku. The British and French governments recognized his new “Ezo Republic” and Artillery Officer Jules Brunet and four other Frenchmen in Japan with a military mission joined the rebellion, assisting Enomoto in training his troops and building up fortifications. In accompanying Enomoto on his journey north, Brunet asserted that his motive was to keep his nation’s influence strong in Japan. Brunet had been a popular teacher of military technology in Japan; he had secretly been asked to join the rebellion, and possibly because of a romantic, adventurous spirit, he agreed. The rebels courted other foreigners, and some Meiji officials feared that the Russians might support the Tokugawa men. Hoping for German support, Enomoto ceded some land to Germans for ninety-nine years. (The Germans ceded it back to Japan in 1871.) Enomoto faced some difficulties in governing his new realm. He had to arrange for food supplies, because most of what was eaten in Hakodate was imported. He worked to encourage more planting of crops that could be raised in the Hakodate climate with the technology of the time. He told Consul Rice that the rights of foreigners would be respected. (Living in Hakodate at that time were 112 foreigners: fifty-four Chinese, seventeen Russians, fourteen Americans, twelve English, eight French, five Germans and two Danes.) Enomoto reported to Rice that the French and British had said they would consider the rebel government the de facto regime. Enomoto also asserted that he could prevail in Ezo against any Japanese attack, and Rice agreed that this seemed probable. Writing about seven months after Enomoto and his rebels were later defeated, Rice pronounced Enomoto’s government more “liberal and enlightened” than both its predecessor and its successor governments. Journalist Richard Hughes has described the rebel regime as “the first experiment in republican government in the Far East.”31 People in Hakodate were anxious. There was no money to pay the rebels who had

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come with Enomoto, and they faced shortages, uncertainty and cold in this northern city. Might the Meiji government send forces to challenge Enomoto’s regime? The foreigners in Hakodate were nervous, and hoisted national flags on all their buildings. Pat Barr quotes the British consul: “As the enemy approach we shall retire towards the hill, if he comes nearer we shall go up the hill, and should it come to the last extremity we shall have no resource but to put our trust in an over-ruling power.”32 The foreign consuls sent word to Yokohama and Tokyo and, in response, several foreign warships came to the Hakodate area. Almost all of the foreign residents of Hakodate, including U.S. Consul Rice, his wife and children, fled to the ships. One woman, a Mrs. Wilkie, gave birth to a baby girl on shipboard. Thomas Blakiston found his commercial operations disrupted. One of his vessels was unable to land at Hakodate because of a standoff between Enomoto Takeaki was one of the first naval officers Admiral Enomoto’s forces in the city of Japan to study abroad. Later, challenging Japan’s and foreign ships; men-of-war from new Meiji government, he led a group of samurai to France, Britain and the United States Hakodate in 1868. In May 1869, Meiji troops the city and defeated Enomoto’s men. standing offshore dominated the harbor. attacked Enomoto himself was pardoned and among his later Blakiston’s ship was carrying live cattle posts was that of Japanese minister to China (courand the captain, John Will, wanted to tesy National Diet Library, Japan). unload the animals. He insisted on making way to a place where he could signal Blakiston for instructions. Blakiston indicated that Will should bring the ship as close as possible to Nanae beach some miles north of Hakodate and then lower the cattle into the water where they could be towed in by small boats. Will carried out the operation, and noted that the cattle made it to land successfully. Enomoto’s rebels had the most powerful Japanese ship of the time, the Kaiyo Maru, but it sank during a storm on Nov. 15, 1868, off the town of Esashi. This was one of the three most important communities, along with Matsumae and Hakodate, that the rebels had taken. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1869 the Meiji government acquired the United States warship Stonewall Jackson and renamed it Kotetsu. The ship’s history is complicated. The American Confederacy had bought the European-built vessel, but when the American Civil War ended, the United States obtained the ship. It went to Japan in a deal entered into by the shogunate, but when the ship arrived in Yokohama, the United States minister there stopped its delivery, as his country had proclaimed neutrality in the struggle then going on in Japan. Rescinding neutrality in February 1869 and thereafter able

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The Kaiyo Maru was the most powerful Japanese ship in the mid–nineteenth century. Rebel supporters of the shogunate sailed it to Ezo (Hokkaido) in 1868, but it sank in a storm. This replica, open to visitors, now sits at the town of Esashi, site of the original ship’s demise.

to support the new Meiji government, the U.S. released the ship to join the Meiji fleet. That spring, the regime sent the ship to Ezo. Sailing from Aomori, imperial forces led by Kuroda Kiyotaka landed on the west coast of the Oshima peninsula, split into three groups and separately marched towards Hakodate. This was civil war. The imperial forces took various sites on their way, including Matsumae Castle. On May 11, the imperial forces attacked Hakodate, both by land and sea. Preparing for hostilities, Enomoto had worked on fortifying the city. He brought the cannon from Benten Cape Fort to one of his ships, but the weapons proved inadequate; several days of firing between the fleets disabled all of the rebel vessels. On land, a sixty-eight pound shell fired by the Kotetsu hit Blakiston’s house. The shell did not damage the dwelling badly but landed in his stable, where it frightened the cow. Blakiston, incidentally, was said to have spied for the Meiji government, being paid for his services during the period that Enomoto controlled Hakodate. He may have done the same for the British government. He certainly helped a number of Japanese escape from Hakodate during the turmoil. While the struggle continued, townsfolk fled, coming back into the city to sleep when darkness brought a pause in the battle. Relatively little fighting occurred, but government troops leading the attackers into the city killed a number of Enomoto’s men hospitalized at Koryuji Temple and then burned the building. Enomoto’s forces sank the Meiji warship Choyo, and names of seventy dead from the ship are memorialized on a monu-

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ment in Hakodate. The emperor’s forces easily overwhelmed Enomoto’s troops except for those holding Goryokaku, Benten Cape Fort and one other fort; some one thousand men had sought refuge in Goryokaku. After one last week, the final holdouts surrendered at Goryokaku. Some men from the imperial invasion fleet had landed overnight on the back side of the mountain. They climbed it and came into the city behind Enomoto’s men, taking them by surprise. Other Meiji fighters marched toward Hakodate from the north, and the rebels found themselves boxed in. Some were taken prisoner and locked up in the fort until they could be returned to their domains. Left were many military and civilian dead and a city perhaps one-third destroyed. Killed in the battle was one of Enomoto’s lieutenants, Hijikata Toshizo. Earlier, Hijikata had been a leader of the Shinsengumi, a group of men he helped found in Kyoto to defend the shogunate; he remains a hero in Japanese popular culture today. On Ezo, he led the troops that captured Matsumae and proceeded to Esashi, only to lose the Kaiyo Maru. When battle raged in Hakodate, Hijikata was shot while leading his troops in a counterattack. At this site sits a shrine to honor him. Fresh flowers always appear, as they do at a different monument in Hakodate built to commemorate all the fallen Tokugawa warriors. Once the conflict ended, the victors ordered that the bodies of the slain rebels be left unburied, with no memorial ceremonies. But with the assistance of a priest, labor contractor Yanagawa Kumakichi had the men interred in a local temple. Later the warriors were reburied on the side of Mt. Hakodate and after four years, a monument was placed there to honor them. Once the Hakodate battle ended, the Meiji government faced no further rebellion. This was the end of an era, significant for all Japan, for it was the death blow of the shogunate and the samurai. For Jules Brunet it meant disgrace and eventual rehabilitation. He deserted the rebels before the decisive battle and earned derision from other foreigners. The French minister to Japan sent him to Saigon, then France. After a year his career resumed and he eventually became a general. For the next few years, however, the Meiji government did not altogether trust Frenchmen and their ships. For Admiral Enomoto, defeat meant honor and a pardon. Kuroda lobbied for the pardon, because of general admiration for Enomoto’s heroic stand at Hakodate and because his experience and knowledge would be valuable to the new regime. (Afterward, his son and Kuroda’s daughter were married.) The admiral later became Japanese minister to China. Significantly for Hokkaido, he negotiated the 1875 treaty between Russia and Japan to settle the border in the Kurils and Sakhalin. Arai Ikunosuke, who fought with Enomoto, also was rehabilitated afterward. Thanks to his technical training, he worked in Hokkaido development and eventually became the first head astronomer in the Central Observatory of Japan. Some of the men who fought for Hakodate in the imperial service also rose to fame. One of the naval officers in the fleet which sailed north to challenge Enomoto was the future Admiral Togo Heihachiro, famed for his exploits as commander-in-chief of Japanese naval forces in the Russo-Japanese War. Kuroda Kiyotaka, as we will see, later played a key role in Hokkaido development. Goryokaku saw changes too. In 1871, the government demolished the office building inside Goryokaku. The fort remains, however, and is visible even from space; a photograph taken of Hakodate from the International Space Station in 2002 clearly shows the city’s unique setting — its peninsula and mountain — and right in the middle of the builtup area is a prominent five pointed star: Goryokaku.

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One of the most famous of the rebels who fled to Ezo (Hokkaido) in 1868 was Hijikata Toshizo. He had been a founder of Shinsengumi, a group of young warriors in Kyoto who defended the shogunate. This shrine adorns the spot where Hijikata was killed in the Battle of Hakodate. Even today, people honor him with fresh flowers for his shrine.

Hakodate’s rebuilding proceeded quickly and the foreigners who had taken refuge on shipboard returned. Many of the city’s Japanese residents had suffered, though, losing houses or other possessions and sometimes even family members during the fighting. Some of the foreign merchants who had traded with the rebel forces were owed money, but the Japanese government did not cover their losses. Though peaceful times now settled on Hakodate, another fort was built there at the end of the nineteenth century. This unprepossessing structure atop Mt. Hakodate was named Hakodate Fort and in 1927 renamed Tsugaru Fort, for the straits it protected. The fort’s significance today lies in the flora of the mountain which grew at will during the half-century the public was kept from the mountain and the fort. Some six hundred species

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have been found there; the lush vegetation has drawn many birds. Another Hakodate spot was also a fortress site earlier in the city’s history. Very late in the eighteenth century the shogunate had built a fort at Cape Tachimachi, the southeast point of the land mass that is Mt. Hakodate. Today, only a marker notes this fort’s location. Goryokaku continued to be an attraction, even after it was no longer used as a fort. For a time, ice cut from its moat was shipped to southern Japanese ports, and for many years, this unusual fort has attracted visitors. A tower has been built nearby so that people can have a good view of its star shape. Carp swim in the moat, and each May the sixteen hundred cherry trees planted all around the fort attract sightseers and flower-viewing visitors. Since cherry trees are a symbol of Japan, the ones planted here (and in other Hokkaido cities) help tie Hokkaido firmly to the nation.

Quieter years After the defeat of Admiral Enomoto’s forces, the new Meiji government made the development of the northern island a priority. It now had a new name. No longer was the island to be known as Ezo; it would be Hokkaido. And to mark the change in regime, officials implemented a new way to write the name of Hakodate. This is written in two characters, the first meaning “box” and the second meaning “building” or “mansion.” In the revision, the first character was changed from the common one used for “box” with the “hako” pronunciation to one which is rare and more elegant, but which carries the same pronunciation as the original character and has a similar meaning. One early act of the Meiji government was to create a new city to be Hokkaido’s capital — Sapporo— and thus deprive Hakodate of some of its influence. Hakodate remained the temporary capital until facilities were ready for the administrative move to Sapporo in 1871. An American medical doctor employed by the government, Stuart Eldridge, established a hospital and a medical school in Hakodate in the 1870s. He contributed to other aspects of the city’s development, too, for example recommending a new method to dispose of human waste, as he feared the traditional method — burial in the hills above the city — was contaminating the city’s water supply. Hakodate’s foreign trade, temporarily disrupted by the hostilities, resumed. In 1870, 132 foreign merchant ships, led by Britain’s sixty-six, came to Hakodate. Port improvements encouraged trade, too. In 1871, Alexander Porter, appointed to supervise foreign ships in the port, surveyed the depths of the harbor and placed buoys at which ships could anchor. Shipbuilding soon became important in Hakodate, with a dry dock built in the 1870s. But a change in government policy in 1875 in order to benefit Japanese firms at the expense of foreign ones made it much more difficult for foreign shippers to profit by stopping in Hakodate, and shipping came to be dominated more and more by Japanese interests. Meanwhile, Japanese workers in Hakodate shipyards were building schooners based on western models. The city gained postal service in 1872, though at first it took almost three weeks for a letter to get to Tokyo. The telegraph link to Tokyo came in 1875. Improvement in transportation and communication continued. Horace Capron enthused over his journey from Yokohama to Hakodate on a steamship newly in service on this route in 1874, for the trip took only two days and two nights. Meanwhile, regular passenger service between Aomori and Hakodate, scheduled every four days, began about 1873. Capron, whom the

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These workers are shown cutting ice near Goryokaku in 1877. The photograph looks south toward the city of Hakodate nestled against the base of Mt. Hakodate (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

Japanese government hired to advise on the development of Hokkaido, had disembarked in Hakodate in 1872 on his first visit to Hokkaido. His interests and knowledge lay mainly in agriculture and thus he did not exclaim over Hakodate’s wonderful harbor as did naval visitors. Indeed, Capron wrote, “At this time a more dilapidated old place was never seen than Hakodate,” though a year later he found the city much improved.33 The Hakodate Shimbun began publishing in 1878, at a time when newspapers were springing up all over Japan. Hakodate was one of the first cities in Japan to have a museum, also begun in 1878. It soon contained an impressive natural history collection. It was in Hakodate that Christianity first made any progress in Hokkaido. The Russian Orthodox church building there was the first Christian church built in Japan for more than two hundred years. Russians were not the only religious figures who appeared, though. A French Trappist monk, Gerard Peuillier, came to Hakodate in 1897 to administer a oneyear-old monastery in what is now Hokuto City near Hakodate. Under his direction, monks slowly built up a thriving complex of buildings and a prosperous farm specializing in dairy products, which they supplied to nearby communities. Peuillier became a naturalized Japanese citizen, changing his name to Okada Furie. Japanese monks joined the order, and soon a chapel served Catholics who lived nearby. The monastery remains famous today; tourists come to view the grounds and buy cookies and butter. Perhaps the Trappists’ most valuable service to Hokkaido has been the Holstein cow; the monks

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Compare this photograph, taken near Goryokaku in 2001, with the previous one. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Hakodate had expanded well north, far beyond the Goryokaku area.

imported some of the animals from Holland in the early years, and the breed became the most common one on the island. In 1898 eight French nuns established a convent nearer Hakodate. This Trappistine convent also still functions, though during World War II Japanese officials expelled all but one of the French nuns; the Japanese nuns kept the institution going. In 1948 the convent had over one hundred nuns; only four were not Japanese. Now seventy nuns raise their own food and package cookies, candies and even dolls for tourists to buy in Hakodate sightseeing spots. Just as do the monks, Trappistine nuns remain silent and in seclusion. The first Protestant missionary to come to Hokkaido, the Reverend M. C. Harris of the Methodist Episcopal Church, arrived in Hakodate with his wife in 1874. For a time he was the acting United States consul in Hakodate. His wife, Flora Best Harris, gained fame in Japan in her own right for opening in Hakodate the first high school for girls in Hokkaido. The Episcopal Church in Hakodate also dates from 1874. Anglican Missionary Society members first arrived in that year, though they did not construct a church building until 1878. This church, like others, was several times destroyed by fire, but the current cruciform-shaped modernistic structure is a striking building on the site of the original church. Not all Japanese welcomed foreigners to Hakodate and the other ports that were

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open to them. In 1863, Father Mermet de Cachon was attacked by a man he had hired as a groom, who struck the abbot on the back of his head with a shovel. There were suspicions that the villain had been hired by others to do the deed because they feared Mermet had learned too much about Japan. On August 11, 1874, a samurai murdered thirty-two-year-old Ludwig Haber, the German consul in Hakodate. A small man who had only been in the city since February, Haber was walking alone through Hakodate Park at the time and had no weapon of any sort. He was cut down by a sword that the assassin had hidden within his clothing. The apparent motive was hatred of foreigners; after committing the crime, the murderer confessed freely, claiming that while he was dreaming, the gods had told him to kill foreigners. He received a trial and a guilty sentence and a month after committing the crime was beheaded, all the foreign consuls in the city attending his execution. Meanwhile, at the behest of the consuls in Hakodate who feared the presence of great crowds in Hakodate shortly after the crime, officials canceled the festival which had been scheduled for that August. When he was consul, Ludwig Haber had founded the Japan-German Society; members today hold a ceremony on the anniversary date at the site of his attack. Haber was buried in the foreigners’ cemetery but on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, his tombstone was moved to a spot at the top of the park near the site of his death; a replica now stands in the cemetery. Other acts of violence involving foreigners also occurred from time to time. Russian Consul Goshkevich had been the subject of a proposed assassination plot in 1861, perhaps because he was considered to be championing Russian culture too strongly. In 1891, a group of foreign sailors who had drunk too much began breaking windows and soon moved on to attacking passersby with broomsticks. A general brawl ensued. In 1898, a crewman from an American sealhunting schooner got into a scuffle in a drinking establishment after claiming he had been robbed, and in the ensuing fray a Japanese man was shot. Various other similar incidents ocIn 1874, a samurai who opposed the presence of foreigners curred. in Japan went to Hakodate and, with his sword, killed young Despite such occasional German consul Ludwig Haber. This gravestone stands at altercations, Hakodate continthe summit of Hakodate Park, near the assassination site.

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ued to grow and develop, as Thomas Blakiston observed. Writing in 1883, he noted the recent strides that had been made in travel to Hakodate, with steamers from Yokohama making the trip in sixty hours or less. Moreover, boats also served Hakodate from Aomori, and from Hakodate one could travel by steamer to many ports on Hokkaido— all the way to Nemuro, and sometimes even beyond, to Iturup in the Kurils. Blakiston commented that Hakodate had changed impressively in the twenty years since his first visit, and he gave the credit to Japanese settlers and merchants, as the number of non–Japanese in the city had hardly varied. (He also felt that once foreign governments and merchants had concluded that Hakodate would not be of consequence in international trade, governments often sent relatively incompetent people to represent their nations in the northern city.)34 Twice the Meiji emperor visited Hakodate. He first came in 1876, on a tour of the northern part of Japan planned both to acquaint him with his country and to please the people of the regions he would visit. Flags and banners raised on the ships at anchor greeted the emperor as his ship entered the harbor. He saw Goryokaku, received an Ainu group, and viewed an Ainu dance. He also visited the local hospital and while there looked through a microscope for the first time in his life — at a toad. The Emperor made his second visit in 1881, putting in at Otaru, going to Sapporo, then overland to Hakodate. Three men-of-war steamed north to be in the Hakodate harbor to greet him. The city put on a grand welcome, installing temporary street lamps and many booths with paper lanterns for light. The townspeople dressed in their best and stood along the streets to watch the emperor’s carriage pass by. Following the emperor came the cavalry, riding Hokkaido ponies, one accompanied by a foal trotting alongside. After dark were fireworks in the harbor. This was a short visit, though; the emperor departed the next morning by ship for Honshu. By 1885, Hakodate’s population was some forty thousand. The figure always increased in the warmer seasons when fishermen, traders and laborers came north, and the city remained commercially important mainly for the trade of sea products to China. Fortythree Chinese were counted as living in the city then and thirty-eight foreigners from other nations. The Chinese were especially important in trade and helped bring prosperity to the city as well as to themselves. An example is Chang Tsun-san, who spent fortysix years, from 1870 to 1916, in Hakodate. One story told of him is that he happened to notice fishermen discarding sharks’ fins, so he developed a method of preserving them for export to China, where sharks’ fins were a delicacy. Much more of the foreign trade with Japan in the last twenty years of the century went through the other ports then open — Nagasaki, Yokohama, Kobe and Osaka — than through Hakodate. Even in Hokkaido, Hakodate was eclipsed as a coaling station by Muroran before the turn of the century. But Hakodate was far from moribund; in 1888 the number of foreign ships calling there strained the resources of the area. During that year, twenty-one men-of-war anchored in the bay (twelve British, five French, two American and one Russian), spending a total of 516 days there. Finding provisions for all 4,434 men in the ships’ crews was a problem. On the other hand, the sight of seventeen menof-war all anchored in the harbor at one time was exciting. By the later years of the nineteenth century, North Pacific whaling was well past its zenith, but trade in both otter and seal skins grew important, with Hakodate the transshipment center. Starting in the 1890s, foreign ships came into Hakodate with seal skins to be shipped to Europe. As the 1890s progressed, Hakodate saw an increasing number

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In 1876, the Meiji Emperor visited Hokkaido. His ship sits prominently in Hakodate harbor, surrounded by smaller Japanese ships. The Japanese flag is visible on a ship to the right, and some of the vessels have hung decorative flags from their masts, possibly to honor the Emperor. Note how closely packed are the houses of Hakodate (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

of foreign schooners involved in the seal hunt. But, unfortunately, when a foreign ship came in to port, “beer shops spring up as if by magic,” the result being that ladies had to avoid the waterfront for fear of meeting drunken sailors. The international seafaring community knew the city well, and it appears in stories by Jack London and Rudyard Kipling.35 By the turn of the century, foreigners came to Hakodate as tourists as well as for business. Anna Hartshorne, who taught in Japan for some years, described Hakodate as “a prosperous, growing, commercial city, getting small share of foreign trade, but very busy with the coastwise service.” She mentioned that the moat which remained after Benten Fort was razed now served as a skating rink in the winter. While Britain’s Asian fleet would spend the winter in Hong Kong and the beginning of summer in Yokohama, she noted, it would sail to Hakodate when ports farther south were stifling in summer heat. Polish ethnographer Waclaw Sieroszewski spent some days in Hakodate in the summer of 1903 and noted the many conversations he had in a sort of pidgin language, composed of “a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, English and Russian words.”36 Hakodate, though small and distant from centers of power, was a cosmopolitan city. As the new century began, a contributor to the Japan Weekly Mail sang the city’s praises: “Hakodate has now its waterworks, its Public Gardens, its three tram lines, its

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electric light, its well-laid out roads, its hospitals, museums, numerous schools, and its industrial and commercial companies. It only needs a railway to connect it with other Hokkaido centres to make its prosperity complete and unrivaled in the northern island.”37 The railway soon came, but the prediction was not realized. Hakodate nevertheless remains a charming and unique city.

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PART II

Development

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6

The Pioneers

Hokkaido has a pioneering tradition, and it was in the early years of the Meiji era that the serious pioneering effort began. One visualizes hardy migrants making their way to a new land, clearing it to make it productive, building towns, helping construct roads, interacting with native people and trying to adapt to a mostly empty land very different from their homeland. This applies both to Japanese pioneers trying to establish themselves in the north and to pioneers settling the North American west. Early migrants to both these regions saw themselves going to a land that needed settlers. In nineteenth century America they were going to areas which their nation held by treaty or purchase, whereas Japanese pioneers were going to an island to which their nation assumed claim. These settlers were encouraged or recruited because their nation feared encroachment by another nation, Russia. Hokkaido was, as various scholars have pointed out, a borderland as well as a frontier.1 In Japan, the new Meiji government assumed power at a time of concern about the foreign ships visiting Hakodate and about Russian designs on the northern island. Ezo, renamed Hokkaido, was now defined officially as part of Japan and government policy encouraged permanent Wajin settlement throughout the island. In addition, with trade in Hokkaido products growing and becoming more lucrative, the government wanted a role in its control. Just a few months after the Meiji government assumed power in January 1868, the young emperor expressed his hope that the northern island be developed. Matsuura Takeshiro, who had explored much of the northern island, was the one who suggested a new name for Ezo. Government officials respected him; while Perry’s ships were in Japan, Edo had ordered Matsuura to observe the Americans’ actions and counsel the government on policy. Soon after the defeat of Admiral Enomoto and his rebel forces at Hakodate came the name change. On August 15, 1869, the island became Hokkaido, or “northern sea route.” James E. Ketelaar has suggested that the “Do” of Hokkaido, which is usually translated as “route,” be understood also to suggest “the way of,” as it is in chado, the tea ceremony (the way of tea) or shodo, calligraphy (the way of writing). It would symbolize the “way” of the new regime. Another interpretation is that the name means “an island floating on northern waters.”2 The new name bound the island more closely to the nation, because Hokkaido was a linguistically Japanese term whereas “Ezo” had suggested an alien land. When the Meiji era began, Hokkaido already had a number of Wajin settlers, as we have seen. The group sent by the Edo government to survey Ezo in 1785 had urged development; the government could then receive income through taxes on cultivated land. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the shogunate supported settlement in order to

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counter Russian ambitions. Later, because the 1855 treaty signed by Japan and Russia did not settle the border on Sakhalin, the Japanese government continued to fear possible Russian threats and thus wanted to strengthen Japan’s hold on Ezo. Officials sent migrants to the island to settle, clear the land, and begin farming. But most people who went did not have the skills or knowledge required, government support dried up, and many people soon left. The opening of Hakodate to foreign ships also spurred settlement. Lieutenant George Preble in Hakodate with the 1854 Perry expedition noted seeing horses and cattle in the hills near the city. The American sailors, not having tasted fresh beef in a long time, tried to get some — but the Japanese told them they “never killed the cattle,” which were used as draft animals. Agricultural development to meet the needs of foreign ships’ crews soon became a priority, though. By 1857 Hokkaido had some milk cattle, and a beef cattle industry began as early as 1870. Rafael Pumpelly saw farms in 1862 as he came to Ono, a village inland from Hakodate “on a broad, swampy plain, one of the few places on Yesso where agriculture is followed.” He reported seeing “an inferior kind of hardy rice” and wrote that “enough silk is produced to supply the raw material for a factory.” He noted that the government promoted immigration to Ezo, encouraging farmers— even supplying horses to them — and fostering “all the occupations necessary” for the island’s development.3 Meanwhile, opportunities in fishing also brought people to the northern island. With the arrival of foreigners, Japanese officials had yet another reason for encouraging Wajin migration to the northern island. Foreigners visiting Hokkaido showed interest in the Ainu, and officials feared the possibility that westerners’ concern for the Ainu might incite rebellion. The more Wajin in Hokkaido, though, the less chance any Ainu uprising would succeed. Migrants who settled in Hokkaido pushed the Ainu into a more and more marginal position, making Ainu traditional life impossible just as the westward movement in North America destroyed traditional Native American life. Starting in 1855, Wajin could settle permanently in the Ezochi. The Japanese government perceived Hokkaido land as empty and thus available for settlement, dismissing Ainu use of land just as American politicians and pioneers violated Native American land rights. This story of settlers overwhelming native cultures occurred elsewhere, too, as in Siberia, Australia and New Zealand.

The Kaitakushi In 1869, facing no immediate challenges in the north after defeating the rebel forces led by Enomoto Takeaki, the Meiji government established the Kaitakushi, or Hokkaido Colonization Commission, to develop Hokkaido, referring to the island as “the northern gate of the empire.”4 The government urged development for many reasons: because of the nearby Russian presence, to find a role for samurai who had lost their function in society with the defeat of the shogunate, to make the island’s resources available for Japan’s modernization and to settle a stable agricultural population. Hokkaido would thus become a source of wealth for the nation rather than a destination for government funds. The Meiji government had ordered a number of clans to establish colonies in Hokkaido, but since this proved financially impossible, officials passed responsibility to the Kaitakushi. The government invested the Kaitakushi with a surprising amount of

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power, both civil and military authority, and what seemed a generous budget, between four and five percent of the Meiji regime’s total budget. The organization would have control of all development; its chief would be the island’s governor. Even those wishing to establish Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples would need Kaitakushi permission. Finally, the new agency was directed to maintain good relations with the Ainu. “Kaitakushi” has been translated in several ways. The volume of official reports from foreign advisers that the Kaitakushi published in 1875 includes the notation that “the word Kaitakushi means ‘Commission for opening up and developing.’” Foreigners in Japan at the time used the term “Colonial Department.” Sometimes one sees “Colonization Commission.” The idea that Hokkaido was “colonized” suggests that it was not and could not be an integral part of Japan and as Michael Weiner has pointed out, Wajin relations with the Ainu during this period were those of colonizers and the colonized. In the world today the word “colonization” has a negative connotation, suggesting the conquest of foreign lands, and to Hokkaido Ainu, this is what was done to their homeland. This era in Hokkaido history has even been called the “Exploitation Period.”5 Japanese-English dictionaries define kaitaku as reclamation, cultivation, development, or opening up land, and some publications call the Kaitakushi the Hokkaido Development Commission. To those who came from elsewhere in Japan to settle the island as well as to Japanese in general, Hokkaido was changed from a mostly empty land to a productive one, benefiting everyone. A young man named Kuroda Kiyotaka gained appointment to the Kaitakushi in 1870. Born in 1840, a samurai of the Satsuma clan on Kyushu, he went to Edo as a young man to study military technology brought to Japan from the west. The Satsuma clan, though large and potent, had not been close to the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the Satsuma were active in the movement that led to the Meiji Restoration. Young Kuroda worked effectively for the cause and thus was chosen to lead the troops sent to Ezo to defeat Enomoto’s rebels. W. S. Clark, whom Kuroda brought from the United States to head Sapporo Kuroda Kiyotaka was perhaps the one man who Agricultural College, called him a “very has had the greatest impact upon Hokkaido. He led the Kaitakushi, or Colonization Commisremarkable man” and “as active and coura- sion, which instigated systematic development geous a man as you could wish to see.”6 In of Hokkaido, mainly in the 1870s. Kuroda hired 1870, Kuroda prepared an analysis of what American advisers in fields from agriculture to was necessary to administer the develop- geology to education. Kuroda directed activities many fields to encourage settlement and prosment of Hokkaido, estimating that the in perity in Hokkaido. He briefly served as prime Kaitakushi would need twenty years to minister of Japan, from 1888 to 1889 (courtesy accomplish this. By late 1871 Kuroda effec- National Diet Library, Japan).

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tively ran the Kaitakushi; in 1874 he was officially appointed its head, and he maintained that position until abolition of the agency in 1881. He brought American experts to Japan to advise on Hokkaido development and urged that migrants from elsewhere in Japan be encouraged to come to Hokkaido to establish agriculture there. Thus Kuroda played a crucial role in the settlement of the island. Later, in 1888 and 1889, he served as Japan’s prime minister. As the Kaitakushi’s purpose was Hokkaido development, the agency created a program to encourage immigration to the island. The Kaitakushi planned to establish agricultural communities and encouraged settlers to grow wheat and other northern crops there. The officials discouraged rice-growing because, influenced by American advice, they thought that cool climate crops would be Hokkaido’s future. In 1869, the organization recruited some five hundred men from the Kanto region (around Tokyo) to settle in the north, specifically in the Soya, Sakhalin and Nemuro areas. These specific locations, Soya at Hokkaido’s northern tip, Sakhalin to the north, and Nemuro on Hokkaido’s easternmost peninsula, were all strategically significant locations, given the anxiety to prevent Russian aggression against Japan. These areas, however, also had winter weather conditions more severe than much of Hokkaido. Not surprisingly, this colonization effort collapsed. During the first two years of Kaitakushi-sponsored immigration, 1869–1871, eighteen groups of immigrants came to Hokkaido. Eleven of the groups consisted of former samurai, mostly from the Sendai region in northern Honshu; commoners made up the other migrant parties. Group migration became the basis for the establishment of Hokkaido communities, and the largest number of immigrants continued to come from northern Honshu. General Enomoto’s followers were among the first immigrants settled by the Kaitakushi. They went to the Ishikari Valley, a place where newcomers were more likely to succeed, and the organization supplied them with necessities for three years. Over the next few years, perhaps twelve thousand people moved to Hokkaido in this program and many were directed to the Ishikari Valley; some of them made up much of the original population of Sapporo. Some Kaitakushi officials also received Ishikari Valley land, and recruiters enlisted settlers for the area from various parts of Japan. The Kaitakushi encouraged people with means to help develop the frontier island, but few showed interest. (In the effort to encourage settlement, the Kaitakushi even brought prostitutes to Hokkaido and built dwellings for them.) Kuroda maintained a policy of subsidizing only those who came to Hokkaido to farm rather than helping all prospective migrants, and some historians have suggested that this retarded the growth of Hokkaido long beyond the time the Kaitakushi existed.7 Kaitakushi policies changed over the next few years; another mistake was to hold back the best land for later settlers. Whatever was tried, success was elusive. First, the settlers had to prepare the earth for crops, and clearing land from forest when one had only hand tools to cut down and then cut up the trees was daunting. Too many migrants took advantage of Kaitakushi aid as long as it lasted and, when it ended, gave up farming and returned to Honshu or went off to the coast to work in the fisheries. After the first few Kaitakushi years, Edwin Dun, an American who went to Japan in 1873 to advise the organization on livestock, described Hokkaido, noting that while “there were towns and villages around the entire coast of the island and Hakodate was an important port and commercial city of the Empire, the interior was known only to the Ainu or

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primitive settlers. There were no roads or other means of communication with the interior and the dense growth of scrub bamboo that covered the highlands rendered progress on horse back or even on foot difficult.... The fisheries were the only profitable enterprise that Hokkaido offered at that time.” He pointed out that “thousands of men” came to the Hokkaido coast for the fishing season, then returning to their homes farther south.8 The government tried different policies to promote land settlement in Hokkaido. One plan offered decreased land prices but required settlers to work in groups of five, toiling set hours, with rules almost as onerous as one would find in a labor camp. None of the programs brought the hoped-for number of settlers or led to general pioneer prosperity. Eager to increase Hokkaido population, Kuroda even brought in a few Chinese farmers. From the first, attracting immigrants to Hokkaido has been difficult. Whereas North Americans descended from people who had left their native countries in Europe to cross the ocean found no philosophical hardship in moving on from one part of America to another, Japanese have always felt ties to their ancestral homes and this was true even if one lived and worked in Tokyo, visiting the family village only a few times each year. Moreover, disparaging reports about Hokkaido’s climate and opportunities appeared in the Tokyo press. Too often, only the poorest and least motivated seemed to want to migrate to Hokkaido. Traditional Japanese practices of government and administration were not suited to an enterprise such as pioneer settlement. Allowing freedom and adaptability rather than following set regulations— which might not fit the conditions— was not the Japanese way. Japan had no tradition of democracy. Moreover, with some Kaitakushi officials in Tokyo and others in Sapporo and the slowness of communication at the time, administration was bound to be difficult. In 1874, the Kaitakushi gained official permission to recruit ex-samurai to go to the northern island as tondenhei, or farmer-soldiers. These former samurai whose feudal lords had not supported the Meiji Restoration now had no means of making a living; their lords encouraged emigration to Hokkaido. As early as 1854, several shogunate inspectors in Hokkaido had recommended a tondenhei system; perhaps the Russian policy of setting up Cossack outposts in Siberia inspired the scheme. The first such Hokkaido settlement appeared in 1875, when 198 farmer-soldiers and their families came to Sapporo and established homes in the Kotoni district, northwest of today’s city center. The government furnished each former samurai with eight acres of land and a house complete with a Russian stove to cope with winter cold. The men even received cold weather uniforms. In return, the eighteen to thirty-five year old male settlers were placed in regiments and participated in military exercises (mostly in the winter, when farming tasks did not claim their immediate attention). They would turn out for military duty if needed. Thus they could help protect Hokkaido from the Russians. They carried guns and, as former samurai, swords. By the end of 1876, more than two thousand tondenhei soldierfarmers had gone to Hokkaido in the program, many simply because the Meiji Restoration had deprived them of their livelihood. Though at first only former samurai were included, later the scheme was opened to others. After the 1875 treaty settled the border with Russia, the military justification for Hokkaido colonization no longer seemed so important, and few more tondenhei were recruited. In 1903 they were incorporated into the nation’s army. During the years of recruitment, over seven thousand tondenhei families participated in establishing about forty villages in Hokkaido.

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Starting in 1874, the government recruited former samurai as tondenhei, or farmer-soldiers, to farm Hokkaido land and participate in military exercises so that they would be ready to defend Hokkaido if needed. Tondenhei families were furnished with houses such as this one, which still stands in Sapporo’s Kotoni neighborhood.

One very small tondenhei settlement near Sapporo only had thirty-two households, but almost all the others held between 150 and 220 families. Most of these villages were placed in the Ishikari Valley, around Sapporo and Takikawa and upstream in the Kamikawa basin, in which Asahikawa sits. A few tondenhei villages were along the coast, at Muroran and near Akkeshi and Nemuro far to the east. The eastern settlements, established from 1886 to about 1890, were planned as defense posts because Russian encroachment via the Kuril Islands seemed a possibility despite the border treaty adopted in 1875 by Japan and Russia. Three tondenhei villages were placed upstream on the Tokoro River and two on the Yubetsu, both streams emptying in to the Sea of Okhotsk on Hokkaido’s northeast coast. The most prosperous area of tondenhei settlement, though, was in the Kamikawa basin. Here the settlers found fertile soil and a climate suitable for farming, with hot summer weather. The tondenhei settlers cultivated northern crops, but as hardy strains of rice later became available, farmers shifted more and more of the land to rice cultivation, which dominated the area by the early twentieth century. The tondenhei lived a regulated life, for example working a twelve hour day in the fields from April through September. During the colder part of the year, the workday would last for only eleven hours, men either clearing land or participating in military

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Here are the 2006 surroundings of the dwelling shown in the previous photograph. The tondenhei house is barely visible behind the parking sign.

drill. Many of the tondenhei had a hard time, as they were not used to farming. But families did work together — each family recruited had to include two able-bodied members who could work in addition to the farmer-soldier — and lend a hand to each other. Some of the tondenhei served in the Russo-Japanese War. Tondenhei settlements were more successful than other new communities in Hokkaido. The Kaitakushi set aside good land for the tondenhei villages, which also received other special benefits. Moreover, as former samurai, the farmer-soldiers were often people who could exert leadership or influence farmers who did not have such advantages. Some years later, tondenhei military units became the famed and respected Seventh Division in the Army of Japan. Another successful effort that grew from the Kaitakushi’s early efforts in establishing a stable agricultural population remains to this day: the huge ranch at Niikappu, northwest of Cape Erimo. Horses were seen as crucial for Hokkaido’s development —for farm work, transportation and military use. Thus the Niikappu stud farm and ranch was organized. Here Japanese horses from the Nambu District of northern Honshu were crossbred with imported stock, creating a superior animal. For many years, Niikappu was an imperial ranch, featuring an elegant dwelling suitable for visits by the emperor and his family and guests. The Kaitakushi set up factories to produce many items the Hokkaido settlers would need, from soy sauce to saddles. Print shops, tanneries, flour mills and textile factories were among the many enterprises started. The organization also became involved in com-

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Farmer-soldier families first came to the community of Ebetsu, just east of Sapporo, in 1878. This tondenhei house, dating from the late nineteenth century, stands today in Ebetsu’s Yukawa Park.

merce in order to market products from the new Hokkaido farms. The Kaitakushi bought farm products, canned them (and also fish), made confections, and then sold the result, both in Japan and abroad. Anxious to increase Hokkaido’s trade, in 1878 Kuroda dispatched several merchants plus an interpreter and four officials on a visit to Vladivostok, directly west of Hokkaido, taking along the kinds of Hokkaido products the Japanese might be able to trade. He followed on a warship. The Japanese visit to Russia stimulated Russian interest in Hokkaido products, but given Vladivostok’s small population (less than forty-five hundred) and its almost uninhabited hinterland, the Japanese decided that establishing ongoing trade with Vladivostok merchants would not be profitable. Looking for ideas that could be useful in Hokkaido development, Kuroda visited a Russian settlement on Sakhalin island. Seeing buildings with window glass, the Kaitakushi ordered glass windows put in their structures. One of Kuroda’s ideas was to adapt Russian techniques to make sleighs that horses could pull over snow-covered ground. The sleighs he saw in Russia featured logs steamed into the characteristic half-round shape of the front of a sleigh. Craftsmen in Sapporo created a similar sleigh, stronger and larger, based on this design. Russian stoves made of iron were useful in Hokkaido, too, and became a feature of Hokkaido dwellings. (The first such stove made in Japan predated the Russian stoves, though. In 1856, Takeda Ayasaburo, who designed Goryokaku, noticed a coal-burning

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Here is an interior view of part of a farmer-soldier house furnished as it once might have been. This dwelling was built in 1895 in Fukagawa (on the Ishikari River, west of Asahikawa). Notice the kettle hanging over the fire pit. This house, where a five-member tondenhei family once lived, now sits in the Historical Village of Hokkaido on the eastern outskirts of Sapporo.

stove in a British ship’s cabin. Thinking that such a stove would be very useful, he made a model based on it.) The Meiji regime abolished the Kaitakushi in 1881, despite Kuroda’s opposition to the move. He feared that if the government agency were not at work, Hokkaido development would languish. The government in Tokyo was facing a huge deficit, however, and here was a place expenses could be cut. The Kaitakushi had certainly not been efficient, but that was generally true of all governmental bodies. Partly to give employment to former samurai, the Kaitakushi had a large bureaucracy. The Kaitakushi had originally been scheduled to operate for only a ten year period, and as the time for the its demise approached, Kuroda worked out a deal to sell its assets to officials of the organization at an extremely favorable rate, just one thirty-sixth of their cost. His motive for the sale was to see Kaitakushi projects continue, he stated. When Tokyo officials approved the deal, furor erupted and the government instead disbanded the Kaitakushi in disgrace, the deal unconsummated. (The scandal was a major factor in precipitating promulgation of the first constitution of Japan a few years later. The controversy also spurred the popularization of newspapers in Japan, for the papers covered the Kaitakushi debacle assiduously and probably were at least partly responsible for cancellation of the sale.)

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The traditional Japanese house featured a firepit in the center of the main room. During the late nineteenth century, modern stoves were introduced to Hokkaido, whose cold winters were unknown in most of Japan. This 1885 Sapporo dwelling featured both tradition and modernity. The house now stands in the Historical Village of Hokkaido.

Despite problems during the Kaitakushi years, Hokkaido population quadrupled under Kaitakushi tutelage. Cultivated lands grew from about two thousand acres to nearly fifty thousand. A number of schools opened in Hokkaido; by 1877, about fifteen hundred boys and three hundred girls were attending elementary schools in the island’s main settlements. And, as one newspaper noted during the discord over sale of the Kaitakushi assets, Hokkaido was “Japan’s treasure chest.”9 Notwithstanding the real problems faced by its settlers, the island was slowly developing, thanks to a frontier spirit that was real, if difficult to pin down.

Communities Cities and towns all over Hokkaido owe their beginnings to the pioneer era and museums and libraries in these communities recount stories of intrepid founders. Here are a few brief examples of early days in various island communities.

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A tondenhei family in Kushiro exhibits their agricultural accomplishments in 1887 (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

Most of the immigration in these years was by groups and a community would develop in the area of settlement. One of the earliest and most successful group settlements in Hokkaido after the Meiji Restoration began in 1870, when Date Kunishige, from Watari Town in Miyagi Prefecture, led a group of his followers, mostly samurai and their families, to a site on the north shore of Uchiura Bay. Because Date’s northern Honshu domain had opposed the Meiji Restoration, the new regime had rescinded the land and privileges of Date and his retainers, ordering the men to take up peasant life, working land that now belonged to others. Leader Date Kunishige petitioned for permission for the samurai to move instead to Hokkaido and establish a colony, beginning agriculture and participating in any necessary military action. (This was not a tondenhei settlement; the Date samurai migrated to Hokkaido before the tondenhei project took effect.) After some time, permission came. Date Kunishige went to Hokkaido to inspect the land set aside, and, deciding it was satisfactory, arranged for the first group of about 220 settlers to leave for Hokkaido on April 29, 1870. Another 72 people left in September and 788 more in March 1871. The final group migrated in 1881. Altogether, about 2,600 people from the Watari area went to this new home in Hokkaido; this was the largest former samurai group to emigrate to Hokkaido. Following a few years of great hardship (partly because these settlers had not come under a program that furnished aid to them) the settlement grew; in only fourteen years it had more than 3,500 residents. After clearing away the forest, the early settlers pioneered the successful use of American plows, thanks

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to an institution established there to instruct settlers in their use. Date Kunishige apportioned community land to the settlers, introducing private ownership of land to Japan. Of all the samurai groups who emigrated to Hokkaido in the Kaitakushi’s first two years, this group achieved the most prosperity. The settlement has become today’s Date City, which remains proud that as long ago as 1872 the community had an elementary school. The city also honors the tradition that Buddhists came as early as the tenth century to form its first temple, Zenkoji, which is celebrated as the first and one of the most revered Buddhist temples in Hokkaido. Tradition — or myth — tells that the monk Kuya went to Ezo in the tenth century to preach to the Ainu, and during his time there he founded Zenkoji. Ebetsu, on the Ishikari plain just a few miles east of Sapporo, saw its first settlers in 1871: seventy-six people in twenty-one households. These people, like the Date group, came from Miyagi Prefecture. A group of tondenhei came in 1878. A tondenhei house, now restored, stands in Ebetsu’s Yukawa Park; also near Ebetsu Station is a small brick structure roofed with tile, a powder magazine used to store powder for about twenty years after it was built in 1887. In 1871, Takeoka Seikichi and his family emigrated from Awaji Island (near Kobe, in the Inland Sea) to settle in Shizunai, on the coast southeast of today’s city of Tomakomai, about half way from there to Cape Erimo. Just over a decade later Takeoka opened a grocery. The family prospered enough to replace it in 1898 with a long, impressive onestory building containing living quarters in the back.10 Not all the settlements prospered, however. The migrants who started a community at Ikeda, east of Obihiro, in 1880 failed for an unusual reason. This group of about two hundred people had come mainly to hunt deer, whose hides and horns were sought after, but when a surfeit of snow combined with too much hunting caused a dramatic drop in the deer population in 1882, almost all the settlers left. A community later grew there and the town of Ikeda has become famous as a winemaking center. Many other Hokkaido communities trace their beginnings to the late nineteenth century. Kita Hiroshima City, about twelve miles southeast of Sapporo on the way to Chitose, received its name because the first sizable number of settlers, some twenty-five families who migrated in 1884, came from Hiroshima Prefecture. (Kita means “north.”) A group of nineteen people founded Yuni, located fairly high in the Ishikari Plain, in 1895. Other pioneering families established Fukagawa, about fifteen miles west of Asahikawa on the main route to Sapporo, in 1892, and a thousand tondenhei families came in 1895 and 1896, spurring the town’s development. Fukagawa grew further after 1898 when the railway came through. Muroran rose in prominence when it became a coaling station for ocean vessels in 1894, soon becoming the third largest port in Japan in terms of capacity. Plans envisioned Asahikawa as the center of an extensive development project in the large Kamikawa basin. In 1888, prisoners built a road from Sapporo to the Asahikawa site. A village began in 1890 and four hundred tondenhei came to settle the next year. Other tondenhei meanwhile came to nearby settlements. Asahikawa grew and had more than five thousand people when the railroad reached it in 1898. In 1899 a newly-established army division was stationed at Asahikawa to provide defense for Hokkaido. An army base was built, land values rose, and more settlers came, the population rising to more than eighteen thousand by 1903. As early planners had hoped, the entire area has become highly developed. Today Asahikawa is Hokkaido’s second largest city, having passed Hakodate in population after World War II.

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Many settlers, including people recruited as tondenhei, came to Hokkaido to escape privations at home. After devastating rains flooded the Nara area near Kyoto in 1889, more than two thousand people from Totsukawa Village migrated to Hokkaido and settled in the Ishikari Valley about thirty miles south of Asahikawa in the direction of Sapporo. The first winter was a trial, even with government assistance; the group lived in tondenhei-built huts, three families in each dwelling. But spring came, they planted crops and caught fish. They called their new home Shintotsukawa, or “New Totsukawa,” after their old home town. Nakatonbetsu, an isolated inland town in Hokkaido’s far north, began with the discovery of gold-bearing sediment in 1891. Some five thousand people flocked to the area, but the gold was gone by 1906. In 1910 the community had just thirty-two households, forestry and farming sustaining the settlers. In 1916 the railroad reached Nakatonbetsu, though the line was later abandoned. The small town survives today thanks to dairying and tourism; visitors can even make their own cheese or try panning for gold. In 1897 a few people began a community they called Tayoro. It is in northern Hokkaido, a bit south of Nayoro; the railroad line to Wakkanai at the northern tip of the island came through in 1903 and more settlers appeared. In 1938 the village adopted the name of Furen and in 1953 it achieved the status of a town. Furen is one of the many Hokkaido place names taken from Ainu words but given Japanese characters that can add an additional layer of meaning. The Ainu word means “red river” but the characters stand for “windy place,” which is also fitting. In 2006 came another name change, as Furen merged with other communities and is now part of the city of Nayoro. In 1902 when a man in his seventies, Seki Kansai, set out to carve out a farm in an empty upland area between central Hokkaido’s two mountain national parks, he was the first settler in what became the town of Rikubetsu. Seki’s son, a Sapporo Agricultural College graduate, helped, and additional settlers came after a railroad reached the area, more than a decade later. In recent times the town of about thirty-five hundred people celebrates its extremely cold weather, and because of exceptionally clear skies, an astronomical observatory is sited here. Many residents are still involved in farming and forestry. Several groups of settlers, including tondenhei, came to eastern Hokkaido in 1897, where they settled in the area which grew into the city of Kitami. But in the first week of September 1898 so much rain fell that the Tokoro River overflowed, carrying away rocks and trees and destroying ninety percent of the settlement’s newly-established cropland. Tokyo provided some relief funds (but none for flood protection). Many of the settlers left, but the tondenhei families had no choice but to stay and toil to rebuild their community. Settlers in the area had to overcome transport difficulties; Abashiri was the port from which people and supplies were taken to the Kitami area, and adverse weather conditions, including an icebound sea, obviously impeded travel. From the coast, settlers and their belongings went by horseback. Kitami eventually grew into a city of more than one hundred thousand people. Long-established towns in Hokkaido saw increased growth and trade as more and more people came north. Thomas Blakiston described Nemuro, a fishing center from long before the Meiji era, as having in 1881 “about seven hundred houses about one-half occupied by fishermen and labourers, the other being the residences and business places of merchants, shop-keepers, and others— not omitting females of uncertain fame who invariably swarm at such a place, especially during the fishing season.”11 Kushiro, to the west of Nemuro, had also been the site of a long-established fishery.

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To the pioneer families who founded the new communities, establishing traditional Japanese religious institutions was an urgent priority. By the end of the nineteenth century there were well over two hundred Buddhist temples in Hokkaido, representing a number of sects. Most of them appeared during the Meiji years. A crucial step in the life of a new town was the arrival of a Buddhist priest. (In a place with harsh living conditions and a challenging climate, having a priest to carry out the rituals surrounding death was important.) Even before the Meiji government took power, authorities of the main temple of an important Buddhist sect, Higashi Honganji, which had had a temple in Hakodate for many years, asked government permission for a role in Hokkaido development. This would indicate the religious group’s loyalty to the new regime. The sect had in mind sponsoring parties of colonists and doing missionary work among these colonists as well as the Ainu. Permission came easily; among other reasons, Higashi Honganji-sponsored colonization might effectively counter Orthodox Church efforts at proselytization. As communities appeared and grew, the successful ones often owed their survival and prosperity to the effectiveness of their leaders. Praised for their “courage, intelligence and vision,” these men exhibited tenacity as well as the ability to guide a group in a difficult undertaking: that of creating a community in an isolated and challenging environment.12 Along with good leadership, sustaining a group spirit played a strong — though elusive — part in community success.

Pioneering The pioneers came in ships that docked mostly in Hakodate, Muroran or Otaru and continued to their place of settlement by train, small boat, wagon or even on foot. Pioneer life challenged the newcomers, as it has wherever in the world people have carved out new settlements in a wilderness. In 1877, William Wheeler, hired to teach at the new Sapporo Agricultural College, described Hokkaido farms. Wheeler estimated the average farm to have from one to five acres of land that had been covered with timber, bamboo and brush before being cleared for cultivation. The farmhouse would be framed with poles tied together, the walls then thatched or finished with clay adhering to a loose fiber matting. The roof would be thatch, with a hole for smoke to escape from the fire in the dwelling’s only room.13 Such a house was startlingly similar to those of the Ainu. A poor pioneer family would have no furniture, maybe just a box or two, and might hang clothes on pegs on the poles in the walls. The house would be small, its single room about ten by eighteen feet, with a fire pit in the middle and perhaps only one pot available for cooking. Companies that brought groups to settle Hokkaido often built dwellings of this type for the migrants. Sometimes the families who had to live in the flimsy houses feared that bears could break down the walls and attack sleeping children; the dwellings would have to be strong enough to keep bears out. Poor farm families elsewhere in Japan also lived in dwellings that could be characterized as hovels, but in Hokkaido the pioneers faced frigid winters. The Hokkaido newcomers’ experience was not too different from that of Ukrainian migrants who settled in the Canadian prairie provinces in the late nineteenth century, where not only did they face the privations of poverty, they found winter weather much colder than they had ever known.

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Many, probably most, late nineteenth and early twentieth century migrants to Hokkaido had little money and were forced to construct primitive huts of this sort as their first dwellings in Hokkaido. Typically, it took a family about five years to amass enough wealth to build a more substantial house. This representation of a peasant hut is in the Historical Village of Hokkaido.

More prosperous farmers would have houses with clapboard walls and shingled roofs, the shingles kept in place by stones placed on boards atop the roof. It usually took the Hokkaido pioneers four or five years at the very least before they could build such a substantial dwelling. The Japanese admired wood’s natural finish, so many of the clapboard houses and shops from pioneer times were unpainted, giving them a misleadingly primitive look in western eyes. The clapboard exteriors—a style borrowed from the west — also were misleading, for most buildings that appeared western on the outside would be surprisingly Japanese inside, with tatami mat floors, sliding doors with paper panels between rooms, and Japanese-style furnishings. The main room in traditional Japanese homes and shops in those days featured a small fire pit beneath a pole from which a teakettle hung, but as time went on, stoves to replace or sit next to the firepit became more common. Many dwellings and inns featured a corridor between the rooms and the outside wall. This feature was adopted from homes in the Japanese heartland, where its function was to help keep the rooms cool. Houses were not insulated against the cold, because this had never been done in the heartland. Farms would include a barn or shed, an all-purpose building for storage and animals. Land was cleared and worked by hand, and the farmer would plant, Wheeler wrote, “millet, buckwheat, barley, beans, egg-plant, tiger-lily-bulbs, potatoes a few, carrots, onions, radishes, daikon ... in sufficient quantity for home use.”14 Hokkaido proved to

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be an excellent place to raise potatoes; its climate is similar to that of Idaho and Maine, both long famous for this crop. From early on, potatoes have been used as a staple food in the Hokkaido countryside, replacing or supplementing rice, which people preferred. Farmers also grew lots of oats, the main feed for horses. In the Japanese heartland, people generally provided the energy required for agricultural work, but on the larger Hokkaido farms, draft animals could mean the difference between success and failure. Logging became important as people cleared land to build houses and grow crops. This was work that could be done during the winter season. Much of the land migrants received was heavily forested, and the trees had to be cleared before seeds could be planted. This had to be done without machinery —chopping down great virgin trees with axes and, more difficult, digging out the stumps and roots. The felled wood was useful, of course, for fuel. Some families found they could clear only about two acres during their first year in Hokkaido. Many settlers suffered injuries while felling the trees. Sometimes the pioneers tried to burn away undergrowth so they could plow, but this could cause forest fire. Around the turn of the century the Higashide family left Ishikawa Prefecture on Honshu for Hokkaido. Ruined by bankruptcy because the family head did not manage his expenditures carefully enough, his son felt emigration to Hokkaido a necessity. The family settled in Otoe Village, a small community nestled among the forests and hills downstream and across the ridge from Asahikawa. (Otoe Village is now part of Fukagawa City.) Here the Higashides lived among many other struggling farm families. Everyone except the babies worked in the fields. The family raised potatoes as their staple food, drying them for winter use, eating them mixed with crushed barley. Most of the winter meals consisted only of miso soup and pickled vegetables along with this mixture. Very occasionally, salted salmon would make the meal special.15 During growing and harvesting seasons family members worked in the fields all through the daylight hours. In wintertime many other chores awaited a farm family. Higashide Seiichi, who grew up on the farm, spent many winter days with his father cutting trees by hand in a government forest, then bringing the wood home. Without firewood to heat the house, life in the winter would have been impossible, and trees could be felled and cut up even when land and water were covered with snow and ice. Despite a fire, the Higashide family home, a mere thatched hut, was uncomfortable in the winter chill, snow blowing in through cracks in the structure. Blizzards like those in pioneer days in the Dakotas or Saskatchewan brought real danger of death in the blinding snow when people were not safely indoors. Thomas Blakiston heard late in February 1871 that Otaru people desperately needed rice. Would John Will, who captained one of Blakiston’s ships, deliver a shipload there? The wind off Otaru was so strong that the ship, anchored under the headland, almost capsized, while townsfolk, knowing the ship was bringing rice, watched from the shore, hoping to rescue rice if the ship were swept on to the rocks. But the wind died and both ship and rice survived. Like the Higashide family, though, poor migrants could not even afford rice and their typical meals would include a bowl of millet, not rice, along with miso soup and pickled daikon, or radish. Michael Lewis has written that migrant families generally did not produce enough food to sustain themselves until they had spent four or five years in Hokkaido.16 In the first two decades of the Meiji era, most of the poor Wajin who came to Hokkaido settled in Ainu villages, and aid from the local Ainu helped them survive.

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In 1882, eleven years after the Iwama family migrated to Date, Hokkaido, from northern Honshu, the family had become prosperous enough to build this house, which now stands in the Historical Village of Hokkaido and is visited by tourists. Instead of nails, stones on the roof hold the shingles down.

Not all the pioneers who helped develop Hokkaido were farmers. By the end of the century fewer than sixty percent of the new immigrants went into agriculture. Some moved to the northern island to work in business or industry. It is not surprising, given the pioneering tradition in late nineteenth century Hokkaido, that Japan’s first female doctor went into practice there: Ogino Genko migrated to Setana, a town on the west coast of the Oshima Peninsula, to set up a clinic in 1897. Not licensed until she was fortyseven years old, she worked at her clinic for ten years. She is just one example of the many support workers necessary in a successful community. The fisheries boomed. It was in the pioneer years that the Hokkaido fishing industry reached its zenith, though unlike agriculture, fishing’s roots in Hokkaido stretched back many, many years. The Kaitakushi abolished the basho ukeoi, opening up the industry to anyone who wished to participate in it. This, however, helped cause the overfishing that led to the near-demise of the herring fishery in the early twentieth century. In addition, large-scale operators became more and more important in the industry; the fishermen worked for them. The markets for both food fish and fish fertilizer grew, and for the Hokkaido pioneer, a few weeks’ seasonal work in the fishery could help family finances immeasurably. Some people spent most of their time harvesting products from the sea: kombu after the springtime herring season ended, trout and salmon in summer and fall, and cuttlefish and shellfish in the winter. All along the coastline of practically the entire island sat scattered houses or villages, though many would be closed up except when people fished there. A number of fishery workers were only seasonal Hokkaido residents. In 1886, a government edict ordered the creation of local fishermen’s associations, largely in order to settle — or prevent — disputes over the fishing grounds. Despite all the efforts to encourage farming, fishing long remained more important to the Hokkaido economy

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Most herring harvested along Hokkaido shores ended up in fertilizer coveted by Honshu farmers. Here, at Rumoi on Hokkaido’s northwest coast, herring are laid out to dry. In the pioneer years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, huge numbers of the tiny fish were harvested; imagine the smell as drying fish lay everywhere (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

than agriculture. In 1891 more than seventy percent of Hokkaido residents participated in some aspect of the fishing industry. By far most of the national taxes paid in Hokkaido were on products of the fishery, but this was by no means popular. Fishermen and farmers in the town of Esashi, across the toe of the Oshima Peninsula from Hakodate, rioted in 1873 over the imposition of taxes they felt excessive. All the Hakodate police were sent to quell the turmoil, which destroyed some buildings. Several people died during the violence. The Kaitakushi opened an experimental salmon cannery near the Ishikari River estuary. It was the needs of the Japanese Navy that spurred the growth of the salmon canning industry, particularly during Japan’s brief war with China, 1894-95, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Other sea products also found markets. The first crab cannery in Japan opened in the Otaru area in the early 1890s and the first fish hatchery in the nation was constructed on the Chitose River in 1888. The kombu harvest was important, especially in the China trade. Traveling in Hokkaido in 1874, Benjamin Lyman noted that the main activity he saw around Akkeshi was collecting and drying kombu.17 In the Erimo district, villages sprang up based on this harvest; in the mid–nineteenth century the area became the source of more kombu than anywhere else in Japan. Once the Kaitakushi opened up the fisheries and allowed access to coastal waters, many people moved to the shoreline area near Cape Erimo, and so much

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kombu was taken that the future of the product there was in doubt, leading to careful regulation of the harvest even before the twentieth century began. The sea otter trade also flourished in these years. Ainu and Russian fishermen had long harvested small numbers of the sea creatures, but after an American sailor found large numbers of sea otter in Kurils waters in 1872 and recognized their value, the hunt exploded. Over the next ten years many otter were taken for their valuable skins, usually by foreign ships employing local crewmen. Hunting the otter brought danger from the stormy Kuril seas, sometimes disappointment and occasionally wealth. One adventurer, Henry Snow, bought an old boat and set out for the Kurils in 1873. His crew found otter, but the boat suffered so much in wind and waves that the men left it in Nemuro and walked or rode horseback all the way to Hakodate with their skins, a twenty-three day trip. German Consul Ludwig Haber bought the skins in Hakodate. Henry Snow estimated the size of the otter harvest during the era it flourished: from 1872 to 1881 the otter hunters took ten thousand skins, from 1882 to 1891 more than one thousand, from 1892 to 1901 about eight hundred and from 1902 until 1909, when he was writing, about three hundred fifty. The otter’s near-extinction killed the industry.18 Miners, as well as farmers and fishermen, must be counted among Hokkaido pioneers. Establishing the mining industry in Hokkaido posed a challenge. No mining tradition — or understanding of the craft — existed there, nor did transportation links from the mining districts to the sea. Hokkaido did not have a surplus population, so people to work in the mines were often not readily available, and because the island was largely undeveloped, prospective markets for coal and other mine products were far away. In the Meiji era, the most important Hokkaido coal mining regions were at Horonai and Yubari. Both sites were in the mountain range east of Sapporo. First, Horonai, less than thirty miles from the capital city, was investigated intensively as a source of coal. Enomoto Takeaki carried out a lot of the detailed survey work, something for which his engineering background strongly qualified him. The Kaitakushi began mine development in 1878 and opened a railroad to Otaru at the end of 1881 to transport the ore. In 1889 the government sold the mine and its railway to a private firm, the Hokkaido Coal Mine Railway Company (later renamed the Hokkaido Coal Mine Steam Ship Company and usually known as Hokutan). In the three decades following the Horonai purchase, Hokutan bought mining rights and opened mines at various other Hokkaido locations. In the narrow Yubari valley in the same mountain range as Horonai but farther south, American geologist Benjamin Lyman suggested that coal mining could be promising, but not for fifteen years was this area thoroughly examined. Then, in 1888, Ban Ichitaro, a samurai who had been on the Lyman prospecting team, went to the Yubari area with Ainu guides and discovered extensive coal deposits. Soon he arranged for the opening of several mines. Hokutan took over in 1892, and with mines in operation, the development of Yubari began. The opportunity for work here drew many migrants, mostly from northern Honshu. Yubari grew to a city of more than one hundred thousand people when the coal industry reached its peak. On the Shiretoko Peninsula, almost as far as one could travel from Sapporo and still be on Hokkaido, sulfur was mined on Mt. Iwo from 1865 to 1867 and again in 1887-88. After an 1889 volcanic eruption, a sulfur flow brought some 80,000 tons of the mineral down the mountain. Over the next decade most of the sulfur was taken out; thereafter the area has been uninhabited. Settlement in mining communities such as Yubari differed greatly from that in farm-

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ing areas. Minerals were found in mountain sites often difficult of year-round access and in the winter even colder than the Hokkaido plains. It is difficult to imagine the privations of the early miners, but a number of mining communities, not just Horonai and Yubari, flourished in Hokkaido in the late nineteenth century. The Kaitakushi had brought in a number of newcomers from northern Honshu. The miners usually stayed in bunkhouses run by contractors and some of these contractors, often recruited by the owners from criminal gangs, mistreated and cheated the miners. Strikes and riots sometimes broke out. Even women and children worked at some of the mines. Housing available for mine families was often dreadful, one 1900 description noting that shacks had rotting floors and leaking roofs and that the one latrine that served twenty of these shacks was inaccessible when it snowed.19 Moreover, from the beginning, mining was dangerous. Some migrants to Hokkaido did not come of their own volition. Having read of the settlement of Australia by convicts, Kaitakushi director Kuroda set up several penal colonies on the Ishikari plain. Prisoners had to work on road construction and in the mines. To open up the north of the island, a prison was built in Abashiri about 1890, the idea being that the prisoners would work on infrastructure projects. Abashiri’s location on the Sea of Okhotsk, distant from Hokkaido’s busy ports and railroads, meant that supplies could not be brought in during the winter months when the harbor was icebound, but the isolated location made prisoner escapes less likely. Partly because of its cold and remoteness, this prison gained a fearsome reputation. Hokkaido became the site for incarceration of long-term prisoners in Japan, one more disincentive for attracting settlers. For some prisoners, though, Hokkaido was a refuge. A few escaped from Sakhalin — then a Russian prison island — to the Japanese island. In 1905, seventeen convicts from Sakhalin (sixteen of them Turks) appeared in Wakkanai. Many convicts worked in the Horonai mine and from 1886 through 1890, fifty-five thousand of them were injured and eighty-two killed in mine explosions. Some eighty percent of the Horonai miners were convicts when Hokutan bought the mine.20 About five years after the purchase, Hokutan phased out convict employment. Convicts continued to be employed in Hokkaido in other ways, though, and when locusts plagued the island in the 1880s, convicts fought pests for a time. In Kaitakushi days, prisoners were seen as a boon to Hokkaido because they could aid in its development. As time went on and more settlers appeared, fear grew of prison escapes as well as of the deleterious effect released prisoners could have on society; starting in 1894, convicts were no longer allowed to settle on the island after serving their sentences. In Japan in those days, political undesirables faced persecution or exile. In the heartland, a number of people agitated for peoples’ rights, and some of those labeled troublemakers were shipped off to Hokkaido. Moving the burakumin, Japan’s untouchable community, to Hokkaido was also suggested early in the Meiji era, but nothing was done. Some Christians, though, were banished to the northern island. A group sent away after they announced their religion came from Urakami district in Nagasaki. Other Christians came voluntarily; in 1881 and 1882, more than one hundred Christians, mainly from Hiroshima and Kobe, settled in Urakawa, on the coast southwest from Tomakomai. As with most immigrants, their first years were very difficult, but as early as 1884 they constructed a church building.21 This was an era when the island was a wild frontier, with many more men than women. Hokkaido’s new communities included the bad along with the good and saw alcoholism,

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violence and crime. Sapporo’s entertainment district became infamous. In response, missionary movements and women activists became much more active than in the Japanese heartland, the same progression that took place in pioneer communities in other places such as North America. Even a temperance society was founded in Hokkaido in 1887. While most pioneers struggled and some failed, many of today’s successful farms and businesses got their start in the pioneer days. Today’s Hokkaido landscape of towns, farms and ranches owes its beginnings to the pioneer era, and many Hokkaido families today look back with pride at their ancestors’ accomplishments, despite hardships, in making a productive island from a wild land.

Transportation Development of Hokkaido land depended on available transportation links. Coastal communities came first, of course. Inland, successful settlement and development of a region was much more likely once the railroads came, because farmers had to get their products to market. Thus while some communities and farms preceded the railroad, most came after a rail link was assured. The earliest lines, more or less in a corridor from Muroran to Asahikawa and west to Sapporo and Otaru, came by the end of the nineteenth century, but the most distant northern and eastern parts of Hokkaido were not reached by rail until the 1920s and 1930s. Hokkaido’s first railroad was not built not to serve farms but to bring coal from Horonai mines to the coast. This was just the third railway line to be built in all Japan. The story of the first section of the line, between Otaru and Sapporo, is told in Chapter 8; that part of the track, partly along a rugged coastline, challenged the engineers. Extending the railroad to the mine was a comparatively straightforward task. Passing through swamp and forest, the section between Sapporo and Horonai opened in 1882. For some miles, the track passed through the wide Ishikari plain, but before reaching Horonai, the line turned up a narrow valley, gaining altitude, finally reaching the mine after traversing a tunnel through a ridge. By 1883, the railway line was complete and Horonai coal could now be delivered to Sapporo and Otaru. Several other rail lines in Hokkaido opened in the next few decades. By 1890, a line extended beyond Sapporo farther into the Ishikari plain, making farming feasible there. By 1892, Hokutan constructed another line to transport coal, running northeast up the coast from Muroran through Tomakomai, but instead of heading from Tomakomai to Sapporo, it went north to Iwamizawa, now a city a little more than twenty miles northeast of Sapporo. Here it met the line from to Horonai. South of Iwamizawa, a branch line was built to the Yubari coal fields. A railroad network in Hokkaido could not reach its potential without a link from northern Honshu to the heartland. By the end of the century, a railroad had been completed from Tokyo to Aomori, the port for Honshu’s far north and the main Honshu terminus for ferries to Hakodate. Hokkaido passengers could then cross Tsugaru Strait by boat to reach the northern island. By 1898, one could travel by train as far north as Asahikawa and by 1900, the line extended even farther north, to Nayoro. Roads as well as railroads helped open up Hokkaido. On island roads in pioneer days, one could see horses pull plows, other farm implements, logs or wagons loaded with families or farm produce. Projects were started to build a route to connect Sapporo with

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Hakodate. Due to budget problems, systematic island-wide road development remained only a dream, though. Without feeder roads, the trunk roads did not get the use — and upkeep — they should have had. In fact, the lack of good transportation on the island truly impeded development. Early in the Kaitakushi years the Higashi Honganji built some roads on Hokkaido, one of them from Date through the mountains to Sapporo, which was then still a village. More than five thousand people worked for more than a year to build the sixty mile track. Many samurai and other recent migrants worked on the project, as did prisoners sent to serve their sentences in Hokkaido and Ainu forced into the work. Resentment engendered by this forced labor hurt Higashi Honganji efforts to convert Ainu to Buddhism. In 1886 the Hokkaido Prefectural Office began a new and extensive roadbuilding program, but despite this, when C. S. Meik visited the island in 1897 he noted very few roads in Hokkaido “suitable for wheeled traffic.22 It took a long time before travel in Hokkaido was easy. One roadbuilding project proposed in the late nineteenth century would connect Abashiri, on the northeast coast, with Asahikawa and, thus, Sapporo. Such a road would open the northeast to settlement, it was thought, as well as making that part of the island easier for the military to defend. Since it would traverse twenty-seven hundred foot Kitami Pass over Hokkaido’s central mountain spine, the road presented a construction challenge. The authorities thus took eleven hundred men from a Kushiro prison to Abashiri and worked them inhumanely for seven months so that a road from Abashiri all the way to the pass almost one hundred miles away was ready in November 1891. Prison authorities arranged for a “moving prison,” a temporary building where prisoners could sleep when they were too far from Abashiri. The completion of the route from Abashiri to Kitami Pass helped open a large area to settlement but more than 180 prisoners died in building the road. The victims were buried by the road without ceremony, but in more recent years those who could be found have been reburied with a formal memorial service, and a monument to their efforts now sits atop Kitami Pass. The historic pass was bypassed in 2002, however, by a tunnel and new expressway section. By 1900, one could go by road along Hokkaido’s northeastern coast all the way to Cape Soya. The trip from Abashiri was “monotonous in the extreme,” however, according to a guidebook.23 As roads were built, so were way stations where travelers could rest or spend the night. The stations’ stables accommodated travelers’ horses. J. M. Dixon, writing in 1881 about his sojourn in “Yesso,” noted the clean, spacious inns he found. He reported that travelers could buy bread for their journey in Sapporo, Otaru or Hakodate, and that the “delightful Sapporo beer” was often available as one traveled.24 Probably the most famous of the travelers’ inns was in Shimamatsu Village in today’s city of Kita Hiroshima (these days less than half an hour from central Sapporo by train). The Shimamatsu location is a national historic site now; in 1881 the Meiji Emperor stopped there overnight while touring Hokkaido. Mail delivery in Hokkaido started in the 1870s, and in 1876 island-wide service began, using the way stations and their stables, but caring for the horses used in the service presented problems. The Kaitakushi found that too many of them died due to the cold and snow or from attacks by predators. Weather problems were not easily surmountable, but officials instituted a bounty system to destroy the wolves and bears that were attacking horses. The payments would also protect farms; bounties were even paid to rid

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farms and fisheries of destructive crows. Mailmen sometimes carried bugles to frighten away bears and in winter they traipsed across the snow on skis or snowshoes. Enhancing communication, telegraph service became available to the public in 1876, connecting Sapporo, Otaru and Hakodate with Aomori and Tokyo. Sleighs based on ones Kuroda Kiyotaka had seen in Russia became a common feature not long after they were introduced in Hokkaido. In winter, many rivers froze firmly enough that a horse could pull a loaded sleigh safely across. Other adaptations to winter conditions appeared; for example, horses were shod late each year with shoes especially designed for use on snow and ice. The Kaitakushi and its successor organizations did not ignore water transportation while developing Hokkaido. Thus in the early 1870s the Kaitakushi bought three ships to serve the island, modern steamships rather than sailing vessels. Tsugaru Strait could see terrible storms, though, and all three ships were wrecked along Hokkaido’s coast. The Kaitakushi meanwhile built lighthouses and upgraded harbors to encourage shipping. Not all their efforts succeeded. Horace Capron, the Kaitakushi’s principal foreign adviser, commented that building docks and warehouses on the Ishikari River had been wasted because the river was too shallow for modern ships.25 In 1891, construction began in Russia of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and in a speech given early in 1892, Governor Watanabe Chiaki of Hokkaido prophesied that “when the Siberian Railway is completed and Vladivostok becomes one of the great eastern seaports, communication between our country and Siberia thus becoming more convenient and frequent, it is safe to predict that the condition of Hokkaido will undergo speedy and material improvement.”26 Governor Watanabe’s prediction did not, however, come to pass, despite the railway’s completion. Reginald Farrer traveled to Hokkaido early in the new century, taking a boat from Aomori to Hakodate and another from Hakodate to Muroran, where he could board a train to Sapporo. Yet this train journey through a land just beginning to be developed left him doubting Hokkaido’s potential. “Once the Japanese had the insanity to think of establishing horse-farms and orchards. Needless to say, they incurred a vast and futile expense. No doubt the horses died of melancholia, and the apples swiftly degenerated into crabs. The Hokkaido is a vain land and profitless.” Yet today, from a train between Muroran and Sapporo one can see well-groomed pastures with healthy and sometimes valuable horses contentedly grazing. The Japan Weekly Mail noted in 1893, “In the popular mind, Yezo remains a place buried under snow and ice for the greater part of the year,” but the publication prophesied five years later that, given the delightful summer climate, Hokkaido would become the nation’s sanitarium.27

Changes, successes, failures Over the years following the Kaitakushi’s termination, colonization and development continued, while from Tokyo came changes in policy and island administration. Technological advances slowly made the northern island more productive and Hokkaido’s Japanese character became more and more pronounced. Some of the new communities established themselves successfully, as Date had, but new immigrants faced the same problems newcomers had seen during the Kaitakushi era. After the Kaitakushi went out of existence, the island was divided into three admin-

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istrative regions, centered in Hakodate, Sapporo and Nemuro. Thomas Blakiston welcomed the division, charging that too large a proportion of Kaitakushi funds had gone to Sapporo and its immediate environs, leaving the rest of the island in need.28 This division lasted only until 1886, however, when for the sake of uniform development throughout Hokkaido, Sapporo was designated capital of the entire island, presided over by a governor appointed by Tokyo. The new Hokkaido government, or Docho, has existed — with changes, of course — to this day. Tokyo appointed the governor (who did not have to be a Hokkaido man) and because this was a political appointment he was frequently replaced. The more effective a governor was, the more chance he would be sent to a part of Japan deemed more important than Hokkaido. By 1885, more than 280,000 Wajin were living in Hokkaido, almost all in coastal settlements and Sapporo. Migration to the northern island continued to be slow, however, despite various changes in official policy through the years. People continued to be loath to leave their home towns, and they feared the cold, the hard work required for success and Hokkaido’s reputation as a prison island. Many people who did go to the northern island were unsuited to pioneering; they had been destitute before and did not have the fortitude to meet Hokkaido’s challenge. Moreover, the information most prospective pioneers received about conditions in Hokkaido was usually either inadequate or inaccurate. The new residents did not want to replace rice as the staple food in their diet, and most of the land available for settlement could not grow rice successfully until later, when new strains and methods were developed. A postwar Japanese novelist has a Tokyo boy recall, about 1900, the saying, “Even the birds do not fly to Ezo Island” and his grandmother saying, “Hokkaido is the place for the penniless and people who have done wrong and have no other place to run to.”29 When in 1891 a Japanese policeman tried to assassinate the Russian crown prince near Kyoto during an official visit to Japan, the Japanese was sentenced to penal servitude in Hokkaido. The injuries to the crown prince, later Czar Nicholas II, were minor, but publicity surrounding the event and the assailant’s punishment in Hokkaido did not help attract settlers to the northern island. As Hokkaido development continued, some things worked and some did not. A key to growth was the development of rice which could be successfully grown despite the cold climate for not only did the migrants who came to Hokkaido want a familiar diet, rice symbolized being Japanese. Rice straw, too, had many uses, being used to make ropes, mats, shoes, even showshoes. In 1872, when Horace Capron made his first visit to Hokkaido, he found a teahouse at Chitose with a corral, several small houses, some large warehouses and a recently built but unused rice mill, “now closed and probably ever will be, as there is no rice grown upon this Island north of the vicinity of Hakodate.”30 The Kaitakushi had given a financial incentive to grow crops other than rice, but after the change in administration and encouragement by the new government, many more farmers tried rice, especially in the Ishikari and Kamikawa basins. A 1902 law promoted formation of irrigation associations, which could enable large-scale creation of paddy fields. This meant community cooperation to build and manage the necessary irrigation system. Nakayama Kyuzo grew rice in what is now Kita Hiroshima, planting a cold-resistant variety called akage and using warmed water, which he carried from a tub, to flood his fields. He saw success by the early 1880s. Over the years, enormous effort has gone into developing strains of rice that would do well in Hokkaido; the Hokkaido Agricultural Experiment Station soon led the way. When new types emerged that could thrive

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in the Hokkaido climate, migrants looked upon life in Hokkaido more positively, but in early years, spreading the knowledge gained through agricultural research was difficult, not the least because so many Hokkaido residents then could not read or write. Now Hokkaido grows more rice than any other prefecture in Japan and one advantage claimed is that Hokkaido rice is more healthful than rice grown farther south, since harmful bacteria do not thrive in a cooler climate. By 1916, rice accounted for almost ten percent of Hokkaido’s gross agricultural product, and by 1926, more than twenty percent. Near the end of the nineteenth century, silkworm raising took root in Hokkaido in areas where mulberry trees did well (mulberries grew wild on the island) such as Urausu, an Ishikari Valley town northeast of Sapporo. But starting in the 1920s, world markets for silk declined, and shortly after the end of World War II and the advent of nylon, Hokkaido silk production ceased. In 1886 new land laws came into effect. Now a farmer could live on virgin land for up to ten years without having to pay anything. After that, he could buy the land — at a low rate of interest — but the land also became subject to taxation. As an aid to settlement and administration, teams were sent out to survey unsettled parts of the Ishikari plain in 1886 and 1887, looking for land areas suitable for agriculture. The rectangular fields one sees in Hokkaido today had their start then. An 1889 land survey designated twelve and one-half acres as the size a farmer could obtain. But peasants found it very difficult to find and borrow the funds to buy the land, which they often lost to prosperous people who became large landowners. The peasants became tenants on the property they had been purchasing from the government. Because of heartland overpopulation, various publications featured articles highlighting migration to the northern island. Some Japanese perceived Hokkaido as a land of opportunity. Shimizu Shikin’s 1899 short story, “A School for Emigres,” features a family that goes to Hokkaido to escape prejudice against burakumin in the Japanese heartland. In Hokkaido the family planned to start a home and school for abandoned children.31 In the 1890s, more settlers came, but much of the land developed then ended up in the hands of affluent or influential men, often one-time daimyo. From the latter 1880s the number of tenant farmers grew greatly, as did the problems that can arise when absentee landlords are numerous. Landowners found it was more economical to have tenants clear the land and then farm it than to buy foreign machinery to fell the trees and dig up the roots. In 1900 families renting farms in Hokkaido numbered almost 30,000; by 1906 more farmers were renters than owners.32 Tenant farmers usually found themselves in penury in Hokkaido despite having come to the northern island to escape deprivation. For the tenant, life could be nearly impossible; winter was a special challenge. Farm chores were few then, so many Hokkaido pioneer farmers supplemented their income by making charcoal; local people were allowed to fell trees in certain portions of government-owned forests. Hokkaido pioneers made snowshoes and skis to get around in the winter and even fashioned ice skates, with the blade mounted on one edge of a triangular piece of wood and straps on the opposite side. Higashide Seiichi wrote of a family forced into tenant farming when no other work was available, but inexperienced and faced with difficult weather conditions, family members did not produce enough to give the required quota to the landowner. Their only solution was to flee, secretly, at night.33 In his 1883 account of Hokkaido, Thomas Blakiston averred it was only natural that many of the agricultural settlements made up of immigrant families were not successful —

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the newcomers had no farm experience and had come to a “wild and rough country with a rigorous climate.” He pointed out that many who failed at farming avoided becoming tenants; compared to farming, “so many other employments were open to them more congenial to their tastes, and more lucrative.” A number of older former samurai had left farms to go into employment in the postal service or in schools, he wrote, while younger men sought work in the fisheries, and many people returned to their homes on Honshu.34 Arishima Takeo, 1878–1923, also wrote about Hokkaido tenant farmers in his most famous short story, translated by John W. Morrison as “Descendants of Cain.” Arishima described the lot of poor Hokkaido tenant farmers: their struggle merely to exist over winter, their miserable hovels, their hard work and their desperation to meet the payment owed to the landowner. Arishima’s main character, brutalized by the death of his child and by the struggles of his own life, loses all hope, succumbing to alcoholism and anger. Arishima also wrote favorably of Hokkaido, however, recording in his diary in 1897, “Amid the brilliance of the fresh green fields cattle and horses play, and students, guiding their plows, cultivate the pasturage that bends like waves in the wind. The clean beauty makes a magnificent panorama that one could not find elsewhere in Japan, no matter where one looked.”35 As settlers came to Hokkaido, the natural environment changed. Edwin Dun wrote of the deer practically disappearing. He saw many on the island when he arrived in 1873, but because of several factors— a market for hides and horns, Ainu hunters needing a livelihood, the presence of more and more Wajin with guns, a terrible winter in 1878-79 and a lack of government policies to protect the deer —“the result was practical extermination.”36 About 1873 a company purchased some ten thousand hides at thirty-five cents each to send to Europe; in the next five years, hunters killed more than five hundred thousand, to respond to export markets for antlers and hides. In 1892 the government temporarily banned all deer hunting on Hokkaido. The Kaitakushi had opened a venison cannery near Chitose in 1878, but it later closed for want of meat. Though the deer survived, the wolf did not. The Ezo wolf, once fairly widespread on the island, was hunted and, later, systematically poisoned to extermination late in the nineteenth century in order to protect livestock. Partly because their natural prey, the deer, had become so rare, wolves— and bears— had begun searching established farms for prey. The last wolf was killed in 1896. The wolf disappeared but forests remained, though as the railroads came, the woods receded. A logging industry developed, and until as late as the 1950s, logs to be used in construction often would be floated down rivers to the mills. Even before 1900, some feared the destruction of forest land and began planning for reforestation and sustainable logging. Trees were cut so wantonly that starting in 1907, forest laws regulated logging. Meanwhile, high in the mountains, the forests remained relatively undisturbed. Hokkaido settlement left a different rural landscape than one finds in the rest of Japan. American-style barns dot the countryside. In the Japanese heartland, farmers live in clusters of houses— villages— and walk out to their fields, but in Hokkaido most farm families live on the farm. This again makes the landscape resemble America. Also missing from heartland farms was the woodpile, which provided winter warmth to Hokkaido farmhouses via the house’s heating stove. Increased settlement spurred Hokkaido development, and by the end of the century the island’s agriculture was as important as its products from the sea, while exports of

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forest products and coal surpassed those of marine products. Several of Japan’s great conglomerates, or zaibatsu, became involved in these years of Hokkaido settlement, Mitsui in mining and financial support and Mitsubishi in transportation. The island’s urban population was growing; at century’s end, Hakodate was the leading metropolis, with 53,000 people. Otaru, prominent in trade and the herring industry, followed with 26,000, Matsumae, still important, with 23,000, Kushiro, the center of commerce, transportation and fisheries for the eastern part of the island, with 13,000, Sapporo 12,500 and Nemuro 11,000. Horonai, the early coal-mining center, had 9,500 people and Akkeshi, a southern coastal town known for its oysters, 8.500. These figures illustrate the prominence of the mining and fishing industries. Though the movement to settle Hokkaido was not completely successful, island population did grow substantially. (Instead of going to Hokkaido, though, many Japanese in dire straits opted instead to go to Hawaii, the American west coast, or Latin America when these opportunities became available after the government allowed legal emigration in 1884.) Between 1869 and 1881, while the Kaitakushi administered Hokkaido, some seventy thousand migrants came to the island, more than half of them former samurai families. Total island population was about 67,000 in 1870 but 427,000 in 1890. Twenty years after that, it had risen to 1,600,000. From 1890 to 1936, about 1,900,000 people came to Hokkaido to live. Yet large numbers of people left the island, too: more than 70,000 in the 1890s and just over 100,000 in the first decade of the twentieth century.37 Perhaps the development of Hokkaido in the second half of the nineteenth century can be described as an imperialist adventure, comparable to the activities of European nations in Africa or the United States, a few years later, in the Philippines. At any rate, the economy that developed in Hokkaido was most definitely a colonial one. The economy created on the island extracted natural resources from Hokkaido’s waters and lands and shipped them elsewhere for processing or manufacture, in the classic colonial manner. Whatever were the motives of government officials in supporting Hokkaido development, the pioneers who came and stayed made the island a fruitful and progressive land. Today one can get a glimpse of their life by visiting the Historical Village of Hokkaido, Hokkaido Kaitaku no Mura. Structures from pioneer days all over the island have been relocated, rebuilt or recreated here at Nopporo, on Sapporo’s eastern outskirts. The village tells the development story, and thus when China’s Communist Party Chairman Hu Yaobang visited Japan in 1983, his Japanese hosts took him to the village, “To Observe Frontier’s Progress,” proclaimed a Japan Times headline. Perhaps the Hokkaido experience had lessons for China as it strove to modernize, said China’s Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian.38 The “village” includes shops and businesses of many sorts— a barber shop, a sweet shop, a brewery, an inn, a grocery, a post office, a police box, as well as houses of different styles. Farm and fishing buildings are there, too. The oldest date from the 1880s and the newest from the 1920s. One very poignant building is the small and primitive thatched hut typical of the dwellings that poor families first lived in as they faced the rigors of a northern winter. Almost all of the Historical Village buildings, however, reflect a more prosperous life style. Though most of the exteriors are western in architectural style, the interiors are Japanese in spirit and feature tatami floors. These buildings reflect a satisfactory if not affluent standard of living, far beyond what was possible for the struggling migrants living in huts of reed and thatch. Ainu are missing from the village because this

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place is a pioneer village, celebrating only this aspect of Hokkaido history. Here is the picture of Hokkaido becoming Japanese. Celebrating, too, the pioneers of Hokkaido were the two visits to the northern island by the Meiji Emperor, signaling Hokkaido’s increasing importance in Japan. Though his 1876 visit was brief, he took a more extensive journey five years later, including arrival at Otaru followed by travel to Sapporo and through the island to Hakodate. During his tour, he saw horse races in Sapporo arranged “for His Majesty’s pleasure,” wrote Edwin Dun.39 The emperor’s 1876 visit, by the way, has been commemorated by a national holiday in Japan. Marine Day was established in 1995 to honor the sea and its products, which have been so important to the island nation. The holiday marks the emperor’s July 20, 1876 return from Hokkaido to Honshu.

7

The Foreign Experts

A number of foreign advisers are linked with the story of Hokkaido and its development in the Kaitakushi era and for a few years afterward. Many Wajin from the south had been enticed to move to Hokkaido, but living conditions there as well as methods for successful farming differed so much from those in most of Japan that in 1871 Kuroda Kiyotaka went abroad to find experts who could offer advice on Hokkaido development, working both as teachers and in the field. As a result, eighty foreigners, mostly American, came to work for the Kaitakushi. Their methods and suggestions influenced Hokkaido development. They did not turn the island into a foreign piece of America, for the Japanese made the decisions, choosing and adapting the ideas of the foreigners that seemed practical and compatible with Japanese ways of life. The foreign experts made a real contribution, though, and their writings have provided us with a window through which we can view the land they came to and influenced. The foreigners arrived at an undeveloped island. “The whole of Yesso is practically a terra incognita to the inhabitants of Nippon,” wrote William P. Blake after working on Hokkaido. Horace Capron felt that “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.” In 1880, Isabella Bird told her British readers, “Yezo is to the main island of Japan ... in the rough, little known, and thinly-peopled; and people can locate all sorts of improbable stories here without much fear of being found out.”1 The island truly was mostly wild and undeveloped. Before the 1868 Meiji Restoration the shogunate brought a few foreign experts to Hokkaido, notably two American mining engineers, Raphael Pumpelly and William P. Blake, hired in 1862 to survey mineral resources in Japan and teach modern mining techniques. These men were well-qualified for the task; Pumpelly was the first graduate mining engineer in the United States and Blake had participated in the expedition of the United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers which surveyed land for a transcontinental railroad line. The Pumpelly-Blake mission to Japan became embroiled in questions both of protocol and politics, however. The two men were to work well away from the treaty ports, as the ports opened to foreign ships were then called. Since foreigners had been forbidden to venture beyond these ports, Japanese officials felt uneasy about hiring the foreign mining engineers. Negotiations regarding their employment had to be carried out in Dutch, the only European language Japanese used at that time. (In just a few more years, English studies burgeoned and English became acceptable.) When the two Americans arrived, the Japanese government in Edo hesitated for a month before receiving them because officials could not decide whether these mining engineers should

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be treated as officials or as mere workmen. This was sorted out — they were welcomed with honor — but the shogunate was facing more and more criticism over Japan’s new policy of accommodation with foreign nations. Thus the officials sent the two experts to the place where they might be least offensive to government opponents: Ezo. Pumpelly and Blake took to the northern island a number of technical books and some of the most up-to-date scientific instruments used in mineral surveys and mining. Disembarking at Hakodate in May 1862, they traveled on horseback to mines in the Oshima Peninsula. Pumpelly noted the lack of modern mining equipment; the Japanese had neither pumps nor blasting powder, using instead pick and hammer. Pumpelly carried out the first blasting ever done in a Japanese mine and he and Blake introduced machinery to pump water out of mines. Confined for two months in Hakodate because of a measles epidemic and later because winter conditions made travel and inspection too difficult, the two Americans taught modern mineral extraction methods to an eager audience. One of their students, Oshima Takato, later took a leading role in developing Japan’s mining industry. In February 1863, the shogunate withdrew the foreigners’ contract — because of increasing anti-foreign feeling in Japan, Pumpelly understood. Some of the daimyo even accused the two men of spying. Pumpelly later wrote about his experiences2 and had a mineral discovered in Hokkaido— pumpellyite — named for him. As for the future of mining, the two men suggested that based on what they had seen on the Oshima Peninsula, the island’s rugged and heavily forested terrain would preclude systematic mining development. A few years later, in 1867, the shogunate hired two British mining engineers, Erasmus M. Gower and James Scott. Gower’s brother Abel was the British consul at Nagasaki, which no doubt influenced the employment negotiations. Government officials in Hakodate wanted Gower to develop the Oshima coal mines, which he did. Working at the Kayanuma Mine near the peninsula’s west coast, he built the first inclined railway in Japan for bringing out minerals, a track along the Tama River. More than half a century later — in 1931— a ropeway replaced the railway. The mine closed in 1964 and many local families left the area, but jobs later became available nearby at Tomari’s nuclear power plant, which began generating power in 1989. Another project set up before the Kaitakushi years involved agriculture. A German merchant, R. Gaertner, received a ninety-nine year lease on almost twenty five hundred acres of land in order to establish a model farm in Nanae, about ten miles north of Hakodate. Though Gaertner renewed his lease when rebel forces took control of the Hakodate area and renewed it again after the Meiji government defeated the shogun’s supporters, the Kaitakushi questioned the conditions of the contract and bought him out. American advisers took over the farm and introduced methods they considered more up-to-date. The farm furnished familiar foodstuffs for the westerners living in Hakodate and for the crews of foreign ships stopping at the port. One 1881 visitor, Arthur H. Crow, wrote that inspecting the farm brought on pangs of homesickness. He recalled “the manager’s pretty white, wooden house ... for all the world like a cosy New England homestead.”3 The Meiji government, concerned about Japan’s place in the world, brought many foreign experts to Japan. Most of these men were European, but Kuroda Kiyotaka chose to go to the United States to seek experts. He felt that climatic conditions in Hokkaido were similar to those in New England, where successful agriculture had long been established. Also, American farmers used agricultural machinery more than did Europeans.

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Finally, involving the United States would not cause international repercussions, whereas close cooperation with a European nation could complicate Japanese relations with Russia — and much of the reason for wanting Hokkaido developed was to help ensure that Russia would not be in a position to wrest the island from Japan. During the eleven years of Kaitakushi existence, the organization hired fifty Americans, seventeen Europeans and thirteen Chinese.4

Horace Capron Horace Capron became the leader of the team of American advisers recruited by the Kaitakushi to advise the organization on Hokkaido development. To find the best person to employ, Kuroda Kiyotaka set sail for the United States on January 1, 1871. First he headed for the nation’s capital, where Mori Arinori, Japanese charge d’affaires, helped arrange a meeting with President Ulysses S. Grant. Grant suggested that Secretary of Agriculture General Horace Capron was the man whom Kuroda ought to see, and Kuroda therefore asked Capron to suggest someone who might assume the position. Kuroda indicated to Capron three important fields of endeavor: first, agriculture—specifically in regard to soil, manure and machinery; second, transportation and irrigation, including roads, canals and dams; and third, the sciences related to natural resources— botany, geology and mineralogy. All these would be under the purview of the foreign expert Kuroda hoped to hire. The perfect candidate did not appear, and eventually President Grant recommended Capron. The Secretary of Agriculture consulted William P. Blake, who was enthusiastic about Hokkaido’s possibilities. Capron agreed to take the job, after specifying the generous salary and benefits he would expect. On August 1, 1871, Horace Capron left San Francisco for Japan, taking along three assistants. It did not prove easy to find them (though once Capron was in Japan, many people expressed their interest in joining him there). He hired a chemist, Dr. Thomas Antisell, to be in charge of geology. Major A. J. Warfield, a civil engineer with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, would direct civil engineering and Stuart Eldridge would be Capron’s secretary. Sixty-seven years old when he arrived in Japan, Horace Capron was “a fine dignified looking, old gentleman.”5 Born in Massachusetts, he grew up in upper New York State. Learning about industry from his father’s cotton and woolen mills, he became manager of a mill in Maryland, married there, opened his own mill and helped build a village. He began farming, too, and gained a great deal of knowledge of agriculture. Later he moved to Illinois, where he raised cattle and horses, and when the Civil War began, he organized a regiment and led his troops in battle. He was a brigadier general when discharged after being injured. After the war, his supporters both in Maryland and Illinois obtained for him the position of United States Commissioner of Agriculture, the head of the Department of Agriculture in Washington which had been created five years earlier. He held this position when the chance to go to Japan came his way. Arriving in Japan August 25, Capron established his headquarters in Tokyo. He and his assistants were lodged in a Tokyo temple complex. They received an effusive welcome and were even presented to the twenty-year-old emperor. Capron visited Hokkaido only during the summers, but about a month after the party arrived in Japan he sent his two technical assistants, Warfield and Antisell, to the

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northern island, whose southwestern area they studied for more than two months. They were to report on soils, trees and grasses, minerals, topography, possibilities for water power and climate. The two men reached wildly different conclusions. Antisell, fearful of winter’s cold and snow in the Ishikari Valley, which had been chosen for the site of Hokkaido’s new capital city, suggested that a capital be developed instead at Muroran, on Hokkaido’s southern coast. Warfield, on the other hand, was enthusiastic about the prospects of the Ishikari plain for agriculture. On the basis of the survey, Capron submitted recommendations to Kuroda in January. Capron played down the problems of Hokkaido’s winter weather, comparing the climate to that of the northern United States. He praised the island’s abundant fishery, forest and mineral resources and potential for agriculture, suggesting the cultivation of fruit trees as well as grains not common in Japan. He advocated using farm machinery to supplement human labor. He urged a thorough survey of the island’s resources, the development of roads on the island, and implementation of a better transportation system between Hokkaido and Honshu. He strongly recommended settlement of an agricultural population, which he thought would become the backbone of the island. He thought that settlers should adapt their life style to the northern region, for example giving up their dependence on rice. He described the laws that had been developed in the United States to support homesteading. His suggestions were positive enough to encourage the Kaitakushi to carry out their plans for development. Capron recommended that an agricultural school and experimental farm be established, and they were, in the Tokyo area in 1872, in order to instruct young men in agricultural techThe Japanese government hired Horace Capron as niques they could apply in Hokkaido. leader of the American experts brought to Japan in A few years later, the school, now relothe 1870s to advise on Hokkaido development. Cap- cated to Hokkaido, became Sapporo ron spent four years in Japan, and continued his Agricultural College. (It evolved into interest in Hokkaido and his advice on its development after he returned to the United States. His today’s Hokkaido University.) Capron advised establishment of experimental statue stands in Sapporo’s Odori Park.

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stations in Hokkaido, too, and the Kaitakushi set up farms for agricultural research at Nanae, at Nemuro and near Sapporo. It is thanks to Horace Capron that many western implements were introduced to the country. One of his first orders upon reaching Japan was to order sawmill construction machinery from America. He also arranged for the shipment of American plants, including vegetables, grains and bush and tree fruit to the new farms and had farm animals— horses, cows and sheep — and machinery delivered to Japan. A small grist mill from one of the early shipments is now on display at the Sapporo Botanic Garden. When Horace Capron finally traveled to Hokkaido, arriving in late June 1872, he stayed for almost three weeks in Hakodate and then set out overland, on horseback, for Sapporo. This was a way to see the country, which was certainly one of his objectives. His party crossed the peninsula north from Hakodate and after a day awaiting better weather, crossed Uchiura Bay in a “frail bark,” almost a seven hour trip.6 He reported that lumber was being cut under his team’s direction already and that canals and reservoirs had been made ready for moving and storing the lumber. When his sawmill was in operation in Sapporo, Capron estimated that it could do the work of six hundred men. Capron enthused at the warmth of Sapporo’s weather in late July “at mid-day 80o to o 85 in the shade.” Seeing mountains and hills awash in wildflowers in full bloom, he could not understand Antisell’s negative reports. Capron was delighted to find that contrary to Antisell’s opinion, corn could mature in the Sapporo vicinity. In his memoirs, Capron again and again remarked upon how mistaken Antisell had been. (Capron also wrote that he had not had enough time to find the best possible men to accompany him.)7 During his stay in Japan, Capron went to Hokkaido each summer, making only three visits to the northern island during his almost four years in Japan. What he saw sometimes pleased him, but not always. During his second visit to Sapporo, he commented on the number of houses that had been built “after our American style of architecture, more suitable for colder regions.... The thin paper and bamboo houses universal throughout Japan and followed upon this island, were actually uninhabitable in the winter.” But the settlers in Hokkaido did not take to American-style homes with wooden floors, chairs and high tables. (American mining expert Benjamin Lyman suggested the policy that should have been tried: adapting “the ordinary Japanese house to the winter climate.”)8 Nor did many of the farmers use the farm machinery brought to Japan, largely because of its cost and limited availability. The use of horses, also new to farm work in Japan, increased in Hokkaido, but slowly, due to expense. On that second visit north, Horace Capron was behind a bullock team, guiding the first plow to make a furrow on the island. Some of Capron’s ideas were not applicable. Consider rice, for example. Capron recommended to Kuroda that wheat and other grain crops naturally suited to Hokkaido be planted instead of rice. Kuroda reported this to other Kaitakushi officials, but as rice was the mainstay of the Japanese diet, Japanese farmers made repeated attempts to grow it in Hokkaido. Capron was mistaken that people needed to base their diet on grains suitable to the climate in order to stay healthy. A wheat-based diet made economic sense but changing people’s diet proved a losing cause, even though for a time the Kaitakushi forbade the cultivation of rice on the island. Today, the very popular Hokkaido noodles— ramen — are wheat products, and another food especially popular in Hokkaido, soba, is made from buckwheat, a grain also admirably suited to Hokkaido’s climate. The Dosanko, however, eat a lot of rice just as do other Japanese.

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Capron feared that the Japanese people did not have the strength and endurance to develop Hokkaido, and he wanted pioneers from Europe and North America brought to the island to settle and set examples for the Japanese; this the Japanese officials would not allow. Capron also predicted that Americans would one day come to Hokkaido for its scenery, just as they went to Switzerland in his day. Horace Capron was not altogether happy in Japan, and his work had mixed results. He did not always get along well with the other Americans who worked for the Kaitakushi and, like other foreign experts, he sometimes chafed under Japanese leadership. He was a “charming companion but nil as an organizer or leader of men,” wrote livestock expert Edwin Dun, who, however, praised Capron’s American staff. Capron took offense when the Kaitakushi did not implement his ideas, and it vexed him when the Japanese modified his suggestions. The Japanese penchant for hiring unneeded officials frustrated him. He had fixed ideas regarding changes in Japanese living styles which should be adopted in Hokkaido and he did not realize how much a people — any people — will resist such changes. But much of his work did see fruition. Among the accomplishments for which he deserves at least some of the credit are creation of a Hokkaido livestock industry, modernization of the Hokkaido mining industry, construction of roads and railroads, and the introduction of agricultural education in Japan. Before his departure, Capron had an audience with the Emperor, who praised him for his “valuable services.”9 Horace Capron and Kuroda Kiyotaka continued to correspond after Capron’s return to Washington. At the Kaitakushi’s request, Capron sent various items to Japan, and once at home in the United States, he spoke out to urge close relations between the two countries. Just under ten years after his departure from Japan, he died at the age of eighty.

Capron’s experts Horace Capron’s assignment in Japan could succeed only if the foreigners who came to work on Hokkaido development under his direction carried out their tasks. Some of the men stand out: the achievements of Benjamin Lyman, Joseph Crawford, Edwin Dun and Louis Boehmer are remarkable — but all of the “western exports,” even those with mixed records, contributed positively to Hokkaido. Thomas Antisell, born in Ireland and educated in Europe, where he studied chemistry and qualified in medicine, emigrated to the United States when he was just over thirty years old and subsequently worked in various fields. Capron hired him because of his strong background in chemistry and, thus, some knowledge of geology. In addition to disagreeing with Capron about whether Hokkaido’s winter climate would preclude development, Antisell got into a dispute with Capron and the Kaitakushi over salary, threatening to leave were it not raised. Though Antisell eventually decided to stay, the Kaitakushi hired a new geologist and Antisell’s report on his 1871 trip to Hokkaido is not included in the volume of official reports issued in 1875. Instead, one can read the report William P. Blake wrote after his time on the northern island several years before the Kaitakushi hired Capron. Antisell served out the time in his Kaitakushi contract by working at the Tokyo Temporary school, afterward serving for two more years as a chemist for the Japanese Finance Ministry. Benjamin Smith Lyman came to Hokkaido as the new mining expert. He would take over the job originally earmarked for Antisell. Lyman had recently completed a one-year

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project surveying petroleum fields in India for the British government. Now, after his arrival in early 1873, he studied the Japanese language and, with Henry Smith Munroe and several Japanese assistants, began extensive surveying in Hokkaido. That spring, while inspecting the Ishikari River basin and going to Horonai because a Sapporo man had found lumps of coal in the area, Lyman’s crew discovered a rich deposit. He also examined potential sites in the Oshima Peninsula that year. In each of the three summers he worked for the Kaitakushi, Lyman traveled in Hokkaido, prospecting and exploring. In 1874, he led a group far up the Ishikari River. One day in mid–July the men camped at what is now the city of Asahikawa. Lyman enthused over the area, comparing it to Kashmir, the idyllic mountain land in northern India and Pakistan. Just as India’s Mughal emperors used to travel to Kashmir for respite from summer’s heat, Lyman thought the Emperor of Japan should come each summer to this “little paradise” where “a fine summer palace and baths” could be built.10 On this trip, Lyman continued eastward, traversing the mountains and then heading to the island’s southeast coast, exploring the Tokachi district, proceeding to Kushiro and Nemuro in the far southeast, then going north all the way to Cape Soya. He returned south along the island’s west coast. This was his longest journey. In 1875, Lyman traveled in different parts of western Hokkaido, looking closely at different coal mines. All in all, Lyman saw a great deal of the terrain of Hokkaido, and he estimated a probable sixty-five billion tons of coal on the island. Lyman and his men also reported on other mineral deposits they found, though Lyman’s emphasis was on coal. He also studied sites for possible harbor and water power development. On his travels, Lyman used Matsuura Takeshiro’s map. Lyman the scientist took care to make measurements of Ainu members of his crew. He wrote about the Ainu, “the digesting and assimilating powers of their stomach are so good that they require only half as much rice as the Japanese coolies ... and that without making up for it by eating more fish or meat.”11 In contrast to this strange observation, his cartography and geologic analyses were careful and precise. Lyman was not very successful in dealing with Kaitakushi officials, but his achievements helped lead to Hokkaido’s future development. His Hokkaido research continued until 1876, though he wintered in Tokyo each year, using this time to construct accurate maps and write his reports. He created the first geological map made of any part of Japan. After leaving Hokkaido upon completion of his Kaitakushi contract, he worked for the government of Japan until 1879, surveying Honshu for petroleum deposits. Even after his contract with the Japanese government expired, he toiled without pay on reports and maps to ensure that his efforts would have lasting value. One of his most useful accomplishments was the training in Hokkaido of his young Japanese assistants, who continued to carry out scientific work after Lyman left Japan. One suggestion of his that the Kaitakushi did not adopt, though, was to allow foreign investment in Hokkaido development. Capron’s civil engineer, A. J. Warfield, contributed to the creation of Hokkaido’s infrastructure, but his misbehavior outweighed his accomplishments. His work was competent; he recommended development of Muroran harbor and surveyed and directed the building of roads, the most important of which went from Hakodate north across the mountain ridge to Uchiura Bay and on to Sapporo. Officials pressured Warfield to get this work done quickly, but while supervising the work, he had difficulty in having his orders understood. He had to use an interpreter and perhaps more significant, the Japanese

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workers did not understand American methods. His frustrations probably contributed to Warfield’s excessive drinking. When intoxicated he could be violent; once while apparently inebriated he fatally shot five dogs belonging to Ainu men. This was more serious than he may have realized, for to the Ainu, dogs were not pets but working animals. Another incident precipitated Warfield’s dismissal. One morning he started his drinking even before breakfast. Becoming angry, he pulled a knife on both his interpreter and a student, cutting the interpreter slightly. Warfield did apologize later, but the damage was done; the Kaitakushi fired him despite his engineering competence. Warfield resisted the dismissal, then insisted he be paid his complete salary including that for the period after his discharge. He appealed to Charles De Long, American Minister to Japan, because the Kaitakushi wanted to pay him nothing. Eventually, under a compromise settlement, Warfield got half his salary as well as the cost of his travel back to the United States. Warfield carried out useful surveying work, which was extended by James R. Wasson, whom the Kaitakushi had hired in 1872 to teach English and mathematics at the temporary school in Tokyo. A year later, Wasson became the organization’s chief surveyor. Murray S. Day continued the effort and by 1875 mapped all of Hokkaido. It was Day who placed official survey markers atop island peaks. Stuart Eldridge, hired to be Capron’s secretary, also had a mixed record. He had been trained in medicine and employed as a United States Department of Agriculture librarian. Once in Japan, Eldridge was more interested in furthering his career in medicine than in following Capron’s directions and, in fact, was contemptuous of Capron. Eldridge tried to alter his contract to his own benefit and Capron charged that Eldridge took for his own use some of the funds meant for other expenses. A revised contract changed his title to “Secretary and Surgeon of the Kaitakushi.” For two and one-half years he worked for the organization in Hakodate. In addition to founding a hospital and establishing a medical school, he taught classes in many different medical disciplines. Feeling that it was most important to establish modern medical practices in Hokkaido, he produced the first medical journal in Japan. He also inspected Sapporo hospital facilities and made recommendations for expanding medical care in Sapporo. The breach with Capron was not mended, however, and after fulfilling his contract, Eldridge went to Yokohama, practicing medicine at the foreigners’ hospital there until his 1901 death. Whatever the relationship between Eldridge and Capron became, Eldridge has been credited as the person who “laid the foundation of modern medical science in Hokkaido.”12 The official report Capron submitted to the Kaitakushi included nothing from Eldridge, just as it ignored Antisell. Edwin Dun is honored in Hokkaido today, recognized as “the father of Hokkaido’s dairy industry.”13 Of all the foreigners hired to work on the northern island during this period, it was he who found the place and the people the most congenial. Horace Capron’s son recruited Dun, the son of an Ohio farm family, to go to Japan as a livestock expert. Arriving in July 1873, he first worked on the Kaitakushi farm in Tokyo but thought that if the Kaitakushi mission was to develop Hokkaido, the livestock should be in Hokkaido, not on a crowded Tokyo farm. He thought the American advisers should have imported some dairy cattle, not just beef cattle, and that much of the farm machinery imported from the United States would be impractical if not useless in Japan. He thought that American advisers should have actual, not theoretical, experience and was not impressed by Capron, suggesting that Capron was recommended for the Kaitakushi job as a way of

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getting an inefficient administrator out of Washington. A highlight of his Kaitakushi career came when the Emperor visited. Dun demonstrated some of the machinery the Americans had imported for Hokkaido use, and while in top hat and evening dress, operated the steam-driven threshing machine. Dun’s achievements were varied. He worked on improvements to the Kaitakushi’s model farm at Nanae, for example recommending an expansion of the drainage system and the creation of pasture lands. He concluded that the Ishikari Valley would be a more successful location for farming because of its amount of usable land, fertility, and the availability of nearby timber. With an imported churn, he introduced butter making to Japan. An example of the useful suggestions American advisers made is illustrated by Dun’s experience with sheep in Hokkaido. He found sheep raising quite practical and was able to increase substantially the amount of wool per animal. Given the need to feed sheep through the long Hokkaido winter, however, he recommended that sheep raising not be established there because it would be cheaper to import wool to Japan from Australia. With his colleague William Brooks, Dun carried out a three-year test to assess the possibility of growing sugar beets in Hokkaido. The men used good land in various places, a number of kinds of proven seeds and different amounts and types of fertilizer. At the end of the experiment, Dun did not recommend the crop. The sugar content of the mature beets was too low, he said, apparently because of the cold climate. Several years later, after the Kaitakushi was disbanded, the Hokkaido government had sugar mills built near Muroran and at Sapporo. The first mill failed and the second one never began operation. Dun was not surprised, but he had kind words for those who had planned the illconceived project: “I am disposed to attribute it to their optimistic temperament that prevents the recognition of even the impossible.”14 Many years later, however, a beet sugar industry based in the Tokachi area became successful. Dun oversaw development of two extensive areas for raising livestock. In the Makomanai area (now in the south part of Sapporo) he established a large dairy farm. He supervised construction of a three-level barn in 1877. It had earthen ramps to the upper stories. The top was for hay storage, below that lived the cows and, on the ground level, pigs. Dun and his men also established the Kaitakushi stud farm at Niikappu. Dun found that the native scrub bamboo on the site made an excellent food for the animals during the winter. Wolves almost totally destroyed the first crop of foals, so Dun recommended the extinction of wolves and arranged for the use of strychnine to accomplish this. Though in pioneer days this seemed appropriate, today it is hard to justify the complete elimination of a natural species. The farmers eventually put out poisoned meat to kill the wild animals. It worked, and the horse breeding continued without real difficulty during Dun’s years in Hokkaido, except for once when a plague of locusts devoured what seemed to be every single green plant for miles. Even now Niikappu is known for its horses; some of its stallions claim very high stud fees. Edwin Dun enjoyed his time working for the Kaitakushi more than did some of the other Americans. He married a Japanese woman and settled in Sapporo, living there from 1876 to 1883 and working with livestock. He came to have a more thorough and realistic understanding of Hokkaido’s potential than did the other foreign advisers. He subsequently spent most of his life in Japan, becoming American minister to the Asian nation for four years and then working in private business, but he said his best years were those he spent in Hokkaido.

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In the late 1870s, American engineer Joseph Crawford directed construction of the first railroad to be built in Hokkaido. It ran from the coal mining center, Horonai, to Sapporo and on to Otaru. Crawford is honored today by this statue, fittingly located at the site of the terminus in Otaru of the railroad he built.

Among the American experts working in Hokkaido during these years was Louis Boehmer, hired by Capron as “nursery-man and gardener.” Boehmer was born in Germany and became an American citizen in his twenties. He worked in Japan for ten years, carrying out an extensive survey of Hokkaido’s native plants. He established a vineyard and made wine; for the beverage he tried local fruits, wild grape and kokuwa, a fruit apparently related to kiwi that had, he wrote, “a very agre[e]able flavor and may turn out

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something quite new in the Wine market.” He found wild hops growing and suggested that hops raised on the island would make a brewing industry practicable. Thus he arranged to import cultivated hop varieties for planting in Hokkaido. The beer brewed in Sapporo with native hops before imported ones were ready, he wrote, was so pure that it “can be recommended to everybody even Temperance people might be induced to take this Beer as a light Beverage.” (When England reported a shortage of hops in 1886, the Japan Weekly Mail suggested growing hops in Hokkaido for export to Europe.) Boehmer also earned credit for introducing many varieties of flowers to Japan. Sapporo, in fact, became a leading source in Asia of flower seeds and plants. Boehmer brought Hokkaido flowers to Europe and America, including one Thomas Blakiston admired and described as a climbing hydrangea. Boehmer carried out extensive botanical exploration on Hokkaido and found many useful native plants, including raspberries, blackberries and red currants as well as many trees, some similar to European and American species and some different.15 An American railroad engineer, Joseph Crawford, supervised construction of the first railroad line in Hokkaido, from Otaru eastward to Sapporo and beyond, through Ebetsu to the foothills of the mountains, where it would serve the Horonai mine. First, the section from Temiya, at the coast in Otaru, to Sapporo was completed, but even after it opened, Crawford continued work on it, making improvements such as straightening out the curves. He trained a number of young Japanese, including Matsumoto Soichiro and Hirai Seijiro, who continued Hokkaido railway development after Crawford left Japan. Matsumoto and Hirai essentially created the railroad infrastructure that served Hokkaido for the next century and each later served as director of the entire nation’s railway system. “Shoulder to Shoulder to Open a Way” reads the plinth on the statue of Joseph Crawford now displayed in front of the Transportation Museum in Otaru at the site of the end of this rail line he built. Other Americans working in Hokkaido in those years included N. W. Holt and James Irwin. Mechanical engineer Holt planned a water mill to provide power at Nanae. He also built lumber mills and constructed the first bridge across the Toyohira River in Sapporo. Irwin was charged with accompanying a shipment of animals across the Pacific Ocean to Japan: nineteen cows and eighty-nine sheep. A storm at sea tossed the animals around despite efforts made to tie them down, and three of the cows died. Two sheep, moreover, succumbed to catarrh — but one lamb was born on the way. Not quite everyone appreciated the American experts. The Kaitakushi hired Enomoto Takeaki after his abortive attempt to found an independent Hokkaido, but he felt the American experts did not accept his judgment and he soon resigned from the organization. And when the government imposed high taxes, some islanders—fishermen, for example — blamed the foreign experts for the high levies, feeling that their salaries were a wasteful use of government funds. Some American advisers, meanwhile, criticized the Kaitakushi for various practices: hiring great numbers of Japanese workers for jobs when only a few were needed, not following the foreigners’ advice, misusing funds and employing secretive methods, such as failing to apprise the foreign experts of policy changes. The western experts introduced many things to Japan, including the farm machinery Horace Capron arranged to be sent there. Some of the machines, especially plows and mowers, eventually caught on because the large Hokkaido fields were more than farmers could work easily with hand tools. Among the vegetables the Americans first brought to Hokkaido were asparagus, tomatoes, celery, carrots, lettuce, onions and peas. The

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foreign advisers brought wheat from America in 1872, and its use spread slowly beyond Hokkaido south to Honshu. They imported oats and corn too, and introduced clover and grasses as hay crops. They also brought in trees and flowers. Upon American recommendations, the Kaitakushi imported a large stock of fruit trees and bushes in 1871. The number of varieties reported is amazing: seventy-five kinds of apple, fifty-three pear, twenty-five cherry, fourteen plum, thirty grape, fourteen raspberry, five blackberry, eight gooseberry, ten currant and a few types of peaches and apricots.16 The American vegetables and fruits were new — and they did not find a market immediately, because the Japanese pioneers on the island wanted food familiar to them. By the mid–twentieth century, the list of crops introduced by the western experts which remained important in Hokkaido’s economy included only wheat, oats, hay crops, corn, sugar beets, barley, potatoes, apples and cherries.

William Smith Clark In Japan today, William Smith Clark is the best known of all the foreign advisers who worked for the Kaitakushi. The organization recruited him for the agricultural college that Capron prescribed be built in Sapporo. This recommendation may have been Capron’s most important contribution while he served in Japan and establishment of the college has been described as the Kaitakushi’s greatest accomplishment. Kuroda agreed with Capron that a college was important and that an American educator should be chosen to help lead the new college, which would be the first agricultural college in Asia. Mori Arinori and his successor as Japanese representative in Washington, D.C., Yoshida Kiyonari, recommended William Smith Clark for the position, and he accepted in 1876 after specifying a high salary, stating that he could only take the appointment for one year, and stipulating that his title would be president. Though he took that title, in reality he was second in command under college director Zusho Hirotake. Clark would also be “professor of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics and the English language.” (The Japanese version of Clark’s contract referred to him as “head teacher.”)17 William S. Clark had risen to the rank of colonel in the Civil War, afterward teaching at Amherst College where one of his students was Niijima Jo, whom Clark described as the first Japanese he had taught. Soon afterward, Clark played an important role in the founding of one of the first land grant colleges in the United States, Massachusetts Agricultural College, located in Amherst, and had been president since its first classes met in 1867. (It grew to become today’s University of Massachusetts.) Horace Capron knew of the college and had recommended it to a Japanese student searching for an American institution to attend. Several other Japanese sent by the Kaitakushi also went to MAC. A model for the Sapporo college could be American land grant colleges, thought Mori Arinori. (Legislation adopted during the American Civil War specified that federal land could be used for “Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.”18 Moneys received for federal land sold under the act would be invested, the proceeds used to support the American colleges.) MAC was a land grant college; in addition, similarities of climate and terrain in Massachusetts and Hokkaido suggested that agricultural techniques understood by an Amherst professor should be applicable at the Sapporo College.

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Clark, who reached Sapporo on his fiftieth birthday, was impressed that Kuroda wanted to establish an agricultural college in Hokkaido at a time when few such institutions existed anywhere in the world. He arrived in Japan full of enthusiasm for his new task, partly influenced by Japanese students who had come under his wing at Amherst. One Japanese student had not met Massachusetts Agricultural College qualifications, but came from an important family; Clark had agreed to admit him to the college. This young man, Naito Seitaro, repaid the favor by interpreting for Clark during the professor’s time in Sapporo. Clark established a curriculum in Sapporo similar to that of his MAC but he also began informally proselytizing, urging the students to become Christians. Officially, Christianity was not allowed in Hokkaido, though prohibition of the western religion had recently been rescinded for Japan’s other islands. But Clark and Kuroda agreed that “moral education” was imperative for the students, and Clark insisted that only through Christianity could he teach this. Kuroda assented to the idea that the Bible become a classroom text in the college; he may have been wary of the controversy that would ensue should Clark give up his position over the question. A number of the early college students did convert to Christianity. (Some may have thought that because Christianity was the religion of highly developed western nations, this religion could help spur modernization in Japan.) In fact, the group of Christian converts at the college became known as one of the three “bands” responsible for the early development of Protestant Christianity in Japan. (The other bands were in Yokohama and Kumamoto.) In 1914, some of the students began to collect funds to build a church to honor Clark, and the William S. Clark Memorial Church opened in Sapporo in 1922. Clark’s recommendations, decisions and activities at the new college covered many fields. He instituted required military training as part of the curriculum. This was new to Japan, but he modeled it upon practice in United States land grant colleges. Clark brought in sports. He arranged for the creation of a model farm to be established in conjunction with the college and it was built, complete with an American-style barn, thus introducing a typical American building style into the Hokkaido landscape. Clark and the other American professors introduced various farm animal breeds and plant varieties they thought would suit Hokkaido. Clark even worked to develop pasture crops from native plants and imported seed in order to produce a superior animal feed. He gave advice on forest practices. Like Capron, he suggested establishing a settlement of migrants from America in Hokkaido. Clark felt that such a colony would take a leading role in spreading modes of life and agricultural practices suitable for a northern climate. William Smith Clark was a dedicated teacher. In addition to all the practices and policies he established or recommended, he inspired his students. He taught classes in botany and English, and not only did he persuade them to adopt his religion, he was able to convince them to be proud of manual labor, something altogether foreign to educated Japanese. But Clark’s writings make clear his opinion that American agriculture was superior, and thus he felt his task was to teach American farming practice to the Japanese rather than to introduce it with a sensitivity to traditional Japanese values. His dismissal of Japanese traditions would certainly have ruffled a few feathers. One story about Clark is told, with illustrations, on a wall in a Hokkaido University museum today. In January 1877, Clark led a group of eleven students and two professors on an ascent of nearby Mt. Teine (3,360 ft.) Near the summit Clark spied a lichen high in a tree. Wanting to know whether it was a newly-discovered one, he asked a student

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to pluck it. Professor Clark leaned over and directed the student to stand on his back in order to reach the plant. Standing in the snow, the student began to take off his shoes first, but Clark stopped him, and, shoes on, the student stood on his professor’s back and reached the lichen. Study showed that it was not an unknown variety, but Clark’s action impressed the students. Clark carried out a number of tasks for the Kaitakushi. As so many ventures in and around Sapporo were beginning at that time, officials sought Clark’s opinion on many matters: how to breed oysters, where to locate barracks, where to quarry stone, how to can salmon. He gave advice on the care of a mulberry orchard. Even after he returned to the United States, he continued advising Kuroda by mail on many subjects, from establishing a paper industry to producing the type of silk that would sell best in America. On his way home, he studied the salmon industry in the American Northwest in order to send suggestions on this subject to Kuroda. The college president from America also had various suggestions for improving life in Sapporo. He urged that houses have stoves and chimneys, not simple openings in the roof through which charcoal smoke could escape. He urged glass windows to replace paper ones, both to hold the heat and to let in more light. He also urged thicker walls to conserve heat. Clark left Hokkaido in April 1877, only eight months after his arrival, but he had a lasting impact on the island. (Perhaps his influence is so strong because he did not stay long, Dallas Finn suggests; Clark left at a time when his impact was immediate.) Clark’s Hokkaido experience was the high point of his life. Back in America, an ambitious educational venture failed, his investments went sour and he died in 1886, a few months short of sixty years of age.19 By far the best known story about William Smith Clark concerns his departure from Sapporo. He made the overland journey on horseback, traveling south from the city instead of taking ship from Otaru because he planned to stop in Hakodate and visit the farm at nearby Nanae. All of the faculty and students accompanied him from Sapporo for perhaps ten miles. When he left them in the village of Shimamatsu, now part of the city of Kita Hiroshima, it was with the words, “Boys, be ambitious!” These words may or may not have been uttered by Clark, and if they were, they were probably part of a longer phrase. One version is that he actually said “Boys, be ambitious for Christ,” which sound like words Clark clearly might have spoken, but the three simple words are what people today remember.20 “Boys, be ambitious” has been printed and restated throughout Japan in the years since. A memorial at Shimamatsu commemorates the event and a bust of Clark appears on the Hokkaido University grounds now. In addition, a “Boys, be ambitious!” statue of Clark, erected in 1976, one hundred years after his visit to Hokkaido, stands atop the hill called Hitsujigaoka, pointing the way and looking down upon the city of Sapporo.

The college professors In all, eleven foreign professors served Sapporo Agricultural College in its first decade and a half, all but three from Massachusetts Agricultural College. The two who accompanied Clark, William Wheeler and David Penhallow, had been his students in Massachusetts. William Brooks followed a few months later.

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William Wheeler had been in the first freshman class at the Massachusetts school. After graduating in 1871 he worked as a civil engineer in the eastern United States. His contract with the Kaitakushi was for a two year appointment at the new college, to teach civil engineering, mechanics, and English. In addition to teaching, Wheeler recorded weather conditions three times each day and planned and carried out various engineering projects. He surveyed locations for both road and railroad between Sapporo and its port city, Otaru, and recommended constructing a railroad line from Sapporo south to Muroran. He suggested that the Kaitakushi send agricultural teachers to the island’s farming communities and that educating men to be these teachers should be a leading priority of the college. It was Wheeler who drew up the plans for the college farm’s barn. Wheeler explored land around Sapporo on horseback, on foot and by boat. He also traveled farther afield, mostly investigating the terrain around Uchiura Bay and farther south on the Oshima Pen- William S. Clark came from America in 1876 to help insula. Once while traveling in the found Sapporo Agricultural College, which grew into today’s Hokkaido University. Clark is best known for his mountains near Jozankei spa high parting words to his students, “Boys, be ambitious!” and in the Sapporo hills, he tried to ford this statue in Sapporo’s Hitsujigaoka Park portrays Clark a stream on horseback though his delivering his message. Ainu guide discouraged this; Wheeler was lucky to survive. When Clark left Sapporo, Wheeler became acting president and then president of the college, but he did not relish the administrative part of the job. (He did not enjoy his contacts with Japanese officials, who were uneasy that someone so young held the job.) He served as president until December 1879. William Wheeler’s contribution to the college and its students was as important as Clark’s. Wheeler lacked Clark’s vigorous personality, but from Wheeler the students learned the importance of both independent thinking and practical learning. David Penhallow came to the college to teach botany, chemistry, mathematics, agriculture and English. He collected many biological specimens and wrote about them as well as analyzing soil. He designed the college arboretum, carried out experiments in

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growing hops and mulberries, gave advice on how to make whisky, and analyzed fish bones for their phosphorus content. He succeeded Wheeler as president, and when he left in 1880, William Brooks assumed the presidency. Brooks introduced ice skating to the college students. This is a fitting memory to keep of him, for he arrived in Hokkaido in the midst of the 1877 winter to take up the post of agriculture professor and college farm superintendent. He had an eventful journey to Sapporo. The steamer trip from Yokohama to Hakodate took three and one half days. After several nights in Hakodate at a Russian hotel, he left for Otaru by ship — but the weather was so bad the vessel turned back; later he endured a stormy but successful voyage. From the coastal town he and his companions rode horseback through the winter landscape to Sapporo, stopping for the night about half way along. Brooks wrote positively about his life in Sapporo— though he said that he and the other Americans did not like the Japanese cuisine. When he made a trip to Otaru in April that year it was the midst of herring season. “Herrings, herrings everywhere, men women and children wallowing in herrings and bedaubed with herrings from head to foot.” However, the Americans had plenty of meat and vegetables in addition to fish and even bread baked by their Japanese cook. Brooks understood that using animal power on the farm was not a Japanese tradition, but he tried to get his students to see the advantages of farming with animals. He showed them, for example, that working with oxen he could carry out a job much more efficiently than it could be done by manpower alone.21 Not until 1888 did Brooks leave Sapporo, after he served the college for twelve years, the final eight as president. When he returned to America, he was instrumental in helping introduce the Japanese soybean as an important crop in the United States. He brought the first Japanese elm to the United States, and it now graces the campus of Mount Holyoke College in Amherst, Massachusetts. The Americans who came to teach at the college saw Hokkaido as a frontier to be opened up and civilized, using America as a model. Not only did they teach students, they studied and explored the island, often with their students, sometimes sending the students out on their own. During the summer vacation in 1877, the three American teachers at the college each took an exploratory trip. With six students, Brooks explored south and west of Sapporo to collect plants, riding some 275 miles on horseback. He and his students traveled to Muroran, along the northern coast of Uchiura Bay, past Mt. Usu to Oshamambe on the bay’s west coast, across the peninsula to Iwanai, to Otaru and back to Sapporo. He praised the inexpensive inns his party had stayed in for their cleanliness— except for the fleas. Wheeler and his party explored the Oshima Peninsula and Penhallow traveled up the Ishikari River system with more students. The American professors also introduced the concept of a sports day at the college, the first such event ever held at a Japanese school. By now, sports days are common in Japanese institutions, much more so than in the United States, whose teachers inspired the idea. The Kaitakushi tried hard to make the western experts at the college feel comfortable, with furnishings and foods, among other things. In a letter to his family, W. S. Clark described a dinner cooked for him: “fresh salmon, ham and eggs, boiled sweet potatoes, and beans and fried potatoes, wheat-bread and butter, coffee, and a nice fresh fruit called Kokuwa.” He also noted having been served “boiled burdock roots” and liking the dish. Belle Stockbridge, who accompanied her husband when he came to teach at the college in 1885, noted the foods they raised while living in Sapporo. They grew fruit for winter jams and jellies, she raised turkeys successfully and they were able to harvest five crops

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of peas, meaning, she wrote, that they could eat fresh peas from July almost through November. They kept a cow for milk and crowds would come to watch Horace Stockbridge milk her, because this was an unusual sight in Japan. Once the cow got away and burst into a private home, causing a lot of damage, but the Stockbridges arranged for repairs. Mrs. Stockbridge commented, by the way, that there was only one other American woman in Sapporo when she arrived — another professor’s wife.22 Kuroda Kiyotaka emphasized that the foreign experts should teach their techniques to Japanese students, who would subsequently run the development programs. After abolition of the Kaitakushi in 1882, few foreigners came to Hokkaido in an official capacity. More and more, Japanese carried out the functions that the foreigners had begun. The other foreign teachers at Sapporo Agricultural College were J. C. Cutter, C. H. Peabody, James Summers, Milton Haight and the last of them in the college’s early years, Arthur Brigham, who left Sapporo in 1893. The students whom all these men had taught in Hokkaido, however, had absorbed what the Americans had imparted to them, and thus the impact of the foreign experts lived on. In 1983, Hokkaido Governor Yokomichi Takahiro summarized the work of these men, from Capron and his assistants to the college instructors. “These foreigners introduced topographical surveys, geological and mineral surveys, and Western-style farming, helped Japanese manage state-run factories, built roads, improved shipping, constructed railways, developed coal mines and inaugurated the Sapporo Agricultural School, contributing greatly to the future development of Hokkaido.”23

8

Sapporo

Under the Kaitakushi, the center of activity in Hokkaido began to shift to Sapporo, and as the city grew, more and more it became the center of island development. Not designated the Hokkaido capital until after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, by the end of the twentieth century Sapporo had become a metropolis of more than 1.8 million people and the fifth largest city in all Japan. In addition to being a provincial capital, Sapporo may be one of the few great cities in the world whose early growth owed so much to a college. The establishment of Sapporo Agricultural College and its evolution into Hokkaido University were especially consequential for the city. Not only was the college built in order to assist utilization of Hokkaido’s resources, in its early years the institution accounted for much of Sapporo’s activity and economy.

Early days An Ainu village Isabella Bird tells us was named Satsuporo sat in the valley where today’s city grew.1 The village obviously furnished Sapporo’s name. Shimura Tetsuichi, sent in 1857 to take charge of river crossings where the Toyohira flowed into the Ishikari, presumably was the first Wajin settler. Two Wajin families were registered as living in the vicinity that year. Officials noted the promise of the Ishikari Valley, in which the village was located, and sent Otomo Kametaro to the region in 1866. Otomo, from the Yokohama area, had been dispatched to Hakodate in 1854 to help establish pioneer farms nearby, and due to his success was then ordered to the Ishikari Valley, to draw settlers to begin farming near Satsuporo Village. A few years later came the Sosei canal, a straight channel south from the Ishikari River through what became the center of Sapporo. Twenty-eight families came and began cultivating the land in 1867. The area later became known for the onions grown there. Onion fields stretched along for several miles; claimed as the best in Japan, some of the onions were even exported. (Onions have continued to be an important crop in Hokkaido, with some thirty thousand acres of the bulb planted annually at the end of the twentieth century.) When the Kaitakushi decided in 1869 to rename Ezo and develop the island, part of the plan was to establish a new capital city much more centrally located than Hakodate. Unusually for important cities, Sapporo is not on the coast. As John Mock has pointed out, Sapporo and Kyoto are the only two major cities in Japan not on the shore, where cities tend to develop because of the need for sea-borne trade.2 Kuroda Kiyotaka urged that the new capital be situated on the Ishikari River. Famed explorer and cartographer

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Matsuura Takeshiro had recommended that the city be built on a tributary, the Toyohira, and he picked the site for the capital city at Satsuporo Village, not far from the Ishikari and on the edge of what gave promise to be a prosperous agricultural region. Placing the city on the sea would have made transportation links to Honshu and the outside world more convenient, but the landforms of the area made that impractical; there was no good harbor with sufficient level land and easy access to the interior. And while much of the Ishikari plain near the coast was marshy peatland, the site chosen for the new capital city was dry and well-drained. Planners placed Sapporo along the Sosei Canal, built a few years earlier by Otomo; this channel could furnish irrigation and drinking water. In the earliest days travelers came to Sapporo on the canal, but a railroad line from Otaru soon superseded it. Now a highway sits along the Sosei, cars on one side of the canal heading south, those on the other side going north. A suggestion has been made to send automobiles underground through the Sapporo downtown area, creating parkland along the historic canal. South of the city center the Sosei Canal meets the Toyohira River, which early planners developed to supply power for industry. American Belle Stockbridge described the river in 1885 as a “roaring, raging, brawling, picturesque river that ... furnished motive power for several mills that gave the town a New England appearance.”3 Now the Toyohira is dammed as it emerges from the hills south of the city’s built-up area and it provides hydroelectric power. Near the city’s center, the river is a placid stream. In 1869 the Kaitakushi chose Shima Yoshitake to lay out the city. From a hill he studied the area and then, inspired by the square grid of streets in Kyoto, created such a plan for Sapporo. He envisioned a city center a mile and a half west of Otomo Kametaro’s Sapporo Village home and office. Shima projected a city bisected by a long, almost block-wide strip which could act as a firebreak. This strip, now Odori Park, provides a welcoming ribbon of greenery in the midst of an urban landscape. The city plan called for government buildings north of the greenbelt, with the business and entertainment districts to the south. Plans from the early 1870s show a city laid out in perfectly square blocks north and south of Odori Park. Just as a block of undeveloped land split Sapporo into northern and southern sections, the Sosei Canal divided it into east and west. East of the canal was the section of the city planned for industry. The Kaitakushi established Sapporo Beer, the city’s best-known industry, in this area. Sapporo’s city blocks are numbered from the intersection of Odori Park and the Sosei Canal. In the central part of today’s city, the streets mostly run either almost northsouth or almost east-west. Thomas Blakiston wrote that the surveyor laying out the city apparently misused his compass; in compensating for the difference between magnetic north and true north, he applied the correction in the wrong direction.4 Shima Yoshitake spent much too lavishly in trying to build the new city, which he apparently had to do were he to carry out his instructions, and the Kaitakushi soon replaced him. Iwamura Michitoshi, who finished the planning, called for wide streets in contrast to those of older cities such as Hakodate. The original plan included six blocks, separated by Odori Park, north to south, and four blocks east to west. Sapporo’s roadways suggested that this would be a modern city; soon the Kaitakushi hired some five thousand men to construct the city’s first buildings. In 1886 Iwamura became the first governor of the newly established Hokkaido Prefecture. The Kaitakushi had twenty square blocks set aside for its headquarters area and the splendid building to be erected there. This two-story western-style structure had four

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The tiny village called Satsuporo became the site for Hokkaido’s capital city. The plan for the new city was drawn up in 1869 but this photograph from 1872 suggests that growth was slow in the capital’s first few years (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

chimneys and a central cupola rising about as high above the second floor ceiling as the foundation was beneath it. Like the city’s other public buildings of that era, it was foreign in design. The building burned in 1879, only five years after it was opened, and was not replaced. A replica now stands in the Historical Village of Hokkaido. In 1871, Sapporo officially became the capital of Hokkaido and Sapporo Shrine was consecrated, with effigies of its gods being carried to the city. Shima Yoshitake had chosen the location for Sapporo Shrine against the hills at the far western edge of the urban area, within today’s Maruyama Park. The shrine is dedicated to the gods of the pioneers, who were chosen by the Meiji Emperor to watch over the settlers. The principal god of the shrine, Okunitama, is the god of Hokkaido’s land, who ensures its bounty. The others are Onamuchi, the god of developing the land; Sukunahikona, who reclaims the land; and the god of the Meiji Emperor, who joined the original three gods in 1964 when the shrine was renamed Hokkaido Jingu, or Hokkaido Shrine. Creation of Sapporo Shrine encouraged settlement in the new capital, for the shrine made the area seem more a part of the naichi. Sapporo now had its deities just as did the heartland. When Horace Capron sent his assistants Antisell and Warfield to survey “Yesso” in 1871, the new city had just 624 residents. Among the places the two Americans were to study was “the tract designated for the city of Sapporo and for the Department of Agri-

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culture, Agricultural College &c. about to be established there.” Also, “the most available sea port in the neighborhood of Sapporo should be determined and an examination made as to the general character of the country intervening between it, and the new capital, especially with reference to the facilities for making either rail or common roads.”5 After his survey, Warfield predicted that many manufacturing concerns would soon be established on the banks of the Toyohira River in the new city, outstripping even Hokkaido’s abundant fisheries in importance. The city site required clearing; William Wheeler, who arrived in 1876, wrote to his family that Sapporo was “located upon a large forest covered plain.” To the small city, in July 1872, he had noted, “The last fifteen miles of our journey was mostly through a densely wooded country with now and then open prairie.”6 Trees, shrubs, grasses and small flowering plants covered the land. The Kaitakushi started many small industries in Sapporo. Among the earliest was a tool foundry opened in 1872. In 1876, W. S. Clark reported that “there is abundance of water power and already mills for manufacturing wood, grain, silk, iron, etc., are in full operation.”7 The Toyohira River that powered the new factories was newly spanned by a wooden truss bridge but flood waters badly damaged it, carrying off almost all of its superstructure. Before the bridge was built, workmen had inquired locally about the possibility of flood surges but because Sapporo was so new, none of the men asked had lived in the vicinity for very long. Horace Capron, however, claimed that the Japanese engineers had not listened to American advice before building the inadequate structure. William Wheeler designed changes to prevent future damage. More people came to Sapporo; new industries and services began. By 1874 the city’s population had grown to 2,161 and according to one estimate, Hokkaido’s new capital gained six hundred more residents in the following year. Most of the people in the city came from the Tokyo area, “brought here by government works,” Wheeler wrote in 1876. A few years earlier, Kuroda Kiyotaka had arranged for importation of a steam engine, and it began operating a sawmill in Sapporo the next year. Ironworking began a few years later and soon Sapporo produced western-style agricultural tools. In the early years, the capitol grounds sported a mulberry plantation, under Edwin Dun’s management, for silkworm production; Wheeler commented on the newly established silk factory. Both the machinery to be installed in the factory and the young women to work there were transported by ship from Tokyo. Wheeler also noted the flour mills, smithies and machines in operation in the city. Mail from Sapporo, he wrote his mother, was carried by pack horse to Hakodate, then by ship to Yokohama and on to San Francisco.8 When he came in August 1876 to help open Sapporo Agricultural College, William Smith Clark noted the “broad, straight streets” aligned to the compass directions. A year after the college opened, students arriving in Sapporo saw a town based “in most details on a small college town in the United States,” a pair of historians has suggested.9 Sapporo soon had a brewery, recommended by Horace Capron after Louis Boehmer discovered native hops growing in Hokkaido. The local climate also suited barley, another key beer ingredient. The Kaitakushi directed Edwin Dun to grow barley for the brewery, and he arranged to use land in the mulberry plantation for this. Nakagawa Seibei became the Kaitakushi’s chief brewmaster, in charge of developing the beer industry in Sapporo. He was born in 1848 in Niigata, studied brewing in Germany and received a German license in the craft. Modeled after Bavarian breweries, the Kaitakushi brewery in Sapporo began operation

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in 1876. David F. Anthony has reported a sign at the ceremony opening the brewery reading “A kind of sake called beer is produced by the brewing together of barley and hops.” The brewery made some ten thousand gallons of beer in its first year, and the first beverage called “Sapporo Beer” appeared in 1877. Soon the lager produced in Hokkaido won praise, beer became popular in Japan and the industry’s future promised to be bright. The Kaitakushi sold the factory to a private firm in 1886 and a descendant company produces Sapporo Beer today. The beer label still features the red star — the Kaitakushi symbol — that appeared on the first bottles and is on the factory chimney. In 1886 the Japan Weekly Mail wrote that the brewery was “one of the few official enterprises which covers its expenses and even shows a small margin of profit.”10 In 1903, to expand beer manufacture, Sapporo Beer purchased its second factory; it had been built in 1890 to process beet sugar. Now it is the Sapporo Beer Museum. Four tondenhei villages populated and helped protect the area that grew into Sapporo City. First came the Kotoni settlement. which grew to 240 households during the tondenhei era. In 1876, more tondenhei migrants established Yamahana Village south of Sapporo’s center and in 1877 and 1888 about 800 people —farmer-soldiers and their families— settled in the third village, Shin Kotoni. These pioneers came by ship from their homes in Kyushu and Shikoku. Disembarking in Otaru, they took the train to Kotoni Station and then walked the two and one-half miles northeast to their village site, where, like other settlers, they farmed, fished and drilled. In 1889, Shinoro was established farther north, in what is now the neighborhood of Sapporo called Tonden. Records tell us that during the next year the village opened an elementary school. It offered only three years of instruction, as the pioneer family members had to work hard in the fields. Tondenhei also built roads and drainage systems in Sapporo. A few tondenhei houses remain in Sapporo today as small museums, surrounded and dwarfed by the streets and structures of the modern city. Three other tondenhei settlements grew just east of Sapporo, at Nopporo, Ebetsu and Shinotsu, just northwest of the center of Ebetsu. Several other historic buildings from Sapporo’s early years remain today. One is the Hoheikan. Constructed in 1880, this is a two story Victorian structure resembling a small New England hotel. Here the Meiji emperor would stay when he visited Sapporo the following year. Several items used during the visit, from lamps to dishes, are now on display. In 1896 Mabel Loomis Todd stayed briefly at the Hoheikan and wrote, “the cook is an artist, the attendants delightful.” She was carefully looked after, even accompanied on her way to the Japanese bath.11 Hirohito stayed there when he made his 1922 visit to Hokkaido as Prince Regent. In 1958 the Hoheikan was moved to its present location in Nakajima Park and the building now is available for parties and ceremonies, though its interior looks a bit worn. A building known as the Former Hokkaido Government Office Building dates from 1888. Japanese familiarly call it Aka Renga, meaning “red bricks.” This red brick structure looks as though it might have graced a late nineteenth century European city. Some 2,500,000 bricks for the edifice came from two villages, Shiroishi and Toyohira, now both parts of Sapporo. For its day Aka Renga was large and tall — two full stories with dormer windows under the roof. A small octagonal dome crowns the building. Notably, it featured electric power and a steam heating system. One historically significant detail of Aka Renga is the five-pointed red star representing the Kaitakushi on the face of each dormer. Inside, in the former governor’s office, stands the Hokkaido flag. The flag also features a red star, but one with seven points

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instead of five. After the Meiji period, the five points were changed to seven, perhaps because that more closely resembled the shape of the island. Said to be based upon the Massachusetts capitol building, Aka Renga’s red brick facade and crowning tower may call the Boston building to mind, but the roof lines of the two buildings are very different and the Sapporo building does not feature the columns and front portico seen in Boston. (The Massachusetts State House no longer resembles its original structure, however; that building is now enveloped by huge additions.) Ginkgo trees planted in a row leading to the Sapporo building form the first row of trees planted in Hokkaido. These days even in the rain one can see tourists stopping to be photographed in front of Aka Renga. Aka Renga has had its troubles. Due to safety concerns, the tower, or dome, was taken down only seven years after the building opened. Fire destroyed Aka Renga in January 1909, obliterating a number of official records. Fire fighting was poorly organized then, and during freezing weather, water for fighting fires difficult to obtain. Ironically, two decorative ponds had been placed in the building’s grounds to provide a source of water in case of fire, but when fire did break out it, the ponds were frozen. Sapporo Agricultural College offered temporary space to government officials after the disaster, and two years later a rebuilt Aka Renga opened. It stands in downtown Sapporo today. In 1968, to celebrate Hokkaido’s centennial, restoration returned a tower to the building, and now it more closely resembles its original state. A 2004 typhoon severely damaged a number of graceful trees in the grounds, however. The city of Sapporo grew and adopted modern practices, just as have other cities all over the world. Before the end of the nineteenth century, Sapporo received its first electric lights, and telephone service began in 1900. A visitor to Sapporo in 1888 compared the city to a “western American” city, noting its “newness and bustle, and a sense of rapid progress.” (1886 figures showed 14,935 residents.)12 Setbacks came, too, for example Ishikari basin floods, as when a 1898 torrent almost destroyed the tondenhei village Shinoro, buildings and fields alike.

Getting to Sapporo Because Sapporo was not located on the seacoast, development of a transportation link to a nearby port was an urgent priority in the city’s early days. Supplies had to be brought in by horses or by small boats rowed or towed up the Ishikari River — both slow and inefficient methods. Moreover, only during parts of the year was navigation on the river possible. Winter ice and spring floods would stop commerce. Horace Capron, William Wheeler and A. J. Warfield all thought that the port for Sapporo should be developed at Muroran, on Hokkaido’s south coast. The other port location under serious consideration was Otaru, then a small fishing settlement nestled under the outlying hills of the mountain cluster west and south of Sapporo. Ishikari, near the mouth of the Ishikari River, was closer than was Otaru to Sapporo, but land there was swampy and the sea far too shallow for harbor facilities. Although Otaru was much nearer the capital city than was Muroran, the Americans feared that using Otaru’s harbor would be problematic because of winter storms. Muroran has milder winter weather and is closer to Tokyo than is Otaru, but because of the distance from Sapporo to Muroran and because of limited finances, the Kaitakushi decided to build the transportation route to Otaru. Though Warfield had felt that Otaru could

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The Hokkaido Government Office Building, 1888, was inspired by the Massachusetts State Capitol in Boston. The Sapporo building was restored in 1968 to reflect its original grandeur, and now holds historic records and exhibits illustrating Hokkaido’s history. The brick structure is familiarly known as “Aka Renga,” or “red bricks.” Almost always, one sees tourists posing in front of the historic edifice as the author did in 2006. Photograph by Mayumi Kayoko.

be only a summer port for Sapporo, others thought the port project feasible despite possible danger from northeasterly winds in the small and shallow harbor. The necessity for using lighters to load and unload cargo there makes the unimproved harbor inefficient by today’s standards but in the nineteenth century it could serve well. Wheeler studied the transportation problem and strongly recommended a railroad from Sapporo to Otaru instead of yet another alternative, a canal from Sapporo to the coast. He described his journey on horseback from Otaru to Sapporo in 1876. “The first nine miles of the route lies along the coast; almost at the very edge of the sea; at the foot of bold bluffs and rocky cliffs, several hundred feet high, sometimes overhanging the narrow pack-horse road; twice piercing the jutting rock by tunnels, the top, or either side of which I could touch with my outstretched hand as I rode through on the small horse.”13 As the Ishikari river plain extends to the sea, it meets this rugged land of hills and moun-

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When Aka Renga had stood for only seven years, its tower was removed for fear that it was unsafe and this old postcard, probably from the early twentieth century, shows how the building long appeared. The tower was restored during the 1968 renovation. Note that no tall buildings stood behind Aka Renga in its early years.

tains; the swamps give way to cliffs. If one leaves the plain and traverses the coast by train or automobile westward beneath jagged cliffs, one is on the route that Wheeler traveled. Once Otaru was chosen to be the port for Sapporo, constructing the railroad became a priority. (This line would also serve Horonai, farther inland from Sapporo, where rich deposits of coal had recently been discovered.) Joseph Crawford headed the rail construction project. Building the line from Zenibako on the coast inland to Sapporo proved fairly straightforward, but constructing it along the rugged coast from Zenibako to Otaru presented a serious challenge. Wheeler and others had inspected the land above the cliffs and determined that an inland route to Otaru would be impossible, so the track from Otaru ran under the cliffs to Zenibako, where the flat land began. Alongside the foot of the bluff, tracks were laid in some places on the road that had been completed a year earlier. Construction included landfills as well as protective retaining walls. The line ran through five tunnels and crossed several bridges between Otaru and Zenibako. From Zenibako to Sapporo, where the track ran partly on swampland, a stable foundation had to be provided. Both in Otaru and Sapporo, turntables were built. The terminus of the line in Otaru was at Temiya Station, where the track extended on to a trestle sixty feet high, built so ships could dock next to it and coal from Hokkaido mines could be loaded through chutes directly from railroad cars on to the ships. American engineers supervised and trained Japanese engineers in the construction work. They completed it in just eleven months, and the track from Otaru as far as Sapporo was ready for traffic by 1880. At first only one train a day operated, taking two or three hours to travel the twenty-two

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In the late 1870s, a road and then a railroad were built to connect Sapporo with Otaru, where the port for the capital city would be developed. Part of the route lay under extensive cliffs, and in places the road, shown here, was wiped out by the railroad (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

mile route between the two cities, and it was often late. By the end of the century, this was a ninety minute trip and a century later, express trains take just over half an hour. Soon Hokkaido’s first official port warehouse opened in Otaru. Once the railroad began operation and harbor facilities in Otaru were available, Sapporo’s future prospects looked good, but keeping the railroad line open proved to be almost as challenging as building it. In early September 1892, storms and flooding destroyed nine railroad bridges on this route. When Belle Stockbridge first came to Sapporo in 1885, she appreciated the train after a cold ship journey from Hakodate to Otaru. “I was glad to exchange the steamer for the 20 mile run on the only American-equipped R.R. line in Japan. It was good to be in an American car again, and to hear the familiar puff and swish and whistle of a real live American engine.”14

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Travelers from Hakodate to Sapporo could not make the entire trip by rail until after the end of the century, but after Sapporo became the capital in 1871, the Kaitakushi expedited construction of a road between the two cities by way of Muroran. The link to Hakodate was important because Hakodate was still Hokkaido’s largest city and most important commercial center. From Hakodate, where construction began, the route by road headed north through Nanae and over a low pass across the Oshima peninsula between low mountain ranges to Mori on the coast of Uchiura Bay. From here travelers would cross the bay by boat to Muroran, an adventurous voyage when the winds were high. Planners envisioned a coastal road from Muroran to Tomakomai. Then the route would head north through lowlands to Chitose and finally Sapporo, just as the railroad and expressway do today. Construction started in 1872, though not before the workers brought from Tokyo had to fight for their lives when their ship foundered on the Hokkaido shore. Despite losing most of their tools, the men soon began to work with whatever implements could be found or improvised. A. J. Warfield surveyed the area to decide the precise route. The groups of laborers followed him: first the tree-cutters, then those clearing the space for the roadbed, those making the road and finally the bridge builders. In earlier years, the traveler arriving at Chitose from the south proceeded to Sapporo downstream by canoe, but by June 1873 the road was completed. The Kaitakushi was not able to keep it in good repair, though. Every year brought a spring thaw and impassible mud, while floods down river valleys destroyed the bridges. In Hakodate in the spring of 1896, “Every level road was a ditch and the roads down from the hill were roaring torrents on account of the melting of the snow.”15

Sapporo Agricultural College A very important part of the young capital city was Sapporo Agricultural College. This institution opened with a formal ceremony (as is still the annual custom in Japan) on August 14, 1876. President William S. Clark delivered a formal address in English following similar speeches in Japanese prepared by Hokkaido Governor Kuroda Kiyotaka and Zusho Hirotake, director of the school and Clark’s supervisor. After Clark’s address came another official’s speech and then one on behalf of the students. All present, except the governor, remained standing throughout the ceremony. Clark’s remarks praised the founding of the school and urged the students to work hard and behave well, but he betrayed that feeling of western cultural superiority so common in Europe and America in the nineteenth century when he said, “This wonderful emancipation from the tyranny of caste and custom, which in ages past has enveloped like a dark cloud the nations of the East, should awaken a lofty ambition in the breast of every student to whom an education is offered.” He took great pride in the “successful opening of our college, the first Agricultural College in the Orient.”16 Preliminary activities accomplished for the new college included the establishment of a temporary school in Tokyo and examination of prospective students. Even before the college opened, one American taught in Sapporo. Since 1875, William R. Corwine had been teaching at a preparatory school established in the city to prepare students for the college. Twenty-four boys or young men, mostly from former samurai families, enrolled in the college in 1876, while twenty-six more entered a preparatory class. Some, including several Ainu, were transfers from the Tokyo school and others had passed tests

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given in Tokyo to new applicants. The tests emphasized Japanese history, mathematics, and various aspects of the English language. Government appropriations limited the number of students to fifty. After the limit on numbers of students was lifted in 1879, the college grew rapidly for a few years; in 1881 the college enrolled three hundred students. The government met student expenses in the college’s first few years, for fear that otherwise no one would consider attending this new institution in a new city in a frontier land. In return, after graduation the students would be employed by the Kaitakushi in Hokkaido for five years. On campus, the students also received pay when they worked in the college’s experimental fields. After the demise of the Kaitakushi, financial support declined and the number of students dropped each year, to about 175 in 1897. For several years the future of the institution was in doubt; the government no longer paid tuition, though loans remained available. By 1901, enrollment reached its previous high, and since then, growth has continued, passing 450 in 1904, seven hundred in 1908 and nine hundred in 1914. The early campus sported two buildings for offices and classes and one for a dormitory, all built in a mixed Japanese and western architectural style. The students lived in two-man dormitory rooms furnished in a western way with beds, desks and chairs. The young men wore westernstyle uniforms and ate western food for breakfast and dinner, though a Japanese lunch was served. Students were to spend four hours daily (except Sunday) in class, studying mainly mathematics, chemistry, English and Japanese. The rest of their time would be taken up with at least that much daily study and in the afternoons, manual labor and military drills. Study was crucial, as the English language presented problems for the students. Even after a very busy day, they would get together in the evening to study. It must have helped; the students’ high caliber impressed their American professors. Here the author stands by the bust of William S. Clark Four years after the college located on the grounds of Hokkaido University. First opened, the first commencement installed on the campus in 1926 to commemorate the uniexercises took place. Thirteen of versity’s fiftieth anniversary, Clark’s bust was sacrificed to the war effort during World War II but was replaced in the original twenty-four students received bachelor of agriculture 1948. Photograph by Mayumi Kayoko.

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The first barn ever built in Japan was constructed on the Sapporo Agricultural College campus in its early years. Intended to be a model for Hokkaido farms, the original “model barn” no longer exists, but this one soon followed and today can be found on the northeast corner of the Hokkaido University campus.

degrees (though they would have preferred recognition as bachelors of science). At the ceremony, the entire student body carried out a military drill. The governor, vice governor and acting president, now David Penhallow, offered speeches as did each of the graduates. Some three hundred people attended, and a fireworks exhibition crowned the occasion. Preserved on the campus are some of the early buildings from the college farm which William S. Clark had recommended so that a foreign teacher could give “instruction both theoretical and practical.” The model barn, fifty by one hundred feet, was the first barn built in Japan. It no longer exists, but a later, similar one is among the historic structures remaining today. The farm buildings and the rest of the campus are not in their original location, though. College buildings first stood between today’s Sapporo Station and Odori Park. Groundbreaking at a new and more expansive location began in 1899 and the college officially opened on its present site in 1903. The farm buildings were once in the area which became the heart of today’s university grounds. In 1911 they were moved and now sit near the northeast corner of the campus. Here one can see the nineteenth century structures: a large dairy barn, a silo, a corn storage barn, a building for threshing and hulling grain, a milk processing plant and a food processing plant. These are the oldest westernstyle agricultural buildings in Hokkaido, as a brochure for the site notes. From America

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came many pieces of equipment for the agricultural program: various types of plows, harrows, drills and cultivators as well as harvesting machinery and hand tools, from rakes and shovels to small forks and trowels. In its first year, the college grew “herdsgrass, clover, wheat, barley, oats, rice, beans, Indian corn, Chinese indigo, potatoes, flax and hemp.”17 The early students supplemented their studies during vacations and after graduation, exploring Hokkaido. In 1881 Uchida Kiyoshi and Tanouchi Suteroku crossed the island, specifically in order to determine the feasibility of building a road from Sapporo to Nemuro by an inland route. Their journey took them through the area that is now Akan National Park. Here they climbed and explored, in awe of the volcanic landscape. They emerged on the east coast at Abashiri, far from Nemuro, however, “and after much struggle we succeeded in reaching Nemuro.” This adventure took almost three months.18 Some of the early college graduates became prominent in Japan and, in one case, even worldwide. The most famous is Nitobe Inazo, a member of the second graduating class. Originally of a samurai family in Morioka City in northern Honshu, he became a Christian through William Smith Clark’s influence, even though Clark departed before Nitobe came to the college. After graduating with a degree in agricultural development, Nitobe studied at Tokyo University and then in the United States, mainly at Johns Hopkins. He completed his studies in Germany, where he attained a doctorate in agricultural economics. All of this helped in pursuit of his dream to be “a bridge across the Pacific.”19 For a time a professor at Sapporo Agricultural College, he inspired his students to pursue their dreams. In 1891, Nitobe and his American wife established a free night school in Sapporo to enable young people to continue their education even if forced to earn a living. Nitobe achieved his own dream, writing a number of books, including Bushido: The Soul of Japan, an influential work explaining Japanese thought to the western reader. When he came to Brown University in 1911, Nitobe became the first exchange professor from Japan to teach in the United States. Later he represented Japan in the League of Nations, becoming an undersecreThe American professors who worked in Hokkaido tary general for the organization. For development introduced the silo to the island. This twenty years his portrait appeared on example, built for Sapporo Agricultural College’s model farm and originally designed by William S. Clark, Japan’s five thousand yen note. One of Nitobe’s close friends, stands by the barn on the Hokkaido University campus.

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Uchimura Kanzo, arrived at Sapporo Agricultural School just after Clark left and, like Nitobe, converted to Christianity. Uchimura called the college “my ‘wetnurse,’” and fondly remembered his luck in being able to live “in the virgin woods of Hokkaido” rather than “muddy Tokyo,” where he was born.20 He specialized in fisheries and after graduation worked several years for the government. He went on to the United States, where he toiled in a hospital and attended Amherst College, graduating in 1887. Back in Japan, concentrating on study and writing, Uchimura gained a reputation as a prominent Japanese Christian and intellectual. His teaching career ended in 1891 after he refrained from bowing in respect to the signature of the Emperor on the newly Nitobe Inazo graduated in 1881 as a member of promulgated Imperial Rescript on Edu- Sapporo Agricultural College’s second class. He cation; he held that bowing would com- later studied abroad, dedicated himself to achieving his dream of becoming “a bridge across the promise his Christian principles. He Pacific” and gained worldwide fame. This is his supported Japan’s war against China in likeness as he appeared on Japan’s 5000 yen note. 1894, but soon afterward became a paci- Photograph by L. A. Irish. fist. Miyabe Kingo, the third of the college’s prominent Christian converts, was a botany student and a friend of Nitobe and Uchimura. After his graduation from Sapporo Agricultural College, Miyabe went on to Tokyo University and then Harvard, where he received a Ph.D. degree. He wrote his dissertation on the flora of the Kuril Islands. Miyabe became a leading botanist in Japan, taught for many years at the Sapporo Agricultural College, and served as college president. A museum dedicated to him stands in Sapporo’s Botanic Garden. A student in the first class, Sato Shosuke, studied agriculture and technology in the United States for four years after his graduation and was the first graduate of the Sapporo college to earn an advanced degree in America, a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. in agricultural economics. He returned to Sapporo Agricultural College as a teacher and soon became its president, an office he held until 1930. The college’s growth and prominence owe a lot to Sato. When proposals came in the 1880s to close the college or to reduce its size, he had just returned from his studies in the United States. He urged upon the Hokkaido government the importance not only of maintaining the college but of expanding it. He wanted creation of a department of practical agriculture designed specifically for men who intended to farm in Hokkaido. It was duly authorized and among the many skills taught were dairying, haymaking, milking cattle, feeding animals, growing fruit, draining and breaking up land and even managing a farm and bookkeeping. Later, Sato was the man who presided over the transition from college to university. One prominent Sapporo Agricultural College graduate who rejected the western influences he found at the college was Shiga Shigetaka of the class of 1884. Shiga briefly

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Left: Uchimura Kanzo came to Sapporo Agricultural College in 1877. He converted to Christianity, continued his education in the United States and became a prominent intellectual in Japan. Right: Miyabe Kingo, educated at Sapporo Agricultural College as a botanist, graduated in 1881, received a Ph.D. at Harvard, taught at his Hokkaido alma mater for many years and founded its botanical garden in 1886. The college campus later moved north, but the garden remains in downtown Sapporo today (both photographs courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

taught botany in Nagano and then traveled extensively in the South Pacific, studying botany and the wider environment in various island groups. He deplored the influence of many aspects of westernization in the islands. Later he edited a new magazine in Japan, Nihonjin, in which he ardently advocated that Japan protect the nation’s unique culture and values while importing only compatible knowledge from the west. Not even all the Americans in Japan were enamored of the college. Edwin Dun, a firm believer in practical work in the field rather than book learning, admitted in his memoirs written many years later that the college had been successful and had become “a most admirable institution of learning,” but he felt that it had not been a practical help in developing Hokkaido agriculture — partly because, he noted, unlike American farmers’ sons, Japanese farmers’ sons did not go to college.21 Novelist Arishima Takeo graduated from the college in 1901. A Tokyo native, he roomed for awhile with the Nitobe family when he arrived in Sapporo. When Arishima decided to attend the Sapporo college, his father bought almost eight hundred acres of land in Hokkaido, thinking that the young man could become a landed proprietor. The young Arishima, however, became concerned by class differences between landlord and tenants and eventually gave the land to the tenants who worked it. He became a Christian for a few years and taught at the college and its preparatory school for about a decade.

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He traveled fairly extensively in Europe and the United States and his writings, including his most famous work, the novel whose title in English translation is A Certain Woman, show his concern for freedom and equality. The double suicide of Arishima and his mistress in 1923 enhanced the author’s fame. The prominence of these men in later life reflects the impressive standard of the college in its early years. Nitobe felt the name Sapporo Agricultural College was misleading because of the strong education offered in English and the humanities. As a center of liberal education, the college played a significant role in Japan’s modernization, not merely in introducing practices leading to successful farming in Hokkaido but more important, equipping young men with the intellectual vigor that enabled them to play a significant role in Japan. By the time the final American professor on the campus left in 1893, some of the college’s graduates who had been sent abroad to continue their studies had returned and could carry on the work the Americans had begun. One change that resulted was that less emphasis was placed upon the study of English, while agricultural education assumed a more central More than any other Sapporo Agricultural College graduate, Sato Shosuke has served his alma mater. role in the curriculum. He fought for the college in the 1880s when its When the Kaitakushi was disbanded, future was in doubt, and from 1907 until 1930 was the college came under several different head of the institution. This bust of President Sato government departments before being sits near the main entrance of Sapporo University. assigned to the Hokkaido government in 1886. Soon the government drastically decreased funds to operate the college farm and, moreover, appropriated much of the farm’s land, leaving only enough for raising experimental crops. Officials did not want the college to compete with private agricultural concerns. Dependent upon government funding, the college several times barely escaped closure, but pressure from influential supporters kept it going. The famous Clock Tower, one of Sapporo’s most beloved structures, began life as part of the college. Built in downtown Sapporo when the campus was located there, it was designed to be the college’s military drill hall. The ground floor held a museum as well as classrooms, while the upper floor was the drill hall. The Clock Tower was dedicated on Oct. 16, 1878. Among the several students who spoke on the occasion was future college president Sato Shosuke.

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The clock would furnish the correct time to the entire city. Most people in those days would have had no way to know the precise time of day, so a clock that chimed periodically would benefit anyone who had a schedule to keep, not just college students attending classes. The clock did not begin operation until 1881, though. Its installation embroiled one of the college’s American professors in controversy. William Wheeler, who originally proposed constructing a drill hall, planned for a clock in the tower of the building. Even though he warned that the tower under construction would probably not be large enough to accommodate a suitable clock, he was told to order one — and when it came from Howard of Boston, all could see that it clearly would not fit. Wheeler, then college president, found himself criticized for the debacle, but he saw to it that a suitable tower was built atop the building. The clock was duly installed and remains there yet, all four faces showing the hours in Roman numerals and the chimes still ringing. A clock tower myth says that Sapporo women, wanting to do their part in pioneering, had their rings melted down to help create the bell and this created its sweet sound. The city moved the Clock Tower to its present site in 1906 and it now stands sixteen hundred feet south of its original location. Here it served as a post office and for many years as a library. Now the Clock Tower is a museum, displaying important aspects of the history of Sapporo Agricultural College and its Clock Tower. It is best seen in winter, when the trees around it have lost their leaves. This modest building is a symbol of the city; the 1963 Citizens’ Charter of Sapporo begins, “We, the citizens of Sapporo, where the chimes of the Clock Tower can be heard....”22 Sosei Elementary School, a Sapporo school which had opened in 1871, held its final graduation ceremony at the Clock Tower in 2003. The school’s own building had been torn down; the number of children in the area served by the school had fallen greatly and so the school was merged with several others. It seems appropriArishima Takeo, a 1901 Sapporo University graduate, ate that this historic school’s final taught in Sapporo for about a decade and traveled extenceremony was held in another sively abroad, but gained fame for his fiction, which examines people’s dilemmas in the modern world (courtesy historic building. Emphasizing Sapporo AgriHokkaido University Library).

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Probably the most famous of Sapporo Agricultural College’s buildings, the Clock Tower sits in downtown Sapporo and now belongs to the city. Designed to be the college’s drill hall, the building was dedicated in 1878. These days it is surrounded by trees and tall buildings, as shown in this 2004 photograph.

cultural College’s central role in Hokkaido development, the Meiji Emperor visited the campus on his 1881 trip to the island. He observed students mowing with scythes and working the soil with a horse-drawn plow. In the barn he saw a cow and horse being weighed on the scale installed there. The Emperor visited the Clock Tower, where professors were lecturing in English. He looked at the natural history exhibits and he watched students do chemistry and physics experiments. (During his three-day Sapporo visit he also observed tondenhei troops, met an Ainu group and, according to legend, ate a dish called “ice cream” at the Kaitakushi office.) Sapporo Agricultural College influenced Sapporo in many ways. The sight in 187778 of horse-drawn vehicles hauling herring fertilizer from the coast for the college’s farm attracted the interest of the populace, and soon draft animals replaced men in pulling carts throughout the city. In 1878, instigated by Professor Brooks, the college held an agricultural fair, the first in Hokkaido. In 1877, the college began selling milk to the city folk, the first milk ever for sale in Sapporo. Butter, too, could be purchased. By 1879 the college began selling fresh meat, unavailable in Sapporo until then except for venison. The college continued to be an important institution in Sapporo despite occasional setbacks, including a fire which consumed the home of the acting president in 1884, unfortunately destroying agricultural experiment records. Part of the university’s sprawling campus is still planted in crops; aerial photographs show a number of rectangular plots in the heart of this city of well over a million people. Surely this must be one of the few major cities in the world to devote acres of land within easy walking distance of its center to farm crops.

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The Kaitakushi, or Hokkaido Colonization Commission, built this museum in Sapporo in 1882. We see people gathering for its opening ceremony. Many of the museum’s exhibits date from the nineteenth century and include birds collected by Thomas Blakiston and minerals found by Benjamin Lyman (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

It was students from the college who carried on Louis Boehmer’s work, raising seeds and planting flowers in Sapporo. Miyabe Kingo established a botanical garden as part of the college in 1886, and it still sits on land donated to the college by the Kaitakushi and provides a verdant space in the middle of the city. About thirty-two acres in size, at first glance much of the garden suggests the natural forest that once covered the area. One can imagine what the Ishikari plain looked like before it was cleared and developed as city or farmland. Though the garden can be a place of refuge in a busy city, an admission fee, unfortunately, discourages city folk from enjoying the green landscape as they might. Adjacent to the Botanic Garden entrance is a small Ainu museum. Many of the artifacts here became part of the museum collection under the Kaitakushi. Some were collected by missionary John Batchelor, whose nineteenth century clapboard house, moved from its original location, sits in the middle of the garden. It is closed and inaccessible to the public, however, and looks forlorn. Next to the house, in another nineteenth century western-style building, is the natural history museum — the oldest museum in Japan, claims a Hokkaido University pamphlet. An American architect drew up the building’s western-style plans, which had to be converted from feet and inches to Japanese measurements before construction could begin. Specimens visible here are not only interesting because they are indigenous to Hokkaido but also because of who collected them. Benjamin Lyman’s rock samples and T. W. Blakiston’s bird skins are displayed, as is a mounted Ezo wolf.

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Tree-lined Poplar Row on the Hokkaido University campus is a site popular with Japanese tourists, for except in Hokkaido, these trees are an uncommon sight in Japan. Poplars were introduced to the northern island during the pioneer era to create windbreaks and this walkway at the Hokudai campus is lined with the trees. A 2004 typhoon with 111 mile per hour winds affected them severely, however, felling nineteen and damaging more than half of the fifty-one trees. For about twenty years before the storm, people had not been allowed to walk along the path between the trees. Poplars normally live about sixty years; some of these were ninety years old, so the walkway was closed for safety reasons and the poplars could only be viewed from afar. By June 2005, forty young trees had been transplanted to Poplar Row and the walkway was once again opened, while some of the downed timber has been preserved in a newly constructed One of the oldest museums in Japan, the building shown cembalo (a harpsichord or dulci- in the previous picture is administered by Hokkaido University. It sits in the middle of the Sapporo Botanic Garmer). The 2004 storm also downed den and among the many specimens in its natural history many trees elsewhere on the cam- collection are a large Hokkaido brown bear and the nowpus—about 1500 in all—and oth- extinct Ezo wolf. ers in the Botanic Garden. Near the end of the nineteenth century, college students began to take a serious interest in Ainu culture and stimulated the creation of several organizations, including the Hokkaido Anthropological Society, to pursue this field. More recently, excavations on campus have uncovered artifacts and seeds from Satsumon-era settlement and have helped develop data showing that ancestors of the Ainu did some farming in that period. In the 1890s, a movement began in Hokkaido to expand the college’s role, to enlarge and transform the school into a university offering instruction in such fields as law and the arts in addition to agriculture. Instead, when Tohoku Imperial University opened in Sendai in 1907 to serve northern Japan, the Sapporo campus became the College of Agriculture of Tohoku Imperial University and soon one could study forestry, fisheries and civil engineering as well as agriculture in Sapporo. The Hokkaido campus’ life as part of Tohoku Imperial University did not last long; pressure soon grew in Hokkaido for the creation of Hokkaido Imperial University. The prominent Hokkaido newspaper of the

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day, the Hokkai Times, suggested that this be accomplished by 1918, which would mark half a century since colonization of Hokkaido had formally begun.23 In 1918 the Sapporo campus was separated from Tohoku Imperial University and became Hokkaido Imperial University, one of only nine universities so designated in the Japanese Empire. The new university revised policies and added programs, and student numbers continued to grow. A landmark step came in 1918 when the institution became the first public university in Japan to admit women, though for awhile not as regular students. In 1919 the college of medicine opened and the university hospital dates from 1921. In 1925, 180 people graduated. When the first group of students studying under the Faculty of Engineering graduated in 1928, seventy-eight received degrees, in civil, electrical, mechanical and mining engineering. The university opened more new departments, including law and literature. In 1960, Hokkaido University had about five thousand students, and by 2006, the number reached eighteen thousand. The one-time Sapporo Agricultural College truly is one of Japan’s leading universities today, with more than half its students coming from outside Hokkaido. The university includes the widely-respected Slavic Research Center and the Institute of Low Temperature Science as well as facilities beyond Sapporo now; among them a branch campus in Hakodate, a marine laboratory in Muroran, several experimental forests, the Akkeshi Marine Station for studies of marine plants and animals, and the Toya Lake Station for environmental biology. After World War II, the institution’s name became what we know today: Hokkaido University. Familiarly known as Hokudai, the university continues to play an important role in the life of Hokkaido and Japan.

Sapporo in the twentieth century Sapporo’s transformation to a major city came in the twentieth century. World events shaped the island capital’s evolution: depression, war, defeat, occupation, Japan’s “economic miracle.” As in the nation’s other important cities, population grew and grew, partly because people left the countryside and small towns for urban opportunities. Transportation facilities modernized and expanded, while parks, stadiums and museums opened or were redeveloped. New strategies for dealing with winter snow and cold appeared, from underground shopping malls and passages to advanced snow removal techniques. As amenities abounded, though, the city also found itself faced with problems of the modern world such as poverty and crime. As the new century began, Sapporo remained smaller than Otaru and Hakodate. Poet Ishikawa Takuboku went to Sapporo in September 1907 and spent two short weeks there. He wrote later, “no other place has left in my heart such a fond, though rushed, memory as Sapporo ... a large country town with wide streets, quiet with many trees, with western style houses forming a line dispersedly, and each large building appearing to be pressed against the boundless sky.” But different people saw different things in Sapporo. A guidebook from that year mentions the city’s “saw-mills and flour-mills, hemp and flax factories and a brewery,” adding that “Sapporo Beer enjoys much favour.”24 When Reginald Farrer visited at the beginning of the twentieth century, he found Sapporo “most pompously laid out,” its streets too wide for the traffic they carried, its outskirts empty. As late as 1922, Sapporo’s streets were “quagmires,” reported another visitor who arrived in the city early in April.25 In 1924 the street leading to Aka Renga

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was paved, the new surface being beechwood bricks. This was unsuccessful; when the ground froze in the winter, the wooden bricks rose up above the surface. So, six years later, the street was repaved with asphalt. Rail service to Sapporo improved, as by 1904 one could take the train from Hakodate to Otaru via the new Hakodate line and then continue on to Sapporo. When the line was put through, it did not follow the route most travelers take today. From Hakodate it struck almost directly north across the heel of the peninsula’s foot and then continued north along the west coast of Uchiura Bay. At Oshamambe near the northwest corner of the bay it diverged from today’s main line, striking through the mountains across the peninsula to a point a few miles west of Otaru, then heading through Otaru to Sapporo. Meanwhile, Sapporo continued to grow and evolve. When the Kaitakushi first planned the capital city, business and entertainment districts were to be located south of Odori Park, but the business district has spread from there to the north. The entertainment district, Susukino, remains south of the park. It got an early start, attracting patrons who had come to Hokkaido to work on the frontier. Now Susukino is known as the largest and no doubt most vibrant entertainment area in Japan north of Tokyo, with hundreds of eating and drinking spots, huge brilliant neon advertisements, and, of course, prostitutes and pimps. A 1918 exposition held in Sapporo and Otaru celebrated Hokkaido’s fiftieth year of development. Sapporo greeted visitors with a three-arched, three-color welcome gate at the station. A streetcar took the tourists to the main exposition grounds at Nakajima Park, where the one-hundred-foot-high “North Pole Tower” caught the visitor’s eye. Exhibits demonstrated aspects of education, agriculture, industry, forestry, colonization and engineering, among other things. As well as illustrating development and prosperity, the exposition was meant to attract visitors and prospective settlers from the other Japanese islands. It was at this time that streetcars replaced the city’s horse-drawn trams. One streetcar line still operates in downtown Sapporo, along with buses, subways, and trains. As population increased, Sapporo acquired more of the signs of a modern city. When the island capital gained official status as a city in 1922, it was the thirteenth largest city in the nation. Japan’s first nationwide census, held in 1920, reported Sapporo’s population as 101,601. Foreign-inspired buildings and wide streets gave Sapporo a look somewhat unusual to Japan, though residential areas tended to resemble those elsewhere in the country. In 1926 a telephone line began service between Sapporo and the island of Honshu. In 1928 came the first radio broadcast in the city, and in the next year the city’s first reinforced concrete building appeared, the Sapporo Teachers’ School. Within Sapporo’s city limits is an airport, not today’s international airport a little over twenty miles away in Chitose, but Okadama Airport, only about three and one-half miles northeast of Sapporo Station. Flights still operate from Okadama to other Hokkaido cities, but Chitose’s facility later became Sapporo’s main airport. In 1926, the village made land available for aviation; the area around Chitose had not been settled for farming in the early days, due both to poor soil and a poor water supply. The “Hokkai One” was the first plane to take off from the new field. Scheduled service between Tokyo and Sapporo, via Sendai and Aomori, began on April 1, 1937. Soon, the Imperial Navy assumed control of the Chitose airfield, which passed to the United States occupation forces as the post–World War II occupation began. In 1959, twenty years after Chitose became a military airfield, the Americans returned it to Japanese control, though not until 1975 did the U.S. Air Force close its Chitose facility.

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Today New Chitose International Airport is a pleasant, modern place. Two of the three runways are reserved for Japanese military use, while the other serves commercial and private planes. In the early days of Hokkaido settlement, the journey from Chitose to Sapporo could be accomplished in one long day, but now one can catch a train at the airport terminal and be in the middle of Sapporo in just thirty-six minutes. Sapporo’s first western-style hotel was the Sapporo Grand Hotel, which opened December 11, 1934. The Emperor’s brother, Prince Chichibu, urged its construction. After studying abroad, he predicted that the Winter Olympic Games would be awarded to Japan sometime, with Sapporo the best venue for the events. Thus an international-style hotel would be an asset to the city. When the national army held special maneuvers in Hokkaido in October 1936, foreign military officers who came to observe were put up at the Grand. The emperor, Hirohito, viewed the maneuvers, and the hotel staff was asked to prepare an outdoor banquet for more than three thousand people, which the Emperor would attend. This was the first imperial visit to Hokkaido since 1881, and the hotel staff prepared elegant lunch boxes for the guests. During the American occupation of Japan, the U.S. Army requisitioned the Grand Hotel and used it for seven years. Before the Grand could reopen to the public came refurnishing and refurbishing; the management had removed some of the hotel’s equipment before the Americans came, and many more items were worn, damaged or gone when the occupation troops left. With some government help, the hotel was ready to welcome guests again in November 1952. In the years since the war, groups ranging from the Vienna Boys’ Choir to the New York Yankees have stayed there and in 1966 a two hundred room annex opened. The war and occupation disrupted Sapporo life in other ways, too; the city could not remain the place remembered by Richard Storry. He recollected the Sapporo of the era shortly before World War II as “rather quiet and dignified, with an atmosphere almost reminiscent of an English cathedral city.”26 Food crops replaced Odori Park flowers during wartime and the statue of Kuroda Kiyotaka that stood in the park was sacrificed to the war effort. Sapporo citizens who had been growing onions were ordered to clear their fields to make room for Okadama Airport facilities. It was not until after World War II that Sapporo emerged as the island’s dominant city. In the early postwar years, Sapporo had an advantage matched by few other major cities in Japan, having an infrastructure undamaged by wartime bombing. The city continued to grow and evolve, though when Joseph Campbell, the well-known scholar of mythology, visited in 1955, he still perceived a “frontier atmosphere,” which brought to his mind “a combination of Alaska [Juneau] and the West.”27 Sapporo’s population doubled in the period from 1935 to 1955; by then Sapporo was definitely Hokkaido’s premier city. Some population growth had come with land annexation. In 1950, Sapporo absorbed Shiroishi Village, south across the Toyohira River. Population doubled again from 1955 to 1965, by which time it reached almost eight hundred thousand. Toyohira Town joined Sapporo in 1961. The city reached a population of one million by 1970, just over a century from its foundation. As the dominant city in Hokkaido, Sapporo has drawn people from Hokkaido villages and towns which have seen their economies collapse from mine closings or the disappearance of sea life. People merely looking for greater opportunity and the city lights also came. Also, of course, Sapporo people themselves sometimes have moved on to Tokyo or Osaka in search of even more opportunity. Sapporo was one of the fastest growing cities in Japan in the postwar decades; after

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the war many people repatriated from former Japanese territory, especially Manchuria and Karafuto, settled in the city. Most new firms were in the service sector, a pattern that has held to this day. The retail sector expanded, and Sapporo’s downtown became an important shopping area, with major department stores opening there. The Makomanai district in the southern part of Sapporo has changed drastically since Edwin Dun established a stock farm on its flat land. Many tondenhei and their families settled nearby during Sapporo’s early years. Now the area is incorporated into Sapporo and is the site of the southern terminus of one of the city’s three subway lines. When American occupation forces settled in Sapporo after World War II, they took over the Makomanai farm’s land and established Camp Crawford. Farm operations were moved to Shintoku —far from Sapporo— some miles up the Tokachi River from Obihiro. The experimental farm in Shintoku remains in operation today, while the Makomanai facilities reverted to Japanese military use at the end of the American occupation and house an army base today. Odori Park is now a strip of green stretching for eleven blocks, crossed by Sapporo’s downtown north-south streets. At the east end of the park is the Television Tower, from which one can gaze over all the city. Built in the 1950s, the tower marked the beginning of television broadcasting in Hokkaido. The building at Odori Park’s west end is a historic one now known as Sapporo Archives Museum. It began life in 1926 as the Sapporo Court of Appeals and later became the Sapporo High Court. Between these two structures are many blocks of park. You can see a rose garden, a children’s play area and a water fountain from which four people can drink at once, which was a gift from Sapporo’s sister city, Portland, Oregon, and a replica of fountains found in downtown Portland. Added in 1967 as part of the commemoration of Hokkaido’s one hundred years of development were statues of two nineteenth century gentlemen who played important roles in Sapporo’s early years. A figure of Horace Capron now accompanies one of Kaitakushi leader Kuroda Kiyotaka. Odori Park plays a central role in different festivals celebrated throughout the year and is best known as the main venue for the gigantic, intricate ice sculptures built each year for the snow festival in early February. City festivals date back as far as 1877, when the populace celebrated “Sapporo Day” in June, with ceremonies at Sapporo Shrine as well as horse races, wrestling, dancing and decorations elsewhere in the city. The internationally famous snow festival began in 1950, with six statues built by local high school and junior high school students. More than fifty thousand people came to see the statues and a tradition had begun. Members of the 1950 student group still build a sculpture each year. Hokkaido University has continued to add to Sapporo’s prosperity, but the city has other universities and colleges too. One is Hokusei Gakuen University. In 1880, a Protestant missionary in her late twenties named Sarah Clara Smith came to Japan. After working in Tokyo, she moved on to Hokkaido in 1883, living for a few years in Hakodate and then in Sapporo, where she opened a school for girls— the first one in Sapporo. Some of the early Sapporo Agricultural College graduates who returned to their alma mater to teach also taught girls at Miss Smith’s school. One of her students, Kawai Michi, later opened a school of her own in Tokyo. She singled out among her teachers in Sapporo Nitobe Inazo, who taught the girls history. Miyabe Kingo taught them biology. Sarah Clara Smith’s school evolved into Hokusei (northern star) Gakuen, and in 1962 a university was opened as part of the educational plant. Nitobe had suggested the school’s name, inspired by a Bible verse, Philippians 2:15: “shine like stars, in a dark world.”28 Hokusei

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Gakuen emphasized Bible and English studies until World War II, when government regulation and antipathy to English-speaking enemies forced curriculum changes. After the war, education in these two subjects resumed. Among other educational institutions in the area are Sapporo Medical University and, in nearby Ebetsu, Sapporo Gakuen University and Rakuno Gakuen University, a school for agricultural studies. Hokkaido produces many graduates in technological fields, but career opportunities on the island for all of them are inadequate. Meanwhile, schools throughout Japan are facing decreasing enrollment as the nation’s birthrate has declined. One institution, the private Sapporo University, ran into trouble trying to boost student numbers. In recruiting foreign students, the university for a time abetted the entry of Chinese connected with organized crime, enrolling as students people who had really come to Sapporo to work in the sex industry. Unfortunately, such practices damage the reputation of a school that can offer a good education to many students, Japanese and foreign. Since the scandal, former Governor of Hokkaido Hori Tatsuya has become university head. Consul General Marrie Schaefer, who represents the United States in Sapporo, taught English at Sapporo University in the 1980s, long before the scandal erupted. A noted religious leader, Makiguchi Tsunesaburo, studied in Hokkaido, graduating from Hokkaido Normal School (which later became Hokkaido University of Education) in 1893. He began teaching geography and later moved to Tokyo, where he founded Soka Kyoiku Gakkai (Value-creating Educational Society), which became Soka Gakkai, the prominent and politically influential Buddhist laymen’s organization. In 1964, Soka Gakkai established a political party, Komeito, and though there is little formal connection between religious group and party today, Soka Gakkai members still wield power in Komeito. Thanks to sports, Sapporo has gained international recognition. Sapporo hosted the 1972 Winter Olympic games, the first winter Olympics to be held in Asia. This event first made the city known to much of the wider world. At that time the largest city ever to host the winter games,29 the city had been scheduled as the site for the 1940 games but war caused their cancellation. Sapporo had long been an important winter sports center in Japan, having held the first national ski championship meet in 1923. Already the city boasted world-class venues for some sports; the 1954 world speed skating championships were held outdoors in Maruyama Stadium — during a heavy snowstorm. Sapporo competed to hold the 1968 Winter Olympics, but Grenoble, France won those games (and more than half of the eighty-five Japanese who qualified for the Grenoble games came from Hokkaido.) For the 1972 Olympics, Sapporo’s city fathers determined to make improvements in the area’s infrastructure, not just the sports venues, in order to profit from the games. Preparations began six years ahead of time. One project was upgrading Chitose Airport so that international jets could serve Sapporo. Also, Sapporo’s first subway line, from the main railway station to the Makomanai rink, where skating events would be held, was built for the Olympics. This was the first subway line in Japan north of Tokyo. A huge downtown underground shopping center opened as did new expressways, and a central heating system was installed for downtown buildings. After the games, the Olympic Village built to house the athletes became a housing complex; the foreign competitors had found their rooms uncomfortably small, though. A 1971 sports meet in Hokkaido tested the city’s winter sports facilities. For a week in February, several hundred foreign athletes competed against Japanese in thirty-five

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events held at the venues prepared for the following year’s Olympics. This was the first large-scale sports meet ever held in the winter in Japan. Several thousand troops helped prepare the snow for Sapporo’s 1972 games. Military troops and three hundred riot police brought from elsewhere in Japan were on hand to cope with possible problems ranging from excessive snowfall to demonstrations by radical students or left-wing agitators. Special bodyguards received training to protect VIPs planning to attend, and the Red Cross put out a call for Rh negative blood, because few Japanese carry that blood type though a fair number of foreigners do. The games were successful and free of violence, though minor problems surfaced. Chartered planes bringing the athletes from the United States and several European countries were unable to make their scheduled landings at Chitose due to a snowstorm and went to Tokyo instead. Also, plans to identify each nation’s teams in both Japanese and English had to be changed; Japanese was scuttled because there was no official designation for North Korea in the Japanese language. (Japan did not recognize the North Korean regime.) Too few hotel rooms were available despite use of ships anchored at Otaru as floating hotels. Both a Soviet ship, which served as the hostelry for Russians visiting the games, and the American S.S. President Wilson, which also brought guests, stayed in the harbor for the games. The Emperor and Empress opened the Olympics and saw several events, and the Crown Prince and Princess attended others. For the formal opening at the new Makomanai outdoor ice rink, the temperature was below freezing, though the sun shone for the ceremony. Later, some of the practices as well as actual events had to be postponed because of too much snow, but good weather, with only a few snowstorms, prevailed for most of the contests. Sapporo Beer advertised to Olympic visitors that Sapporo, like those other two famous brewing cities, Munich and Milwaukee, lay at 45 degrees north latitude, “Climatically best suited for brewing the finest beer.” (In 1962, the Japan Times had called Sapporo “the mecca of Japanese beer production.”)30 Meanwhile, city officials required strippers in the Susukino entertainment district to keep more clothes on than usual while the many foreign visitors were in Sapporo. Due to the games’ success, the city bid for the 1984 winter games, but was not chosen. Japan expressed interest in hosting the 2016 summer Olympics, with Sapporo, Fukuoka and Tokyo each seriously considering the idea. Concerned about costs, however, Sapporo Mayor Ueda Fumio decided to poll citizens on the proposal. A slight majority opposed hosting the games, possibly due to the cost, and Mayor Ueda declined to bid for the Olympics. Just after the twenty-first century began, a new sports stadium opened in Sapporo. The city was awarded three of the 2002 World Cup soccer matches and constructed for them a multipurpose dome. The Sapporo Dome features a retractable soccer field of real grass, which can be wheeled into the dome. This means that soccer can be played even when snow carpets Sapporo, and the professional soccer team based in the city, Consadole Sapporo, is now able to play all of its home games in its home city. Baseball is also played there, but games take place on the permanent artificial field under the dome, which seems a pity since Sapporo often has summer weather perfect for baseball. In 2004 the dome became the home field for one of Japan’s major league baseball teams, the Nippon Ham Fighters, who had been using the Tokyo Dome as their home. Now the team is known as the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. In 2006 they won the Asian championship as well

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as Japan’s. The Sapporo Dome truly is a multi-sport facility. When the Nordic World Ski Championship contest took place in Sapporo in 2007, workers trucked in snow to cover the dome’s floor for some events. Sapporo has impressive facilities dedicated to art as well as to sport. The Museum of Modern Art downtown contains a wonderful painting, Iwahashi Eien’s “Retrospection of Hokkaido.” Iwahashi spent his first twenty-one years in Hokkaido; this painting is a scroll ninety-seven feet long which displays the Hokkaido landscape throughout the four seasons, from winter to winter. In recent years, two grand parks related to art have opened in the city. South of the city center, the Sapporo Art Park includes a museum of contemporary art, a sculpture garden, a craft museum, studios and a house where novelist Arishima Takeo once lived. In the northeast area of Sapporo is Moerenuma Park, designed by prominent JapaneseAmerican artist Isamu Noguchi. When shown the site, a landfill mostly enclosed by a now-isolated river loop, Noguchi was enthusiastic about its possibilities. He died in 1988, shortly after planning the park’s layout, and by 2005, the park’s construction was complete. The park includes various structures of Noguchi’s design, most impressive the pyramid-shaped artificial “Play Mountain” 170 feet high. In addition to Moerenuma Park, Noguchi designed a sculpture for children to be installed in Odori Park. Here a street was actually closed for a block in order to place the work where Noguchi wished. The granite sculpture is called Black Slide Mantra, which describes it well; this children’s slide was designed to contrast with Sapporo’s snow, Noguchi explained.31 The city has made many other improvements, too. The city hall and the main building of the Grand Hotel were torn down in 1973 to make way for more modern structures. A ring road was built in the 1980s. The second of the city’s three subway lines, from east to west, opened in 1976 and another north-south line in 1988. Additions have been made to all three lines since they first opened, and thanks to the subway, downtown streets are no longer crowded with buses. In 1997 Kitara Hall opened in Nakajima Park, just south of the Susukino District, as a concert hall, complete with pipe organ. The name — Kitara — was coined to suggest the north, as kita means “north” in Japanese; also, Apollo’s lyre was a kithara. Yet placing this large edifice in Nakajima Park at the expense of grass, trees and flowers seems a sad choice. Other park attractions from earlier days have been lost, too, including a baseball field that was flooded to become a skating rink during the winter. Since 1990, Sapporo has hosted the annual Pacific Music Festival in various venues, recently including Kitara Hall. Conceived by Leonard Bernstein, the event combines training of young musicians with concerts for the public, both indoors and out. For this and for many other reasons the tourists come, more than thirteen million in 2002. Sapporo’s best-known event remains the snow festival. Because of its popularity, sculptures have been made in recent years not only in Odori Park but also in two other sites, including the military base in Makomanai. The number of sculptures has grown to over three hundred. Since 1955, members of Japan’s military forces have built the largest sculptures (as a cold weather training exercise) and American troops stationed in Japan have also contributed sculptures in various years. In the early twenty-first century, however, Japan’s army has been reduced in size; also, some of its troops have been deployed abroad, not so many military men have been available for the festival, and city workers have been called in to help. In 2004, the Japanese military announced that it would be making fewer figures than usual because training for duty in Iraq took precedence. The

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World-renowned Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) designed this sculpture as a slide for children. Built of black granite to contrast with Sapporo’s white winter snow cover and created to be placed in Odori Park, it was installed there three years after Noguchi’s death.

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Makomanai site would no longer be used for the festivals after 2005; a new site in the northeastern part of Sapporo has been opened. Meanwhile, other Hokkaido cities have included ice sculptures in their winter festivals. Since 2004, some Sapporo businesses have experimented by changing summer work schedules, giving employees the equivalent of daylight savings time. Daylight time has drawn fierce opposition in Japan because occupation authorities imposed it after the war, but it makes sense in Hokkaido, which is far to the east in Japan’s time zone, meaning that daylight comes very early but darkness comes early, too. Of course winter still causes problems in Sapporo. Because fifteen to twenty feet of snow falls upon the city in an average winter, its removal strains the city budget. In the early postwar years, snow removal machinery was used in Sapporo for the first time; occupation officials had requested this, and they made equipment for the purpose available to the city. Development of ever more sophisticated snow removal systems continues, stressing the safety of pedestrians and motorists. Coping with the snow has evolved, with studded tires banned in 1992. Newer strategies include heating important roads and even some driveways and sidewalks. Both snow removal and application of freeze-prevention agents are common practices now. Among the city’s tanks for collecting snowmelt is one below the plaza outside Sapporo Station’s north entrance. Some, but certainly not all, of Sapporo’s problems are related to its weather. Winter cold and snow impact homeless people, who sleep where they can find a little shelter or visit twenty-four-hour convenience stores to soak up a little warmth. Homeless people live in the city despite Sapporo’s cold winters. Other troubles are those found in many of the world’s major cities these days. Sapporo’s dark side includes problems from shoplifting to drugs or alcoholism, poverty to illegal gambling and police corruption. Some of the many Susukino sex shops have ties to organized crime. In addition, development has too often meant throwing money into projects not adequately thought out, which therefore do not enhance the city as they might have. Using some of the downtown area’s limited parkland as the site of a new concert hall is an example. And it is sad that with almost all prewar structures torn down and replaced, the old city is lost. It is almost impossible to imagine that at one time almost every building in this city had a wooden facade. Aka Renga, that red brick edifice, and the Clock Tower, finished with white-painted wood siding, are among the few historic buildings still standing. Despite the many redevelopment projects that Sapporo has seen, the city’s architecture remains mostly undistinguished. Like other cities throughout the world, Sapporo faces the challenge of increased automobile use. Public transportation is available via tram, bus, subway and train, but more and more private cars appear on the city’s streets. By 2004, Sapporo residents owned more than one million cars, and transportation authorities have met very limited success in trying to decrease traffic congestion. Possibly luring more people to downtown Sapporo by train instead of automobile is the redevelopment of Sapporo Station and its surroundings, which has made this area an attractive destination rather than merely a place to catch a train (though by 1960 the station served about one hundred thousand passengers each day.) The station complex includes hotel, theater, department store and large underground mall and presents a modern facade and plaza. Planned is an underground walkway that will extend from the station all the way to Odori Park, a real boon to pedestrians during inclement weather.

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This not-very-flattering view of Sapporo was taken from the T38 tower in the Sapporo Station complex at the city’s center. The greenery at the upper right of the photograph identifies the area as Hokkaido University’s campus.

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The developed areas around Sapporo Station and Odori Park are convenient for travelers to the city. Sapporo’s hinterland, exceptionally large for Japan, means that many travelers come. Sapporo is six hundred miles from Tokyo and is by far the largest city north of the national capital. While most of the other large cities in Japan are located fairly near other very large urban centers, Sapporo is not. Here is where governmental functions on Hokkaido are clustered and where policies affecting the island (except those made in Tokyo) are decided. Sapporo is Hokkaido’s center for commerce, education and entertainment. Sapporo in the early twenty-first century is not a perfect place, but it remains a pleasant, inviting, and busy city, making the most of its northern climate, from displays of temperate zone flowers in spring and summer to ice fantasies in the winter.

9

Development and the Ainu

While official policy in Japan stressed migration to Hokkaido and development of the island, Ainu were already there. The Kaitakushi implemented a colonial regime; though large Ainu reservations were not created as were Indian reservations in the United States, officials relocated many Ainu families and communities. The Meiji government and colonial officials treated Hokkaido as an empty land for Wajin to develop, and many Wajin truly believed that official policies designed to impose a Wajin lifestyle on Ainu would benefit these native people of Hokkaido. Not until after World War II did world attitudes about colonial policies change significantly, and in Japan the twentieth century saw a new Ainu consciousness develop. In response, government attitudes toward the Ainu slowly evolved; in 1997 official support for Ainu cultural activities began.

Ainu in the pioneer years As we have seen, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the shogunate began a plan to assimilate the Ainu, who were now to speak, live and act Japanese. Ainu were meant to feel Japanese and thus support the nation in case of any foreign — meaning Russian — incursion. In addition, officials felt, Ainu would then not be tempted to leave Japan. Ironically, not only did Ainu resist “becoming Japanese,” the Matsumae also opposed this policy, apparently because of the prejudice of Ezo Wajin (including officials) against Ainu. But the shogunate wanted the Ainu assimilated in order to turn them into a loyal, stable and productive populace. One goal of the assimilation policy was to prevent Ainu from practicing Christianity. This religion had been proscribed in Japan for two hundred years; thus when shogunate officials took control, they acted forcefully to exterminate the Russian Orthodox Christianity they saw some Kuril Island Ainu practicing. The officials supported the spread of Japanese Buddhism and Shinto and encouraged temple and shrine construction in Hokkaido. They also prohibited the traditional Ainu bear ceremony, iyomante (but that did not stop the ceremony’s practice). Many Ainu did not comply with the various orders, and local officials did not apply the new rules stringently. Several aspects of the new policy worked in favor of the Ainu, at least briefly; “hitherto the traders have been a pack of tricksters, and care shall be taken to see that trade is fairly conducted,” read the shogunate’s new policy. Traders and others who dealt with the Ainu were expected to treat them justly and humanely. For example, the shogunate planned that medical care be provided. The regime was paternalistic,

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and the people who dealt with Ainu generally felt them to be backward or slow. Even enlightened Japanese like Honda Toshiaki compared the Ainu to children.1 Government policy, of course, was designed to reward Ainu who cooperated — among other things, by providing them hulled rice in place of brown rice. In reality, Wajin who dealt with Ainu on a daily basis, as in the fisheries, did not change their attitudes and continued to discriminate against and take advantage of Ainu, whether or not these Ainu accepted government regulations. Ainu policy was far from stable, however. When the Russian threat ebbed and the shogunate returned the administration of Ezo to the Matsumae in 1821, the reason given for the change was improvement in relations between Ainu and Wajin. Such improvement was hard to see, and with the Matsumae once more in control, regulations for Ainu changed again; many Wajin living in Ezo considered Ainu as less than human. No longer were they to be made into Japanese, and no longer were they even allowed to speak the Japanese language or live in a Japanese manner. Under Matsumae rule, conditions for Ainu life deteriorated. Officials tried to turn some Ainu into farmers and others were coerced into working in roadbuilding and other activities. Some were forcibly relocated; many Ainu women were taken — again, forcibly — by Wajin men. Ainu population dropped significantly during these years of Matsumae and shogunate rule. From 1800 to the present, Ainu population measured in Hokkaido has varied between 15,000 and 20,000. Brett Walker cites official estimates of Ezo’s Ainu population: 26,256 people in 1807 but only 17,810 in 1854. Another estimate for the island shows a twenty-five percent population drop from 1804 to 1854.2 Diseases— especially smallpox —contributed largely to the population decline. Ailments new to Ainu attacked them, from influenza to smallpox to syphilis, because these people had no immunity. Smallpox had existed among Ainu at least as far back as 1624, when an epidemic was first recorded. Carl Etter recounts Rumoi Town’s escape from smallpox during a late eighteenth century outbreak in neighboring Mashike. The Ainu chief in Rumoi told a Japanese official that he was considering having all his people run from the town to escape the disease. But the official suggested that would make it difficult to get food to people. He advised instead cutting off access to Rumoi. Everyone’s fishing nets were gathered and installed to encircle the town. With signs, guards and fetishes also put in place, Rumoi people kept themselves free from smallpox. In other communities, Ainu hearing of a smallpox outbreak in the vicinity would flee into the hills.3 After the shogunate reinstated direct rule of Ezo in the mid–nineteenth century, officials made efforts to stem disease, including the 1857-58 inoculation of more than six thousand Ainu against smallpox. In the latter years of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis also devastated the Ainu, as they were exposed to it for the first time. The Ainu mortality rate from TB was far higher than that of Japan’s population as a whole. The mid–nineteenth century brought change to the Ainu as it did for all Japan. After Commodore Perry made his epic voyage to Japan and Russian ships too appeared, the shogunate assumed direct control and once again a Japanization policy began. Officials also made some efforts to placate Ainu, with an order that no longer could Ainu women be used as concubines. Ainu would now be allowed to study the Japanese language, too. Wajin still pressed Ainu into working in the fishing industry. Kayano Shigeru has written of his great-grandfather, who was taken in 1858 at the age of eleven or twelve from Nibutani Village on the Saru River to Akkeshi on the coast, a journey of at least 175 miles. The grandfather was “enslaved,” Kayano wrote in a book for children about the

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Ainu. Matsuura Takeshiro compiled a record of the Nibutani Ainu who were forced to work in Akkeshi at that time. Forty-three of the 116 villagers were “drafted for forced labor,” including all or almost all the men of working age. Even some women and children were included.4 Matsuura also visited Ainu households in Kitami whose able-bodied members had been taken to Rishiri island, far from their homes, to work in the fisheries. A later example of Ainu relocation took place in Kushiro in 1885. Ainu were moved inland, beyond the town, in order to prevent confrontations between Ainu and Wajin living in the same area. Also, this would make it more difficult for Ainu to pick up day jobs and to spend their money on alcohol. The Japanization policy continued after the 1868 Meiji Restoration. In fact, as Richard Siddle has pointed out, the renaming of Ezo as Hokkaido in 1869 emphasized that the island was an integral part of Japan. Certainly the “north” part of the name implies this. Miyajima Toshimitsu has noted the special significance the name change had for the Ainu. Ezo had been the “land of the Ainu,” because the Ainu had once been known as the Ezo, but the new name did away with any relationship between the Ainu and the island.5 When Hokkaido came under the direction of the Kaitakushi in 1869, the organization assumed responsibility for the island’s Ainu. Leaders in Tokyo adapted some “modern” ideas from western nations, including racial theories which suggested the Ainu were a lesser people, and Kuroda Kiyotaka said, “the natives should be treated with affection, protected, and educated,” but he noted their “repugnant practices” and “inferior customs.”6 Over the following years as government policies continued to undermine Ainu culture, most officials felt that what they were doing was in the best interests of the Ainu as well as the Wajin. Ainu children would now attend school and would be taught in the Japanese language. Kuroda arranged for several Ainu to be educated in Tokyo. The Kaitakushi outlawed traditional Ainu practices that officials felt uncivilized, including tattooing of women, wearing earrings by men and hunting with poisoned arrows. Not only were such practices perceived as uncivilized, some of them made the Ainu look different from Wajin. Japanese officials feared that if Ainu continued to appear distinctive, Russians would be tempted to gain Ainu support. On the other hand, if Ainu shaved, adopted Wajin hair styles and attire, Russians might feel that appeals to Ainu would be useless. Ainu officially became “commoners” of Japan; now they came under the Japanese legal system rather than Ainu traditional law. They were officially recognized with Japanese names, not their Ainu names. Since Ainu had no surnames, new ones were adopted, based on where the people lived. Ainu were registered separately from the Wajin, however, and were known as kyudojin, or “former natives.” Whatever policy Tokyo imposed, Ainu remained Ainu and suffered discrimination under Hokkaido Wajin regardless of whether or not they left the Ainu way of life for the Japanese way. At least, as Siddle has pointed out, by now Ainu usually were called “natives” rather than “barbarians,” as they were earlier known. Ainu, of course, had no role in planning these or any other Hokkaido development policies. They became victims but, unlike some Native Americans, Ainu did not forcibly resist, nor did they attack settlers. Scholar Katarina Sjoberg has written that the Ainu of that time based the troubles that had come to them on the disintegration of their relations with the Ainu gods. Perhaps the Wajin gods had more power than Ainu gods, some Ainu came to think, and thus these Ainu did not challenge the Wajin way of life.7 In negotiations with the Russians over the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin, the shogunate did not take the Ainu of those areas into consideration. During nineteenth century talks

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with the Russians over the boundary between the two nations on Sakhalin, Japanese officials argued that Sakhalin had been Ainu territory and since the Ainu had long been under Matsumae suzerainty, Sakhalin was therefore Japanese territory. However, when the treaty reached in 1875 gave Russia title to all Sakhalin, more than eight hundred Ainu living there lost their homes. The Russians plundered and pillaged as they proceeded south on Sakhalin, so many Ainu reluctantly decided they would be wise to leave and relocate in Japan. (Miyajima Toshimitsu has written that Japanese officials forced the Ainu to leave Sakhalin.)8 The Ainu refugees from Sakhalin moved first to the Soya area at the very north of Hokkaido and then to a site on the Ishikari River called Tsuishikari (now in the city of Ebetsu). Kaitakushi officials had promised these people that they could stay in Soya, not far from Sakhalin, but Kuroda Kiyotaka apparently decided that they would be more useful in the Ishikari basin, where the Kaitakushi hoped to begin coal mining and Ainu could work as miners. In this way, officials tried to change the way of life of these people but it did not work out; many died in epidemics and a number of survivors returned to Sakhalin. In the early twentieth century, when Japan once more obtained title to southern Sakhalin, the remnants of the Sakhalin group returned to their original homeland. But half a century later, as World War II drew to an end, many of their descendants fled from Sakhalin to Hokkaido to escape the invading Russians, and almost all the rest were repatriated to Japan after the war. The Kuril Ainu suffered too. In 1884, concerned about the loyalty of the Ainu in the North Kurils where under Russian influence they had become Orthodox Christians, Japanese officials moved them to Shikotan in the South Kurils, far from the Russian border. This disrupted traditional lifestyles and more than half of the people died in the first five years of their exile. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki has pointed out, it was important to consider the Ainu as true Japanese in order to substantiate Japanese claims to the places that had been Ainu homelands (southern Sakhalin and the Kurils as well as Hokkaido) but in order to support the policy of destroying Ainu culture and turning the Ainu into Japanese, they had to be seen as a separate people — two antithetical theories.9 Ainu occasionally resisted Wajin decisions but were friendly to settler families. As settlers came to Hokkaido, Ainu often cooperated with them; the newcomers needed both Ainu expertise and assistance. It was when greater numbers of Wajin came, putting pressure on Ainu and their land, that tension and prejudice surfaced. The appearance of more and more settlers could not help but impact Ainu life. Administrative districts set up by the new Wajin authorities often cut across traditional Ainu community boundaries. Also, Ainu could no longer depend upon hunting as they traditionally had; not only were their traps and poison banned, Wajin with guns decimated the animal population. The result was catastrophic both for the animals, which were almost wiped out, and for the Ainu. The weather during the extra-severe 1878-79 winter added to the dislocations in Ainu life created by increased Wajin activity in Hokkaido and some Ainu starved. Officials banned Ainu from fishing in the Tokachi area in 1883, again leading to starvation for some. Perhaps as many as one-fifth of the Ainu suffered near-starvation in the late nineteenth century.10 In Hokkaido, just as in North America and Australia, alcohol helped destroy traditional aboriginal culture. The invasive group supplied drink to the minority indigenous group, leading often to debt, illness or even suicide. Alcohol could have a devastating effect on a society already crumbling by forced changes in lifestyle, whether Ainu, Native American, or Australian Aboriginal.

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The Land Regulation Ordinance of 1872 also hurt Ainu communities. It designated Hokkaido land as belonging to the Japanese state, effectively destroying any land rights. Now Ainu property could be taken for Wajin settlement or other uses, the people being removed to whatever spot was specified for them. Many times in the next decade or so this happened. This policy brings to mind the establishment of Indian reservations in the United States. Ainu relocation was not systematic as was Indian removal policy, however. Ainu were supposed to stay on their land and raise crops. Plans to make the Ainu into farmers sounded good, but in those days officials in Japan, as elsewhere in the world, did not realize that people simply do not change their lifestyles easily. Kaitakushi Ainu policies were also hampered by lack of funds and lack of attention. After the Kaitakushi was disbanded in 1882, efforts to turn Ainu into farmers continued. Officials hoped to settle Ainu on the land as successful (and busy) farmers so that the land which they had previously used for hunting and collecting food plants could be opened to Wajin settlement. Compelling some Ainu to move to the newly created farming communities was unsuccessful, partly because the people were made to live in communities built in ways alien to Ainu practice. Traditionally, each Ainu kotan had been very small. Under 1882 regulations, however, the new Ainu communities were much larger, in order to properly administer villages and to be able to have one agricultural expert guide a large number of people in farming techniques. These large villages tended to be far from the original Ainu communities and they were totally separated from Wajin communities. Officials hired agricultural experts to show Ainu how to farm. This too did not succeed, partly because in Ainu tradition it had always been the women who grew what crops were raised. The small plots (two and one-half acres, sometimes less, per family) given to Ainu for farming proved too little to enable an Ainu family to make a living from agriculture (and make the payments required once the land was productive) even if family members worked diligently. Often, the land made available to Ainu was swampy and unhealthy, unsuitable for farming. As more and more Wajin migrated to Hokkaido in the last decades of the nineteenth century, pressure on the land grew and the Ainu who held land and had been struggling to make ends meet often ended up selling or leasing their land on terms unfair to themselves. All in all, the program to turn Ainu into farmers was a failure, even though officials may have genuinely believed that what they were doing was good for the Ainu as well as for the Wajin. Gradually, Ainu men went back to seasonal work in the fisheries while the women did what farming continued. Ainu who depended on fishing also struggled. As the Ainu population dwindled in the nineteenth century, fishery contractors brought in prisoners or north Honshu laborers to work; Ainu still employed in the fishery found they could not make an adequate living. Despite the hardships, most Ainu men ended up doing seasonal fishing work or inland forestry and surveying. These Ainu returned as much as they could to their traditional roles in life. Also, more and more Ainu could be found in isolated coastal dwellings, where they would do odd jobs for the occasional traveler. Life had changed irrevocably for Ainu as the nineteenth century came to an end. They had to compete with Wajin for fishing jobs once reserved for them, many Ainu were relocated by officials, and Ainu had to pay taxes and face a possible draft, just as did others in Japan. On the other hand, as official policy evolved, it actually took effect only sporadically, as local officials saw the need. In addition, the policies did not call for using violence to impose new rules upon the Ainu.

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Miyajima Toshimitsu has suggested that much of the prejudice today against the Ainu stems from the pioneer days. Because Wajin newly arriving in Hokkaido saw Ainu living in degrading circumstances, the newcomers assumed this was the Ainu natural state, and thus Ainu must be inferior. A western observer in Japan wrote of the Ainu, “Idleness with them is the rule,” but the visitor did not seek the reasons for the idleness he saw. He also saw Ainu poverty, though it is only fair to point out that many Wajin peasants were poor, too.11

Travelers, missionaries, scientists and the Ainu In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of travelers to Hokkaido, both Japanese and foreign, wrote about the Ainu. Most who observed Ainu emphasized the alien aspects of their culture, though a few perceptive travelers including Mogami Tokunai and Mamiya Rinzo described Ainu practices thoughtfully. Mogami in particular gained detailed knowledge of Ainu life from several years spent living among them. Matsuura Takeshiro, of course, was also sympathetic to the Ainu. He vigorously inveighed against Ainu forced labor. He collected Ainu artifacts and presented some of them to Professor Edward S. Morse, a noted American biologist and archaeologist who published influential studies of Japan. Morse, in turn, gave a collection to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. An earlier traveler, Uehara Kumajiro, interpreted for the shogunate and as a result put together the first Ainu-Japanese dictionary in 1804. This was the first time the Ainu language was ever expressed in written form, though travelers from much earlier times— even Friar Jeronimo de Angelis in the early seventeenth century — had collected Ainu words. Many otherwise enlightened Japanese theorized that the Ainu were an inferior people. Oyabe Jenichiro, who spent several months living with Hokkaido Ainu about 1884, liked the Ainu he grew to know and generalized that they were “good-natured, brave, and faithful” but perhaps “stupid.” He decided that what Ainu needed more than anything else was “spiritual progress,” while Nitobe Inazo, who had studied in America and Europe, said in the early twentieth century that Ainu were “barbaric” and incapable of much work.12 In 1876, Christian missionary work began among the Ainu, when the Rev. Walter Dening went to live in an Ainu village, study the language and impart the teachings of Christianity. The westerner most identified with the Ainu, though, was missionary John Batchelor, an Englishman who lived among them for many years. Arriving in Hokkaido in 1877, he went with Dening to visit Ainu villages and from 1882 until the beginning of the Second World War he largely devoted his life to the Ainu. For awhile, he and his wife lived in a room built onto an Ainu chief ’s house. The Batchelors adopted a young Ainu girl and raised her as a Christian. Batchelor helped organize schools and a clinic for Ainu. He learned the Ainu language and compiled reference works about Ainu people, culture and language. He was the first to translate the New Testament into Ainu; he was responsible for the first items (including the Lord’s Prayer) ever printed in Ainu. This was in 1885. In 1887, he published the first grammar of the language ever to appear. Frederick Starr, writing in 1904, reported that Batchelor had converted perhaps nine hundred Ainu to Christianity.13

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Batchelor became recognized during his lifetime as the world’s foremost authority on the Ainu. He liked Ainu and was irate at Wajin characterizations of them as only half human. Even he perceived Ainu as victims, however, as a people who would always need help rather than ones who could stand up for their own rights, and he tried to convince them to stop some of their practices, such as tattooing girls. (He was unsuccessful in that effort.) John Batchelor’s life was not always easy; he faced legal action in 1885 for living in an area not open to foreigners. The real reason for his prosecution apparently was that he was working to revive the Ainu language; officials opposed his attempts to study and encourage Ainu culture because they wanted the Ainu to adopt Japanese ways. But he later won official recognition, receiving an honor from the Emperor in 1909. One American who met him in Sap- British missionary John Batchelor (1854–1944) devoted poro in 1940 felt, however, that most of his life to work with Hokkaido Ainu. He pioneered Batchelor was “more interested in the study of Ainu language and tradition, publishing several books and articles on Ainu life and beliefs as well as preserving the Ainu for posterity a detailed Ainu-English dictionary. He is about seventy than in alleviating the suffering of years old in this photograph (courtesy Hokkaido Univerthose living today.”14 Batchelor sity Library). lived in Japan until he was forced to leave during World War II. He died in England in 1944, ninety years old. Since Batchelor’s time, scholars have pointed out mistakes in his interpretations of Ainu language and culture, but his insight was pioneering in an age when many people took for granted that “native” people were inferior. Many westerners who traveled to Hokkaido to work for the Japanese government were curious about the Ainu. American mining engineer Raphael Pumpelly, surveying Hokkaido in 1862, came upon an Ainu village. “The Japanese look upon the Ainos with contempt,” he wrote, and described the Japanese theory he had heard that the Ainu were descendants of a Japanese woman and a dog. Pumpelly found the Ainu were “a mild, good-natured race,” and he also noted that for more than a millennium they had defended their lands successfully. Horace Capron compared the Ainu to American Indians, saying that Ainu were “a very superior race of beings in every respect, having none of their [Indians’] savage brutality.” Capron was misinformed, though, in thinking that Ainu did

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not fight wars, “all individual disputes being settled by the Fathers of the different communities in which they live.” Many aspects of Ainu life reminded Capron of American Indians. Both groups depended on fish and game for their food and their dwellings were similar, with a fire spot in the middle of the house from which smoke escaped through a small opening in the roof. Capron also noted a similarity of clothing and the practice of carrying babies on people’s backs. William S. Clark found “fine looking savages of a peaceable disposition ... and a language very smooth and agreeable to the ear.”15 Visitors to Hokkaido expressed extremely varied opinions about the Ainu. One positive quality many nineteenth century observers noted was Ainu kindness, though other visitors judged Ainu negatively. H. C. St. John wrote in 1873, “The Ainos are goodnatured, kind, and obliging; they are always willing to do anything they may be asked, appear glad to see a strange face amongst them, are neither rude nor inquisitive, and invariably in their peculiar way salute you.” As several travelers have pointed out, Ainu could have fun at the expense of people who studied them; upon occasion, they no doubt made up tales to get a rise out of a credulous listener. They were “a very matter-of-fact race,” thought John Batchelor. On the other hand, Henry Savage Landor wrote that the Ainu “are the furthest behind in the great race of human development.” He judged them to be probably less civilized than the Australian aborigines and others “among the lowest races in creation.” (But he admired Ainu horsemanship.) John R. Black claimed about the Ainu, “religion they have none; unless the occasional idolatrous ceremonies performed in front of the dwelling of the village patriarch can be dignified with the name.” Such an ethnocentric remark of course tells us more about the observer than about the culture he observed. Thomas Blakiston suggested that the Ainu would be effective soldiers should the Japanese need to defend Hokkaido, but he doubted that the Japanese would want to “teach the Ainu to know their own strength.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, western writers often called the Ainu the “hairy Ainu,” but as more astute observers have pointed out, Ainu were hairy not in comparison to westerners but to Japanese, among whom beards are rare. A number of western writers disapproved of the dirtiness of the Ainu.16 The nineteenth century traveler in Hokkaido most often cited is Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman in her forties when she went to Japan in 1878. Ainu in the settlement of Biratori, up the Saru River about ten miles from Hokkaido’s southern coast, welcomed her generously, and she wrote of her experiences with them. While on her travels she sent letters to her sister in England which were later published as Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, a book still in print. Perhaps so many people refer to Bird because her work is easily accessible and interesting to read, and perhaps it draws attention because her journey was, as she wrote, “the first foray made by a lady into the country of the aborigines.” The book was praised in its day for its full and accurate portrayal of the Ainu, though one reviewer criticized Bird’s use of the word “savages” to describe the Ainu because it implied that the Ainu were “a fierce, cruel, brutal race,” which Bird’s description otherwise did not suggest.17 Her work inspired European and American interest in the Ainu. In 1896 Mabel Loomis Todd, visiting Hokkaido with a scientific expedition to view an eclipse, was anxious to collect Ainu artifacts. She wrote, “an event in one’s lifetime is the first sight of an Ainu. A ‘civilized’ specimen soon crossed my path, the most extraordinary figure in my experience. With his wild head of electrified black hair parted in the middle and standing out under a round-crowned and very dingy Derby, huge hoops of brass or German silver in his ears, his face largely hidden by an enormous beard and mus-

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tache, a white cotton kimono and cowhide boots, this anomalous relic of a vanishing nation was infinitely more pathetic than his veriest savage kinsman.” Wajin had “brighter intellect” than Ainu, she thought.18 Most western visitors and observers merely collected artifacts or wrote books or articles about their experiences with the Ainu, but western insensitivity to Ainu culture caused a furor in Hakodate in 1865. Several Englishmen from the city opened Ainu graves in the village of Mori on the south shore of Uchiura Bay and removed skulls, presumably for European anthropologists to study. This was clearly forbidden, and one account says that a foreign consul publicized the event out of disappointment because he had not been able to obtain such bones. The British Consul in Hakodate, Howard Vyse, who was implicated in the theft, ruled the accused men innocent of any charges, holding that their guilt was not proven. But this caused dismay, and Sir Harry Parkes, British Minister to Japan, found the question referred to him. Both the incident and Vyse’s inept handling of it outraged many Ainu. The miscreants did confess and Parkes fined them and sentenced them to about a year’s confinement with hard labor. Eventually, the purloined bones, which had been sent to Vyse’s brother in England, were returned to the Ainu along with the money collected from the fines— and Vyse lost his job.19 By the 1880s, a few Japanese tourists ventured to Hokkaido; the government publicized the Ainu to attract visitors. Most important, the Meiji Emperor visited the Ainu community at Shiraoi, where Ainu were working in the Wajin-run fisheries. Twentieth century scholars have contributed significantly to Ainu studies. Among the Japanese, Kindaichi Kyosuke, who carried out significant studies of Ainu culture, has been described as “perhaps the foremost Ainu specialist in the world.”20 Working with Ainu Kannari Matsu, he put together a collection of eight volumes of yukar. Kindaichi also encouraged a young Ainu, Chiri Mashio, to pursue studies in Ainu linguistics. Chiri became a Hokudai professor and eventually published three volumes of what he planned to be an eleven volume dictionary of the Ainu language. He died of heart disease in 1961 when he was only fifty-two years old, and though his massive project was left unfinished, his scholarship has been widely admired. Neil Gordon Munro, a Scottish physician and anthropologist who lived long in Hokkaido and studied Ainu culture and language, wrote in 1937, “I am only interested in the Ainu because I see in them good stuff which only needs opportunity AND TIME to make them worthy citizens of the country.”21 The Hokkaido government solicited Munro’s advice about the Ainu. How could their situation be ameliorated? He recommended improving housing and education and investing more funds in public health, especially in taking steps to lessen Ainu consumption of alcohol. Munro tried to teach habits of good sanitation to the Ainu, for he feared that tuberculosis, which came to the Ainu through Wajin, was one of the dangers of not practicing cleanliness, and he personally tried to convince Ainu to stop drinking. (When accused in 1938 of being a spy against Japan, he suspected that it was a liquor dealer who made the charge.)

The Former Aborigines Protection Act In the last decades of the nineteenth century, reformers and liberal thinkers in Hokkaido pushed for action to improve the Ainu condition, though few Ainu spoke out. Not only missionaries like Batchelor, but Wajin concerned about education and public

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welfare called for reform. Most Ainu did not overtly oppose Japanization, but one exception was Kannari Taro. In 1883, when he was seventeen years old, he sent a petition to officials urging education for the Ainu. Soon he met missionary John Batchelor, worked with him and continued his efforts for Ainu interests. But, eventually, discouraged, Kannari fell into alcoholism and died at the age of thirty. Government action to reform policy toward the Ainu took some years to achieve. Such a law was first introduced in the Diet in 1893. Politicians wrote it without consulting any Ainu, instead looking at legislation from other nations, including the Dawes Act adopted in the United States in 1887 under which individual Native Americans could receive titles to their own parcels of land. The American policy failed; though it did disrupt traditional ways of life, it did not turn Indians into farmers and therefore was not a good model for Ainu policy in Japan. This went unrecognized. Paternalism — or worse — also surfaced in Diet debates on the proposed law, which contained various references to Ainu inferiority. One of the reasons it took some years for a reform law to pass was the feeling among some Diet members that innate Ainu inferiority meant that people could not improve; thus, there was no reason to try to better their status. The Diet finally adopted the “Law for the Protection of the Former Natives of Hokkaido,” or, more familiarly, the Ainu Protection Act, in 1899. Officials intended it to improve Ainu conditions by preventing practices through which Wajin took advantage of the Ainu. Again, the policy was genuinely meant to foster improvement by making the Ainu into Japanese, but the act’s title, emphasizing protection, implicitly asserted Ainu inferiority. The reference to “former natives” made clear that Ainu now had supposedly been assimilated into the general Japanese population. The Act was the most serious effort yet to ameliorate the plight of the Ainu. Because Ainu were widely portrayed as a “dying race,” victims of the “survival of the fittest,” the legislation was intended to be a sympathetic means to protect them.22 Under the law’s provisions, up to twelve and one-half acres of land would be available for individual Ainu who wished to farm. The government would provide tools and seeds and the Ainu farmer would receive some protection from taxation. Ainu land had to be cultivated within fifteen years or it would revert to the state. Schools and medical care would be provided when needed, though schools would be segregated and Ainu would be taught in the Japanese language. Finally, the government would control Ainu community assets and decide when to extend financial help to needy Ainu. Ainu history in the early twentieth century measured the success and failure of the Ainu Protection Act. Ainu generally wanted a plot of land only big enough for the women to cultivate while the men worked in the fishery or in town; therefore, more and more families resorted to renting out much of their land to Wajin farmers. Often, when times were bad, Ainu families even felt they had to sell their land. The legislation thus did not create Ainu farmers. One study, centered on the Shizunai District on the southern coast of Hokkaido, showed that nearly eighty percent of the land reserved for Ainu had to be returned to the state. Just as Wajin settlers on Hokkaido would not give up rice for a wheat-based diet, Ainu men respected their tradition by which only women did the farming.23 The Ainu Protection Act’s attempt to make medical care available to the Ainu was laudatory, but promises were not met. Though Ainu did not have to pay for medicine, they often could not get care in their own communities, and many people were unable to travel elsewhere due to poverty — or illness.

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With the act in place, fishing rights no longer differed between Wajin and Ainu. In practice, however, Ainu did not fare any better in the fisheries than they had before, because powerful entrepreneurs and associations dominated the industry. As the herring and salmon runs had declined due to overfishing, Ainu as well as Wajin lost employment and thus livelihood. A few Ainu found a very different sort of employment, for in the early years of the twentieth century, Ainu became actors on a world stage — literally — when they appeared in expositions on three continents. Ainu went on display at an exposition in Osaka in 1903 in a “native village” exhibit; several other groups including Taiwan’s aborigines were also presented. In the 1912 Colonial Exposition in Tokyo, Ainu were again shown to visiting crowds. On the international stage, such an exhibit of Ainu first occurred at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. Frederick Starr, a University of Chicago anthropologist, went to Japan to recruit a group of Ainu to appear in the fair’s anthropology section, where “natives” from various parts of the world, including Filipinos, American Indians and African pygmies, would be shown. Ainu were included because of their “primitive” music and their “primitive agriculture which has produced a distinctive form of millet” as well as for their bear cult.24 In reality, however, public interest in the “Hairy Ainu” may have been at least part of the reason exposition organizers wanted to exhibit them. Arriving in Hokkaido in January 1904, Frederick Starr approached John Batchelor for assistance in locating some Ainu to participate in the exposition. After the governor of Hokkaido approved the project, Batchelor agreed to help. Starr visited various Ainu communities while recruiting for the fair and he concluded, like Batchelor, that Ainu days were numbered. “Now Yezo is filling with vigorous, incoming Japanese, before whom undoubtedly the Ainu must yield.... To-day the Ainu is ‘a ward,’ to be guarded by a paternal government, to be ‘elevated’ by civilization.”25 Starr’s party of nine Ainu, whom he thought were the first Ainu to leave Japan in modern times, duly obtained passports at a police station and the group set off for St. Louis in March. Starr brought various Ainu artifacts, too, for the exhibit, including a small but complete house. When the travelers crossed the Pacific, a separate section of the ship — in steerage, of course — was arranged for the Ainu. Traversing the United States by train, the Ainu attracted visitors at every stop. At the fair, the Ainu lived in the house brought from Hokkaido, visited with the other native peoples and, to the surprise of some observers, attended Christian church services. Though the exposition certainly exploited the Ainu, there was some benefit for them. One woman at the St. Louis Exposition made enough money selling handmade items to have a Wajin-style house built when she returned to Japan. Another noteworthy exposition was the 1910 Anglo-Japanese Exhibition in London. Ten Ainu traveled to England on a Japanese ship with a group of aborigines from Taiwan. England’s King George V and Queen Mary visited the Ainu village at the exhibition. A number of Japanese visited, too, but the exploitation of the Ainu embarrassed many who saw them. Ainu also went on display in their own communities in Hokkaido. In those days, a prime reason for tourists to go to Hokkaido was to see an Ainu settlement, so a 1914 travel guide included a long section on Ainu customs in its general description of the island. By the early twentieth century, the town of Shiraoi on Hokkaido’s south coast was on a well-frequented tourist route because of its Ainu village. Travelers could check their luggage at the train station and hire a “station-boy” to be a guide to the nearby Ainu settle-

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ment. The tourist was advised to come prepared with trinkets and candy for the Ainu women and children; the visitors would then be shown Ainu treasured belongings. Some sixty Ainu houses, “wretchedly poor huts,” stood in the settlement, apart from the Japanese dwellings in Shiraoi. The guidebook author opined that “Ainu have never shown any capacity, and are merely adult children, they seem to suggest water on the brain rather than intellect.” He also noted that “present-day marriages between Japanese and Ainu are said to be sterile,” which was widely believed despite its lack of factual basis.26 Though the proportion of Ainu children attending school increased after the Protection Act went into effect, the education they got was substandard. Details of the law laid a foundation for this, specifying three years of segregated schooling for Ainu but four years for Wajin children. Education helped disrupt traditional Ainu life; the new schools used the Japanese language, which helped lead to the near-extinction of the Ainu tongue. Many families needed children to help earn enough for the family to live on, so not too many children went to school at first. Also, finding Wajin teachers to teach Ainu children proved difficult. By the time of the First World War, most Ainu children actually attended school as required, and once they did, the education they received played a major role in assimilating them into a Japanese cultural world, speeding the decline of Ainu tradition. Education policy regarding Ainu evolved during and after World War I. In 1916, Ainu children were for the first time required to attend school. Now they were compelled to attend for four years, where they studied mostly vocational subjects, including sewing and farming. Wajin students, meanwhile, had six years of schooling. Though Wajin children entered first grade at age six, Ainu children could not do so until age seven, as officialdom felt them “not as mature as Wajin children of the same age bracket both emotionally and intellectually.”27 The 1916 rules only lasted until 1922, when Ainu schools were made to adopt the Japanese curriculum and years of schooling, but Ainu and Japanese did not attend the same schools for another fifteen years. When Japan’s crown princes came to Hokkaido on official visits in the early twentieth century, they were shown Ainu schools but, more important, Ainu were exhibited in native costume and instructed to perform traditional ceremonies for the royal visitors. Richard Siddle notes that the emphasis of these visits was not to show Ainu as a marginalized group striving to better themselves (which they were) but as a picturesque group needing the protection of the state. He even suggests that the Ainu were “cast again in their role of primitive barbarian,” just as they were in the international expositions.28 Tourists were urged to visit schools for Ainu children in order to see what the government was doing for these people. Even after Wajin and Ainu attended the same schools, Ainu have reported the discrimination they felt at school, teachers giving higher grades to the Wajin students and making sure Wajin children did not mix with the Ainu. School texts used in Japan portrayed Ainu as primitive or inferior, and the perception that Ainu were a dying race lingered in the news media as well as among the Wajin public. In daily life, Ainu suffered from Wajin prejudice, even physical abuse, when local Wajin felt Ainu behaved too assertively and were lazy spendthrifts. Poor Wajin farmers struggling with harsh conditions— oppressive landlords as well as poor soil and challenging weather — sometimes oppressed Ainu in turn. Even Ainu children recognized the prejudice against them. Ainu artist Sunazawa Bikky and his brother Kazuo described playing “cowboys” as children in the 1930s. When asked who were the cowboys and who were the Indians, Kazuo answered, “nobody wanted to be an Indian, we knew that Indi-

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ans were treated the same as us, so we played good cowboys and bad cowboys.” Ainu Kayano Shigeru, writing of his childhood in the 1920s and 1930s, noted that when his family ate salmon it had to be in secret. Though this fish had once been a staple of the Ainu diet, under the Wajin regime Ainu could not catch salmon for personal use.29 And to encourage Ainu to live in a “modern” way, official and unofficial efforts continued to make Ainu live in Wajin-style dwellings. Despite Ainu frustration, the 1920s were not a time of social ferment among Ainu. Most of them lived in widely dispersed rural communities, which made any type of organization difficult. Moreover, only one Ainu became a university student during that time. The government of Hokkaido did take action in 1924 to try to stem the frequent practice of Ainu leasing their land to Wajin to farm. The Docho began implementing farming cooperatives among Ainu, and they were fairly effective, despite usually being run by Wajin who thought Ainu incapable.

Ainu consciousness While the outside world exhibited the Ainu, Ainu efforts at community improvement slowly developed momentum, inspired partly by the Chikabumi Ainu activism in the 1890s. At that time, a group of Ainu at Chikabumi on the outskirts of Asahikawa famously asserted their rights. The pressure of Wajin settlement in the 1890s had displaced these Ainu from their Ishikari Valley home areas. But when an area next to their new Chikabumi home became an army base, pressure grew to relocate the Ainu once again. The company constructing the base petitioned the Hokkaido government to remove the Ainu, citing among other things the people’s poor sanitation and the belief (or excuse) that the Ainu would be better off somewhere else. In 1900 the government ordered their departure. Meanwhile, the company induced many of the Ainu to ask to be moved to Teshio, far to the north. But Ainu leaders in opposition found backing from a number of Wajin who opposed the company’s policies. They petitioned the Docho, and a delegation — one Ainu and two Wajin — even went to Tokyo, spoke to newspapermen and lobbied politicians. They were successful and the Ainu got to keep their land — but by 1906, facing increased pressure from Asahikawa authorities to use the Ainu land, the Docho agreed to lease it to the city upon condition that the Ainu could continue to live there. Of course plans made for the Ainu were inadequate, the Ainu community became embittered and problems were stored up for the time the lease would expire thirty years later. As the lease neared termination (which in 1922 had been set for October 31, 1932), Wajin who wanted to develop the land became embroiled in dispute with Ainu groups. Fierce lobbying ensued. Some dedicated Ainu went to Tokyo to lobby Diet members to support unconditional return of the land to the Ainu. Finally, in March 1934, the Diet passed a compromise law: some of the land would go to the Ainu but their individual plots would be very small, and the rest of the land would be controlled for the Ainu by the Hokkaido government as community property. Dissatisfaction continued to simmer among the Chikabumi Ainu, however. It was about this time that Ainu in Sakhalin finally got Japanese citizenship. A young Sakhalin Ainu, energized by Chikabumi Ainu activism, traveled to Tokyo to assert his community’s rights both to citizenship and to control of traditional Ainu fishing grounds.

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Several Tokyo officials visited Sakhalin (the southern half of which was then Japanese territory), and the Sakhalin Ainu attained citizenship on January 1, 1933. This also meant, however, that Japanese law would apply to these Ainu and that they could be drafted. Meanwhile, some Hokkaido Ainu migrated to Sakhalin hoping for a better life, just as did other settlers. Others moved to Manchuria; both groups had to return to Japan at the end of World War II. Ainu activism reached a milestone in 1930 with the founding of the Hokkaido Ainu Kyokai (Ainu Association). This was the first all–Ainu organization, though it was government sponsored, assisted by the Docho social service section. For a few years, the Ainu Kyokai published a journal, The Light of Asia. Kyokai efforts tended to deal largely with economic welfare, especially in finding employment for Ainu. Meanwhile, education officials in Hokkaido, feeling that the Ainu had been successfully assimilated, decided that Ainu children need no longer be educated separately from Wajin youngsters. The education they now received, however, followed the national curriculum and paid no attention to Ainu traditions, interests or needs. A 1931 article in the American journal School and Society about this change in policy claimed, “Relations between the Ainu and Japanese today are entirely friendly.”30 Ainu Kyokai activities in subsequent years, however, show how mistaken was this foreign view. Ainu children attending Wajin-majority schools continued to suffer taunts from their Wajin classmates. After founding the Ainu Kyokai, members strove for revisions to the Ainu Protection Act. Partly in response, bureaucrats traveled to Hokkaido to inspect Ainu living conditions. It took some time before legislation was formally approved, but the first bill passed by the Diet in 1937 amended the Protection Act and included much of what Ainu activists had hoped for. Now Ainu could sell their property just as Wajin could (except that Ainu needed the Hokkaido governor’s permission) and they could qualify for government assistance even if they were not farmers. In making the 1937 changes, the government felt that the goals of the original act had more or less been met. That is, Ainu had adopted the Japanese way of life. The legislation took effect at a time Japan was becoming more and more immersed in war in China, however, and issues such as policies regarding Ainu were set aside for many years. A number of Ainu served in the Japanese forces during the war. Since the end of the nineteenth century, most had faced the draft, but unlike blacks and Asians in the United States during World War II, Ainu were not placed in segregated units. Many lost their lives; thirty-nine died in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. They fought on the Asian mainland too, and the Japanese captured by the Russians and imprisoned in Siberia until well after war’s end included Ainu soldiers. Shortly after the war, Kindaichi Kyosuke held that for some thirty years most Ainu had wanted assimilation with the majority Wajin and that their loyalty to the nation did not waver during the war years.31 As war was ending, the U.S.S.R. captured and held Sakhalin. Soon the Sakhalin Ainu were sent to Hokkaido, one more step in a series of forced moves. (According to a Soviet writer, however, Japanese officials forced Ainu to evacuate and then stole their goods.)32 Some of the Ainu brought to Hokkaido to live were seeing this place for the first time. Even some other aboriginal people, the Uilta, were “repatriated” from Sakhalin to Hokkaido, which had never been their home. After World War II, Ainu groups became more militant and non–Ainu even protested on behalf of the Ainu. In 1946 Ainu activists organized a meeting in Shizunai, the coastal town southeast of Tomakomai that was significant to them because Shakushain had been

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killed there. Also, interested people reorganized the Ainu Kyokai and some two thousand people joined the new association. Renewed Ainu activism could not prevent the land reform measures adopted under the American postwar occupation of Japan from undermining Ainu land rights. Though the reform was intended to see that land was owned by those who worked it, the new law also deprived the Ainu of about forty percent of their land. This was land that Ainu rented to Wajin farmers while the Ainu worked in the fishing industry or elsewhere. Intense lobbying by Ainu and their supporters, even to General MacArthur himself, did not work. The Ainu lands that had been rented to Wajin farmers were gone. Anger at this community loss helped fuel postwar Ainu activism. On the other hand, when an occupation official suggested that Ainu might gain independence, Ainu showed no interest, not trusting the American motives.33 But Americans who visited Hokkaido or were stationed there during the Occupation helped the Ainu economy by buying many tourist items. Other changes occurred in the immediate postwar years. Amendments to the Ainu Protection Act removed some safeguards that had aided Ainu, ending certain tax preferences and rights to medical care, for example. All these setbacks discouraged Ainu leaders, and the Kyokai became inactive. But with educational reforms adopted during the occupation, schooling became more available to Ainu children. Now nine years of schooling were required for everyone, though not all Ainu children graduated from junior high school in the early years of the law, and according to a survey in one Ainu community, few went on to high school. As time has passed, however, more Ainu have gone to high schools and beyond. The Ainu Kyokai regrouped and in 1961 changed its name to Utari Kyokai because many members felt that non–Ainus used the term “Ainu” in a derogatory way. (In the Ainu language, utari means “our people.”) The organization could still be useful; a government survey carried out in one Hokkaido region in the 1960s made clear the relative poverty of the Ainu community. One-third of the Ainu eligible for employment either had no jobs or subsisted as day laborers. Only a few Ainu had become prosperous. By the 1960s, tourism was becoming popular and relatively easy in Japan, and Ainu were among the tourist attractions in Hokkaido. In 1964, more than half a million people visited the Shiraoi Ainu village. The next year, Shiraoi’s Ainu tourist activities were relocated to a lakeside site. The visitor today traverses a huge shopping area before entering the “village,” where the buildings have been designed more for tourist convenience than authenticity; the “houses” seem much larger than were Ainu traditional dwellings. The Ainu Museum at Shiraoi, however, beautifully presents items used in Ainu traditional life. Tourism helped stimulate other activities, too. In 1968, the Utari Kyokai and commercial organizations sponsored a bear ceremony. Supposedly based on tradition, the event raised money for Ainu causes, with spectators (including Ainu) charged a fee to attend and an extra fee to take photographs. Ainu had mixed feelings about the event, some feeling it was merely a commercial enterprise taking advantage of Ainu tradition, yet others were supportive. In 1964, officials in the city of Asahikawa organized an Ainu festival to attract visitors to the city. Many Ainu, especially young people, complained that city officials hijacked Ainu culture for a commercial enterprise. A number of Ainu from elsewhere in Hokkaido came to Asahikawa and received one thousand yen per day from the government for their attendance. On the other hand, when Hokkaido celebrated its centenary in 1968 with a number of events throughout the island, Ainu were almost entirely left out.

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Because of Wajin prejudice, many Ainu were ashamed of being Ainu and assumed that their traditional way of life was dying out, but such attitudes were beginning to change. In these years of activism, some Ainu groups attacked problems such as alcoholism. They strove to help poorer Ainu improve their communities’ appearance and, more important, their personal behavior. Such activities inspired Japanese Ainu as well as others who wanted to take up the issue of Ainu rights. The late 1960s and the 1970s saw activism throughout the world, inspired partly by civil rights demonstrations and rebellion against the Vietnam War in the United States, and in the name of Ainu rights both Ainu and Wajin in Japan organized protests and, sometimes, acts of violence. Ainu groups publicized their unhappiness about not being considered during the 1968 Hokkaido centennial celebrations and in response, well-meaning Wajin collected funds from Ainu and non–Ainu to erect a statue of Shakushain in Shizunai. Installation of the statue came in 1970, complete with a plaque on the pedestal with words written by Hokkaido Governor Machimura Kingo. On September 20, 1972, a group chiseled the governor’s name from the plaque. One Ainu, Yuki Shoji, was implicated in the defacement. He was incensed that the name of a member of the oppressive majority appeared in the monument to an Ainu hero who had resisted the majority. The Wajin activists who participated in the defacement had a different motivation; they did it as part of their movement to seek world revolution. In October 1972, explosions went off simultaneously in Sapporo and Asahikawa, in Sapporo to destroy Ainu artifacts displayed at the University of Hokkaido and in Asahikawa to blow up a statue depicting heroic Japanese pioneers standing around a seated Ainu — a sculptural group Ainu activists had seen as demeaning to them ever since it was unveiled in August 1970. Wajin extremists, who carried out various other violent actions throughout Japan while protesting Japanese treatment of minorities, were responsible for the bombs. The Asahikawa statue had been planned several years earlier to commemorate the city’s eightieth anniversary. Ainu and others protested when the Tokyo sculptor unveiled his proposed model for the work, for it showed four strong young pioneers upright, while a heavily bearded Ainu knelt, suggesting the Ainu’s subjugation. The finished version therefore showed the Ainu seated, not kneeling, though the pioneers still stood above him. After the statue’s destruction, many local Ainu pled for cooperation between Wajin and Ainu, and a rebuilt statue, erected in 1977, stands in Asahikawa’s Tokiwa Park today. Some Ainu handed out protest leaflets at the unveiling of the new statue, just as Sunazawa Bikky did when the original statue was first displayed. Additional violent actions during the decade seemed to have an Ainu connection. In March 1974, a young Hiroshima Wajin stabbed Shiraoi Mayor Asari Giichi in the throat. The assailant claimed that Shiraoi’s Ainu village exploited Ainu people, who earned low wages performing and making artifacts while Wajin investors reaped the profits. The mayor recovered, but in September, another Wajin with a similar motive set the Shiraoi tourist office on fire. In July 1975 a bomb damaged the police headquarters building in Sapporo and in March 1976 another killed two government workers when it exploded in the Docho building in the city. Statements left at both scenes claimed these as responses to Japanese policies toward minority groups including, specifically in Hokkaido, the Ainu. A group calling itself the “East Asia Anti-Japanese Armed Front” claimed having arranged the blasts “in protest against Hokkaido police’s colonial rule over the Ainus.”34 Groups claiming to act in the name of Ainu liberation also exploded bombs in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1977. A few

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This statue in Asahikawa’s Tokiwa Park was planned to celebrate the city’s eightieth anniversary. The sculpture’s original design featured an Ainu kneeling before a group of vigorous ethnic Japanese pioneers. Protesters destroyed the statue in 1982 because they thought it demeaned the Ainu people. This newer version, showing the Ainu man seated, not kneeling, was later erected. It left activists partly satisfied.

weeks after the 1976 Sapporo bombing, JNR, the national railway system, received a message written partly in Japanese and partly in Ainu, threatening explosions on rail lines in Hokkaido and Honshu. These were not carried out, however. Except for the defacement of the plaque at Shakushain’s statue, all of this violence — and more — was carried out by Wajin groups claiming to work on behalf of the Ainu but with no apparent connection to any Ainu people or organization. In an age of protest, here was a cause to protest about. But Ainu suffered from the violence; some of them experienced police harassment and incarceration despite their innocence. Many Ainu worried about being connected in the public mind with the agitation. On the other hand, these actions stimulated Ainu consciousness.

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More positive developments also occurred. In 1973 an Ainu group marched in Sapporo’s annual May Day parade for the first time, an illustration of the more assertive mood of many Ainu. Sunazawa Bikky designed an Ainu flag. It features a red arrow held by a white Ainu symbol, both on a blue ground. The white stands for Hokkaido’s snow, the blue represents the sky, and the red symbolizes the poison Ainu once used on arrowheads. Positive expressions of Ainu culture such as the flag became more and more evident. Kayano Shigeru opened an Ainu museum in his hometown of Nibutani with artifacts he had collected. He also achieved personal milestones on behalf of the Ainu; he became the first Ainu to serve in the Diet when he took his seat in its upper house on August 8, 1994. Later that year, he gave the first Ainu language speech ever heard in the Diet. He was an active spokesman for Ainu rights, pointing out, among other things, that in the United States, treaties (whether adhered to or not) were made between government and native peoples, while in Japan, government simply confiscated Ainu land. Ainu affairs attracted growing public attention. Several delegations from the national government made visits to Ainu areas in the late 1960s. Japan’s Socialist and Communist Parties both urged policies sympathetic to Ainu recognition, economic advance and an end to discrimination. Okada Haruo, a Socialist Party legislator from Hokkaido, pointed out in a 1973 government hearing that thirty percent of Ainu were getting relief payments. Moreover, he claimed that the government had adopted the 1899 law in order to discriminate against Ainu. The Docho organized an agency in 1973 to coordinate policies with an impact on the Ainu community and proclaimed a seven-year plan for Ainu development — a welfare policy. When this plan neared an end, the government implemented an additional such plan. The money provided scholarships and low interest loans for Ainu as well as support for the Utari Kyokai. Ainu activism continued. Protests against derogatory or insulting presentations on television, in advertisements and in magazine articles led to withdrawal of the offending material. Ainu and others have criticized the way they are portrayed in Japanese textbooks and they have continued to work for fishing rights, especially to catch salmon. In 1984 the Utari Kyokai called for outright abolition of the Protection Act, specifying the provisions the organization wanted to see in new legislation. These included recognizing Ainu culture, establishing programs and reserving additional land for Ainu, teaching the Ainu language to children and university students and setting aside seats in the Diet and the Hokkaido legislature for Ainu representatives. A continuing concern was scientists’ study of Ainu skeletons. Kodama Sakuzaemon, a leading researcher, was especially involved. Scholars also poked, prodded and measured Ainu, photographed them wearing few clothes and asked questions about intimate matters and sacred beliefs, but rarely recorded Ainu feelings about such activities. (The furor regarding the bones taken to England in 1865 is an exception.) In recent years Hokkaido University has been returning bones to Ainu organizations. After negotiations with Ainu representatives, Hokudai authorities arranged that a modest memorial hall be built for the Ainu remains, and an annual memorial ceremony has been held. Yet still at issue are the many artifacts Kodama and others collected from Ainu graves. Kayano Shigeru wrote of his attitude to scholars’ activities: “I despised scholars of Ainu culture from the bottom of my heart.... Under the pretext of research, they took blood from villagers and, in order to examine how hairy we were, rolled up our sleeves, then lowered our collars to check our backs, and so on.” Once his mother had had so much blood drawn that she could hardly walk home afterward, he said. He compared the scientists’

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photographs of Ainu to prisoners’ mug shots. A few years later, though, realizing that scholars were helping to save aspects of Ainu culture, Kayano began to look upon scholars’ efforts more positively and he helped with some research himself.35 Ainu scholars had other concerns regarding the academic world. Yuki Shoji organized a protest in 1977 against a Hokudai professor whose lectures included belittling remarks about Ainu and their culture. When the professor, Hayashi Yoshishige, would not apologize, a student group barricaded him in the classroom. Police eventually broke up the protest. Later, still seeking an apology, Yuki erected a tent on the Hokudai campus in the middle of winter. As he stayed there, public pressure grew, and the professor finally made a formal apology. Note that many in the field of education supported Hayashi on the grounds of academic freedom. Traditional Ainu religious rituals began to disappear as Ainu adopted more and more Wajin practices. Many Ainu pay at least nominal obeisance to Buddhism and Shinto and have Buddhist altars in their homes, as do other families in Japan. Few Ainu are Christian, despite John Batchelor’s efforts. It was his personal influence that led to many of the conversions, some feel, and thus the religion declined among Ainu after Batchelor’s death. In recent years, Ainu religion has seen a revival, and sometimes families carry out traditional rites along with Buddhist or Christian ceremonies. The Ainu observances tend to be very private affairs. In the last few decades, officials have permitted the iyomante ceremony to take place. This was not out of compassion for Ainu, but to bring tourists. No longer would iyomante be performed in February, as was traditional, but during the tourist season, and, of course, the ceremony was changed substantially, now groomed specifically for the visitors. Ainu have also, of course, continued to carry out private iyomante ceremonies. Internationally, Ainu have gained more recognition. In 1974, the China-Japan Friendship Association invited fifteen Ainu to visit China for three weeks, specifically to meet with China’s minority groups. Ainu groups have visited indigenous communities in various other countries too, including Alaskan Inuit villages and First Peoples’ communities in British Columbia, Canada. There is special interest among Northwest Coast Indians of Canada and the United States because cultural similarities, for example in styles of art as well as ceremonies to honor the salmon suggest a possible ancient link. (The earliest recorded modern contact between Ainu and any American Indians apparently had occurred in conjunction with the 1904 St. Louis Exposition.) A Navajo visiting Hokkaido about 1990 was amazed at the similarities he saw between Ainu culture and his own, saying about the Ainu, “They are Indians, too.”36 Cultural borrowings have occurred — if this is how the carving of totem poles by Ainu artisans can be described. To attract tourists, these started appearing in Hokkaido after the Second World War. They have been adapted to Ainu culture, featuring Ainu designs and motifs rather than Native American ones. Since 1987, Ainu have been involved with the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations and in 1992, Nomura Giichi, chairman of the Hokkaido Ainu Association, addressed the United Nations General Assembly. In traditional Ainu attire, he spoke on the occasion of International Human Rights Day. In 1993 Ainu participated in the United Nations’ International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. In conjunction with the U.N. year, Ainu hosted a forum of indigenous peoples, and the ties between different groups have continued to blossom. Other indigenous peoples’ activism has stimulated Ainu activity, as well as Ainu pride. An Ainu group has joined the World Council

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of Whalers, as these Ainu hope to revive their traditional use of the whale. And in 1999, the United States’ national museum, the Smithsonian Institution, mounted an impressive exhibit of Ainu history and culture, traditional and modern. Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo visited the exhibit while he was in Washington. (But Ainu Kawamura Kenichi, also there, overheard Obuchi asking, “Are there still Ainu in Hokkaido?”)37 In 1980 the Japanese government had notified the United Nations that Japan had no minority populations. Ainu objected loudly. Kelly Dietz has noted that by this statement, “the Japanese government denied the very existence of the Ainu.”38 But in 1986 Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro once again asserted the view that Japan was free of ethnic minorities. Moreover, he claimed that Japan’s economic success was due to the nation’s homogeneous population. (He had been trying to explain earlier comments he had made disparaging American blacks.) Nakasone thus inadvertently stimulated greater Ainu efforts to gain recognition and equal treatment. He continued to assert that Japan had no ethnic minorities because, he claimed somewhat inaccurately, no minorities in Japan suffered discrimination and, furthermore, were mostly assimilated. The question of whether Japan had minorities did not go away. In 1987 the Japanese report to the U.N. Human Rights Commission did finally admit that the nation included minority peoples but did not agree that they suffered from human rights problems. The Utari Kyokai presented a report to the U.N. that year, though, asking for a study of Japanese government policies toward Ainu. To cite one example, Ainu felt that textbooks in use by Hokkaido students continued to slight Ainu culture; it was rarely mentioned in the books, and when it was, the information was often inaccurate. Some improvement has occurred, the Hokkaido Board of Education ruling in 1992 that high school teachers should no longer tell students that the Japanese people are all of the same race. A government action which deeply disturbed many Ainu was the construction of a dam inundating Ainu land, not the least because it would be in Biratori Town’s Nibutani Village, which is generally recognized by Ainu and Wajin alike as the center of Ainu culture and its renaissance. (About eighty percent of Nibutani’s population is Ainu.) Tokyo planned a dam on the Saru River in order to provide water to a future industrial development some distance away, in Tomakomai. Though the industrial project was later canceled, the dam was not, and it was completed in 1996 despite grave concern from Ainu, whose ancestral lands it destroyed. In 1997 the Sapporo District Court ruled that the government had, in fact, violated Ainu rights by not taking Ainu concerns into account before going ahead with the dam. The Ainu should receive compensation for this, the court ruled — but the dam remained. As part of recompense for constructing the dam, the government built a new museum in Biratori. Opened in 1992, much of Kayano Shigeru’s collection of Ainu artifacts is exhibited here, while Kayano continued to show other Ainu items plus some from other indigenous peoples in his museum, renamed the Kayano Shigeru Ainu Memorial Museum. Though Ainu activists could not stop the Nibutani Dam, they have been able to take an active role in planning for another dam on the same river. The government authorized construction of the Biratori Dam farther upstream, both to limit flooding and to provide hydroelectric power. This time, however, the team surveying the river area and compiling data for the Japanese equivalent of American environmental impact statements includes Ainu members. Although the local Ainu community has been consulted during planning, Ainu have not had final decision-making power regarding the project. Meanwhile, Ainu throughout Japan still do not have the right to catch fish, except

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for ceremonial purposes. They contrast this with the situation in the United States, where courts have affirmed the right of Northwest Native Americans to half the salmon harvest in the region. Near the end of the century, on July 1, 1997, Ainu did achieve a long-sought objective: repeal of the 1899 Ainu Protection Act. The furor caused by Prime Minister Nakasone’s remarks in 1986 had inspired a Health and Welfare Ministry study to consider changing or scrapping the 1899 law. Then, in 1988, Hokkaido Governor Yokomichi convened a group to study the Ainu situation, which resulted in a recommendation by the Docho for new legislation. Kayano Shigeru’s presence and activity in the Diet also increased pressure for change. Publicity about his attainment of office and his calls for amelioration of Ainu problems led to heightened awareness in Japan of the Ainu and was an important factor in the study and preparation of a replacement law. The new law, Ainu Shinpo, or Ainu New Law, repealed the 1899 act. No longer would the governor of Hokkaido control Ainu group property. The Docho would return assets to the Ainu, but government and some Ainu spokesmen did not agree on the value of the assets or on the method of allocation; the courts rejected an Ainu lawsuit on the matter. Ainu Shinpo’s provisions, designed to preserve Ainu tradition and language, were very different from the proposal submitted by the Docho and Hokkaido Ainu. The new law did not go far enough, thought many who had worked for it, since it dealt only with culture, not economic and political needs. Moreover, much of the power in deciding how to spend the funds set aside for cultural promotion was placed in Wajin hands. Ainu Shinpo still did not recognize Ainu as an indigenous people. A non-binding resolution adopted in conjunction with the law did, however, describe Ainu as an indigenous minority and this was significant because of the implication that people who are indigenous might have rights to their land and resources. The Japanese government, therefore, preferred to avoid the entire question. Ainu have continued to face discrimination in marriage, employment and education, with only 17.4% achieving a college education, not quite half the rate for other people. Meanwhile, 38.3% of Hokkaido Ainu received public assistance according to 2006 figures. Ainu thus have remained economically marginalized. Many hide their Ainu blood, and alcoholism remains a problem in the Ainu community. Many Ainu have undoubtedly felt culturally Wajin, not Ainu, but also perceive that prejudice against them still exists. In a 1974 report, George DeVos and William Wetherall suggested that the general view of Ainu people by twentieth century Wajin was one of “condescending quaintness,” and perhaps this perception has not changed much.39 Most people will have access to Ainu only at their museums, tourist villages and festivals, yet in these settings it is too easy to picture them as exotic primitive people rather than individuals who have every right to participate freely in national life. Kayano Shigeru complained that tourists often left an Ainu complex with a misleading idea of Ainu life, thinking that what they see in a traditional Ainu village catering to tourists represents the way Ainu live today. He wrote of being a “display Ainu” at the tourist center, but only because he needed the money he would earn.40 Ainu practices have been adapted to present to tourists; traditional ceremonies are sometimes held only to appeal to visitors. Also, Ainu art is often modified for sales to tourists. The ubiquitous carvings of bears by Ainu craftsmen have no cultural significance. Instead, they have merely been developed for the tourist trade, possibly inspired by carved bears sold to tourists in Switzerland. Wajin actually carve many of the “Ainu” bears sold

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in Japan. Douglas Sanders, writing about the Ainu in 1986, suggested that the number of Ainu carved bears for sale in Hokkaido was probably greater than the number of Ainu people.41 To some people, Ainu tourist villages are a way to take advantage of Ainu, to denigrate them as colorful primitives. A survey in the mid–1980s showed that fewer than ten percent of Ainu people worked in the tourist sector, however.42 And the villages do play a role in stimulating the revival of Ainu culture and crafts, and in offering a “safe” place to be Ainu to people who find difficulties in trying to live in Sapporo or other cities. Ainu even run a new festival now. Since 1950, Ainu have been celebrating the Marimo Festival at Lake Akan, centered around the unusual and beautiful marimo plant that grows in the lake. Some have criticized this festival as meant merely to attract tourists, but Ainu who participate in it defend it as a means to offer thanks for nature’s bounty. An Ainu group from Shiraoi was invited to dance for the Emperor at the celebration of his birthday in 2004, and the performers presented a dance that is traditionally part of iyomante, returning the bear to heaven. Beyond Japan, more people now know about the Ainu than ever before. Some American school children learn about the Ainu as they study Native Americans and the impact of a more technologically advanced society upon aboriginal peoples. Today, however, one tends not to recognize an Ainu upon the street, as Ainu wear the same clothing as other people in Japan. Times have changed; when David Penhallow, a scientist, wrote of the Ainu in the nineteenth century, he felt that “the appearance of the Aino is so different from that of the Japanese as to determine a wide separation of the two people, even upon the most casual inspection.”43 In recent years, Ainu culture has been showing a revival. The Japanese government named traditional Ainu dancing as a cultural treasure in 1984. In the field of art, sculptor Sunazawa Bikky became known as an artist, not just an Ainu craftsman. Fujito Takeki, first merely a carver of bears for tourists, branched out, creating sculptures in wood of people as well as animals, all true works of art. Ainu music has found an audience, too, mainly through Oki Kano, who discovered while in his early twenties that his father was Ainu. Oki learned to play the traditional Ainu tonkori and released his first CD in 1996. Meanwhile, Ainu Shinpo’s passage has led to government financial support to Ainu cultural activities. What is the future of the Ainu language? It will continue through the recitation of yukar, songs, greetings and prayers, many think, but whether it will be used in daily life is extremely doubtful. In 1998, however, an oratorical contest in the Ainu language took place for the first time and in 2001 an Ainu language radio station in Hokkaido began broadcasts. College courses in Ainu language became available and even manga have been written in that language. Ainu cultural festivals occur each year, and many non–Ainu as well as Ainu attend. One such festival is the Asir Chep Nomi ceremony, held in September to celebrate the return of the salmon to the rivers. In Sapporo, Ainu commemorate the salmon’s reappearance at the side of the Toyohira River, with traditional food served before the ceremony. These days Ainu show more pride in their heritage than has been the case for many, many years. How many Ainu are there today? When Ainu population figures are estimated, it always is with a caveat or two. The number of Ainu today is impossible to say. In official statistics, only those who identify themselves as Ainu are counted as Ainu. Some who are

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These days, Ainu in Hokkaido carry out some traditional ceremonies. Here, in September 2002, an Ainu group met on the bank of the Toyohira River in downtown Sapporo to celebrate the annual return of salmon to the river.

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Herring were plentiful in 1918, when these men harvested the tiny fish off the Hokkaido shore. Years of overfishing, though, have severely depleted the herring supply (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

Ainu hide their ethnicity in order to escape discrimination. While Ainu in villages or towns with large, cohesive Ainu communities like Nibutani or Shiraoi may not deny their heritage, Ainu living in large cities or their suburbs often do. In addition, there has been enough intermarriage between Wajin and Ainu that it is hard to define who is Ainu. Should part–Ainu people be counted as Ainu? Wajin who marry Ainus are felt by Wajin to have entered the Ainu community, though Ainu do not see them as true Ainu. Meanwhile, intermarriage between Ainu and Wajin has become fairly common. Estimates of Ainu population today range from the almost twenty-four thousand in Hokkaido who are officially counted as Ainu to as high as three hundred thousand nationwide. More Ainu probably live in Hokkaido’s Hidaka District, and particularly Nibutani, than anywhere else in Japan. Whether or not Ainu can be counted accurately, many of them have not supported ethnic activism, often because of the belief that assimilation into the majority community offers more benefit. A popular view in Japan of Ainu culture is of a people living with nature in a preindustrial environment, a culture admired as a lost ideal. As we have seen, though, greater understanding of today’s Ainu is developing, but even in 2005, a cabinet minister talked of Japan consisting of “one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and one race.”44 Recognizing a distinct Ainu culture has been problematic in Japan, because ethnic homogeneity and the “Japaneseness” of the nation’s people are widely-held concepts. Any efforts at distinctive Ainu behaviors tend to set aside the Ainu as separate people.

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An international event in 2008 finally led the Diet to recognize Ainu as an indigenous people. It was Japan’s turn to host a Group of Eight international summit conference, and Tokyo decided to hold it at Lake Toya in Hokkaido, probably because similar meetings have been accompanied by demonstrations and protests in recent years, so an out-of-the-way but attractive venue seemed appropriate. For Ainu, however, this was an opportunity to hold a summit of indigenous peoples just before the G-8 meeting. Here they would press for government recognition. Hokkaido Diet members, meanwhile, led efforts to draft a resolution recognizing Ainu indigenous status and the Diet adopted it — unanimously — in June. What this means for Ainu is not clear; Ainu leaders, for example, continue to press for more rights to fish for salmon. Tokyo has appointed a panel to study possible policy changes. The group, including Ainu leaders, Hokkaido Governor Takahashi Harumi and others, was expected to submit its findings in about a year. The role of Ainu in Japan surely will continue to be a mixed one. Ainu are both Ainu and Japanese. These days the Ainu tourist sites bring Ainu together for festivals and for cultural study, working to maintain a vibrant Ainu culture and society, but many Ainu do not participate in Ainu cultural or political activities, and some Ainu do not even know that they have Ainu ancestors. In the twenty-first century, one hopes for an end to discrimination and more recognition of what Ainu have to offer.

10

The Early Twentieth Century By the time the twentieth century began, the era that had made Hokkaido’s history so different from that of the Japanese heartland was over, and much of the island’s subsequent story has been that of Japan. If there was any theme that set Hokkaido apart in the first part of the new century, it was the continuing effort to urge settlers to migrate to the island, while officials continued to promote development of the island’s mines, fisheries, forests, agriculture and industry. This period of Japanese history began with war, the Russo-Japanese War, and encompassed the time during which Japan was first recognized as a significant modern military power. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was fought not in Siberia and Hokkaido, as one might expect from its name, but mainly in Manchuria, where Russia and Japan were vying for dominance in northeastern Asia. The conflict did impact Hokkaido, however. Anticipating war with Russia, the government established the army’s new Seventh Division and assigned it to Asahikawa, beginning a long association with the city and helping bring prosperity to it. The Dosanko worried that fighting might spread to their island. Days after a February 8, 1904 surprise Japanese attack on Port Arthur (now Lushun, on the tip of China’s Liaoning Peninsula) began the war, the New York Times reported a rumor that Russian ships had attacked Hakodate, still Hokkaido’s most important city; luckily for Hakodate, the account was false.1 A few days later, though, hearing that Russian warships were off the coast nearby, many people fled the city, some taking cart loads of belongings, others filling the trains to overcrowding. Most people soon returned after no Russians appeared. A military camp was established at Hakodate and Russian gunboats operated in nearby Tsugaru Strait, disrupting commerce and the ferry service between Hakodate and Aomori. On February 11, Russian ships fired on two merchant steamers headed for Hokkaido, sinking one immediately but rescuing some passengers and crew members. The other ship, though damaged, managed to escape, thanks to bad weather. Crew members lightened the ship’s load, throwing overboard many of the bales of rice being transported to Otaru, and the ship sped away from the Russians as quickly as possible. Towns and villages along the Tsugaru Strait shore took precautions. Townsmen set up warning systems so that should enemy ships appear, noncombatants could hurry to the hills while men and boys would grab whatever could be used as a weapon and make ready to face any Russian attempting to land. No such invasion took place, but mines as

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well as warships in the strait made the journey from Honshu to Hokkaido treacherous. The vessels at risk during the war were not all Russian and Japanese. In one widely publicized case, Russians seized a British steamer which had picked up coal in Muroran to be delivered to Singapore. The Russians intercepted the ship in Tsugaru Strait, took it to Vladivostok to confiscate it and its cargo but released the ship four months later. In another case, the Tacoma, an American ship on its way to deliver supplies to Vladivostok, became trapped in La Perouse Strait ice during the 1904-05 winter and, when freed much later, was seized by the Japanese. (This was legal under international maritime law.) Renamed the Shikotan Maru, the ship continued service in Asia until 1924. The war affected Hokkaido in several ways. Many Hokkaido men fought, of course. Asahikawa’s Seventh Division lost heavily in the conflict. The war lasted nearly six months, and after Japan’s final victory, Seventh Division troops paraded in Asahikawa, people welcoming them home in triumph. Peace negotiations granted Japan the southern half of Sakhalin, which the Japanese called Karafuto. Tokyo maintained control of the newlyacquired territory (unlike the Kuril Islands, which Hokkaido administered). A number of Hokkaido residents headed to Karafuto to settle, including some Ainu returning to their ancestral homes and many fishermen hoping to escape the domination of large operators in the Hokkaido industry. Japan’s acquisition of Karafuto also meant that much national development money that might have gone to Hokkaido was spent on the island to its north instead. Funds also went to Taiwan, which Japan had controlled since the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and to Korea, governed by Japan from 1910.

Development In the twentieth century, Hokkaido was finally allowed to begin to catch up with the rest of Japan politically and administratively. In 1897 the Docho divided the large island into nineteen subprefectures for administrative purposes; in 1910 the number was decreased to fourteen, and these remain today. In 1901 the government of Japan allowed the establishment of a Hokkaido assembly, though it had little real power, and in 1902 came the first members elected from Hokkaido to the national legislature, the Diet in Tokyo: one each from Hakodate, Sapporo and Otaru. The rest of Japan had received the vote a decade earlier, and agitation in the northern island for suffrage finally helped bring the Dosanko the right to vote. Hokkaido later gained more representatives in the Diet, but Tokyo continued to appoint all the prefectural governors in Japan until after World War II. Government development plans for Hokkaido appeared in the first two decades of the century: a fifteen year scheme in 1910 largely for infrastructure improvements and a 1927 proposal which included increasing both island population and food production. Some projects saw implementation, but national and world events have a way of affecting such plans, and both World War I and the Great Depression influenced what actually happened in Hokkaido. When the Kaitakushi had begun strenuous efforts to develop Hokkaido in the 1870s, planners acclaimed the area’s natural resources: minerals, sea life and forests. These island assets, especially coal, played an important role in Hokkaido’s economy in the early twentieth century. On the island, the mining industry prospered. Towns such as Akabira,

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Utashinai and Ashibetsu, all in the Sorachi River valley, saw investment in coal mining. Population increased in mining towns, for although mechanization slowly grew, it could not replace the human workers. Miners sometimes rebelled against poor working conditions and low wages, though. More than a thousand men at Hokutan’s Horonai mine went on strike in April 1907 for higher pay. The strike soon turned into a riot, strikers setting some company buildings on fire and clashing with police. After the violence, a company spokesman told the strikers that the firm would not raise wages but would donate rice to the workers’ families. The trouble subsided, but Yubari miners also struck in 1907. Mining continued to be hazardous; increasing mechanization did not end the perils miners faced. Gas explosions in a Yubari mine in 1908 killed ninety men. In April 1912 another killed 269 and in December, 216. Yet again in 1914, more than 400 died in a Yubari gas burst. Though companies put efforts into increasing mine safety, these mines were inherently dangerous because methane gas would build up around the deep coal deposits and this gas could easily explode. In the second and third decades of the century, Japan’s zaibatsu firms— large national conglomerates— purchased most of Hokkaido’s mines. In 1913 Mitsui took over Hokutan, which had more than five thousand workers by then and produced more than half the coal mined on the island. Mitsubishi and Sumitomo also bought up Hokkaido mines. With capital available, these great concerns could seek out and test promising areas not yet studied. Mechanization in the mines continued, with some machinery imported and some built by the mining firms. Japan’s coal was especially important during World War I, and because of a shortage of labor the government brought Korean workers to work in the mines. Hokutan hired its first Korean miners in 1916, bringing 33 of them to Yubari. By 1917 Hokutan had 192 Koreans working in Yubari and in 1918, 447. By 1919, there were 2,524 Koreans in Hokkaido. An analysis of Korean workers in Japan in 1923 showed that of the 3,286 then in Hokkaido, ninety percent were working as laborers. For every Korean woman in Hokkaido, there were more than eleven Korean men. Many of the Koreans stayed; in 1928, thirteen percent of the mine workers in Hokkaido were Korean; 1505 of them worked for Hokutan. Koreans usually held the most dangerous and difficult jobs in the mines, but Hokutan management held that because Koreans were less knowledgeable than other miners about safety and health, more accidents and illness could be expected among Koreans than among other workers.2 Even women worked underground in Yubari. The number of female miners rose during World War I, and in 1916, when their labor was first officially recorded, 2382 women were working in the Hokkaido mines. By 1920, that had increased to more than 5000. Salaries did not match men’s pay, however. When the labor market in Hokkaido was tight, workers felt enabled to strike for better pay and conditions; miners formed a union in Yubari in 1919. Companies responded to worker shortages in different ways, offering pay incentives and stronger safety rules. As the trade union movement developed in Japan, the companies continued to recruit Korean workers, leading to the first Korean labor organization in Japan, set up in 1920 as a section of the Yubari Federation of the National Union of Miners. Mine activism in that year was partly a response to a shocking mine disaster at Yubari in June, which killed more than two hundred people. After an underground explosion, Hokutan decided that

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in order to put out the conflagration below, it had no choice but to seal the mine despite the presence of many miners (including women) still underground.3 Despite accidents, Yubari prospered during the years leading up to World War II. Even before the buildup to war in the 1930s, more than three thousand men worked in Yubari’s two principal mines. Once the country was on a war footing later in that decade, stepping up the extraction of coal became a priority. Safety issues continued to arise, too, especially after gas exploded in a Hokutan mine in Yubari in 1938, killing 161 people. The government planned additional safety measures and at the same time encouraged increased production. Meanwhile, living conditions remained inadequate. For example, company houses in the mountain town of Yubari had little privacy and no insulation. Just as the mining industry saw changes during this era, so did the fishing industry. The herring fishery almost collapsed due to overfishing, and stocks of other fish also declined. Meanwhile, fishing boats powered by engines, not wind or oars, became more available. Steam trawlers made in Germany were first brought to Hokkaido in 1909 and fishermen began going to fishing grounds farther from Japan. Soon the mother-ship system began, first for crab and later for salmon. By the 1920s and 1930s, as large capitalists played a stronger and stronger role in the fisheries, factory ships were dominating the salmon and crab industries. Many of the workers whose families were formerly employed in the herring fisheries now worked on the factory ships and the boats they sent out. Life was hard; the men stayed at sea for months at a time. Kobayashi Takiji wrote a harrowing tale about laborers’ appalling life on a frightful factory ship, where they faced everything from vermin to death.4 This story, its title translated as “The Factory Ship” or “The Crab Ship,” became newly popular in 2008, as workers in Japan who are poorly paid struggled to get along during an economic downturn. Though the large operators dominated the ocean fishery, small-scale coastal fishing continued. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, fishermen’s associations were given rights to manage this fishery. Merchants controlled the marketing, however, and fishermen’s families were consistently in debt, some owing as much as eighty percent of the value of the catch. In the 1930s, civil servant Ando Takatoshi led an effort to establish fishing cooperatives to market sea products; this could release fishermen from the merchants’ stranglehold. He helped convince fishing families to create such cooperatives and later worked to bring them together into a Hokkaido-wide federation. Repayment of the fishermen’s debts was slow but the process of reforming the coastal fishery was well underway when World War II disrupted the industry. During this era, forestry continued to serve dual needs— to prepare land for farming and to provide wood for construction and fuel. Forestry in these years often followed the railroads, just as settlement did. Much of the land was cleared for agricultural use, but reforestation began in some of the tracts harvested for wood. Logging continued to be done mostly during the winter, when farmers could not work in their fields, and also because of the relative ease of hauling logs in the snow to a nearby river bank. Craftsmen built sleighs for the job. When spring came, logs were floated down rivers. As the Hokkaido rail network expanded, trains carried more and more lumber. In the early years of the twentieth century, a lot of the timber went to China. For domestic use, forest products included charcoal and pulp as well as boards. As the years went on, even Hokkaido’s timber resources could not supply the needs of the nation, and Karafuto’s forests plus imported lumber became more and more important. Significant agricultural advances on Hokkaido came in the early twentieth century.

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Tokyo established the Hokkaido Agricultural Experiment Station in 1901. Research expanded, with creation of experimental farms at various locations throughout the island, from Soya in the north to Nemuro in the east. Researchers carried out all sorts of experiments and planted many kinds of crops. Because of the importance of rice in the Japanese diet, the study of rice cultivation continued to be prominent. As early as 1896, farmers had begun forming local associations to develop irrigation schemes for rice paddies. By the 1930s, some 250 irrigation associations had been organized in Hokkaido; government subsidies had made construction of irrigation works practical. Higashide Seiichi observed a large-scale irrigation project near Fukagawa in 1916 or 1917 and noted that Korean laborers brought to do the construction work lived almost as slaves. In midwinter, even during snowstorms, they worked stripped to the waist. Higashide’s father explained to the boy that the workers were forbidden to wear more clothes in order to ensure that they worked as hard as possible. Higashide speculated that they were probably misled into coming to Hokkaido.5 The first half of the century saw new land opened for agriculture, though from 1920 to 1930 the amount under cultivation actually decreased. (After World war I ended, agricultural production in Europe revived and Japanese exports lost markets there.) Efforts continued to expand the Hokkaido land used for cultivation because of Japan’s need to feed its growing population, and critics urged the government to stop large landowners in Hokkaido from letting much of their acreage lie fallow; were the land used more efficiently, it could support many more people. Great efforts have gone into developing pest-resistant varieties of rice that could be grown successfully in a northern climate. Early research centered on finding early maturing varieties, but later study stressed the importance of strains that could tolerate cool summer weather. In 1905 the introduction of Akage rice spurred island development, for this variety enabled successful rice-growing in new areas. Then in 1914 came Bozu rice, which is easily planted mechanically. Further experimentation included growing rice in especially prepared seedling beds protected from the cold. The young plants would be transplanted into the fields after cold weather danger ended. In 1937, another newly developed rice strain, Norin #11, became available to Hokkaido farmers; it needs only one hundred days to mature. Maps of the development of areas for rice production in Hokkaido show the rice frontier moving northward and eastward. Surprisingly, it almost reached the northern tip of the island by 1930. In the 1930s, agricultural lands grew by more than 350,000 acres. But rice cultivation was an iffy enterprise in these farthest reaches of the island. Years when the weather was colder than usual could mean a small or nonexistent crop. A bad crop year could mean hunger and destitution for farm families. Cold in 1902 virtually destroyed the rice planted in Hokkaido and briefly meant no expansion of the rice-growing area. Because of extra-cold weather and a destructive late–August typhoon in the 1913 growing season, by early 1914 Hokkaido and northern sections of Honshu faced famine. An official estimate suggested that ninety-five percent of Hokkaido’s harvest failed. “Men are subsisting on straw, the bark of trees, unmatured daikon, acorns powdered and made into gruel, buckwheat chaff powdered and made into gruel by pouring on hot water,” wrote an observer.6 Again, in the 1920s and 30s, colder weather in some years led to very low crop yields. Research on crops other than rice led to improvements in agricultural efficiency. In 1920, peas, beans and potatoes occupied more land than rice. New varieties of wheat,

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American advisors introduced western surveying techniques to Hokkaido. This group of Japanese men with an Ainu guide surveyed land in the Chitose area about 1910 (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

potatoes and vegetables were introduced successfully. Systematic asparagus cultivation on Hokkaido began in the 1920s and became established successfully around Kimobetsu, just east of Mt. Yotei. A cannery built there in the 1930s processed the vegetable. It was also in the 1920s that dairy farming began to be important in Hokkaido. Consistent use of crop rotation schemes also began. Research continued; one problem on Hokkaido only somewhat successfully tackled was peat bog reclamation; peat was extensive on the island, especially in the lower Ishikari Valley and the Kushiro-Nemuro area, but with treatment, the peatland could become productive farmland. Unlike the traditional Japanese pattern of land use, much of Hokkaido’s agricultural acreage has been planted in crops used for animal feed. For many years Japan’s military establishment was a prime market for Hokkaido oats because of the need for horse feed. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, horses provided the motive power needed on Hokkaido farms, which, unlike heartland farms, were too large to work efficiently by hand. Thus the typical Hokkaido farm depended upon horse power; in almost every farmyard would sit the large two-wheeled cart pulled by horses in summer and the sleigh used in winter. Agricultural cooperatives have been influential in Hokkaido just as in the rest of Japan, and in 1919 Hokkaido farmers formed the Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Societies of Hokkaido, or Hokuren — an organization to coordinate the sales of their farm products. Since then Hokuren has carried out many diverse activities, from canning farm products to producing insecticides to arranging exports.

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Top: Men are surveying in these grasslands about 1910. Bottom: Peat bogs covered a fair amount of potential Hokkaido farmland. Around 1920, these men worked to drain this particular piece of land (both photographs courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

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Farm buildings, including houses, mostly stood on individual holdings, in the American pattern, rather than in villages as in the Japanese heartland. Houses showed some American influence on the outside, but just as in earlier years, interiors were built and furnished in the Japanese style and few dwellings were truly suitable for Hokkaido winters. Many aspects of Hokkaido life did not change much. The weather continued to offer challenges but people were learning ways to cope. In the countryside, some farm families built windbreaks using straw from their rice paddies to protect their houses from the cold winter winds. Clothing more suitable to the Hokkaido winters became available, and during cold weather, some railroad cars contained stoves to provide heat. But even in the twentieth century one could see immigrant huts built with walls of “matting and brushwood.” Such simple dwellings were as primitive as those built half a century earlier, typically featuring only one room. The fire in the center of the room would warm the small dwelling more or less adequately in winter. At least plenty of firewood was usually available nearby.7 In 1900, Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko, or Hokkaido Development Bank (sometimes translated as Hokkaido Colonial Bank) was incorporated to support island development. Infrastructure projects financed publicly and privately in the following decades included the island’s first hydroelectric plant, which opened in 1906 at Iwanai on the coast southwest of Otaru. The government undertook harbor improvements at many places, including Wakkanai, Abashiri and Nemuro as well as the chief ports of Kushiro, Hakodate, Otaru and Muroran. One sector that especially benefited from the work was coastal shipping, an important part of Hokkaido commerce. Additional funds were expended on road and bridge construction, irrigation and drainage and the bank lent funds for projects and helped with relief when times were especially bad. Development did not magically happen, however, and when the Diet did implement programs, official corruption too often influenced sales or leases and it was impossible to determine the impact of these specific development measures on Hokkaido’s economy and standard of living. In 1913, a prominent Tokyo official, Viscount Kiyoura Keigo, expressed disappointment after visiting Hokkaido that more progress had not been made. Though impressed by Otaru and Hakodate and certain factories he saw in other cities, he felt the island needed more residents and greater agricultural development and he criticized Hokkaido’s people for not doing more, attributing this to the “lack of a fighting spirit” of too many migrants, who went to Hokkaido only to depart soon for their old homes.8 Among the industries that grew during this era was sake manufacture. The two essentials for a good product could be found in Hokkaido: pure, tasty water and a suitable variety of rice. Sake has traditionally been made in the winter, when cold weather discourages the growth of bacteria which can spoil the liquor. Thus Hokkaido is a natural spot for its manufacture and Hokkaido sake has won prizes. These days, about fifteen firms produce sake on the island. Sake is not the only product for which Hokkaido climate and terrain proved suitable. In 1910, Sekon Nikoshiro opened a factory in Sapporo to produce condensed milk from raw milk. A dairy industry expanded and by 1926, four condenseries and about ninety dairies operated in Hokkaido. Meanwhile, peppermint, which was first grown in the Kitami region in 1901, was finding a wide market and paper manufacture using pulp from island trees was growing rapidly.

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This early twentieth century scene shows a farming complex near Sapporo. The railroad has arrived, as has electricity. The buildings demonstrate both Japanese and American architectural styles and two Japanese flags wave at the entrance to the complex (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

During the first thirty years of the twentieth century, transportation links, and thus farms and towns, spread all across the island. Advancing outposts led to the disappearance of forest; stumps dotted the farm fields in areas fairly recently brought into cultivation. The railroad and the pioneers had reached Asahikawa before 1900, while in the Kitami area most agricultural development got its start in the second decade of the twentieth century when the railroad came, though a few settler families, including some tondenhei, had pioneered there around the turn of the century. To serve local farm families, the new railroad lines featured many stations, and inns for travelers sprung up near these stations. Hokkaido’s transportation system was developed primarily to expedite the export of raw materials, specifically coal and lumber and, later, farm products. That the first railroad line built on the island served the Horonai coal mine illustrates this. Lines were built from producing centers to Hokkaido’s main ports: Otaru, Hakodate, Muroran and Kushiro, but not until 1904 could one travel directly from Hakodate to Otaru and Sapporo by rail. From Asahikawa one could take trains both northward and, by 1907, eastward all the way to Kushiro. This route traversed the Tokachi plain, stimulating agricultural development in that wide area. In 1926 the Chitose Line, from Tomakomai north to Sapporo, opened, making it possible to travel directly from Sapporo to Muroran by rail. Travelers proceeding from Muroran toward Hakodate would still have to take

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Shown in 1910 at the time of the autumn harvest, these immigrants probably had not lived long on Hokkaido. We hope they were able to build a more substantial dwelling not too long after this picture was taken (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

a boat across Uchiura Bay. About 1930, a rail line opened from Muroran to connect with the Hakodate Line on the west coast of Uchiura Bay. Today, the section along the north shore of the bay is part of the main line connecting Hakodate and Sapporo; the route north from Hakodate winds around Uchiura Bay via the north end of Muroran City to Tomakomai and then north, through Chitose to Sapporo. By 1918, the twenty-one miles of railroad that had existed in Hokkaido fifty years earlier had grown to almost one thousand miles. Just a few years later, in 1922, a railroad line to the far north opened, its terminus at Wakkanai. Travel by sea offered an important alternative for Hokkaido families. Boats continued to travel along the Hokkaido coast from port to port. At that time, many small steamers serving coastal ports on Hokkaido called at Hakodate and passenger ships served the city twice each day from both Muroran and Aomori. A ship service from Yokohama operated two or three times weekly and occasional ships from Hakodate sailed to Sakhalin or Honshu’s west coast. In 1923, ferries began plying La Perouse Strait from Wakkanai to Sakhalin. About 2400 miles of road existed on Hokkaido by the end of World War I, but all except the main roads remained poor, making life difficult for the farmer trying to get his crop to market. Most roads were not usable either during winter or the spring thaw. A traveler in 1923 reported that the route north from Hakodate was still unsatisfactory, being “no better than a wide track resembling a badly ploughed field. At the sides were deep corrugations; in the middle was a high causeway abounding in dangerous ruts and

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This rural post office was built in 1902 on Hokkaido’s southwest coast to serve the herring fishermen who brought prosperity to the area. The building is now in the Historical Village of Hokkaido.

cavities.”9 The main improved highways were gravel, but others suited farm carts at best. More horse-drawn vehicles traveled on both rural roads and city streets than automobiles, especially in agricultural areas, and local firms built carts and sleighs for summer and winter travel. Even in the 1930s, roadway development came relatively slowly and almost all roads remained unpaved. Otaru, Hakodate and Sapporo were by far Hokkaido’s largest cities in the first half of the twentieth century. As Sapporo’s port, Otaru was increasing in importance. Construction of a breakwater began in 1897, though it took a decade to complete. The structure gave protection against the strong winds that threatened to send ships on to the rocks. After the breakwater came the Otaru Canal, dug just inland from and parallel to the shore. Here barges could unload goods brought from ships directly to the warehouses lining the canal. The many products shipped from the city included many kinds of goods, from peas to railroad ties. During the early twentieth century, Otaru was Hokkaido’s commercial center, partly because the annexation of Karafuto brought new opportunities for trade. Fishing rights Japan obtained off the Russian coast after the Russo-Japanese War also benefited the city. Twenty some banks opened in Otaru along with the shipping interests and the businesses that appeared around them. The zaibatsu, too, established Hokkaido branch offices in Otaru. As the city flourished, periodic fires swept through the built-up area, and stone became more frequently used as a building material. For a time, Otaru was Hokkaido’s

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largest city, with 91,962 people in 1910, closely followed by Hakodate (88,888) while Sapporo (88,841) came third.10 Otaru’s most prosperous days are brought to mind by the historic stone shop and bank buildings from the Meiji and Taisho eras that still stand. They give the city a very visible connection with earlier times that is missing in most of Japan. The Handbook for Travelers to Japan described Hakodate in 1907: “Not withstanding its size and prosperity, [it] is of little account as a port for direct foreign trade.” Domestic trade kept its harbor active. Most of the few foreigners living in the city, the handbook reported, were missionaries. Seven years later, though, (and according to a different guidebook) Hakodate was “a new, flourishing frontierlike city with 21,000 houses and 91,000 inhabitants.” Fishermen congregated there, and in those days perhaps five hundred vessels would embark from Hakodate during a summer season for other northern ports, many in Russia. But officials forbade photography or sketching within about four miles of Hakodate’s port, for it was a “strategic zone.” By 1920, Hakodate was well ahead of Sapporo and Otaru in population, with 132,622 people compared with 102,462 in Otaru and 94,568 in Sapporo; at the time, Hakodate was the tenth largest city in all Japan.11 An unusual edifice and a symbol of Hakodate’s history and prosperity is the Chinese Memorial Hall. This Chinese-style building of red brick was planned as a gathering place for the city’s prosperous Chinese business community. Finished in 1910, the hall appears very simple from the outside, but inside are altars, paintings and brilliant red pillars. Chinese merchants in Hakodate brought artisans from China, including specialists such as lacquer painters, to create the building. The Memorial Hall’s richness emphasizes the importance of trade with China to the city. Constructed without any nails, this is the only building of traditional Chinese construction in Japan and is now open to visitors. Other cities grew, too. When Frederick Starr landed at Muroran in 1904, he described the town as “small and mean, stretching in two or three long streets at different levels, along the shore.” This city, originally developed as a port for receiving coal from Hokkaido mines, grew after the 1907 establishment of an iron and steel works, which took advantage of the iron mines not too far away at Kutchan, on the western edge of the mountains north of the city, as well as coal from Yubari. Ore imported from Korea and China supplemented the local supply. A 1914 guidebook described Muroran as a “picturesque town” (of 21,000 people) in a “pretty site.” The town grew steadily, and in the 1930s passed the hundred thousand population mark, probably because of the need for iron and steel as Japan went to war with China.12 Asahikawa, too, was gaining population, more than 20,000 from 1920 to 1930, when it counted more than 80,000 residents. By this decade, the northern part of the island was seeing increased migration and development, and Asahikawa was the hub. One of Hokkaido’s most important cities, Tomakomai, dates its growth from the early twentieth century, though the Hara brothers had settled there with fifty samurai from Tokyo in 1800 and a small settlement grew after the Kaitakushi built the road from Muroran to Sapporo. (It was at Tomakomai that the Sapporo route met the road heading eastward along Hokkaido’s south shore.) This tiny outpost remained merely a collection of small inns and shops catering to travelers; several Meiji era attempts to establish communities there failed, but in 1910, Oji Paper opened a mill in Tomakomai. The firm chose the site because of its water supply, abundant nearby forests and extensive land suitable for industrial development. Muroran served as the port for the mill, and these

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The other side of this postcard picturing Muroran has a handwritten message in Czech and was sent to Czechoslovakia from Japan in 1920.

two cities came to form Hokkaido’s industrial center. Oji’s health dominated Tomakomai. By 1920, more than one thousand people in the city worked for the firm. Oji remains one of the ten top forest products companies in the world. Nowadays, the company’s Tomakomai mill produces thirty percent of Japan’s newsprint. By 1910, Hokkaido’s population was about 1,450,000, with just over forty-five percent listed as being in farming and just under twelve percent in fishing. The production of “silk, bricks, beer, watches, sugar, canned goods, hemp, cement, paper, manure, iron goods, and shipbuilding” aided the Hokkaido economy.13 Tourism promoters emphasized the island’s more exotic features. Noboribetsu, between Muroran and Shiraoi, was already well-known for its hot springs and loud, sulfurous, horrifyingly beautiful volcanic landscape. In those days tourists were not protected as they are now, and among the places where visitors could walk in Noboribetsu were spots where they had to pick up their feet quickly or risk burning their shoes. Of course the hot springs then featured “promiscuous bathing,” which simply meant that unclothed visitors of both sexes could enter the same pool. English language guidebooks such as the 1907 Handbook contrasted travel in Hokkaido to that in the Japanese heartland, warning tourists that on the northern island “there are comparatively few good roads, the inns are often far apart, and jinrikishas are met with only in a few places and basha [carriages] on the main roads. Most journeys are performed in the saddle.” The handbook highlighted Noboribetsu for its hot springs and volcanic landscape, Biratori, to see the Ainu, and lakes and mountains. In 1914 foreign tourists could read that it was sometimes possible to buy “grizzly bear skins (prices flexible) and Siberian furs” but that Tokyo was a better place to buy traditional Japanese items.14

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The commercial and industrial center of Muroran has expanded greatly since 1920, as shown in this 2006 view of the city.

In 1914, World War I erupted in Europe and its repercussions both hindered and stimulated Hokkaido development. The war gave an impetus to Hokkaido manufacturing, for warfare interrupted worldwide commerce; Japan, like other nations, found the need to become more self-sufficient. In Hokkaido, chemical industries, especially paper manufacture, grew, and at Kamiiso, near Hakodate, cement production became important. The war affected agriculture too, encouraging growth of crops other than rice because their export meant strong profits. During the war, wages did not keep pace with prices, leading to strikes and protests throughout Japan. Four thousand workers struck at a Muroran steel mill in 1917. In 1918, rioting broke out in Japan over a doubling of the price of rice. Authorities broke up strikes in Hokkaido that year and, to discourage further unrest, made more rice available and reduced prices. With the end of the war, the government promoted and sometimes subsidized the shift back to rice cultivation. Meanwhile, Hokkaido felt the effects of inflation and recession. Some firms faced bankruptcy and government and private efforts to improve the island’s economy included extending fishing grounds farther into the ocean as well as introducing more modern mining techniques. As World War I ended, revolution stirred in Russia, and nearby Hokkaido felt the impact. Several nations, including Japan, sent troops to oppose the communists in the Russian Far East. With instability in Russia, Japan remained tense, keeping sensitive places off limits to foreigners and fortifying Hokkaido ports. The 1920s brought prosperity to Hokkaido, as exemplified by the theaters and restau-

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rants on the island. Japan’s first firm to prepare frozen food for sale began operations in Hokkaido in 1920, their original product being frozen fish. For more prosperous Dosanko, the first golf club in Hokkaido opened in 1928 in Otaru. Despite modern innovations such as these, people in the Japanese heartland as well as many foreigners still perceived the island as backward. Fewer than two thousand cars were registered in Hokkaido in 1932; statistics like this tended to bolster the perception that Hokkaido was behind the times. After traveling widely in Japan, Henry Franck published a “geographical reader” about the country for American students in 1927. When he went to Hokkaido he left his wife and child behind, because “traveling in Yezo is not very comfortable.” He devoted a chapter to the Ainu, but after seeing traditional Ainu dwellings pronounced that “their miserable straw huts without floors are not suitable dwellings for the long, cold Hokkaido winters,” apparently having no idea what adaptations Ainu made for wintertime.15 During the 1920s, the most dramatic events in Hokkaido occurred in Otaru. At the end of December 1924, an accidental explosion occurred near Temiya Station while workers were unloading a ship’s cargo of explosives. The blast left a rubble-filled hole one hundred feet wide, and petroleum stored at the station started an intense fire, destroying more than forty warehouses and ravaging countless businesses, shops and houses. The blast wrecked forty railway cars, sank twelve lighters in the harbor and threw a thirtyfoot length of steel rail three miles across the water. The carnage reminded people of the dreadful earthquake and fire that had devastated Tokyo and Yokohama the year before. The Otaru explosion and fire claimed more than 120 lives, injured many more people and wiped out more than one thousand houses. “The whole waterfront was in flames,” reported the New York Times.16 Otaru was the site of an event in 1925 with national repercussions. Military training for all Japanese schoolboys ages twelve and above had recently become required. A military instructor at Otaru Commercial College planned an exercise centered on a hypothetical earthquake in the Otaru neighborhood, after which local Koreans and anarchists supposedly rose in rebellion. Students were to plot ways to “annihilate the enemy.” Widespread protests, even beyond Hokkaido, followed the announced exercise, and Tokyo’s Ministry of Education “had to admit that the ‘hypothesis’ was ill chosen.”17 Rising prices and increased unemployment helped foment an upsurge of leftist activity during the twenties. In 1927 a June-July general strike lasting almost a month severely disrupted Otaru. Many workers’ wages had been cut because owners had been hurt by a downturn in financial markets. The strike, which started among waterfront workers, encompassed tenant farmer protests, which had begun several months earlier. Agricultural cooperatives agreed to make food available for strikers and their families in Otaru while the port was at a standstill. Minor scuffles with police occurred and life remained tense, but in the end the harbor workers achieved much of what they wanted. The communist movement that grew during the 1920s and 1930s in Japan was heavily involved in the 1927 labor actions in Otaru. Hokkaido had a fair number of communist activists, both because of the island’s nearness to the Soviet Union and because of continued economic troubles. In late 1927 party cells were first organized on the island. When elections for the national Diet took place early the next year — the first election since the vote was extended to all men — a communist representing the Worker-Peasant Party ran for the Otaru seat. He was unsuccessful and soon officials carried out a widespread roundup of communist and other leftist leaders throughout Japan, detaining for questioning over five hundred people in Otaru alone. Thirteen of the Otaru leaders faced

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arrest and torture, which Kobayashi Takiji recounted in his story, “March 15, 1928.”18 When the worldwide depression started a few years later, support for the party grew, as did government repression. Not until after World War II did the Japanese Communist Party become a legal organization.

Settlers As the century began, a guidebook for visitors to Japan described Hokkaido’s people as “less polished and more independent” than other Japanese.19 Meanwhile, immigrants continued to come to Hokkaido during the first decades of the twentieth century, about fifty thousand to eighty thousand each year. Group immigration was still significant, more than one hundred groups moving to Hokkaido in those years. While newcomers often had to struggle with poverty, many of the earlier migrants and their families had become prosperous. After early years of toil and privation, some tondenhei members went into business when their terms of service ended. Migrants opened every type of shop needed in Hokkaido’s growing communities. Some of these now stand in the Historical Village of Hokkaido: among them a noodle shop, a dye shop, a sake brewery, even a photography studio. On the farms, substantial houses came to replace the primitive huts in which so many families had started their life in Hokkaido. These houses tended to resemble those in the migrants’ home districts, even when such structures did not suit the northern climate. Some migrants later returned to their home islands or moved from the countryside to Hokkaido cities, giving up their effort to be pioneer farmers. Poor people had no funds to blast out stumps or to treat the soil with lime to combat acidity. The migrants also often lacked basic farming skills as well as ability to cope with Hokkaido conditions, so different from those in their home areas. Many Japanese hoping to migrate continued to prefer Hawaii, the American mainland or Taiwan — not Hokkaido, charged a member of the National Diet in 1907, explaining that this was because Hokkaido was so poorly administered. Anxiety about the cold climate and the possible unavailability of rice surely must have been important, too. Hokkaido did receive positive assessments, however. In 1914, Sato Shosuke, head of the college in Sapporo, claimed that Hokkaido “is at present receiving many emigrants” and opined that though its population was just a little more than one million, the island could support as many as six million people.20 By 1916, Hokkaido had some 360,000 dwellings to house its residents. But even those who tried to migrate did not always arrive. When two ships collided in Tsugaru Strait in March 1908, one of the ships— the Matsu Maru —sank in half an hour. Of 124 migrants on the ship, only six survived. During and after World War I, the feeling grew in Japan that the nation needed to expand but that Hokkaido was unsuitable for settlement because people did not want to go there. The war stimulated migration to Hokkaido, though, and over ninety thousand people came in 1919, helping cement Hokkaido’s position as a necessary source of agricultural products in Japan. Migration dropped off in succeeding years. The first national census counted 2,359,183 people in Hokkaido in 1920. Since the founding of the Kaitakushi, migration to the island had accounted for an increase of about two million people. Government programs to encourage settlement continued

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Many of the immigrants who came to Hokkaido during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came in groups. These people, from Yamanashi Prefecture (west of Tokyo), had just arrived in 1909 at the site of their new community near Lake Toya (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

sporadically. Despite official encouragement, fewer people than the government hoped actually went to Hokkaido. Moreover, promising alternatives lured some Hokkaido settlers away. In the 1920s, when Matsue Shunji got control of much of the land of Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean to raise sugar cane, many people moved from Hokkaido to the tropical isle to work on the plantations. In 1926, the government reported a plan to spend some five million dollars over the following two decades to establish 1,800,000 new farmers in Hokkaido. The main impetus for encouraging this migration, as well as earlier ones, was not development, as it had been when Russian expansion was feared, but was rather an attempt to relieve overpopulation on Japan’s other islands. The number of Hokkaido residents remained lower than hoped, even though in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Hokkaido’s population nearly tripled, growing from 985,000 to 2,812,000. Several early twentieth century migrants to Hokkaido later became famous from teachings and writings which have spread throughout the world. One of these settlers, Ueshiba Morihei, founded the martial art known as aikido. In 1910 he went to Hokkaido to look at areas where he might establish a settlement. Two years later, still in his twenties, he led eighty-four people to Hokkaido all the way from Wakayama Prefecture, south of Osaka. In Hokkaido they established the village of Shirataki in the uplands west of Abashiri. They had left home in March, but their route to their new home took them over

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One of the first tasks facing Hokkaido pioneers was clearing the land, not an easy task in the days before chain saws. These settlers, working about 1910, would have plenty of firewood to warm their dwellings during the long winters, though (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

Hokkaido’s central mountains— a difficult journey — and they did not reach Shirataki until May 20. They spent the summer building shelters and only the next year began to grow crops. For several years the group managed to survive on their mountain plateau mostly on potatoes, wild vegetables, and fish caught in the nearby river. By 1915 the small settlement was becoming fairly prosperous, the people making money from lumbering in addition to farming. That year Ueshiba met jujutsu master Takeda Sokaku in a nearby settlement and began intense study of his martial art. In 1917 the town of Shirataki burned down, but the villagers worked hard to rebuild it. Two years later, though, Ueshiba left and returned to Wakayama Prefecture when he learned of his father’s serious illness. Later he began teaching aikido, which he developed after studying jujutsu. He never returned to Hokkaido, but it was there that he had received his inspiration to become a master of martial arts. It was the physical strength and endurance he developed in Hokkaido that made his success possible. For Namikoshi Takujiro, life in Hokkaido also led to accomplishment. He migrated to Hokkaido with his family from Shikoku in 1905, when he was seven years old. Unfortunately, his mother developed arthritis in the Hokkaido cold, and to ease her misery, the young boy would massage her. He found that pressure was more effective than rubbing. Later he developed his methods into shiatsu, a system of treatment that used the pressure of fingers upon specific points of the body to ease suffering. Namikoshi opened a clinic in Sapporo, and, eight years later, another in Tokyo. Eventually he began a school to train practitioners, and shiatsu has by now spread around the world.

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Makiguchi Tsunesaburo, who formed the Buddhist social-political organization, Soka Gakkai, also found inspiration during his years in Hokkaido. He was born in 1871 and grew up in Niigata Prefecture. When a teenager, he moved by himself to Hokkaido, inspired by the idea of going to the frontier. First he lived with an uncle in Otaru, where his hard work and study led to a chance to attend Sapporo Normal School (which later became Hokkaido University of Education). After his 1893 graduation he worked as a teacher, later an elementary school principal and a college instructor. In 1901 Makiguchi left Sapporo for Tokyo, where he wrote and worked for educational reform, but without much success. In 1930, with friends who were also mostly teachers, he founded Soka Kyoiku Gakkai, or Value Creation Education Society, which combined principles of education and Buddhism. His association became an influential Buddhist organization and in 1943 Makiguchi and other leaders were arrested because they would not follow Shinto, the state religion which was mandatory under the wartime regime. Makiguchi died in prison the next year but his organization, renamed Soka Gakkai, remains vibrant today. It sponsored an influential political party, Komeito, and though the two organizations have severed official ties and Komeito has become New Komeito after a political merger, Soka Gakkai influence remains strong in the party. Several prominent literary figures of this era have Hokkaido connections. Ishikawa Takuboku, usually affectionately referred to simply as Takuboku, has been called Japan’s poet laureate, especially for his evocative thirty-one syllable poems called tanka. In his early twenties he went to Hakodate, arriving in 1907 from his home prefecture of Iwate. In Hakodate he edited a literary journal and taught school. Because a fire destroyed the journal office and his school later that year, Takuboku moved briefly to Sapporo and then on to Otaru, where he worked for a newspaper. The third of a year he spent there was a happy time, but he had to leave after an office fight, and a friend obtained an editorial post for him in Kushiro. After only two and one-half months in the eastern Hokkaido city he left for Tokyo, hoping to make his mark in the literary world. He died of tuberculosis when only twenty-five years old but his poetry is revered in Japan now. In Hakodate is his family grave and in Kushiro, Otaru and Sapporo are monuments to his memory. His time in Hokkaido inspired some of his poetry. Here is a poem he wrote about Kushiro: While ice is glistening And plovers are crying, The winter moon shines Over Kushiro Bay.21

Left-wing writer Kobayashi Takiji — usually called simply Takiji — was born in 1903 and grew up on a poverty-stricken farm. His parents, lured by advertisements promising a glowing future in Hokkaido, emigrated to the island only to find no respite from poverty. An uncle made it possible for him to attend Otaru Commercial College; Kobayashi then went to work at a bank in Otaru. By 1927 he had become interested in the problems of working class people, and during the strike that year, he aided the protesting dockworkers. Takiji began writing about poor people’s struggles, the bitter life that faced many of Hokkaido’s poor early in the twentieth century both on land and sea. Even those farmers who managed to make a small success as they developed their land would often lose the farm to wealthy capitalists in order to discharge debts that were often very small. Thus ordinary people who had struggled so hard to make Hokkaido land productive found they ended as they had begun. They had fled the tenant farmer life in Honshu only

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One of Japan’s most beloved poets, Ishikawa Takuboku, lived for part of his short life in several Hokkaido cities. Here is his statue in Sapporo’s Odori Park.

to find themselves in the same situation in Hokkaido. Kobayashi’s picture of tenant life in Hokkaido was all too accurate, for tenant farmers worked many acres of rural land; a wealthy landlord could have a hundred tenants or more. A group of tenants went on strike in 1926. Takiji’s story, “The Absentee Landlord,” describes the farmers’ struggles and decision to strike against their landlord’s cruel extortions. This was based on an actual event; in the story and in reality, the peasants won out. After this story appeared, bank officials requested Kobayashi Takiji’s resignation. Now out of a job, he headed for Tokyo. Arrested there as a dangerous leftist, he died that night — February 20, 1933 — after prison torture. He was thirty-one years old.22 A play revolving about agricultural issues in Hokkaido’s Tokachi District in the 1930s has had a strong influence on Japanese dramatists since a magazine published it in 193738. Land of Volcanic Ash, by Kubo Sakae, is rarely staged because of its unwieldy length but is often excerpted in anthologies. Born in Sapporo but raised mostly in Tokyo, Kubo set his great drama during the hard years of crop failure and depression in the 1930s. The play’s many characters include poor peasants, the mill manager, an agricultural researcher and an absentee landlord’s mistress. The plot examines significant economic issues includ-

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ing soil depletion as well as describing the relationships between the characters. Land of Volcanic Ash makes the area around Obihiro and its problems during the 1930s come alive for the reader or viewer.23 Well-known sports figures, too, especially sumo champions, have come from Hokkaido, but the northern island athlete with the most interesting story played baseball. Victor Starfin was a Russian who grew up in Asahikawa after his White Russian family fled Soviet rule.24 Starting in 1936, he was a star pitcher for the team that later became the Yomiuri Giants and he had an impressive record, but as a foreigner, was kept under house arrest during World War II. Starfin died in a traffic accident in 1957 when only forty years old and several years later won election to Japan’s baseball hall of fame. Asahikawa’s baseball stadium is named for him.

Adversity Just as natural forces created the coal, forests and fish that have provided so much of Hokkaido’s wealth, they have also been responsible for disaster: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, destructive storms and fires. Hokkaido’s most active volcano is Mt. Usu, northwest of Muroran and just inland from the northern shore of Uchiura Bay. Scientists have identified nine eruptions of this mountain from the seventeenth century to the present. These have included explosions, mud flows, falling ash and flowing rock fragments. In 1910 the mountain erupted for the first time in many years, forming new craters, destroying several hundred houses and causing some ten thousand people, mainly in Date and Abuta, to flee. In 1926, Mt. Tokachi erupted. This 6,854 foot peak is in Daisetsuzan National Park in Hokkaido’s central cluster of mountains. After several days of rumblings, on May 24 came an earthquake and then a series of explosions draining the lake in the crater at the volcano’s summit. Melted snow from the almost four foot snow pack poured down the mountainside, carrying mud, plants and trees with it and wiping out several neighborhoods in the town of Kamifurano. “This means the destruction of the wealth created by thirty years of hard labor,” wrote the Japan Times.25 Exhibits in Kamifurano’s pioneer museum show the disaster’s effects and the town’s subsequent reconstruction. Komagatake erupted violently in June 1929, its first important eruption since 1856. This 3,732 foot volcano is not particularly high but it rises near the coast, across the heel of the Oshima Peninsula about twenty miles north of Hakodate. It is visible from Hakodate Bay. During the 1929 eruption, ash fell on Hakodate for many hours and severed train service to Sapporo. Since Hakodate’s electricity came from power stations near the mountain, the city went dark. Ash or lava covered villages and fields in the foothills; some villagers found themselves trapped between streams of lava rolling down the mountain, awaiting rescue from the sea. Many acres of forest burned and two people died. For two and one-half months after the convulsive June 17 explosion, minor volcanic activity continued. The mountain then became quiescent until minor eruptions in the mid–1930s and another in 1942, when an eruption altered Komagatake’s features and caused ash fall but no significant damage. Given Hokkaido’s extensive wooded area, forest fire was a seasonal danger. Bad years included 1904 and 1906, when fires burned for several months and destroyed many acres of forest. In May 1911, fires in various parts of the island consumed wide swaths of forest

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and led to serious consideration of ways to prevent future fire. During the outbreak, fires invaded Sapporo’s outskirts and for a time were burning on both sides of the railroad tracks connecting Sapporo and Otaru. Flames imperiled Sapporo Shrine but troops called out to fight the fire protected the sacred precincts. In addition to regular firemen and military troops, prisoners were enrolled to fight the Hokkaido fires; the entire island seemed threatened. Yubari mine pits had to be sealed because flaming trees set afire piles of coal stacked outside the mines. Fire destroyed most of the town of Wakkanai at Hokkaido’s northern tip and flames even ravaged the lighthouse at Cape Soya. Little was left of it but ashes. More fires broke out near Hakodate. The year 1940 was another bad year for fires. A forest fire in the far north swept through and almost destroyed a small coastal town in the far north. Other fires that year burned many acres of trees near Kitami. Unfortunately, these fires came at a time when Hokkaido lumber operators found a sudden demand for their products as war in Europe seriously cut into the availability of products from Scandinavia. The worst disaster in Hokkaido during the prewar decades of the twentieth century was the great Hakodate fire of 1934. The city had seen earlier conflagrations. After a late November 1878 fire that destroyed almost one thousand homes, officials decided to straighten and widen the streets, but in December 1879, fire destroyed two thousand houses in the heart of the city, about forty percent of it. A student in Sapporo noted, “We may say that all former Hakkodate [sic] has disappeared, but I hope new Hakkodate will soon appear.”26 And it did. Since the area replanned and rebuilt after the 1878 fire had escaped destruction in 1879, officials extended the new plan. The historic district’s perpendicular streets date from this time. These “slopes,” straight streets that head directly uphill, are an uncommon sight in Japan and thus spark visitor interest in Hakodate. On August 25, 1907, fire broke out again, reportedly in a soap-maker’s house during a high wind. The fire burned for nearly twelve hours, destroying thirteen thousand houses and, all in all, about seventy per cent of the city. About three hundred people died. All the consulates except the American one were lost, along with several banks, the post office and the telephone exchange; the center of the city was practically gone by the time the fire burned itself out. Telegraphic messages afterward had to be sent by ship to Aomori to be dispatched. It would be ten years before the city could recover, reporters estimated, and insurance companies faced the greatest claims ever made in Japan. Fire due to a thoughtlessly discarded cigarette destroyed seventeen hundred dwellings in May 1913. On August 3, 1916, fire broke out in the city again, once more cutting the telegraph lines as well as wrecking some fifteen hundred houses. Again, a high wind — frequent in Hakodate — was blowing. A gunboat and military troops were available to help fight the blaze but could not prevent all the damage. An April 14, 1921, fire originated in a Hakodate movie theater, the Horaikan. One more time fire destroyed the city’s commercial center and, in all, about one-third of Hakodate. Yet again a strong wind helped spread the fire. The post office, newspaper office, railway passenger office, several schools and the British Consulate all saw destruction in the blaze. The story is repetitive because in times of high wind there seemed to be no way to prevent a fire in Hakodate from spreading rapidly, and the city, near Tsugaru Strait, often experiences high winds. The greatest fire of all came in 1934, starting on the evening of March 21 when a chimney collapsed. High winds fanning flames meant destruction again of a great part of the city. Many people could not flee the wild flames quickly enough;

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In March 1934, high winds spread a devastating fire through Hakodate. More than two thousand people perished, almost half of them drowning in an attempt to flee the flames. Photographs show the aftermath of the blaze (courtesy Hakodate Municipal Library).

others dashed for what they thought would be the safest place, the harbor, but 917 of them drowned. In addition, more than two hundred succumbed to the cold; it was still winter in Hokkaido and sleet blasted the city. Snow kept falling as March came to an end, making relief efforts more difficult. Pictures of the city after the disaster are reminiscent of the Hiroshima landscape after the atomic bomb was dropped. Ships took some refugees from the Hakodate fire to Aomori; tents, schools and barracks housed others temporarily. Planners hoped to rebuild the city with broader streets and more parkland and they used experience gained in reconstructing Tokyo after its devastating 1924 fire. The 1934 conflagration destroyed some 23,000 houses in Hakodate and more than two thousand people died, reported the New York Times, “Hakodate was an attractive and remarkably clean city.”27 After the fire, perhaps eighty percent of it was gone, while the survivors suffered, many reporting visions of ghosts. The city quickly provided stopgap work for needy men. Soon schools opened in temporary buildings. New building restrictions came into force, requiring all new construction to be fire-resistant, and there has not been a major conflagration since. To spur people on in reviving their city, the Hakodate Port Festival came about in 1935; it is now a well-established summer event. These days the pleasant and historic city at Hokkaido’s southwestern tip bears no scars from the great fire, but it was in the years shortly after the fire that Sapporo overtook Hakodate in population. A very different sort of disaster spread throughout the entire world following the 1929 stock market crash: the Great Depression. It affected Hokkaido as well as the rest of Japan. Wages fell substantially for many, and by August 1931, more than six thousand

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The fire that swept through Hakodate in 1934 destroyed some 23,000 houses; about eighty percent of the city became nothing but a memory. Stringent construction regulations adopted afterward have prevented major conflagrations (courtesy Hakodate Municipal Library).

casual laborers in Hokkaido were out of work. Kobayashi Takeshi, who later became head of Nikkyoso, the Japanese teachers’ union, taught during the depression in a smalltown Hokkaido elementary school which had no electricity and little heat. He noted that when a window broke, it had to be covered with cloth. During winter cold, there was no choice but to close the school. One observer writing in January 1932 estimated that some 250,000 peasants in Hokkaido were barely able to survive. (The other northern prefectures also had large numbers on the edge of starvation.)28 Some farm families held out by obtaining loans or mortgages, which meant hard work and minimal living expenses for years. Whether the crop was good or bad during the depression years seemed to make little difference in whether the Dosanko prospered. In 1930, prices for Hokkaido rice were low because the rice harvest was good all over Japan. These low prices exacerbated the suffering caused by depression unemployment. When the rice crop was poor for the next few years, adversity continued and farmers abandoned much land that had proved marginal for successful rice cultivation. A Hokkaido farm girl wrote in her diary for July 1, 1934, that villagers had been surviving on dried potatoes and “herring dregs” normally used for fertilizer. Meanwhile, her aunt’s family in a nearby village was eating nothing but weeds and the roots of ferns. Once a month, government officials handed out rice to the starving people, but it was

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only enough for a few days. Families worked long hours in their fields, but with no guarantee that they would get a crop, especially because they had little fertilizer. What little help the government furnished was not enough, and in July, a farmers’ deputation traveled to Tokyo to plead for more assistance. Kayano Shigeru, who grew up in Nibutani, remembers that in 1935 some relief was available. Men received payment for collecting and transporting pebbles to be used on a newly built road surface. Elementary school children received rice balls, he recalled, but not every day.29 After Japan gained control of Manchuria on the Asian mainland in 1931, Japanese settlers who moved there to develop the land included many who had become disillusioned in Hokkaido. Some farm products, such as soybeans, became cheaper to produce in Manchuria than in Hokkaido. Ironically, what had been learned in developing Hokkaido was now adapted to use in opening up new regions in Manchuria, which diverted government money and attention from Hokkaido. Three thousand Hokkaido people, including even a few Ainu, emigrated to Manchuria during the depression. Meanwhile, because it was so hard to make a living in the early depression years, the government of Japan subsidized emigration to Brazil, setting aside funds to help people from the regions, including Hokkaido, which had been stricken by crop failures. Ironically, later in the decade, cold weather was not such a problem and the crops looked better, but labor shortages reduced Hokkaido farm output; more and more men were serving with Japanese military forces in China. Hard times continued. The worldwide depression had wrecked the economy, crops had failed for several years, and in 1938 the herring did not appear, causing destitution among fishermen and their families. Despite the depression, though, some new enterprises began in Hokkaido. Japan’s first cheese factory opened in 1933 in the town of Hayakita; the firm later became famous for Snow Brand products and cheese became a part, although a very small one, of the Japanese diet. That same year, the largest peppermint processing factory yet built in the entire world took shape in Kitami. In 1934, Taketsuru Masataka, son of a sake brewer, founded a whisky distillery in Hokkaido, locating it in Yoichi, a town on the Japan Sea about a dozen miles west of Otaru. Taketsuru felt the climate there resembled that in Scotland, where he had studied applied chemistry and become interested in whisky distillation. His company grew into the internationally recognized Nikka Whisky Distilling Company and continues to produce its Nikka brand in Yoichi.

Hokkaido’s role in aviation A pioneering tradition is central to the story of Hokkaido’s development, and this land of pioneers played a role in the achievements of another group of pioneers: early twentieth century aviators. The island was an obvious stopping point on the shortest route across the Pacific Ocean. Attempts to cross the Pacific as one leg of a round-the-world flight began in the mid–1920s, when such a flight was both challenging and dangerous. Weather conditions intensely affected that era’s slow, low-altitude airplanes, but reports were not available for out-of-the-way places. Adequate landing sites were few and fuel could be hard to find. An obvious trans-ocean route crossed the Pacific via the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia, the Aleutians and then mainland Alaska, fliers usually approaching Kamchatka

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from Tokyo, then Hokkaido and the Kuril Islands. In 1924 an American military team trying to make the first round-the-world flight used this route, in the opposite direction. Four planes started out. They were Douglas biplanes suitable for landing on water or land and capable of carrying a 2600 pound load, which would include fuel, equipment and passengers. One of the planes crashed in Alaska and the others had to wait in the Kurils for several days because of fog. They flew on one hop from a Kuril Island airstrip over Hokkaido— where fog bothered them — to land in north Honshu. Landing strips had been prepared in Hokkaido in case of emergency. The flight was successful; two planes accomplished the entire trip around the world in 175 days. In the same year, a British group attempted a round-the-world flight going in the opposite direction. The British fliers’ amphibious biplane, a Vickers Vulture, left Southampton, England on March 25 and traveled via the Mediterranean Sea to India, China and Japan, on July 14 landing briefly at Kushiro, Hokkaido. They headed on to the Kuril Islands where they were grounded by fog for several days. Via Kamchatka, they headed on August 4 for the Aleutian Islands but ran into solid fog and attempted a landing on the sea for fear of destruction on the cliffs of Bering Island, then totally obscured. Rough seas damaged the plane, making it unable to continue, but the crew managed to steer it to a beach. This was the end of the round-the-world attempt. While the British air crew struggled to cross Asia, a ship supporting the effort, the minesweeper Thiepval, made port in Hakodate after many trials in stormy seas. The sailors spent an enjoyable two months there and when leaving for their home port at Esquimalt, Canada, near Victoria, took along a small bear from Hakodate, naming it “Haca-daddy” for the city. It remained a mascot at the base, but the sailors did not treat it particularly well, turning it into an alcoholic. The most famous dirigible in history, the Graf Zeppelin, flew over Hokkaido on its record-making 1929 journey. This was the only round-the-world dirigible flight ever made. The trip took three weeks and on Monday, August 19, people watched it pass over Hokkaido as it flew on a lap from Friedrichshafen, Germany to Tokyo. When the airship left Japan several days later, its route across the Pacific passed well south of Hokkaido. Plans had called for passing over eastern Hokkaido and the Kurils, but due to stormy weather, a longer and more southerly route was chosen. The depression years were enlivened for people the world over by the exploits of pioneering aviators. More fliers, Japanese and foreign, tried to cross the Pacific, flying between Tokyo and North America via Hokkaido, the Kurils and the Aleutians. The first Japanese flyer to make a nonstop attempt, Yoshihara Seiji, was flying to generate good will, he said, but he had to give up his endeavor after flying legs to Nemuro and beyond, when his plane was damaged in the Kurils. Meanwhile, on a projected roundthe-world flight, well-known American flyers Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon were fined about $1000 each by Japanese authorities for flying over fortified zones in Hokkaido without permission. They completed their flight in early October 1931, becoming the first men to fly nonstop across the Pacific. Their route, too, took them over Hokkaido and the Kurils. Excitement and worldwide publicity came to Hokkaido when Col. Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh landed their single-engine pontoon plane in Nemuro in August 1931. Mrs. Lindbergh later described the journey from New York via the North Pacific to Tokyo in her book, North to the Orient.30 Pan American Airways’ Juan Trippe, who hoped to start scheduled flights across the Pacific Ocean, had planned

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Across the street from the panorama in Nemuro commemorating Russian explorer Adam Laxman’s 1790 visit (see photograph page 60) is this one honoring famed aviators Charles and Anne Lindbergh, who stopped in Nemuro on a 1931 flight across the North Pacific Ocean from New York to Tokyo.

the Lindberghs’ trip. Though this would not be a record-setting journey, it generated reams of publicity because of the Lindberghs’ prominence. The Lindberghs flew west from the United States to the U.S.S.R. in stages, and took off from Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, intending to land at Nemuro after a nine hundred mile flight. Because of the fear of bad weather, however, Lindbergh asked the United States Embassy in Tokyo to obtain permission from Japanese authorities to land in the Kuril Islands should it be necessary. As it happened, the journey to Nemuro proved to be far from easy for the famous couple. While they were flying southeast along the Kuril chain, radio reports came in that the fog which often envelops Nemuro during summer days was too dense to permit landing. Thus the Lindberghs came down by a small island, Ketoy, almost midpoint in the Kuril chain, where the cloud cover was not too thick. Before trying to leave Ketoy, Lindbergh discovered an engine problem. A Japanese ship standing by towed the pontoon-equipped plane to a kidney-shaped bay of about five square miles on nearby Simushir Island, where a calm bay would make the repair job easier. Here the couple worked on repairs and slept on tatami mats in “a little shack built for fox farmers.”31 Meanwhile, Japanese aeronautical engineers waited in Nemuro in case the colonel needed their help, but Lindbergh managed to repair the engine himself. From Muroton Bay on Simushir to Nemuro was an estimated 420 miles, but after flying more than half way to Nemuro, the Lindberghs learned that once again fog prevented a descent near the city. They landed instead on Iturup, the largest of the Kurils. With the waves high, Lindbergh had searched for a place to land, and settled on a small lake a few miles from Shana Village. Here officials wined and dined the aviators at an inn and gave them a sleeping room with tatami and futons; two quilts were stitched

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together for the lanky colonel. It was not far to Nemuro, but the next day the Lindberghs once again found they had to land en route, this time on Kunashir Island, just forty miles short of their fogged-in goal. They stayed in a hut and, finally, successfully made the halfhour flight to Nemuro the next day, August 24, 1931. The town had made elaborate plans to welcome the Lindberghs and newsmen had converged there, filling all available hotel rooms for the five days they had to wait until the famous aviators arrived. Some ten thousand people lined the Nemuro beach road, watching for the Lindbergh plane. The colonel and his wife received a formal welcome, rested, ate, gave an interview and prepared for the final leg of their trip to Tokyo. In the midst of their travails on the way to Nemuro, Anne Morrow Lindbergh consulted some notes she had with her regarding weather patterns for the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kuril Islands (which she called by their Japanese name, Chishima): “Average days of fog in August — 28.” Although she may not have realized it, Nemuro usually has a similar amount of fog during that month. The Lindberghs probably did not know that French ship’s captain L.A.A. Simonet de Maisonneuve, sailing in the area in August and September 1855, proposed naming the Kurils the “Fog Archipelago.” And Henry Snow, hunting sea otters in Kuril waters in 1874, reported that sixty-five of the eighty-two days he was in the islands were foggy. The island chain’s name — Kuril —comes from an Ainu word meaning “smoky.”32 Despite the excitement among Japanese people that Charles Lindbergh had made a historic flight to their land, his journey caused apprehension, too, for it demonstrated the possibility of air invasion from the north. Moreover, the flight indicated to Trippe that weather problems would preclude the use of the northern route for scheduled trans–Pacific flights. The Lindberghs were not the only foreign travelers to come to Hokkaido during the depression years, though their appearance may have been the most spectacular. In 1936 a total eclipse of the sun lured foreign travelers to northeastern Hokkaido which was (and is) far from the usual foreign tourist’s destinations in Japan. As the great day approached, so did concern about the weather: would clouds obscure the effect? Anticipating this possibility, Japanese eclipse-seekers had scattered to different sites on Hokkaido. Many who came to view the unusual astronomical event did see it, but a group which had traveled from Cambridge, England viewed nothing but cloud. By the late 1930s, general travelers could fly to Hokkaido through an air link from Tokyo. Prominent world figures who stopped in Hokkaido during that decade included Helen Keller. Babe Ruth came with an American all-star team which played against the Nippon All Stars in 1934. (The game in Hakodate was delayed due to rain, but eight thousand people came the next day and saw Ruth hit a single.) Refugees came to Hokkaido, too—from the Soviet Union. Some White Russians fleeing the country after the Bolshevik revolution ended up on the island. Forty-seven of them were living in Hakodate in 1932 when twenty-one Soviet fishermen in several boats escaping the desperate conditions they faced in the U.S.S.R. asked for asylum in Hokkaido. Hokkaido authorities temporarily interned the fishermen in Hakodate. The Docho decided to send them back, and though local Russians tried everything they could to prevent this, the refugees were returned and their fate remains unknown. Soon, tension and war enveloped Japan, and some of the Russians living in Hokkaido were suspected of spying for the Soviet Union.

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The end of an era Hokkaido development had proceeded slowly in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and in the 1930s, first depression, then war, came to dominate existence. By the end of the prewar era, it was second generation settlers who were prominent or powerful on the island, people who had grown up on Hokkaido perhaps hearing their parents’ stories of the sacrifice and drudgery of the early days. Having the example of their forebears’ stamina before them, the Dosanko would now face an uncertain future. More and more, war needs dominated commerce, and as war intensified, life in Hokkaido changed as it did in all Japan. As early as 1931, the Hokkaido National Defense Assembly, a gathering of two thousand island people — some prominent, some unknown and some military, some civilian — gathered to support Japanese martial activities in Manchuria. On the other end of the spectrum, communist spies remained active on the island. In a way, the prewar era in Hokkaido ended with the visit of Emperor Hirohito in 1936. He spent two and one-half weeks on the island, but the centerpiece of his visit was attendance at army maneuvers on the Ishikari plain. (During the maneuvers, a typhoon swept across the island; several soldiers taking part in the war games died when a landslide engulfed them.) The Emperor spent days touring the island, as far as Nemuro, Hokkaido’s easternmost city, and because news media reported imperial visits extensively, the nation’s attention turned to Hokkaido for a time. Many government officials went to the island during these weeks, and the Japan Times hoped that the opportunity to see the island firsthand would encourage official efforts at development, editorializing that “the government should and must stand ready to lend a helping hand to those with enough ambition and courage to develop this northern island, this land which is primarily to the people of Japan a Land of Hope.”33 But with war first in China and then in the Pacific, the nation’s priorities changed.

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Starting in the early 1930s, Japan drifted into conflict against China; In 1937 this hostility became full-fledged war. In December 1941, following Japanese surprise attacks in Asia and Hawaii, war became worldwide, not to end until 1945. Hokkaido suffered little damage in World War II compared to the rest of Japan, but the civilian population had to endure food and fuel shortages and Hokkaido development was no longer a priority except as it contributed to the war effort. Even after the war ended, dislocation continued, as Americans occupied Japan for almost seven years. During these years, returning soldiers, refugees, food shortages and labor unrest all complicated recovery in Hokkaido.

War Hokkaido survived the war years nearly unscathed in contrast to the Japanese heartland but throughout the war troops were stationed on the island to protect Japan’s northern flank. Naval forces in the area patrolled against any invasion coming from the north and submarines based at Hakodate guarded Tsugaru Strait. Sapporo was the headquarters for the Northern District Army as well as the main supply depot for island forces, and Chitose was the island’s military aviation center. At Hakodate and near Cape Soya at Hokkaido’s northern tip were army units of two thousand or more men, while Asahikawa, the home of the famed Seventh Army Division, was headquarters for some twenty thousand additional troops. In the early 1930s, a brigade from Asahikawa participated in Japan’s conquest of Manchuria; Hokkaido men were felt to be well-suited to fight in the climate and terrain there. Facing Soviet troops in the Battle of Nomonhan in 1939 on the border between Mongolia and Manchuria, the Seventh Division’s Twenty-sixth Regiment lost about seventy percent of its men. Later, in the Pacific War, twenty-five hundred Seventh Division men served in the Solomon Islands to secure Guadalcanal from American assault. Fewer than eight percent of them survived to return to Japan. The men of Asahikawa’s Seventh Division thus hold an honored position in Japanese military history. As the Pacific War began, the Kuril Islands played a significant part in Japanese and American war plans. The small islands were stepping stones, as John J. Stephan points out, from Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and the Soviet Kamchatka Peninsula to and from Hokkaido and the Japanese heartland.1 Starting in 1940, the Japanese constructed fortifications on the Kurils in expectation of a possible Russian move against them. After the Nazis invaded the U.S.S.R. in June 1941, the Soviet Union began fighting Japan’s ally, Germany, and from

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December 1941 Japan was fighting Russia’s allies Britain and America; hostilities between Japan and her northern neighbor came to seem almost inevitable. In addition to Northern District Army troops stationed on the Kurils, the Japanese Navy set up its Fifth Fleet headquarters on Paramushir Island, far north in the island chain. In search of oil, Japan considered invading north Sakhalin and the Siberian mainland. Had this northern strategy been chosen, Hokkaido as well as Karafuto and the Kurils would have been in the midst of the action, but Japanese strategists decided to turn towards Southeast Asia instead. Thus in December 1941 Japanese forces attacked Hawaii, Hong Kong, the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula. Japan made some significant moves in the north. The carriers for the Pearl Harbor attack were gathered at a hidden bay on Iturup Island in the Kurils, an ideal place to maintain secrecy (and actually a little closer to Honolulu than is Tokyo). Half a year later, Japanese forces from Paramushir attacked and occupied two of the westernmost Aleutian Islands. Many Hokkaido men went to the Aleutians as occupation troops, but U.S. forces reclaimed these islands a year later. The Japanese navy meanwhile moved its northernmost base of operations from Paramushir to Chitose. After December 7, 1941, Japan feared possible American assault upon essential installations in the Kurils and worked to reinforce the island chain. Beginning in July 1943, United States bombers did appear, attacking Japanese military facilities in the northernmost islands. In February 1944, American ships began shelling Kurils bases at night. By March, American planes were bombing islands in the chain only five hundred miles from Hokkaido. Speculation was that the United States could use the Aleutians as a springboard to bomb Hokkaido. U.S. surface ships and submarines attacked ships traveling between Hokkaido and the islands, despite fog that hampered the American effort. The raids kept Japanese forces busy defending and strengthening their installations against possible invasion. More troops were dispatched to the islands, but through the middle of 1944, approximately ten percent of them died en route.2 Later, Japanese troops were needed more desperately elsewhere, and from October some were taken from the northern islands. Allied forces might have stormed the Japanese base at Paramushir in conjunction with a Soviet declaration of war against Japan, but the U.S.S.R. proclamation did not come until just days before Japan’s surrender in 1945. Meanwhile, American ships that were damaged while attacking the Kurils headed for the nearby Kamchatka peninsula, where Soviets quietly allowed emergency docking. Mines and submarines threatened shipping in and near northern Japan during the war and Japanese forces sank a number of American ships en route to the Soviet Far East. American policy makers hoped to keep open the sea routes around Hokkaido in order to ship goods to the U.S.S.R. in support of the struggle against Hitler. Before America joined the war in December 1941, the U.S. government began to make supplies available through the lend-lease program to nations fighting the Nazis. (This program, by the way, incensed the Japanese against the United States, whose government had tightened regulations, ending almost all trade with Japan while at the same time attempting to send goods through Japanese waters to the U.S.S.R.) The Kurils controlled passage to Vladivostok and Soviet ports on the Sea of Okhotsk, so when a U.S. ship delivered lend-lease goods, its registry was changed from American to Soviet. Since Japan and the U.S.S.R. were neutral at the time, the Japanese allowed most of the ships through without attack, but only under certain conditions. Throughout most of the war, the U.S. continued to supply the Soviet Far East with

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lend-lease goods, sometimes through the Kurils and sometimes through the straits north and south of Hokkaido; Japanese forces sank nine of the ships and U.S. submarines torpedoed Japanese vessels. On October 11, 1943, Japanese defenders on Hokkaido, near Wakkanai, bombed and sank a U.S. submarine, the Wahoo, in La Perouse Strait. The sub and its crew had gained the reputation as the most successful American submarine in the service. It had sunk four or more Japanese ships in the strait, so its presence in the area was known. Now a memorial to the men who were lost stands at Cape Soya. American and Japanese, including relatives of those who died on the Wahoo, raised the monument. In 2006 the ship was discovered on the seabed in the midst of La Perouse Strait, but the Wahoo is to lie there in perpetuity, undisturbed. One maritime disaster remembered by Koreans to this day occurred July 9, 1944, when an American submarine sank the Japanese ship Taihei Maru north of Hokkaido. On board the Taihei were about a thousand Korean laborers whom the Japanese armed services had conscripted. After working in Hokkaido, the Koreans were being taken to the northern Kurils to build military installations, but 655 of the men died when the ship sank. For the Japanese, transportation links between Hokkaido and Honshu grew more and more vital during the war as U.S. forces moved ever closer, cutting off Japan’s ability to import needed goods from areas such as Southeast Asia. Hokkaido’s natural resources, especially coal, and her industrial and agricultural production became more crucial than ever to the war effort. Knowing this, the American military strove to disrupt shipping from Hokkaido. This was a challenge, because Japan had laid minefields in important channels. At the beginning of the war, much of the cargo sent from Hokkaido to Honshu went by sea directly to ports in the Tokyo region. But allied attacks at sea increased off Honshu’s east coast while Hokkaido’s resources became ever more necessary. The rail ferry fleet from Hakodate to Aomori grew from seven to twelve boats and shipments continued by rail from Aomori to the heartland. By 1945, American attacks were causing serious damage near Japan’s main islands. On February 27, American naval aircraft sank a new railroad ferry built in Yokohama to be used on the Tsugaru Strait crossing just as the ship was steaming up the coast to begin service. And despite Japanese mines, in June 1945 eight U.S. submarines successfully navigated La Perouse Strait; Admiral Chester Nimitz, chief naval officer in the Pacific Theater, considered the trip through this strait one of the most perilous routes submarines had to travel during the war.3 Once American ships navigated the strait, no longer could the Japanese assume that the Sea of Japan was a safe refuge. U.S. Submarine Commander William Germershausen even penetrated Otaru’s breakwater in the U.S.S. Spadefish. He torpedoed and sank three Japanese vessels nearby, having chased one outside the breakwater and intercepting two hoping to enter the harbor. One of the ships was a merchantman, one a troop ship and the other a military cargo ship. Late in June, U.S. ships penetrated westward beyond the Kurils into the Sea of Okhotsk for the first time. An American presence near the Kuril chain and in the Sea of Okhotsk endangered Japanese fishermen; with food short in the Japanese islands, disruption of the fishery was extremely serious. By early July U.S. ships were shelling Karafuto. That same month, a U.S. submarine landed eight men on Karafuto at night to set a charge on a railroad track, hoping to blow up the first train to come by. It worked despite the defenses on Karafuto poised against a possible American invasion. In mid–July 1945 came the first and only extensive American attack on Hokkaido,

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though a few reconnaissance missions had earlier flown over the island. Americans knew of Honshu dependence on Hokkaido coal and of the crucial role played by the ferries between the two islands. Eighty percent of the freight carried across the strait was Hokkaido coal, absolutely necessary for Honshu industry.4 Aerial reconnaissance photographs showed ports such as Hakodate overflowing with ships ready to transport the freight. On July 14, planes from Admiral William F. Halsey’s carrier fleet bombed northern Honshu and selected Hokkaido targets, especially airfields. This was the first attack from American ships on any of Japan’s home islands. Given the strong possibility of cloud cover or fog, the raid’s success was impressive. (The action had been postponed for a day due to fog and clouds, and even the July 14 weather was far from perfect.) On the fifteenth, guns of the battleships Iowa, Missouri and Wisconsin fired more than eight hundred shells at coastal installations. Several lighter ships also pounded Muroran, impairing the city’s industrial capacity. During the two-day attack, fighters from aircraft carriers heavily damaged rail and port facilities at Akkeshi, Hakodate and Kushiro. The planes dropped bombs on Tsugaru Strait, too, sinking eight of the twelve rail ferries and putting the others out of commission. Hokkaido’s southern coastal cities bore the brunt of the action. The New York Times reported Kushiro “almost completely destroyed”— an overstatement, though the attack killed 192 people and injured more than 500. Japanese officials announced that Hakodate, Muroran, Obihiro and Kushiro had been bombed but that damage was “believed to be negligible.”5 Fire consumed some 400 Hakodate houses during the attack, though, and an estimated 200 people were killed in Nemuro, where fire engulfed perhaps seventy percent of the city, a survivor estimated years later. The main targets in Muroran were the Japan Steel Company and the Wanishi Iron Works, but with rain and fog obscuring the city, damage to the factories was not too great. The Japanese claimed to have shot down four planes; according to American sources, several planes did not return from the mission but U.S. craft picked up all except three of the crewmen. On Hokkaido, more than eight hundred people died from the air strikes.6 Among those killed were several Koreans who had, it is thought, been coerced into working in the Muroran ironworks. Many Muroran residents fled to nearby mountainside tunnels to escape the bombardment. Due to poor weather the Americans did not accomplish as much as they had hoped, but after the attack only eighteen percent as much coal was transported as was previously carried across Tsugaru Strait. Historian Richard B. Frank characterized the July 14–15 raid as “the most devastating single strategic-bombing success of all the campaigns against Japan” because of the damage inflicted on shipping routes between Hokkaido and Honshu. Americans found “little or no defense” by the Japanese, only some antiaircraft fire. Tokyo radio, however, claimed near the end of July that despite Muroran being “in pitiful ruins about ten days ago ... the great majority of factories and factory workers are back at work.”7 On July 28, American planes dropped leaflets on eleven Japanese cities, warning of imminent bombing raids. Hakodate was the only Hokkaido city to be warned, but it was not among the places that were bombed the next day. On July 31 and August 1, however, three American submarines shelled Tomakomai in the fog, attacking boats and boat sheds, while the Thornback and other vessels fired at Urakawa on the coast to the southeast. These and the mid–July strikes were the only attacks made on Hokkaido during the war.

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War would have had a greater effect on Hokkaido had one possible American invasion plan ensued: a strike from the Aleutians through the Kurils and Hokkaido to the Japanese heartland. U.S. planners showed interest in attacking Japan’s main islands from the Kurils since the distance from the American military base on Attu in the Aleutians to the North Kurils was less than seven hundred miles. Military strategists seriously considered such a plan but rejected it for various reasons, one of the important ones being weather. When it was not winter in the Kurils and eastern Hokkaido, fog often obscured the land. Moreover, amphibious landings on the Kurils would be problematic because of the great clusters of seaweed in the waters around the islands. The B-29s promised to be ready in 1944 would have such a long range that they could bomb even the main Japanese islands from the Aleutians, skipping over the Kurils. Finally, whether the Soviets would allow an operation via the Kurils to use support facilities in Kamchatka was questionable. The invasion plan the Americans did adopt would approach Japan from the south, but strategists concocted an elaborate scheme to convince Japanese leaders of an imminent attack on Hokkaido. These plans included fake radio messages during Allied broadcasts in addition to leaflets directed to Hokkaido citizens advising them how to avoid the coming warfare. The goal was to keep Japanese troops in the north, away from invasion sites. After atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, neither a phony nor a real invasion of any of Japan’s four main islands was necessary. By early August 1945, Hakodate and Otaru were on a list of cities to be firebombed. Before the mid–August Japanese surrender, General Nathan Twining chose six possible cities as future atomic bomb targets should the Japanese government not capitulate. Heading his list were Sapporo and Hakodate. Also, had the war not ended, Japan planned to send large four-engine bombers on suicide one-way flights from Chitose to American cities. Even east coast cities could have been bombed, reported the New York Times shortly after the end of the war.8

The home front The war and its effects dominated life for the Hokkaido citizenry as for everyone in Japan. War stimulated the economy, increasing production in Hokkaido fields, forests, mines and factories, but also disrupted life and as time went on caused great hardship. In the early 1930s, the army encouraged the formation of civilian organizations to support Japan’s military efforts. Soon after Japanese troops invaded Manchuria in September 1931, several thousand people, including prominent Hokkaido leaders, participated in founding the Hokkaido National Defense Assembly to encourage Japanese efforts in Manchuria. Meanwhile, for strategic reasons, tourists could not visit the Kuril Islands. (A special exception was made for the Lindberghs.) In preparation for possible future military action it was in Hokkaido in 1936 that the Japanese Army held its last full-scale maneuvers before expanding beyond China. Richard Storry, later a renowned historian of Japan, arrived in the country in mid–1937 to take a teaching position in Otaru. He found Japan on a “semi-war footing,” with air raid drills, patriotic displays and men saying goodbye at the station while their relatives cheered. In the three years he lived in Hokkaido, 1937–1940, each time Storry

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traveled to the island he was grilled by officials— detectives, he wrote — both on the ferry from Honshu and on the train.9 Air raid drills began in the 1930s, and in Hokkaido, fear of the Soviet Union grew as international tensions rose. Authorities detained a Soviet vessel in Hakodate in 1938 for a month and a half, claiming that it was disguised as a passenger liner when it was really a research vessel trespassing in a fortified area. By the mid–1930s, tourists were prohibited from photography in areas labeled as strategic zones, including Tsugaru Straits and Hakodate. After 1940, newspapers were not allowed to print any photographs of Hakodate and by then, some parts of Hokkaido in addition to the Kurils were off limits to foreign travelers. Neill James, an American writer who traveled in Japan in 1940, suggested that “if war comes, the partially fortified island may be lost to Russia.” James stayed in Hokkaido’s best hotels while traveling that year and found that even the rice served to a foreign visitor was mixed with potatoes or millet.10 Also inadequate were supplies of charcoal, which was heavily used as a stove fuel in Hokkaido. Hokkaido was not as heavily protected as Japan’s heartland, but some seventy-five thousand or more troops guarded the island, estimated a 1944 U.S. intelligence report. Hokkaido’s strongest defenses, both anti-ship mines and coastal guns, were placed at Tsugaru Strait. Other mined areas included the Nemuro and La Perouse Straits. The navy had patrol bases at Hakodate, Urakawa, Akkeshi and Wakkanai, with fuel depots at five or more ports around the island.11 Japanese communities also maintained local beach defenses against possible invasion. Island residents’ lives inevitably changed due to war, especially after the United States entered the conflict. As war shipments between Hokkaido and Honshu came to dominate transportation links between the islands, Hokkaido residents had to rely more and more on local products, especially foods. City dwellers raised garden vegetables and neighborhood families often cooperated in growing and sharing produce. This was part of the Hokkaido frontier spirit, they felt. Food crops replaced the grass and flowers of Sapporo’s Odori Park. Food was rationed throughout Japan, even such staples as miso and soy sauce, but as a rule, the Dosanko had more food available than did Japanese elsewhere. Even on Hokkaido, though, people ate lots of potatoes, pumpkin, wheat and even millet when rice grew scarce. As the war continued, officials urged potato cultivation on the other islands in order to combat food shortages but had difficulty bringing seed potatoes from Hokkaido, where they were plentiful. As the military forces drafted more and more young men, the elderly, women and the young were left to raise the food crops. Work on the farm became more difficult, as many Hokkaido horses were drafted for war service, most being sent to North China. School authorities sometimes dismissed Hokkaido students from schools to assist with farm work and young women in youth groups on other islands were dispatched to Hokkaido to help harvest the crops. Women took over other work, too, even mining. Though underground work in mines by women had been banned in 1933, women were called back to the Yubari mines a decade later and worked underground for three years. By 1942, Hokkaido householders had to donate their metal pots and pans to the war effort. Even temple bells and bronze statues were lost to the national need. Hakodate’s Orthodox church sacrificed its chandeliers and most of its candelabra as well as its famous bells (but in 1983 an expert bell caster on Honshu donated new ones to the church). The cannons from Benten Cape Fort in Hakodate that Admiral Enomoto moved to a ship in 1868 had spent their subsequent years in a Hakodate park, but they, too, were melted

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down, as was the bust of William S. Clark on the Hokudai campus. (It was replaced in 1948.) Even though Hokkaido was a prime source of newsprint, it became scarce on the island and eleven Hokkaido newspapers merged to create the Hokkaido Shimbun, which has been Hokkaido’s dominant newspaper ever since. Contributing to the newsprint shortage, authorities took over a newsprint factory in Ebetsu in 1943 in order to manufacture airplanes from plywood, but by the end of the war only two planes had been assembled. Coal dominated Japan’s energy supply and keeping the coal mines productive became crucial during wartime. Using as much Hokkaido coal as possible in Hokkaido industry became more and more important. The steel mills in Muroran had been using North China coal because lower grade Hokkaido coal was not so suitable, but late in the war, the mills were told to use Hokkaido coal. Meanwhile, the government ordered the coal mines at Kushiro closed or mostly shut down because of the growing difficulty of shipping the coal as Japanese transport vessels were damaged or sunk. Because so many Japanese were serving in the armed forces, many Koreans and some Chinese under contract as well as Chinese and western prisoners of war toiled in Hokkaido mines and construction projects. Though an International Labor Organization convention prohibited the use of forced laborers in underground mines, in mid–1945 more than eighty percent of the Koreans and more than sixty percent of the Chinese workers in Hokkaido were doing such work. By war’s end, more than three-fourths of the underground workers in some Hokkaido mines were foreign. Conditions were harsh; one estimate holds that at some of the sites to which Chinese forced laborers were brought in 1944 to work as miners, more than a third of them died. In all, about sixteen thousand Chinese forced laborers toiled in Hokkaido during the war; about three thousand died. The number of Koreans laboring in Hokkaido mines during the war rose to almost forty thousand. At least 41 of the 640 Koreans working in 1943 at one Hokkaido mine died there. Some Koreans who escaped were tortured, like Kang Myongbong, who worked for Hokutan at Yubari. Each time he tried to escape, his punishment was worse. After his third recapture, he was beaten and his ankles tied with ropes wetted to tighten them. He passed out from pain and after the ropes were released he could not walk at first. He did escape successfully when he tried it a fourth time. Given the labor shortage in wartime Japan, successful escapees generally had no trouble finding alternative employment, especially in construction. Showing emphatically how they felt, many Koreans and Chinese forced to work in the mines walked out the day the Emperor broadcast Japan’s surrender.12 To increase the electricity supply, the Hokkaido Electric Power Company built two dams in the island’s north, on the Uryu River west of Nayoro. Conscripted Koreans worked along with Japanese laborers at the site from 1937 to 1943. The men also built a railway line, now abandoned, and the Uryu power station. But the privations suffered by the workers— overwork, illness and malnutrition — detract from the lake’s creation. A waterside memorial temple commemorates the two hundred or more Japanese and Korean workers who died during the construction. Hokkaido witnessed an unusual event in the midst of wartime troubles: the birth of a volcano. Mimatsu Masao, a postmaster in the town of Sobetsu on the shore of Lake Toya about ten miles north of Muroran, found a mountain growing in nearby farm fields. After a series of December 1943 earthquakes, the earth began to swell, with eruptions

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During World War II, a small mountain emerged in the midst of Hokkaido farm fields. An outlier of the mountain called Usuzan, the new peak was dubbed “Showa Shinzan,” or “Showa era new mountain.” A small museum at its base recounts the mountain’s story.

beginning in June 1944. Lava first broke the crust in December and by September 1945 the mountain reached its maximum height, 1344 feet. It acquired the name Showa Shinzan, or Showa Era New Mountain. (The Showa Era is the period during which Hirohito served as emperor, 1926–1989.) Because the mountain appeared during the war, scientists could not study the eruption. Mimatsu did keep careful records of Showa Shinzan’s growth, however. It destroyed some fifty houses as well as many acres of farmland. Showa Shinzan created problems for Japan’s military government. To protect against American air raids, officials were enforcing blackout regulations— while Showa Shinzan spouted plumes of fire. Army officers even asked Mimatsu if he could douse the fires— an impossibility, of course. Also, deformations of the earth broke up a railroad line that then traversed the area. Since the line carried iron ore for Muroran’s steel mills, the military kept townsfolk busy repairing the line, but it finally had to be relocated. When Japan once again became prosperous, the new mountain became a tourist attraction. A nearby museum dedicated to Mimatsu Masao tells Showa Shinzan’s story. The Dosanko, as all Japanese, found wartime life disrupted more and more. While most of Japan’s major cities lost a substantial part of their population during the war, Sapporo gained residents, meaning even more mouths to feed. As war continued, even schoolgirls received training in using bamboo spears to resist the American soldiers who were expected to invade. Civilians found travel restrictions tightened, with rail passenger cars converted to freight cars, first class suspended and tickets rationed. On the other hand, while in the early days Hokkaido figured prominently in military policy, action shifted

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southward as the war ground on, and programs such as rationing were not so carefully enforced in Hokkaido. Late in the war, the Japanese government decided that some two hundred thousand people whose homes in Tokyo had been destroyed by bombs should be resettled on Hokkaido, where they would grow more food for the war effort. The first groups arrived in July 1945. The press described the warm welcome they could expect and did receive; local people had done all they could to prepare land and housing and they donated tools and household utensils to the newcomers. The migrants were “farmer soldiers,” just like the late nineteenth century tondenhei, for in 1945 the need to grow food for the nation was as crucial as was readiness to protect Hokkaido. Some of the Hokkaido villagers preparing for the new residents were themselves descendants of the tondenhei and a few of the early pioneers were still on hand. Bombers attacked the third group of 1945 migrants en route to Hokkaido, however. Far fewer than the total number envisioned actually made the trek north, and within a few months, many returned to Honshu, having found that the reality in Hokkaido was very different from what they had been told. The bush-covered land they received was not ready for cultivation, as promised, food supplies were inadequate and housing not suitable for the cold winter.

Prisoners and escapees During the war, living in Hokkaido in addition to the Dosanko were people fleeing the heartland, conscripted Chinese and Koreans and Allied prisoners of war. Several POW camps were located in Hokkaido mining communities: Akabira, Utashinai and Ashibetsu on the Sorachi River, not far from Takikawa, and Bibai, on a short stream farther south. The captives labored in coal mines in these communities. A few other locations in Hokkaido also held prisoners. Some men worked in the cement plant at Kamiiso. Some unloaded boatloads of fish and coal in Hakodate and a few were kept at Northern Army headquarters in Sapporo. Some British, Australian and American prisoners spent several years in Hokkaido, as did a number of Dutch prisoners taken in fighting on Java (now part of Indonesia but then in the Dutch East Indies). One British prisoner captured in Java, Frank Blanton, remembered the time he spent as a prisoner working on the Hakodate docks throughout a Hokkaido winter as “the most difficult time of my life.” More than fifty of his colleagues there did not survive their imprisonment, he recollected.13 Many Americans captured when Wake Island fell late in December 1941 were imprisoned in several places, finally landing in Hokkaido in 1944 and 1945. Most American POWs brought to Hokkaido did not arrive until about six weeks before the Japanese surrender, though the prisoners obviously had no idea that war would end so soon. At war’s end, about sixteen hundred Allied prisoners were in Hokkaido camps. The prisoners’ main problem was inadequate food, but they had other worries as well. A typical diet for the men was three small teacups full of cooked rice daily along with a few greens and some thin soup of little nutritional value. Occasionally the men received partly spoiled dried fish. The prisoners toiling in mines worried about dangerous conditions; many men had to work in mines that had long been closed and thus contained unsafe, often rotted supporting timbers. One American prisoner, Chester M. Biggs, Jr., was serving with the Marine detachment at the American embassy in Beijing, China when war between Japan and the United

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States began in December 1941. With tension growing, the American government had planned to evacuate these Marines on December 9, but Japanese forces appeared December 8 and took everyone prisoner. The men were held in China, but after American planes began bombing eastern China in 1945, the prisoners were moved to Japan, sent north on trains, and on the fourth of July a group including Biggs boarded a ferry in Aomori to go to Hokkaido. From Hakodate the men went by train to Akabira and finally walked several miles to their new prison camp. This was in Utashinai, a town between mountain ridges south of Asahikawa, where Biggs estimated that about two thousand men, mostly Korean, labored at a coal mine. The prisoners brought from China had to work in a section of the mine that had been opened up at one time but not worked for many years. The men worked a ten hour shift or longer with time out for one meal, but their supervisors were Koreans also working under duress who did not press the Americans too hard. Several of the POWs went at the face of the rock with jackhammers, and others shoveled away the chunks cut out of the wall. Yet others brought in timbers to support the roof of the area being mined out. Cave-ins in the old mine made prisoners uneasy, and to add to the prisoners’ troubles, the men at Utashinai heard about the harsh winter weather there and wondered how they would survive it with their ragged clothes and inadequate diet. Prisoners held elsewhere in Hokkaido also have recounted difficult experiences. Food supply was such a problem in Japan by then that some prisoners in Hokkaido even received grasshoppers to eat. Some of the Japanese prison employees and guards treated POWs brutally. By the summer of 1945, Japanese manpower was so short that even teen-aged boys became prison guards in Hokkaido. One older guard, obviously not fit for service at the front, whacked the prisoners with his artificial arm. The war ended before the prisoners who arrived in 1945 had to face a Hokkaido winter. Repatriation came only after those in the heartland had been rescued but food drops to the camps helped the Hokkaido prisoners in the meantime and within a month after war’s end, they were on their way back home. During the occupation that followed the war, American officials charged some Hokkaido prison camp officials and guards with war crimes because of inhumane treatment of prisoners. Those found guilty received prison sentences ranging up to thirty years (though many were later reduced) and at least one official in Hokkaido, Hakodate prison commander Hirate Kaichi, was executed. Charges against him included starving prisoners, beating them with his sword and altering documents to cover up his misdeeds.14 Among the Britons imprisoned during the war in Hokkaido was author Oswald Wynd. Born in Tokyo with dual citizenship, in wartime he served in Britain’s Ninth Indian Division. Captured by Japanese troops in Malaya in 1941, he was taken to Hokkaido. His dual citizenship could have meant execution because he was a Japanese citizen fighting against Japan, but he was incarcerated instead and his knowledge of Japanese language and customs benefited his fellow prisoners. Wynd is best known for his novel The Ginger Tree. Australian John Holland was a different kind of Japanese war prisoner in Hokkaido. During the war, Holland broadcasted for Radio Tokyo. In 1943 he resigned from the station but was arrested by the kenpeitai, the Japanese military police, who accused him of spying for the U.S.S.R. Sent to a camp at Otaru, he suffered from cold weather, dirt, poor food and illness. He tried to escape, hoping to find a fishing boat that he could sail to Russian territory; he got out of the prison but could not locate a suitable vessel and even-

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tually turned himself in. Before his escape attempt, guards had beaten him. Afterward, his treatment was better, except that for several months he was kept in solitary confinement and interrogated for many hours each day. After a trial, he was sentenced to three years in prison, which he began serving in Sapporo, where again he suffered from the cold. Not quite two-and-one-half years after his arrest came his release, on September 4, 1945. He stayed briefly at Sapporo hotels, where local Franciscan monks befriended and fed him. Near the end of September, Americans, now in occupation, arrested Holland (it was thought he might try to escape to Manchuria) and took him to prison in Yokohama, pending possible charges of aiding the enemy. A few months later, the Americans released him to Australian authorities, who kept him in custody until June 1946. He was never tried by any of the allies, but suspicion remained that he had carried out treasonous or near-treasonous activities during the war. Perhaps the most prominent war prisoner in Hokkaido was David Marshall, described by the New York Times as “one of the founding fathers of Singapore.” Among the leaders of Singapore’s drive for independence from Britain, Marshall became the first elected chief minister of the Singapore government when the island gained increased political autonomy as a prelude to independence. Later, for fifteen years he served as Singapore’s ambassador to France. Wartime military service came before Marshall achieved these offices, though. After capture by the Japanese in 1942 while he was serving in British colonial military forces, he was taken to Hokkaido and put to work in the coal mines. He later quipped that he got his exercise in those days digging coal. While detained in Hokkaido, he also led efforts to secure and guarantee the rights of the POWs.15 Another prisoner sent to Hokkaido was Branko Voukelitch of the famed spy ring in Japan led by Richard Sorge during World War II. While the Japanese executed Sorge for his activities in spying for the Soviets, Voukelitch was sentenced to a life term in prison, first in Tokyo but from July 1944 in Abashiri, where he did not survive the winter. Wartime shortages of food and fuel would have made that infamous prison even more hellish than usual. A group of people brought to Hokkaido from American territory for internment during the war were the Aleuts who lived on Attu Island, the Aleutian Island closest to Japan. Japanese troops took Attu in June 1942. Fearing that the Attu Aleuts could share military information with any American troops who might appear, in September the Japanese sent the Aleuts to Japan, where they were taken to Otaru. Here they lived in a railroad employees’ dormitory and many worked in a nearby soap factory. Some labored at digging and pulverizing clay. Those who survived later described the stay in Otaru as imprisonment; to the Japanese, the Aleuts were detainees. When John Holland was sent to Hokkaido, he was put in with the Aleuts, where the conditions were miserable, he said.16 The Aleuts reported liking the Otaru people but did not like being forced to learn and use Japanese. They also did not like the food, which often was insufficient and even in good times would have been very different than food they usually ate. Lunch would be just one ball of rice, and no milk was available, even for the babies. The Aleuts had to use chopsticks, which they had never seen before. They did not have enough fuel to keep warm in winter and they never received any of the Red Cross packages or medicine sent for them. Many suffered from tuberculosis, which had developed on Attu, and some died. Others died from beriberi or starvation. Of the forty-five Aleuts in Otaru — including five born there — twenty-five survived. Only one of the five infants lived to return to Alaska.17 Conditions improved a little in 1945, but when American soldiers came at war’s end,

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the Aleuts described their treatment by the Japanese: “We told of the beatings they had given us, of the months of cold and sickness and starvation. We told of our people who died of neglect.” While they were still in Otaru before repatriation, they happened upon a “church that looked like our own church at Attu with big dome and a Russian cross.” Twice in their last days in Japan they attended services there. When returned to the Aleutians (but not their own island, which the American government held for military use), the Attuans did retain one aspect of their Otaru experience: a Japanese song to which they danced.18 A few small groups of prisoners among the men kept on Hokkaido managed to escape their confinement briefly. Two British prisoners escaped via a tunnel they had dug. They planned to walk by night to the north of the island, steal a boat and row to Kamchatka but were captured after just a few days of walking. Two American sailors who escaped made their way to the coast where they found a rowboat with a sail. Knowing little of geography, they thought they could soon row to Attu. Perhaps luckily for them, people on shore spotted them and the sailors were soon back in prison. This was not for long, it turned out; the war had just ended. One American airman whose plane was lost in the mid–July 1945 raids on Hokkaido spent an adventurous several months on the island. Rear gunner Oliver Rasmussen’s mission was to destroy the kamikaze training base that had been established at Chitose, but his Helldiver ran into 3435 foot Mt. Tarumae near Tomakomai when the pilot became disoriented. The crash killed the pilot, but Rasmussen’s injuries were relatively slight, and he spent sixty-eight days hiding out in the Hokkaido countryside. Part Chippewa Indian, he had grown up in the northern Wisconsin woods where he learned the skills he would need to survive in Hokkaido. He was able to extract some emergency rations from the wrecked plane and make his way with difficulty to a secluded spot in the forest near a water source. Here he rested up, using his parachute as a blanket or sleeping bag while his injuries began to heal. After about two weeks, his rations ran out, and he subsisted on milk, vegetables and rice he stole from farms. Finally, about two months after his crash, the sight of American planes overhead not attempting evasion and not facing pursuit convinced him that the war must be over. He walked into Tomakomai, where local police brought in an Oji paper mill manager to interpret. Thus Rasmussen’s great adventure ended. He resumed his military career, but nothing in his life thereafter equaled the challenge of his fight for survival in the Hokkaido woods. He considered himself the first American fighting man not a prisoner to land on Japan during the war. Another escapee, Liu Lianren, received international attention when he was discovered on Hokkaido more than twelve years after the war ended.19 A peasant who was kidnapped in 1944 and brought from China to work in Hokkaido mines, he escaped not long before war’s end and hid out in a cave in Hokkaido’s wilderness until his discovery in 1958. Years later he sued for damages and the Tokyo District Court ordered the Japanese government to pay his heirs twenty million yen. (Liu died in 2000.) A higher court overturned the decision, however. A number of other Chinese brought to Hokkaido to work mainly in the mines during the war also sued, but without success. As in Liu Lianren’s case and in the American occupation to come, war’s effects lasted many years. More than a decade after the war, Soviet mines were still being found in Tsugaru Strait, perhaps from World War II, perhaps from the Korean War. And in 1996, twenty-six poison-gas bombs were retrieved from Akan National Park’s Lake Kussharo, presumably having been jettisoned by the Japanese Army just after war’s end.

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The occupation As soon as possible after the war, the United States began to set up an occupation regime under the direction of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. (Thus the occupation bureaucracy became known as SCAP.) American forces dismantled Japanese military organizations and established both civil and military authority. Until the occupation ended in 1952, SCAP set policies and took action in many fields, working to establish security, make adequate food supplies available and rebuild both a civilian government and the nation’s economy. Americans wrote a new constitution for Japan and guided the Diet in adopting democratic reforms. The Americans perceived their mission to be the creation of a democratic nation, but occupation officials ran the country at first. Americans took over Japanese military facilities, such as the base at Chitose, and made their Hokkaido headquarters at Camp Crawford, which they built on the land of the Kaitakushi farm at Makomanai. Camp Crawford was the largest American camp in Japan — 23,000 acres. (GIs called the place “the best camp in Japan.”20) American troop strength in Hokkaido grew to twenty thousand people, largely to defend Japan against possible Soviet incursion. While occupying troops improved a number of airfields in Hokkaido that the Japanese military had used, they destroyed others. They developed a radar site atop the highest point on Okushiri Island, punching in a primitive road some six or eight miles long for access. Japanese workers, apparently including convicts, prepared the site. The Americans established an air station at Wakkanai in Hokkaido’s far north to keep an eye on the U.S.S.R. and SCAP also ran nonmilitary affairs in Hokkaido, though not giving the island any special consideration. When occupation authorities paid any attention to the northern island, it was to deter Soviet action. Arriving in Sapporo in October 1945, American officials imposed a curfew for the Japanese but after just two days, rescinded the order; the city was not dangerous. When the Americans first came, they saw no women or children, for all were hidden away or sent out of the city. They soon returned. Possibly the occupiers were dangerous, however — when American paratroopers first entered Sapporo, some of them apparently erupted in sex, violence and looting.21 The American base at Chitose attracted vice and drunkenness and this led to bad feelings between Japanese and Americans. Brothels enticed a number of GIs, who also regularly used the black market that sprang up. Occupation troops and local residents sometimes fought each other, occasionally even shooting Japanese or Americans to death. Drinking often exacerbated the violence. Soldiers involved faced court-martial and even the death penalty. Most Americans, of course, got along well with the local citizenry. The immediate problem facing the Dosanko was not danger from the Soviets (or the American occupying forces) but the continuing shortages, especially of food. Though the island had seen very little war damage, its people suffered from hunger, as was the case in most of Japan. In the first year or so after war’s end, starvation was a real possibility. No longer could the country count on rice from Korea or Taiwan, which the Japanese had controlled before the war. With shortages of goods came inflation. Hungry people sometimes resorted to selling elegant kimonos or other family treasures in order to pay high black market prices for scarce food. Also available illegally were American supplies from military bases. Hokkaido as well as the rest of Japan faced possible famine in the 1945-46 winter,

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officials feared. The crop year had been bad — the 1945 rice harvest in Hokkaido was less than half of normal — and the dislocations caused by war and subsequent occupation did not help. Fewer people than usual had been free for spring and summer work in the fields, but later in the year returning soldiers and repatriated and relocated Japanese added to the number of people to feed. Many had fled Karafuto when Soviet troops appeared a few days before the Japanese surrender. Some forty-five thousand people from Karafuto, mostly women, sought refuge in Hokkaido— and arrived with nothing but their lives. In September 1946, seventy thousand refugees were reported in Hokkaido, about sixty percent of them without homes. Not only was finding food for these people a problem, so was housing. Officials opened large public buildings and former barracks to house the needy, some of the structures holding more than a thousand people. Also among desperate people were the new settlers who had been urged by the Japanese government to leave threatened and bombed-out areas in Tokyo to open up new land in Hokkaido for agriculture, only to find that all the good land was already being farmed; if the land was worthwhile, settlers found they could not clear it because there were neither horses nor fuel for bulldozers to do the work. These twentieth century pioneers had practically no resources to see themselves through a hard Hokkaido winter. Occupation authorities established prices, rationed supplies and sent specified amounts to communities throughout Japan, sometimes earmarking imports for food deficit areas. For some time, however, authorities did not set prices that would allow farmers to meet expenses. Many farmers then refused to sell their crops. In addition, infrastructure deterioration made food distribution difficult. Fish rotted on docks for lack of cold storage facilities and railroad cars. In mid–November 1945, when desperate villagers in four small Hokkaido mining communities stole eighteen thousand pounds of grain and flour by seizing the contents of farmers’ carts and forcing entry to a flour mill, the New York Times reported Japan’s “first major food riot.”22 By the end of the year, occupation representatives and Docho authorities began working with city officials, labor union leaders and farmers for both short and long term solutions. Officials also started bypassing the rationing system and buying rice directly from farmers so that it would be available to residents, especially those of Sapporo and Muroran who were reportedly “on the brink of starvation” in early January 1946. Supply problems continued, however, and at the end of April, Sapporo officials reported that they had only enough rice available to feed the city’s people for one day. All Japan required food rationing but Hokkaido’s food shortage was the worst in the nation, a newspaper reported in May 1946.23 At that time, distribution of food allotments on the northern island was two months behind schedule. In midyear, General MacArthur ordered extra food supplies be sent to two regions: the Tokyo-Yokohama area and Hokkaido. Food production in Japan slowly grew, but shortages continued and supplies of rationed goods continued to lag a month or more behind schedule in Hokkaido. SCAP officials tried to stem black market sales of rice, and were urged to arrest farmers who did not supply the specified amount of rice to official markets but instead sent it to the black market. In early 1947, authorities collected less than half of Hokkaido’s food quota. Even in the summer of 1947, food shortages persisted. Some industrial workers claimed they could not work full time because they had to spend so many hours searching for food. In mid–July, citizens in various Hokkaido cities demonstrated in order to publicize the lack of food in their communities. To dramatize the problem, Wakkanai people carried pictures of skeletons as they marched. Japanese voters elected prefectural governors in

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1947, and late that year, Hokkaido Governor Tanaka Toshifumi told an American reporter, “Eighty percent of my energy has been spent on the question of food.”24 In 1948, supplies sometimes remained behind schedule, but as the nation slowly recovered from the war, food shortages gradually ebbed. Food deficiencies during the war and after bore part of the blame for the many cases of tuberculosis discovered during the occupation. The disease hit the northernmost prefectures hardest and health officials attributed this to crowded living conditions and people’s close contact during long winters. Typhus, too, became a problem in Hokkaido by the autumn of 1945, presumably brought by miners conscripted from Korea. After war’s end, many of the Koreans left their jobs and headed south, towards home, incidentally spreading the disease, which SCAP fought with inoculations and DDT. War had depleted local resources in addition to food. The demand for forest products from Hokkaido had skyrocketed as wartime needs grew and foreign sources became unavailable. The end of the conflict saw a need for timber for rebuilding Japanese cities including Tokyo, Yokohama, Hiroshima and the others that had seen massive destruction. Related to this was a desperate shortage of newsprint in the immediate postwar years. Wartime bomb damage, the loss of Sakhalin’s timber resources and the shortage of coal to run the mills were all factors. All this left Hokkaido’s forest resources drained, so that after the war reforestation became an important priority. For a time newsprint, like food, was rationed. Soon after war’s end, work became available for salvage companies raising ships sunk during harbor attacks, more than two hundred of them off Hakodate. Some ships were made seaworthy again and refloated and others taken apart for scrap. Meanwhile, SCAP modified two landing ships (LSTs) to carry rail cars, moving freight and passengers across Tsugaru Strait as temporary replacements for the ferries destroyed during the war. Coal was a necessity in reestablishing Japan’s civilian economy, and Hokkaido’s mines furnished a significant amount of Japan’s supply. Stabilizing coal production proved far from easy, though; almost as soon as the war ended, problems arose. The situation of the Chinese and Korean miners in Hokkaido demanded attention. Hearing of the war’s end, Chinese laborers at a mine in Bibai immediately took over their barracks but mine guards and police kept them confined to the mine area. A month later the Chinese demonstrated, mainly for food and freedom, and soon forced their way free, went to other mines and gathered more Chinese to join them. On September 24, the group clashed violently with authorities in Yubari, took several officials hostage and demanded better conditions, also insisting they would not work with Japanese miners. SCAP authorities ordered the Chinese back to the mines— and gave permission to Japanese police to arrest, even shoot, Chinese if necessary. Japanese managers were anxious to keep Korean and Chinese miners because Japanese workers would not toil for low wages, and tension in the mining communities continued. On November 6, some Chinese miners at Bibai physically attacked a mine official, took over his office and forced negotiations. Finally, SCAP officials decided the best strategy was immediate repatriation, and they arranged for U.S. Navy ships to return the miners to China. Korean miners asserted their rights, too. On October 2, 1945, almost seven thousand in Yubari went on strike, demanding better conditions and repatriation to Korea. Soon they began coordinating their efforts with the Chinese miners, though at other times, groups of Chinese and Korean miners clashed with each other. Finally, occupation author-

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ities decided to accede to the Koreans’ demand for repatriation, and most of the Koreans were returned to their homes by the end of the year. Japanese miners also took action, striking on September 11, 1945 at a Utashinai mine. By November, Mitsubishi felt forced to recognize a miners’ union in Yubari after the workers staged a work slowdown and forced public negotiations. The first large-scale coal miners’ organization formed in Japan was the Hokkaido Federation of Mine Workers’ Unions, formed on November 10, 1945. By the end of the year, three-fourths of the Japanese miners in Hokkaido had joined. Unions organized successful protests mainly because working conditions, which had not changed after the war, were so bad, with crew bosses often beating the workers. In addition, rampant inflation made wages inadequate. Miners were supposed to receive extra food rations, but food shortages prevented this, especially in Hokkaido, where even the ordinary ration amounts were often not to be had. As postwar troubles in the mines kept surfacing, the companies found themselves forced to improve compensation and working conditions; SCAP directives called for shorter hours and higher wages. In Hokkaido, because so many of the miners were Koreans and Chinese who had been repatriated by the end of November, the companies needed a new work force, something difficult to obtain under conditions as bad as they were. Miners’ actions— or inaction —caused anxiety because of Japan’s need for Hokkaido coal. By December 1945, the national railways cut service in half due to lack of coal. Japan had a “coal famine,” newspapers reported.25 Miners found various imaginative ways to fight for their demands. In Bibai, Mitsui miners used production control when the company refused to improve working conditions and salaries. With this tactic, the miners became their own supervisors and increased output while decreasing hours. But the dispute continued until the Docho intervened and, as arbiter, granted most of the union’s demands. In October 1946 miners struck throughout Hokkaido. Some 66,000 (out of a total of about 71,000) mine employees from forty-six of Hokkaido’s fifty-three mines walked off the job, protesting low wages. Because of the nation’s need for coal, such a strike could have wide repercussions. Following mediation by the Hokkaido governor, coal operators settled; the miners won a thirty percent wage increase plus other concessions. Supplies of coal remained inadequate. Oji threatened to suspend paper production in Tomakomai because of a lack of coal to run the mills. Oji even temporarily sent some of its work force to work in the mines when the labor shortage was at its worst. One Docho response was to take coal allotted for other uses, including heating, and supply it to Oji and other manufacturers instead. Authorities found that some workers hired in Tokyo and brought by Japanese labor suppliers to work in Hokkaido mines and construction projects were kept in slave-like conditions; at least fifteen thousand people were thus employed in 1946. Reports of many deaths among workers brought a Japanese government probe, and the practice ebbed, though even in 1948 SCAP reported slave labor: men hired on a temporary basis being kept in filthy quarters and given none of the benefits available to regular workers. Miners’ dissatisfaction and disruptions continued. Unhappiness over wages left miners discouraged, one could hear, but some people claimed that the miners were wellcompensated, merely taking advantage of Japan’s need for coal to wrest even higher wages from the companies.26 Shortages continued, and in an attempt to encourage miners to produce more, several unusual programs emerged. A 1947 project would build and repair

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homes for miners in order to spur them to increase output. SCAP instituted a plan in 1948 to reward miners in difficult underground work with luxury goods, including sake, cigarettes and sugar. Not only among miners did labor unrest continue. University professors struck in July 1948, carrying out a twenty-four hour action to back demands for better pay. Electrical workers staged power outages to back their demands. More serious was the militancy of railroad workers. Despite General MacArthur’s order outlawing public employee strikes, wildcat actions disrupted train service in Hokkaido and elsewhere; a 1948 standoff between workers and officials meant weeks of canceled runs. After a government ultimatum, some employees returned to work, some fled, some faced arrest, Others were fired. SCAP and Japanese officials deplored the wildcat strikers’ challenge to government authority and blamed the trouble on the desire of the communist-dominated Railway Workers Union to embarrass SCAP. Official pressure eventually forced the strikers to back down. Though strikes seriously disrupted Japan’s economic recovery, SCAP had encouraged the formation of trade unions. (The Japanese government had proscribed labor unions in 1940; by December 1945, new legislation protected rights to collective bargaining.) Unions became relatively strong in Hokkaido, reflecting difficult conditions in the mining industry. Communist influence, wartime and postwar deprivations, food and power shortages as well as wages that did not keep up with prices all played a part. Labor strife was a symptom of the difficulties of shifting to a peacetime economy. The postwar years were a time when many in the “free world” feared the spread of communism, and this was true in Japan, where Hokkaido seemed to be the center from which communist propaganda was disseminated. Communism “was everywhere in Hokkaido ... in schools, labor unions, out in the mining and fishing villages,” a prominent Hokkaido woman told a visiting American in January 1948. The Hokkaido woman could not understand why General MacArthur had released communists from Japanese jails at the beginning of the occupation.27 (These were among the many political prisoners incarcerated by the Japanese government in the 1930s and 1940s and liberated by SCAP.) War’s end found thousands of Japanese troops stranded in the Soviet Far East, and the U.S.S.R. was very slow to repatriate them, both in order to use their labor and to indoctrinate them with communist ideology. As the Soviets eventually returned the internees to Japan, some of those who came back worked to spread left wing theory in Hokkaido. A United Press reporter asserted in 1948 that communists were threatening poor island farmers, ordering them to support the Communist Party — because otherwise, when Soviet troops arrived to take over Hokkaido, they would slaughter the farmers. In 1949, the Hokkaido Communist Party had some six thousand members (plus at least that many more secret members). A year later, only about four thousand remained in the party, but concern about a Soviet threat continued.28 Communist influence was relatively strong in Hokkaido compared to the rest of Japan. More than a dozen communist-oriented newspapers were published on the island until they were closed down by SCAP authorities in September 1950; even the Hokkaido Shimbun was embroiled in controversy in 1946 when SCAP pressured the newspaper’s owner to fire more than fifty members of the editorial staff for communist leanings. Strong party activity in Hokkaido worried officials in Tokyo. Officials identified as communists eleven suspects who were arrested for gunning down a Sapporo police inspec-

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tor in January 1952, and an Ishikari Valley farmer even compared communists in Hokkaido to the Ku Klux Klan. A left-wing Hokkaido University protest in 1950 disrupted the address an American adviser on education, Dr. Walter C. Eells, was attempting to deliver. Eells’ recommendations on Japanese education drew controversy. He gave a series of lectures throughout Japan in 1949-50 designed to promote academic freedom and combat communist influence on university campuses. He asserted that communist professors lacked free will and had minds closed to alternative ideas; thus they should not be allowed on university faculties. Antagonistic signs greeted Eels at the auditorium in Sapporo where he was to speak; one proclaimed, “No more Hiroshimas— No more Eells.” His address was scheduled for faculty members only. Militant students barricaded the venue until the university president agreed to admit students, too. They not only objected to Eells’ basic message, they were upset because they were not allowed to ask questions, though professors could do so. Japan’s main English-language newspaper reported, “Red Students Disorderly.”29 They were more than disorderly, eventually breaking up the meeting, taking it over and turning it into a student protest rally. Hokkaido University later expelled four of the students involved, identifying three of them as communists, and gave lesser punishments to four others. Taking responsibility for the fiasco, the university president resigned. Eells, meanwhile, faced opposition at other institutions. While occupation authorities worked to counter communist activities within Hokkaido, U.S. military forces protected the island against possible external threats. Meanwhile, the Americans in Hokkaido also responded to internal emergencies, from threats of starvation to natural disasters. U.S. troops helped with relief after a severe temblor, later dubbed the Tokachi earthquake, struck Hokkaido and northern Honshu in March 1952. Tsunamis caused much of the destruction; southern Hokkaido suffered the most, with Kushiro and the Tokachi plain reporting deaths and many collapsed buildings. The shaking cut rail lines, severing Kushiro’s transportation connections with the rest of the island. U.S. military planes helped bring emergency supplies to the quake and tsunami victims. In its early days, SCAP dealt with immediate difficulties such as insuring an adequate food supply. Later, long-term planning was possible, and a very far-reaching SCAP program was land reform. The intent was to get rid of absentee landlords and give land ownership to the people who did the actual farming. Before the reforms, tenant farmers worked forty-three percent of the land under cultivation in Hokkaido. Under the new regulations, no Hokkaido farm could contain more than twelve cho of land (about thirty acres) while in the rest of Japan, three cho was the maximum area set. (This reflects the differences between farming in Hokkaido and in other prefectures; in Hokkaido, for example, it is impossible to raise more than one crop a year.) In 1950, with land reform in place, tenants worked only seven percent of Hokkaido agricultural land. Another impact the occupation had on Hokkaido, though much less significant, was the popularization of skiing. Austrian military officer Theodor von Lerch had introduced the activity to Japan in 1911 after he arrived to train military officers, but the sport did not become widespread until after World War II, when the first ski lifts were built. In later years, the ski industry has introduced Hokkaido to thousands of Japanese from other islands and has benefited Hokkaido’s economy. Very shortly after the war ended, Hokkaido was the starting point for a recordbreaking flight, when three B-29 Superfortresses, one piloted by Gen. Curtis LeMay, took

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off from Chitose on a nonstop flight to the American mainland. The modified planes had excess weight removed and bomb bays filled with gasoline tanks. Headwinds and ice forming on the wings slowed the aircraft, which were heading for Washington, D.C. Several Soviet fighter planes briefly followed them as they neared the Kamchatka Peninsula, but the Americans continued on via Nome and Fairbanks in Alaska, Whitehorse in the Canadian Yukon, and Edmonton, Alberta. After twenty-six hours in the air they landed in Chicago, having completed the longest nonstop flight ever undertaken by the Air Force and the first from Japan to the United States. Six weeks later, four B-29s successfully made the flight from Hokkaido nonstop to Washington, taking twenty-seven and onehalf hours. In 1950, war erupted in Korea. At the end of World War II, Soviet troops had occupied its north and Americans the south; after several years, two separate Korean governments assumed office. Troops from the north invaded the south on June 25, 1950. To prevent a communist nation from swallowing up South Korea, United Nations troops entered the conflict. American forces stationed in Japan played a major role in the fighting, and new soldiers were brought to Japan as replacement troops and for training. Even in winter, some trained for amphibious landings on Hokkaido’s south shore. Troops sent to Korea after participating in winter exercises in Hokkaido expressed their thankfulness, saying it enabled them to better cope with Korea’s cold. Meanwhile, American forces in Hokkaido built and maintained defensive installations. The GIs operated radar sites scattered around Hokkaido, from Okushiri Island to Abashiri, from Rumoi to Cape Erimo to Nemuro. The new constitution adopted in Japan under SCAP pressure excluded Japanese military forces, but because of security concerns in Asia, slowly a new defense organization took shape in Japan. This Japanese National Safety Corps was the forerunner of today’s Self-Defense Force. By 1952, Americans gave these troops some of the responsibility for defending Hokkaido. The Korean War ended with a truce in July 1953 and in Japan the new Self-Defense Force grew and began replacing U.S. soldiers. Little by little the Americans left. In 1955, the United States turned the defense of Hokkaido over to the reconstructed Japanese military. A few Americans remained; the U.S. air base at Chitose operated for another twenty years and the U.S. promised to defend Hokkaido with naval and air forces if necessary. Members of United States military forces continued to participate in maneuvers in Hokkaido, especially to take advantage of winter conditions and practice survival techniques. Hokkaido has changed dramatically since the days of war and occupation brought tragedy and trouble to the island. The formal termination of the occupation came with the adoption of a peace treaty ending World War II, which Japan and the allied countries signed on September 8, 1951 (though the Soviets refused to accept it). When the treaty came into effect on April 28, 1952, the occupation was officially over and Hokkaido entered a new era.

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Hokkaido and Her Northern Neighbor A significant aspect of Hokkaido’s postwar history and development has been the island’s relationship with the Soviet Union — later, Russia. Hokkaido’s location so near the Russian Far East has made it inevitable that when tensions have arisen between Japan and Russia, this northern island is on the front line. In the very last days of World War II, the U.S.S.R. declared war on Japan and quickly sent troops to occupy all of nearby Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Shocked by the sudden Soviet moves and the quick overrunning of Karafuto and the Kurils, Japanese wrath increased when the Soviets kept thousands of Japanese prisoners of war in Siberia long after war’s end. Despite the end of the fighting in 1945, the two nations still have not signed a peace treaty, because Japan continues to claim that the southernmost Kuril Islands, now incorporated into Russia, legally remain part of Japan. Soviet bitterness against previous Japanese actions no doubt fueled Soviet desires to grab Japanese-controlled territory while it could be done. Not only had Japan begun the Russo-Japanese War with a surprise attack, Japan had defeated the Russians. Later, aiming to keep communists from controlling the Russian Far East, Japan had sent troops to Siberia during the Russian Civil War at the end of World War I. Soviets also saw economic and strategic advantages in occupying Sakhalin and the Kurils; the U.S.S.R. would gain lucrative fishing grounds as well as control of the Sea of Okhotsk. Sakhalin has an expanse of about thirty thousand square miles, but that is much less important than its location and offshore oil and sea life. The land area of the small Kuril Islands is hardly significant, but their setting and fisheries certainly are. The Cold War, fishing confrontations, and controversy that grew over sovereignty of the South Kurils all damaged relations between the two countries after World War II — and Hokkaido has been in the middle of all of this.

War in the north and Soviet plans In the far north of Japan, World War II did not end with Japan’s surrender. Once Germany capitulated in May 1945, the Soviet government began moving troops from the European front eastward to Siberia. The U.S.S.R. and Japan had signed a neutrality pact in 1941, but on April 9, 1945 the Soviets announced their intention to end the agreement. Technically, it would remain in force for one more year, and Japanese officials thus assumed

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that the U.S.S.R. would not make any offensive moves until 1946. Just a few days after the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, however, Soviet forces began an assault that had been planned for some time, challenging Japanese troops in Manchuria and Sakhalin. Soviets claimed later that Japan had made the neutrality pact invalid by supporting Germany, the U.S.S.R.’s enemy, during the war as well as by not living up to earlier promises to cede energy concessions in northern Sakhalin. On August 9 the Soviets began shelling the Japanese border on Sakhalin; the invaders looked upon Karafuto as Russian land, despite the treaty at the end of the Russo-Japanese War awarding the area to Japan. Some thirty-five thousand Soviet troops fought their way south and, after two weeks of tense fighting, gained control of the entire island. The port city of Maoka (now Kholmsk) was one place where civilians became victims between the two armies. In Wakkanai stands a memorial to Japanese telephone operators in Maoka who heroically stayed at their post throughout the fighting and then committed suicide. Many of Karafuto’s 450,000 residents tried to flee. Men sent women and children from Sakhalin to Hokkaido to get them out of danger as the Soviets advanced southward. Thousands of Japanese fled Sakhalin and the Kurils in the summer of 1945, some with nothing but the clothing they wore. Some managed to board ships to Japan but an August 22 submarine attack, probably Soviet, on a few of the vessels taking refugees from Sakhalin to Hokkaido killed seventeen hundred people. Several hundred of the many Koreans who had been brought to Karafuto by the Japanese as laborers also managed to escape Sakhalin; once on Hokkaido, they found themselves housed in refugee camps set up especially for Koreans. Though some of the Sakhalin refugees went on to Honshu and other islands, many stayed on Hokkaido. With resources on that island already strained, caring for these refugees was not easy, especially because so many family breadwinners were not allowed by the Soviets to leave. When the first Soviet troops landed on the Kurils on August 16 — after the Japanese government announced its surrender — defenders thought the troops were Americans, and military headquarters sent a message of protest to General MacArthur. Two days of bitter fighting followed on Shumshu, the island nearest the Kamchatka Peninsula, but the Soviets took the other islands easily. Five hundred women and children from cannery workers’ families on the north Kuril island of Paramushir stole away during a temporary halt in fighting and traveled safely to Hokkaido in fishing boats. On Shumshu, just as on Sakhalin, the Japanese fought hard against the invaders but by early September the Soviets completed their conquest. Once Soviet troops had started their advance into Manchuria, Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro urged a quick surrender for fear the U.S.S.R. could not only take other Japanese-held territory — Korea and Karafuto— but also Hokkaido. Presumably, he did not know that Soviet leader Josef Stalin did, in fact, intend to invade Hokkaido. Once Karafuto and North Korea were secured, Stalin’s commander in the Soviet Far East would oversee a troop landing at Rumoi. The Soviets would proceed to occupy the entire northern half of Hokkaido, more or less northeast of a line from Rumoi on the Japan Sea to Kushiro on the Pacific Ocean, including these two cities in their zone of occupation. But should the Soviet military find Japanese troops making a stand on Hokkaido, the Soviets had orders to take the entire island. (Were the Soviets to control northern Hokkaido, they would also control La Perouse Strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin.) Even after the Japanese surrender, Soviet plans to invade Hokkaido remained in place, but unexpected delays due to strong resistance on Sakhalin and the Kurils caused

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a postponement of the proposed August 22 Hokkaido landings. When that date came, Stalin ordered the Hokkaido invasion abandoned. He likely took into account the unexpected difficulties Soviet troops faced in the advance on Sakhalin. A concern about Allied reactions and the assurance that Japanese officials would definitely sign an official surrender document on September 2 probably also influenced him. Hasegawa Tsuyoshi has suggested other possible factors: that the operation was “too risky,” and that Stalin may have learned that the U.S. knew of his plans.1 A successful Soviet invasion of Hokkaido might not have been difficult, because Japanese defenses there were not strong, consisting of only one brigade and two divisions poised opposite possible U.S. advances from the south and east rather than against Soviet threats from the north. By 1945, obstacles were minimal, and American carrier-based planes and battleships had operated almost with impunity in destroying shipping and war-related industry in the mid–July strike on Hokkaido’s south coast. Had Hokkaido been invaded, tens, even hundreds of thousands, of residents could have been imperiled. Richard Frank, using statistics from Manchuria where many Japanese civilians died when the Soviets took over, has estimated that nearly four hundred thousand people on Hokkaido could have died in a Soviet invasion. Seizure of even part of Hokkaido would have had important strategic ramifications beyond control of La Perouse Strait. As military historian David Glantz has pointed out, Soviet occupation of part of Hokkaido could have meant vast changes for the future of east Asia. The occupation of all of Japan would then surely have been prolonged, and South Korea’s future could have been affected, too. In addition, were Hokkaido in the Soviet bloc, economic development would no doubt have proceeded quite differently, and certainly much more slowly.2 Though Stalin abandoned a Hokkaido invasion, he recommended to U.S. President Harry S Truman that the Japanese troops in northern Hokkaido make a formal surrender to Soviet forces. Stalin argued that because Japanese troops had occupied “the whole Soviet Far East” just after the Russian Revolution, it was only right that the Soviets be allowed to occupy part of Hokkaido after World War II. This, Stalin indicated, “has a special meaning for the Russian public opinion would be seriously offended if the Russian troops would not have an occupation region in some part of the Japanese proper territory.” Originally, the U.S. had intended to give the U.S.S.R. a role in the occupation, but Truman turned down Stalin’s request. Many years later, a Japanese psychiatrist who emigrated to the United States said, “When I was growing up, I felt I owed my freedom to the American military and General MacArthur who kept the Russians from taking Hokkaido.” Japanese people in retrospect indicate great relief that the Soviets did not have a role in the occupation, and fears that the Soviets might invade Hokkaido lingered in Japan for decades.3 Long after the war, Japan’s Self-Defense Force continued to prepare for a possible Soviet invasion of Hokkaido, and officials worried about what support they could expect from the Dosanko should an invasion occur. There were a number of communists in the northern island in the first postwar decade or so. Also, ordinary homeowners might resist SDF attempts to condemn property for military use while countering an invasion. Even in the mid–1980s, the accepted view was that Soviets could take control of Hokkaido without much difficulty, and policy was to strengthen defenses on Hokkaido to deter the U.S.S.R. until American troops could arrive to back up Japanese military forces.4 In September 1945, the United States agreed that the Soviets could hold the Kuril

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Islands, though the Americans had planned to have a share in occupying the chain. President Truman requested that American military and commercial interests have access to an air base in the central Kurils, but Stalin agreed to this only if the Soviets could have reciprocal rights in the Aleutians, something U.S. officials clearly would not allow. The Soviets tried to persuade Japanese living on Sakhalin and the Kurils not to leave those islands, but few agreed. Authorities in Japan urged speedy repatriation of the Japanese who had not been able to flee Sakhalin, but the Soviets delayed, wanting to use Japanese labor until new settlers could be brought in. The occupiers arrested Karafuto’s leading Japanese: businessmen, officials, lawyers and the like, as well as military men. Many of these people found themselves prisoners in mainland labor camps. In 1990, a Japanese Sakhalin resident in his sixties told a visiting Japanese delegation that at the end of the war he had not been allowed to leave Sakhalin because the Soviet Union needed engine drivers. Some men belonging to Sakhalin’s native peoples— Nivkh and Uilta as well as Ainu — were arrested and sent to Siberia, not to be released for years. When migrants from elsewhere in the Soviet Union began arriving almost a year and a half after the end of the war, the U.S.S.R. finally allowed official repatriation of Japanese to begin. The process was slow, and Soviet officials suspended the program for several months in late 1948 due to “bad weather.”5 The Soviets slowly returned Japanese soldiers captured in Sakhalin and Manchuria but, unlike civilians, some soldiers apparently did accept what they were told about the advantages of communism. Some Japanese were repatriated as late as twenty years after war’s end. Many were ethnic Japanese women who had married Koreans in Sakhalin and who had not been allowed to leave earlier. Though repatriations from Sakhalin took a number of years, all the Japanese residents of the South Kurils— some 17,000 — were expelled to Japan by 1949. The Soviets destroyed every Japanese house and used stones from Japanese graveyards in new construction. Most of the Kuril Islands Japanese settled in Hokkaido, many in Nemuro— as close as they could be to their former homes.

The Cold War Hokkaido was on the front line of the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that followed World War II and grew more serious with the outbreak of the Korean War. In Hokkaido, distrust of the Soviet Union was pervasive. The anti–Soviet anger of many people repatriated to Hokkaido helped account for this anxiety. Japanese defense officials proposed a new farmer-soldier corps, but few men saw any advantages in applying for the scheme. Because of the perceived Soviet threat, though, a large American military force remained on the island during and even for a few years after the occupation. In 1951, U.S. anxiety about the U.S.S.R.’s possible plans grew to the point that most of the American troops’ dependents were sent south to Honshu. The Cold War helped solidify Soviet determination to hold the Kurils and all of Sakhalin. Postwar geopolitical realities saw the United States active in the western Pacific region because Soviet challenges and a resurgent China made this area strategically significant. Moreover, with American airmen stationed in Hokkaido patrolling the skies near newly-held Soviet territory in Sakhalin and the Kurils and perhaps crossing into Soviet airspace, the Soviets fortified those areas. As the Cold War developed, bottles containing propaganda leaflets presumably from

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the U.S.S.R. appeared every now and then on the Hokkaido shore. More than five years after the war ended, Hanson W. Baldwin suggested in the New York Times that Soviets might have a takeover of Hokkaido in mind, and in April 1952 U.S. Secretary of the Navy Dan A. Kimball asserted that the Soviet military presence on Sakhalin “poses a very real invasion threat” to Hokkaido.6 Japanese and Soviets spied upon each other. In 1953, Soviet soldiers caught two Japanese who had been sent by U.S. intelligence agents to the Kurils to carry out espionage. Gunfire killed one of the men but the other received a sentence of twenty-five years at hard labor. After a 1956 amnesty, he returned to Japan and took up life in Omu, an isolated town on Hokkaido’s Okhotsk Sea coast, where he worked as a postal clerk. Occasional battles between Soviet and American planes, mostly on or near Hokkaido, created tension. For some years, Soviet jets based in the south of Sakhalin and American planes from Wakkanai patrolled the air space on their respective sides of the “MacArthur Line,” the imaginary line separating Sakhalin and the Kurils from Hokkaido. In 1952, Soviet planes began to fly over Hokkaido fairly frequently, a Japanese spokesman claiming at least forty such incidents in the second half of the year. An American Air Force B29 flying northwest of Nemuro on a training mission disappeared in October; radar had shown another plane approaching it from the east. The two planes merged on the radar screen and then disappeared to the southeast. Soviet officials claimed that their fighter planes had attacked the United States plane after it entered Soviet territory. The American Air Force continued to assert, however, that the U.S. plane was over Japanese waters when it was last seen by radar. The next month, two American planes patrolling near Nemuro chased a Soviet plane they spotted over Hokkaido until it left Japanese territory. In January 1953 the United States announced, with Japanese concurrence, the determination to take action should Soviet planes continue to invade Hokkaido air space, noting that newer and faster U.S. planes had been sent to Japan to counter threats. Japan had no air force at the time, and the Japanese officials involved felt that the American promise should help calm “the people of Hokkaido who are nervous about the increasing number of Soviet planes that have been flying over their towns and farms day and night.”7 In February, U.S. army planes fired at two Soviet planes over Hokkaido but claimed that the Soviet planes fired first. Later that year the Japanese impounded a Soviet ship for illegally entering Japanese waters. A U.S. army general called the incursions “an active invasion of Japanese territory,” claiming that the U.S.S.R. was carrying out reconnaissance missions to obtain photographs of military installations on Hokkaido.8 The Korean War ended in mid–1953, and in 1954 some U.S. troops began withdrawing from Hokkaido, members of the new Japanese Self-Defense Force replacing them. The Cold War had not ended, though. Soviet jets shot down a United States photo-reconnaissance plane just off the Nemuro Peninsula in November 1954, without provocation, Americans said, but the Soviets claimed the plane had entered Soviet territory. U.S. officials later admitted that the plane had been flying over an island claimed by both Japan and the U.S.S.R. With the end of the Korean War, tensions between the U.S.S.R. and Japan simmered down considerably, but for many years Japan kept a sizable military force in Hokkaido, which the Soviets felt was aimed at them. Whenever the U.S.S.R. appeared to make a belligerent move, people in northern Hokkaido became anxious. Because of possible threats from the north, by September 1956 more than fifty thousand Japanese troops— one third of the nation’s ground forces— were stationed in Hokkaido, and the strong presence

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remained for several decades. Even in the later 1970s, fictional accounts of Russians invading Hokkaido were bestsellers in Japan. Confrontations near Hokkaido between the United States and the Soviet Union continued sporadically. On July 1, 1968, the Soviets forced a U.S. plane carrying troops to Vietnam to land on Iturup Island in the Kurils after the plane apparently strayed off course into Soviet-held territory. Very quickly, however, United States officials apologized, the Soviets released the plane, its crew and its passengers, and the incident was over. Thanks to publicity about the episode, Japanese citizens learned for the first time that the Soviets had established a military airport on Iturup. Because of incidents like these, the U.S. maintained a few troops in Hokkaido for many years. The U.S. left the Wakkanai base in Hokkaido’s far north, near Sakhalin, in 1972 and withdrew from Chitose in 1975. After this, the only U.S. installation in Hokkaido was a long-range navigation station at Urahoro on the southern coast. The Chitose field, next to the New Chitose International Airport, continues as a Japanese Air Self-Defense base. In 1976 a defector from the U.S.S.R. escaped via Hokkaido. MiG fighter pilot Viktor Ivanovich Belenko flew his plane, then the most advanced of the Soviet fleet, into Japanese territory. Radar stations picked him up, but he descended to an altitude below radar capability where clouds helped him elude pursuit. Soon he landed at Hakodate. The Soviet government claimed that fuel loss caused Belenko’s actions and that after he landed he was kidnapped, but Belenko indicated that he hoped for asylum in the United States. Japanese officials consented, and Belenko proceeded to the United States, where he went to work as a test pilot and consultant. The Belenko incident had various repercussions. American and Japanese technicians took apart his plane to study it in detail; they became convinced the west did not have to worry about Soviet technology. Japan shipped the plane’s parts back to the Soviet Union in crates. The Japanese had another worry, however: Belenko had easily penetrated supposedly closely-guarded air space. Meanwhile, the incident soured U.S.S.R.–Japan relations. Probably partly in response, the Soviet Union created a two hundred mile exclusive economic zone off its coast, which severely restricted Japanese fishermen. The U.S.S.R. also refused for some years to discuss the question of sovereignty of the South Kuril Islands which Japan continued to claim. Though Belenko’s story made world headlines and caused a diplomatic storm, he was not the first Soviet military pilot to fly to Japan, hoping for asylum in the United States. Vladimir Barashkov had done the same thing in November 1948, landing on Rishiri Island (the same island on which Ranald MacDonald had set foot just one hundred years earlier). Barashkov’s escape was kept secret for more than three months and did not raise a furor. The most widely known Cold War incident in the Hokkaido region was the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983. En route from New York via Anchorage to Seoul, the plane had wandered off course flying over the Sea of Okhotsk. Four Soviet interceptor aircraft from Sakhalin brought down the Korean plane, killing the 269 people aboard. Remains and pieces of wreckage later washed up on Hokkaido beaches. An adequate explanation of the plane’s deviation from its assigned route has never emerged; some suggested that it was carrying out a secret spy mission, but whatever led the plane astray, the shocked world reaction to the intemperate Soviet response added to Cold War tensions, which were strong during the early 1980s. In Hokkaido’s far north today is a memorial to those who died.

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During Cold War years, few Japanese and Russians were allowed to travel to each other’s countries. Diplomats from the U.S.S.R. stationed in Japan could not go to sensitive areas, for example, Hokkaido port cities. Throughout those years, too, Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force kept much of its strength in Hokkaido. Had hostilities broken out between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S., American forces would no doubt have tried to block Soviet ships from entering or leaving the Vladivostok area or the Sea of Okhotsk (where the U.S.S.R. kept a fleet of its most up-to-date submarines) and both La Perouse Strait and Tsugaru Strait would have become centers of tension. As late as 1992, Russians expressed concern that Japan and the United States saw Hokkaido as a military center that could threaten the Russian Far East. Another Cold War effect on Hokkaido lingered beyond the end of the century: central government direction of Hokkaido’s resources, through the Hokkaido Development Bureau. Though postwar democratic reforms in Japan had brought Hokkaido’s government in line with those in the other prefectures, Tokyo officials felt the need to continue control of Hokkaido development; the island was on the Cold War’s front line. As a result, Hokkaido has had less autonomy than Japan’s heartland regions.

The Northern Territories In the peace treaty signed with the Allies in 1951, Japan renounced all claim to Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Despite this, Japan continues to assert that Soviet control of the southernmost Kurils, consisting of Shikotan, Kunashir, Iturup and the Habomai group of small islands, has been illegal. (In Japan, Iturup is known as Etorofu and Kunashir as Kunashiri.) Japanese efforts continue to this day to retrieve these islands. Long administered as part of Hokkaido, they are known in Japan as the Northern Territories.9 The Northern Territories issue has had an overriding influence on Japanese policy toward the U.S.S.R. (and, subsequently, Russia) since World War II. The Soviet-Japanese military conflict in 1945 lasted for no more than a few weeks, but the diplomatic stalemate it led to has endured for more than half a century and shows no sign of solution. Soviet control of southern Sakhalin, or Karafuto, seemed legitimate, since Japan had gained that area through conquest, the Russo-Japanese War. But even now Japan disputes the Soviet seizure of the South Kurils. At their conference held at Yalta in the Soviet Union in 1945, allied war leaders including Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed that Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands should go to the U.S.S.R. after Japan’s defeat. This was in exchange for the Soviet agreement to join the war against Japan after Germany’s surrender. The Yalta agreement was kept secret until after the end of the war for fear the accord might spur a Japanese attack on Siberia. Roosevelt may have mistakenly thought that Japan had seized the Kurils during the Russo-Japanese War and that as territory acquired by force, the islands should be surrendered. In reality, the 1855 Treaty of Shimoda, which delineated a border between Russia and Japan for the first time, placed that boundary in the middle of the Kuril chain, with the islands now known as the Northern Territories belonging to Japan. In a subsequent treaty signed in 1875, Russia gave Japan title to the entire Kuril chain in exchange for ownership of Sakhalin. Both Russia and Japan claim rights to the disputed islands because of prior discovery, but events are not entirely clear. By the early

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eighteenth century, Russians had penetrated the island chain from the north and Japanese from the south. Perhaps Roosevelt felt that ownership of the Kurils would be due the U.S.S.R. should that nation help defeat Japan. Allied leaders also may have decided that the Kurils should not be part of Japan so that Japan could not use them to build future military strength. Perhaps the Soviet Union could govern the southern Kurils as a temporary trusteeship territory, in the way the United States administered Okinawa until returning to Japan that far southern island region in 1972. As World War II approached an end, the U.S. planned to occupy the southern Kurils but the Soviet advance precluded this, and Harry S Truman, now president, did not make it an issue. Hasegawa Tsuyoshi has suggested that the U.S. simply did not think the Kurils important enough to worry about. In November 1945 the United Nations granted the U.S.S.R. the right to occupy all the islands in the chain. Having little choice, Japan accepted this but later argued that the southern islands to which it still lays claim were not included in the agreement. Japan pointed out that until the end of World War II no nation except Japan ever held title to them. In addition, Japan claimed that Shikotan and the Habomais were not in the Kuril chain at all. Habomai Village, in fact, included land both on Hokkaido’s Cape Nosappu and on the small islands. Moreover, as Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo asked a Russian official in 1977, why was the Soviet Union so determined to hold on to such a tiny island area in the Kurils, given the huge size of the Soviet nation?10 Fukuda’s query seems easy to answer, though; It seems clear that Stalin wanted to hold the Kuril chain for security interests, because the islands controlled entry to the Sea of Okhotsk. From late 1945, pressure came in Hokkaido for reversion of the Northern Territories to Japan. Most insistent, of course, were people displaced from the islands. (More of the seventeen thousand Japanese expelled from the Kurils by the Soviets after war’s end had lived on the disputed islands than on other islands in the Kuril chain.) Nemuro fishermen and refugees from the Kurils, including fishermen now prohibited from their traditional fishing grounds, formed organizations to lobby for return of the islands. A serious Japanese request for their reversion came in December 1945 when Nemuro Mayor Ando Sekiten took to Tokyo a petition with thirty thousand signatures appealing for the return of the Northern Territories. The document included a personal appeal to General MacArthur for action. The Hokkaido University president pressed for reversion and the Hokkaido Prefectural Assembly lobbied the Diet and SCAP on the matter. The U.S.S.R. was anxious to annex the Kurils before a postwar peace conference took place for fear such a meeting might decide that the disputed islands should revert to Japan. Thus on February 2, 1946, the Soviets formally (and unilaterally) declared the incorporation of the islands into the nation and at the beginning of 1947 announced the creation of the province of Sakhalin, which would include all of that island and all of the Kurils. Soviet names replaced Japanese ones and Soviet citizens— mostly war veterans and their families— repopulated the former Japanese areas. At the San Francisco Peace Conference in 1951, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru explained the Japanese claim to the South Kurils, but the treaty nonetheless deprived Japan of the islands— without saying what nation might receive them. As representatives of a defeated nation, Japanese officials felt forced to accept the treaty but the Soviet Union did not sign the American-written document. When the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, members added a proviso noting that the agreement said nothing about Soviet rights (or lack of them) to Sakhalin or any of the Kurils.

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Not until after Josef Stalin died in 1953 did the Soviets seriously consider improving relations with capitalist nations, and in 1955, talks began between the U.S.S.R. and Japan about negotiating a peace treaty. Japan demanded the return of the Northern Territories; while discussions proceeded in London, the Docho sponsored a rally in Tokyo urging reversion of the disputed islands to Japan. Hokkaido Governor Tanaka Toshifumi addressed the rally and also held a press conference. The issue could not be resolved, though, and instead, in 1956 the U.S.S.R. and Japan normalized relations without signing a formal treaty; Japan was motivated partly by the desire that Japanese fishermen be allowed to operate in now–Soviet waters. The agreement specified that the Soviet Union would return Shikotan and the Habomais (which included only seven percent of the disputed land area) to Japan upon a ratification of peace treaty between the two nations. Nothing was said regarding Iturup and Kunashir. Soviets hoped their offer would turn Japanese anger from them toward the Americans, who still held Okinawa. With reversion of the smaller islands in mind, the Hokkaido government drew up proposals in 1956 for development on Shikotan and the Habomais, while the U.S.S.R. ejected a number of Soviet residents from them. The Japanese government considered accepting the offer of those islands for fear that otherwise the Soviets would rescind fishing agreements and continue to refuse repatriation of Second World War Japanese prisoners convicted of war crimes in the U.S.S.R. Eventually, Japan rejected the Soviet proposal, partly because of American pressure. In the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. did not want Japan-U.S.S.R. relations to improve. American officials feared that if the Soviet Union and Japan reached a territorial agreement, the Americans might be coerced into returning Okinawa and removing U.S. troops from Japan. Thus in order to pursue Cold War goals, American officials used the Kurils controversy to perpetuate enmity between Japan and the Soviet Union. The United States therefore bears some responsibility for the continuing problem.11 The Soviets resisted returning the entire South Kuril group partly for fear of the military potential that Kunashir and Iturup could offer the Japanese and their American allies, giving them easy entry to the Sea of Okhotsk. In an October 1949 speech, prominent Soviet official and later premier Georgii Malenkov had stressed the vital role played by the Kuril chain in the nation’s far eastern defenses. In addition, the U.S.S.R. would lose abundant mineral resources on Kunashir and Iturup and probably the seabed as well as lucrative fishing grounds were the nation’s leaders to renounce claim to all the disputed islands. In 1960 Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko announced that Shikotan and the Habomais could not be returned to Japan until all American military personnel left Japan; the Soviets seized on the adoption of a new U.S.-Japan security treaty to renege on the earlier offer. By then, Japan was claiming that Iturup and Kunashir were not part of the Kuril chain that had been specified in the Yalta agreement and the 1951 peace treaty. Perusal of a map shows that the Japanese could make a strong case that the Habomais and Shikotan are not part of the Kurils. Henry Snow, who hunted sea otters in Kurils waters in the late nineteenth century, wrote, “Shikotan and the small group of islands [the Habomais] lying off the easternmost point of Yezo can hardly be said to belong to the Kuril chain.”12 It is difficult to argue that Kunashir and Iturup are not part of the Kurils, however. During the three decades from the early 1960s to 1991 the Soviets did not even recognize the existence of a controversy over the sovereignty of the disputed islands. Meanwhile, the United States government returned Okinawa to Japanese control in May 1972

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after a long Japanese campaign for reversion. Once Okinawa was again part of the nation, people in Japan could turn their sights to the Northern Territories question, which lived on. Former Kurils residents felt the Japanese government was not working hard enough to obtain the islands, especially when compared with official efforts exerted to regain Okinawa. The U.S.S.R. had withdrawn some of its troops from the South Kurils by 1960, but reacting to Japan-China negotiations and a subsequent friendship treaty, in the late 1970s Soviets strengthened military forces on the islands. In response, Japan stationed more troops in Hokkaido. In August 1978 Japanese officials estimated Soviet troop strength on the islands at three thousand; during that summer, Soviets held maneuvers there. By 1979, nine to ten thousand troops were apparently stationed on the Northern Territories and guns newly installed on Kunashir could shell Hokkaido’s northeastern coast; Japanese protested the troop presence on territory they claimed. For many years the Kurils, designated as a special security zone, were closed to almost all Soviet visitors as well as foreigners. In the early 1980s, Japan reemphasized its claim to the disputed islands. From 1981, Japan has recognized February 7 each year as Northern Territories Day. This is the anniversary of the date in 1855 upon which Russia and Japan delineated their border in the Kuril Islands. The Soviet newspaper Izvestia charged that the designation of Northern Territories Day was an “unfriendly act.”13 During the 1980s, the islands’ strategic importance to the U.S.S.R. grew as Cold War tensions increased. New Soviet missiles able to span the Pacific Ocean were kept in the Sea of Okhotsk where they could be safe, even though American submarines could detect them. Late in the 1980s, with the opening of the glasnost era in the U.S.S.R and the end of the Cold War, relations between Japan and the Soviet Union improved and the Northern Territories dispute gained attention once again. Soviet officials hinted that an agreement might be possible. For the first time, Soviet citizens learned that a Japanese movement to regain the South Kurils had existed since the 1940s. In 1989, as part of the commemoration of the first Russian landing on the disputed islands (by Martin Spanberg 250 years earlier), the U.S.S.R., for the first time since World War II, allowed foreign newsmen to visit the islands. A few months later, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Petrovsky suggested joint environmental studies of the Sakhalin and Kurils area. An article appeared in the Soviet press suggesting the disputed islands be handed over to the United Nations under a joint Soviet-Japanese trusteeship, but Japanese officials immediately turned down this idea.14 In January 1990, Boris Yeltsin, not yet Russian leader but described by the Japan Times as “a leading Soviet reformer,”15 offered a five-step plan to solve the island question. First, the Soviet Union would officially recognize that the dispute existed. Next, Japan and Russia would establish a free enterprise zone in the islands. Then the islands would be demilitarized and the two nations would adopt a peace treaty without settling the dispute. Finally, the question would be left to the next generation — people not emotionally involved. The stalemate continued, despite Yeltsin’s and others’ settlement proposals. On a visit to Moscow in March 1991, Ozawa Ichiro, a leader of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, apparently offered an aid package amounting to more than twenty-six billion dollars were the disputed islands returned. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev refused. When people living on the disputed islands— by this time, second and third generation

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residents— responded to a poll that same month on whether the territories should be returned to Japan, about seventy percent voted no.16 Later that year, the Soviet Union recognized the independence of the three Baltic republics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Japanese officials then suggested that the Northern Territories case was similar, for these territories, too, had been illegally seized and occupied by the Soviets. But no Russian government could agree to give up the disputed islands at a time when the U.S.S.R.’s breakup was weakening the region in the eyes of the world. However, during Gorbachev’s visit to Japan in 1991, he agreed to remove some Soviet troops from the islands. By the end of 1991, Gorbachev had resigned, the U.S.S.R. had broken apart, and Boris Yeltsin had become leader of a new independent Russia. (Yeltsin, by the way, had been the first high-ranking Soviet official to visit the disputed islands.) Several prominent Russians suggested that Russia might return Shikotan and the Habomais to Japan and various hints emanated from Moscow suggesting that economic aid not directly tied to the islands issue could lead to Russian willingness to cooperate. But Japan did not follow this lead, and partly because of the islands dispute, Yeltsin canceled a 1992 visit to Japan, though he did visit in October 1993. Scholar Randall E. Newnham contrasts Japanese reluctance to offer aid with West Germany’s generosity; Russia acquiesced in the subsequent reunification of Germany while remaining intransigent regarding the Kurils.17 Over the years, different administrations in both the U.S.S.R./Russia and Japan have changed policy on the Kurils. Sometimes the northern nation has seemed ready to return Shikotan and the Habomais to Japan, sometimes not. Sometimes Japan has appeared ready to accept two islands while continuing to disagree and negotiate over the larger ones, and sometimes Japan has demanded reversion of all the Northern Territories. Meanwhile, the United States would no longer object were Japan to seek only Shikotan and the Habomais. As for the Russian residents in the South Kurils, their lives had become uncertain, due to a combination of inflation, late pay and inadequate supplies. Along with straitened economic circumstances came concern about the islands’ uncertain future. In 1993 Governor Yevgeny Krasnoyarov of Russia’s Sakhalin Province, which includes the Kurils, urged that the controversy be set aside until Russian living standards became comparable to Japan’s. He was apparently concerned that Kurils residents would support reversion to Japan in order to improve their lives. Soon, however, a natural catastrophe threatened life in the Kurils. On October 4, 1994, a severe earthquake hit the Northern Territories, killing several people and destroying many, many buildings, both commercial and residential. Budget problems since the collapse of the Soviet Union had meant lack of attention to this remote area and officials were unprepared for the disaster, which according to a Russian government official left ninety percent of Shikotan’s people homeless. The earthquake devastated public infrastructure, too, with water and sewage systems broken up and electricity lost. Japan was ready to aid in rescue efforts by dispatching Self-Defense Force troops as well as to finance rebuilding, but such gestures foundered on the Northern Territories dispute, and, in the end, Japan sent only emergency humanitarian assistance, though the amount was substantial. The earthquake led to a major exodus of people from the islands, half the population of Kunashir and Shikotan leaving when the government offered to resettle them in central Russia. Some returned later, however. Troop cuts helped decrease the population of the South Kurils to approximately half of the Soviet high of about 25,000. Russia’s economic problems and consequent restriction of aid to the Kurils led South Kurils residents to vote in 1997 by seventy percent to return the islands to Japan. The next

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year, islanders proposed leasing the disputed islands to Japan for ninety-nine years.18 But with the rise of nationalism in Russia and secession movements in regions of Russia such as Chechnya, Russian leaders would not consider these proposals. Japan and Russia agreed in 1997 to sign a peace treaty by 2000 and Boris Yeltsin reaffirmed this in 1999. Since then, no progress has come in the Northern Territories dispute despite the promises, and no peace treaty has been adopted. About 16,800 Russians now live on the islands, according to a late 2006 estimate. These islanders include people who had been lured to the Kurils after the war by promised subsidies and economic opportunities. To their descendants, the islands have always been home. But living conditions have deteriorated since the demise of the Soviet Union, and Kimura Hiroshi, who visited Iturup and Shikotan in 1999, agreed with a Russian reporter that the Northern Territories were already Japanese because their economy was kept alive by Japan, not Russia.19 Meanwhile, in one respect the area is a Japanese tourist attraction, for Cape Nosappu, northeast of Nemuro’s built-up area and the closest place on Hokkaido to the Northern Territories, sports several facilities for visitors: a memorial arch, an eternal flame, a museum explaining Japan’s role in developing the islands and its claim to them, and an observation tower to view the forbidden land. Official policy in Japan urging the return of the Northern Territories has even reached into education, for the issue was made a required part of the social studies curriculum for Japanese students both in junior and senior high school. Moreover, since 1969 the Japanese government has ordered that the Northern Territories be included on all maps of Japan, and current maps reflect this. Many Japanese have been lukewarm about the islands issue, but others continue to feel adamant about the return of the islands. Japan might have asked the International Court of Justice to rule on whether part — or all — of the Northern Territories should be considered part of Japan, but the government has never taken that step, presumably for fear the decision would not be satisfactory. Ainu have weighed in on the dispute. Any time negotiations loomed, Ainu leaders have spoken out claiming Ainu rights to the islands, because Ainu lived there before either Japanese or Russians did. Many vocal Ainu feel that the Japanese desire to reclaim the South Kurils would be just another land grab, another case of Wajin takeover of Ainu land. The stalemate has lasted into the twenty-first century. Russian and Japanese leaders continue to vow to solve the dispute, but it is hard to see how they can, although, as Gilbert Rozman has pointed out, mutual interests such as the desire for closer relations in the face of anxiety about China’s growing might and North Korean intentions could possibly lead to agreement. During the 1970s and 1980s the strategic value of the islands was very important to the Soviet Union, but that issue has receded and more recent analysis suggests that the strategic value was overrated. Since then, weapons development and the end of the Cold War have both been important in decreasing the Kurils’ importance as a bastion of defense. Many of the military installations in the islands have been removed, for their cost could no longer be justified. From the mid 1990s, Japan has been giving economic aid to Russia and helping create joint development projects without tying them to the South Kurils question. Such generosity, if continued, could possibly make return of the islands politically realistic for Russia, but Japanese contributions may have come too late, at a time when Russian leaders find it impossible for political reasons to relinquish any territory. Kimura Hiroshi, however, has argued that Russian leaders have ceded other territory, for example signing over the Crimea to Ukraine in 1997.20

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Russians apparently remain ambivalent about the Northern Territories question. Officials and citizens in Sakhalin Province want to have a say in decisions regarding the islands. On Northern Territories Day in recent years, Russians have demonstrated in opposition outside the Japanese consulate in Sakhalin. Other protests have criticized the Japanese inclusion of the disputed islands on maps of Japan. A November 2004 survey found minimal support in Russia for returning the disputed islands to Japan but a poll conducted across the nation in mid–2005 reported that just over half the people who were questioned supported the return of all the Northern Territories to Japan, with only a quarter of the respondents opposed. In late 2006, as he was concluding his service as Russian ambassador to Japan, Alexander Losyukov blasted the “rigid public” in both nations for the stalement. And Japan’s Foreign Minister Aso Taro suggested that Japan try to settle the question by agreeing to an equal division of the land area of the islands, though after a furor arose, he denied that Tokyo was serious about such a proposal.21 Meanwhile, in the twenty-first century new Russian families have moved to the disputed islands and with Russia’s economy becoming stronger, Kurils residents were seeing real improvements by 2007. An airport is being built on Iturup and after it opens— scheduled for 2010 — life should become even easier. Russian President Vladimir Putin implied in 2004 that Russia could return Shikotan and the Habomais to Japan, which was refused, as usual. The next year he visited Japan, but on the Northern Territories issue, he and Japan’s Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro announced only that in the future they would work towards a settlement and in 2006 the Russian government announced plans for substantial investment in South Kurils infrastructure, apparently a hint that Russia had no plans for ever ceding any of the islands to Japan. In 2008, Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo and President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia announced their intent to pursue a settlement, but such resolves have been announced before, with no result. Why cannot Russia and Japan reach an agreement? Russia does not want to give up land, and the Northern Territories may still have some strategic significance. Some mineral resources on the islands and, much more important, the fisheries, have considerable economic value. Also, as long as the controversy remains unsettled, Russia holds a card that can be used in bargaining with Japan. Whatever payment Japan might offer for the return of the islands could not compensate for their loss. To Japan, the issue has taken on symbolic value; no government could agree to give up what is widely regarded as part of the nation’s inherent territory. The Japanese feel they have a moral claim to the islands and that the Russians are occupiers of Japanese land. Thus without the Northern Territories, Japan is imperfect. One Japanese suggestion is that Russia should return the Northern Territories to Japan just as the United Kingdom returned Hong Kong to China. Billboards supporting the Japanese claim to the Northern Territories continue to be seen in Hokkaido cities, from Nemuro to Chitose to Hakodate, yet most of the Japanese public seems unconcerned. Is there a solution? One obvious compromise would be a reversion of the Habomais and Shikotan to Japan, but unless Japan and Russia both see advantages in resolving the issue, a stalement will continue, and in each nation, domestic politics will always play a role. The Habomais are uninhabited now except for border guards and in 1984 the Soviet government declared about two-thirds of the Habomais, Shikotan and Kunashir a nature preserve. Only a very few scientists are allowed to visit these places, and some local species

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As World War II was ending, the U.S.S.R. took control of the Japanese islands offshore from Nemuro, some of which Japan continues to claim as her territory. “Return the Northern Territories” (Japan’s name for the disputed islands) says this sign, seen in Nemuro in 2004.

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At one end of the Hakodate tram line stands this sign requesting Russia restore to Japan the “Northern Territories,” Japanese islands seized by the U.S.S.R. at the end of World War II.

now endangered in Hokkaido are thriving on these islands, most impressively the world’s largest owl, Blakiston’s fish owl. These days much of the Kuril chain is a nature-lover’s paradise, with seals and sea lions found in great numbers on some tiny islets and large colonies of small foxes cavorting about various uninhabited islands. Wildflowers of a northern landscape abound. This is a volcanic landscape and here and there are fumaroles and the smell of sulfur. If one should be lucky enough to travel there on a day that is not foggy, some of the islands, like Yankicha in the central Kurils (which the Japanese call Ushichi or Ushishiru), are among the world’s most beautiful unspoiled places. Russia’s economic problems have led to depletion of ranger protection of the islands, however. Some people suggest that the entire Kuril chain be made an international park in order to protect the Kurils’ fragile beauty. UNESCO has recommended a joint Japan-Russia program to preserve the Shiretoko Peninsula in Hokkaido along with the disputed islands. Should Japan ever regain sovereignty over the Northern Territories, pressure for both their development and their environmental protection would be intense. If reversion of the islands were someday to occur, Hokkaido would benefit from whatever policies Japan subsequently adopted for the islands.

The fisheries Sea life remains a significant resource for the Dosanko; thus it is not surprising that relations between Japan and Russia regarding fishing are crucially important to Hokkaido.

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Sometimes fisheries disputes between the two nations seem to be a way of life; even in the late nineteenth century Japan and Russia argued over rights to sea life. The Treaty of Portsmouth signed in 1907 after the Russo-Japanese War included accords renewed in the 1920s and 1930s under which each nation’s people could fish in Russian Far Eastern waters, but problems nevertheless arose. In the thirties, both Japan and the Soviet Union dispatched destroyers to protect their fishermen in the North Pacific; Soviets accused Japanese at sea and workers at their facilities on the Soviet shore of spying. Richard Storry in Otaru heard rumors of imminent war with the Soviets whenever fishing negotiations became tense, and largely because fishery disputes grew so heated, the Soviets closed their Hakodate consulate in December 1938. During World War II, agreements between the two nations allowed a little Japanese fishing in Soviet waters, but this ended with the Soviet invasion of Karafuto and the Kurils.22 At the beginning of the American occupation of Japan, General MacArthur established strict limits within which Japanese fishermen could operate, and waters east of Hokkaido remained out of bounds. (Japan also lost fishing grounds around Korea and Taiwan as a result of the war.) Most of the Japanese men whom the Soviets had deported from the Kurils were fishermen, and many who settled in Nemuro continued to fish in waters now off limits, often close to the Kurils. When the Soviet government incorporated the Kurils into the U.S.S.R. in February 1946, the declaration included a 12-mile claim of territorial waters around the islands. During that spring, Soviet officials captured a Japanese boat for illegal fishing in Kuril Islands waters, the first of many such seizures. When caught, fishermen faced punishment by Soviet authorities, including fines and confiscation of boats, even imprisonment. Sometimes Soviets fired on Japanese fishermen and sometimes, fishermen charged, Russian patrol boats appeared in Japanese waters. Other times, engine problems or the generally bad weather — the fog —could cause a boat, Russian or Japanese, to veer off course. Because of food shortages in Japan, SCAP several times increased the area in which the Japanese could fish, but this did not include waters around the Soviet-held Kurils. Japanese fishermen saw more and more Soviet patrol boats near Nemuro and reported Soviets holding and questioning more and more Japanese fishermen. Despite these confrontations, apparently no official contacts regarding fishing took place between Japan and Russia. Meanwhile, the Hokkaido Prefectural Assembly argued that access to the Kuril fishing grounds could help ease food shortages. Nemuro’s economic problems were particularly acute. This small city probably suffered more than any other place in Japan from Soviet actions. Its prewar position as an entrepot for trade with the Kurils had, of course, abruptly ended with Soviet seizure of the islands. Now Nemuro had to absorb many refugees from the Kurils, thousands of them, but their traditional fishing areas were unavailable. People in Nemuro were especially active in the Northern Territories reversion movement, for the loss of fishing grounds was a major blow. Despite the refugees, Nemuro’s population dropped by several thousand because of the city’s poor economy. Before the war, Nemuro fish processors had employed some twenty-eight hundred people but in 1947 only about ten percent as many were working in the canneries. In the 1950s, Nemuro looked “down at heel and squalid,” F. C. Jones wrote, the very picture of a place that had suffered “economic adversity.”23 The city meanwhile was gaining a dubious reputation as a center of espionage. By mid–1951, the Russians had captured 110 Japanese boats in the Nemuro region,

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though after collecting fines they returned all but seventeen of the vessels. Often, fishermen detained and later released swore they had not entered Russian waters; tricky currents could sweep boats where they did not intend to go. Sometimes Soviet agents stole fishing boats in Nemuro and sailed them the few miles to territory now held by the U.S.S.R.24 In February 1952 United States General Matthew Ridgway complained to the Soviets about the seizure of Japanese fishing boats, but the Soviets nevertheless claimed thirty-six Japanese fishing vessels that year. At the end of the year ten of these boats and sixty-seven of their men were still held. Once the occupation ended in 1952 and Japan was once again sovereign, Japanese could resume distant fishing, but challenges and disputes over fishing between Japan and her northern neighbor have arisen again and again. The fishermen of Hokkaido have suffered most, for Japan’s northern fishing industry has been centered in Hokkaido ports. In August 1953, the Japanese detained a Russian fishing boat within a mile of the northern Hokkaido coast and arrested its four crew members, including the captain. Apparently, the boat was supposed to pick up a Soviet spy who had, however, been apprehended in Japan. In late June 1954 it was a Japanese fishing boat that was in trouble. The Mikasa Maru went aground in fog on an uninhabited island in the Kurils. Its men may have been fishing illegally, but repeated radio calls reporting a disabled vessel and very limited food supplies went unanswered by the Soviets. Days later, fearing the men faced illness, even death, from exposure and starvation, Japan sent a Coast Guard cutter to the rescue. This was the first Japanese official vessel to enter the Soviet zone since the war, a reversal from prewar days when Soviet officials had to get special permission to enter a closed port in the Kurils to rescue a stranded Soviet crew. Proceeding to the site of the grounding, the patrol boat sent out two rafts only to be ordered away by Soviet soldiers with guns. Reluctantly, the Coast Guard abandoned the rescue attempt, but unexpectedly, the Soviets returned the Mikasa Maru crew to Japan in mid–July. The men said they had been detained because Soviet officials suspected that the boat was purposely beached so that the Japanese could “spy for the Americans.”25 A few days later, another Japanese fishing boat collided with a Soviet vessel in the northern Kurils and sank. After about a month, the Soviets released the boat’s crew members. In August, Japanese patrol boats stole into Soviet-held waters to rescue a crew when another boat went aground on an island only about three miles from Hokkaido’s Cape Nosappu. In the spring of 1955, Soviets stepped up harassment of Japanese fishing boats, sending more than ten patrol boats to the Habomais. Japan’s Maritime Safety Board responded and dispatched vessels to help protect the fishermen. A group of crab fishermen released that year after five months of Soviet detention complained of poor treatment. All they were given to eat, they noted, was “black bread and soup three times a day,”26 not a diet that would appeal to Japanese. The U.S.S.R. continued to detain Japanese fishermen, and in March 1956 the Soviet government declared that foreign fishermen would need Soviet permission to operate even in international waters near the territory of the U.S.S.R.— including the disputed islands of the South Kurils. While the two countries discussed a possible peace treaty during 1955 and 1956, the Soviets announced new restrictions on foreign fishing vessels. Japan was anxious to protect her fishing industry and wanted productive fishing negotiations even if the two nations could not agree on a treaty, so Japanese officials insisted on separating fishing from other issues. Japan and the U.S.S.R. eventually reached a fishing accord. Provisions included the maximum number of fish to be taken, delimitation of the fishing areas,

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length of the fishing season and even details regarding fishing nets. In addition, the two nations would cooperate in marine rescues and resource conservation. In succeeding years Japanese and Soviet officials met annually to set fishing quotas. The talks sometimes extended for two or three months before an agreement emerged, and fleets had to wait each year for an accord in order to begin fishing. (Sometimes Japanese officials allowed boats to proceed to fishing grounds early so they would be in place when the quota for that year was finally set.) In some years, extended negotiations meant postponing the start of the fishing season. Japanese commentary suggested that Soviets purposely dragged out the talks so that Japanese negotiators would have to choose between accepting the Soviet proposals or losing an entire fishing season.27 Japanese fishermen suffered annual anxiety over whether they would be able to continue the work that was their livelihood. If fishermen could not fish, or if their fishing was limited, paying fixed costs for boats and equipment would be difficult. And year by year Japan’s permitted catch saw a decrease. The focus of the talks in some of the years after the 1956 agreement was safe fishing; the Japanese proposed that certain areas around the South Kurils be open to Japanese fishermen with no threat of capture. Seizures continued, however, though slightly fewer than before the accord, and safe fishing continues to be a Japanese concern. In 1962 the U.S.S.R. decided that Japanese could not harvest sea products near Shikotan and the Habomais; instead, they would have to buy fish and kombu from the Soviets. The Japanese suspected that Soviet officials did not want Japanese fishermen near Soviet military installations. Some two hundred Japanese boats went out anyway, and the Soviets did detain some of them. More confrontations with fishermen ensued. In the nineteen years after the war ended, the Soviet Union confiscated 810 Japanese fishing boats and imprisoned more than 6000 crewmen.28 And the stalemate over fishing continued, some Japanese fishermen being held for a year or more by Soviet authorities. At least one fisherman was captured three times. A man who was returned to Japan in 1970 reported that in the prison where he had been held, men were required to work in quarries throughout bitter winter weather, and even the sleeping quarters were unhealthily cold, well below freezing, causing illness as well as discomfort. The possibility of internment in the Soviet Union meant that fishermen bought insurance to sustain their families in case of capture. At the end of 1975, the Japanese government agreed to pay compensation to all fishermen who had been detained by the U.S.S.R. since 1946, the payments based on length of detention, damage to vessels and loss of income. Families would also receive funds if a fisherman had died. Government relief measures have at times also been available for fishermen unable to ply their trade due to increased Soviet restrictions. Japanese fishermen continued to fish in Kurils waters because of all the fish there, because they believed the waters belonged to Japan, and because dark of night or frequent fog could hide fishing boats from Russian patrol boats. Also, fishermen continued to protest Soviet interference in international waters. Meanwhile, the Soviets tried to recruit captured fishermen as spies in exchange for permission to fish without harassment or in prohibited areas. Some Japanese have collaborated and in the late 1960s apparently smuggled out several U.S. deserters through Nemuro via the Kuril Islands. Other Japanese fishermen sometimes supplied information or consumer goods to the Soviets. Informers among the fishermen remained a concern for several decades, but Japanese fishermen have also furnished information to their own government, and some were actually double agents, apprising the Japanese military of Soviet installations on the islands.29

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Japanese fishermen faced problems both near the Kurils and near Hokkaido. Soviet seizures of Japanese fishing boats continued, tending to increase when the Soviets wanted to make a political point, for example against the visit of a Chinese delegation to Nemuro in 1975. Meanwhile, the Japanese became concerned because an expanded Soviet fishing fleet had taken to fishing in waters off Hokkaido, trawlers and large mother ships, sometimes with accompanying refueling tankers. Moreover, the trawlers often tore Japanese fishermen’s gill nets. Despite a 1975 agreement to defuse the issue, in 1976 a Soviet ship even dragged one Japanese boat for about an hour after catching the rope to its net and ignoring whistle signals from the small vessel. Finally the rope broke, freeing the boat. In one year’s fishing season, Hokkaido fishermen estimated that they had lost more than a million dollars in damaged equipment and fish they did not catch. After Victor Belenko flew to Hokkaido and defected to the United States in September 1976, Japanese fishermen complained that Soviet damage to the fisheries off the Japanese coast barely outside the three mile limit increased substantially, apparently in reprisal for Japanese assistance to Belenko and the dismantling of his plane. The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force and the U.S. Navy were also often active in the seas around Hokkaido, and fishermen sometimes reported that friendly military vessels tore fishing nets. In the 1970s, nations around the world began claiming 12-mile limits of territorial waters, while the Japanese government still recognized the 3-mile limit that had long been the international standard. In Japan, a nation in which sea products were central to the diet, freedom of the seas was an important principle. Also, officials feared that imposing a wider limit would lose their ships free passage in foreign areas. A 12-mile limit would mean Japanese sovereignty over Tsugaru Strait between Hokkaido and Honshu, and the government was wary of restricting Soviets using this passage to sail to Vladivostok and nearby ports. It was a touchy issue. In addition to 12-mile territorial waters, nations began to claim 200-nautical-mile fishing zones. This was a blow, for more than one-third of Japan’s 1975 catch had been taken within two hundred miles of other nations. In December 1976, the U.S.S.R. announced such a zone. Hokkaido fisheries concerns immediately began urging the Japanese government to implement a similar zone. Soon, harassment of Japanese fishing began in the areas newly declared under Soviet jurisdiction, where Hokkaido fishermen had traditionally worked. And once the new Soviet zone was established, many South Korean as well as Japanese fishermen moved to waters off Hokkaido and local fishermen began to complain that South Koreans were frequently — if accidentally —cutting Japanese nets. The two nations discussed the matter amicably, and the South Korean government agreed to compensate Japanese fishermen. Deciding that new international practices made wider territorial waters and fishing zones necessary, Japan created its own expanded waters in 1977. (More than forty nations had already taken such action.) According to speculation, Japan established a new 12-mile territorial limit specifically to stop Soviet fishing near the coast.30 Creation of the 200mile zone was a step taken only reluctantly, because it contradicted the principle of freedom of the seas. Under the new legislation, fishermen from nations which had their own 200-mile zones would have to pay a fee and acquire a permit before fishing in Japan’s zone. These changes required new fishing agreements between Japan and the U.S.S.R., but both nations were determined to maintain rights to the Northern Territories, complicating the negotiations. Japanese officials kept stressing that they were keeping the fishing

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and Northern Territories issues separate. Hokkaido Governor Dogakinai Naohiro accompanied Japanese delegates to Moscow in April 1977 because of the huge impact the talks could have on Hokkaido fishermen. He reported that the Soviet fisheries minister expressed sympathy with the Dosanko over their difficulties, though it is hard to say that this affected negotiations at all. Japan wanted to reach an agreement in time to allow fishing during the 1977 season. Wakkanai residents demonstrated publicly to protest against imminent stringent limits. A dramatic photograph in the Japanese press showed Wakkanai’s harbor crowded with fishing boats forced to return to port at the beginning of April when talks between the two nations deadlocked and the Soviets shut down the herring fishery.31 The negotiations took so long that the Docho made loans available to desperate fishermen. Japanese officials protested that the U.S.S.R. should not extend the two 200-mile limit around the Northern Territories and charged that the new limit was a ploy to obtain Japanese recognition of Soviet sovereignty over the disputed islands. The Soviets ignored the complaint. Japan claimed that its own 200-mile zone included the area around the Northern Territories, meaning that Japanese and Soviet claims overlapped — but the Soviets controlled the area. Finally, the two nations agreed on a temporary measure in order to allow fishing during the 1977 season, but only for a decreased Japanese catch. Japan and the Soviet Union have set fishing quotas annually in each subsequent year. Starting in 1978 the Japanese have had to pay a “cooperation fee” to fish in Soviet waters, the announced purpose being to support fishery conservation efforts. Such a fee is still assessed. From the mid–1980s, the Soviets insisted on drastically reduced quotas and the right to as large a Soviet catch in Japanese waters as the Japanese took from Soviet waters. Some years, negotiations have proceeded more or less smoothly, but in others, such as 1985, they dragged on and on, effectively shortening the season during which the Japanese could fish; even in the twenty-first century, Japan complains that Russia continues this practice. Not only the Soviet 200-mile zone upset Japanese fishermen; the United States also established such a zone. Between them, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. thereby controlled almost all of the area in the North Pacific Ocean in which Japanese had previously fished. Reflecting the concern of Hokkaido fishermen, Kushiro Mayor Yamaguchi Tetsuo appealed to North Pacific Fisheries Management Council members at their 1977 meeting in Alaska for “generous access to fish in U.S. waters.”32 The two nations reached agreement quickly, but Japan would have to limit its catch and pay fees to fish in the new American 200-mile zone. Hokkaido fishermen expressed relief that the accord came soon, so that fishing would not be delayed, but they also suggested that their government, not the fishermen, should pay the new charges. Officials did make some funds available to compensate the fishermen that year. Since adoption of the 200-mile zone, the United States has occasionally temporarily detained Japanese boats and fined fishermen for illegal fishing in the American zone and there have sometimes been minor disagreements over regulations. Nemuro population decreased substantially after the Soviet and American 200-mile limits came into force. The number of Nemuro fishing boats dropped by half during the year after the Soviets announced the new zone, and to revive the city’s fortunes, officials lobbied Tokyo to allow the port open to Soviets. Since 1991, Russian vessels have been calling at Nemuro, dropping off fish and picking up merchandise such as secondhand Japanese appliances.

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Over the years, separate agreements concluded between Japan and her northern neighbor have covered kombu, important for people who gather this seaweed in the Nemuro area. Japanese had long harvested it from the very productive beds around tiny Kaigara Island, the closest of the Habomai Islands to Nemuro. Once the Soviets controlled the Northern Territories, however, kombu, like fish, caused recurring disputes, confrontation and negotiation. People in the U.S.S.R. did not use the sea product, but Japanese who tried to harvest it often found their boats confiscated. In the early 1960s, as a stalement persisted, Japanese kombu gatherers decided not to try any harvesting near Kaigara Island. Eventually, negotiations between Japanese and Russians allowed the gathering to proceed; in exchange for payments to the U.S.S.R., the Japanese kombu fleet would not be subject to harassment or confiscation. However, the Soviets stopped kombu gathering when establishing a 200 mile fishing zone, and not until 1981 could the two nations reach a new kombu accord. With an agreement in place, more than three hundred Japanese boats could head to Kaigara each September day to harvest a product the Soviets did not use. Since then, the kombu agreement has stayed mostly intact despite occasional problems, and the Japanese continue to pay a required fee to gather the sea plant. During the negotiations in various years, by the way, it was not the Japanese government that reached agreement with the Soviets on the kombu issue. Instead, a fisheries industry organization carried out the bargaining. The government thus would not be put in a position that might be construed as a recognition of Soviet sovereignty over Kaigara Island. Kombu collection in this area continued with little dispute until 2006, when the Russians did not meet with the Japanese to negotiate payments and conditions. Russia’s fishing industry has suffered since the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991. Economic subsidies to the Russian Far East from the national government ended. These had included funds for equipment and repair as well as for fishermen’s salaries. Russian fishermen began smuggling increased numbers of fish to Japan, meaning less tax collected by the Russian government. Illegal Japanese fishing in waters claimed by Russia also increased, and in the mid–1990s Russian officials took measures to curb poaching by Japanese fishermen, beginning to fire at foreign boats and to capture more Japanese fishermen. The Russians had been using radar for some years to spot even small fishing boats, yet the superior speed of Japanese fishing craft and their advanced technological equipment enabled many fishermen to operate in prohibited zones without interception. In response to the changed conditions, Russia and Japan opened wide-ranging negotiations over fishing. After several years of meetings, the two countries signed an agreement in 1998 to allow limited Japanese “safe” fishing within twelve miles of the Northern Territories in exchange for Japanese aid to the Russian Far East. Not since 1945 had any Japanese fishermen operated legally in those waters. With the opening up of the Russian economy, private interests bought some government-run businesses. Joint fishing ventures and other cooperative operations between Japanese and Russian companies began; Hokkaido fishing organizations have played a major role in reaching agreements. Also, Russian fishermen began the legal sale of their catches in Japan, where high demand meant high prices. Japanese ports thus saw Russian fishing boats making more and more visits. After delivering their catches, the Russian crews have loaded their boats with Japanese consumer goods. Nemuro is well-positioned in this trade except that its historic port, on the Okhotsk Sea, is icebound for about a third of each year. The city now has an alternate port at Hanasaki just three miles away, on the Pacific Ocean side of the Nemuro peninsula. Hanasaki remains ice-free.

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Poaching and smuggling have become important to the Kurils economy, where more than one-third of the catch has been illegal, Russian fishermen sneaking into Japanese waters with a contraband catch to sell at Nemuro or Kushiro while Japanese fish without permission near the Kurils. Too often, Japanese officials have not punished Japanese fishermen, because Japan did not recognize the Northern Territories as foreign territory.33 By 2007, most of the crab brought to Japan from Russia was illegally caught, but signs showed that perhaps the governments of the two nations would take serious action to curb the smuggling. The importance of the fisheries continues to affect the Northern Territories debate. In recent years, some in Nemuro suggest that Japan should try to reach compromise on the dispute, asking to obtain only Shikotan and the Habomais and waiting until later to claim Kunashir and Iturup. Many Nemuro fishermen may be interested only in fish, not in return of all of the disputed islands. They would be happy if they could work legally in Shikotan and Habomais waters.34 As the world’s population has increased but fishing stocks in the oceans have declined, Japan has been able to obtain smaller and smaller quotas of fish from other nations’ waters. Restrictions upon fishing have not only been imposed by foreign nations; international regulations also limit fisheries on the high seas. Conservation has become more important around the world and though fish remain a crucial part of the Japanese diet, Hokkaido fishermen have an ever harder time and Japanese firms have had to buy more and more fisheries products from foreign concerns. The number of Japanese fishermen has declined, and among items sold in Hokkaido to Russians in recent years are used fishing boats. Controversy over fishing is not a burning issue between Japan and Russia these days, but in fifty years, from 1946 to 1996, Japan’s northern neighbor confiscated 1775 fishing vessels and detained 14,862 fishermen.35 Some were kept for as many as four years. In November 2005, the Russians seized a Japanese boat for the first time since 1997. Three weeks later the boat and its crew were returned to Japan, but the incident shows that fishing remains a potential flash point, as demonstrated in August 2006 when Russian border patrolmen shot and killed a Nemuro fisherman in a fishing boat apparently poaching in Russian waters. Less seriously, in 2007 Japanese authorities arrested a Russian sailor after he took an inflatable boat to Hokkaido in order to purchase a can of beer. Late that year, Japanese and Russian authorities agreed to cooperate on a number of fisheries issues, from preventing illegal activities to issuing fishing permits promptly. Just as with the Northern Territories dispute, Hokkaido would see nothing but gain should fishing relations improve. As long as fish remain central to Japanese cuisine and an important part of the Hokkaido economy, periodic altercations with Russia and political pressure from Hokkaido fishermen and politicians over rights to the resource can be expected to continue.

Better relations Despite disputes between Japan and Russia over the Northern Territories and fishing restrictions, relations between the two nations have improved. Even during the Cold War years, Soviets and Dosanko made some friendly gestures to each other. The Japanese Foreign Office opposed Soviet participation in the World Speed Skating Championships in Sapporo in 1954, but finally allowed seven U.S.S.R. skaters to enter Japan. The Japanese

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crowd cheered the Soviet skaters, who won the top three places in the meet, and the media noted the visiting skaters’ popularity in Sapporo. In the 1960s, a Hokkaido trade cooperative and a Soviet counterpart agreed on a barter plan under which lumber from the U.S.S.R. would be exchanged for various items, including vegetables, cloth, tires and rope, and after a coal mine accident in Yubari in 1965, the Soviet Miners’ Union invited injured miners to Sakhalin for treatment of carbon monoxide poisoning. The miners showed improvement there. Later examples of good relations between Hokkaido and her northern neighbor abound. In 1977 the Soviet Union chose Sapporo as the site for the first Soviet cultural exchange center to be opened outside the communist world, and before the end of the 1980s, Soviets and Japanese met in the Soviet Union Far East Region-Hokkaido Goodwill Games. In 1989, the Soviet government allowed Japanese journalists to visit the Northern Territories; reporters from the Hokkaido Shimbun took the initial trip, and for the first time in about forty years, people in Japan were able to learn about life in the Kurils. In the later years of the twentieth century, Hokkaido began striving for economic development through closer ties with Russia. Initiatives included trade expansion, study missions both to and from Russia and support for Sapporo’s Slavic Research Center. The Hokkaido government opened an office in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Sakhalin’s capital city (and the one-time Japanese city of Toyohara). In November 1998, the governors of Hokkaido and Sakhalin signed an agreement to develop economic and cultural ties. Incidentally, Hokkaido Governor Hori Tatsuya had been born on Sakhalin, but his trip to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, where the agreement was signed, was the first time he had been on that island since 1945. Sapporo has developed a sister city relationship with the Siberian city Novosibirsk and recent Hokkaido governors have made a number of official visits to the U.S.S.R., mainly to promote trade. Dosanko interested in ties with Russia note that while the Northern Territories dispute strains relations at the national level, local relations can proceed. “Moscow and Tokyo are far away, while Sakhalin and Hokkaido are very close,” noted a Sakhalin administrator in 2006.36 For decades after the war, people wanting to travel between Hokkaido and Sakhalin had to fly via Honshu and then the Soviet mainland, but scheduled plane service between Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Hokkaido now operates, and half a century after shipping service ended between Wakkanai and Otomari (the southern Sakhalin — or Karafuto— port now called Korsakov), ferries and cargo vessels once again began to operate between the two cities. In October 2002, service began between Otaru and Vanino, a port on the Russian mainland several hundred miles north of Vladivostok. From Vanino, goods can be sent by rail to a connection with the main trans–Siberian line and on to Moscow or St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, among the Japanese goods shipped to Sakhalin are used cars and heavy machinery, while the main export from the island to Japan is timber. Russian ship visits to Hokkaido ports have increased dramatically, with twelve times as many ships coming at the end of the decade of the 1990s as at the beginning. The crewmen purchase all sorts of goods in the Hokkaido ports, from cars to food and medicine. Comparatively, trade between Russia and Hokkaido has outstripped trade between Russia and the rest of Japan, but some Sakhalin residents fear that if the Northern Territories are returned to Japan, the Japanese will lose all interest in trading with their northern neighbor Some of the trade between Russia and Hokkaido has ties to organized crime. Japanese boats have been known to carry items to bribe Russian officials. Japanese gangsters— the

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yakuza— and the Russian “fish mafia” have been involved in illegal fishing, but more recently they have participated mainly in processing and selling fish caught by Russians. Drug trafficking by Russians to Hokkaido has also emerged as a problem and, of course, Japanese sometimes find it handy to blame theft in Hokkaido on Russians wanting to smuggle the purloined goods to Russia and sell them there. In Otaru, Nemuro and Wakkanai, many trilingual signs appear today, in Japanese, English and Russian. In these Hokkaido port cities, a western visitor may be assumed to be Russian, while in the rest of Japan, he will be taken for an American. Russians on shore leave in Hokkaido port cities have at times become drunk and violent, and as the news media plays up such incidents, some Japanese are wary of Russian visitors. Because some Russian ships’ crew members have behaved badly, several Otaru bathhouse operators banned all foreigners. A few plaintiffs sued and were awarded damages in 2002. Many Russian ships now dock in Nemuro and signs welcoming the sailors to the city in Russian are common. Even a small Nemuro information center for Russian seamen has opened. Russian fishermen are now a vital part of Nemuro’s economy, both for the sea products they bring and for their purchases; approximately twenty thousand Russian fishermen come to Hanasaki port in Nemuro each year. But in 2006, almost half of the surviving Japanese repatriated from the Kurils after World War II were living in Nemuro and the city continues to sport signs demanding the return of the Northern Territories. Wakkanai also has many Russian visitors. In 1990, a group of teachers and children from Sakhalin arrived, the first time since the war that any Soviets had been admitted to the city. By 2000, the number of Russians granted permits to visit Wakkanai outnumbered the city’s population. Since the fishing industry has been struggling in recent years, Wakkanai officials suggest that increasing ties with Russia could help the city’s economy. No longer does Wakkanai perceive itself as the defensive frontier against the Soviet Union across the strait. Just as Kuril Islands Russians come to Nemuro to shop these days, Wakkanai officials want easy entry procedures to encourage Sakhalin residents to make shopping trips to Hokkaido. But smuggling between Russia and Japan continues, and in Wakkanai, officials have also become concerned about the number of automobile accidents involving Russians. The other two cities where Russian visits have had an impact in recent years are Otaru and Hakodate. In Otaru, as early as 1991 the first Japanese duty-free shop geared for the Russian market opened for business. In Hakodate, Russia’s Far Eastern National University has a branch campus, and in November 2008, a Russian foundation opened a Russian center at the university. Patriarch Alexey II of the Russian Orthodox Church visited the city in 2000, well more than a century after Japan’s first Orthodox church opened in Hakodate. These days, one sees positive signs of Russia-Japan cooperation in many fields. Oil and gas resources off the Sakhalin coast are being developed, and Hokkaido firms have been active in supporting industries, including transportation and construction. As the oil industry in Sakhalin grows, so do fears of possible accidental damage to sea and shore, and Sakhalin and Hokkaido have agreed to cooperate on measures to safeguard the environment. In the twenty-first century, Russian and Japanese coast guards have practiced cooperative countermeasures against smuggling and in 2007, the two nations together installed and are now using fiber optic cable under the sea to connect Hokkaido and Sakhalin. In addition, Japan has expressed willingness to help finance a railroad bridge between Hokkaido and Sakhalin.

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A number of Russian fishermen sell their catch in Nemuro these days, and many shops in the city welcome the Russian visitors. The ramen shop at the far left of the picture, photographed in 2002, features the Russian word for “restaurant” on its sign.

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In recent years Japan has extended economic and humanitarian aid to the Russian Far East despite the Northern Territories controversy. Some aid, including food and medicine, has even gone to the disputed islands. Japan has put money into infrastructure, including port facilities on Kunashir and a medical clinic on Shikotan. The Japanese have also responded to individual Russians in need, especially with medical care. When a severely burned three-year-old Russian boy from Sakhalin was brought to a Sapporo hospital in 1990, Japanese officials waived visa requirements for his family. Many Hokkaido Japanese, including school children, contributed funds for his care, and skin used for grafts came from Japanese donors. One case that received wide publicity was that of Sakhalin border official General Vitaly Gamov and his wife. In May 2002, incendiary bottles struck Gamov’s apartment in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, severely injuring him and his wife. Despite being flown to Japan for treatment, General Gamov died in a Sapporo hospital several days later. The Russian mafia drew blame for the attack, because Gamov had been working to stop the lucrative poaching. Cooperation abounds between Russia and Hokkaido, but the Northern Territories and fisheries issues continue to fester. Russia will always loom large in Hokkaido’s future, whatever happens on the international front. If tensions should grow, Hokkaido will be a military center, but if relations remain friendly and positive, trade and visits back and forth will draw Hokkaido ports closer to Russia. Symbolizing the tie between Russia and Hokkaido is the Japanese song Pechika, which describes a family telling stories around the stove. The song features a Russian word that has found a place in Japanese, for pechka in Russian means “stove,” and Russian stoves played an important role in Hokkaido during pioneer days. Russia is on three sides of Hokkaido: the Siberian mainland to the west, Sakhalin to the north and the Kurils to the east. Historian John J. Stephan has noted the great distance between the U.S.S.R. and Japan despite their geographic proximity; “Distant neighbors,” scholars call Japan and Russia.37 One hopes that this distance truly is lessening.

13

Recovery and Development

After the end of World War II, great efforts took place to reconstruct Japan. For Hokkaido, these were years of development but also disaster: new initiatives in infrastructure —from harbors to hydroelectricity — but also decline in some industries, especially mining, some bad years on the farm, a sudden worldwide rise in the cost of oil and a typhoon in 1954 during which a thousand people perished on a sinking ship. As Hokkaido approached its hundredth year of development, these setbacks might have discouraged both the politicians who made funds available for the island and the Dosanko themselves. Was Hokkaido after all too marginal a place for serious and sustained development? But Japan needed Hokkaido, and while sad and exceptional events garnered headlines, development and modernization proceeded and life became more comfortable and more prosperous for most.

Development The first priority for Japan after World War II was recovery. Because of food shortages, officials urged further settlement and extension of agriculture on Hokkaido. Even before the war, Japan had needed to import rice; now, with overseas territories including Manchuria and Korea gone, Hokkaido would be the key to raising more rice and other crops. Another crucial need if agricultural output were to be effective was the restoration of shipping. By 1950, fourteen railroad ferries were available to cross Tsugaru Strait, and Hokkaido’s farm products could once again easily be delivered to the Japanese heartland. At mid-century, the island of Hokkaido had about 4,300,000 people. Urban streets remained unpaved, most towns and farms did not have piped water, most families had no telephones. Farmers still depended largely on horses, not tractors, and Hokkaido had more than 250,000 horses in 1949. Some rural families had no electricity; even in the early 1960s, more than twenty thousand households went without it. More than one hundred rural schools still had no electric power. Only about twenty percent of junior high school graduates went on to high school, at least partly because of school fees. (Elementary and junior high school, both compulsory, were free.) Isolated areas had inadequate medical services and the Docho established mobile clinics to help meet the needs of rural residents. Some families were so poor that they could not afford to eat any of the food they raised to sell, instead subsisting mostly on potatoes. But visionaries saw potential for Hokkaido to become the Japanese equivalent of a national breadbasket as well as a refuge

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Here is a main street in Hakodate. This postcard view probably dates from the 1950s; women appearing in the photograph are not wearing the traditional kimono. Tram cars that look like this one still operate on Hakodate’s main streets.

for some of the extra population on other islands. Moreover, at the end of the war, Hokkaido’s industry was in good shape contrasted to that on the rest of Japan, which had been heavily bombed. (In rebuilding, however, facilities on the other islands incorporated modern, efficient techniques and created new products, leaving Hokkaido industry behind.) The Diet passed the Hokkaido Development Law in 1950, creating the Hokkaido Development Bureau as a special branch of the national government. Tokyo reasoned that because of possible Soviet threats, control of Hokkaido improvement was a matter of national security. A year later, the first of a series of development plans began, calling for strengthening the island’s infrastructure, expanding production in agriculture, fisheries and forestry, and substantially increasing Hokkaido’s population during the next decade. Details of the plans specified the amount of each crop to be grown and of the various minerals to be mined in Hokkaido as well as how transportation facilities would be upgraded. New areas were to be opened to farming, including peat meadows in the Ishikari Valley previously thought unsuitable for agriculture but which with modern reclamation techniques gave promise of becoming productive. New fishing ports would be developed and old ones repaired. Hatcheries, refrigerated warehouses and plants to manufacture ice would be constructed. Hokkaido Governor Machimura Kingo pointed out that unlike the early twentieth century development plans, whose main thrust was to relieve population pressure in the Japanese heartland, postwar plans included the goal of raising the standard of living on Hokkaido. Projects would include housing construction, for example.1

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Plans may be adopted, but accomplishment is what counts. Too often, politics influenced appropriations and too much investment went into already established fields like agriculture instead of into industry. World Bank funds aided in land reclamation, but Japanese financing for the plans was slow in coming. Both Hokkaido officials and central bureaucrats had to approve payments and Tokyo failed to provide ample support. The Hokkaido Shimbun could be critical of development progress, writing in 1957 that plans had “not been for the sake of economic growth of Hokkaido, but for the advantage of politicians.” The newspaper estimated that only half of the first five years’ targets had been met, because neither Tokyo nor the Docho made adequate funds available.2 Though the development plans’ goals were not nearly realized, some projects were set in motion and others were completed. Perhaps most important were the hydroelectric projects, including a large dam on the Ishikari River near Sounkyo— the scenic gorge in Daisetsuzan National Park near the river’s headwaters— and its accompanying power stations. Many Japanese who had been living in lands lost in the war, especially people from Sakhalin, Manchuria and the Kurils, settled on Hokkaido. Otherwise, population did not grow as much as officials wished; just as with every other government scheme to move people to Hokkaido, few responded. The plan set to begin in 1971 included a population goal for the island of six million people. This has not yet been reached. In addition, even in 1957, twelve years after war’s end, the island had a shortage of one hundred thousand housing units. Moreover, funds were short, and new settlers did not have the capital needed to begin successful farming operations. Most refugees had arrived with none of their possessions. Land clearing for new farming ventures was much more difficult than it should have been because American postwar occupation regulations regarding oil conservation severely restricted use of machinery such as bulldozers. While Tokyo encouraged agricultural production in Hokkaido, the weather did not always cooperate. When the 1956 growing season was extremely cold, some ninety percent of Hokkaido’s food crops failed, and because the Soviet Union was harassing Japanese fishermen and limiting their catch, provisions were very short. The families in most dire need were repatriates from Manchuria settled in areas marginal for agriculture because that was where land was available. These refugees came to Hokkaido with little or nothing and tried to establish farms, but they faced poor seasons in both 1953 and 1954. The nearly total crop failure in 1956 when summer high temperatures often did not climb above 56o F. left them near starvation. Hokkaido police reported that conditions were so bad that some families sold their daughters, who then were often forced into prostitution. The Japanese and Hokkaido governments worked to assist destitute farmers with public works jobs, loans, subsidies, donated rice and, for children, school lunches. (This helped encourage school attendance.) The United Nations donated food; so did Japanese and foreign charities. Thailand and Burma made extra rice available and the U.S. Air Force sent three planes full of rice — 42,000 pounds of it — to Hokkaido for the hungry populace. Not only farmers suffered in 1956; fishermen had a poor year too, but bureaucratic red tape meant that the government’s relief rice could go only to farmers, not fishermen. Meanwhile, Docho employees received their regular year-end bonuses, prompting criticism that these funds should go instead to families in need. The Japan Times wrote of the plight of Omu, a town on Hokkaido’s northeast coast. With government encouragement, a dozen or more families had moved to the area after the war to create a farming community. But unfavorable soil plus several years of excep-

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tionally cold temperatures had reduced the families almost to destitution. They blamed the government for sending them to such an inhospitable place. (A newsman visiting Omu made a point of reporting that these people even had to use their heating stoves in the summer!) Farmers in Shibecha, an inland settlement north of Kushiro, told a similar story. They had first settled the isolated spot in 1945 but the cold weather in the 1950s defeated their efforts.3 After the disastrous 1956 season, both public and private efforts continued research on cold weather agriculture. “Always a food-deficit area, Hokkaido must still import much of its rice and wheat,” John D. Eyre wrote in 1959.4 From the 1960s, government has taken the leading role in agricultural planning, land clearing and reclamation, so the individual farmer has not had to bear so much of the heavy cost of opening new lands. Farm organizations also have urged measures to promote and help support shifts to crops and types of farming that promise more success. The agricultural cooperative movement has played a prominent role in Hokkaido. A 1946 law set down the framework for cooperatives, which are run by farmers and their employees, not the government. Among the many services the cooperatives offer are leasing farm machinery to their members and processing crops. The island’s umbrella farm organization, Hokuren, searches for market opportunities for Hokkaido products, and Hokuren and local cooperative units also carry out many other activities to assist farm communities, from producing seeds to making loans. Agricultural success remained inconsistent as yields varied greatly during the early postwar years. After extensive storm damage on the island in 1961, Sapporo’s sister city, Portland, arranged for shipment of five thousand tons of Oregon hay to Hokkaido. The 1964 Hokkaido rice crop was only half as large as usual and the very cold spring in 1965 delayed planting. The cold weather put off planting for so long that when the time finally came, Self-Defense troops helped get the seedlings set out quickly. Suicides and even cases of infanticide among farm families were reported that year after excessively cold weather damaged both rice and wheat plantings. Prospects were so bad that Docho officials investigated the possibility of helping Hokkaido farmers emigrate to Brazil. From late October 1965 through February 1966, official and private agencies such as the Red Cross amassed funds to aid Hokkaido farmers. In 1966, in addition to cold, early summer typhoon damage, an August deluge of rain and September frost caused problems. Sometimes harvests fail, sometimes they are too bountiful; by the early 1980s, Japan was facing a rice glut, and this put pressure on Hokkaido farmers as well as others to decrease plantings. Milk, too, was in oversupply. Other crops showed promise; for example, the sugar beet, introduced unsuccessfully in the nineteenth century, has been profitable in more recent years. A beet factory opened in Obihiro in 1919 and after World War II the government encouraged sugar beet production anew as Japan, shorn of Taiwan, had no domestic source of cane sugar. Government officials encouraged farmers in the Abashiri-Kitami region to plant the beets after they proved to be the only major crop in the area that survived the exceptionally cold weather of 1956. Not only do market needs and weather affect crop choices, so do war and politics. It was a political policy that led to the intrepid efforts to grow rice successfully in Hokkaido, for an all-important goal in Japan was self-sufficiency in rice. Farms grew larger during those years; the more recently developed a region of agricultural land, the larger the farms. Some of the biggest spreads are in areas such as the dairying center east of Kushiro, where the average amount of land per farm is about 125

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acres. Bigger farms minimize growing costs; rice is less expensive to produce in Hokkaido than elsewhere in Japan. But as development has diverted more and more forest land to agricultural use, increasing numbers of wild animals have invaded settled areas, nibbling plants and sometimes tearing them out of the ground. In addition, volcanic eruptions have destroyed wild animal habitat, meaning that farm animals become prey. Agricultural development in Hokkaido has involved a change in land use as well as opening new land. Many fields in the northern and eastern areas of the island that proved marginal for rice have been converted to successful mixed farming, with spreads including fields of beans and potatoes as well as pasturage for dairy farming, which was becoming more important in Japan. These changes were not easy to make, for constructing buildings and buying land and animals required capital. Meanwhile, rice remained Hokkaido’s most extensively grown crop, being produced on twenty percent or more of the island’s cultivated land in the mid–1960s. (In the 1960s, however, apples were the most profitable crop in Hokkaido, followed by rice and then potatoes.) Continuing agricultural research has led to increased stability in the farming sector. Perhaps it took the hard times on the farm in the 1950s and 60s to make the substantial investments in hard work, time and money available to create a productive agriculture that was truly suitable to Hokkaido climate and soil. Several successful specialized agricultural pursuits grew or, in some cases, began during these years. One was horse breeding, especially in Urakawa. Throughout Hokkaido, horses had been a common sight working in the fields until after World War II. Well into the 1960s, winters saw timber harvesters with sled loads of logs pulled by horses. Machinery has taken over, but racehorse breeding and training have become important economic activities, and the horse pastures enclosed by white-painted board fences are a rare sight elsewhere in Japan. Some postwar refugees were settled on the Tokachi Plain after the war, but bitter winters and the short growing season discouraged them. As conditions improved throughout Japan, a number moved on to other islands, but many stayed and persevered. The Tokachi Plain proved suitable for grazing, and one specialty crop has been introduced in the region very successfully. Starting in the 1960s, wine production has become a central part of Ikeda Town’s economy. Marutani Kaneyasu, mayor of this town near Obihiro, spearheaded the idea as a way to use agricultural land effectively at a time when Tokyo was urging the reduction of acreage devoted to rice cultivation. Farmers planted vineyards in 1961 and two years later winemaking began. Soon the product, known as Tokachi Wine, won recognition in European contests and the industry was on its way to success. A September 2003 earthquake caused the loss of more than one hundred thousand bottles of wine and damaged the factory, but did not stop Ikeda’s annual wine festival, which took place as usual a week later, and production of wine continues. When Hokkaido was first being developed in the nineteenth century, the island’s natural resources—forestry, fishing and mining — seemed to offer almost unlimited bounty. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, forestry, like fishing, was stringently limited and mining was phased out. Forest management has changed drastically since the early days. A desire for both sustainability and profitable forest use prompted the establishment of the Hokkaido Forest Products Research Institute in 1949. Forestry on a sustaining basis will continue to be important to the nation, if only because unlike the other islands, Hokkaido has a large amount of relatively level forest land. (Forests on the steep hillsides of the other islands are difficult to harvest; in addition, fell-

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ing the trees that grow there is apt to cause erosion). Forest fire has remained a threat; a conflagration swept across at least fifty thousand Hokkaido acres in the spring of 1955. In addition to fire, in recent years air pollution has begun to damage Hokkaido forests. Among Hokkaido forest products, newsprint continues to be significant, but these days the island’s trees cannot meet Japan’s need, and wood pulp is imported to the island for paper manufacture. Products of Hokkaido’s rivers and the sea remained important in the island’s economy, but no longer did anyone see these resources as inexhaustible, and ever since the end of the war the Russians have controlled some traditional Dosanko fishing grounds. Research to protect and increase marine resources has been ongoing and hatcheries for sea creatures such as oysters and sea urchins as well as fish have been established. For the fishermen, life improved. After the war, the fishing cooperatives in Hokkaido organized a system to make credit available to their members so they would no longer have to borrow from merchants at high interest rates. Meanwhile, national legislation in 1949 ordered compulsory establishment of fishermen’s cooperatives. The fishermen’s own organization thus would allocate resources and issue licenses for coastal fishing. Cooperatives manage the fishery, establishing, among other things, the number of boats participating and the amount of gear they use. Cooperatives also market their members’ products; some even process the catch. Ando Takatoshi oversaw creation of a mutual insurance system for Hokkaido fisher families, which is important given the threat to the fishing industry from dangerous working conditions and natural disasters. The mining industry reached its zenith in Hokkaido in the second half of the twentieth century, with more than one hundred thousand miners in 1961 working in some 250 mines, mostly producing coal. After World War II, planners touted Hokkaido’s mineral wealth, and the deposits that were extracted played an important role in Japan’s recovery. But miners worked in deplorable conditions— and deadly accidents continued even after companies adopted new safety precautions. Thirty-nine miners died in a methane gas explosion in a Kushiro mine in 1954. Sixty people died in an Akabira coal mine in November 1955 when sparks from a motor apparently ignited gas in a shaft; the resulting explosion filled the shaft with rubble, trapping the men nearly a mile underground. On the first day of February, 1960, a blast rocketed through a Hokutan Yubari mine just before 2 A.M. About sixty-five men were then at work in a pit three thousand feet deep. Some miners were brought out alive, but a fire starting in the mine complicated rescue efforts, and forty-two died. In Ashibetsu, eight miners died in 1962 after a gas explosion in a Mitsui mine, ironically on the very day that mine inspectors were completing a survey of Hokkaido mines in hopes of making coal a more competitive energy source. Sixtyone deaths occurred in February 1965 after a methane gas explosion and subsequent cave-in at the same Hokutan Yubari mine where forty-two men had died from an explosion five years earlier. Sapporo mine security officials had warned Hokutan that methane in that mine was building up to a dangerous level. About ten days before the explosion, the company closed the mine for a few days to take protective measures. But Hokutan reopened the site, and government officials issued a new warning — just two hours before the tragedy. Afterward, Tokyo ordered a six month closure of the mine. In 1968 thirtyone miners died in a July fire and eight in a September cave-in, both also in Yubari. In 1969, nineteen miners were killed when dynamite exploded in an Akabira mine and newspapers castigated mine officials for putting profits ahead of safety.5 An unexplained

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explosion in a Sunagawa mine considered exceptionally safe killed fifteen men in December 1974 and in November 1975 gas exploded in the Hokutan mine at Horonai, killing eleven men and trapping thirteen more. The fire became more and more intense and officials eventually ordered the pit flooded, dooming the trapped miners. Almost two years later, after the water was pumped out and the bodies recovered, the pit reopened. A fatal concentration of methane in a Yubari mine killed ninety-three miners in 1981. The New York Times noted that this was a serious setback to Japan’s efforts to produce as much of its own energy as possible.6 While government funds had supported this Hokutan operation in order to update it, some miners charged that safety precautions had been scaled down in the interest of stimulating production. This mine supposedly had the very best available safety procedures and equipment, but because of financial troubles, mine operators cut corners and safety suffered. Many men evacuated the mine and others were rescued, but when no hope remained for the others, officials flooded the mine to put out fires still smoldering in it. Some months later, the company drained the mine and brought out the dead. That mine was permanently closed, but another gas explosion in a Yubari mine owned by Mitsubishi killed sixty-two people in May 1985. Most of the 336 miners in the shaft at the time of the accident escaped to safety. The catastrophes summarized here do not include all of the mining accidents in Hokkaido; others also resulted in deaths— and natural disasters, too, endanger miners. A March 1952 earthquake in Hokkaido disrupted work at a number of mines, cutting electric power and flooding some pits; half of the people killed due to the quake were miners who died when mines collapsed. Whatever the causes of such mine disasters, they resulted in lost lives and disabled miners. Costs related to safety measures, rescue attempts and interruption of mineral extraction as well as negative publicity helped lead to permanent mine closures at a time when less expensive imported coal was becoming available and when, in addition, coal was losing out to oil. From the 1960s, world oil prices tumbled and less and less Japanese coal found a market. Moreover, thanks to low shipping costs, it became cost effective to import cheap coal from foreign open pit mines instead of extracting it from deep Hokkaido mines. Because of the importance of the coal industry to island mining communities as well as the hope to maintain a strong domestic energy supply in Japan, government officials expressed reluctance to force mine closures. Mine closings occurred throughout Japan in the late twentieth century, however, as imported coal replaced more and more domestic coal (partly because the United States was insisting that Japan buy more coal from America.)7 From the 1960s to 1990 the number of coal mines on Hokkaido shrank about ninety percent, with some 380,000 people moving away from the mining towns. For example, Haboro Mine, near the coast well north of Rumoi, closed in 1970 after only thirty years in operation. About two months after the 1969 explosion in Akabira, the Yubetsu Coal Mining Company announced reorganization of the mining operation there; the work force would drop from 1422 to 375 employees. The last mine in the city was closed in 1994. In 1960, Akabira had a population of almost sixty thousand, but since then, its population has declined by three-fourths. Nearby and beyond a mountain ridge, Utashinai saw its population drop to only about twelve percent of the 46,000 it was at the height of mining shortly after World War II. The tiny city’s high school closed in 2007 and students now have to travel to Akabira or elsewhere to attend school. And so came the end of the industry and a way of life. The closure of Horonai coal

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mine in September 1989 seemed especially significant, because it had been the discovery of coal at Horonai more than one hundred years earlier that had stimulated so much Hokkaido development. The last coal mining complex in Japan, Taiheiyo in Kushiro, closed in 2002, partly because government subsidies to coal mining companies ended that year. What coal was left in Hokkaido could only have been recovered at an exorbitant cost. Ironically, at the beginning of the century some pundits had felt that Hokkaido’s coal would be “inexhaustible.”8 The mines have closed, but their legacy remains, for former miners who contracted black lung disease have brought lawsuits both against the mining firms and the government, charging inadequate supervision of mining conditions. World economic conditions do not remain static, however, and as oil prices rose significantly in 2008, so did the price of coal, prompting Japanese firms to look seriously at the possibility of once again producing domestic coal. Not all the affected mines produced coal. Sumitomo shut down its Konomai mine in northeastern Hokkaido in 1973. It once produced more gold and silver than any other mine in Asia, but most of the precious metal had been extracted and what was left cost more to obtain than it was worth. In 2006, Nippon Mining and Metals closed Japan’s last zinc mine, Toyoha mine near Jozankei spa in the hills within Sapporo’s city limits. The mine produced zinc, lead and indium but ran out of ore. During the 1960s and 70s, Japan’s economy made spectacular progress, but with the mines closing, Hokkaido was vulnerable to the autumn 1973 worldwide crisis when oilproducing countries suddenly raised prices and drastically limited exports. Hokkaido, where winter cold necessitates high fuel consumption, felt the shortage acutely. Nonessential uses felt severe cutbacks. At Noboribetsu, workers killed 55 of the 167 bears in the zoo because of lack of fuel to heat their facilities, while at the Sapporo Zoo, heating the polar bears’ pool stopped, turning the water to ice and depriving the animals of their usual chance to swim. More serious, families and firms throughout the island had budget troubles. One project put on hold because of the oil crisis was the construction of a bullet train line in Hokkaido, then in the planning stage. The crisis soon abated all around the world, but it had created one more challenge for Hokkaido. It was during this era that environmental consciousness became an important factor in Hokkaido development, adding restoration and protection as island goals. Lake Toya and the Ishikari River offer examples of both environmental degradation and recovery. Lake Toya, known for the clarity of its blue water, had lost much of its transparent quality by 1970, due both to nearby sulfur mines and a growing number of hotels, whose sewage, often inadequately treated, was pumped into the lake. Cleanup measures were taken and sewage no longer flows into Lake Toya. Nearby Mt. Usu’s 1977 and 2000 eruptions temporarily clouded the lake with ash and pumice. Significant industrial pollution tainted Hokkaido’s main rivers so that spawning in these waterways produced very few young fish. In 1971, the Ishikari community, at the mouth of the Ishikari River, canceled its annual salmon festival celebrating the appearance of the fish returning from the sea to head upriver. Overfishing and river pollution had cut the salmon catch from almost two million in 1879 to seven thousand in 1957 and just 184 fish in 1970. Thus the festival was canceled for lack of fish. But thanks to fisheries management and environmental regulations, more fish now enter the river and the festival once again takes place each September. Fish populations, however, remain much lower than once seen, and salmon hatcheries have been built in various Hokkaido locations.

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While the Docho and local Hokkaido officials faced issues involving the island’s prime economic sectors, many Dosanko thought that Hokkaido was merely a pawn in national politics. People complained at the high prices on the island. Critics charged that Tokyo’s Hokkaido Development Bureau worked halfheartedly; it wasted resources, it left roads inadequate and in poor repair, and a number of its plans had no apparent purpose. The real object of the Development Bureau, some thought, was to inhibit the island’s Socialist governor.9 Tanaka Toshifumi served as governor of Hokkaido for twelve years, 1947 to 1959. He was the first popularly-elected governor of Hokkaido; under postwar reforms in Japan, prefectural governors would now be elected, not appointed. During Tanaka’s early years in office, American occupation officials made the key decisions, but the governor used his influence in addressing the shortage of food, and also on behalf of education, labor issues and social welfare programs. Later he was able to turn more attention to stimulating interest in Hokkaido products, both abroad and elsewhere in Japan. Political disagreements between Tokyo and Sapporo tended to hinder Hokkaido progress. The northern islanders voted much less conservatively than most Japanese in the early postwar years when the Japan Socialist Party was strong, choosing many Socialists for the national Diet and the Hokkaido legislature as well as Governor Tanaka. The Hokkaido Shimbun had an influence, often opposing national policies on issues important to Hokkaido when the island’s interests seemed to be receiving inadequate attention. (And because for years after the war, the nation’s daily papers arrived on the northern island two days late, the Hokkaido Shimbun remained especially influential.) Attitudes changed, however, and in 1959, Hokkaido voters, like the nation’s voters as a whole, chose conservative Liberal Democratic Party candidates both for the majority of the Hokkaido legislature and for governor, electing Machimura Kingo of the Hokkaido pioneer Machimura family. During his time in office, Governor Machimura emphasized development, expressing what government plans had accomplished as well as what had not been done and setting out what should be achieved by 1970. A key challenge, he said, would be to persuade Japanese industrial firms to operate on Hokkaido. The “plain spoken” governor10 extolled the Dosanko “frontier spirit.” He also strove to make Hokkaido’s history better known, championing both Japanese and foreign accomplishments in making the island what it had become. Liberal Democrat Dogakinai Naohiro, often called “Mr. Do,” won election as governor of Hokkaido in 1971 and held the office for twelve years. One of his initiatives urged each community on the island to turn out at least one local product. While governor, Dogakinai continued to lay out five roles for the island: to produce food for the nation, develop both industry and tourism, provide superior educational opportunities and support exchanges with the world’s other northern regions through the Northern Regions Study Council. This Sapporo-based organization, born in 1971, became the Northern Regions Center in 1978. In the years since then, its programs have included many activities in Hokkaido geared to promoting international understanding. Citizen exchanges are an important aspect of the Center’s program. Specialists in fields important to northern regions have been brought together through the Center. Examples abound. Agricultural researchers from Hokkaido and Russia have cooperated in studies of potato culture while Hokkaido and Alaska have shared findings related to fisheries. Joint research and business ventures with North American firms have also been developed in agriculture and forestry.

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Private firms, such as the steel mills at Muroran and the Oji Paper Mill in Tomakomai, have played an important role in the island’s economy. In the 1950s, both the paperpulp and the steel industry increased production, though a 1954 strike at Japan Steel cut into that firm’s output. “Muroran must be the world’s most scenic steel town,” wrote Alexander Campbell in 1961.11 Paper produced in Tomakomai was transported via Muroran until new port facilities opened in Tomakomai, where excavation began in 1951 to develop an artificial channel along which modern and extensive facilities could be constructed. Since Tomakomai is located on a sandy beach, its docking facilities had been minimal. The port project — the world’s first artificial port created by excavation — led to the city’s designation as an international port. Along with port facilities, the publicly and privately financed project included preparation of an adjoining industrial site for manufacturing, oil refining and power generation, though the oil shock of the 1970s slowed development and the industrial park attracted only a small number of the factories for which it was planned. Improvements meanwhile continued at the port of Muroran, with new wharves, lighthouses and protective embankments constructed. In the late 1950s, about half of Hokkaido’s foreign trade (measured in volume) passed through Otaru, but during the 1970s, work on a nearby rival port began: Ishikari Bay New Port, near the mouth of the Ishikari river. Public and private funds from the Docho, Otaru and Ishikari supplied investment for the project, which required dredging as well as breakwater and wharf construction. The port is well-positioned to serve Sapporo, of course, as well as Russian far eastern ports, and has become an important distribution center. In eastern Hokkaido, Kushiro’s port saw vast improvement. An additional river channel was dug through the city starting in 1969, and now Kushiro boasts both east and west harbors. This prevents flooding, and the new channel supplements the shallow harbor at the mouth of the Kushiro River. Kushiro, surprisingly, was one of the fastest growing urban areas in Japan throughout the 1950s and 60s. In Sapporo, population was rapidly increasing. Otaru and Hakodate had long been sizable cities and Muroran had reached one hundred thousand residents by 1940. By 1950, Asahikawa attained that number and Kushiro followed. Though Hokkaido cities were growing in the decades after World War II, in the heartland many still perceived Hokkaido as a place of cold and discomfort. As always, some residents left the island, according to a 1963 report some 75,000 annually, including about one-fifth of the year’s high school graduates. If people from the heartland were to come to Hokkaido and learn what it was really like, a good transportation system, starting with the connection to Honshu, was crucial. After World War II, ferry and shipping lines serving coastal communities were restored one by one. The only prewar luxury liner on trans–Pacific service to the United States that survived the war — the Hikawa Maru— began a coastal service in 1947, connecting Muroran with Honshu ports. As car ownership in Japan grew in the postwar years, automobile vacations in Hokkaido grew popular and services carrying cars between Honshu ports and Hokkaido cities increased. On the island itself, roads were extended and improved. This was sorely needed, for in the 1950s their poor condition discouraged travel. A motorist from Honshu in 1955 found a gravel surface on the main road to Sapporo except for the final stretch from Chitose, which was paved. But steady progress of the highway system inspired increased

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This postcard view entitled “Fine Front Street of Asahigawa Station, Asahigawa” probably dates from the 1930s. Note the traditional attire worn by the women in the photograph. (“Asahigawa” is a variant spelling of “Asahikawa.”)

automobile use. The first expressways in Hokkaido opened in December 1971 from Otaru to Sapporo and from Chitose to Kita Hiroshima, about half way from Chitose to Sapporo. Air travel slowly became available to a wider public. When the Emperor and Empress of Japan took a month-long tour of Hokkaido in 1954, they experienced their first airplane flight on the return trip to Tokyo. The trip from Sapporo to Tokyo took only three hours (and since then, the time has been cut in half.) By 1978, the airport at Chitose was serving seven million passengers a year. Congestion became a problem as air travel grew in popularity, and construction began in 1975 on what became New Chitose International Airport in 1988.

Challenges: strikes, protests and disaster In Hokkaido, the years after war and occupation saw strikes and protests, natural disasters and dissent, sometimes accompanied by violence. The complexity of reestablishing the economy frustrated people, inspiring workers to strike and students to demonstrate. During these same years, accidents in the mines and on the high seas challenged the island’s economy as well as evoking horror. Labor confrontations dwindled as Japan stabilized after the war. Many, though not all, of the strikes that affected Hokkaido were scheduled for a limited period, were settled quickly or petered out. Hokkaido workers of course participated in nationwide labor actions, for example a two-month-long coal strike over wages in late 1952. Resulting coal

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Hokkaido’s second largest city, Asahikawa has grown and prospered since World War II. The main street leading to the station is now a pedestrian mall, and on the station’s forecourt a group of elementary school students on an excursion are eating lunch. Contrast this scene with that in the previous photograph.

shortages caused cancellation of some of Hokkaido’s rail and ferry services and Japan Steel’s Muroran plant had to cut its production by seventy percent. The Government of Japan finally ordered the miners back to work for a cooling-off period and the miners soon agreed to a compromise settlement, though more coal mine strikes took place later. A dramatic and long-lasting strike took place at the Oji Paper Mill in Tomakomai in 1958; as this mill produced thirty percent of the newsprint manufactured in Japan, the strike was serious for the country. This walkout was not the first disruption at Oji. Workers had struck for about three weeks in 1953 over wages, forcing newspapers to cut their number of pages. Mediation settled that conflict, but in late 1957 workers walked out over sanitary conditions and safety as well as pay. This union action failed, and later fruitless negotiations and short walkouts set the stage for a five month strike. Workers walked out July 18, 1958, seeking higher wages and a guaranteed union shop. In September, some workers returned to the job, but others stayed out and sporadic violence broke out between the two groups. After being closed for two months, the mill resumed some production, with police protecting workers ready to cross picket lines, but violent confrontations continued. Strikers tried to block pulp deliveries to the mill as well as shipment of the newsprint from the mill. On September 15, strikers forced the men who had resumed work to stay in the factory, unable to leave at the end of a shift. They remained in the plant for almost two months. At the beginning of October the strikers and their wives took control of the city, allowing only strike supporters on the streets. In early November, some strikers, apparently drunk, sneaked into the factory to destroy machinery. Some days

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later, strikers invaded a power plant and cut off electricity to Oji. In reporting the strike, the American newsmagazine Time emphasized the violence and highlighted the communist role in the action.12 Mediation finally began, and by the end of the month the strikers agreed to go back to work. The union shop remained intact and the strikers resumed work in mid–December, but relations between management and labor as well as between the different workers’ factions remained uneasy for some time. The next June, the union gave up the union shop — probably because it was losing members to its rival group — while the company offered wage increases. The turmoil in Tomakomai received a lot of press; one result of Oji’s labor troubles was to discourage investment on Hokkaido. Miners struck during these years, to protest unsafe, even life-threatening, conditions, typically carrying out twenty-four hour work stoppages. Wage issues, too, precipitated short strikes as did proposed work reductions and mine closures, the workers objecting to imports of coal at a time when domestic mines were being closed. March 1974 offers an example of various inflation-related labor protests. Public employees walked off the job for twelve hours, demanding both the right for civil service workers to strike and wage increases to counter inflation. In Hokkaido, railroad workers’ action slowed the speed of both government-operated and private trains. Inflation also motivated Hokkaido farmers to dump their milk, to insist that the government raise the product’s guaranteed minimum price. The worldwide civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s inspired demonstrations in Japan not directly tied to economic issues. Protest and violence in Hokkaido centered on three issues: militarism, including Japan’s ties with the American military establishment, as well as student autonomy and Ainu rights. Universities throughout Japan saw left-wing student activism escalate. In the 1950s, anti–American student protests included opposition to Walter Eells’ 1950 speaking tour and, in 1951, to the mutual security treaty adopted by the U.S. and Japan. Antagonism extended to the continuing American military presence and other U.S. ties; fear of agitation even arose over the possibility of associating Hokkaido University with an American university. Such a relationship could bring financial and academic benefits, but some influential people including the university president hesitated to implement a tie for fear of antagonizing left-wing students and faculty members. Several American universities sought a connection, including the University of Washington in Seattle since it, like Hokudai, had a strong fisheries program. When a formal tie with Hokudai came in 1956, though, it was with the University of Massachusetts. Because of the link between Sapporo Agricultural College and the University of Massachusetts— then Massachusetts Agricultural College — during the time of William S. Clark, establishing a tie with this campus appeared less apt to arouse controversy than would a relationship with any other American university. And 1956 seemed an auspicious year to create this new link, for it was the fiftieth anniversary of Hokudai’s achievement of university status. Dissent over American policy continued sporadically in Hokkaido. For example, noise from U.S. military exercises at Chitose led to nearby farm protests in the late 1950s. Demonstrators fought with police in 1962 while objecting to a U.S. navigation installation near Kushiro; about 180 people squatted on a highway to prevent delivery of construction supplies. In the late 1960s, protesters throughout Japan insisted that the United States return Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty. Even in Hokkaido, as distant from Okinawa as one could be in Japan, the demand fomented activity, for were Okinawa returned to Japan, perhaps the Northern Territories could also become Japanese once again.

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In 1968, radical Hokkaido students and local citizens protested vigorously against a plan to build a Self-Defense Force missile base in a forest at Naganuma Town, about ten miles east of Sapporo. Many nearby residents sought to prevent construction, pointing out that the base would be situated on land that had long been a forest reserve protecting the local water supply. The townsfolk feared that clearing the forested land would make nearby farmland prone to flooding. They questioned whether the Agricultural and Forestry Minister could arbitrarily nullify the area’s designation as a forest reserve. More significantly for the nation, protesters used the argument that the SDF was an unconstitutional organization, for the Japanese constitution adopted after World War II renounced war. Violent confrontations between police and left-wing students supporting the townspeople continued for several years. Despite various court battles, work proceeded on the missile base, with almost ninety acres of forest cleared and a dam constructed to prevent floods. The site already housed missiles by the time the Sapporo District Court ruled on September 7, 1973 that the SDF was unconstitutional. Naganuma citizens wanted the forest reconstituted, but in 1976 an appeals court reversed the lower court decision. Japan’s Supreme Court later affirmed the constitutionality of the SDF, which has remained Japan’s military force. The Naganuma agitation instigated the most serious challenge to Japan’s defense establishment. Among other antimilitary protests in Hokkaido, in 1973, when the GSDF planned to ship some equipment by ferry from Hokkaido, about 150 protesters at the Tomakomai pier held up the shipment until removed by police. More antiwar demonstrators appeared the next morning, and the ferry company decided not to accept the final shipment. Antiwar sentiment also caused an eighteen-year-old protester to place fake bombs in three Sapporo locations in 1977; he said he wanted the Japanese people punished for atrocities committed in China during wartime. Student activism in Japan reached a climax in 1969. At several Hokkaido high schools, just as elsewhere in Japan, students disrupted graduation ceremonies scheduled for early in the year. Universities all over Japan faced protests, attributed to communist students. In Hokkaido, radical students were strongest at Hokudai; their general goal was to gain a greater student role in university management. They caused months of turmoil on campus and disrupted the opening ceremony of the new school year in April. In May, a group of students painted a new slogan on the pedestal supporting the university’s bust of William S. Clark. In huge white painted letters, one could read “Boys be revolutinary” [sic] but the words were soon removed. More seriously, later that same month some radical students captured university president Horiuchi Juro, who had compared some of the students’ actions to Nazi methods. The students held Horiuchi for almost twenty-four hours but released him when a doctor warned of the seriousness of the president’s high blood pressure. The situation on the Hokudai campus deteriorated so much that no classes met after late June. Early in August, in response to troubles across the nation, the Diet adopted legislation designed to resolve campus discord. Administrators could suspend classes for nine months; if the dispute could not be resolved within a year, the Ministry of Education could disband the school. Hokudai students were among those who protested this legislation, and the standoff continued. On November 8, in response to official requests, two thousand police raided the campus. Students threw Molotov cocktails at the policemen who tried to enter the barricaded buildings. These small missiles caused several fires, though all were soon extinguished. Other students threw rocks at the police, who

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responded with water cannons and tear gas. Finally, after about six hours, the students capitulated; thirty students and policemen had been injured in the melee. When brought to trial several years later, several student leaders were found guilty of various charges and sentenced to incarceration. In December came more troubles, when some students belonging to a radical Marxist group seized a Hokudai building. Early in the new year, however, faculty members and other university workers backed up by two hundred riot police removed barricades that the students had set up and the students withdrew. Slowly, campus life returned to normal. The challenges to Hokkaido during these years included disease. Just as epidemic disease decimated the Ainu several centuries earlier, polio struck Japan hard in 1960, especially in Hokkaido, where ninety-one people died of the disease that year. Many more victims, especially children, suffered paralysis. Hokkaido doctors blamed Japanese red tape for slow release of imported vaccine; meanwhile, the United States donated iron lungs and chest respirators, which the Air Force flew to Hokkaido. Thereafter, thanks to a strong emphasis on immunization, polio almost completely disappeared. Despite modern technology, strong currents and violent storms in Hokkaido waters continue to bedevil fishing and sea transportation. Fishing boats sink in stormy waters and ships collide in the fog. High winds and waves force cancellation of ferry service. Another transportation problem occurred when floating mines laid by the Soviets in the Sea of Japan, perhaps during World War II, appeared near the ferry route, causing officials to suspend the Hakodate-Aomori ferry run several times. On September 26, 1954, Japan suffered its greatest maritime tragedy of the century. A typhoon sweeping northward to Hokkaido led to the loss of the ferry boat Toya Maru, which sank just off Hakodate. At about 6:30 P.M. the Toya Maru left Hakodate, carrying 1250 passengers and 45 rail cars en route to Aomori across the strait. Shortly after departure, the vessel got into trouble in heavy seas. Unable to return to Hakodate and safety, the ship anchored just offshore, but in the high winds the anchor chains broke apart and the ship was tossed about. Three locomotives on board broke their moorings and rolled free, unbalancing the ship, and it sank. As it went down, 1172 people died, many trapped below decks. Of 44 American servicemen aboard, only one survived; just 159 of the 1331 passengers and crew did not perish. Several other vessels also sank in the storm, including four other ferries. All their crewmen were lost, but only the Toya Maru was carrying passengers. For days people could stand on the beach at Nanae, just northwest of Hakodate, and see the broken vessel lying off the coast. A year after the tragedy, a court of inquiry announced its finding that ship’s captain Kondo Heiichi, who died in the accident, was negligent “in navigation.” The court held that the accident could have been prevented if everyone in command on land and at sea had done all that could have been done and had worked cooperatively. The inquiry found the ship’s structure too weak and blamed ship owner Japan National Railways for “inadequate administration.”13 Meanwhile, JNR pressed into service a thirty-year-old passenger ship to replace the Toya Maru. Interestingly, the Emperor and Empress of Japan had traveled from Aomori to Hakodate on the Toya Maru just seven weeks before the disaster; the ship had been specially refurbished for their trip. The enormity of the Toya Maru tragedy eclipsed other storm losses, from deaths of the crewmen on other ships to destruction of houses and industrial buildings. The high winds uprooted more than five hundred million cubic feet of timber in Hokkaido and

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spread a fire in Iwanai on the west coast of the Oshima Peninsula, destroying more than half the town. More than thirty people died there and thousands more lost their homes. Even well after the storm, its effects were felt; ship losses seriously disrupted port activity at Hakodate and Aomori, so that railroad cars and their cargo piled up at both terminals. Adding to delay, ship captains became more likely to cancel sailings in questionable weather. It is tragic events such as the loss of the Toya Maru that unfortunately interrupt daily life. More mundane stories which are just as significant never get told. For the story of Hokkaido these include everything from growing use of home insulation to the transformation of marginal cropland to good pasture. However, fiction, film and drama with a Hokkaido theme not surprisingly tend to play on the island’s dramatic qualities: isolation, frigid weather, storm, poverty and catastrophic incidents. A harrowing tale set on Hokkaido is Takeda Taijin’s story “Luminous Moss.” Takeda became acquainted with the island shortly after World War II while teaching Chinese literature at Hokudai. His famous work, a story containing a play, concerns the efforts of men to stay alive through the winter — and the terrible choices facing them — on the deserted Shiretoko shoreline after a shipwreck. The story raises profound questions about life.14 A play, a movie and an opera, “Hikarigoke,” written by leading Japanese composer Dan Ikuma, have been based on “Luminous Moss.” Takeda wrote the libretto for the opera, which was first presented in 1972.

Hopes for prosperity “Hokkaido is still a virile idyllic place — not too easy, not too proud.”15 This 1961 observation suggests that Hokkaido was indeed a land of opportunity, as its champions had asserted for a hundred years, but that the rewards of life on the island could be elusive. For the nation, Hokkaido’s resources remained vital, as the efforts put into improvement of agricultural land show. But the island filled other needs, too. Some postwar developments even took advantage of Hokkaido’s northern climate. In 1956 the island became the site for training Japan’s Antarctic scientific group, because the members could experience polar-like conditions at their base on Lake Tofutsu near Abashiri. The nation’s postwar economic boom led to prosperity, more in the heartland than in Hokkaido, and, consequently, lured Hokkaido young people south. Tokyo continued to consider Hokkaido distinct from the rest of Japan and drew up development plans for the island. Goals came to include conservation as well as improvement of infrastructure and living conditions and encouragement of industry. Plans were often too lofty and officials in Tokyo were apt to be woefully uninformed about the northern island. When Shibuya Naozo came to Hokkaido after he had been appointed development minister for the island in 1979, he exclaimed when viewing the new site planned for industrial use in Tomakomai, “Oh, how spacious. I didn’t know Japan still had a space like this.”16 Hokkaido leaders have striven to involve island industries, agriculture and fisheries in foreign commerce. Trade patterns shifted due to World War II. Before the war, Hokkaido firms had traded extensively with China and the Soviet Far East but the Second World War and the following Korean War almost brought an end to such commerce. Figures from 1951 show that trade with Europe, especially in forest products, had expanded, and that a small market was opening up in South and Southeast Asia. The United States

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was the nation to which the most goods were sent (and remains Hokkaido’s major trading partner today). Island leaders hoped to expand foreign trade. In 1957, for example, a trade mission of Hokkaido government and business leaders took a six-week trip to Southeast Asia seeking trade opportunities. The Docho had a trade office in Hong Kong and planned annual trade fairs there. By the 1970s, exports to the rest of the world included a wide variety of agricultural and marine products. Manufactured goods sent abroad included iron and steel, ships, wood products— and even skis and baseball bats. Among imports were iron ore, wood chips, fertilizer, machinery and — somewhat surprisingly — wheat and fish, but by the 1980s, almost half of Hokkaido imports consisted of petroleum and its products. Island leaders would continue to seek trade opportunities in the years to come. The Hokkaido economy continued to rely heavily on public rather than private investment, and the value of imports to the island from the rest of Japan and abroad remained much higher than the value of exports; nevertheless, the per capita income of the Dosanko improved from about 80% of the average income of all Japanese people in 1960 to 95.3% in 1978.17 Life was becoming more pleasant and comfortable, with improvements in housing construction and increased use of household appliances. Buildings became more suitable to the Hokkaido climate and more and more families obtained washing machines, refrigerators and cars. Also in this era television reception came to the island. Symbolizing a new era of openness in these postwar years was the opening of Mt. Hakodate to the public for the first time in half a century. First a road to the top was built and in 1958 a scenic ropeway from city to summit began operation. Astute advertising since then claims the evening view from the summit as one of Japan’s premier scenic vistas. Meanwhile, taking advantage of the road, an observatory on top of the mountain began operation in 1953. Hokkaido celebrated its history and development with two major expositions, the Grand Hokkaido Exhibition held in Otaru and Sapporo in 1958 and the more ambitious Grand Centennial Fair of 1968 that commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the adoption of the name “Hokkaido” and the beginning of the island’s systematic colonization and development. The Centennial Memorial Tower arose in Sapporo’s eastern outskirts and special events took place throughout that summer. Statues to Kuroda Kiyotaka and Horace Capron appeared in Odori Park and Governor Machimura invited Capron’s great-grandson Albert Capron and his wife to the festivities. The Emperor and Empress of Japan attended an anniversary ceremony on September 2; their tour, the third postwar imperial visit to the island, included even a trip to Wakkanai at Hokkaido’s northern tip. They saw a Hokkaido which could not have been imagined in the days when it was known as Ezo.

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Hokkaido in the World Economy The end of the twentieth century meant new challenges for Hokkaido as the island coped with changes in the world economy. Mines, forests and fisheries no longer provided the wealth they once had, and even agriculture has had to take new realities into account. The strong rise of the Japanese yen against the U.S. dollar punished Hokkaido exports, whether from forests, fields or the ocean. As Japan’s economy began to stagnate, Hokkaido lagged behind the heartland but island leaders have continued to woo business and industry from elsewhere in Japan and abroad and, in addition, tourism has become an economic mainstay.

Challenges and changes Yokomichi Takahiro served as Hokkaido governor from 1983 to 1995, after twentyfour years of conservative leadership on the island. Yokomichi ran for the office as an independent; he had been a Socialist Party member but said he ran for office to represent a Hokkaido Citizens’ Party. Partly due to his commitment to visit every community on Hokkaido, he remained popular with his constituents while in office despite the island’s economic troubles. Yokomichi promoted Hokkaido as a site for investment, visiting cities in the heartland and abroad on behalf of island communities and industries. As he worked to develop Hokkaido’s economy in a changing world, he reported survey results showing that the Dosanko— almost eighty percent of them — liked living in Hokkaido, and that among Japanese in the entire nation, only Kyoto was chosen as a better place to live than Hokkaido.1 Hokkaido leaders in recent years have tried to emphasize the island’s advantages while solving its problems. In the late 1980s, Hokkaido’s population dropped for the first time, probably due to decline in the island’s major economic bases. Fishing remained crucial, but fishermen were facing more and more restrictions and young people were less apt to follow family tradition and take up fishing as a career. The array of fresh seafood for sale in Hakodate’s morning market and the great signs in Nemuro and Hakodate advertising crabs illustrate the industry’s continuing importance to Hokkaido, however. Sea animals harvested off the island include squid, scallops, octopi, clams, crabs, sea urchins, abalone and prawns. Salmon is the most prominent fish sought by island fishermen, but they also harvest trout, smelt, mackerel, codfish, flatfish and herring. Kombu and sea cucumbers also remain

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important marine resources. Local yields of sea products have decreased substantially, however, and fishing villages beyond commuting distance to urban centers have seen a population decline. Some fishermen work far from the mainland, but these days they have to buy rights— mostly from Russia or the United States— to carry on their occupation, while those who work near the Hokkaido shore need to find ways to help increase fish stocks. Hokkaido factories meanwhile process imported marine resources along with locally caught sea life. Agriculture has remained a Hokkaido mainstay. Holding about one-fourth of Japan’s cultivated land, Hokkaido has become a crucial source of farm products for the nation, just as early planners hoped. The prefecture grows about 8.5% of the nation’s rice (despite the inhospitable climate), 70% of Japan’s wheat, 85% of azuki (red) beans, 93% of kidney beans, over 20% of soybeans and more than 70% of potatoes. Over 40% of Japan’s dairy products come from Hokkaido and over 90% of Japan’s race horses are raised on Hokkaido.2 These days one can see vast commercial farms on the island and the government encourages more large-scale agriculture. By the 1990s the average size of a Hokkaido farm was almost thirty acres, about twelve times the average in Japan. Because of their size, Hokkaido farms can be more efficient than those elsewhere in the nation. Agricultural cooperatives are well-established on the island and, like the fishery cooperatives, are active in fields as diverse as marketing and medical care. Insurance through the cooperatives is especially important in protecting farmers against natural disasters, which can devastate a year’s crops. Farmers in northern Hokkaido have adopted innovative practices to assist cold climate cultivation. In Furen, well north of Asahikawa and now part of Nayoro City, special efforts include scattering dark ashes on farm fields in the spring to help the snow melt earlier. Meanwhile, water from melting snow is held behind several dams in the area to create water for summer irrigation. Furen boasts of being the northernmost place in Japan where commercial rice is grown. Its specialty is glutinous rice, which traditionally is pounded into a powder and steamed. Changing international trade regulations have opened some of Japan’s protected agricultural markets. Most Hokkaido farmers are not part-timers (unlike farmers elsewhere in Japan), and such changes can mean the end of profitable farming for many on the northern island. The government cut subsidies, affecting Hokkaido dairy products, starch, beans and beef; also, cheaper foreign products began coming into Japan. Upset about the influence that international trade agreements, especially with the United States, had on their interests, Hokkaido farmers attacked an effigy of American President Ronald Reagan in 1987 because of U.S. pressure to open Japan to more imports. After international meetings that year and the next, Japan agreed to end some agricultural quotas and the United States consented to drop insistence that quotas for starch and some milk products be raised. In 1990, though, the opening of the Japanese market to more meat and dairy products meant failure for some Hokkaido farmers. Tokyo made development money available to the island to create other jobs for some families, but the younger generation is deserting the farms in the same way that many fishermen’s sons avoid their fathers’ occupation. International pressure to open markets has not died. In 2007, Australian and Japanese leaders discussed reducing trade barriers. Again, Hokkaido farmers were concerned, and a study on the island predicted that removing the tariffs on wheat, sugar, beef and dairy products would mean the disappearance of 47,000 Hokkaido jobs.3 On the other

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The Hokkaido countryside can be reminiscent of American farm landscapes. This photograph was taken from a train in Hokkaido’s far north. 5679 foot Mt. Rishiri, on Rishiri Island, appears in the distance.

hand, the future for Hokkaido rice looks good; research has led to development of new, tastier strains suited to the island’s climate. Other problems have hurt agriculture. Hokkaido’s cattle industry has suffered serious harm since a cow born on the island was diagnosed with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) in September 2001, the first such case discovered in Japan. The market for beef products quickly plummeted, and the government began testing every cow that died as well as banning the type of feed suspected of causing the illness. About two years later, Tokyo announced that cattle feed imported from Europe probably was the culprit. Convincing consumers of beef safety has not been easy, however, especially because cows suffering from BSE (so far all born before the feed ban) have been discovered as recently as December 2007. Snow Brand, the top dairy firm in Japan, damaged faith in Hokkaido products when impure powdered milk processed on the island sickened some thirteen thousand people in Osaka in 2000. Moreover, less than two years later company officials admitted that Snow Brand had changed the labels on some beef products to convince consumers that the meat did not come from places implicated in BSE. Soon afterward, word came that the company had used in production more than two thousand tons of Hokkaido butter that had been stored past the date it was to be sold. After these serious missteps, Snow Brand reorganized and sought to recoup its once positive reputation. In 2007, for the first time in six years, the firm brought out a new product, a brand of cheeses made from Hokkaido milk. Other Hokkaido firms have damaged faith in the “wholesome image of food products from Hokkaido.”4 Many Japanese tourists had been buying Ishiya’s popular white-

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chocolate-filled cookies, Shiroi Koibito (white lover), but in 2007 customers learned that the company has been changing expiration dates on some of the packages and that some other products were contaminated. Also in 2007, a Tomakomai firm, Meat Hope, was found to have falsely labeled some of its products for years and soon went out of business. Whether Hokkaido can reclaim its reputation for healthful food products is not clear. To promote local agricultural products, the Docho works to publicize Hokkaido foods, even opening a shop in the middle of Tokyo to introduce items from the northern island. New Chitose International Airport also contains many inviting shops selling Hokkaido food products. Such efforts help counter the harm caused by Snow Brand, Ishiya and Meat Hope. Despite these firms’ practices, BSE and vagaries of the world economy, Hokkaido agriculture is efficient, productive and a key to island prosperity. Food processing firms change product lines in response to changing tastes. For example, dairies now produce less milk but more cheese to meet Japanese demand. The most recent development plans for the agricultural sector emphasize both low cost dairy products and high value fruit, vegetables and flowers. The expanded wine industry on the island is a good example of fashioning a high value product from plants grown on the island. In the island’s supermarkets today shoppers can buy wine from Otaru, Furano, Hakodate, Ikeda and other island communities as well as from Europe, Australia and South and North America. In addition to encouraging agricultural innovations, strengthening industrial and commercial sectors has been a continuing theme in Hokkaido— even in recent years as the international economy faltered. Shipbuilding and the iron and steel industries were doing poorly. Hakodate Dock Company laid off large numbers of workers in the 1990s and the last of the mines closed during the following decade. Many industrial firms operate on the island, of course; for example, factories in Muroran still produce cement and steel and refine oil, Also, in recent years, various small specialized industrial firms have located there. Machinery produced in Hokkaido has been limited mostly to parts, but island firms not surprisingly build lots of agricultural machines— especially the large scale ones used on Hokkaido— as well as snow removal equipment. Challenging agriculture, industry — in fact, every sector of the Hokkaido economy — is the cost of energy. The island’s climate requires heavy fuel use in wintertime, adding to expenses borne by homemakers, business and industry alike. The Hokkaido Electric Power Company, or Hokuden, long used local coal, but as its cost became prohibitive, the company began using nuclear energy to replace some of the coal. A nuclear power plant in Tomari, near Iwanai, began operation in 1989. Nuclear power brings its own problems, of course, not the least of which is public opposition. Lawsuits to prevent plant construction failed and petitions and demonstrations did not stop its operation. Nine hundred thousand people on Hokkaido signed a petition asking the Docho to allow a public vote on siting a nuclear plant on the island, but the Hokkaido Assembly turned down the request, 54–52. A citizen referendum would not have been legally binding, but it could have influenced lawmakers. Even when the new plant’s test run took place in October 1988, protesters appeared; it did not help that a mock evacuation drill involving nearby communities preceded the test operation. Tomari was the first Japanese nuclear plant to be opened since the disaster in 1986 at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, and it is the only nuclear power facility on Hokkaido. In 2000, Governor Hori Tatsuya announced support for adding a third reactor at the complex and construction began in 2004, despite public opposition and continuing anxiety about nuclear safety.

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A series of small fires— probably arson — at the construction site in 2007 suggested continuing opposition to the nuclear plant and, of course, led to increased security measures. Hokkaido has in recent years been looking into alternative energy sources in addition to hydroelectric and nuclear power and imported oil and coal. By 2006, natural gas from Tomakomai, sent by pipeline, replaced all of the imported liquefied petroleum gas used to heat Sapporo homes. Geothermal power has been used in the town of Mori, north and across the peninsula from Hakodate, since the early 1980s. Japan’s first commercialscale wind power facility was built in the late 1990s at Tomamae, a town of 4600 people on Hokkaido’s northwest coast, where the array of more than forty windmills provides an arresting view. Modern windmills also dot the landscape at other places, including Wakkanai in the far north. In 2004, the nation’s first offshore wind power facility also opened on Hokkaido, nearly half a mile off the coast of Setana, a town on the Oshima Peninsula’s west coast. Yet because wind power is variable, power companies can be reluctant to use it. Several communities in Hokkaido use methane, either from abandoned coal mines or from cattle excrement, to produce energy. The city of Sunagawa, between Sapporo and Asahikawa, produces electricity by incinerating garbage. More experimentation with the use of stored snow for air conditioning is also underway. Tokyo has begun to subsidize production of ethanol to be used as an energy source. The Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry in Tokyo announced a plan for production of biofuel made from Hokkaido sugar beets, wheat and rice to run automobiles; farm cooperatives and sake producer Oenon would carry out the project. In other enterprises supported by the ministry, Kirin Brewery and Mitsubishi announced they would open a bioethanol factory in the Tokachi District in 2009, while several other firms planned a factory in Tomakomai to produce the fuel from rice. By 2008, use of food crops around the world to produce ethanol was leading to food shortages and high prices, though, and several Japanese firms pursued plans to use other materials, such as rice straw, for ethanol production. Alternative energy projects such as these may help provide Hokkaido’s long term power needs, but by 2007, rising oil prices worldwide were leading to bankruptcies on the island. Household budgets suffered, too, as late that year kerosene prices rose to the highest level ever seen on the island and farmers protested the rising cost of cattle feed as well as gasoline for their tractors. More and more cases were reported during the 200708 winter of thieves draining household kerosene tanks. The most serious economic collapse on the island had come a decade earlier, though, when Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko failed in November 1997. Often called simply Takugin, this was Hokkaido’s largest bank and the largest bank in Japan ever to go under. It had been one of the top twenty banks in the nation and had offices in a number of American and European cities. Since its founding ninety-seven years earlier in order to support Hokkaido development, the bank had acted as a symbol of the island’s promise and achievement. In 1980, Takugin claimed assets topping eighteen billion dollars, but as Japan’s economy faltered in the late twentieth century when land values plummeted, banks found themselves holding too many bad loans. Before the failure, Takugin tried a number of steps to try to stave off ruin, including selling off assets— even its head office building. But nothing could avert collapse. Because sixty percent of Hokkaido’s companies borrowed from Takugin, the bank’s failure made it much more difficult for them to obtain loans and thus led to bankruptcies for many. A number of small businesses on

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the island closed their doors when they were unable to borrow, and people who had invested in those firms lost their savings while people who worked for them lost their jobs. Small Hokkaido towns saw bank branches close. Takugin’s downfall not only shattered Hokkaido’s economy, it had an appalling psychological effect on the island, both because this was the largest bank on Hokkaido and because of its role in island history and development over the century. Subsequently, Tokyo oversaw restructuring of Hokkaido banking and continued to fund construction projects on the island, ameliorating some effects of the bank failure. Perhaps Hokkaido’s continued economic troubles helped voters decide to return local politician Suzuki Muneo to the Diet, where he had served for twenty years until he was charged with bribery. He had abused his position in order to win contracts for Hokkaido firms. For example, he saw to it that military live-firing exercises were moved from Okinawa to Yausubetsu, an isolated region of eastern Hokkaido west of Nemuro, in order for firms in his constituency to obtain the contracts to construct the new facilities required. Suzuki is apparently a master at manipulation; some of his machinations involved large contributions to his account. The bribery leading to his arrest involved use of his government influence to minimize the punishment a timber company would receive for illegal harvesting. Arrested, Suzuki spent more than a year in the Tokyo Detention Center before being released on bail. He was convicted and in November 2004 sentenced to two years in prison. Released on bond after he appealed, he created a new political party in order to make a comeback and won election to the Diet again in 2005. “A politician’s job in Hokkaido is to bring money and public works from Tokyo, and this was something Suzuki did extremely well,” commented a newspaper columnist.5 Corruption too often has been found among officials in Hokkaido, just as elsewhere in the world. In Kushiro in 2002 illegal election activities of the city administrators led to the mayor’s resignation. Twenty-first century inquiry has shown that Hokkaido Prefectural Police funds have too often been diverted in order to entertain top police officials. In addition, illegal trade among Japanese and Russians continues in various parts of the island; not just fishery products but guns, drugs and even people have been smuggled into Japan. Crime syndicates operate in Hokkaido as well as elsewhere in Japan, and have been active in laundering funds from the illicit commerce. In the fishing industry, poaching is a worry. This can happen in all waters, not only those claimed by Russia, and sometimes criminal organizations are involved. Near Muroran, for example, in 2006 the Coast Guard arrested ten men going after sea cucumbers. Other men were arrested in Wakkanai while stealing about six hundred pounds of these aquatic animals, which are valuable in China when dried. In addition, thieves stole sea cucumbers from a workshop in Mori in December. Fisheries officials consequently are looking for legislation to increase penalties for poaching and thievery, but because most poaching activity brings sorely-wanted sea products to market, curbing the illegal activity is difficult. And not all fisheries officials are honest; the head of the Hokkaido Hakodate Fisheries Research Institute was arrested in late 2007, charged with accepting bribes. In recent years, petty theft by elderly citizens has also become a problem, people acting out of poverty or, often, simply because of loneliness. While crime and corruption harm the Hokkaido economy, military forces stationed on the island have long been an economic benefit. Well more than one-third of the land used by Japanese military organizations lies in Hokkaido, and many of the island’s communities have connections to military activities. One of the Ground Self-Defense Force’s

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five regional armies is stationed on the island, its four divisions headquartered in Asahikawa, Obihiro, Chitose and Sapporo. Chitose is also home to a major military airfield located next to the commercial airport, New Chitose. In addition, Japan’s Defense Agency operates Sapporo’s Okadama Airport. Also, Yoichi, west of Otaru, and Hakodate house Maritime Self-Defense Force facilities. Self-Defense Force winter training exercises take place in Hokkaido. American forces have trained with Japanese troops and in recent years, U.S. forces have participated in a number of joint exercises, including the live-fire artillery practice at Yausubetsu. The Dosanko do not support military activities uncritically. About fifteen hundred people protested large-scale landing maneuvers on a Hokkaido beach in 1982. In 1985, people turned out in opposition to U.S.-Japan winter military maneuvers and when Taiki, a town on Hokkaido’s south coast, agreed to sell shore land to the GSDF in 1987 for landing practice, more protests ensued. Drills continued at Taiki in subsequent years, but so have demonstrations— by people as varied as Communist Party members, labor union members and peace activists. One small group of people carried out a unique peace demonstration in 2003, marching on a Sea of Okhotsk ice floe to protest American preparation for war against Iraq. When SDF troops based in Hokkaido were sent to Iraq in 2004 as the first Japanese forces to be stationed in a combat zone since World War II, more protests ensued. A GSDF commander threatened to end SDF participation in Sapporo’s annual snow festival because of antiwar protests in the city. Antiwar activists even held a demonstration in Asahikawa, where next to the government the SDF is the largest employer and support for Japanese troops is strong. A majority of the American troops in Japan are stationed on Okinawa in the far south, and many local residents have long campaigned to reduce the U.S. presence. Because a large industrial site in Tomakomai remained empty in the late 1990s due to Japan’s recession, a government-connected research group suggested moving Okinawa’s seventeen thousand American Marines to Tomakomai, but this did not happen. In 2004, Governor Takahashi Harumi spoke out against reassigning any American Marine contingents to Hokkaido. In 2005, though, Tokyo announced plans to move some of the American airmen stationed in Okinawa to other Japanese military bases, including Chitose. That city’s mayor protested on behalf of his citizens, but regardless of the opposition, some training operations formerly carried out in Okinawa are now scheduled for Chitose. Despite these various citizen protests, the Self-Defense Force has found recruiting relatively successful in Hokkaido, because the weak economy there has made it fairly difficult to find nonmilitary jobs. Disaster relief is part of the SDF mission and has certainly benefited Hokkaido. After Mt. Usu erupted in August 1977 and March–April 2000, SDF troops helped evacuate nearby residents, provide relief and clear away the damage. Not all SDF relief efforts are dramatic. Excessive snowfall during the winter of 2005-06 caused dangerously large amounts to pile up on streets in western Hokkaido, so SDF troops worked at clearing away snow and carting it off by the truckload. Japanese troops have even given emergency aid outside the country. Forces stationed in Hokkaido went to Indonesia’s Aceh Province to participate in the relief effort there after the devastating December 2004 earthquake and tsunami. During the last decade of the twentieth century, another Hokkaido community also faced destruction from earthquake and tsunami. The combination ravaged Okushiri Island, about twelve miles off the Hokkaido shore in the Sea of Japan. Islanders had prepared

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for such events, but not for one of this magnitude. On July 12, 1993, landslides, fires and waves more than thirty feet high destroyed Okushiri Town, the island’s largest settlement, killing more than two hundred people. Though rebuilt, the town has lost residents and now subsists on tourism and sea urchin fishing. Since the disaster, public funds have made Okushiri a “fortress island;” new seawalls reach as high as thirty-eight feet and flood gates on four rivers prevent tsunami-generated waves from surging upstream. All families received radios to warn of tsunami dangers and evacuation routes have been planned and publicized. Some of the measures, of course, are too expensive for other communities, as only national and prefectural aid made them possible in Okushiri.6 Other recent earthquakes have wrought damage in Hokkaido. In January of the same year, an earthquake centered at sea less than twenty miles from Kushiro caused an unusual problem. Winter cold complicated recovery efforts, for the frozen ground made it difficult to dig to broken gas mains under the streets in order to restore heat, and some people suffered gas poisoning from the cracked conduits. Mending pipes so that people could cook and be warm was a priority, and affected schools had to stay closed until the gas lines were once more in service. The Kuril Islands earthquake in 1994 also meant destruction in eastern Hokkaido, both from the quake itself and from minor tsunami waves. Even a rare tornado in November 2006 caused nine Hokkaido deaths. Changes in the world economy, corruption, disaster — Hokkaido had to face many different challenges in the late twentieth century. Among them is population decline. Since 1985, almost three-fourths of the island’s cities have been losing people. The Ishikari plain, and especially Sapporo, gained residents (Sapporo population grew from 1,542,979 in 1985 to 1,888,953 in 2006, almost one-third of Hokkaido’s total population) while Hakodate lost, from 319,194 to 290,927. Muroran’s population in 1970 was more than 160,000, but the worldwide oil shock hit the city’s industry severely, especially during the 1980s when population dropped by one-fourth, and in 2006, Muroran had only 97,322 residents. Most of the island’s distant and isolated cities— Nemuro, Kushiro and Wakkanai — lost population. Kushiro, however, has remained the island’s fourth largest city. Hokkaido’s total population has been decreasing, too; with a 2006 population of 5,605,531, the island counted 86,790 fewer people than at its greatest number, 5,692,321, in 1995. The decline continues; Hokkaido lost more than 20,000 residents in 2008. Figures for 2006 show just nine Hokkaido cities with a population of more than one hundred thousand. Sapporo is truly dominant. Asahikawa, the second largest city, counted 353,540 people. (It passed Hakodate after World War II.) Rounding out the list are Hakodate (290,927), Kushiro (188,653), Tomakomai (173,013), Obihiro (170,064), Otaru (140,089), Kitami (128,630) and Ebetsu (125,497).7 Towns and villages now reveal empty houses and untended gardens. Whereas in the first half of the twentieth century Hokkaido, unlike the rest of Japan, saw a gain in rural population, people are now leaving rural areas for the cities. Educating children in isolated towns and villages has become difficult, with one-room schools in some places and, elsewhere, long distances for children to travel. Occasionally, children must board away from home in order to attend school. Two hundred forty-eight schools in Hokkaido closed in the ten years ending in 2003. Population shifts helped prompt Tokyo to implement a plan throughout Japan to encourage towns and cities to merge in order to save administrative costs. Local people have a say on the mergers and Hokkaido voters have turned down some proposals. Others are changing the map, however. In northeastern Hokkaido, three towns and a village —

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Engaru, Ikutahara, Maruseppu and Shirataki — joined in a new and larger Engaru Town. Northeast of Tomakomai, two towns, Hayakita and Oiwake, have merged to create Abira Town, named for the river that flows through both communities. The new city of Hokuto west of Hakodate joins the towns of Kamiiso and Ono. Some of Hokkaido’s new cities and towns encompass many square miles with population centers far apart and a few, such as the merged Otaki Village and Date City, combine noncontiguous areas. It may take a long time to develop a new entity’s community spirit.

Tourism To help lessen the flow of population from rural and distant areas to Sapporo and other cities, the Docho decided to encourage communities to create tourist facilities; a new national law helped inspire resort development, starting in 1987. The government invested in highway improvement and offered various inducements such as tax exemptions to resort developers. Cities and towns have built ski areas, resorts and museums. Hokkaido had seen increasing numbers of tourists from the other Japanese islands ever since the nation’s recovery after the war made leisure travel affordable. A 1982 report indicated that many Japanese chose Hokkaido for their honeymoons; almost one-fourth of the newly-married Japanese who took their trips within the country rather than abroad went to Hokkaido. Books and films helped make the island’s attractions known to a wider public and Hokkaido native Miura Ayako was voted Japan’s most popular novelist in a 1986 poll. Her novel, Shiokari Toge (translated as Shiokari Pass), was a bestseller and an equally successful film. Based on a true incident, it is set partly in Hokkaido early in the twentieth century. The Hokkaido mountain landscape plays an important role in the story, which reaches a climax when a runaway train hurtles down Shiokari Pass north of Asahikawa. In the film version, the dramatic landscape can be even more compelling. Miura grew up in Asahikawa and her first novel, Freezing Point, is set there. The Toya Maru tragedy and Asahikawa’s severe winter weather both feature in this tale, which has been adapted both for film and television. A small museum commemorating Miura’s life and works sits in her Asahikawa neighborhood.8 Meanwhile, television programs featuring Hokkaido have been shown in various Asian countries in order to attract Asian tourists to the island. (On the other hand, televised views of Hokkaido’s extreme winter weather can discourage heartland Japanese from moving there.) A popular tourist destination even takes advantage of Hokkaido’s reputation as a prison island. In its most famous prison, Abashiri, terrible overcrowding helped lead to occasional violence. A new maximum security facility replaced the prison in 1984 and the old facilities were converted into a museum. It is impossible for a visitor to visualize all the horrors of prison life there, though, for the neat, clean buildings are set in verdant grounds. Tourism has engendered a more positive view of Hokkaido among Japanese people living on the other islands, helping dispel negative views of cold and remoteness. Various Hokkaido communities now hold winter festivals, and despite the prominence of Sapporo’s February extravaganza, it was in Asahikawa that the world’s largest snow sculpture was built — a 1994 replica just under one hundred feet high of a South Korean castle. Otaru’s evolution offers a good example of the transition to tourism. The city’s importance in shipping is still significant; the port has been modernized and large piers

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This canal in Otaru was dug early in the twentieth century. Lighters or barges then could easily bring goods from ships anchored in the harbor to warehouses fronting on the canal. In more recent years, docks have been extended out to deep water so that the canal is no longer necessary for commerce. Most of the warehouses are now shops and restaurants for tourists, and the city advertises the canal’s romantic appeal.

extend well out into the harbor; lighters no longer need to unload ships offshore and bring goods to the warehouses along the canal. Now able to accommodate container vessels, Otaru solicits increased trade with Russia and is a sister city to Nahodka, the Russian port near Vladivostok just across the Sea of Japan. Otaru’s commerce declined, however, after development of new port facilities in Hokkaido, especially at Tomakomai and at Ishikari Bay New Port. Otaru therefore put more and more effort into becoming an important tourist destination. The historic warehouses have been refurbished and turned in to tourist shops, restaurants and Otaru’s historical museum, while city publicity stresses romantic scenes along the canal that was built for commerce. Hakodate, for so long the island’s premier city, is tourist-dependent now, with its longtime industries, fishing and shipbuilding, in decline. A 1985 study showed that almost one-fourth of Hakodate’s people were connected to the tourist sector. Its seafood and its panoramic views as well as Goryokaku and Meiji era buildings draw visitors. By the 1990s, the city was welcoming some four million tourists annually.9 Even Muroran, once Hokkaido’s leading industrial city, has begun to build upon tourism. Downsizing of its steel industry meant population decline, and these days the city publicizes its ferry service from Honshu, its scenic views and its whale-watching excursions.

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Yubari, once Hokkaido’s most important mining center, has been especially hard hit by population decline. Nestled between mountain ridges, the community had about ten thousand residents when the twentieth century began. The mining industry expanded, and by 1910, Yubari’s population had doubled; it doubled again by 1920, to some fifty thousand. The depression years showed a decrease, but an upsurge came with World War II and continued in the postwar years. Population peaked in the 1955–60 period at more than 107,000 people. From then came a steady decline, to about 31,700 in 1985, 21,000 in 1990 and 13,000 in 2006. As Suzanne Culter has pointed out, the city’s population declined by seventy-four percent from 1960 to 1985. When jobs in the mines disappeared and alternative work was not available for all of the displaced miners, many families had little choice but to leave Yubari. And as mining families left, many jobs that had depended on the miners’ families disappeared too. Retail establishments and schools closed, throwing more people out of work. Schools are consolidating and closing. The vocational high school started by Hokutan in 1920 finally shut its doors because student numbers had fallen precipitously. Only fifteen people graduated in the class of 2003.10 Yubari tried various schemes to revive the city. The mayor decided to have old, dirty mining structures torn down so a clean and bright city image would attract tourists. Many residents did not like the results, feeling that their community had disappeared; they did not recognize the one in which they now lived.11 The city government meanwhile decided to sponsor cultivation of the Yubari melon. This new variety of cantaloupe, grown in vinyl greenhouses, has been popular but remains expensive and is not profitable without subsidies. It continues to sell as a luxury gift item because of its high quality. A melon-flavored black tea as well as “Yubari Melon Yogurt” and various other Yubari melon products can be bought in Hokkaido. Other city efforts include a museum illustrating the history of coal mining, which includes descent into an underground excavation. Also, an annual international film festival featuring “fantastic films” began in 1990. All of these projects did not save the city from bankruptcy and near-economic collapse in 2006, however. City officials announced plans to sell or close tourist attractions and even to cancel the popular and respected film festival, though a nonprofit organization has been created in order to continue that tradition. Drastic measures taken by the Yubari government include converting Yubari’s only hospital into a clinic which will offer fewer services. These services were saved only because a doctor from Hokkaido’s far north agreed to head a privatized operation. More than two-fifths of the city’s people are over sixty-five, which makes the decreasing options in local medical care especially significant. If Yubari is to meet its debt obligations in the next twenty years residents will face the highest taxes in Japan and municipal employees the lowest wages in the nation. Meanwhile, various business firms outside the city have expressed interest in buying or operating tourist facilities there and the mayor of a heartland city — Kasai, in an agricultural area inland from Kobe — has proposed that Yubari City workers whose jobs have disappeared apply to work in his city, which is looking for experienced public employees. This is one example of the ways Yubari people have received support and encouragement from all over Japan. This small city gained a lot of national attention, partly because other communities may face similar challenges. Meanwhile, some Yubari people feel that Tokyo has been especially hard on their community as a warning to others. Theme parks sprang up in Hokkaido to attract tourists. Glucks Konigsreich (Gluck’s Kingdom) opened near Obihiro as a replica of medieval Germany based on Grimm’s Fairy

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Tales and other traditional European stories. The complex also included amusement park rides for its visitors. Another theme park, Canadian World, began operation in Ashibetsu. A mining community on the Sorachi River with seventy thousand people at one time, Ashibetsu’s population had dwindled to less than twenty thousand, and creation of the park in 1990 was an attempt to reverse the city’s fortunes. Canadian World features fictional heroine Anne of Green Gables, or, as the Japanese call her, Red-haired Anne, along with a reproduction of her Prince Edward Island, Canada, farm home. After the park opened, Ashibetsu and Charlottetown, the capital of Prince Edward Island, became sister cities. Canadian World, however, has not been a success, as visitors did not come in expected numbers— perhaps because of Ashibetsu’s isolated location — and the attraction now looks sad and shopworn. Meanwhile, Glucks Konigsreich has closed. Many communities have competed with each other for visitors. Even some ski resorts have closed because of high costs and low patronage. Companies building and operating new facilities have too often brought in their own workers instead of hiring unemployed townspeople. Moreover, when new recreational facilities have opened, local people have frequently found that because of high prices they could not visit the new attractions. Meanwhile, Japanese tourism abroad grew rapidly in the early 1990s when the appreciation in the value of the yen made foreign travel affordable. This meant, of course, that people who might have vacationed in Hokkaido went elsewhere. Some Hokkaido attractions, however, remain especially popular. Asahikawa’s Asahiyama Zoo has recently become more and more successful and is reputed to be the finest zoo in Japan. Asahiyama has followed modern zoological trends in presenting a more natural environment for the animals. Zookeepers take the penguins on walks through the snow twice a day during the winter months to help the animals shed some of the fat they naturally put on during the cold part of the year — and this delights the zoo’s visitors. This zoo is now the best-loved one in the country, attracting more visitors than even Tokyo’s well-known Ueno Zoo. Niseko, in the mountains west of Sapporo, has become a boom town thanks to winter sports; its high-quality powder snow lies on the ski runs for almost half the year. After September 2001, travel to the United States lost some of its appeal and more and more Australian skiers began coming to Hokkaido. Niseko, in particular, has attracted expatriates and a number now live there year-round. Some local people are not happy about all the foreign visitors and the increased traffic and construction they bring. Niseko however, is an example of a town that has made tourism pay off.12 In 1987 the city of Monbetsu, northwest of Abashiri on the shore of the Sea of Okhotsk, originated tourist cruises in icebreakers cruising among Sea of Okhotsk ice floes. Several years later, with a larger boat, Abashiri joined the effort. Abashiri’s popular cruises through winter drift ice have attracted as many as half a million tourists during a season, but climatic conditions change from year to year, making advance planning for such trips difficult. In 1989, the year that marked the end of Hirohito’s sixty-four year reign as emperor, there was no ice at all at Abashiri, but in 2003, when the ice stayed longer than usual, one of the icebreakers usually used for tourists came to the aid of Abashiri fishermen and coast guard authorities by helping to open the port, which was still closed by ice in late March. Nowadays, though, the icebreaker operators worry that global warming will mean the end of the ice. Over the last hundred years, the amount of drift ice off Abashiri has decreased by forty percent.

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Earnings from the tourist sector now exceed those from farming, and some agricultural operations now cater to visitors. In the uplands near Furano, high on the Sorachi River, some farmers have planted their fields to lavender and the area has become a great tourist attraction during the summer blooming season, with wide expanses of the violet flowers in the foreground and mountains in the distance. Regardless of the season, souvenirs with a lavender theme, even “Hello Kitty” lavender items, are sold in gift shops throughout Hokkaido. Farmers also plant other flowering crops, including buckwheat, mustard and even potatoes, to create multicolored displays while the lavender is in bloom as well as to extend the season of flowers. As tourism has become an important sector in Hokkaido’s development plans, gift and gourmet products have been created, advertised and sold as Hokkaido specialties. For historic reasons, Otaru glassware produced for the tourist market is significant, both for its beauty and because it represents a local tradition. Creation of elegant glass items grew out of the glassmaking that flourished in Otaru in pioneer times, producing lamp chimneys for settlers and, later, fishermen’s floats. Other communities offer unique food products. Jams, jellies, wines and candy are made from the haskap (sometimes anglicized as “hascup”), a native berry found extensively in the Chitose area. Caramel-based candies from Hokkaido feature not only haskap but other island specialties including Yubari melon, local butter and milk, and even lavender. One can purchase Genghis Khan (mutton flavored) caramel, which has sold well as a novelty item despite its odd taste. Hokkaido melons, asparagus and potatoes have been especially popular with Japanese tourists. Rice grown in Numata, west of Asahikawa, has found an export market in Taiwan thanks to being called “snow rice;” its storage facilities are kept cool by snow. Special promotions of Hokkaido products occur outside the island, in Honolulu, for example. Even Hokkaido place names are exported. American menus and shop names feature “Sapporo Ramen” and “Sapporo” has also appeared in names of Mitsubishi automobile models sold in the United States. Trader Joe’s, an American specialty food retailer, advertises “Japanese Hokkaido Scallops,” and “Ezo Abalone” raised in Hawaii can be bought on the U.S. mainland. “Ezo beer” is a product developed by a Californian long resident in Sapporo. The company’s several varieties are brewed in Oregon but sold in Japan. Sapporo Breweries is now based in Tokyo, not Hokkaido, but the company still features a classic Sapporo Beer which can be purchased only on the northern island. Many communities have opened art museums, historical museums and other specialized ones. Asahikawa boasts a sculpture museum which is worth a visit for its building alone, a beautiful western colonial-style edifice constructed in 1902 to be an officers’ club for the military establishment in the city. Hokuchin Memorial Hall, a small but very interesting army museum located on the SDF post in Asahikawa, displays mementoes of the tondenhei as well as the famous Seventh Division, whose exploits are still honored for exemplifying the tondenhei spirit. Otaru has a transportation museum located at the terminus of the first rail line in Hokkaido; some of the original structures, including the roundhouse, remain. In Kushiro are the city’s excellent and architecturally impressive historical museum and the port museum, located in Hokkaido’s first brick building (1908), now reconstructed but once the home of the local newspaper where poet Ishikawa Takuboku worked briefly. In addition to its famous prison museum, Abashiri’s attractions include the outstanding Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples, which features artifacts from northern peoples all over the world.

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This beautiful building in Asahikawa now houses a sculpture collection, but the structure was built in 1902 as a club for military officers. When the Emperor toured Hokkaido in 1936, he stayed here.

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Additional responses Tourism has not been the only response to the changing economic climate. Hokkaido leaders work to make the island more attractive for the Dosanko as well as for educational institutions, business and industry. While wooing high tech firms, Hokkaido boosters emphasize the island’s skilled workforce along with an attractive environment. Efforts also include measures to improve the transportation infrastructure while responding to environmental concerns. Hori Tatsuya, governor from 1995 to 2003, emphasized strengthened relations between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, which would bolster the economy of both islands. Takahashi Harumi became Hokkaido’s first female governor when she took office in 2003. She sees an end to Hokkaido’s colonial economy; she has vowed to replace the dominance of Tokyo and its construction budget with local initiative, basing public works projects on real need rather than a mere desire to create construction jobs. She has also promised to fight unemployment and do without subsidies from Tokyo by continuing to build up the economy with tourism, information technology, biotechnology and a greater shift to more high-value-added agriculture. Promises have been made before, of course, and other prefectures also have such ideas. The mining town of Kamisunagawa in the foothills just off the route from Sapporo to Asahikawa had an exceptionally deep mine shaft. When its mine closed, investment from Mitsui firms (Mitsui had run the mine) and the government created a microgravity center using the mine shaft to study the effects of near-zero gravity. Thousands of experimental drops have taken place there. Horonobe, an agricultural town in Hokkaido’s far north, once had 7500 people, but its population has dropped by more than half, partly because a number of dairy farmers left due to economic difficulties that emerged after international trade liberalization. To create new jobs, town officials obtained support from the populace in the 1980s to welcome construction of a nuclear waste facility. Farmers had mixed feelings; they wanted to preserve the land and they worried about safety, but they would benefit from funds sent by Tokyo were the facility to be built. A later survey throughout Hokkaido found lack of citizen support. Governor Yokomichi and the Hokkaido Provincial Assembly revisited the idea and ultimately prevented construction of a repository; the Assembly adopted an ordinance prohibiting the transfer of nuclear waste to Hokkaido. A laboratory has been built, however, and scientists gained permission to carry out research for twenty years at the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute’s Underground Research Center in Horonobe. Some new products are being developed especially for Hokkaido use. One is an electric-powered four-wheel-drive wheelchair specially built to maneuver on snowy pavements. Sapporo Breweries has developed a special film made of aluminum, wheat bran and nylon to cover beer being transported during cold weather and prevent the beer from freezing. Shoes designed especially for Hokkaido winters have appeared on the market. Some feature cleats, some have non-slip surfaces; these shoes even come in fashionable styles. As more and more factories and tourist facilities appear, concern for the environment grows. Not all the Dosanko appreciate having more than 170 18-hole golf courses on the island. In addition to land use, environmental concerns include pollution and wildlife destruction. A project to be sited in Hokkaido was the first large Tokyo-planned con-

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struction plan stopped by pressure from a public concerned about the environment. Lake Utonai, a wetland in Tomakomai, was imperiled by a plan to change the flow of the Chitose River during times when periodic flooding threatens the Ishikari Valley. After a destructive 1981 flood, planners drew up a scheme in which the waters of the Chitose — a tributary of the Ishikari —could be diverted through a canal heading south. This new channel to the Pacific Ocean would prevent flooding but it would also attract the waters that feed Lake Utonai, drying it up. After more than a dozen years of citizen opposition, officials dropped the canal plan and instead concentrated on smaller projects in the Ishikari basin to guard against floods. In 1987, Ainu and other environmentalists protested a plan by Japan’s Forestry Agency for selective logging in about eight percent of Shiretoko National Park. The Environmental Agency asked for a survey of the area to ensure that no endangered species would be harmed, and after a study, the plan was revised; fewer trees would be felled. The Forestry Agency had justified the plan on grounds of maintaining the lumber industry in the face of increasing timber imports, but throughout Hokkaido, forest maintenance and reforestation are also priorities. Development has channeled rivers between concrete banks and has created artificial shorelines. Comparison of old and new maps and photographs shows clearly the many island rivers that have been straightened, even moved. A good example of a river that has lost its meanders is the Kotambetsu, which reaches the Japan Sea north of Rumoi. It wandered through nearly flat land as it approached the sea, but the landscape is different now as the Kotambetsu follows the more direct route carved out for it. One town which lost a beach is Shiraoi, once an Ainu settlement where the beach played a key role in daily life. The town and ocean were separated only by a sand dune, and children would frolic on the sand while their elders launched fishing boats which had been pulled up on to the beach to sit overnight. Above the high tide line were great pots where fish were boiled for their oil. Now Shiraoi is isolated from the sea by an express highway. Traffic shoots along, bypassing the town, and against the sea side of this highway a tetrapod breakwater replaces the beach. A very small area remains as the Shiraoi harbor, giving access to the ocean. Meanwhile, the tetrapods do not protect Shiraoi residents, though they help make the oceanside highway possible; a September 2006 typhoon sent water into Shiraoi houses, damaging windows and walls. Concrete has also replaced some of the beach in the historic Oshima Peninsula town of Esashi where families used to sit on the sand or play in the water. Too many communities in Japan have seen this kind of development, but construction has also been a benefit — offering jobs, of course, and improving transportation routes. The many breakwaters installed at coastal towns and villages have supplied safer moorages for fishermen. Cities large and small now have protected harbors thanks to these breakwaters. But, as in Shiraoi, stretches of shoreline all over the island have become forests of tetrapods, and one must mourn the loss of beach. Harbor improvements in Hokkaido are impressive as well as intrusive. Thanks to harbor development, Tomakomai handles about forty percent, by volume, of the island’s cargo and leads Hokkaido seaports in handling international trade these days. The changes at the city’s shoreline are hard to believe: that a large, modern harbor could be created partly out of flat, swampy land. Next to Tomakomai’s artificial harbor is the large industrial zone planned in the 1970s. Because this area is only about twelve miles from New Chitose International Airport, it is well-placed to attract business and industry. However,

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the site was not very successful in attracting firms— by 1998 only fifteen percent of the available land had been purchased — leaving a mountain of public debt. In Kushiro, too, the port is a crucial economic asset. In addition to being an important fishing center, Kushiro also serves as the distribution center for all of eastern Hokkaido. Thus the city does not depend mainly on tourists, though Kushiro does take advantage of being the gateway to Kushiro Shitsugen National Park, the extensive wetland that is home to the Japanese crane. Fast water flowing down the channeled Kushiro River has been drying up the marsh, though, so about a quarter-century after a construction project straightened portions of the river, some of its meanders are to be restored. Some environmentalists think the project will help restore the marsh, but others think this is simply one more project to support the construction industry. Transportation services both within Hokkaido and to the other islands are crucial for industry, trade, tourism, agriculture, fishing and daily life. Local, prefectural and national governments understand that a good transportation system is essential. Making travel safer has had a high priority in Hokkaido, especially after the loss of the Toya Maru in 1954, and has led to construction of the Seikan Tunnel joining Hokkaido and Honshu. This replaces the sixty-mile ferry route between Aomori and Hakodate. At thirty-two miles in length, the Seikan Tunnel is the world’s longest tunnel, though only fourteen miles of it are actually under water. Instead of spanning the channel from the Aomori harbor to Hakodate’s, it crosses the strait at nearly its narrowest spot. The project was first seriously proposed about 1940 by military and railway officials who feared the damage that bombers over Tsugaru Strait could do to wartime shipping. Construction meant engineering challenges as well as expense, though. The Toya Maru tragedy heightened demands for action, and serious planning began. Ferry traffic grew quickly in the years after the disaster and by 1971 it was clear that ferry dock facilities would have to be substantially upgraded in order to keep up with future traffic growth. The alternative: build a tunnel; it would be the longest one in the world. Digging began in 1964. Constructing it was expected to take around seven years but required twentyone, costing thirty-four lives and more than ten times the funds estimated. During construction, extensive flooding disrupted the work several times, most seriously in May 1976 when flood waters suddenly burst into the tunnel at a rate that reached thirty-two tons of water per minute. Both the main tunnel and a service passageway next to it were flooded, and it took five months to free the tunnels of water. Construction continued, and by 1985, the thirty-five-foot-wide sections mined from the two ends met in the middle. Once the tunnel was complete, tracks were laid, and the Seikan Tunnel opened to traffic on March 13, 1988. The tunnel serves mainly to move freight, not people, and carries electrically operated trains, not cars, because adequately ventilating a passage of that length for automobile use was impractical if not impossible. With over one hundred airplane flights now arriving in Hokkaido every day, however, fewer people are using the Seikan Tunnel than used the ferries before the tunnel opened. Travel on the Aomori-Hakodate ferry run had begun to decline as early as the 1970s, in fact, as air travel became faster and more convenient. Because airplanes fly from Tokyo to Sapporo in just an hour and a half, the train has not been expected to make money. It has, however, served to advance the technology of tunnel construction and to encourage projects such as the “Chunnel” connecting England and France. For the Dosanko, the Seikan Tunnel has eliminated many rail service disruptions, because ferry

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service had always been suspended during the worst weather. (Perhaps almost as important to many travelers, they no longer need fear seasickness.) High speed ferry service between Hakodate and Aomori is now also available; a new catamaran introduced on the route in September 2007 makes the journey in less than two hours. The ship, decorated with excessively cute pictures of sea life on both sides of its hull, carries cars as well as foot passengers. This ferry might well attract passengers away from the tunnel, but the two services should prove to be complementary. The ferry would be more convenient for people wanting to travel between the cities of Aomori and Hakodate as well as for those bringing their cars. But the tunnel will be indispensable when bad weather forces cancellation of ferry service and, perhaps, even air travel. Ships make overnight trips to several Hokkaido ports from both the Japan Sea and Pacific Ocean coastal ports on Honshu, and naturalists have enthused over the birds and fish — even sharks— visible on the long Tokyo-Kushiro route. One of the ferry boats which served the Aomori-Hakodate route before the tunnel opened has been refurbished and is now open to the public in Hakodate as a tourist attraction. Air travel to Hokkaido— mainly Sapporo— has boomed, and in 1988 New Chitose International Airport opened. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the number of people flying this route each year exceeded the total population of Hokkaido. New Chitose International Airport is now the central focus of Hokkaido’s transportation system, and island interests have encouraged the shipment of international air cargo to New Chitose rather than to the crowded Tokyo airports. In 1994, the Chitose facility became Japan’s first airport to be open twenty-four hours a day and these days, Tokyo-Chitose is the busiest air route in the world. Recently, planes have been flying directly to Hokkaido’s premier airport from Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore, Guam and Russia’s Sakhalin Island as well as, during skiing season, from Australia. However, due to economic troubles, Japan Air Lines dropped its direct Sapporo-Honolulu flights in 2003. Construction of a new building at Chitose to serve international flights is to begin in 2009. Yet due to the world’s economic downturn in 2008, a few flights to New Chitose have been cut. New Chitose also serves as an emergency airfield for long distance flights that run into difficulty. International flights taking a polar route fly nearby, for example on their way from North America to Tokyo. Hokkaido can be a way station for these flights, just as it was for pioneer aviators hoping to cross the Pacific Ocean. Among a number of examples, a Boeing 747 bound for Tokyo from Chicago in November 1985 refueled at Chitose because exceptionally strong headwinds meant the plane burned too much fuel. In May 2005, a JAL flight from Brazil via New York to Tokyo stopped in Chitose after the air pressure in the plane suddenly dropped for unknown reasons. All the advances in international air travel have encouraged a stronger Hokkaido presence on the world scene. As transportation across national borders has become faster and less expensive, Hokkaido’s international ties have strengthened. And though to Japanese, Sapporo may seem distant, to foreign travelers its ninety minute flying time from Tokyo is trivial. The market for domestic air travel to Hokkaido has spurred the creation of new airlines, the best known of which is Air Do or, officially, Hokkaido International Airlines Co. Air Do began service in December 1998 with one airplane, a Boeing 767, making three daily round trips to Tokyo; the fledgling company’s goal was to provide low cost service. Establishing a new player in the air travel market proved difficult, though, as other

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companies lowered their prices on competing flights. Additional airlines sprang up to serve the Hokkaido market and overnight car ferry service between Honshu and Hokkaido featured reduced prices due to the increased airline competition. Air Do went bankrupt in 2002, but reorganization and a new link with All Nippon Airways led to expanded service and prices comparable to those of the major airlines. High fuel prices throughout the world in 2008, though, made Air Do’s future questionable. More and more Hokkaido travel in recent years takes place in private automobiles. Advances have come in making winter driving safer. Some Hokkaido roads are heated to melt snow and ice on hills and dangerous curves. This can be done fairly easily in places like the Jozankei resort area, where water from hot springs is pumped underneath the highway. And when the first expressways were built on Hokkaido, snow-melting equipment was included. Despite this, Hokkaido consistently leads Japan’s prefectures in the number of annual traffic fatalities. Its large area, its mountains and its winter conditions offer challenges to drivers. Nissan has constructed a track in Rikubetsu, an inland town in a mountain valley between Daisetsuzan and Akan National Parks, to test car and driver behavior in normal conditions, during cold, snow and ice, and at high rates of speed. Honda, Toyota and Bridgestone are among the other firms that carry out automotive tests in Hokkaido. While many transportation improvements have come, increased automobile use has meant that some rail lines have become uneconomic. When nearby highways with bus service are available, these rail lines have been discontinued. The railroad no longer serves Matsumae Town, the island’s first capital. Even the line to Horonai, once part of the first rail line built in Hokkaido, ceased operation in 1987, a little more than one hundred years since service began. Most lines today except that between Otaru and the airport in Chitose have seen a drop in passengers, both because the island’s population is no longer growing and because automobile use continues to increase. JR Hokkaido, which operates the intercity rail system on the island, is now profitable only because of development of its real estate holdings, particularly at Sapporo Station. JR Hokkaido continues to search for innovative ways to operate. In April 2007, the company started service with a car that can run both on railway tracks and on roads, its first line running through the rural area southeast of Abashiri. This is the first operation of such a vehicle in the world. Changing traffic needs offer challenges to planners, as do changes in cost of living, available types of employment, leisure time activities, product popularity and other aspects of modern life. So does the need for environmental protection. Development plans for the island reflect all of these, but Tokyo direction and financing of Hokkaido has always been presented in terms of what Hokkaido can do for the nation. In recent years, however, the bureaucracy has been reorganized and should link central planning more directly with island localities. Partly meeting the needs once addressed by Takugin is the Development Bank of Japan created by Tokyo in 1999. Two years later, the Hokkaido Development Bureau found itself abolished and reconstituted in Tokyo’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. In 2008, though, after bid-rigging became public knowledge, Tokyo planned to abolish the bureau. Tokyo and the Docho have not always coordinated their plans and strategies. Some functions of the center are now carried out by a new regional bureau in Hokkaido and the island will be a test case for the nation through another Tokyo initiative. In 2006, the Diet adopted a plan to designate Hokkaido as a “special zone.” The government proposes

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dividing all Japan into about twelve regions, one of which would be Hokkaido. The purpose would be to move some responsibilities from the center to the new regions, while financial help from the center would continue. The scheme has already generated criticism, however, because very little responsibility would actually be transferred. All of Japan has seen subsidies from the central government cut back or phased out. Since the days of the Kaitakushi in the nineteenth century, lack of money has impeded prosperity on Hokkaido; in fact, the Takugin failure was linked to the island’s weak economy. In the twenty-first century, the challenge is to increase self-sufficiency as funds from Tokyo decrease. (Even in 2006, however, Tokyo was paying four-fifths of the cost of road construction on Hokkaido.) Some Dosanko are glad to see the end of development projects which they blame for despoiling the island and for encouraging dependence rather than initiative. But the loss of funds and jobs does hurt. Unemployment in Japan showed a small decrease in 2006, but in Hokkaido it rose slightly. Also, Hokkaido’s per capita income is below the national average. While Tokyo sends less support to Hokkaido, some island firms look abroad, for instance to Sakhalin, whose developing oil and gas industry offers many projects, especially for construction companies. Also, through trade promotion, citizen exchanges and cooperative research projects, the Northern Regions Center continues to be active. A number of universities in Hokkaido, not only Hokudai, have exchange programs with institutions abroad. Sister city relationships are thriving. Sapporo and Portland, Oregon established a tie in 1959. Portland’s suburb Gresham and Ebetsu near Sapporo later became sister cities. After Ishikari and Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada, became sister cities in 1983, the indigenous peoples in the two areas also formed a partnership: Hokkaido Ainu with the Cape Mudge Indian Band. In Abashiri stands a totem pole specially carved for the city as a gift from its sister city, Port Alberni, British Columbia. Hakodate and Halifax, Nova Scotia are sister cities, an appropriate tie because their fortresses, Hakodate’s Goryokaku and the Halifax Citadel, are of similar design. Tobetsu, a town north of Ebetsu, has developed a strong tie with Sweden and houses the headquarters of the Swedish Center Foundation in Japan. One material benefit has been the construction of many Swedishstyle houses in the Hokkaido town, where their effective insulation is eminently practical for winter weather. The town celebrates an annual summer solstice festival modeled after Swedish tradition. The sister city relationship between Otaru and Dunedin, New Zealand is almost thirty years old. Kushiro and New Orleans established a sister-port relationship in 1984, recognizing the significance of the huge amount of feed grain shipped from the American port to Kushiro for Hokkaido’s dairy cattle. When New Orleans suffered massive destruction in 2005 from Hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding, Kushiro businesses and citizens collected relief funds for the ravaged city. Positive ties with communities elsewhere in Japan as well as abroad can only benefit Hokkaido as the future brings new and often unexpected challenges. As the world changes, so must Hokkaido change. The Dosanko have a reputation for individualism, perseverance and ability to cope with extreme conditions; the spirit that made early pioneers successful should help the island and its people in years to come.

Conclusion Hokkaido— once Ezo— has always been the Ainu homeland, but once Wajin appeared the island’s story took a new direction. A Wajin enclave appeared on Hokkaido’s long southwestern peninsula and as Wajin power grew under the Matsumae family, clashes with Ainu almost inevitably came. The more powerful Wajin won out, but a new challenge appeared: foreign explorers. Japanese law kept them away, but the Russian Empire expanded ever farther eastward and Japan’s rulers feared encroachment on Ezo, not to speak of nearby Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. In the mid–nineteenth century, the shogunate reluctantly opened the nation to foreign port visits and, soon, trade. It was time to settle Ezo and incorporate it into the nation — with a new name: Hokkaido. From the time the island became Hokkaido, its history has been one of development. With the assistance of foreign experts, detailed study of the island and its resources began. Pioneers came to settle and farm the land as well as to harvest the island’s plentiful resources. A new capital city, Sapporo, appeared, and while it and its university, founded in pioneer times, are now among Japan’s greatest, the island’s natural resources no longer offer seemingly unlimited potential. Hokkaido suffered crop failure, depression, war and storm-related tragedy during the twentieth century but life for the Dosanko improved with infrastructure development and modernization. Challenges remain, but life on the island can be good.

The future What does the future hold for Hokkaido? The late twentieth century saw major changes in the island’s economy, from mine closures to fish population decline as well as national economic malaise, but the Dosanko must build for the future. Hokkaido prosperity was long based upon the extractive industries— mining, fishing and forestry — as well as agriculture. But mining is gone, fishing has diminished and forestry has lost prominence with more lumber coming into the island than leaving it. This leaves as Hokkaido’s resources agriculture, nature and people. Hokkaido agriculture makes a crucial contribution to Japan. Research continues and new practices add to efficiency and increased production. Organic farming is making headway on the island while experimental planting of genetically-modified rice in isolated fields is also underway. The most vivid data illustrating Hokkaido’s agricultural importance to the nation appear in a self-sufficiency rating. In 2000, only forty percent of the food eaten in Japan was raised domestically, but Hokkaido was two hundred percent self-sufficient.1 The northern island was no longer a food deficit area.

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Despite the blunders at Snow Brand and other firms, the future looks good for products made from Hokkaido crops and resources. Hokkaido whisky has won the top awards in international whisky competitions, even beating out Scotland’s best. Another Hokkaido prizewinner is a Tokachi District cheese, the top entry among soft cheeses in Switzerland’s 2004 Mountain Cheese Olympics2; cheese is an example of a Hokkaido product finding a market throughout Japan as Japanese consumers develop a taste for foreign foods. Hokkaido has Japan’s first ostrich ranch, where the big birds are raised for food, and in Abashiri a Tokyo University of Agriculture branch campus has organized a company to sell emu products. New products introduced in the Japanese market emphasize their Hokkaido connection as a selling point, whether lavender ice cream or soybeans used to made a bean candy. An island firm that has developed a way of freezing milk without loss of flavor or consistency planned to export the product. Twenty-first century Governor Takahashi Harumi has announced her determination to continue to build Hokkaido’s food industry. Hokkaido communities continue to encourage tourism; this sector has recently overtaken agriculture in income generation. Visitors come for the weather, the sports, the northern scenery, the historic buildings and the hot springs. Foreigners come; a 2004 survey taken in Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong ranked Hokkaido as the Japanese destination most people would like to visit; the island scored higher than Tokyo or Kyoto. Most tourists come from the other Japanese islands rather than foreign countries, so official campaigns to attract tourists target people from other Asian countries as well as Japanese.3 In all, almost fifty million people traveled to Hokkaido in 2006, estimated the Docho. All but about six hundred thousand were Japanese, however, and hopes have arisen that foreign visits will increase as a result of publicity and promotion regarding the 2008 Group of Eight conference held at Lake Toya. In addition, more Japanese might come to Hokkaido after completion of a bullet train to the island, a project that began construction in 2005. Ecotourism in Hokkaido attracts Japanese and foreign tourists. The Kushiro Shitsugen wetland offers various environmentally-friendly activities for visitors: hiking, canoeing, cycling and, in the winter, cross-country skiing. Tours have also been organized during which visitors help restore natural habitat. With Shiretoko named a World Heritage Site in 2005 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), planners strive to prevent the tourist influx from overwhelming the peninsula. The increase in tourist numbers will, of course, be an economic benefit to Hokkaido, but environmental damage remains a concern. Infrastructure improvement, too, must be coordinated with protection of the environment. Whether this can overcome Japan’s “pave-and-dam ethic”— to use Pradyumna Karan’s description — is unclear.4 Among the unusual environmental concerns is the recent decrease in floe ice along the Sea of Okhotsk coastline. Scientists think that waters from the Amur River on the Asian mainland cause the floes to form, and that damming the river has decreased the amount of river water running to the sea. Global warning is also a culprit. Scientists suggest that this may cause the decline of some fish species near Hokkaido, though warm water sea creatures, like oysters, may increase. In addition, though hotter weather in southern Japan seems to be damaging the rice crop there, rising temperatures benefit rice cultivation in Hokkaido. Meanwhile, bird flu, discovered in dead swans found along Hokkaido’s northeast coast in 2008, is a more immediate worry.

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The current regard in Hokkaido for environmental management is a far cry from people’s earlier attitudes; before World War II, Kushiro officials worried about the damage the now-protected Japanese cranes were causing to the forests.5 Some of Hokkaido’s wild animal species, including the crane, are doing well these days, though a 2007 discovery that mercury may be poisoning some cranes has raised alarm. Asahikawa’s Asahiyama Zoo has successfully bred a Steller’s Sea Eagle, that magnificent and protected but threatened bird which often winters on the Hokkaido coast. Some large animals, too, are thriving. Though deer were almost wiped out in the late nineteenth century, populations have long since recovered and are now blamed for traffic accidents as well as damage to forests and farm crops. Deer can be hunted lawfully, with over forty thousand of them taken in 1996. These days officials are encouraging more people to take up hunting. The Docho is promoting venison as a food, often marketing it as momiji (maple tree) meat, thus finding a use for deer killed to protect crops. Venison now appears in school lunches in some Hokkaido communities. Bears are thriving too, and inspire fear; they killed three people in Hokkaido in early 2001. The greatest concentration of bears is in the Shiretoko Peninsula, where officials fear that the danger they pose may keep visitors away. How to preserve a bear population while protecting people remains perplexing. Illustrating concerns in Hokkaido about wild animals, some Dosanko reacted angrily to a proposal to reintroduce wolves to Nikko, worrying that these animals could come to Hokkaido via the Seikan Tunnel — and Nikko is three hundred miles from Hokkaido. This weather-dependent island will always face the need to cope with severe winter conditions. Though insulation in buildings is common now and sophisticated methods of keeping roads open have been developed, winter means a standstill for the construction industry and blizzards can still bring the island’s commerce to a halt and make life more difficult for everyone. The winter climate is hard on roads, meaning high expenses for highway maintenance. Roads that freeze at night and thaw during daytime also lead to too many accidents. Winter storm conditions cause road closures and flight cancellations and there is sometimes enough snow in a Hokkaido town that people have to enter houses on the second floor, not the first. Even in the twenty-first century, some homeless men have lived in tents during an Asahikawa winter, scavenging for food; edibles they have found were, of course, frozen.6 Because of winter cold, providing energy for Hokkaido will continue to be a challenge. Rising worldwide oil prices in 2005 and after plus an especially cold and snowy 2005-06 winter season have made alternative energy sources even more important. On the other hand, during the mild winter of 2006-07, some Hokkaido businesses suffered, including firms that repair frozen water pipes. Also, because Hokkaido homes are heated well in winter, the Dosanko are uncomfortable during visits to heartland homes where heating is minimal even when the weather is cold. Hokkaido’s economy remains weaker than that of Japan as a whole. Consumer spending and salaries lag, and the Docho has cut both wages and staff numbers. Hokkaido graduates were finding fewer jobs in 2007 than was the case nationally. Some costs are high on the northern island. This has not just been a postwar phenomenon; a 1914 guidebook noted that hiring porters in Hakodate to transport travelers’ luggage cost twice as much as in “Japan proper.”7 Most of what is imported to the island from abroad first goes through another port, perhaps Yokohama, or through distributors in Tokyo. If more imports and exports could be handled directly by Hokkaido ports and New Chitose International Airport, prices on the island could drop.

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For years, Hokkaido leaders have been striving to attract industry. Only two percent of Japan’s manufacturing firms are located in Hokkaido, where five percent of the people live. Because of Dosanko frustrations, at the end of the twentieth century one could even hear half-serious threats of secession from Japan, or more serious suggestions that Hokkaido be more loosely linked with Tokyo through a federal system of government. Recent government restructuring initiatives taken by Tokyo may or may not satisfy the Dosanko. With the worldwide economic collapse that began in late 2008, some industrial firms have closed facilities or scrapped plans to build new ones in Hokkaido. Even Oji has ended production in several plants. And like newspapers in the United States, the Hokkaido Shimbun has faced declining circulation. Since Hokkaido is on the nation’s periphery and has a relatively small population, manufacturers were not tempted to locate there even before the economic turndown. Firms which do set up shop in Hokkaido face extra costs due to severe winter weather: heating expenses, suspension of much outdoor work during winter months and weather-related transportation disruptions. Many companies find it necessary to give employees in Hokkaido an extra heating allowance. Medical costs for people in Hokkaido are higher than for people living on Japan’s other islands— but one of the reasons is that old and infirm people are sometimes placed in medical facilities for the winter months. These days some Hokkaido people seek temporary work elsewhere in Japan during the winter; government offices in Hokkaido have aided in searches for these jobs. Some recent technological developments on the island are based on Hokkaido’s winter climate. These include invention of a system for storing ice to be used later for summer cooling. In the city of Bibai, a nursing home collects snow in a storeroom. When hot weather comes, the door is opened and cool air is emitted into the building’s dining room. The city’s government office building is also partly cooled with stored winter snow and Bibai has even provided snow to give some relief to polar bears suffering in the zoo in Asahikawa during summer heat. An Asahikawa firm brews sake, taking advantage of cold weather by making some of it in an igloo. As these examples show, Hokkaido entrepreneurs and scientists have worked to cope with and even exploit the island’s challenging winter climate. Research continues on how to make better use of the insulation provided by the island’s snow cover. Meanwhile, the Dosanko do not let winter cold and snow bother them; they continue their activities as usual, whether shopping, eating out or enjoying sports. In winter, of course, the sports are snow and ice pursuits or indoor activities like basketball. Too often people ignore Hokkaido’s benefits, such as the island’s freedom from the heartland’s hot, sultry rainy season. The Dosanko highlight Hokkaido’s location; it is closer to both Europe and North America than are Japan’s other three major islands. Businesses in Hokkaido and foreign countries have established successful joint ventures and Hokkaido is also well-placed to dominate trade with the Russian Far East. One exciting idea is to build a suspension bridge across twenty-six mile La Perouse Strait, from Cape Soya to Sakhalin Island. Russia must first bridge the narrow passage between Sakhalin and the mainland; then Japanese money will be available to help build the bridge to Hokkaido, a Russian official reported in May 2007.8 Another, more feasible, possibility is a gas pipeline connecting the islands of Sakhalin and Hokkaido, giving Hokkaido easy access to Sakhalin’s plentiful gas reserves. Meanwhile, Russian and Japanese telecommunications companies operate a fiberglass cable between the two islands.

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Relations with Russia remain important to Hokkaido. Hokkaido fishermen work in or near Russian waters and continue to fear that Russia will interfere with their livelihood. Hokkaido interests stress cooperation with the northern neighbor, and Hokkaido and Sakhalin officials support joint development. Thus cargo shipped between Wakkanai and Sakhalin’s southern port, Korsakov, has grown substantially. Perhaps the Northern Territories dispute might even see a solution, for with changing technology the islands no longer have the strategic importance they once had. Today, though, no breakthrough is in sight. Meanwhile, though Russia does not seem to offer a threat to northern Japan these days, Hokkaido remains central to Japan’s military establishment. Activities by other nations, too, affect Hokkaido. If the United States, for example, should impose more stringent limits on fishing within its 200 mile limit, the Hokkaido economy would be disrupted. Such American action is theoretical, but the 2006 underground detonation of a nuclear weapon in North Korea was not. This disturbed the Dosanko, for Hokkaido could easily be the target of such a bomb if not the site of a catastrophic accident. As a protest against the nuclear test, Japan banned North Korean ships from entering Japanese ports. This hurt Otaru, where each year about ninety North Korean boats had been coming to unload and load trade goods. Even more serious in its possible consequences is the worldwide terrorist threat. The continuing Self-Defense Force maneuvers in Hokkaido— an outgrowth of earlier military preparedness activities intended to counter a supposed threat from the U.S.S.R.— now reflect this new concern. Counterterrorist measures on the island have included strict regulation of foreign vessels and their passengers, which impacts trade and tourism as well as local fishermen, who have been unhappy at being kept from port areas closed due to new regulations. While maintaining vigilance against possible international threats, Hokkaido must work for economic security. The island has become the home of businesses to which weather and distance from the heartland do not matter. For employers, the island’s advantages include relatively low salaries and low office costs and for employees, lower housing costs and shorter commutes. In the twenty-first century, more and more Japanese firms have established call centers in Hokkaido. One requirement for this is an educated work force, which Hokkaido has. Another advantage of Hokkaido for call center work is that people there generally speak without a strong dialect or regional accent. Research thrives at Hokudai and the Docho has been developing joint research programs between local universities and industries. The island includes a number of research institutes and universities, not just in and near Sapporo. From Wakkanai to Hakodate, Otaru to Kushiro, students can pursue higher education or specialized training. Biotechnology companies are prospering, with seventy-five biotech firms operating on the island in 2004. Information technology has found a center in Sapporo, its growth led by Hokudai graduates, and now employs more people on Hokkaido than any industry except for food manufacturing. To many Japanese, Hokkaido remains exceptional, a remote place of snow, ice and dangerous bears. Many people still feel as a 1921 visitor wrote, “Hokkaido ... makes the Kyoto or Nagasaki resident feel chilly. The idea of moving to Hakodate or Sapporo is as though a Virginian were asked to live in Labrador or a Frenchman in Iceland.” Film director Kobayashi Masahiro, who shot a 2003 film on the northern island, said, “There’s a loneliness and an ambiguity to Hokkaido that cannot be seen elsewhere in Japan.”9 The Island is important in the Japanese imagination as the locale for exotic events, often in

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anime or in computer games featuring future wars. Hokkaido is perceived as alien — distant and forbidding — despite the brief airplane flight from Tokyo. Many Dosanko as well as Japanese in the heartland perceive Hokkaido people as different. While they refer to the other Japanese islands as naichi, Hokkaido is “outside Japan.” In 1902 Anna Hartshorne wrote of Hokkaido, “The children growing up there will love the north, but the older ones must feel themselves exiles, however loyal to its interests.”10 And so it has been. Adjustments were hard for the pioneers, whether in the nineteenth or twentieth century, but later generations love their homeland. Observers agree that Hokkaido’s history has produced a people with a much more egalitarian viewpoint than people elsewhere in Japan. The Dosanko are more open and outspoken, more adventurous and more individualistic and have an independent streak rarely found in the rest of the nation. Women have more rights (perhaps because there were few of them in pioneer days, and thus they were highly valued). If the Dosanko are perceived as different, so are the Ainu. Japan, and especially Hokkaido, face the challenge of overcoming prejudice and discrimination against Ainu people, while at the same time encouraging Ainu cultural life. An inspiration to Dosanko is the dog Taro, famous for surviving in the Antarctic in 1958 despite being abandoned by Japanese explorers forced to abort their trip with no room for dogs on the evacuation helicopter. Thirteen dogs died but two, Taro and Jiro, lived until a new team arrived the next year. Jiro died on a 1960 expedition, but Taro, who had been trained in Wakkanai, spent six years in the Antarctic and then spent his retirement years in the Sapporo Botanic Garden. He died in 1970. Hokkaido’s history, climate and landscape are unique in Japan, making the island a wonderful but sometimes challenging place. William S. Clark’s words, “Boys, be ambitious!” and the “Clarkii spirit” recalled by his students after his departure inspire the Dosanko even today. Perhaps Hokkaido never was quite the paradise Clark described while musing about a prospective immigrant, “the best land he ever saw in the valley of the Ishkari [sic], where salmon and deer will come to his door and ask to be eaten, and magnificent bears will bring him their skins for robes.”11 No longer is Hokkaido a pioneer land, but today it offers Japan’s wildest place (the Shiretoko Peninsula), clean air, pleasant summers and invigorating, not to say difficult, winters. Hokkaido has uncrowded cities, grand vistas, pleasant countryside, great people, and opportunity.

Appendix 1. Hokkaido Chronology 10,000 BC– 2nd C. BC Jomon Period existed in Japan 2nd C. BC Epi-Jomon Period began in Ezo AD 7th C. Satsumon Period emerged Okhotsk people arrived in Ezo 659 First known observation post established in Ezo 12th C. Okhotsk people disappeared; perhaps were absorbed Satsumon culture became Ainu culture First Wajin settlements appeared in Ezo prob. 1216 First written records appeared of Wajin arriving in Ezo 1420–30 Ando family driven into Ezo, inaugurated first Japanese government there 1456 Koshamain’s war took place 1550–51 Wajin made agreement with Ainu, resulting in establishment of Kakizaki authority in Oshima Peninsula 1582 Kakizaki recognized by shogunate as independent of Ando clan 1600s Basho ukeoi system developed 1603 Kakizaki name changed to Matsumae; area became domain of Japan 1606 Matsumae Yoshihiro built Matsumae Castle; established his capital there prob. 1618 First European, Fr. Jeronimo de Angelis, SJ, visited Ezo 1630s Omi trading houses from Honshu began setting up branch offices in Matsumae 1633 Shogunate inspectors first went to Matsumae 1643 Maarten Gerritsz Vries explored along west coast of Ezo 1669 Shakushain’s War fought

18th Century 1716 1739 1759 1771 1785 1787 1789 1792 1796 1799 1799 1800

Matsumae gained full daimyo status Martin Spanberg sailed near and observed Ezo Matsumae clan first heard of Russians in Kuril islands Benyovsky warned, falsely, that Russians planned to attack Matsumae Mogami Tokunai participated in expedition from Edo to Ezo La Perouse explored in Ezo waters Menashi-Kunashir Ainu uprising occurred Laxman expedition from Russia wintered at Nemuro; Japanese refused trade privileges Broughton visited Ezo area Mamiya Rinzo’s first trip to Ezo took place Shogunate assumed direct control of eastern Ezo Ino Tadataka began surveying Ezo

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19th Century 1805–06 1806–07 1807 1811–1813 1821 1831 1844 1846 1848 1850 1854

1855 1856 1858 1861 1862–63 1864 1868 1869

1869–76 1871 1872 1874 1875 1876 1878 1879 1880 1881 1886 1888 1889 1890

Krusenstern and Rezanov voyaged in Japanese waters Russians Khvostov and Davydov raided Sakhalin, Kurils and vessels at sea Shogunate placed all Ezo under direct control Golovnin and seven other Russians held captive in Ezo Shogunate returned entire island of Ezo to Matsumae control Australian ship Lady Rowena put ashore at Akkeshi Matsuura Takeshiro made his first visit to Ezo U.S. whaler Lawrence sank off Kurils; survivors jailed in Matsumae U.S. whaler Lagoda men placed in captivity Ranald MacDonald came to Ezo Matsuura’s first map of Ezo printed Shogunate resumed administration of Ezo Treaty of Kanagawa opened Hakodate to U.S. ships Commodore Perry visited Hakodate Treaty opened Hakodate to British ships Treaty opened Hakodate to Russian ships E. E. Rice became first American trade representative in Hakodate Japan granted trade privileges to U.S., Britain, France and Russia I. A. Goshkevich became Russian consul in Hakodate Russian Orthodox priest Father Nikolai arrived in Hakodate Raphael Pumpelly and William Blake surveyed Ezo mines Niijima Jo came to Hakodate Goryokaku completed Meiji Restoration took place Enomoto and followers established anti–Meiji government in Hakodate Enomoto men lost to Meiji forces led by Kuroda Kiyotaka Name of Ezo changed to Hokkaido Kaitakushi established Shima Yoshitake began laying out new city of Sapporo Basho ukeoi system abolished Kuroda Kiyotaka went to the U.S. to search for foreign advisers for Kaitakushi Horace Capron and his assistants began work for the Kaitakushi Sapporo became official capital of Hokkaido Land Regulation Ordinance adopted; Ainu land could now be confiscated German Consul Ludwig Haber assassinated in Hakodate Tondenhei established Border between Russia and Japan settled; Sakhalin now Russian, entire Kuril chain now part of Japan Sapporo Agricultural College founded; William S. Clark arrived to serve as first president Kaitakushi brewery began making beer in Sapporo— the origin of Sapporo Beer Isabella Bird traveled in Hokkaido Survey for Otaru-Horonai railroad began Horonai mine opened First graduation ceremony of Sapporo Agricultural College held Railroad between Otaru and Sapporo opened to traffic Meiji regime ordered that Kaitakushi be abolished Railroad to Horonai completed Hokkaido Prefecture established; Iwamura Michitoshi named its first governor Ban Ichitaro discovered rich coal deposits in Yubari Hokkaido Development Bank (Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko) founded Asahikawa founded Abashiri Prison opened

Hokkaido Chronology 1896 1899 1900

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Trappist Monastery founded in Kamiiso, near Hakodate Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Law enacted by National Diet Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko (Hokkaido Development Bank) incorporated

20th Century 1901 1902 1904–05 1905 1909 1910 1914 1916 1919 1922 1927 1930 1931 1931–35 1934 1937 late 1930s 1943 1945

1945–47 1946 1950 1952 1952–53 1954 1956

1958 1968 1969 1972

Hokkaido granted a prefectural assembly Hokkaido Agricultural Experiment Station established Suffrage began in Hokkaido Russo-Japanese War occurred Cold-resistant akage variety of rice introduced Japan received southern half of Sakhalin at end of Russo-Japanese War First steam trawler came to Hokkaido to begin fishing operations there First development plan for Hokkaido adopted Oji Paper Mill started operation in Tomakomai More than 400 people killed in Yubari mine explosion Bozu rice, suited to efficient sowing in Hokkaido, developed Korean workers first brought into Hokkaido mines Regulations adopted requiring four years of schooling for Ainu children Hokuren (Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives of Hokkaido) organized Soya Railroad completed, enabling development of Wakkanai Docho abolished educational requirements specifically for Ainu Otaru general strike took place Second development plan for Hokkaido enacted Hokkaido Ainu Kyokai established; strove to combat discrimination Lindberghs flew to Tokyo via Kurils and Nemuro Famine occurred in Hokkaido Great Hakodate fire broke out Airplane service between Tokyo and Sapporo began War began affecting Hokkaido life U.S. bombing of Kuril Islands began Volcano Showa Shinzan began to grow near Lake Toya Many captured Americans taken to prison camps in Hokkaido; most prisoners put to work in the mines Mid-July: Americans bombed southern Hokkaido ports Soviets captured Karafuto and Kuril Islands Soviets planned invasion of Hokkaido which Stalin canceled at last minute Truman denied Soviet request to occupy Hokkaido after war’s end U.S. occupation began in Hokkaido as well as the rest of Japan Occupation officials repatriated Korean and Chinese coal miners Hokkaido suffered severe food shortages Occupation adopted land reforms; dispossessed many Ainu landowners Japanese government created Hokkaido Development Bureau First Sapporo Snow Festival held New comprehensive development plan established for Hokkaido Confrontations occurred during U.S. and Russian military flights in Hokkaido area Ferry Toya Maru sank during typhoon U.S.S.R. agreed to hand Shikotan and Habomai Islands back to Japan; Japan refused, insisting on Kunashir and Iturup too Diplomatic relations between Japan and U.S.S.R. restored Cold weather led to severe Hokkaido crop failure Workers struck Oji Paper Company’s Tomakomai mill for five months Hokkaido celebrated centenary of Japanese settlement Student unrest caused long-term suspension of Hokkaido University classes Sapporo Winter Olympics took place

336 1975 1976 1976–77 1977 1978 1980s 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990s 1990 1993 1994 1997 1998 1999 2000

APPENDIX 1 Wajin blew up Asahikawa statue, thinking it demeaned Ainu Hokkaido prefectural police headquarters bombed Soviet defector landed Soviet MiG fighter in Hokkaido U.S.S.R., then Japan, established exclusive 200 mile fishing zones Japanese territorial waters extended from three to twelve miles Mt. Usu, near Lake Toya, erupted Soviets held military exercises in and around Northern Territories; began building full-scale bases on Kunashir and Iturup Ishikari Bay New Port opened Prime Minister Nakasone denied Japan a multicultural nation Icebreaker trips for tourists on Sea of Okhotsk began Seikan Rail Tunnel opened between Hokkaido and Honshu First nuclear power station in Hokkaido, located at Tomari, began delivering power Hokkaido population dropped for first time Last coal mine in Yubari closed Earthquake and tsunami devastated Okushiri Island Kayano Shigeru became first Ainu to serve in National Diet Earthquake killed seven people and damaged structures in Northern Territories; a little damage in eastern Hokkaido Diet abrogated Ainu Protection Law; replaced it with Ainu Cultural Law Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko failed Air Do (Hokkaido International Airlines Co.) began operation Plan to store nuclear waste at Horonobe withdrawn New Development Bank of Japan took over funding of some Hokkaido projects Mt. Usu erupted Russian patriarch made first-ever visit to Japan, including Hakodate Lawsuit filed after Otaru hot springs refused entrance to non–Japanese Impure Snow Brand milk product sickened many people

21st Century 2001 2002 2004 2005 2006

2007 2008

First case of mad cow disease in Japan diagnosed in a Hokkaido cow Last coal mine in Hokkaido closed Some World Cup soccer matches held in recently completed Sapporo Dome Professional baseball team Nippon Ham Fighters added “Hokkaido” to its name and adopted Sapporo Dome as new home Construction began on third reactor at Tomari Construction of bullet train line in Hokkaido began UNESCO named Shiretoko Peninsula a world heritage site City of Yubari declared bankruptcy Russian border patrolman shot and killed Japanese fishermen on boat accused of poaching in Kurils waters Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters became baseball champions in both Japan and Asia Fast catamaran car ferry service between Hakodate and Aomori began Passenger car running both on roads and on rails began service near Abashiri Government of Japan recognized Ainu as an indigenous people G-8 Summit held at Lake Toya Operation of an undersea cable between Hokkaido and Sakhalin began

Appendix 2. Key Figures in Hokkaido History Brooks, William (1851–1938) Professor of agriculture and director of the college farm at Sapporo Agricultural College 1877–1880; College president until 1888. Broughton, William (1762–1821) Ship captain who sailed in Japanese waters 1794–98; explored Uchiura Bay on Hokkaido; sailed around the Kurils and near Sakhalin. Capron, Horace (1804–1885) U.S. Secretary of Agriculture hired by the Kaitakushi as main adviser on Hokkaido development; arranged for various American experts as well as machinery, plants and farm animals to come to Japan. Chiri Mashio (1909–1961) Ainu who became linguistic and ethnographic scholar; published two volumes of a massive Ainu dictionary before his untimely death. Clark, William S. (1826–1886) American educator who spent almost a year in Japan as president of the new Sapporo Agricultural College; remembered for his parting words, “Boys, be ambitious!” Crawford, Joseph (1842–1924) Engineer hired in 1878; worked three years for the Kaitakushi, mainly on surveying and building the Otaru-Horonai railroad line. Davydov, Gavril Ivanovich (1784–1809) Russian midshipman who commanded one of the two ships that raided Sakhalin, the Kurils and Japanese ships at sea, 1806–07. Dogakinai Naohiro (1914–2004) Governor of Hokkaido 1971–1983; leading

Ando Takatoshi (1894–1990) Leader of movement to improve standard of living in fishing communities; promoted organization of fishing cooperatives. Aoshima Shunzo (1751–1790) Agent who reported to shogunate on causes of the Menashi-Kunashir revolt. Ban Ichitaro (1854–?) Samurai member of Benjamin Lyman’s team; later discovered Yubari’s rich coal deposits. Batchelor, John (1854–1944) English missionary who spent much of his life on Ainu causes, helping people, studying culture and language and translating works into Ainu. Benyovsky, Mauritius Augustus (1746–1786) Hungarian adventurer who aroused the shogunate in 1771 with spurious claims of planned Russian aggression. Blake, William P. (prob. 1826–1910) American surveyor hired with Raphael Pumpelly to advise the shogunate on mineral development; put to work in Ezo’s Oshima Peninsula. Blakiston, Thomas Wright (1832–1891) Hakodate merchant who explored much of Hokkaido’s coastal area on horseback; studied and collected birds and other animal specimens and made significant scientific observations. Boehmer, Louis (1841–1892) Kaitakushi horticulturist who introduced many plants and spent more than twenty years in Japan; suggested the manufacture of beer in Hokkaido.

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proponent of strengthening relations with northern countries and regions. Dun, Edwin (1848–1931) Agricultural expert who lived in Japan for most of his life after his arrival in 1873, first as Kaitakushi livestock adviser, later as United States minister to Japan. Eldridge, Stuart (1843–1901) American hired by Horace Capron; became pioneer of medicine and medical education in Hokkaido; spent rest of his life as a doctor in Yokohama. Enomoto Takeaki (1836–1908) One of the first Japanese educated in technology in Europe; opposed the Meiji government and in 1868 led his supporters to Hokkaido where after several months they were defeated in battle by Meiji forces. Golovnin, Vasilii Mikhailovich (1776–1831) Russian explorer in Kurils waters in 1811 on a surveying expedition, captured and confined in Matsumae area for two years. Goshkevich, Iosif Antonovich (1814 or 1815– 1875) Russian consul in Hakodate 1858–1871; did much to advance Russian interests there. Haber, Ludwig (1843–1874) German consul to Hakodate who gained fame after his assassination by an anti-foreign Japanese. Habuto Masayasu (1752–1814) Ezo administrator after shogunate took control from Matsumae at end of 18th century; vigorously led efforts to develop Ezo. Hidaya Kyubei (1765–1827) Contractor who ran trading post on Kunashir; treated Ainu so badly they rebelled, setting off the Menashi-Kunashir War. Honda Toshiaki (1744–1821) Influential intellectual who worked to increase knowledge in Japan; urged expanded trade, exploration and settlement in the north. Hori Tatsuya (1935– ) Governor of Hokkaido 1995–2003; presided over establishment of economic and cultural cooperation between Hokkaido and Sakhalin. Ino Tadataka (1745–1818) Sake merchant who gave up business at age fifty to study surveying and astronomy, then explored Ezo; made Japan’s first geographical survey.

Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912) Leading Japanese poet who lived in Hokkaido for a year, in Hakodate, Otaru and Kushiro. Iwamura Michitoshi (1840–1915) Kaitakushi commissioner who finished planning the new city of Sapporo and designed its street grid; first governor after establishment of Hokkaido Prefecture in 1886. Kakizaki Nobuhiro (1431–1494) Originally named Takeda Nobuhiro; demonstrated military skill during Koshamain’s war; adopted by Kakizaki clan and renamed; became family leader. Kayano Shigeru (1926–2006) Prominent Ainu activist; established an Ainu museum in his home town of Biratori, studied and taught the Ainu language, challenged the government to uphold Ainu rights; the first Ainu ever to sit in the National Diet. Khvostov, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1776–1809) Russian naval lieutenant who commanded one of the two ships that attacked Sakhalin, the Kurils and Japanese ships at sea, 1806– 07. Kindaichi Kyosuke (1882–1971) Foremost scholar of Ainu language; transcribed over a million lines of Ainu epics. Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933) Proletarian writer raised in Hokkaido; arrested in 1933 and died after torture. Kodama Sakuzaemon (1895–1970) Hokkaido University anthropologist who studied Ainu origins; mistrusted by Ainu for disinterring Ainu skeletons and keeping them for research. Kondo Morishige (1771–1829) Samurai and shogunate official; traveled to Ezo and Kurils with 1798 expedition; traveled extensively in Ezo in 1807 and urged colonization of the north; also known as Kondo Juzo. Koshamain (d. 1457) Chieftain who led first major Ainu challenge against the Matsumae; his men destroyed twelve Wajin forts before their defeat. Krusenstern, A. J. von (1770–1846) Commander of Russian ship that explored in Ezo waters 1803–05. Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840–1900) Leader of Meiji forces who defeated Eno-

Key Figures in Hokkaido History moto’s rebels; became Kaitakushi head and directed Hokkaido development; traveled to U.S. to obtain advisers; prime minister of Japan 1888–89. La Perouse, Jean-Francois de Galaup (1741– 1788) French explorer of the Pacific; in 1787 “discovered” the strait now named for him between Hokkaido and Sakhalin. Laxman, Adam Erikovich (1766–1803) Negotiator sent by Russia to Japan in 1792, allowed to winter in Nemuro but was refused permission to open trade between the nations. Lyman, Benjamin Smith (1835–1920) Mining geologist in Japan 1873–1881; traveled and prospected extensively in Hokkaido; submitted detailed reports of his findings. MacDonald, Ranald (1824–1894) American adventurer who faked accident in order to visit Japan in 1848; kept confined during almost all his time there, on Hokkaido and in Nagasaki; taught English to some Japanese who later interpreted when the Perry expedition came to Japan. Machimura Kingo (1900–1992) Born in Sapporo to a pioneer family; Hokkaido governor 1959–1971; also served as president of the upper house of Diet. Mamiya Rinzo (1775–1844) Explorer of the north who discovered that Sakhalin was an island. Matsumae Yasuhiro (1625, 1627 or 1628–1680) Matsumae leader who defeated Shakushain’s forces. Matsumae Yoshihiro (1548–1616) First of the Matsumae family to be recognized as the shogun’s vassal and the ruler of Ezo; supervised trade with Ainu. Matsuura Takeshiro (1818–1888) Famed explorer of Hokkaido, the Kurils and Sakhalin who surveyed and produced a detailed and surprisingly accurate map of Hokkaido; suggested the name “Hokkaido.” Miyabe Kingo (1860–1951) Member of second graduating class at Sapporo Agricultural College; a leading botanist in Japan. Mogami Tokunai (1754–1836) Leading Japanese explorer in Ezo, Sakhalin and the Kurils; sympathetic to Ainu.

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Munro, Neil Gordon (1863–1942) Medical doctor who often visited, then lived in Hokkaido, working with Ainu; prominent in developing archaeology in Japan. Niijima Jo (1843–1890) Young man who came to Hakodate in order to slip out of Japan; studied at Amherst College in the United States; became an educator in Japan and established Doshisha University. Nikolai, Father (1836–1911) Russian Orthodox priest who came to Hakodate in 1861; became bishop in Tokyo in 1877; the person who did the most to advance the Orthodox church in Japan. Nitobe Inazo (1862–1933) Member of Sapporo Agricultural College’s second graduating class; became prominent intellectual and internationalist; served as League of Nations under-secretary general. Ohara Sakingo (1761–1810) Tutor for Matsumae in 1783; perhaps spied for the shogunate; reported on secret trading in Kurils between Matsumae and Russians. Otomo Kametaro (1834–1897) One of the founders of Sapporo Village, which eventually grew into the city of Sapporo; builder of Sosei Canal from Sapporo to the Ishikari River. Penhallow, David (1854–1910) Botanist and teacher of scientific subjects and English during Sapporo Agricultural College’s first years; later briefly college president. Perry, Matthew Calbraith (1794–1858) American naval commander and envoy who led expedition in 1853 to “open up” Japan; returned in 1854, achieved treaty with Japan to open ports of Hakodate and Shimoda to American ships. Peuillier, Gerard (Okada Furie) (1859–1947). Monk in the Trappist Monastery near Hakodate for fifty years; largely responsible for the institution’s success. Pumpelly, Raphael (1837–1923) Mining engineer hired by shogunate in 1862 to survey mineral resources; carried out efforts on Ezo’s Oshima Peninsula; taught mining technology to Japanese students. Rezanov, Nikolai Petrovich (1764–1807) Russian envoy to Japan who sailed with

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Krusenstern, tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with Japanese; subsequently ordered raids on Sakhalin, the Kurils and on Japanese vessels at sea.

Takadaya Kahei (1769–1827) Prosperous Ezo merchant captured by Russians in retaliation for Golovnin kidnapping; helped broker Golovnin’s release.

Rikord, Petr Ivanovich (1776–1855) Senior officer on Golovnin’s ship; after Golovnin’s capture, a leader in effort to rescue him; finally obtained agreement for his release.

Takahashi Harumi (1954– ) Minister in charge of Hokkaido economy and industry; chosen in 2003 to be first woman governor of Hokkaido.

Sato Shosuke (1856–1939) Member of first graduating class of Sapporo Agricultural College; later earned PhD in agricultural economics at Johns Hopkins university; taught at the Sapporo college and served as its president for forty years. Shakushain (d. 1669) Ainu leader who challenged Wajin rule of Ezo; killed in 1669 by Wajin after surrendering; honored by Ainu today. Shima Yoshitake (1822–1874) Kaitakushi commissioner given responsibility to lay out Sapporo; chose location for Sapporo Shrine. Shimizudani Kinnaru (1845–1882) Governor at Hakodate after Meiji forces took power from the shogunate; led government in Hokkaido most of the time until establishment of Kaitakushi. Smith, Sarah Clara (1851–1947) Protestant missionary who worked for fifty years in Japan; started the first school for girls in Sapporo, which grew into Hokusei Gakuen University. Spanberg, Martin (d. 1761) One of Vitus Bering’s lieutenants; in 1739 sailed Russian ship through Kurils and past Ezo; apparently met Japanese only in northern Honshu. Sunazawa Bikky (1931–1989) Leading Ainu artist; mainly a sculptor; designed Ainu flag.

Takeda Ayasaburo (1827–1880) Student of Dutch, English and French; studied technology in Europe; met Russians who sailed to Japan in 1853; designed Goryokaku Fort. Tanaka Toshifumi (1911–1982) Socialist who became Hokkaido’s first popularly elected governor; food supply and relief needs dominated his 1947–1959 term. Uchimura Kanzo (1861–1930) Graduate of second class of Sapporo Agricultural College; became prominent intellectual and Christian. Ueshiba Morihei (1883–1939) Leader of a pioneer immigrant group to Hokkaido while in his late twenties; met jujutsu expert Takeda Sokaku, studied under him and originated martial art of aikido. Vries, Maerten Gerritsz (d. 1647) First European voyager in Ezo region; in 1644 approached but did not land on Ezo. Wheeler, William (1851–1932) Scientist and engineer; spent 1876 to 1879 at Sapporo Agricultural College, succeeding Clark as college president. Yokomichi Takahiro (1941– ) Hokkaido governor 1983–1995; ran as independent, traveled extensively in Hokkaido and abroad; worked for stronger trade between Hokkaido and foreign nations. Zusho Hirotake (1840–1911) First director of Sapporo Agricultural College, under whom William S. Clark worked.

Appendix 3. Glossary prayer and to offer sake to the gods (an Ainu language word). inau. Ainu sacred stick with shaved curls of wood on its sides (an Ainu language word). JNR. Japanese National Railways, Japan’s national railway system, broken up in 1987. Jomon. Ancient people of Japan who preceded the Yayoi. JR Hokkaido. Hokkaido Railway Company, the public railway system serving Hokkaido since 1987. Kaitakushi. Hokkaido Development Commission, or colonial department. kamui. Ainu term for god (an Ainu language word). Karafuto. Japanese name for Sakhalin Island, often used to refer only to southern half of the island, which was part of Japan 1905–1945. Kenpeitai. Japan’s military police; existed until 1945. kombu. Edible seaweed or kelp. kotan. Ainu traditional village (an Ainu language word). kyokai. Society, association. maru. Ship. Meiji. Emperor of Japan 1868–1912; also name of the era during those years. naichi. Japan. The homeland. Santan trade. Trade from north China through Sakhalin to Ainu in Ezo and then to Wajin. SCAP. Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, the American occupation organization in Japan after World War II. SDF. The Self-Defence Force, Japan’s military organization. shogun. Military leader acting in name of emperor, to 1867. shogunate. Government of Japan when headed by the shogun. Showa. Emperor 1926–1989; also name of that era.

Ainu. Aboriginal people of Japan, now found mostly in Hokkaido. Ainu-e. Japanese paintings of Ainu. Ainu Kyokai. Original name of Ainu Association of Hokkaido. ainu moshir. The land of the Ainu (Ainu language words). Ainu Shinpo. 1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Law. basho ukeoi. Contract labor system used in fisheries, 17th to 19th C. bugyo. Magistracy; magistrate. burakumin. Japan’s “untouchable” community. cho. A unit measuring the area of land, about 21 ⁄2 acres. daimyo. A feudal lord. Diet. Legislature of the Government of Japan. Docho. The Government of Hokkaido. Dosanko. Originally, the small Hokkaido horse; later, a familiar name for people of Hokkaido. Edo. The shogunate’s capital; name changed to Tokyo in 1868. Emishi. Name for early people who were probably Ainu. Ezo. Name used for the island of Hokkaido until 1871. Ezochi. Portion of Ezo reserved for Ainu during Matsumae era. GSDF. Japan’s army: the Ground Self-Defense Force. Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko. Hokkaido Development Bank. Hokudai. University of Hokkaido. Hokuden. Hokkaido Electric Power Company. Hokuren. Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Societies of Hokkaido. Hokutan. Hokkaido Coal Mine Railway Company, later Hokkaido Coal Mine Steamship Company. ikupasuy. Flat, carved Ainu sticks used in

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Taisho. Emperor 1912–1926; also name of that era. Takugin. Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko, or Hokkaido Development Bank. tancho. Japanese crane. Tokugawa. 1603–1868 era, when Tokugawa family dominated government. tondenhei. Farmer-soldiers. tonkori. Ainu musical instrument similar to a Jew’s harp. utari. Ainu word meaning “our people.”

Utari Kyokai. Ainu Association of Hokkaido; name adopted in 1961. Wajin. Ethnic Japanese. Wajinchi. Portion of Ezo reserved for Wajin during Matsumae era. Yayoi. Ancient people of Japan who probably appeared about 4000 B.C. Yezo. Alternative spelling of Ezo. yukar. Ainu heroic epic. zaibatsu. Giant combination in industry and finance, such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui.

Chapter Notes Preface

Kaitakushi by Horace Capron, Commissioner and Adviser, and His Foreign Assistants (Tokei: Kaitakushi, 1875), 422. 14. St. John, 350, 354. 15. Mabel Loomis Todd, Corona and Coronet (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1898), 234–35. 16. Kipling’s Japan: Collected Writings, eds. Hugh Cortazzi and George Webb (London: Athlone, 1988), 228.

1. John M. Maki, William Smith Clark: A Yankee in Hokkaido (Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaido University Press, 1966), 195–96.

Chapter 1 1. Horace Capron, “Memoirs,” 2 v. (Beltsville, Maryland and Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library), 2: 101–2. 2. Donald Keene, Travels in Japan (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1981), 127. 3. Wim Swaan, Japanese Lantern (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965), 195. 4. Mark Brazil in Japan Times, March 2, 2003; Watanabe Akira, “Hokkaido Guidebook,” International Geographical Union, Regional Conference in Japan, Regional Geography of Japan (Tokyo: Society of Japanese Regional Geography, 1957), 27. 5. William S. Clark in First Annual Report of Sapporo Agricultural College, 1877 (Tokei: Kaitakushi, 1877); Clark to Kaitaku no Shiohanga Yasuda Sadanori, Oct. 13, 1876, Clark Collection, University of Massachusetts. 6. William S. Clark to William B. Churchill, Nov. 19, 1876, Hokkaido Daigaku, Hokudai Hyakunenshi (Sapporo: Gyosei, 1981) I:267. 7. Belle Stockbridge, “Personal Recollections of Japan by Belle Lamar Stockbridge,” Stockbridge Collection, University of Massachusetts, 14. 8. Stockbridge, 14–15; Henry Finck, Lotos-Time in Japan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 119. 9. H. C. St. John, “Notes on the East, North-east, and West Coasts of Yezo,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 42 (1872), 345. 10. Stockbridge, 14; William Wheeler to his Mother, Aug. 10, 1876, English Language Reports and Letters to the Kaitakushi relating to Wheeler, Monograph 10 (Sapporo: Hokkaido Prefectural Government, 1992), 77. 11. Wheeler to his Mother, Sept. 10, 1876, Monograph 10, 96. 12. Peter Robinson, “Hokkaido: Japan’s New Frontier,” Fodor’s Japan and Korea 1980 (New York: David McKay, 1980), 407. 13. Benjamin A. Lyman, “Geological Survey of Hokkaido; Report of a Geological Trip Through and Around Yesso, with Notices of the Topography, Timber, Population, Ainos, and of the Progress of the Geological Survey,” Reports and Official Letters to the

Chapter 2 1. D. B. Penhallow, “Origin of the Ainos and their Final Settlement and Distribution in Japan,” Canadian Record of Science 2 (1886), 1, 17–18; Shannon A. Docherty, “Parallels between the Bear and Salmon Tales of the Ainu of Japan and the Native Americans of the Northwest Coast: An Analysis from a Culturalprehistoric Perspective,” M.A. Thesis, University of Oregon, 1986, 20–22, 32–33. 2. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 86. 3. The “lost tribes” claim is reported in John R. Black, Young Japan: Yokohama and Yedo, 1858–79, 2 v. (Yokohama: Kelly, 1880, 1881, reprint Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 2: 50; Penhallow, 18–19. 4. Japan Times, Aug. 21, 1997. 5. Japan Textile Color Design Center, comp., Textile Designs of Japan v. IV: Designs of Ryukyu, Ainu and Foreign Design (Osaka: Japan Textile Color Design Center, 1961), 18, 19. 6. Ainu scholar Chiri Mashiho introduced the theory that warfare recounted in some Ainu epics describes Okhotsk-Satsumon conflicts, Donald Philippi, Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans: The Epic Tradition of the Ainu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 40–41, 44. 7. Jean-Francois de Galaup, Count of La Perouse, quoted in A. W. Habersham, My Last Cruise: Or Where We Went and What We Saw (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1857), 308; A. J. von Krusenstern, quoted in MorrisSuzuki, 12; A. H. 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), for example, 6–7, 13, 296–97. 8. E. A. Hammel, “A Glimpse into the Demography of the Ainu,” American Anthropologist 90 (March 1988), 33–39. 9. William W. Fitzhugh and Chisato O. Dubreuil, eds., Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People (Seattle: Smith-

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sonian Institution with University of Washington Press, 1999), 375. 10. Takakura Shinichiro, “The Ainu of Northern Japan: A Study in Conquest and Acculturation,” trans. John A. Harrison, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 50 (1960), 18–19. 11. Annie H. Bradshaw, “The Ainus of Japan,” Women’s Board of Missions, Lesson Leaflet, August 1905, 2, in Neesima and Uchimura Collection, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Amherst, Massachusetts; John Batchelor, The Ainu of Japan: The Religion, Superstitions, and General History of the Hairy Aborigines of Japan (London: Religious Tract Society, 1892), 28; and Ainu Life and Lore: Echoes of a Departing Race (Tokyo: Kyobunkwan, 1927, reprint, NY: Johnson Reprint Co., 1971), 14; Kayano Shigeru, Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir, trans. Kyoko Selden and Lili Selden (Boulder, CO: Western Press, 1994), 11. 12. Endo Masatoshi, “The Mobility of Resident Members of the Ainu in Hokkaido, Japan, in the Midnineteenth Century,” The Science Reports of the Tohoku University, 7th series (Geography) 45 (Dec. 1995), 76. 13. Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (London: John Murray, 1880; reprint Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 267. 14. Carleton S. Coon, The Hunting Peoples (Boston: Little Brown, 1971), 149. 15. Bird, 245–46, 285. 16. Batchelor, Ainu Life and Lore, 152; Yamada Akako, The World View of the Ainu: Nature and Cosmos Reading from Language (London: Kegan Paul, 2001), 60. 17. Kuzuno Tatsujiro, “Aino Gods and Beliefs,” in Irimoto Takashi and Yamada Takako, eds., Circumpolar Religion and Ecology: An Anthropology of the North (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1994), 3. 18. Batchelor, “The Ainu Bear Festival,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, second series 9 (Dec. 1932), 38. 19. Bradshaw, 2; Batchelor, Ainu Life and Lore, 16. 20. Basil Hall Chamberlain, Aino Folk Tales (London: The Folk-Lore Society, 1888, reprint, Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967), 6. 21. Chamberlain, Aino Folk Tales, 53–4, 57. 22. John Batchelor, The Pit-Dwellers of Hokkaido and Ainu Place-Names Considered (Sapporo: J. Batchelor, 1925), 41. 23. Nitobe Inazu, The Japanese Nation: Its Land, Its People and Its Life, with Special Consideration to Its Relations with the United States (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 86–87; F. Hadland Davis, Japan, from the Age of the Gods to the Fall of Tsingtau (London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1916), 1, 2; Basil Hall Chamberlain, Japanese Things (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1971, revised reprint of Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan for the Use of Travellers and Others, by Basil Hall Chamberlain; 5th revised ed., London: John Murray, 1905), 22. 24. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, The Ainu of the Northwest Coast of Southern Sakhalin (Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland Press, 1984), 12.

Chapter 3 1. John A. Harrison, Japan’s Northern Frontier (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1953), ix.

2. Batchelor, Ainu Life and Lore, 38. 3. Takakura, “The Ainu of Northern Japan,” 32. 4. Takakura, 27. 5. Miyajima Toshimitsu, Land of Elms: The History, Culture, and Present Day Situation of the Ainu People, trans. Robert Witmer (Etobicoke, Canada: United Church Publishing House, 1998), 55. 6. Brett L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 204. This work includes a detailed account of Shakushain’s War. 7. David L. Howell, Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society and the State in a Japanese Fishery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 31. 8. Watanabe Hitoshi, The Ainu Ecosystem: Environment and Group Structure (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 122 note 27. 9. Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan (London: Routledge, 1996), 36. 10. Walker, 95. 11. Miwa Kimitada, “Colonial Theories and Practices in Prewar Japan,” John F. Howes, ed., Nitobe Inazo: Japan’s Bridge Across the Pacific (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 160. 12. David N. Wells, trans. and ed., Russian Views of Japan, 1792–1913: An Anthology of Travel Writing (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 53. 13. Glenn Thomas Trewartha, Japan: A Physical Cultural and Regional Geography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 344. 14. Harrison, 31. 15. John J. Stephan, “Ezo under the Tokugawa Bakufu 1799–1821: An Aspect of Japan’s Frontier History,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1969, 276. 16. Richard Louis Edmonds, Northern Frontiers of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan: A Comparative Study of Frontier Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 87, 102–3. 17. J. M. Tronson, Personal Narrative of a Voyage to Japan, Kamtschatka, Siberia, Tartary, and Various Parts of Coast of China; in H.M.S. Barracouta (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1859), 151–52. 18. William Wheeler to his sister, Aug. 12, 1877, English Language Reports and Letters relating to Wheeler, 173; Landor, Alone with the Hairy Ainu, 204.

Chapter 4 1. John A. Harrison, “Notes on the Discovery of Yezo,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 40 (1950), 258. 2. Cornelius Janszoon Coen, Voyage to Cathay, Tartary and the Gold- and Silver-Rich Islands East of Japan, 1643, trans. and ed., William C. H. Robert (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1975), 243, 245 and “Extract from a missive of the Governor General Anthonio Van Diemen and the Council of the East Indies at Batavia to the Managers of the Dutch East India Company at Amsterdam, Jan. 4, 1644,” 259. 3. Stephan, “Ezo under the Tokugawa Bakufu,” 251. 4. George A. Lensen, The Russian Push toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697–1875 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 118. 5. A. J. Von Krusenstern, Voyage Round the World,

Notes — Chapter 5 in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806, by Order of His Imperial Majesty Alexander the First, on Board the Ships Nadeshda and Neva, 2 vols., trans. Richard Belgrave Hoppner (London: John Murray, 1813, reprint New York: Da Capo Press, 1968) II: 29. 6. Krusenstern, II: 41, 47; I: map is on an unnumbered page at the front. 7. Krusenstern, II: 30–31, 42, 45. 8. Thomas W. Blakiston, Japan in Yezo: A Series of Papers Descriptive of Journeys Undertaken in the Island of Yezo at Intervals between 1862 and 1882 (Yokohama: Japan Gazette, 1883), 85n. 9. Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin, Japan and the Japanese: Comprising the Narrative of a Captivity in Japan, and an Account of British Commercial Intercourse with that Country, 2 v. (London: Colburn and Co., 1853), I: 38–39. 10. Golovnin, I: 104. 11. Golovnin, II: 252. 12. Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), 138. 13. W. R. Broughton, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1804. Reprint New York: Da Capo Press, 1967), 98–99, 101, 105–8. 14. Matthew C. Perry, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, compiled by Francis L. Hawks (Washington: Beverley Tucker, Senate Printer, 1875, reprint Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000), 469. 15. John Rodgers, June 11, 1855, in Allen B. Cole, ed., Yankee Surveyors in the Shogun’s Seas: Records of the United States Surveying Expedition to the North Pacific Ocean, 1853–1856 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 56. 16. Sakamaki Shunzo, “Japan and the United States, 1790–1853,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, second series 18 (1939), 11. 17. Ranald MacDonald, Ranald MacDonald: The Narrative of His Early Life on the Columbia under the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Regime; of His Experiences in the Pacific Whale Fishery; and of His Great Adventure to Japan; with a Sketch of His Later Life in the Western Frontier, eds. William S. Lewis and Murakami Naojiro (Eastern Washington State Historical Society, 1923; reprint Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1990), 157, 161–62. 18. MacDonald, 168, 169. 19. MacDonald, 197. 20. Perry, 363, 365. 21. Perry, 430; Perry, The Japan Expedition 1852– 1854: the Personal Journal of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, ed. Roger Pineau (Washington: Smithsonian, 1968), 204; George Henry Preble, The Opening of Japan: A Diary of Discovery in the Far East, 1853–1856, ed. Boleslaw Szczesniak (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 186; J. W. Spalding, The Japan Expedition: Japan and Around the World: An Account of Three Visits to the Japanese Empire (New York: Redfield, 1855), 296–97; Henry F. Graff, ed., “Bluejackets with Perry in Japan,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 55 (June 1951), 276. 22. Spalding, 298. 23. Kojima Matajiro, Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Hakodate, trans. Alice Cheney (Hakodate; Hakodate Kyodo Bunkai, 1953), 14. 24. Thomas C. Dudley, “Memoir,” 135, Dudley Col-

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lection, University of Michigan; Perry, Narrative, 455. 25. Perry, Narrative, 453, 467. 26. Frederick Wells Williams, The Life and Letters of Samuel Wells Williams, LL.D., Missionary, Diplomatist, Sinologue (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 219. 27. Samuel Eliot Morison, “Old Bruin” Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 394; Spalding, 310. 28. Harrison, Japan’s Northern Frontier, 53–54, 29. Quoted by Lewis Bush, Japan Times, August 27, 1970.

Chapter 5 1. John Batchelor, “Helps to the Study of Ancient Place Names in Japan,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Second Series 6 (1929), 76; Stephan, “Ezo under the Tokugawa Bakufu,” 114. 2. Todd, Corona and Coronet, 254–55; William Heine, With Perry to Japan: A Memoir by William Heine, trans. Frederic Trautman (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 151–52. 3. F. V. Dickins, The Life of Sir Harry Parkes: Sometime Her Majesty’s Minister to China and Japan, 2 v. (London: Macmillan, 1894), 2:193–94. 4. Spalding, Japan and Around the World, 295; Anna C. Hartshorne, Japan and Her People, 2 v. (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1902), 1:356; Rutherford Alcock, The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in Japan, 2 v. (New York; Harper and Brothers, 1863), 1: 241; Neill James, Petticoat Vagabond in Ainu Land and Up and Down Eastern Asia (New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942), 36.; Lesley Downer in Financial Times, February 2, 2008. 5. Heine, 145; Allen diary in Graff, “Bluejackets with Perry in Japan,” 276, 278; Thomas C. Dudley to Fanny Dudley, May 20, 1854 and Dudley Memoir, 129–30, both in Dudley Collection. 6. Preble, The Opening of Japan, 194. 7. Preble, 188 (original spelling and punctuation retained); Spalding, 297. 8. Samuel Wells Williams, “A Journal of the Perry Expedition, to Japan,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1910 part 2, 202; Kojima, Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Hakodate, 24; Dudley to Fanny Dudley, May 20, 1854, Dudley Collection. 9. Kojima, 15. 10. Perry, Narrative, 475. 11. Tronson, Personal Narrative of a Voyage to Japan, 353–54; Perry Collins, Overland Explorations in Siberia, Northern Asia, and the Great Amoor River Country; Incidental Notices of Manchooria, Mongolia, Kamschatka, and Japan, with Map and Plan of an Overland Telegraph around the World, via Behring’s Strait and Asiatic Russia to Europe (New York: D. Appleton, 1864), 323, 326. 12. Wells, Russian Views of Japan, 125. 13. William F. Gragg, A Cruise in the U.S. Steam Frigate Mississippi, Wm. C. Nicholson, Captain, to China and Japan from July, 1857, to February, 1860 (Boston: Damrell and Moore, Printers, 1860), 41; Richard Henry Dana, Jr., The Journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 3 v., ed. Robert F. Lucid (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 3:1026; fighting is reported by Henry Arthur Tilley in Japan, the Amoor,

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and the Pacific; with Notices of Other Places, Comprised in a Voyage of Circumnavigation in the Imperial Russian Corvette “Rynda” in 1858–1860 (London: Smith, Elder, 1861), 120. 14. Francis Hall, Japan through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, Kanagawa and Yokohama, 1859–1860, ed. F. G. Notehelfer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 250; Blakiston, Japan in Yezo, 3. 15. E. E. Rice to Secretary of State W. H. Seward, Aug. 3 and 4, 1863, U.S. Consulate (Hakodate-shi, Japan), “Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Hakodate, 1856–1878” (Washington: National Archives, 1957). 16. Physician J. L. C. Pompe van Meerdervoort, quoted by George A. Lensen, The Russian Push toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697–1875 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 368. 17. E. E. Rice, quoted in Eldon Griffin, Clippers and Consuls: American Consular and Commercial Relations with Eastern Asia, 1845–1860 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edwards Brothers, 1938), 181. 18. G. Pemberton Hodgson, A Residence at Nagasaki and Hakodate in 1859–1860 with an Account of Japan Generally with a Series of Letters on Japan by His Wife (London: Richard Bentley, 1861), 92. 19. Hodgson, 96, 199; J. E. Hoare, “Britain’s Consular Service, 1859–1941,” Ian Nish, ed., Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, vol. 2. (Folkestone, U.K.: Japan Library, 1997), 96. 20. E. E. Rice to Secretary of State Lewis Cass, Oct. 17, 1859, “Despatches.” 21. Dana, 3:1029; Griffin, 332, 334. 22. John Will, Trading under Sail off Japan 1860 to 1899: The Recollections of Captain John Baxter Will Sailing Master and Pilot, ed. George Alexander Lensen (Tokyo: Sophia U., 1968), 29–30. 23. Will, 24–25. 24. Holmes, quoted in Hugh Cortazzi, Victorians in Japan (London: Athlone, 1987), 37. 25. Hall, 250. 26. Alcock, 2: 327; 27. Raphael Pumpelly, My Reminiscences, 2 v., (New York: Henry Holt, 1918), 1: 337–38. 28. Blakiston, 3, 4, 5. 29. Samuel Mossman, New Japan: The Land of the Rising Sun (London: J. Murray, 1873), 209–10; Gragg, 43. 30. Hall, 370. 31. E. E. Rice to Secretary of State, Dec. 25 and 31, 1868 and Jan. 24, 1870, “Despatches”; Richard Hughes in Far Eastern Economic Review 92 (April 23, 1976), 23. 32. Pat Barr, The Coming of the Barbarians; The Opening of Japan to the West 1853–1870 (New York: Dutton, 1967), 218. 33. Capron, “Memoirs,” 2: 234, 68, 171. 34. Blakiston, 1, 8, 95. 35. Hartshorne, 1: 356; Jack London, The Sea Wolf (New York: Macmillan, 1904; reprint Bantam, 1960), 39; Rudyard Kipling, Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People (Garden City, NY: Page and Doubleday, 1919), 40. 36. Hartshorne, 1: 355, 358, 356; Bronislaw Pilsudski, The Collected Works of Bronislaw Pilsudski, Alfred F. Majewicz, trans. and ed., 3 v., (Berlin, NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998–2004), 3: 794, n. 382. 37. “Hokkaido Jottings,” Japan Weekly Mail, Sept. 15, 1900.

Chapter 6 1. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Creating the Frontier: Border, Identity and History in Japan’s Far North,” East Asian History 7 (1994), 1; Bruce L. Batten, To the Ends of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, and Interactions (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 46–48, 236. 2. James Edward Ketelaar, “Hokkaido Buddhism and the Early Meiji State,” in Helen Hardacre, ed. with Adam L. Kern, New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 535; Japan Times, July 20, 1960. 3. Preble, The Opening of Japan, 188; Raphael Pumpelly, Across America and Asia: Notes of a Five Years’ Journey Around the World and of Residence in Arizona, Japan and China (New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1870), 144. 4. Miyajima, Land of Elms, 75. 5. Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, reverse of title page; Michael Weiner, “The Invention of Identity: Race and Nation in Pre-war Japan,” Frank Dikötter, ed., The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1977), 112; Imai Toshinobu, “Changing Agricultural Land Use during the Exploitation Period 1868–1944 in Hokkaido,” Science Reports of Tohoku University 25 (1975), 293. 6. W. S. Clark to his family, August 14, 1876 and Sept. 10, 1876, Clark Collection. 7. David F. Anthony, “The Administration of Hokkaido under Kuroda Kiyotaka 1870–1882: An Early Example of Japanese-American Cooperation,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1951, 68. 8. Edwin Dun, “Reminiscences of Nearly a Half Century in Japan,” Beltsville, MD and Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library), 4. 9. Choya Shimbun, Aug. 8, 1881, quoted in James L. Huffman, Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 116. 10. The 1898 building now stands in the Historical Village of Hokkaido. (See end of chapter.) 11. Blakiston, Japan in Yezo, 37n. 12. Oda Toshikatsu, Planned Population Distribution for Development: Hokkaido Experience (New York: United Nations Fund for Population Activities, 1981), 9. 13. William Wheeler to his father, Nov. 25, 1877, English Language Reports and Letters to the Kaitakushi relating to Wheeler, Monograph 10, 188–190. 14. Wheeler to his father, Nov. 25, 1877, 10, 194. 15. Higashide Seiichi, Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), chapter 1. 16. Will, Trading under Sail off Japan, 70–71; Michael Lewis, Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama, 1868–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), 63. 17. Benjamin S. Lyman, “Geological Survey of Hokkaido. Report of a Geological Trip through and around Yesso, with Notices of the Topography, Timber, Population, Ainos and of the Progress of the Geological Survey,” Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, 432.

Notes — Chapters 7, 8

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18. Henry Snow, In Forbidden Seas (London: E. Arnold, 1910). The statistics appear on p. 295. 19. Hane Mikiso, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 231. 20. Japan Weekly Mail, April 6, 1895; Kasuga Yutaka, Transfer and Development of Coal-Mine Technology in Hokkaido (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1982), 25. 21. The Urakawa group’s simple church building from 1894 now stands in the Historical Village of Hokkaido. 22. C. S. Meik, “Around the Hokkaido,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 16 (1889, part 2), 156. 23. Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason, eds., Handbook for Travellers in Japan (London: John Murray, 1901), 540. 24. J. M. Dixon, “Travelling in Yesso,” Chrysanthemum 1 (1881), 421. 25. Capron, “Memoirs,” 2: 126–27. 26. Japan Weekly Mail, April 16, 1892. 27. Reginald J. Farrer, The Garden of Asia: Impressions from Japan (London: Methuen, 1904), 159; Japan Weekly Mail, Aug. 19, 1893 and July 30, 1898. 28. Blakiston, 35n. 29. Miura Ayako, Shiokari Pass, trans. Bill and Sheila Fearnehough (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1987), 69, 71. 30. Capron, 2:100. 31. Rebecca L. Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 204–5. 32. Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan, 58. 33. Higashide, 17. 34. Blakiston, 50. 35. John W. Morrison, Modern Japanese Fiction (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1955), 117–60; Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Diaries: The Japanese at Home and Abroad as Revealed Through Their Diaries (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 406. 36. Dun, 52–53. 37. Ohara Keishi, comp. and ed., Trade and Industry in the Meiji-Taisho Era, trans. Okato Tamotsu (Tokyo: Obunsha, 1957), 497; Irene Tauber, The Population of Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 174; Japan Times, July 8, 2008. 38. Japan Times, Nov. 28, 1983. 39. Dun, 53.

6. Capron, 2: 83. 7. Extract from Capron’s Japanese Journal in Merritt Starr, “General Horace Capron, 1804–1885,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 18 (1925), 317; Capron, 2: 73, 114. 8. Extract in Starr, 326–27; Lyman is quoted in Fujita Fumiko, American Pioneers and the Japanese Frontier: American Experts in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), 132. 9. Dun, 27; Japan Weekly Mail, April 13, 1875, quoted in United States House of Representatives, House Exec. Documents, 44th Cong., 1st sess., v. 1 pt. 2, 796. 10. Benjamin Smith Lyman, “Geological Survey,” Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, 348. 11. Lyman, 386. 12. Rokkaku Satoko, ed., Dr. Stuart Eldridge: An American Surgeon in the Japanese Government Employ in Meiji Japan (Hokkaido: Miyama Shoto, 1981), 115. 13. This phrase appears on an informational sign in Makomanai, Sapporo. 14. Dun, 34. 15. Note by Horace Capron, Jan. 25, 1872 and Louis Boehmer to Murahashi Haisanara, July 10, 1877, Reprints of Reports and Letters to the Kaitakushi relating to Boehmer, Monograph 3 (Sapporo: Hokkaido Prefectural Government, 1991), 1, 119, 120; Japan Weekly Mail, Oct. 2, 1886; Blakiston, Japan in Yezo, 11. 16. American Influence upon the Agriculture of Hokkaido, Japan (Sapporo: College of Agriculture, Tohoku Imperial University, 1915), 12. 17. Maki, William Smith Clark, 131. 18. Maki, 81–82. 19. Dallas Finn, Meiji Revisited: The Sites of Victorian Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1995), 56; Maki, 196. 20. Maki, 195–96. 21. William P. Brooks to sister, April 22 and Sept. 30, 1877, Brooks Collection, University of Massachusetts; Brooks, “Farm Report,” Second Annual Report of Sapporo Agricultural College (Tokei: Kaitakushi, 1878), 20. 22. William S. Clark to his family (“Old Mother Clark ... and Her Little Clarkies Eight”), Oct. 22, 1876, Clark Collection; Stockbridge, “Personal Recollections,” 16–18, 12. 23. Japan Times, June 29, 1983.

Chapter 7

1. Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 233. 2. John A. Mock, Culture, Community and Change in a Sapporo Neighborhood, 1925–1988 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 4. 3. Stockbridge, “Personal Recollections,” 14. 4. Blakiston, Japan in Yezo, 114n. 5. Capron, 2: 33, 34. 6 William Wheeler to his Mother, Aug. 10, 1876, Wheeler’s English Language Reports and Letters to the Kaitakushi, 84; Capron, “Memoirs,” 2:103. 7. W. S. Clark to his sister Belle, Aug. 5, 1876, Clark Collection. 8. Wheeler to his Mother, Aug. 10, 1876, 83–84, 88. 9. Clark to his sister Belle Leete, Aug. 5, 1876, Clark Collection; John F. Howes and George Oshiro, “Who Was Nitobe?” in Howes, ed., Nitobe Inazo: Japan’s Bridge Across the Pacific, 9.

1. William P. Blake, “Abstract of Report of Wm. B. Blake, Geologist and Mining Engineer, Nov. 25, 1871,” Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, 4; Capron, “Memoirs,” 2:89; Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 221. 2. Pumpelly, My Reminiscences, 2 v. See volume 1. 3. Arthur H. Crow, Highways and Byeways in Japan: The Experiences of Two Pedestrian Tourists (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1883), 305–6. 4. Hokkaido Prefectural Government, Foreign Pioneers: A Short History of the Contribution of Foreigners to the Development of Hokkaido (Sapporo: Hokkaido Prefectural Government, 1968), 19. 5. Dun, “Reminiscences,” 27.

Chapter 8

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10. David F. Anthony, “The Administration of Hokkaido under Kuroda Kiyotaka 1870–1882: An Early Example of Japanese-American Cooperation,” PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1951, 140; Japan Weekly Mail, Oct. 2, 1886. 11. Todd, Corona and Coronet, 258. 12. Japan Weekly Mail, Nov. 10, 1888; Eugene S. Uyeki, “Spatial Stratification in Sapporo, Japan, 1975,” Urban Studies 27 (1990), 561. 13. William Wheeler to his Mother, Aug. 10, 1876, Monograph 10, 79. 14. Stockbridge, 11. 15. Japan Weekly Mail, March 28, 1896. 16. Maki, William Smith Clark, 154; W. S. Clark to his family, Aug. 14, 1876, Clark Collection. 17. W. S. Clark to Kuroda Kiyotaka, Sept. 8, 1876, Reports and Letters to the Kaitakushi relating to W.S. Clark, Monograph 8 (Sapporo: Hokkaido Prefectural Government, 1993), 45; First Annual Report of Sapporo Agricultural College, 1877 (Tokei: Kaitakushi), 11. 18. Uchida Kiyoshi to W. S. Clark, Jan. 10, 1882, Correspondence of W. S. Clark and His Japanese Students, (Sapporo: Shuppan Kikaku Senta, 1961), 202. 19. Note the title of Howes, ed., Nitobe Inazo: Japan’s Bridge Across the Pacific. 20. Masaike Jin Megumu, “Kanzo Uchimura,” trans. Murai Masaharu, The Lure of Litchfield Hills 25 (summer 1965), 10. 21. Dun, “Reminiscences,” 56. 22. Display in Clock Tower, Sapporo. 23 The Semi-Centennial of the Hokkaido Imperial University, Japan 1876–1926 (Sapporo: Hokkaido Imperial University, 1927), 104–5. 24. Quoted in Hijiya Yukihito, Ishikawa Takuboku (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 25; Basil Hall Chamberlain and W.B. Mason, eds., Handbook for Travellers in Japan (London: John Murray, 1907), 522. 25. Farrer, The Garden of Asia, 160; L. H. Dudley Buxton, The Eastern Road (New York: Dutton, 1924), 47. 26. Storry, quoted in Hugh Cortazzi, comp. and ed., Japan Experiences: Fifty Years, One Hundred Views: Post-War Japan through British Eyes 1945–2000 (Richmond, England: Japan Library, 2001), 188. 27, Joseph Campbell, Sake and Satori: Asia Journals — Japan, ed. David Kudler (Novato: CA : New World Library, 2002), 159. 28. The King James version of this verse reads, “Shine as lights in the world.” 29. Turin, Italy, host of the 2006 winter games, was much larger in 2006 than Sapporo was in 1972. 30. Japan Times, Feb. 3, 1972 and June 14, 1962. 31. Masayo Duus, The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey Without Borders, trans. Peter Duus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 380–81.

Chapter 9 1. Takekoshi Yosaburo, Economic Aspects of the History of the Civilization of Japan, 3 v., (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 3:165; Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan, 40. 2. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands, 182; Peter Geiser in Fred C. C. Peng and Peter Geiser, The Ainu: The Past in the Present (Hiroshima: Bunka Hyoron, 1977), 27. 3. Carl Etter, Ainu Folklore: Traditions and Cul-

ture of the Vanishing Aborigines of Japan (Chicago: Wilcox and Follett, 1949), 143–44. 4. Kayano, Our Land Was a Forest, 27–28; Kayano, The Ainu: A Story of Japan’s Original People (Boston: Tuttle, 2004), 15. 5. Siddle, 53; Miyajima, Land of Elms, 74. 6. Siddle, 61; Miyajima, 77. 7. Siddle, 61; Katarina Sjoberg, The Return of the Ainu: Cultural Mobilization and the Practice of Ethnicity in Japan (Berkshire, U.K.: Harwood Academic Publisher, 1993), 115. 8. Miyajima, 95. 9. Morris-Suzuki, “Creating the Frontier,” 16. 10. Miyajima, 83. 11. Miyajima, 83; Black, Young Japan, 2: 50. 12. Oyabe Jenichiro, A Japanese Robinson Crusoe (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1898), 27, 29, 34; Miwa Kimitada, “Colonial Theories and Practices in Prewar Japan,” in Howes, ed., Nitobe Inazu, 164. 13. Frederick Starr, The Ainu Group at the Saint Louis Exposition (Chicago: Open Court, 1904), 10. 14. James, Petticoat Vagabond in Ainu Land, 54. 15. Pumpelly, Across America and Asia, 171; Capron, “Memoirs,” 2: 93–94; W. S. Clark to his family, Aug. 14, 1876, Clark Collection. 16. H. C. St. John, “The Ainos: Aborigines of Yezo,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1873), 250–51; Japan Weekly Mail, Sept. 3, 1887; Landor, Alone with the Hairy Ainu, 228, 237; Black, 2:50–51; Blakiston, Japan in Yezo, 30. 17. Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 222; unidentified contributor to The Chrysanthemum (July 1881), 275. 18. Todd, Corona and Coronet, 259–60. 19. A good account of this incident appears in J. E. Hoare, “Mr. Enslie’s Grievances: The Consul, the Ainu and the Bones,” Japan Society of London Bulletin 78 (March 1976), 14–19. 20. Shibatani Masayoshi, The Languages of Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5. 21. N. G. Munro to Tani Kijiro, Apr. 23, 1937, Munro Collection (Sapporo: Hokkaido Government Archives). 22. Siddle, 76–77. 23. Fukusawa Yuriko, Ainu Archaeology as Ethnohistory: Iron Technology among the Saru Ainu of Hokkaido, Japan in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, UK: John and Erica Hedges, 1998), 10. 24. D. R. Francis, quoted in James W. Vanstone, “The Ainu Group at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904,” Arctic Anthropology 30 (1993), 78. 25. Starr, The Ainu Group, 75. 26. T. Philip Terry, Terry’s Japanese Empire Including Korea and Formosa: A Guidebook for Travelers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 332–345, 353–54. 27. Fred C. C. Peng in Peng and Geiser, 186. 28. Siddle, 93. 29. Chisato O. Dubreuil, “The Life and Art of Bikky Sunazawa: A Contemporary Ainu Sculptor,” M.A. Thesis, University of Washington, 1995, 51; Kayano Shigeru, “Traditional Ainu Life: Living off the Interest,” in Judith Roche and Meg McHutchinson, eds., First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 24. 30. “Schools for the Japanese Ainu,” School and Society 34 (Oct. 31, 1931), 598–99. 31. Kindaichi Kyosuke, “Present-Day Ainus Desire Absorption with Japanese,” Nippon Times, July 24, 1948.

Notes — Chapters 10, 11 32. N. Yakovlev, “A Visit to the Ainu in Southern Sakhalin,” Asiatic Review, new series 43 (July 1947), 277. 33. Koshiro Yukiko, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan (NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), 110. 34. Japan Times, July 20, 1975. 35. Kayano, Our Land Was a Forest, 98–99, 106. 36. Nabahe Keediniihil, quoted in A. E. Cullison, “Japan Looks North at Last,” Journal of Commerce, May 2, 1990, 10A. 37. Japan Times, June 9, 2000. 38. Kelly Dietz, “Ainu in the International Arena,” Fitzhugh and Dubreuil, eds., Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People, 361. 39. Japan Times, June 7, 2008; George De Vos and William Wetherall, Japan’s Minorities: Burakumin, Koreans, Ainu (London: Minority Rights Group, 1974), 17. 40. Kayano, Our Land Was a Forest, 118–19. 41. Douglas Sanders, “Japan: The Ainu as an Indigenous People, IWGIA Newsletter 45 (1986), 123. 42. Murayama Tomi, “The Ainu: Struggle for Survival and Dignity,” AMPO 17 (1985), 46. 43. Penhallow, “Origin of the Ainos,” 15. 44. Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Aso Taro quoted in Japan Times, Oct. 18, 2005.

Chapter 10 1. New York Times, Feb. 12, 1904. 2. Michael Weiner, The Origins of the Korean Community in Japan, 1910–1923 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989), 60, 66, 89; Weiner, Race and Migration in Imperial Japan (London: Routledge, 1994), 133–34. 3. Michael Hoffman in Japan Times, March 2, 2003. 4. Kobayashi, “The Factory Ship” and “The Absentee Landlord,” trans. Frank Motofuji (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973) 5. Higashide, Adios to Tears, 18–19. 6. Rev. Weston T. Johnson for the Famine Relief Committee, quoted in letter by S. H. Wainwright to the Japan Weekly Mail, Jan. 31, 1914. 7. J. W. Robertson-Scott, The Foundations of Japan: Notes Made during Journeys of 6000 Miles in the Rural Districts as a Basis for a Sounder Knowledge of the Japanese People (New York: D. Appleton, 1922), 341. 8. Japan Weekly Mail, Oct. 4, 1913. 9. Aylwin Bowen, In New Japan: The Narrative — A Travel Record in the Main — of a Post-War Sojourn (London: H. F. and G. Witherby, 1932), 216. 10. F. C. Jones, Hokkaido: Its Present State of Development and Future Prospects (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 19. 11. Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason, Handbook for Travellers in Japan 1907; 516; Terry, Terry’s Japanese Empire, 347; Jones, 19. 12. Frederick Starr, The Ainu Group at the Saint Louis Exposition, 7; Terry, 356. 13. The Times (London), July 19, 1910. Elsewhere in this edition of the newspaper, Hokkaido’s population at the end of 1908 is reported as 1,137,410. The first official census in Japan came in 1920. 14. Terry, 346, 355–56; Chamberlain and Mason (1907), 516.

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15. Harry A. Franck, The Japanese Empire: A Geographical Reader (Dansville, NY: F. A. Owen, 1927), 88, 103. 16. Japan Times, Dec. 29, 1924; New York Times, Dec. 29, 1924. 17. Richard Storry, “Hokkaido in the Late Thirties,” Proceedings of the British Association for Japanese Studies 1 (1976), 90. 18. “The Fifteenth of March, 1928” appears in Kobayashi Takiji, The Cannery Boat by Takiji Kobayashi and Other Japanese Short Stories (New York: International Publishers, 1933), 69–93. 19. Chamberlain and Mason, Handbook for Travellers in Japan (1901), 529. 20. New York Times, Jan. 9, 1914. 21. Translation adapted by Mayumi Kayoko and the author from translation by Takamine Hiroshi, in Takamine, A Sad Toy: A Unique and Popular Poet, Takuboku’s Life and His Poems (Tokyo: Tokyo News Service, 1962), 47. 22. See Kobayashi, “The Factory Ship” and “The Absentee Landlord” in John W. Morrison, Modern Japanese Fiction. 23. Kubo Sakae, Land of Volcanic Ash, trans. David G. Goodman (Ithaca, NY: China-Japan Program, Cornell University, 1986. 24. His name appears in English as Starfin, Starffin and sometimes Stalhin. 25. Japan Times, May 26, 1926. 26. Uchida Kiyoshi to William Smith Clark, March 20, 1880, Correspondence of W. S. Clark and His Students, 219. 27. New York Times, March 22, 1934. 28. Benjamin C. Duke, Japan’s Militant Teachers; A History of the Left-Wing Teachers’ Movement (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973), 191; Shimomura Chiaki, quoted in Hane, Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes, 120. 29. Hane, 133; Kayano, Our Land was a Forest, 54. 30. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935). 31. Japan Times, August 23, 1931. 32. A. Lindbergh, 169; Ian R. Stone, “The Annexation of Urup, 1855,” Polar Record 28 (Jan. 1992), 61; Henry Snow, In Forbidden Seas, 81. 33. Japan Times, Sept. 27, 1936.

Chapter 11 1. John J. Stephan, The Kuril Islands: Russo-Japanese Frontier in the Pacific (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1974), 133. 2. Stephan, 140–41. 3. “The Mighty Mine Dodgers,” http://www.sub marinesailor.com/stories/SeaDogMineDodgers.asp, 6, retrieved Dec. 11, 2003. 4. Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Penguin, 1999), 157. 5. New York Times, July 16, 1945; Nippon Times, July 16, 1945. 6. Nenpyo de Miru Hokkaido no Rekishi [Chronology of Hokkaido History Described] (Sapporo: Hokkaido Shinbunsha, 2001), 101, reports 835 deaths. Almost two thousand people died as a result of the raids, wrote Misawa Akihiko in the Yomiuri Shimbun, July 9, 2005, provisional translation from Consulate General of the United States, Sapporo, Japan, http://sapporo.us

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consulate.gov/wwwhcgyomiurijuly4th.html, retrieved Dec. 5, 2005. 7. Frank, 157; New York Times, July 16 and 25, 1945. 8. New York Times, Sept. 16, 1945. 9. Storry, “Hokkaido in the Late Thirties,” 88–89, 91. 10. Neill James, “Hokkaido— Arctic Hot Spot,” Asia 41 (December 1941), 712; James, Petticoat Vagabond, 38, 76. 11. Joint Army-Navy Intelligence Study of Northern Japan: Hokkaido (Washington, DC: Joint Intelligence Study Publishing Board, 1944), 1–27, 28, 13–14. 12. William Donald Smith III, “Ethnicity, Class and Gender in the Mines: Korean Workers in Japan’s Chikuho Coal Field, 1917–1945,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1999, 350, 283, 335. 13. HBC (Hokkaido Broadcasting Company), “Up to the Minute in Hokkaido,” June 5, 2006, http://www. hbc.co.jp/english/main_e.html, retrieved June 7, 2006. 14. Nippon Times, Aug. 29, 1946. 15. New York Times. December 15, 1995; Alex Josey, The David Marshall Trials (Singapore: Times Books, 1981), 242. 16. Loreley A. Morling, A Very Different Type: The True Story of a Recalcitrant Journalist (Swan View, W. Australia: Loreley A. Morling, 2000), 41. 17. Edith Ross Oliver, Journal of an Aleutian Year (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 250– 254. 18. Account by Alex Prossoff in Oliver, 247. 19. Liu Lianren’s name has been anglicized in various ways, including Riu Renjin and Liu Lien-jen. 20. Burritt Sabin in Japan Times, March 2, 2003. 21. Takemae Eiji, The Allied Occupation of Japan, trans. and adapt. by Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swaan (NY: Continuum, 2003), 67. 22. New York Times, Nov. 17, 1945. 23. Nippon Times, Jan. 13, and May 16, 1946; New York Times, April 29, 1946. 24. Darrell Berrigan, “Russia Builds a Base in Japan,” Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 8, 1947, 157. 25. Nippon Times, Dec. 6, 1945. 26. Margery Finn Brown, Over a Bamboo Fence (New York: William Morrow, 1951), 127–28. 27. Brown, 111. 28. Nippon Times, Aug. 21, 1948; “Japan: Reds Show a Net Loss,” Newsweek, Oct. 30, 1950, 42. 29. Walter Crosby Eells, Communism in Asia, Africa and the Far Pacific (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1954), 31–32; Nippon Times, May 18, 1950.

Chapter 12 1. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 273. 2. Frank, Downfall, 356; David M. Glantz, The Soviet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945: ‘August Storm’ (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003), 305–6. 3. Harry S Truman, Memoirs, 2 v. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 1:440; New York Times, March 29, 1992. 4. James Fallows, “Building Japan’s Defenses— Painfully,” U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 15, 1986, 40.

5. Quotation marks set off “Bad weather” in the original, Nippon Times, April 29, 1948. 6. New York Times, Feb. 12, 1951; Christian Science Monitor, April 10, 1952. 7. New York Times, Jan. 14, 1953. 8. Christian Science Monitor April 10, 1952. 9. Whether one uses the term “Northern Territories” or “South Kurils” can have political significance. “Northern Territories” is the clearer term to use when describing the islands that Japan claims and this book is about Japan; I have chosen to use “Northern Territories” most of the time. 10. Hasegawa, 274, 289; Kimura Hiroshi, JapaneseRussian Relations under Gorbachev and Yeltsin (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 202. 11. For analysis of the U.S. role, see Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The Northern Territories Dispute and Russo-Japanese Relations, v. 1, Between War and Peace, 1697–1985 (Berkeley: University of California, 1998, 114–15; and Marc Gallicchio, “The Kuriles Controversy: U.S. Diplomacy in the Soviet-Japan Border Dispute, 1941– 1956,” Pacific Historical Review 60 (1991), 94–98. Richard deVillafranca holds that Japanese domestic politics rather than U.S. pressure prevented a JapanSoviet peace treaty in 1956. See his “Japan and the Northern Territories Dispute: Past, Present, Future,” Asian Survey 33 (1993), 611–618. 12. Snow, In Forbidden Seas, 1. 13. New York Times, Jan. 7, 1981. 14. New York Times, July 4, 1990. 15. Japan Times, Jan. 17, 1990. 16. Japan Times, March 19, 1991. 17. Randall E. Newnham, “How to Win Friends and Influence People: Japanese Economic Aid Linkage and the Kurile Islands,” Asian Affairs 27 (Winter 2001), 253; Kimura, 253–54, holds that West German economic aid to the U.S.S.R. had little to do with German reunification. 18. Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2001. 19. Kimura, 272. 20. Gilbert Rozman, “A Chance for a Breakthrough in Russo-Japanese Relations: Will the Logic of Great Power Relations Prevail?” Pacific Review 15 (2002), 329; Kimura Masao and David A. Walsh, “Specifying ‘Interests’: Japan’s Claim to the Northern Territories and Its Implications for International Relations Theory,” International Studies Quarterly 42 (1998), 220; Kimura Hiroshi, 256. 21. “Majority of Russians Support Return of All Four Islands to Japan: Poll,” Jiji Press English News Service, June 23, 2005, retrieved through Proquest database; Japan Times, Nov. 14 and Dec. 25, 2006. (Aso Taro became prime minister of Japan on Sept. 24, 2008.) 22. Robert Swearingen, The Soviet Union and Postwar Japan: Escalating Challenge and Response (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), 172; Storry, “Hokkaido in the Late Thirties,” 93. 23. Jones, Hokkaido: Its Present State of Development and Future Prospects, 38. 24. U.S. News and World Report, June 29, 1951, 20– 21. 25. Nippon Times, July 17, 1954. 26. Nippon Times, July 14, 1955. 27. Japan Times, May 5, 1970. 28. New York Times, Oct. 11, 1964. 29. Geoffrey Murray in Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 21, 1982.

Notes — Chapters 13, 14, Conclusion 30. Japan Times, Jan. 27, 1977. 31. Japan Times, April 2, 1977. 32. Japan Times, January 30, 1977. 33. Robyn Dixon in Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2001; Brad Williams, “The Criminalization of Russo-Japanese Border Trade: Causes and Consequences,” Europe-Asia Studies 55 (2003), 713. 34. Williams, 720. 35. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The Northern Territories Dispute and Russo-Japanese Relations, v. 2, Neither War nor Peace, 1985–1998 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 529. Japanese fishermen in more southerly waters have been detained and their boats confiscated in postwar years by officials of other nations, especially South Korea, but the problem with the Russians has been much more serious. 36. “Russia: Sakhalin Region Media Highlights 30 Oct.–5 Nov. 06,” BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, Nov. 28, 2006, retrieved through Proquest database. 37. John J. Stephan, “Japan and the Soviet Union: The Distant Neighbors,” Asian Affairs 8 (Oct. 1977), 278.

Chapter 13 1. Machimura Kingo in Japan Times, June 14, 1962. 2. Comments from Hokkaido Shimbun reported in Japan Times, May 21, 1957 and July 25, 1956. 3. Japan Times, Dec. 24 and 28, 1956. 4. John D. Eyre, “Development in Hokkaido,” Geographical Review 49 (July 1959), 428. 5. Comments from Asahi Shimbun andYomiuri Shimbun reported in Japan Times, April 4, 1969. 6. New York Times, Oct. 27, 1981. 7. Suzanne Culter, Managing Decline: Japan’s Coal Industry Restructuring and Community Response (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999); 1, 43. 8. William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado’s Empire (New York: Harper, 1903), 653. 9. Takamatsu Toichiro in Japan Times, Aug. 31, 1956. 10. A. M. Rosenthal in New York Times, May 19, 1963; Japan Times, June 30, 1963. 11. Alexander Campbell, The Heart of Japan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 250. 12. Time, Oct. 20, 1958, 33. 13. Japan Times, Sept. 23, 1955. 14. The story appears in Takeda Taijun, The Outcast Generation; Luminous Moss, trans. Shibuya Yusaburo and Sanford Goldstein (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1967). 15. Japan Times, June 28, 1961. 16. Japan Times, June 30, 1979. 17. Japan Times, July 3, 1980.

Chapter 14 1. Japan Times, June 27, 1986. 2. http://www.agri.pref.hokkaido.jp/center/syup

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pan/e/page5.html; also p. 22. The figures are from 2000. 3. Japan Times, March 13, 2007. 4. Japan Times, Aug. 19, 2007. 5. Negishi Mayumi in Japan Times, August 14, 2005. 6. Japan Times, Nov. 16, 2006. 7. http://www.city population.de/Japan-Hok kaido.html. The figures are from 2006. 8. Miura Ayako, Freezing Point, trans. Shimizu Hiromu and John Terry (Wilmington, DE: Dawn Press, 1986.) 9. Samejima Kazuo, “Comment” to Yoneda Hitomi, “The Hillside City and Tourism: A Case Study of Hakodate,” Regional Development Dialog 12 (summer 1991), 141. 10. Culter, Managing Decline, 62; HBC, “Up to the Minute in Hokkaido,” March 2, 2003, http://www. hbc.co.jp/english/main_e.html 11. Culter, 96–97. 12. Japan Times, July 8, 2008.

Conclusion 1. Takahashi Harumi, “The Potential of Hokkaido,” Japan Spotlight, July/August 2006, 32. 2. Winning whiskies have been produced by the Nikka Whisky Distilling Company, The Scotsman, Dec. 1, 2003 and Japan Times, May 23, 2008. The cheese came from Kyodogakusha Shintoku Farm, Japan Times, Nov. 1, 2004. 3. “Hokkaido Tourism,” Hokkaido Bureau, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, http:// www.mlit.go.jp/english/2006/m_hokkaido_bureau/ 05_tourism/index.html; “Hokkaido Top Spot in Japan for E. Asian Tourists: Survey,” Asia Pulse, in Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, Aug. 17, 2004, retrieved through Infotrak database. 4. Pradyumna P. Karan, Japan in the 21st Century: Environment, Economy, and Society (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 302. 5. Japan Times, Jan. 15, 1935. 6. Japan Times, February 22, 2004. 7. Terry, Terry’s Japanese Empire, 345. 8. “Russia: Sakhalin Region Media Highlights 14–20 May 07,” BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, May 29, 2007, retrieved Feb. 3, 2005 from Proquest database. 9. Poultney Bigelow, Japan and Her Colonies: Being Extracts from a Diary Made Whilst Visiting Formosa, Manchuria, Shantung, Korea and Saghalin in the Year 1921 (London: Edward Arnold, 1923), 180; the film, Onna Rihatsushi no Koi, is known in English as Amazing Story, http://members.aol.com/sarumachi/coif feuse/locarno.html, retrieved Oct. 28, 2003; website no longer available. 10. Hartshorne, Japan and Her People, 1: 376. 11. W. S. Clark to Uchida Kiyoshi, Oct. 9, 1880, Correspondence of W. S. Clark and His Japanese Students, 218; Clark to his sister Belle, Aug. 5, 1876, Clark papers.

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Index Numbers in bold italics indicate pages with illustrations.

Abashiri 20, 25, 127, 136, 223, 319, 326, 328; ice floes 19, 318; Prison 134, 136, 315, 319, 334 Abira 315 Abuta 53, 236 agriculture 17–18, 52, 125, 224, 262, 308, 309, 319, 327; Ainu 30, 31, 50, 195; cooperatives 221, 230, 293, 308; dairying 17, 150, 177, 293; development of 116, 224, 293, 294; farms 15, 116, 120, 129–30, 140, 223, 224, 290, 293–94, 309; model farms 144, 151, 155, 171, 172, 172; research 147, 220, 221, 294; see also animals; farm; food supply; horses; rice; tenant farmers aikido 232–33 Ainu 2, 19, 23–40, 27, 88, 142, 149, 150, 204, 332; activism 203, 206, 207, 208, 322; and art 211–12; clothing 25, 26, 30; communities 27–28, 29, 195, 201–2, 210, 214; discrimination against 193, 202, 211; and disease 54, 192, 199; in exhibits 201–2, 209; farming 30, 31, 50, 195, 200; festivals 205, 212, 213; fishing, traditional 29, 31; fishing under Wajin law 192–93, 194, 195, 201, 203, 210–11; food and diet 30, 31, 32, 53, 203, 212; and forced labor 51, 136, 192–93, 194; and foreign explorers 26, 56, 67, 74; foreign interest in 56, 80, 116, 149, 196–99, 209–10; and government 47, 48, 53, 191, 200, 203–4, 208, 211, 215, 335, 336; housing 27–28, 28, 203; hunting 23, 29, 140, 194; and imperial visits 177, 199, 202; and indigenous question 211, 215; international ties 209–10, 212, 326; and Kuril Islands 23, 24, 26, 72, 194, 275; and land 195, 200, 203, 205; legends and tales 36–37; men’s role 29;

museums 178, 205, 208, 210, 211; music and dance 36, 212; origin 24–25; population 192, 212, 214; rebellions 42–43, 47– 48, 50, 51, 52, 65, 333; religion, traditional 32–37, 193, 209; and religions foreign to Ainu 57, 126, 191, 194, 196, 209; and Sakhalin 23, 24, 26, 50, 204, 267; study of 179, 196–199, 197; trade with 28, 29, 42, 43, 45–46, 48, 50, 59, 60, 61; traditional life 23, 26–38, 56, 214; Wajin, relations with 43, 43, 51, 117, 130, 193, 211; Wajin views of 24, 39–40, 192, 193, 202–3; women’s role 29–30, 31; see also Ainu; alcohol and alcoholism: education: Ainu; iyomante Ainu-e 35, 43 Ainu Kyokai 204, 205, 335; see also Utari Kyokai Ainu language 23, 24, 38–39, 66, 196–97, 199, 208, 212; as place name source 38–39, 127; and Wajin explorers 65, 66, 73, 196 Ainu Protection Act 199–201, 202, 203–4, 205, 208, 335; abolition of 211, 336 Ainu Shinpo 211, 212, 336 Air Do 324, 336 airports; Chitose 181, 184, 185, 300; New Chitose International 14, 19, 21, 182, 300, 310, 322, 324, 329; Okadama 181, 182, 313; see also aviation Aka Renga 55, 164–65, 166, 167, 188 Akabira 217, 253, 254, 295, 296 Akan, Lake 16, 212 Akan National Park 20, 172, 256 Akihito, Emperor 212 Akkeshi 14, 20, 120, 132, 141, 180, 192–93; and explorers 56, 59, 69, 71–72, 334; and Russians 52, 59, 62; and World War II 248, 250

361

Alaska 61, 82, 240; see also Aleutian Islands Albrecht, Mikhail 91 Alcock, Rutherford 85, 95 alcohol and alcoholism 134, 188, 240, 328; among Ainu 32, 33, 194, 199, 206, 211; traded to Ainu 42, 50, 51; see also beer; sake; Sapporo Beer Aldson, Hans 67–68 Aleutian Islands 24, 59, 61, 240, 241, 267; during World War II 246, 249–50, 255–56 Aleuts interned in Japan 255–56 Alexander I, Emperor of Russia 62 Alexey II, Patriarch 287 Allen, William B. 79, 86 Americans 1, 17, 77, 88, 89, 90, 94, 144, 145–59, 247–49, 253–54; see also names of individuals; occupation, American Amherst College 97, 154, 173 Amur River 69, 92, 328 Anatolii, Father 92 Ando Sekiten 271 Ando Takatoshi 219, 295, 337 Ando family 42, 43, 333 animals 16–17, 29, 46, 51, 136; farm 147, 150–51, 153; see also bears; birds; deer; fisheries; horses; wolves Anne of Green Gables 318 Anthony, David F. 164 anti-foreign feelings 91, 93, 98, 108; see also foreigners, detention of; Japan closed to foreigners Antisell, Thomas 145, 146, 147, 148 Aomori 13, 102, 109, 135, 181, 225, 247, 336 Aoshima Shunzo 51, 66, 337 Arai Ikunosake 103 Araki Daikaku 42 Arishima Takeo 140, 176, 174– 75, 186 area 9

362 armed forces, Japan 132, 181, 182, 183, 186, 244, 246–49, 319; Seventh Army Division 21, 121, 126, 216–17, 245, 319; see also Self-Defense Force Asahidake 10, 21 Asahikawa 21, 126, 149, 236, 300, 301, 315, 320; and Ainu 203, 205, 206, 207; climate 13, 315, 330; and military 126, 216, 245, 313, 319; population 227, 299, 314; transportation to 135, 136, 224; zoo 318, 329 Asari Giichi 206 Ashibetsu 218, 253, 295, 318 Aso Taro 276 Australia 71–72, 308, 318 aviation 251, 286, 300, 323, 324–25; domestic 181, 243; Lindbergh trip 241–43; military 262–63, 268–69; pioneers 240–41; see also airports Bakunin, Mikhail 92 Baldwin, Hanson W. 268 Ban Ichitaro 133, 334, 337 Barashkov, Vladimir 269 Barr, Pat 101 basho ukeoi 49, 54, 131, 333, 334 Batchelor, John 45, 84, 178, 196–97, 197, 200, 209, 337; on Ainu 29–30, 32, 33, 35–36, 198 Bates, George M. 89 bear ceremony 29, 33–34, 33, 34, 191, 205, 209 bears 17, 329; see also bear ceremony beer 33, 110, 153, 163–64, 319, 334; Sapporo Beer 161, 164, 180, 185, 319, 321, 334 Belenko, Viktor Ivanovich 269, 282, 336 Benkei 37 Benten Cape Fort 98, 102, 103, 110, 250 Benyovsky, Mauritius Augustus 57, 59, 333, 337 Bering, Vitus 57 Bernstein, Leonard 186 Bibai 253, 259, 260, 330 Bifuka 13 Biggs, Chester M., Jr. 253–54 Biratori 210, 228; see also Nibutani Biratori Dam 210 Bird, Isabella 30, 32, 143, 160, 198, 334 birds 17, 32, 46, 96, 178, 278, 329; see also Japanese crane Black, John R. 198 “black ships” see Perry Expedition Blake, William P. 143–44, 145, 148, 334, 337 Blakiston, Thomas 95–96, 102, 130, 133, 161, 178, 337; and Hakodate 90, 95–96, 108–9; and Hakodate war 101, 102;

INDEX observations 62, 127, 138, 139–40, 153, 198 Blakiston Line 96 Blakiston, Marr & Company 96 Blanton, Frank 253 Boehmer, Louis 152–53, 163, 178, 337 border, Japanese-Russian 64, 77, 82, 103, 116, 194, 270, 334, 335 bovine spongiform encephalopathy see BSE Boyle, J.J. 67 Bradshaw, Annie 29, 35 Brazil 240, 293 Bridgestone 325 Brigham, Arthur 159 Brooks, William 151, 156, 158, 177, 337 Broughton, W.R. 66–68, 67, 333, 337 Brown, Eliphalet, Jr. 86 Brunet, Jules 100, 103 BSE 309, 336 Buddhism 42, 128, 191, 209; temples 52, 84, 86, 117, 126, 128 bugyo see Hakodate bugyo burakumin 134, 139 business 122, 311–12, 331, 390; unethical practices 309, 312 Camp Crawford 183, 257, 263 Campbell, Joseph 182 Canada 9, 98, 128, 241, 318, 326 Canadian World 318 canals 160, 161, 166, 322 Capron, Albert 306 Capron, Horace 145–48, 146, 150, 183, 306, 334, 337; observations 7, 105–6, 137, 138, 143, 147, 163, 197–98; recommendations 146–48, 154, 165 Caroline E. Foote 88, 95 Carvalho, Diogo 56 castaways, foreign 72, 76 castaways, Japanese 59, 60, 61, 64, 65 Castricom 56 Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia 59 Chamberlain, Basil Hall 37 Chang Tsun-san 109 Chichibu, Prince 182 China 80, 86, 90, 141, 209, 267, 273, 275, 282; trade 41, 45, 50, 51, 85, 95, 132, 219; and war with Japan 132, 204, 254, 303; see also santan trade Chinese 95, 109, 119, 184; conscrips 251, 253, 256, 259 Chiri Mashio 199, 337 Chishima Archipelago see Kuril Islands Chitose 21, 24, 25, 138, 169, 319; military base 256, 257, 263, 302, 313; see also airports: Chitose; airports: New Chitose International Chitose River 132, 322

Choshu clan 98 Christianity 75, 86, 97, 106–7, 183, 335; and Ainu 57, 191, 194, 196, 209; ban of 46, 87, 134; Russian Orthodox 57, 90–92, 106, 128, 191, 194, 256, 287, 336; at Sapporo Agricultural College 155, 172–73, 174 Churchill, Winston 270 Clark, William Smith 1, 154–56, 157, 170, 172, 303, 337; observations 12, 117, 163, 198, 332; and Sapporo Agricultural College 1, 154–56, 158, 169, 171, 172, 251, 302, 354 climate and weather 12, 147, 158, 231, 292–93, 306, 328; fog 19, 20, 57, 66, 72, 243, 249, 279, 280; winter conditions 12–13, 136, 158, 188, 223, 329, 330 coal 18, 85, 133, 149, 251, 259– 60, 334, 336 coaling stations 77, 90, 94, 109; see also miners; mining Coen, C.J. 56 Cold War 20, 264, 267–70, 285, 335, 336; and Northern Territories 272, 275 College of Agriculture of Tohoku Imperial University 179–80; see also Hokkaido University colleges and universities 183–84, 303, 331; see also individual institutions Collins, Perry 88 commerce see trade communication 105, 137, 181; see also postal service communism and communists 230, 244, 261, 264, 266, 304 Communist Party (Japan) 208, 231, 261, 313 conscripts 251, 253, 254, 256, 259; see also prisoners Constitution, Japan 263, 303 consular offices, Hakodate 93, 101, 109; American 89–90, 334; British 89, 90, 92–93; Russian 90–91, 92, 95, 334 consular offices, Sapporo 184 cooperatives, agricultural 221, 230, 293, 308, 335 cooperatives, fisheries 219, 295 corruption 312 Corwine, William R. 169 crane see Japanese crane Crawford, Joseph 152, 153, 167, 337 crime 108, 135, 188, 206–7, 286– 87, 312 Crimean War 77, 82, 90 crops 17–18, 52, 129–30, 151, 154, 160, 172, 220–21, 223, 293 Crow, Arthur H. 144 Culter, Suzanne 317 Cutter, J.C. 159

Index Daikoku Island 67–68, 67 Daisetsuzan National Park 21, 236, 292 dams 210, 292 Dan Ikuma 305 Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. 89, 94 Date 131, 125–26, 136, 236, 315 Date Kunishige 125–26 Davydov, Gavriel Ivanovich 62, 334, 337 Dawes Act 200 Day, Murray S. 150 daylight savings time 188 de Angelis, Jeronimo 56, 333 deer 17, 46, 50, 126, 140, 329 DeLong, Charles 150 Dening, Walter 196 development policies: early twentieth century 217, 223, 232, 335; late twentieth century 291–92, 293–94, 314–15, 325, 335; Meiji 116–24, 139, 144–45; shogunate 52, 53, 115 DeVos, George 211 Diana 62, 63, 87, 98 Dietz, Kelly 210 disease 259, 304; among Ainu 54, 192, 199 Dixon, J.M. 136 Docho see government, Hokkaido Dogakinai, Naohiro 283, 298, 337–38 Doshisha University 97 drift ice 20, 313, 318, 328 Dudley, Thomas 80, 86 Dun, Edwin 118–19, 140, 142, 150–51, 163, 174, 183, 338 Dutch nation and people 42, 93, 253; Dutch East India Company 56 Eamont 71 earthquakes 11, 87, 262, 274, 296, 313–14, 336 Ebetsu 122, 126, 164, 184, 194, 251, 314 Ebisu people 26 economy and economic conditions 141, 229–30, 297, 311, 326, 329–30; Great Depression 231, 235, 238–40 ecotourism 328 Edo 42, 77, 90, 96, 117; see also Tokyo education 107, 124, 126, 153, 290, 314; Ainu 200, 202, 204, 205, 210, 211, 335; military training 155, 230; see also colleges and universities Eells, Walter C. 262, 302 Ekaterina 59 Eldridge, Stuart 105, 145, 150, 338 Eliza F. Mason 87 Emishi people 26 energy 310, 329; alternative sources 311, 330; hydroelectric

21, 251, 292; oil and gas 287, 296, 297, 311, 329; see also coal; nuclear power Engaru 315 Enomoto Takeaki 100–3, 101, 116, 133, 153, 250, 334, 338 environmental concerns 140, 297, 321–22, 323 Epi-Jomon Period 25, 333 Erimo, Cape 10, 19, 132–33 Esashi 49, 101, 102, 103, 132, 322 escapees 63, 72, 254–55, 256 Etorofu see Iturup Etter, Carl 192 Eusden, Richard 93 exchange rate 94 exploration, American 73–76; European 56, 66–68; Japanese 65–66, 68–69, 72–73; Russian 57, 59–63 explorers see names of individuals expositions 181, 306; Ainu in 201, 209 Eyre, John D. 293 Ezo (island) 9 Ezo (people) 26; see also Ainu Ezo brocade 45, 50 Ezo Republic 100 Ezochi 9, 45, 48, 54, 116 Ezogashima 26 famine see food supply: shortage Far Eastern National University (of Russia) 287 farmer-soldiers 53, 253, 267; see also tondenhei Farrer, Reginald 137, 180 Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Societies of Hokkaido 221, 293, 335 ferry service 299, 301; Aomon Hakodate 13–14, 85, 105, 135, 247, 248, 259, 290, 323, 324, 336; and Seikan Tunnel 323–24; Toya Maru disaster 304–5, 323; and World War II 247–48; see also water transportation festivals 21, 186, 188, 205, 238, 315 Fillmore, Millard 77 Finch, John 72 Finck, Henry 13 Finn, Dallas 156 fire 165, 177, 236–38, 238, 239, 248, 295, 304–5, 335 First Peoples see Indians, American fisheries 18, 20, 141, 331, 335; early twentieth century 219; herring 18, 49, 54, 132, 158, 214, 219, 283; kombu (kelp) 18, 51, 85, 95, 132–33, 284; Matsumae era 22, 42, 46, 49, 50, 54; Meiji era 119, 131–32; poaching and smuggling 284, 285, 286–87, 312; post–World

363 War II 307–8, 283, 295, 331; salmon 18, 20, 31, 49, 132, 297; sea products 50, 85, 95, 140; 200-mile fishing zones 282, 283; see also Ainu: fishing, traditional; Ainu: fishing under Wajin law; basho ukeoi; fisheries controversy with U.S.S.R./Russia fisheries controversy with U.S.S.R./Russia 279–85, 331 flags 164–65, 208 flora 15–16, 92, 104–5, 152–53, 154–55 food and diet 63, 130, 147, 240, 319, 328; Ainu 30–32, 53; contamination of 309–10; see also food supply food supply 43, 52, 54, 100–1, 148, 290, 327; Ainu 49, 50, 194; for foreigners 89, 94, 116, 158–59; detention of 62–64, 72, 75–76, 78; shortages, Hokkaido, prewar 220, 239–40, 335; shortages, Hokkaido, postwar 257–59, 260, 279, 290, 292–93; shortages, North Honshu 51, 54; World War II 250, 253, 254; see also anti-foreign feelings; Japan closed to foreigners forests and forestry 15, 16, 18, 219, 259, 294–95, 329; logging 130, 140, 219, 233, 322; reforestation 54, 140; sawmills 96, 147, 163, 180 Former Aborigines Protection Act see Ainu Protection Act Former Hokkaido Government Office Building see Aka Renga Fort McHenry, Maryland 98 France 77, 82, 93, 100, 103, 184, 334 Franck, Henry 230 Frank, Richard 248, 266 Fuji, Mt. 38 Fujito Takeki 212 Fukagawa 123, 126, 130 Fukami Genyu 65 Fukuda Takeo 271 Fukuda Yasuo 276 Fukuoka 185 Fukushi Naritoyo 96 Fukuyama see Matsumae Furano 319 Furen 127, 308; see also Nayoro Gaertner, R. 144 Gamov, Vitaly 289 Genghis Khan 37 Geography 8, 9–22, 10, 11, 146–47; misconceptions 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 66, 68, 75; see also explorers; maps George V, King of England 201 Germany 93, 100, 108, 144, 172, 245, 274 Germershausen, William 247

364 Glantz, David 266 Glucks Konigsreich 317–18 gold 42, 46, 56, 57, 65, 127 Golovnin, Vasilii Mikhailovich 62–65, 86, 91, 334, 338 Gorbachev, Mikhail 273, 274 Goryokaku Fort 97–98, 98–99, 100, 103, 105, 109, 326, 334 Goshkevich, Iosif Antonovich 90–91, 108, 334, 338 government, Hokkaido (Docho) 138, 217, 271–72, 279, 292, 335; and Ainu 203, 208, 211; policies 260, 290, 310, 315; relations with Government of Japan 298, 325; see also Kaitakushi government, Japan 217, 291, 303, 311, 325, 326; and Ainu 193, 200, 203–4, 208, 211, 215, 336; Meiji 100, 102–3, 115, 123; see also shogunate governors, Hokkaido 138; see also names of individuals Gower, Erasmus M. 144 Graf Zeppelin 241 Grant, Ulysses S. 145 Gray, Robert 66 Great Britain 77, 82, 92–93, 100, 110, 201, 334 great circle route 85 Gromyko, Andrei 272 Group of Eight summit 215, 328 GSDF see Self-Defense Force Guerin, Nicholas-François 88 Haber, Ludwig 108, 108, 133, 334, 338 Habomai Islands 270, 271, 280, 284; and partial islands reversion 272, 274, 276, 285; see also Kuril Islands; Northern Territories Haboro Mine 296 Habuto Masayasu 52, 62, 338 Haight, Milton 159 Hakodate 50, 53, 84–111, 106, 107, 108, 138, 150, 180, 227, 234, 236, 238, 241, 291, 313, 316, 326; and Chinese 95, 109, 227; description 12, 85–86, 104–5, 110, 227; fires 237–38, 238, 239, 335; fishery 85, 133, 307; harbor 14, 19, 54, 78–79, 82, 85, 90, 95, 110, 223; imperial visits 109, 142; population 109, 141, 227, 299, 314; port opening 55, 78–82, 81, 87, 95; railroads to 111, 181, 224; roads to 53, 135–36, 169, 225; and Russians 59, 62, 63, 64, 87, 88, 90–92, 95, 216, 243, 269, 278, 287, 336; sea transportation to 109, 225; and war of 1869 98, 100–3, 101, 102, 104, 334; and World War II 248, 249, 250, 253; see also Aomori; ferry service; Gorykaku

INDEX Hakodate, Mt. 69, 71, 84, 86, 87, 96 Hakodate bugyo (magistrate) 52, 98, 100; and foreigners 62, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94 Hakodate Dock Co. 310 Hakodate Marine Observatory 96 Halifax, Canada Citadel 98, 326 Hall, Francis 90, 97–98 Halsey, William F. 248 Hammel, E.A. 27 Hanasaki 20, 284, 287 harbors 14, 223, 322; see also Hakodate: harbor; Otaru: harbor Hardy, Alpheus 97 Harris, Flora Best 107 Harris, M.C. 107 Harris, Townsend 88, 90 Hartshorne, Anna 85, 110, 332 Harvard University 173 hascap 319 Hasegawa Tsuyoshi 266, 271 Hawaii 93, 231, 246 Hawks, Francis L. 79 Hayakita 240 Hayashi Yoshishige 209 Heine, William 84, 86 Herndon, Hugh 241 herring 18, 49, 54, 132, 158, 214, 219, 283 Hidaka District 19, 214 Hidaya Kyubei 51, 338 Higashi Hongary 128, 136 Higashide Seiichi 130, 139, 220 Hijikata Toshizo 103, 104 Hikawa Maru 299 Hirai Seijiro 153 Hirate Kaichi 254 Hirohito, Emperor 164, 182, 185, 202, 244, 300, 306, 320 Hiroshima 126, 238 Historical Village of Hokkaido 123, 124, 129, 131, 141–42, 162, 226, 231 Hodgson, Pemberton 90, 92–93 Hodnett, Patrick 82 Hokkai One 181 Hokkai Times 179–80 Hokkaido Agricultural Experiment Station 138, 220, 335 Hokkaido Ainu Kyokai 204, 205, 335; see also Utari Kyokai Hokkaido Anthropological Society 179 Hokkaido Citizens’ Party 307 Hokkaido Coal Mine Railway Company 133, 134, 218, 295, 317 Hokkaido Coal Mine Steam Ship Company 133 Hokkaido Colonization Commission see Kaitakushi Hokkaido Development Bank 223, 311–12, 326, 335, 336 Hokkaido Development Bureau 270, 291, 298, 325, 335

Hokkaido Electric Power Company 251, 310 Hokkaido Federation of Mine Workers’ Unions 260 Hokkaido Forest Products Research Institute 294 Hokkaido International Airlines Company 324, 336 Hokkaido Jingu (Shrine) 162 Hokkaido Kaitaku no Mura 123, 124, 129, 131, 141–42, 162, 226, 231 Hokkaido National Defense Assembly 244, 249 Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters 185–86 Hokkaido Shimbun 251, 261, 286, 292, 298, 300 Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko 223, 311–12, 326, 335, 336 Hokkaido University 96, 156, 170, 171, 172, 179, 180, 189; and Ainu 178, 179, 208, 209; student protests 262, 302, 303, 335; see also Sapporo Agricultural College Hokkaido University of Education 184 Hokudai see Hokkaido University Hokuden 251, 310 Hokuren 221, 293, 335 Hokusei Gakuin 183–84 Hokutan see Hokkaido Coal Mine Railway Company Hokuto 52, 106, 315; see also Kamiiso Holland, John 254–55 Holmes, Harry 94 Holt, N.W. 153 Honda (automotive company) 325 Honda Toshiaki 52, 66, 192, 338 Hori Tatsuya 184, 286, 310, 321, 338 Horiuchi Juro 303 Horonai 133, 141, 149; mine 218, 296–97, 334; railroad 135, 153, 167, 325, 334 Horonobe 321 horses 53, 121, 136, 137, 142, 221; breeding and raising 19, 121, 151, 294 houses and housing 86, 96, 134, 156, 223, 231, 292, 306; Ainu 27–28, 28, 203; pioneers’ 129, 129, 130, 141, 147, 225; tondenhai 119, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126 Howe, George 72 Hu Yaobang 141 Hughes, Richard 100 ice floes 20, 313, 318, 328 Ikeda 126, 294 immigration see migration income 306, 326 Indians, American 1, 23, 116,

Index 195, 200, 201, 209, 211, 212, 326 Indonesia 56, 313 industry 19, 121, 223, 228, 248, 310, 330; in Sapporo 163–64, 180; see also fisheries; forests and forestry: sawmills; mining; Oji Paper Company Ino Tadataka 68–69, 71, 73, 333, 338 International Court of Justice 275 International Labor Organization 251 internment of foreign sailors 63–64, 72, 75–76, 77, 78 Iraq 313 Irwin, James 153 Ishikari 165, 297, 326, 336 Ishikari Bay New Port 299, 316 Ishikari River 9, 31, 49, 137, 160, 292, 297, 322 Ishikari Valley 21, 65, 134, 135, 146, 165, 178, 332; agriculture and reclamation 15, 138, 151, 221; settlers 118, 120, 127, 160 Ishikawa Takuboku 180, 234, 235, 319, 338 Ishiya Company 309 Iturup Island 62, 64, 68, 269, 270, 275, 276 Iwahashi Eien 186 Iwamura Michitoshi 161, 334, 338 Iwanai 305 Iwase Yashiro 94 iyomante 29, 33–34, 33, 34, 191, 205, 209 James, Neill 85, 250 Japan, closed to foreigners 41, 62, 77–78, 98; see also antiforeign feelings; foreigners, detention of Japan National Railways (JNR) 207, 304 Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute 321 Japan Sea 21, 82, 247 Japan Steel 248, 301 Japanese crane 17, 20, 323, 329 Japanese, ethnic see Wajin Japanese language 38–39 Jernegan, Nathaniel M. 87 JNR 207, 304 Johns Hopkins University 173 Jomon people and era 25, 333 Jones, F.C. 279 Jones, George 87 Jozankei 325 JR Hokkaido 325 Kaifu Maru 65 Kaigara Island 14, 284 Kaitakushi 116–24, 131–32, 153, 334; Ainu policy 117, 193, 194–95; and Americans 143, 145–58; development programs 118–22, 133–34, 138; and

Sapporo 160–64, 177; and Sapporo Agricultural College 154– 56, 178; termination 123–24, 334; and transportation 137, 165, 169 Kaiyo Maru 101, 102, 103 Kakizaki Nobuhiro 43, 338 Kakizaki family 43, 45, 333; see also Matsumae family Kamchatka Peninsula 23, 24, 46, 59, 65, 240–42; and explorers 57, 61, 64, 66; and World War II 245, 246, 249 Kamifurano 236 Kamiiso 52, 229, 253, 315, 335; see also Hokuto Kamikawa Basin 21, 120, 126, 138 Kamisunagawa 321 Kamokutain 47 Kannari Hatsu 199 Kannari Taro 200 Karafuto 14, 61, 183, 217, 219, 226, 246, 247; Soviet acquisition of 258, 265, 267, 270; see also Sakhalin Karan, Pradyumna 328 Kasai 317 Kawabata Gyokusho 35 Kawai Michi 183 Kawamura Kenichi 210 Kayano Shigeru 30, 192, 203, 208–9, 210, 211, 240, 336, 338 Kayanuma Mine 88, 144 Keene, Donald 7, 66 Keller, Helen 243 kelp see kombu kenpeitai 254 Ketelaar, James E. 115 Khabomai Islands see Habomai Islands Khvostov, Nikolai Alexandrovich 62, 334, 338 Khvostov-Davydov raids 62, 63, 64, 68, 334 Kimball, Dan A. 268 Kimobetsu 221 Kimura Hako 43 Kimura Hiroshi 275 Kindaichi Kyosuke 199, 204, 338 Kipling, Rudyard 21, 110 Kita Hiroshima 126, 136, 138, 156 Kitami 20, 127, 193, 223, 314 Kitami Pass 136 Kiyoura Keigo 223 Kizu Kokichi 91 Kobayashi Chogoro 65 Kobayashi Masahiro 331 Kobayashi Takeshi 239 Kobayashi Takiji 219, 231, 234– 35, 338 Kobe 109 Kodama Sakuzaemon 208, 338 Kodayu Daikokuya 59, 60 Koizumi Junichiro 276 Kojima (Island) 21 Kojima Matajiro 86 Komagatake 9, 236

365 kombu 18, 46, 51, 85, 95, 132–33, 281, 284 Komeito 184, 233 Kondo Heiichi 304 Kondo Morishige 68, 70 Konomai Mine 297 Korea 88, 217, 279, 290; North Korea 185, 275, 331; South Korea 266, 282 Korean Air Lines Flight 007 269 Korean War 256, 263, 268 Koreans 265, 282; in mines 251, 254, 259–60, 335; as World War II forced laborers 247, 248, 251, 259 Korsakov, Russia 286, 331 Koshamain 42–43, 338 Koshamain’s War 42–43, 333 Kotambetsu River 322 Kotetsu 101, 102 Krasnoyarov, Yevgeny 274 Krusenstern, A.J. von 26, 61, 334, 338 Kubo Sakai 235 Kunashir Island 51, 57, 62, 242, 270, 272, 276; see also Kuril Islands; Northern Territories Kunashiri Island see Kunashir Island Kuril Islands 8, 14, 46, 72, 73, 77, 109, 173, 334; as Ainu homeland 23, 24, 26, 29; and aviation 241, 242–43; and Russians 52, 53, 57, 60, 68, 82, 120, 333; under Soviet/Russian administration 267, 271–78, 287, 335; and World War II 245–46, 247, 249, 265; see also Habomai Islands; Iturup Island; Kaigara Island; Kunashir Island; Northern Territories; Shikotan Island Kurils waters 18, 133, 279, 336 Kuroda Kiyotaka 82, 102, 103, 117, 183, 306; and Ainu 193, 194; and foreign experts 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 159; and Kaitakushi 117–118, 122, 123, 134, 137, 160, 163; and Sapporo Agricultural College 154–56, 169 Kushiro 19, 95, 125, 223, 224, 234, 241, 248, 265, 312, 319, 326; earthquakes 262, 314; fishing 20, 46, 127, 193; mining 295, 297; population 141, 299, 314 Kushiro-Shitsugen National Park 19–20, 323, 328 Kussharo Lake 256 Kutchan 227 Kuya 126 Kyoto 45, 160 labor unions 218, 239, 260, 261, 300–2 Lady Rowena 71, 334 Lagoda 72, 75, 334

366 land grant colleges 154, 155 land reclamation 15, 54, 221, 222, 291, 293 land reform 205, 262 land use policies 118, 119, 139, 220, 291, 294; and Ainu 116, 195, 200, 205, 334 Landor, A.H. Savage 55, 198 La Pérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, Count of 26, 66, 68, 333, 339 La Pérouse Strait 14, 20, 66, 217, 225, 286, 330; and U.S.S.R. 265, 270; and World War II 247, 250 Lawrence 72, 74, 334 Laxman, Adam Erikovich 52, 59, 60, 60, 61, 333, 339 League of Nations 172 LeMay, Curtis 262–63 lend-lease program 246–47 Lewis, Michael 130 Liberal Democratic Party 298 The Light of Asia 204 Lindbergh, Charles 241–43, 242, 249, 335 Liu Lianren 256 logging 130, 140, 219, 233, 322 London, Jack 110 London, England 201 Losyukov, Alexander 276 Lyman, Benjamin 132, 133, 147, 148–49, 178, 339 MacArthur, Douglas 205, 257, 258, 261, 265, 266, 271, 279 MacArthur line 268, 279 MacDonald, Ranald 73–76, 76, 77, 94, 334, 339 Machimura Kingo 206, 291, 298, 306, 339 mad cow disease 309, 336 Makhov, Vasilii 91 Makiguchi Tsunesaburo 184, 234 Makomanai 151, 183, 186, 188, 257; see also Sapporo Maksimov, Sergei 88 Malenkov, Georgii 272 Mamiya Rinzo 62, 63, 69, 73, 196, 333, 339 mammoth 16 Manchuria 45, 183, 204, 240, 244, 290, 292; and Russia/ U.S.S.R. 90, 216, 245, 265 maps 8; Ezo 46, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 68, 69, 70, 73, 75, 334; Hokkaido 10, 11, 150; inaccuracies 56, 57, 61, 75 marimo 16, 212 Marine Day 142 Maritime Safety Board, Japan 280 Marshall, David 255 Marutani Kaneyasu 294 Mashike 192 Massachusetts 165 Massachusetts Agricultural College 154, 155, 156, 157, 302

INDEX Matsuda Denjiro 69 Matsue Shunji 232 Matsumae (town) 45, 46, 50, 55, 68, 84, 144, 325, 333; Castle 44, 45, 55, 97, 102, 333; and explorers 59, 69, 78; and interned sailors 63, 72, 75, 334; as Wajin headquarters 41, 45, 53; and war of 1868–69 100, 101, 102, 103 Matsumae Kageyu 80 Matsumae Yoshihiro 45, 333, 339 Matsumae family 45–52, 54, 61–62, 65, 93, 192, 333, 334; and Perry 79–80; see also Kakizaki family Matsumoto Soichiro 150 Matsuura Takeshiro 54–55, 74, 115, 160–61, 193, 196, 339; explorations 72–73, 334; map 55, 73, 149, 334 Maximowicz, Carl Johann 92 Meat Hope 310 medicine 91, 105, 150, 290 Medvedev, Dmitry 276 Meiji Emperor 98, 151, 162; in Hokkaido 109, 110, 136, 142, 177, 199 Meiji Restoration 100, 125, 193, 334 Meik, C.S. 136 Menashi-Kunashir uprising 51, 52, 66, 333 mergers (city and town) 315 Mermet de Cachon, Jean 93, 108 migration 50, 54, 141, 148, 155; to Ezo 46, 116, 117; by group 53, 118, 125–27, 232, 232–33; from Hokkaido 232, 240, 253; to Hokkaido 138, 139, 253; resistance to 119, 231; see also refugees; tondenhei Mikasa Maru 280 militarism 230, 244, 249 military see armed forces, Japan; United States: military forces Mimotsu Masao 251–52 miners 133–34, 295–96; Chinese and Korean 218, 251, 254, 259–60, 335; prisoners of war 251, 253–54; strikes by 218, 259–60, 302; women 218, 250; see also coal; mining mines (undersea) 216–17, 246–247, 250, 256, 304 mining 18, 49, 88, 133, 141, 217–18, 251, 295–97, 334, 336; foreign advisers 133, 143- 44, 148–49; see also coal; miners minorities 206, 209–10; see also Ainu; burakumin Missouri 248 Mitsubishi 141, 218, 260, 296 Mitsui 141, 218, 321 Miura Ayako 315 Miyabe Kingo 173, 174, 178, 183, 339 Miyagi Prefecture 125, 126

Miyajima Toshimitsu 193, 194, 196 Mock, John 160 Mogami Tokunai 66, 68, 69, 69, 196, 333, 339 Monbetsu 318 Mori 169, 199, 311, 312 Mori Arinori 145, 154 Morison, Samuel Eliot 80 Moriyama Einosuke 76 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa 194 Morrison, John W. 140 Morrow, Anne 241–43, 242, 249, 335 Morrow, James 80 Morse, Edward S. 196 Moscow, Russia 16, 283, 286 Mossman, Samuel 96 Munro, Neil Gordon 199, 339 Munroe, Henry Smith 149 Muroran 19, 67, 67, 72, 109, 126, 169, 180, 217, 228, 228, 229, 316; population 227, 299, 314; port 14, 126, 128, 165, 223, 299; railroads to 135, 137, 224–25; steel mills 229, 299, 301, 316; and World War II 248, 251, 252 museums 110–11, 252, 315, 316, 319; Ainu 178, 205, 208, 210, 211; Sapporo 173, 178, 178, 179, 183, 186 music 36, 186, 212 Nadezhda 61 Naganuma 303 Nagasaki 50, 82, 91, 93, 94, 95, 109, 134; interned sailors in 72, 76, 77; open to Chinese and Dutch 41–42, 51, 59, 60, 85; and Russians 59, 60, 61, 77, 82 Nahodka, Russia 316 Naito Saitaro 155 Nakagawa Goroji 64 Nakagawa Seikei 164 Nakasone Yasuhiro 210, 211, 336 Nakatonbetsu 127 Nakayama Kyuzo 138 Nambu clan and district 53, 121 name of island 9, 74, 105, 115, 193 Namikoshi, Takujiro 233 Nanae 52, 96, 101, 147, 153, 169, 304; farm 144, 151 national parks 16; see also Akan National Park; Daisetsuzan Natiional Park; Kushiro- Shitsugen National Park; ShikotsuToya National Park; Shiretoko National Park Native Americans see Indians, American Naumann’s elephant 16 Nayoro 13, 127, 135, 308 Neesima, Joseph Hardy (Niijima Jo) 97, 154, 334, 339 Nemuro 20, 53, 109, 118, 120, 127, 133, 138, 223, 242–43, 242, 244, 279, 281; fishing 20, 279,

Index 285, 307; and Northern Territories 271, 277, 279, 285; population 141, 279, 283, 314; and Russians 52, 59–60, 60, 283, 285, 287, 288, 333 Nemuro peninsula 20, 69 Neolithic period 25 neutrality pact, Japan-Russia 264–65 Nevelskoi, Genadii Ivanovich 77 New Chitose International Airport 14, 19, 21, 182, 300, 310, 322, 324, 329 New Orleans, Louisiana 326 Newnham, Randall E. 274 newspapers 106, 123, 179–80; see also Hokkaido Shimbun Nibutani 192–93, 208, 210, 214, 240; see also Biratori Nibutani Dam 210 Nicholas II, Czar of Russia 158 Niijima Jo 97, 154, 334, 339 Niikappu 121, 151 Nikolaevsk, Russia 92, 96 Nikolai, Father (Ioann Dmitrievich Kasatkin) 91–92, 97, 339 Nimitz, Chester 247 Nippon Mining and Metals 297 Niseko 318 Nissan 325 Nitobe Inazo 39, 172, 173, 174, 175, 183, 339 Nivkh 267 Noboribetsu 19, 39, 228, 297 Noguchi, Isamu 186, 187 Nomonhan, Battle of 245 Nomura Giichi 209 Nopporo 21, 141, 164 North Korea 185, 275, 331 North Pacific Fisheries Management Council 283 Northern Regions Center 298, 326 Northern Territories 270–78, 277, 278, 282, 83, 285, 286, 302, 331, 335, 336; see also Habomai Islands; Iturup Island; Kaigara Island; Kunashir Island; Kuril Islands; Shikotan Island Northern Territories Day 273, 276 Nosappu, Cape 20, 51, 275 Novosibirsk, Russia 286 nuclear power 144, 310–11, 321, 336 Numata 319 Obihiro 18, 19, 248, 293, 313, 314 Obuchi Keizo 210 occupation, American 181, 182, 183, 205, 257–63, 292, 335 Ogino Genko 131 Ohara Sakingo 68, 339 Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko 40 oil and gas 287, 296, 297, 311, 326, 329, 330

Oji Paper Company 227–28, 260, 279, 299, 301–2, 330, 335 Okada Furie 106 Okada Haruo 208 Okadama Airport 181, 182, 313 Okhotsk (town) 64, 65 Okhotsk people 25, 333 Okhotsk, Sea of 20, 21, 82, 246, 247, 313; ice floes 20, 313, 318, 328; and Russians/Soviets 57, 61, 62, 270, 271, 272 Oki Kano 212 Okikurumi 35, 36, 37 Okinawa 271, 272–73, 302, 312, 313 Okushiri Island 11, 21, 257, 313–14, 336 Olympic Games 21, 182, 184–85, 335 Omi traders 45, 49, 333 Omu 292–93 Onibishi 47 Orthodox church 57, 90–92, 106, 128, 191, 194, 256, 287, 336 Osaka 45, 109, 182, 201 Oshamambe 181 Oshima (Island) 21 Oshima Peninsula 9, 18, 41, 42, 49, 54, 144, 149 Oshima Takato 144 Otaru 21, 130, 132, 158, 216, 230–31, 234, 326, 331, 335; expositions 181, 306; harbor 14, 165, 167–68, 223, 226, 299, 331; imperial visits 109, 142; population 141, 180, 226–27, 299, 314; railroad to 133, 135, 152, 153, 161, 167–68, 181, 224, 334; and Russians 286, 287, 316; tourism 315–16, 316, 319; and World War II 247, 249, 254, 255–56 Otaru Commercial College 230, 234 Otomari 286; see also Korsakor, Russia Otomo Kametaro 160, 161, 339 otter and otter hunting 109–133 Oyabe Jenichiro 196 Ozawa Ichiro 273 Pacific Ocean 18, 20, 21 Pacific rim of fire 11 Paleolithic settlements 24 Pan American Airways 241 Pangborn, Clyde 241 Paramushir Island 246, 265 Parkes, Harry 85, 90, 199 Peabody, C.H. 159 peace treaty, Japan-Russia 264, 272, 275, 280 peat bogs 15, 161, 221, 222, 291 Penhallow, David 23, 24, 156, 157–58, 171, 212, 339 Perry, Matthew Calbraith 67, 77–82, 78, 192, 339 Perry expedition 67, 77–82, 81, 85–87, 334

367 Petropavlovsk (Kamchatka) 64, 66 Petrovsky, Vladimir 273 Peuillier, Gerard 106, 339 Philippi, Donald 25 photography 86, 91 physical features 9–11 pioneering 115, 118, 124–35, 139–40, 160, 231, 232, 233; housing 115, 129, 129, 130, 141, 147, 225 place names from Ainu 38–39, 127 Plymouth 73 politics 98, 100, 123, 217, 297–98, 307, 312, 321 pollution 295, 297 population 9, 124, 138, 141, 228, 231, 232, 290, 292, 299, 314–15; decline 296, 307, 314, 317, 336; Ezo era 52, 53, 54; see also Ainu: population; individual cities: population Port Alberni, Canada 326 Porter, Alexander 105 Portland, Oregon 183, 293, 326 ports see harbors; individual cities: harbors postal service 54, 136–37, 163; 226 Powhatan 78 Preble, George H. 79, 86, 116 prehistory 16, 24–25 prisoners 134, 136, 138, 235; prisoners of war 253–56, 335; see also conscripts prisons 134, 138, 255, 315, 319 protest actions 206–7, 302–4, 313, 335 Providence 67–68, 67 Pumpelly, Raphael 95, 116, 143–44, 197, 334, 339 Putiatin, Evfimii Vasilevich 77, 78, 82, 87, 90, 98 Putiatin expedition 77, 78, 82, 87, 90 Putin, Vladimir 276 railroads 111, 133, 207, 219, 252, 261, 325, 328, 334, 336; construction 152, 153, 167–68; expansion 135, 140, 169, 181, 224–25; see also Seikan Tunnel Railway Workers’ Union 261 Rakuno Gakuen University 184 Rasmussen, Oliver 256 Red Cross 293 refugees 134, 261, 292, 294; from Kuril Islands and Sakhalin 258, 265, 267, 271, 279; Russian 92, 134, 243 religion see Ainu: religions foreign to Ainu; Ainu: religions, traditional; Buddhism; Christianity; Shinto Remick, George 87 Rezanov, Nikolai Petrovich 61, 62, 339–40

368 rice 45, 116, 147, 220, 229, 308, 319; and Ainu 31, 47; crop failures 239, 258, 293; hardy strains 120, 138–39, 220, 335 Rice, Elisha E. 89, 92, 93, 94, 100, 101, 334; on Russians 90, 91 Ridgway, Matthew 280 Rikord, Petr Ivanovich 63, 64, 77, 340 Rikubetsu 127, 325 Rishiri, Mt. 66, 309 Rishiri Island 21, 62, 66, 74–75, 193, 269, 309 roads 135–36, 225–26, 299, 325, 329; construction 53–54, 136, 168, 169, 299 Rodgers, John 68, 88 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 270, 271 Rozman, Gilbert 275 Rumoi 21, 132, 192, 265 Russia 1, 2, 122, 137, 229; and Ainu 50, 60, 193, 204; explorers from 57, 59–65, 77, 333–34, 338; and the fishery 18, 133, 278–85; Japanese policy toward 48, 52, 59–64, 119, 145, 333, 334; post–Soviet era 274– 76, 284–89, 330, 336; relations with Japan 14, 65, 77, 145, 285–89, 331; suspicion of 53, 57–58, 85, 90, 98, 115–16, 119, 120, 192, 193, 250; trade with 60, 61, 62, 92, 122, 284, 286– 87, 331; treaty negotiations with 82, 89, 272, 280, 334, 335; see also Kamchatka Peninsula; Kuril Islands; Northern Territories; Russian Far East; Russo-Japanese War; Sakhalin; U.S.S.R. Russian Far East 14, 23, 89, 229, 264, 287, 330; see also Kamchatka Peninsula; Kuril Islands; Northern Territories; Russia; Sakhalin; U.S.S.R. Russian language 2–3, 63, 91, 289 Russian Orthodox Church 57, 90–92, 106, 128, 191, 194, 250, 256, 287, 336 Russo-Japanese War 121, 132, 216–17, 264, 265, 270, 279, 335 Ruth, Babe 243 St. John, H.C. 14, 20, 198 St. Petersburg 59, 64 Sakai, John 92 Sakakura Genjiro 65 sake 42, 50, 51, 74, 223, 330 Sakhalin 14, 53, 90, 118, 122, 134, 259; and Ainu 23, 26, 193–94, 203, 204; border determination 77, 82, 103, 194, 270, 334, 335; explorers and 57, 59, 61–62, 66, 68–69, 73; Hokkaido relations 225, 286, 287, 321, 326, 330, 331, 336; Soviet invasion 264–66; as

INDEX Soviet/Russian province 18, 20, 26, 269, 274, 276, 285; see also Karafuto salmon 18, 20, 31, 49, 132, 297 samurai, former 100, 116, 118, 119, 125, 140 Sanders, Douglas 212 San Francisco Peace Conference 271 Sangar, Straits of see Tsugaru Strait Santan trade 45, 50 Sapporo 21, 38, 85, 141, 142, 183, 237, 257, 258, 272, 285–86, 289, 293, 297; airports and aviation 181–82, 184, 185, 313, 324, 335; Botanic Garden 147, 173, 178, 178, 179, 179, 332; as capital 105, 138, 161–62, 334; crime and protest 188, 206, 303; festivals 21, 183, 186, 188, 208, 212, 335; historical buildings 55, 164, 165, 166, 167, 175– 76, 177, 177, 188; imperial visits 109, 142, 177; population 21, 141, 163, 165, 181, 182, 227, 299, 314; railroads; 19, 21, 135, 137, 153, 166–68, 181, 188, 189, 224, 225, 334; roads 136, 168, 169, 180–81, 188; and World War II 182, 249, 250, 253, 255; see also Makomanai; Shiroishi; Susukino; Toyohira Sapporo Agricultural College 117, 146, 154–59, 157, 164–79, 170, 171, 172, 183, 334; Botanic Garden 147, 173, 178, 178, 179, 332; Clock Tower 175–76, 177, 177, 188; graduates 172–75, 173, 174, 175; see also Hokkaido University Sapporo Beer 161, 164, 180, 185, 319, 321, 334 Sapporo Gakuen University 184 Sapporo Medical University 184 Sapporo University 184 Saris, John 56 Saru River 192, 198, 210 Sato Shosuke 173, 175, 175, 231, 340 Satsuma clan 98, 117 Satsumon people and era 25, 333 Satsuporo 160–61; see also Sapporo Sawabe, Paul 92 SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) 257–63, 271, 279, 335; see also occupation: U.S. Schaefer, Marrie 184 Scott, James 144 SDF see Self-Defense Force sea otters 109, 133 sea products 50, 85, 95, 140; see also fisheries seals and seal hunting 109–10 Seikan Tunnel 14, 323–24, 329, 336

Seki Kansai 127 Sekon Nikoshiro 223 Self-Defense Force 263, 268, 269, 270, 312–13, 319, 331; in disaster relief 274, 293; see also armed forces, Japan Sendai region 45, 57, 118, 181 Setana 131, 311 settlement see pioneering Seventh Army Division 21, 121, 126, 216–17, 245, 319 Shakushain 47–48, 51, 204, 206, 207, 340 Shakushain’s War 47–48, 50, 65, 333 Shanghai 93, 96 Shelting, Aleksei 57 shiatsu 233 Shibecha 293 Shibuya Naozo 305 Shiga Shigetaka 173–74 Shihei Hayashi 50 Shikoku 233 Shikotan Island 57, 270, 271, 272, 274, 276–77, 285; see also Kuril Islands; Northern Territories Shikotan Maru 217 Shikotsu-Toya National Park 10, 19 Shima Yoshitake 161, 162, 334, 340 Shimamatsu 136, 156 Shimizu Shikin 139 Shimizudani Kinnaru 100, 340 Shimoda 78, 80, 82, 87, 93 Shimura Tetsuichi 160 Shinotsu 164 Shinsengumi 103 Shinto 117, 162, 191, 209; Sapporo (Hokkaido) Shrine 162, 183, 237 Shintoku 183 Shintotsukawa 127 shipwrecks 72, 77, 95, 101, 137, 231; Toya Maru 14, 304–5, 315, 323, 335 Shiranuka 53, 88 Shiraoi 39, 206, 322; and Ainu 47, 199, 201–2, 205, 206, 212, 214 Shirataki 232–33, 315 Shiretoko National Park 20, 322 Shiretoko Peninsula 10, 133, 278, 328, 329, 332, 336 Shiriuchi 42 Shiroi Koibito 309–10 Shiroishi 164, 182; see also Sapporo Shizunai 48, 126, 204–5, 206 shogunate 41, 43, 45, 46, 51, 53, 62, 333; Ainu policy 47, 52, 53, 191; direct rule of Ezo 52–54, 60, 143–44, 334; and explorers 60, 65, 68; and war of 1869 97, 98–103 Showa Emperor (Hirohito) 164, 182, 185, 202, 244, 300, 306, 320

Index Showa Shinzan 19, 251–52, 252, 335 Shumaranai, Lake 21 Siddle, Richard 193, 202 Sieroszewski, Waclaw 110 Signal’nyy Island see Kaigara Island silkworms 139 silver 56, 65 Simonet de Maissonneuve, L.A.A. 243 Singapore 255 Sino-Japanese War 217 sister cities 20, 72, 183, 286, 293, 316, 318, 326 Sjoberg, Katarina 193 skiing 262, 318 Slavic Research Center, Sapporo 286 Smith, Charles H. 93 Smith, Sarah Clara 183, 340 Smithsonian Institution 80, 210 snow see climate: winter conditions Snow, Henry 133, 243, 272 Snow Brand Products 240, 309, 336 So Shokei 69 Sobetsu 251 Socialist Party, Japan 208, 298 Soka Gakkai 184, 234 Sorachi Valley 218, 253 Sorge, Richard 255 Sosei Elementary School 176 South Korea 266, 282 South Kurils see Northern Territories Southampton 79, 80 Soviet Miners’ Union 280 Soviet Union see U.S.S.R. Soya, Cape 20, 62, 66, 75, 118, 136, 237 Soya Strait see La Pérouse Strait Spalding, J.W. 79, 85, 86 Spanberg, Martin 57, 273, 333, 340 sports 158, 185–86, 230, 285–86, 321, 336; baseball 185–86, 236, 243, 336; see also Olympic Games spying 254, 255, 268, 281 Stalin, Josef 265, 266, 267, 271, 272 Starfin, Victor 236 Starr, Frederick 196, 201, 227 Stephan, John J. 54, 59, 84, 245, 289 Stockbridge, Belle 13, 15, 158–59, 161, 168 Stockbridge, Horace 159 Stonewall Jackson 101 storm damage 127, 165, 179, 293, 304 Storry, Richard 182, 249, 279 strikes 134, 218, 229, 230, 251, 259–61, 300–2, 335 student protests 302–4, 335 suffrage 217, 230, 335

sulfur 133 Sumitomo 218, 297 Summers, James 159 Sunagawa 296, 311 Sunazawa Bikky 202–3, 206, 208, 212, 340 Sunazawa Kazuo 202–3 Susukino 181, 185, 188 Suzuki Kantaro 265 Suzuki Muneo 312 Sweden 326 Swift 68 Tachibana Kosai 90 Tachimachi, Cape 105 Tacoma 217 Taihei Maru 247 Taiheiyo Mines 297 Taiki 313 Taiwan 217, 231, 319 Takadaya Kahei 64, 340 Takahashi Harumi 215, 313, 321, 340 Takakuro Shinichiro 46 Takeda Ayasaburo 98, 122–23, 340 Takeda Nobuhiro 43, 45 Takeda Sokaku 233 Takeda Taijin 305 Takeoka Seikichi 126 Taketsuru Masataka 240 Takikawa 120 Takuboku 180, 234, 235, 319, 338 Takugin 223, 311–12, 326, 335, 336 Tanaka Toshifumi 259, 272, 298, 340 Tangaro 75 Tani Buntan 69 Tanouchi Suteroku 172 Taro and Jiro 332 Tarumae, Mt. 256 taxation 51, 54, 132 Tayoro 127 tenant farmers 139, 140, 234–35, 262 territorial waters 279, 282–83, 336 Teshio 203 Teshio River 9, 68 Teuri Island 21 theme parks 317–18 Tinian Island 232 Tobetsu 326 Todd, Mabel Loomis 84, 164, 198–99 Tofutsu, Lake 305 Togo Heihachiro 103 Tohoku Imperial University 179–80 Tokachi, Mt. 236 Tokachi region 19, 224, 235–36, 262, 294, 311 Tokachi River 9 Tokachi Wine 294 Tokoro River 120, 127 Tokugawa government see shogunate

369 Tokugawa Ieyasu 45 Tokugawa Mitsukuni 65 Tokyo 105, 135, 145, 173, 181, 182, 185, 201; see also Edo Tomakomai 169, 227–28, 248, 256, 310, 311, 314; harbor 299, 303, 316, 322; industrial site 210, 305, 313, 321–22; industry 227–28, 260, 299, 301–2, 310, 335; railroad to 19, 224–25 Tomamae 311 Tomari 144, 31–11, 336 tondenhei 119–21, 126, 231, 319, 334; housing 119, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126; settlements 120–21, 126, 127, 164, 183, 224 tourism 228, 315–19, 328, 336; and Ainu 199, 202, 205, 209, 211–12 Toya, Lake 19, 180, 215, 251, 297, 336 Toya Maru 14, 304–5, 315, 323, 335 Toyoha Mine 297 Toyohara 286; see also YuzhnoSakhalinsk, Russia Toyohira 164, 182; see also Sapporo Toyohira River 153, 160, 161, 163 Toyota 325 trade: through Ainu 45–46, 60, 61, 62; foreign desire for 59–61, 64, 77; through Hakodate 89, 94, 95, 96, 105, 109–10; postwar 299, 305–6, 308, 319; see also Ainu, trade with; Russia, trade with trade unions 218, 239, 260, 261, 300–2 trading posts 45, 46, 49, 51, 52; see also basho ukeoi Trans-Siberian Railway 137 transportation 135, 319, 323; see also aviation; ferry service; railroads; roads; Seikan Tunnel; water transportation Trappists and Trappistines 106–7 treaties 82, 89, 94, 263, 270, 279, 302, 334; and Northern Territories 270, 271–72, 275; Treaty of Kanagawa 78, 79, 82 trees 15–16; see also forests and forestry Trippe, Juan 241–42, 243 Tronson, J.M. 55, 88 Truman, Harry S. 266, 267, 271 Tsugaru Clan 52 Tsugaru Fort 104 Tsugaru Strait 13–14, 16, 26, 55, 61, 68, 71; and Hakodate 18–19, 84, 85, 95; post–World War II 256, 259, 270, 282, 290; and Russo-Japanese War 216–17; shipwrecks 72, 137, 231; and World War II 245, 247, 248, 250, 256, 323 Tsuishikari 194 tsunamis 11, 87, 262, 313–14, 336

370 Twining, Nathan 249 typhoons 11, 165, 179, 244, 293, 304 Uchida Kiyoshi 172 Uchimura Kanzo 172–73, 174, 340 Uchiura Bay 19, 67, 68, 80, 100, 125, 147, 225 Ueda Fumio 185 Uehara Kumajiro 196 Ueshiba Morihei 232–33 Uilta 204, 267 unemployment 326, 330 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 278, 328, 336 United Kingdom see Great Britain United Nations 209, 210, 263, 271, 273 United States 77, 145, 146, 200–1, 211, 283, 296, 311, 331, 334; Civil War 90, 101, 145, 154; in Cold War 257, 266–69, 270, 272, 335; in Hakodate 78–81, 85–90, 101; Japanese in 97, 172, 173, 175, 231; military forces 181, 183, 186, 282, 292, 302, 313; and Northern Territories 272, 274; troop withdrawal 263, 268, 269; and World War II 245, 246–49, 335; see also Americans; occupation, Americans; Perry expedition University of Massachusetts 154, 302 Urakawa 53, 134, 248, 250, 294 Urano, Jacob 92 Urausu 139 Urup Island 60, 64, 68; see also Kuril Islands Uryu, Lake 21 Uryu River 251 U.S.S.R.: break-up of 274, 284; defections from 243, 269; Hokkaido invasion plans 265–66; Japanese apprehension of 250, 266, 267, 268, 291; postwar 265–74, 279–84, 285–86, 412; relations with U.S. 266–67, 268–69, 270; and World War II 245–47, 249, 254, 255, 264–65; see also Kamchatka Peninsula; Kuril Islands; Northern Territories; Russia; Russian Far East; Sakhalin

INDEX Usu, Mt. (Usuzan) 19, 236, 297, 313, 336 Utari Kyokai 205, 208, 210; see also Ainu Kyokai Utashinai 218, 253, 254, 260, 296 Utonai, Lake 322 Vanino, Russia 286 Vauban, Sebastian 98 Vladivostok, Russia 14, 21, 122, 137, 217, 246, 270 Volcano Bay see Uchiura Bay volcanoes and volcanic eruptions 10, 11; see also Asahidake; Komagatake; Showa Shinzan; Tokachidake; Usu, Mt. Von Lerch, Theodore 262 Voukelitch, Branko 255 Vries, Maerten Gerritsz 56–57, 66, 333, 340 Vukovich, Nicolai 65 Vyse, Howard 199 Wahoo 247 Wajin (ethnic Japanese) 1, 2, 42, 49, 52, 333; see also Ainu: Wajin, relations with; Hakodate: port opening; Matsumae family Wakayama Prefecture 232–33 Wakkanai 14, 20–21, 38, 223, 237, 250, 306, 311, 314, 332; fisheries 283, 312; food shortage 258–59; railroad to 225, 335; and Sakhalin 134, 257, 265, 269, 286, 287, 331 Walker, Brett 48, 192 Wanishi Iron Works 248 war of 1869 55, 98–103, 98–99, 101, 102, 104, 334 warfare 29, 39, 42–43, 47, 217; see also Korean War; RussoJapanese War; World War I; World War II Warfield, A.J. 145–46, 149–50, 162–63, 165, 169 Washington, University of 302 Wasson, James R. 150 Watanabe Chiaki 137 water transportation 29, 137, 225, 299, 324; see also ferry service weather see climate and weather Weiner, Michael 117 Wetherall, William 211 whaling and whalers 69, 71–72, 77, 89, 95, 109, 209–10, 334 wheat 17, 147 Wheeler, William 165, 166–67,

340; descriptions of Hokkaido 15, 16, 55, 128, 163; at Sapporo Agricultural College 156–57, 158, 176 Will, John 94, 95, 101, 130 Williams, Samuel Wells 80, 86 wine and winemaking 126, 152–53, 294, 310 Winter Olympics see Olympic Games Wolfe, James 87 wolves 17, 140, 151, 329 Worker-Peasant Party 230 World Bank 292 World Council of Whalers 209–10 World War I 218, 229 World War II 14, 204, 245–56, 263, 270–71, 335 Wu Xueqian 141 Wynd, Oswald 254 Yagishiri Island 21, 74 yakuza 286–87 Yalta Agreement 270, 272 Yamaguchi Tetsuo 283 Yamakoshinai 54 Yamanashi Prefecture 232 Yanagawa Kumakichi 103 Yausubetsu 312, 313 Yayoi people 25 Yeltsin, Boris 273, 274, 275 Yezo see Ezo Yoichi 47, 240, 313 Yokohama 90, 94–95, 109, 225 Yokomichi Takahiro 159, 211, 307, 321, 340 Yoshida Kiyonari 154 Yoshida Shigeru 271 Yoshihara Seiji 241 Yoshitsune 37, 42 Yotei, Mt. 19 Yubari 133, 219, 227, 237, 317, 334, 336; mine accidents 218–19, 286, 295, 296, 335; mine labor 218, 219, 259–60 Yubetsu Coal Mining Company 296 Yubetsu River 120 Yufutsu 53 Yuki Shoji 206, 209 Yuni 126 Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia 286, 289 zaibatsu 141, 218, 226 Zenibako 167 zoos 297, 318, 329 Zusho Hirotake 154, 169, 340