hokkaido

Hokkaido

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HokkaidoA History of Ethnic Transition

and Development on Japan’s Northern Island

ANN B. IRISH

McFarland & Company, Inc., PublishersJefferson, 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 formor by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopyingor 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 ofAinu 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., PublishersBox 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640

www.mcfarlandpub.com

To Les

Table of Contents

Preface 1

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

Appendix 1. Hokkaido Chronology 333

Appendix 2. Key Figures in Hokkaido History 337

Appendix 3. Glossary 341

Chapter Notes 343

Bibliography 352

Index 361

vii

Preface

When people think of Japan, Hokkaido may not usually come to mind. This workgrew out of my desire to learn more about that northernmost island of the nation. In thecountry’s other three main islands—Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku—Japanese peoplehave lived for many centuries, but ethnic Japanese, or Wajin, began coming to Hokkaidoin large numbers only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Another people, theAinu, long populated the island, but as more Wajin came, Ainu numbers fell apprecia-bly and their way of life was forced to change. Knowing this, I began wondering aboutparallels between Hokkaido’s history and the history of the North American west, anotherfrontier land, whose European settlers came at about the same time in history that theWajin became dominant in Japan’s northern island. Thus I looked for a history ofHokkaido, only to learn that in the English language none apparently existed. I foundmany books on Ainu culture and not so many works on other aspects of Hokkaido. Withsome searching, however, one can find additional information about Hokkaido’s storyin English language articles in journals, magazines and newspapers as well as internetsites.

Hokkaido’s history differs significantly from the general history of Japan. The Japa-nese 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 theland just across both the Japan Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk from Hokkaido, not manymiles away. Hokkaido would be a natural stepping stone for Russians anxious to expandtheir territory, just as it was for Japanese. Hokkaido was influenced by other foreigners,too, including European and North American explorers and merchants. Anxious todevelop this island whose climate differed so from the Japanese heartland, in the 1870sthe Japanese government turned to Americans for expert assistance. One of the Ameri-cans, William S. Clark, who came to Sapporo to help start Hokkaido’s first college, isremembered even today in Japan for his parting words to his students: “Boys, be ambi-tious!”1

As I learned more about Hokkaido, my questions increased. The most insistent oneinvolved the pioneers or colonists from other Japanese islands who settled in the north-ern island, often enduring much hardship. While many people have written in Englishabout the Ainu, very little about the Wajin pioneers is available. Yet the story ofHokkaido—how it became the vigorous modern land it is today—is the story of the Ainuand the pioneering settlers, just as the story of the western United States and Canada isthe story of Indians—Native Americans or First Peoples—and pioneers.

Hokkaido’s story deserves to be better known to a western audience. The question

1

was whether I could write the story, for my ability to read the Japanese language is lim-ited. I have depended mainly on English language sources, but have also used a few inFrench and Japanese. Perhaps as an outsider—someone not a Hokkaido resident whetherAinu 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, andspecifically 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 aspectsof the Hokkaido story that would be most meaningful and interesting to the westernreader. However, by organizing each chapter around a particular theme of importanceand choosing details that would resonate with a western audience, I may inadvertentlyleave the reader with a skewed view. For example, I have devoted a chapter to the west-erners brought to Hokkaido in the nineteenth century to help with island development.This may unintentionally suggest that these outsiders had more influence than was actu-ally the case.

The reader should remember that Hokkaido, as part of Japan, reflects Japanese his-tory and culture, as do other parts of the nation. It is important to remember that Japa-nese history is Hokkaido history. The northern island, though, also values its own uniquestory.

One of the difficulties in writing about a region of a nation for a foreign audienceis the need to include some national history for readers not well versed in it. This canhelp illustrate how the region’s history conforms, or does not conform, to the nation’shistory 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 nationnor to leave unexplained some aspects of the story of Japan which need elucidation inorder to make Hokkaido’s story accurate and comprehensible.

Anyone writing in English about Japan faces the problem of how to write Japanesenames. 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 theword “Japanese” is used, the implication is that the Ainu are not Japanese. They are bothpeople of Japan and citizens of Japan, however, and this makes them Japanese. For thenon–Ainu Japanese, therefore, I have chosen to employ the Japanese word Wajin, whichis often used to describe the settlers who came to Hokkaido from the other Japaneseislands. (Wa means “Japanese,” and jin means “people.”) This usage creates a dilemma,however. Foreign words should be italicized, but Wajin appears so frequently, especiallyin Chapter 3, that I treat it as a well-known word and write it in roman type. Anotherproblem is that Ainu words and names have been transliterated into English in differentways, so the reader should be aware that the variant I choose may not be the only oneseen 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 nameshave been transliterated from Cyrillic to Roman script in various ways.

Islands near Hokkaido now incorporated into Russia but formerly Japanese areimportant to the Hokkaido story. My usage is slightly inconsistent when writing aboutislands in the Kuril chain which Russians and Japanese call by different names. In mostcases, I have used the names which appear on current international maps, which are Rus-sian. However, I employ the Japanese name for the Habomai group (Khabomai in Rus-sian) and for tiny Kaigara Island (Signal’nyy in Russian). When these islands have been

2 PREFACE

noted in the international press, the Japanese names appear. Also note that “Kuril” issometimes spelled “Kurile” in English language publications.

Dates used in Japan (and Russia) in earlier times did not conform to the calendarin 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 manyqueries and requests. Most of my research in the United States was done at the librariesof the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Hawaii at Manoa inHonolulu as well as the Seattle Public Library and the Vashon Island Branch of the KingCounty (Washington) Public Library System. I particularly appreciate the interlibraryloan service provided by the King County Library as well as the librarians from otherinstitutions who have made materials available to me through this service. I also wantto acknowledge the useful attention I received at the Special Collections and Archives,University of Massachusetts, Amherst, especially from Michael Milewski, and at AmherstCollege in the same city. My sister Sally Connerton made it possible for me to visitAmherst and to obtain some of the materials in these libraries. Staff members of the Clat-sop County Historical Society in Astoria, Oregon helped me regarding Ranald MacDon-ald. 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 SchnitzerMuseum of Art.

At the University of Washington, Professor Kenneth J. Pyle of the Jackson School ofInternational Studies and Japanese Studies Librarian Keiko Yokota-Carter have been espe-cially helpful. I am grateful to Professor Sarah Elwood of the Department of Geographyfor her advice on maps and to Josef Eckert for creating the maps as well as for other assis-tance. The University of Hawaii at Manoa has a collection rich in materials aboutHokkaido; I especially appreciate the help of two librarians there, Japanese SpecialistTokiko Bazzell and Russian Bibliographer Patricia Polansky, who has been my main guideto using materials about Russia. Emeritus Professor John J. Stephan of the University ofHawaii encouraged me and has read much of the manuscript; his suggestions have greatlyimproved the book. Ian Stone has been especially helpful on the Russian Far East, andMark Brazil of Rakuno Gakuen gave me invaluable assistance concerning the natural his-tory of Hokkaido and nearby areas. I was able to visit Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands ona 2003 voyage undertaken by Society Expeditions, Seattle, Washington, and I thank every-one involved who made the trip possible as well as those on the voyage who respondedto my innumerable queries.

In Hokkaido, staff at the Hokkaido State Archives in Aka Renga (Old GovernmentBuilding) went out of their way to help me despite the language barrier. I also owe thanksto librarians of the Hokkaido University Library, especially Ideue Keiko of the ResourceCollection for Northern Studies (Hoppo Shiryoshitsu) for helping me obtain copies ofphotographs in the library’s collection as well as for other assistance. At the HakodateMunicipal Library, Hirasawa Yoshiko spent a lot of time finding materials that wouldinterest me. William Kay of Sapporo has shared details about life in Hokkaido.

My friends Kobayashi Sachi and Mayumi Kayoko traveled from their homes in Osakaand Himeji to Hokkaido to help me with my research and I owe endless thanks to themfor using their bilingual skills to ease my efforts. Mayumi Kayoko has contributed in manyways, and both she and Otsuki Sachiko have helped with translations.

Family members have made important contributions to this work, especially my

Preface 3

husband Les, who spent many hours surfing the web in search of information aboutHokkaido and who has been my mentor in digital photography. He also prepared thephotographs for publication. Thanks also to my sister Mary Mullen, my daughter EllenIrish, and Mike Mullen, who were the first people to read the manuscript, and to mydaughter 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 myperceptions. I am responsible, of course, for the choice of what is and what is not includedin 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 whohave helped me during my visits to the island as well as all the others—the Ainu, the pio-neers and the people living there now—who make the island the wonderful place it is.

4 PREFACE

PART I

Becoming Hokkaido

1 The Place

“How amazing it is that this rich and beautiful country, the property of one of theoldest 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 solong unoccupied and almost as unknown as the African deserts.” Thus wrote AmericanHorace Capron about Hokkaido in 1872.1

Foreigners visualize a Japan full of people and full of contrasts, a land of enduringtradition but also modernity. Temples and shrines, kabuki and koto, sushi and sukiyaki,samurai and sumo, flower arrangement, tea ceremony and an esoteric writing system rep-resent tradition, while modernity features high-tech electronics but crowded cities wherepeople have tiny apartments and long commutes, well-designed cars but horrendoustraffic jams, manga and the yakuza. Hokkaido includes all of these, but Japanese settle-ment of the island came late in history, and Hokkaido still has a comparatively sparsesettlement pattern, traces of pioneer attitudes and a reputation as an exotic place. Whileall the characteristics outsiders perceive as “Japan” are found on the northern island, tra-dition has been brought there relatively recently and the island’s greater roominess mit-igates some of the less pleasant aspects of modernity. Other Japanese see Hokkaido asremote, spacious and distinct. Many tourists travel on Hokkaido each year, some in sum-mer, some in winter; for a Japanese from the nation’s heartland, taking a holiday inHokkaido seems like going to a foreign country while avoiding the problems of interna-tional travel.

Until the mid–nineteenth century, this northern island’s story featured the land’sfirst people—we know them as the Ainu—and the gradual influx of the outer world inthe form of ethnic Japanese from their nation’s heartland and explorers and adventurersfrom the wider world. Since then, development has in many ways dominated the island’sstory as the land became more and more an integral part of Japan. But even today manyJapanese have misconceptions about Hokkaido. Donald Keene, eminent scholar of thingsJapanese, wrote in 1981 that people in Japan had told him about “the vast stretches oftundra in the north” on the island.2 Though it does get very cold in the winter and thesnow lies late, the only tundra in Hokkaido is high in its mountains, hardly in “vaststretches.” Most Americans, too, know little about Hokkaido, despite strong Americaninfluence 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 asits friendly people make it a rewarding place both to live in and to visit, and far fromnot having a past, the island has a remarkable one.

7

8 I. BECOMING HOKKAIDO

NORTHEAST ASIA (map by Josef Eckert)

Land, climate and settlement

Hokkaido is Japan’s northernmost land, with a short written history compared tothat of the Japanese heartland. Japanese people often do not perceive the island as partof the naichi, the “real” Japan. “Hokkaido” means “northern sea route” and the govern-ment of Japan bestowed this name upon the island in 1868, determined upon incorpo-rating this area into Japan through colonization and development. Before then, Hokkaidowas known as Ezo, or Yezo, a name sometimes applied to Ainu people in ancient timesand sometimes used merely to denote a northern boundary beyond which lived barbar-ians. Thus the geographical meaning of Ezo was inexact, as was the name. Variant west-ern 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 ofnorthern Honshu where Ainu once lived.

Neither Japanese nor Europeans definitely recognized Hokkaido, or Ezo, as a sepa-rate island until almost 1600. Even after that, some maps of Japan showed Ezo connectedto the mainland or as an island of unknown dimensions that extended beyond the bor-der of the map. Frequent ocean fog kept explorers from easily gaining an accurate ideaof Ezo and other nearby islands; geographical mistakes circulated long after Japanesefrom Honshu had taken over Ezo’s southern tip.

Hokkaido, with an area of 31,200 square miles, is very close in size to Austria andalmost twice as big as Denmark, Switzerland or the Netherlands. Hokkaido is a littlelarger than Maine or South Carolina but a bit smaller than Indiana or Virginia. Fromnorth to south the island extends for three hundred miles, more or less, and from eastto west a few more. By far the largest of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures (provinces orstates), Hokkaido has about twenty percent of Japan’s land area and is more than fivetimes the size of the next largest prefecture in area. The island is just seventh in popula-tion, 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 onesas are the other islands. (Even the smallest of Japan’s four major islands, Shikoku, con-tains four different prefectures.) A better way to think about Hokkaido’s area is to notethat while it has less than half the area of Honshu, Japan’s main island, it approaches twicethe size of Kyushu and is more than four times as large as Shikoku. And even thoughHokkaido’s population seems relatively small and the island has lots of empty space, thedensity of population (170 people per square mile) is more than twice as great as that ofthe United States (84 per square mile) and much much greater than Canada’s (nine persquare 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. TheIshikari, which waters the island’s largest plain, is, at about 160 miles, Japan’s third longestriver. Hokkaido’s second longest river, at 155 miles, is the Teshio, which drains much ofthe 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 ofmountains.

Beyond the Hokkaido lowlands are hills rising to mountain peaks, a scenic land-scape offering challenging but not discouraging hikes and climbs. Mountains lie alongthe central spine of Hokkaido’s Oshima Peninsula in the island’s far southwest, and anoutlier, straight north from Hakodate on the island’s southern tip and on the oppositeshore of the peninsula, is Komagatake, a volcanic peak (3673 feet) which erupts every

1. The Place 9

now and then. Just southwest of Hokkaido’s capital city, Sapporo, is a knot of moun-tains, much of it preserved in Shikotsu-Toya National Park. In the main part of the islanda cluster of volcanic peaks, including the island’s highest, Asahidake (7557 feet), offerscenery, skiing and hiking. The mountains extend north toward the island’s northern tipand, more prominently, south, all the way to Cape Erimo. Hokkaido’s most unspoiledland is along another mountain ridge that extends out the Shiretoko Peninsula to thenortheast. All these mountain ranges separate the island’s various lowland plains fromeach other, making transportation systems difficult to build. Moreover, volcanic erup-tions sometimes send falls of ash and rock or streams of lava, mud or gravel and some-times 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 min-ing industry established prosperous communities in these valleys. The general picture is


PHYSICAL FEATURES OF HOKKAIDO (map by Josef Eckert)

one of folds in the earth wrinkling up eons ago to make mountains. The volcanoes camelater 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 Alaskaand 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 areasfarther south in Japan. Nonetheless, the number of these events is startling. An earth-quake in 1952 and its accompanying tsunami killed at least thirty people and caused seriousdamage in the Kushiro and Obihiro regions. A 1968 quake caused fifty deaths on Hok-kaido and northern Honshu. More recently, an earthquake and tsunami devastated theisland of Okushiri off Hokkaido’s west coast in July 1993; over two hundred people diedand 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, whenthe ferry Toya Maru and other ships sank, more than one thousand people dying.

1. The Place 11

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.

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 surround-ing Tokyo and Kyoto—is far to the south. Looking at Hokkaido on a globe, one sees thatits latitude is comparable to that of Oregon or Massachusetts or northern Spain. It is truethat the farther one ventures from the equator, the colder the weather, but water and aircurrent 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, resemblesBoston and centrally located Sapporo is more like Toronto.4 Climate varies considerablyon the island, both from south to north and from east to west, winters on the west—theJapan 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 snowywinters and the mountainous landscape. There are no glaciers here. (There are none inJapan.) Thanks to climate, Hokkaido gives the feeling of being much further north than itactually 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 aspeople ventured north, the cold and snowy Hokkaido winters were a strong disincen-tive, discouraging many pioneers and retarding the development of the large island.Because climate and the changing seasons play a significant role in Japanese thought, thevery climate in Hokkaido, so unlike that of the heartland, makes this island seem differ-ent.

William Smith Clark called the island’s climate “salubrious and agreeable,” but hehad 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 thenatural resources of Hokkaido, which seem superior even to those of our beloved NewEngland.”5

Spring and fall are the showy seasons in Japan, with springtime cherry blossoms andthe brilliant momiji, or maple trees, of autumn. Hokkaido cities, parks, temple groundsand even historic fortresses feature these, but the spring flowers appear later and the fallshades earlier than elsewhere in Japan. Sapporo’s cherry trees burst into bloom about amonth after those in Tokyo, and in southern Hokkaido the flowers often coincide withJapan’s Golden Week holiday period during the first week of May.

Summer brings many tourists from the other islands of Japan while the heartland isexperiencing a hot and sultry rainy season. Hokkaido has no definite rainy season andon average receives less yearly precipitation than the rest of the country. Torrential rainsdo occasionally cause flooding, especially along the rivers in the southwestern part of theisland, and flooding can also occur with the spring thaw. Later, with high temperatureson Sapporo August days hovering around eighty degrees F., the days are pleasant, thoughit does sometimes get much warmer. Along much of Hokkaido’s southeastern coast, fre-quent 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 meanJanuary temperature is about 24.6 degrees F. and the city receives an average twenty feetof 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 theautumn had been lovely but that on November 15, “by a snow storm which spread a soft


white blanket over the unfrozen earth” more than two feet thick, winter had come.6 Whilesnow covered the land, the rivers froze. When spring came, Americans working to developagriculture in Hokkaido found that because the ground was protected by snow all win-ter, it had not frozen, and potatoes and turnips which had remained buried since fallwere still edible.

Belle Stockbridge, an American who went to Hokkaido in 1885, wrote of theHokkaido climate:

Those who have tried it, say it is the finest climate in the world. The winters last about eightmonths; and the snow lies four feet thick from the middle of December till the last of April. Theautumns are long and hazy—a real Indian summer—and the snow comes before the ground isfrozen more than three or four inches, so that in spring there is no mud, for the snow melts atthe 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 com-monly paved, a Hokkaido route for travel could deteriorate into a slimy springtimemorass.

In places, Hokkaido can get very, very cold. The inland city of Asahikawa sells sou-venirs 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 min-imum temperature was only 8.1 degrees F., while the maximum was 23.5. Bifuka, aninland town halfway between Asahikawa and the northern tip of the island, boasts Japan’scoldest 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 chal-lenge, with 158 Fahrenheit degrees (or 70 Celsius degrees) difference between the sum-mer and winter temperatures. And today, though citizens and communities arewell-prepared for cold and snow, blizzard conditions still sometimes close schools androads. In late January 2003, as eastern Hokkaido coped with blowing snow, rain fell inSapporo, causing difficulties for those building the giant snow sculptures for the earlyFebruary winter festival. A celebration at that time of year can raise spirits, for it is thelength of the Hokkaido winter—which seems to go on and on and on—rather than theactual 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 independ-ent of beaten roads, but went over the hard crust at will. The sun was so dazzling over theabsolutely unbroken expanse of white, that we could never sleigh with any comfort to our eyestill the middle of the afternoon. Then we used to go miles and miles, returning in the beginningof the snow lit long twilight.

Approaching town they would see people on their way home from the public bath, walk-ing slowly, comfortable in the cold air because of the warmth their bodies still held. Butat the end of the century another traveler, Henry Finck, called Hokkaido “the JapaneseSiberia.”8

Hokkaido’s challenging winter weather has made it seem a remote place in the Japa-nese consciousness, but its island status has made it physically remote. The dangerousTsugaru Strait—often called the Straits of Sangar by nineteenth century Europeans—separates Hokkaido from Honshu, and a ferry crossing from Aomori to Hakodate added

1. The Place 13

hours to one’s trip from the heartland. The strait itself varies in width from fifteen totwenty-five miles, but the distance from one sheltered harbor to the other made the ferry’sroute close to seventy miles long. Wind always seems to blow through the strait. Thecrossing is often rough, sometimes impossible—and, as when the Toya Maru sank, evendeadly. Now the train crosses from Honshu to Hokkaido in a tunnel, bringing the north-ern island closer to the rest of Japan. Most people fly, though. From Tokyo’s airports onecan 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 inJapan—at Hokkaido’s northern tip. Here, as at Tsugaru Strait, warmer waters from theSea of Japan clash with the Pacific Ocean’s colder ones. Moreover, the sweep of the tidesand the direction of the current make navigation difficult in fog compounded often withstormy 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 hadmore 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 harborswere the places foreign ships were most likely to approach in the 1800s. Nowadays,improvements have made shipping safer and more efficient, notably at modern harborfacilities 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 latenineteenth century despite winter weather and remoteness. They were encouraged bythe government, which wanted to ensure that Hokkaido be part of Japan; Hokkaido is aborderland 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 ofWakkanai is almost at the northern tip of Hokkaido, which is only twenty-six miles fromRussia’s Sakhalin Island directly north across La Perouse Strait. Just off Hokkaido’s eastcoast begins the Russian-held Kuril Island chain, which extends about seven hundredmiles, all the way north to Siberia’s Kamtchatka peninsula. In fact, the channel betweenHokkaido 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 haveJapanese names along with their Russian names: Sakhalin is “Karafuto” in Japan and theKurils are to Japanese the Chishima Archipelago (one thousand islands). To this very day,Japanese-Russian relations are overshadowed by discord over where the border betweenthe two nations should lie; the southern Kuril Islands remain in dispute. Because of thisdisagreement, the two nations have not signed a peace treaty with each other after WorldWar II.

Hokkaido today differs from the Japanese heartland not only in climate. Country-side and towns and cities have a distinct character. Unlike almost everywhere else inJapan, Hokkaido streets and farmers’ fields are usually laid out in rectangular grids; thenetwork of squares formed by the farm roads around the town of Shari on the Sea ofOkhotsk is one striking example. City blocks are numbered, east-west and north-southfrom a city’s center, making addresses easy to find. This is because Hokkaido’s towns andcities are rather recently planned and most were laid out by government surveyors. Inthe rest of Japan, streets and roads grew naturally from ancient animal trails into pathsfor people and, finally, roads.


Look beyond the rectangular blocks, and Hokkaido towns and cities are clearly Japa-nese. A foreign tourist heading to Hokkaido after travel elsewhere in Japan will not seemuch in urban areas that is distinctive. The shops are the same (including many Japa-nese chains and even some foreign ones, like McDonald’s), the people look the same anddress the same (except for wearing heavier outer clothing in the winter), the vehicles arethe same, the sounds the same. A Hokkaido city is a Japanese city; a Hokkaido town isa 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 com-munities with their sharp, cold air and deep snow cover seem much different than thoseof Japan’s heartland.

Hokkaido’s countryside is unique in Japan. For comparison, let us start with a lookat the Japanese heartland where the settled land is flat or leveled into rice-paddy step-ping stones. Beyond, forested hills or mountains are always visible. The nearly level landbetween the hills is totally tamed—into cities, small clusters of village homes, or flatfields with occasional buildings here and there. Hokkaido has flat land with hills beyondit too, but the flat is much more extensive than elsewhere in Japan. Farms and individ-ual fields are larger, too. On Hokkaido, farm houses and outbuildings are located amongthe fields, as in North America, rather than clustered in villages as they are elsewhere inJapan. And in Hokkaido one can see flat or nearly flat land that remains forested, some-thing not common elsewhere in Japan. In Hokkaido some of the terrain is rolling anddeveloped into dry fields, not rice paddies. In Hokkaido too are pastures, barns reminis-cent of America, silos, bales of hay, herds of cows, orchards—in other words, one sees anon–Japanese landscape. There are even Japanese cowboys who work on Hokkaido’s largespreads. Hokkaido farms are different from other Japanese farms in another way: theharsh climate allows successful harvest of just one crop annually while in much of therest of Japan, two and in some places even three crops can be grown each year. Hokkaidofarms 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 sum-mer cold or fog, but this land makes good pasture. A sizable amount of lowland is cov-ered 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 ofrunning streams.” Hokkaido is beautiful, a place of wide landscapes that lure the naturephotographer, and that is not all. When William Wheeler arrived from New England inAugust 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 isnot. It grows wild seemingly everywhere. The Americans who came to Hokkaido one hun-dred or more years ago were surprised at the amount of bamboo they found in the for-est along with trees that were similar to well-known American maple, pine, cedar, elmand 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 dande-lion.

Among trees, the Ezo matsu, usually translated as Ezo pine, has become the symbol

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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. Inthe southern part of the island beeches grow.

Most of Hokkaido was naturally forested. Southwestern Hokkaido features decid-uous 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, whilein the mountains and farther north and east more evergreens, mainly spruce and fir,appear.

The early Americans found heavily forested land around Sapporo. William Wheelerwrote in 1876,

The forests are truly primeval, consisting of huge trees of strange varieties, twined with numer-ous kinds of climbing vines, hung with parasitic ferns and lichens, and an undergrowth of denseshrubs and bamboo grass from five to eight feet high. Huge trunks of fallen trees lay in delight-ful confusion, and gulches and ravines lent their charm to the variety of our experience. Nowyour horse leaps a fallen trunk; or passes under an inclined one, nearly sweeping you from yourseat; descends an almost vertical incline into some gulch, and ascends the opposite side in a wayto make you wish that you were secured fore and aft in your saddle; while the whole partymight 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 withdeciduous 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 best-known plants is the marimo, a green, velvety, spherical alga that grows large, up to a footin 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 andbegan to work to protect it. Since 1950, the Lake Akan community has hosted an annualmarimo festival highlighting the need for protection, and tourists can visit the MarimoExhibition and Observation Station. They can buy small, cultivated marimo at Hokkaidogift shops.

The natural flora of a northern mountainous region attracts tourists from farthersouth to Hokkaido. Wildflowers native to Hokkaido vary from the very early-bloomingskunk cabbage and the lovely trillium of the spring to the azalea, iris and hydrangea. Andwhen a Japanese garden was created in Moscow in the late twentieth century, plants werebrought from Hokkaido rather than the Japanese heartland to ensure that they couldwithstand Moscow’s rigorous climate.

During periods of lower sea levels in prehistoric times, Hokkaido was attached tothe Asian mainland through Sakhalin. As a result, some of the world’s greatest animalsmigrated to Hokkaido. An almost complete set of a mammoth’s bones from perhaps120,000 years ago has been found on the island. Also living on Hokkaido then was Nau-mann’s elephant, similar to the mammoth in size but with relatively straight tusks. Bisonalso roamed Hokkaido long ago. There may also have been a land bridge to Honshu, butthe depth of Tsugaru Strait between Hokkaido and Honshu, over 450 feet, makes thisquestionable. (When the sea was at its lowest, however, even if there was no land con-nection the strait would have been considerably narrower, and people may have crossedthe 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 leasttwenty thousand years.


Hokkaido is the home of many wild animals. Wolves once roamed the island butwere hunted and poisoned to extinction in the late nineteenth century. Today Hokkaidoboasts Japan’s largest animal, the brown bear (called the grizzly in North America). Thebearskin 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 vil-lage offered a bounty in 1960 for bears killed because of one called a man-eater that wasseen in the community. Even bears penned up for tourists to see have occasionally mauledpeople, bitten off an arm or a hand. Bears killed two people in Hokkaido in 2006 andone in 2008.

Deer are prominent on Hokkaido. Overhunting in the late nineteenth century almostled to their disappearance, but the native sika deer have rebounded thanks to more recentprotection policies. The island boasts perhaps two hundred thousand deer now, so manythat they have become a nuisance. In the national parks in Hokkaido’s mountainous cen-ter one can see deer as well as fox, badger and weasel. In all Japan, only in Hokkaido isthe small pika found. Hokkaido also is home to the Blakiston’s fish owl, which has beencalled the world’s largest owl. It is now designated as a Japanese National Treasure, butis on the endangered list. The Steller’s sea eagle, also a National Treasure, is large andimpressive.

Perhaps most important to the Japanese people, more than a thousand beautifulcranes winter and breed in Hokkaido marshes, and some live there year round. This birdis the red-crested crane, or tancho, Japan’s national bird. It is nearly five feet in heightand has a tiny patch of bright red feathers atop its white head. It chooses one lifelongmate. The Japanese crane symbolizes long life; it can live for fifty years or more. To theJapanese 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 andagain in November.

Squirrels, beaver, sables, chipmunk, wild boar and the serow, a wild animal similarboth 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 madeHokkaido their home. Mink brought from America have multiplied and these days devoursmall animals. Raccoons bought as pets have caused substantial damage to farm fieldsand there is concern that the European bumblebee, introduced to pollinate hothousetomatoes, might injure native plants. Meanwhile, some Hokkaido animals in addition tothe wolf have become extinct. One is the river otter.

Hokkaido is known for agriculture, mining, forestry and fishing. All of these activ-ities take advantage of the island’s location, climate and natural characteristics. In the1870s when serious development of Hokkaido began, American advisers were broughtin 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 raisedefficiently in Hokkaido, and rice now predominates among Hokkaido’s crops. Dairyproducts 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 typesof crops, for if a year’s weather is bad for one crop—being too cold for rice, for exam-ple—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 min-ing’s importance to Hokkaido’s economy lasted only for about a century. Foreign expertssurveyed and gave advice on development of the mineral resources. Centuries earlier, afew 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 mineralresource of the island, and Hokkaido’s coal long supplied a sizable portion of Japan’senergy. Now, though, the coal mines are gone and the mining towns changed out of allrecognition—in some cases a majority of a town’s people have had to leave as the minesclosed and jobs disappeared. Mine workings and workers’ houses are gone. Here andthere 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 leg-islators acted to protect the forests. Logging has changed the landscape, leaving largefields and meadows in place of much of the forest. Even today, however, Hokkaido hasmore than one-fifth of Japan’s forested land. New, artificial forests planted for future har-vesting have changed the look of the island, but many places in the mountains appear asthey always have.

Another prime Hokkaido industry is facing hard times: fishing. The abundance oflife in Hokkaido’s waters was an important factor in the island’s development. In addi-tion to fish, both squid and kombu (kelp, or seaweed) are important Hokkaido productsand in the old days men hunted fur seals and otter for their valuable pelts. Harvestingmarine wealth has been a mainstay for Hokkaido’s people, given the rich fishing andwhaling grounds off the island’s coastlines. Boats going after salmon would bring backhuge catches, and herring for use in fertilizer were caught by the million. Some peopleused to say that you could tell by the particular smell of a fishing village which kind offish were caught and dried or processed there. Settlements on the coast have always beenfishing communities or ports, and some have died as fishing declined. Fishing boats andfishermen are still visible in Hokkaido’s ports, but not in the great numbers of earlieryears. By now the North Pacific has been overfished, Russia limits access to the watersnear 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 outfrom the southeast, an extrusion described, accurately, as fishtail-shaped. Hokkaido’sshape has been compared to that of a sting ray, a Japanese dragon, or a Japanese kite. TheOshima Peninsula looks like a foot or boot, similar to the Italian peninsula, with Hako-date on the base of the heel and Hakodate Bay separating the heel on the east from thetoes on the west. Fodor’s guide to Japan has described the entire island as “shaped ratherlike 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 firstimportant city and its largest until well into the twentieth century. Just across Tsugaru


Strait from Japan’s main island of Honshu, Hakodate used to be the most importantHokkaido terminus for ship traffic. After Japan became involved in worldwide commercein the mid–nineteenth century, several western nations opened consulates in the city andmany ships, especially those hunting whales or seals, used Hakodate’s port facilities. Hereis by far Hokkaido’s best natural harbor, but because it is located on the island’s extremesouthwestern 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 bya headland where one finds Muroran, Hokkaido’s tenth largest city. A century and a halfago, 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 precipi-tous mountains on the north coast; trains following this route now run through manytunnels and today’s superhighway veers inland. Muroran is an industrial city; steel andcement manufacturing and ship construction are important there. As Muroran is on thesea, 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 fromSapporo and from Hokkaido’s international airport at Chitose. In the northwestern sec-tion of the park is 6263 foot Mt. Yotei, often called Hokkaido’s Mt. Fuji. Lake Toya tothe southwest is a beautiful round volcanic caldera lake surrounding a magical-lookingisland, rather like Crater Lake in Oregon. Mt. Usu, just east of the lake, is a volcano thathas been very active recently, with eruptions in 1977–78 and 2000 in addition to theappearance of a subsidiary peak, Showa Shinzan, on its flank during World War II. Thepremier tourist destination in this area is Noboribetsu Hot Springs, set in a narrow val-ley where people come to bathe in the springs or to view Jigokudani (Hell Valley), a Yel-lowstone-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. Con-tinuing east along the coast, the line turns north at the port city of Tomakomai, an evenlarger industrial center than Muroran. For one continuing eastward, the road heads downthe coast in an east-south-east direction. Inland is the Hidaka District, where Ainu cul-ture remains most robust. The district is also known for horse breeding. Along the coastone 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, thesemountains are sometimes known as Hokkaido’s backbone. In earlier days, coastal sailorsalong this coast often had trouble rounding the cape because the current would suddenlybe against them, the wind could be strong and the seas stormy. Cape Erimo itself is oneof Japan’s windiest spots.

From the cape, the road heads north again, to the Tokachi plain, a prosperous agri-cultural area. The traveler sees frequent rows of tall trees planted as windbreaks, sincethe area’s light volcanic soil is apt to blow in the wind. The Tokachi region’s hub is Obi-hiro, 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 easternHokkaido. Its waters are open throughout the year, while ports to the north can be ice-bound in the winter. Though fog lingers in this area during much of the summer, moreand 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 arethe 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 deepsea 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 doesnot greatly impede shipping. The countryside beyond Akkeshi still looks remarkably likean 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 HabomaiIslands 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-shroudedNemuro. In 1871, H. C. St. John reported that the local governor told him most of thesummer days were foggy, and that “the Japanese never can wear summer clothes” inNemuro, but he exaggerated. The crops that could be grown, St. John understood, wereradishes, potatoes and turnips.14 Persistent fog that keeps the summers cool in theKushiro-Nemuro region discouraged rice cultivation but in recent years dairying hasbeen successful. Nemuro’s harbor, which faces north on the Sea of Okhotsk, freezes overin the winter, but ice fishing is carried on. Less than three miles away, across Nemuro’slong but narrow peninsula, is Nemuro’s Hanasaki community, where an ice-free harboron the Pacific Ocean has been developed to handle more and more of the Nemuro region’scommerce.

Our traveler continuing east along the peninsula from central Nemuro comes toCape Nosappu, the easternmost point in all Japan and location of Hokkaido’s oldest light-house. It is from here that one can occasionally walk to Russian territory. North fromNemuro, across a wide plain, one comes to the Shiretoko Peninsula, whose headland isthe end of Hokkaido’s eastern mountain range. Much of the peninsula is preserved asnational park land, and it may be the prime wilderness area in Japan. To the west in theheart of the mountains at Hokkaido’s center is the best-known and some say most beau-tiful 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 throughShari to Abashiri, a small city best known for its nineteenth century prison, feared asthe 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 optionfor winter tourists. Here, the formation of winter ice floes occurs farther south than any-where 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 thesame region is the growing city of Kitami, its hinterland known for its peppermint pro-duction.

Next on our circle tour is a long northwestern trek up the coast to the northernmostpoint 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 onSakhalin across La Perouse Strait. The nearby city of Wakkanai has prospered throughtrade 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 persistentsummer fogs of Kushiro, and despite Wakkanai’s location at the far north of the island,


its harbor remains open year-round due to the moderating effects of the Japanese cur-rent.

Inland and about sixty miles south of Wakkanai is Hokkaido’s only sizable artificiallake, Lake Shumaranai (sometimes called Lake Uryu). Frozen throughout the long win-ter, it provides water for irrigation and hydroelectric power. It also serves as a reservoirto hold water during the spring thaw and prevent flooding.

From Wakkanai the road leads south along Hokkaido’s west coast. At the small cityof Rumoi, a main road leads inland and one can travel to Asahikawa, the most centrallylocated 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 andfertile Kamikawa Basin, Asahikawa also became the home of Japan’s elite Seventh ArmyDivision at the end of the nineteenth century, and except for a few years after World WarII, the city has had an important military connection. This industrial center is a westerngateway to Hokkaido’s central mountains, including Asahidake, in Daisetsuzan NationalPark, the largest national park in Japan. Streams with headwaters in or near the park flowin three directions: northeast to the Okhotsk Sea, southeast to the Pacific Ocean or westto 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, anextensive cultivated region drained by the river for which it is named. Approaching twomillion 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 every-thing in Hokkaido. As Japan’s cities go, Sapporo is new, its site purposely mapped out in1871 to be the island’s capital. The venue for the 1972 Winter Olympics, Sapporo is famousfor 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 whatthe land was like before settlement.

South and slightly west of Sapporo is the city’s airport, at Chitose, about twenty-five miles away. In pioneer days the countryside between Sapporo and its airport was heav-ily 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 around-the-island tour. Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1892 that “an energetic tourist wouldhave gone to Hakodate, seen Ainos at Sapporo, ridden across the northern island underthe gigantic thistles, caught salmon, looked in at Vladivostok....”16

Today’s tourist itinerary is somewhat different and though the visitor these daysrarely proceeds across the Japan Sea to Russia’s Vladivostok, Hokkaido’s seas are wortha look. Beyond the coastline are three very different seas. The coldest of these, the Seaof Okhotsk to Hokkaido’s northeast, brings floating ice to the Japanese coast. West ofHokkaido is the northern portion of the Japan Sea, where a warm current flows north-ward, and to the southeast is the great Pacific Ocean.

West of Hokkaido in the Sea of Japan are seven small nearby islands administeredas part of the prefecture. Near Wakkanai at the very north are Rebun and Rishiri, bothnow part of a national park; off the coast perhaps seventy miles south are tiny Teuri andYagishiri. Off the Oshima Peninsula is the largest of the islands, Okushiri, and off thesouthern 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. Variouscities attract winter visitors with winter festivals and the mining towns work to createjobs 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 wintersand distance from the Japanese heartland. The northern island also suffers more than otherparts of the nation when times are hard. Over the years, loss of resources and industrieshas hurt. But Hokkaido’s people are resilient, and they remind the visitor that summerdays are wonderful in this northern island and that in the winter, skiing in powder snowon the hills at the edge of Sapporo cannot be beat. In Hokkaido are wide-open spacesthat one can only dream about in the heartland.


2 The Ainu

Long before ethnic Japanese settled on Hokkaido, another people inhabited thenorthern island: the Ainu. These people and their culture are an important componentof the story of Hokkaido. Their history in Japan can be compared to that of the NorthAmerican native peoples who have long been called Indians. As David Penhallow, anAmerican scientist who lived in Hokkaido from 1876 to 1880, wrote in 1886, “The rela-tions of the Aino to the Japanese were and are precisely those of the American Indian tothe 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 Americanand Ainu were not quite exterminated. Not only is history similar, cultural likenessesexist between Ainu, other peoples in the Russian Far East, and the North American North-west Coast tribes. For example, fishing methods and ceremonies performed by Ainu andthose of the Northwest Coast people to welcome the first salmon of the year bear a strik-ing resemblance.1

In the old days, the Ainu lived by hunting and fishing, using the plants of the coun-tryside 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. TheAinu people looked different than the people farther south, in feature resembling Cau-casians more than did Wajin. Most Ainu did not have the Japanese eye fold. Ainu hadthick 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 cen-tury their communities were no longer found on the main island. Hokkaido has long beenthe center of Ainu culture, but Ainu also lived to the north and east of Hokkaido, onSakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Almost all the remaining Ainu there were sent to Japanin 1945 after the end of World War II. On the Asian mainland, some Ainu possibly livedin 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 inter-ested Japanese people more than most others. By tradition, the Japanese people are thepeople 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 impe-rial family was descended from the sun god, Amaterasu. Such a history can be contrastedto that of a nation like Canada or Australia or the United States, where the majority pop-ulation emigrated from Europe in historic times.

The Ainu were for a time thought of as the “ancient Japanese,” stimulating studyand debate about origins.2 With the development of scientific understanding of prehis-tory, it became clear that the peoples of Japan probably migrated from somewhere elseto the Japanese islands. Where did the Ainu fit into this picture and where did they comefrom? Language does not help answer the question of origins, for there is no clear rela-tionship between the Ainu language and other languages, and recent language studies sug-gest that Ainu have lived in their present area, mostly isolated from other peoples, for along period of time. Japanese study of the question of origins has had political implica-tions, because of the concern that if Ainu are proven to be Japan’s first people, that couldgive 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 beenproposed; 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 hadtraveled via the Aleutian Islands and then the Kurils to Hokkaido. Others have connectedthe Ainu to Polynesians, southeast Asians or the Australian aborigines. In the nineteenthcentury, David Penhallow wondered if Ainu and Eskimo could be related. He noted thatAinu lived on the Kuril Islands and the Kamchatka Peninsula, and suggested that it wouldnot have been impossible for them to travel to the Aleutians.3

Another great question involves race: what race are the Ainu? Are they related toCaucasian peoples, as their eyes and the men’s beards might suggest? Some have suggestedan Ainu–Pacific Islander connection. Most experts today agree that they are a Mongoloidpeople, related to Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Okinawans and the peoples native to theRussian 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 Wajinhave looked upon the Ainu as lesser beings. In the earliest contacts between the two peo-ples, Wajin identified Ainu as barbarians. Often told among Wajin was the story that aJapanese princess, the daughter of the nation’s first emperor, angered her father so muchthat he sent her off in a boat. She landed on the island of Ezo and mated with a dog—andfrom them came the Ainu people. One version of this tale extends the myth, claiming thatsome of the descendants of the princess and the dog coupled with bears, creating Ainugods. Some Ainu may even have believed that their people originated after a marriagebetween 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 theJapanese 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 Ainulanguage. 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 haveidentified humans who preceded the Ainu in Hokkaido. According to archaeological evi-dence, Paleolithic, or Stone Age, settlements existed in Hokkaido about twenty thou-sand years ago. In 1997, archaeologists found stone tools estimated to be betweenseventeen and eighteen thousand years old in a Chitose site.4

Pottery some twelve thousand years old has been found in southern Japan, and as


early centuries passed, pottery was produced farther and farther north, showing thatsome of the pottery-makers, called the Jomon people, migrated northwards. How theJomon (whose era is called the Neolithic Period elsewhere in the world) might have cometo Japan in the first place remains unknown, but they presumably came from the Asiancontinent. For many centuries the Jomon were the people of Japan, and remains of theirsettlements have been found in southern Hokkaido. They arrived in Hokkaido probablyeight thousand to six thousand years ago and during that time made the earliest potterydiscovered on the island. The Jomon were hunter-gatherers who lived in pit houses (per-haps only in the winter). They apparently felt no push to develop systematic agriculturebecause their environment was rich in animals and fish. Recently, however, archaeolo-gists 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. Archae-ological digs have demonstrated that these people traded with others, from Sakhalin toHonshu. For example, Sakhalin amber has been found at Hokkaido Jomon sites, as hasjade from Honshu’s Toyama Prefecture. Even bits of a fabric tentatively identified asJomon era silk has been found in Hokkaido. Art historians have suggested that the dec-orative 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 cul-tivation in Japan, but though they moved north, they did not enter Hokkaido. Scientiststoday generally think that the Ainu are descended from the earlier Jomon, while peoplefarther south in Japan are a mixture of Jomon and Yayoi.

Complicating the picture in Hokkaido, a different people moved south from SakhalinIsland 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 ofAbashiri, on Hokkaido’s northeast coast facing the Sea of Okhotsk, is an archaeologicalsite preserving caves which sheltered these people. They had a maritime culture, depend-ent on sea mammals. The Okhotsk people probably were among the ancestors of theAinu, whose culture thus included influences from the Okhotsk and Jomon and, to a muchlesser extent, the Yayoi.

Archaeologists have named different periods in Japan’s early history, identifying theJomon 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 wasemerging elsewhere in Japan. The Satsumon Period followed in Hokkaido at about thesame 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 halfbelow ground level.

During the Satsumon era (from about the seventh until the thirteenth century) peo-ple in Hokkaido cultivated cereal crops, supplementing the foodstuffs they got throughhunting, fishing and gathering. Satsumon and Okhotsk people apparently sometimeslived in the same places, though probably the Satsumon subsisted more on land animalswhile the Okhotsk people depended on food from the sea. By the twelfth century, how-ever, the Okhotsk people seem to have disappeared, perhaps being absorbed by the Sat-sumon or else leaving Hokkaido and retreating north. On the basis of Ainu epics, DonaldPhilippi has suggested that they were defeated in war by the Ainu, the surviving Okhotskpeople becoming part of the general population, and these people, Satsumon and Okhotsk,became the Ainu.6

2. The Ainu 25

Early Japanese writings tell of a people called the Ebisu, or Emishi: barbarians wholived in the northern lands. By the twelfth or thirteenth century, Ezo replaced Emishi asthe name of the northern people, and their island, Hokkaido, was called Ezogashima.These “northern” peoples had occupied northern Honshu at one time, but, say Wajinsources, were forced across Tsugaru Strait and by the eighth century, the strait was therecognized border between the Wajin and the Ezo. Were the Ezo people the Ainu? Itseems so, though a debate continues over whether the Emishi and the Ezo were the samepeople.

The term “shogun,” given in the late eighth century to the leading military officialin Japan, meant “barbarian-conqueror” and the defeated barbarians were people whoevolved into the Ainu. Ainu today have suggested that many of their ancestors were notforced to leave Honshu for Ezo Island. Meanwhile, those who stayed on Honshu wereeventually 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 theculture of other native peoples in similar climates. Ainu had developed clothing fromanimal skins and shoes from seal skins, made homes that would protect them from thecold of winter and evolved ceremonies and celebrations and decorations for the humanbody.

Anyone interested in the Ainu people must have wondered what their culture waslike before it was influenced by Wajin. The question is unanswerable, of course, but alsonot very meaningful, because throughout many, many centuries, different peoples inter-acted. The Ainu of Hokkaido and their precursors traded with people of Sakhalin andthe Russian mainland as well as Honshu. Thus Ainu culture developed and changedthrough the centuries just as does any culture, incorporating influences from other peo-ples 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 usuallybeen recognized to be Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.

It is possible to generalize and offer a broad view of Ainu life and culture, remem-bering that definite regional differences existed. Legends and stories preserved throughoral tradition provide insight about Ainu practices. Archaeological study adds detail. Inaddition, some early travelers to Hokkaido recorded what they saw, what they were toldand what they learned of the Ainu people and their language. The French explorer, theCount of La Perouse, who met Ainu in southern Sakhalin in 1787, wrote, “They are avery superior race to the Chinese, Japanese, and Mantschoos.” A. J. von Krusenstern, trav-eling for Russia at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, noted the kind welcomethe Ainu gave to their strange visitors. Some later observers emphasized the character-istics of the Ainu that they considered strange, even bizarre, as they prophesied these peo-ple’s imminent disappearance from the scene.7 But if reports of early travelers are readwith 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 neigh-borhoods today, where the Ainu speak Japanese, watch television, dress in the same waysnon–Ainu people do, eat the same foods and go to the same schools. (In reading early


accounts of Ainu life, one mustremember that the Wajin presencein Hokkaido had brought aboutmany changes.)

Ainu lived in small villages orkotan, and the kotan were locatednear rivers where the men fished.Each community had rights to fish-ing, hunting and gathering in aspecific area. The kotan would havea headman (who might be respon-sible for more than one village.)He would supervise religious cer-emonies, represent the kotan inrelations with outsiders and makesure all families in his area had foodto eat, as well as carrying out otherduties associated with leadership.Different kotan were generally threeto five miles apart, having as fewas three or as many as twentyhouses, each dwelling sheltering asingle nuclear family. There was noconcept of individual ownership ofland. Occasionally, kotan memberscould decide to move the entire vil-lage to a new location in the searchfor, say, better sources of food, butAinu were not a migratory people.The men might temporarily leavethe village for hunting or fishing,but the village was a permanenthome.

Apparently, each family —usually father, mother and unmar-ried children—had its own house,located at some distance from otherhouses in the kotan, although E. A.Hammel holds that based on early nineteenth century census records, many Ainu, notnecessarily related, typically lived in a single household.8

An Ainu house was rectangular, about twelve by eighteen feet, with a small ante-room at the entrance. Beyond was just one large room with a firepit or fireplace in themiddle, smoke escaping through an opening in the roof above. Several layers of matswoven from reeds and cattails covered the floor; Ainu say the layers allowed heat fromthe fire to penetrate the space between the mats, bringing warmth to the entire floor. Menconstructed houses with walls of thatch fastened to beams strengthened by wooden cross-pieces tied to them. The peaked roof was similar; the men would build it on the ground

2. The Ainu 27

Postcards showing Ainu scenes were popular in earlierdays. Ainu would usually be pictured in traditional dress.Ainu men, unlike Japanese, sported heavy beards, andAinu women were heavily tattooed around the mouth.This group posed in front of a clapboard house, not a tra-ditional Ainu dwelling (courtesy Hakodate MunicipalLibrary).

and raise the completed framework, then attaching it to the walls. The east side of thedwelling was sacred, with objects placed there to give thanks to the gods. A window onthis side of the house was reserved for the gods, who could come into the house throughit; two windows on the south side also gave light. The door was made of matting or sim-ilar 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 posses-sions. After trade with Wajin began, Ainu families treasured highly the Wajin-made lac-querware they used for storage.

At one time, Ainu forged implements out of iron received in trade, but this forginglater died out, people acquiring all their metal goods through trade. Ainu also madeearthenware pottery items, but this ceased around the fifteenth century once peoplecould obtain utensils from Wajin traders.

Ainu houses stayed remarkably warm during the frigid winter. The fire in the centralfire pit was never extinguished, and as the cold season approached, a pile of earth sometwo feet high could be constructed outside the walls of the house to shield them andscreens 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 androof of thatch were about a foot thick. Thatch shutters outside and curtains inside cov-ered the window openings. Houses with these and other methods of protection from thecold 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-


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

sure. People found it easy to travel over hard-packed snow, and woodcutting kept work-ers warm.

Ainu families built small outbuildings on stilts to store food supplies away frommarauding animals. A well-known structure in the kotan is the bear cage. A young bearwould be captured and raised here until it was used in a religious ceremony and one vil-lage 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 wellas crafting the tools used in these pursuits. When hunting in the winter, the men oftenestablished 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 impor-tant to them, but also smaller animals, including deer and rabbits. In the springtime, onereason to hunt was to obtain the thick pelt an animal had grown for the winter. Mentrained 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 derivedfrom aconite roots (monkshood). An animal killed this way could be safely eaten afterthe flesh was cut away from the area the arrow had penetrated. Men caught birds andsmall animals in traps or with bows and arrows and sometimes spears or knives craftedfrom readily available stone or bone. For river fishing, men killed salmon with speciallydesigned clubs covered with spiritual carvings. At night men fished by torchlight. Theyalso made nets and fish-traps, and even trained dogs to catch salmon. Men would fishfor salmon late in the autumn when the fish left the ocean to swim upstream. Folktalestell 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 bowsand arrows or harpoons. Men even fished through the ice in the winter. Men constructeddugout canoes to use in the rivers and larger ones for sea activities. A painting fromaround 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 pas-sengers to the Kuril Islands.9

Some of the men’s activities did not involve hunting and fishing. Men were respon-sible for trade with other nearby Ainu communities and also with distant people, fromSakhalin or the Kurils and, later, with Russians, Chinese and Wajin who appeared intheir land. The men were the wood carvers. Using knives, chisels and axes, they carvedintricate patterns into eating vessels and implements as well as religious objects. Mencarried out Ainu religious rituals, after preparing the items used in them. Men were thefighters, and warfare between separate Ainu communities was fairly common. Ainu epicssuggest that at one time class differences existed between Ainu, with higher ranking mendoing the fighting while servants carried out daily chores. At the top of the system werethe men who were expert at hunting bears. Polygamy was once found among Ainu, ashigh-ranking or wealthy men could have several wives.10

Women’s duties were very different from men’s. In 1905, Missionary Annie Bradshawdescribed Ainu women as near-slaves to the men: “From morning till night and fromone year’s end till another it is nothing but work, work, work, and their work is manuallabor of the heaviest and most tiring kind.” One job women did not do, she tells us, iswashing dishes, because they reasoned that the dishes would soon be used again in thesame 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,”

2. The Ainu 29

but wrote more than a quarter of a century later that Ainu men respected women, whowere “treated as the equals of the men,” though their roles differed. Women cared for thechildren, of course, and except during the winter, roamed the plains and mountainsgathering whatever plants would be useful—for eating, for medicine, for clothing. Inspringtime women planted small crops, mostly of millet. Gardens were not fertilized orweeded, though. In the spring women tapped maple trees for syrup. Ainu scholar KayanoShigeru remembered licking the sweet icy syrup as a child.11

Just as with food, Ainu used available materials for clothing, and as trade grew withother peoples, more types of apparel became common. In earlier times, women madeclothing from hides of many animals—bear, deer, rabbit and fox, for example. Ainu alsoused 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 cutrobes, 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 maximumgrowth but had not started to deteriorate with approaching cooler weather. The womenwent to the river bank to harvest the stalks and then prepared them for weaving by care-ful 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. Inthe winter women also hunted small animals and, occasionally, deer. All of these activi-ties, hunting, fishing and gathering, were what sustained the Ainu. One study has esti-mated that Ainu were traditionally dependent for their subsistence about forty percenton fishing and thirty percent each on gathering and hunting.11

During deep winter, women created mats and clothing, weaving fabric called attushfrom elm bark. Making clothes meant hard work. Bark of the proper quality would bepeeled in strips from the tree. Then women would separate the bark into inner and outerlayers, using only the inner layer to make cloth. The women would soak this bark forperhaps a week, wash, dry, and painstakingly split it into fibers, then twist and gatherthese into a skein before weaving bark cloth on a loom. An Ainu legend tells that the firstpeople in the world wore clothing made from bark in this way. The garments were some-what coarse and could become a bit brittle as they dried.

Women embroidered symmetrical geometric designs around the neck, sleeve andlower ends of ceremonial garments, sometimes over most of the surface. In more recentyears, Ainu used new or used cotton received in trade to make robes with traditional cutand designs. Women also wove a secret belt to wear inside their clothes for special pro-tection. 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, ormore coats of skins, with hoods of the same.” She admired the bark-cloth dresses orkimonos worn in the summer.13 Several coats made from salmon skins have been foundin Hokkaido; such a coat required fifty or more skins. Many examples of traditional Ainuclothing can be seen in museums today, along with shoes of seal fur or straw and bootsof salmon skin. Fish scales could provide a non-slip surface for the sole. The boots weremade large enough that they could be stuffed with straw for warmth. People wore wovenleggings when going through underbrush or tall grass; the reed or rush fibers of the leg-gings would be left untrimmed at the ankle and as the weaver walked, the rustling reedswould help keep insects away. Ainu apparently did not wash themselves and travelers thusoften mentioned their smell.


Accompanying clothing is decoration, and in the days before extensive trade withother peoples, Ainu developed a distinctive mode of decorating women with tattoos, themost apparent feature being heavy coloring around the mouth, making the lips appearmuch larger than normal. This tattoo would keep evil spirits from entering a woman’sbody through her mouth and nose. With a knife, a skilled older woman made cuts andfilled them with specially-prepared soot, then applying juice from plants with medicinalproperties in order to prevent infection. A girl’s forearms and wrists were often tattooedtoo. The first decorations might be applied as early as a girl’s seventh year, but over theyears until maturity more tattooing would bring the pattern to perfection.

Tattoos were not the only decorations. On ceremonial occasions, both women andmen wore widely looped earrings decorated with beads in their pierced ears. Womenoften wore large and beautiful beads, obtained in trade, in elaborate necklaces. Womenalso wore woven headbands on special occasions, while men wore headdresses such asthose still seen today at ceremonies. When men carried swords (received in trade), thesewere held in cloth straps featuring intricate designs.

Traditional Ainu food—the gift of the gods—included all the edible resources, ani-mal and vegetable, that one would expect to find in a northern land of forest, ocean andrivers. 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 vegeta-bles, including onions, tomatoes, potatoes, pumpkins and daikon. Long ago, beforewidespread trade developed with other peoples, Ainu may have carried on more exten-sive agriculture. Wajin introduced the above vegetables, but Ainu have apparently raisedatane, a turnip, for centuries. Ainu women gathered additional native plants, includingwild garlic, wild grapes, lily bulbs and even skunk cabbage. The women would dry theseplants, sometimes after boiling them first. Women collected berries and nuts—acornsand 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 dry-ing. Preservation was important, and Ainu would kept stocks of preserved food on handin case of famine as well as for winter use. During winter, people lived mostly on driedsalmon, venison and vegetables. (Food can be preserved through salting as well as dry-ing, but for Ainu the cost was prohibitive in more recent years because of a Wajin monop-oly on salt.) To prepare food for eating, Ainu women would boil together whatever wasavailable. 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 traditionalAinu diet and also the most important food for winter use. It is recorded that when theIshikari River salmon run failed in 1725, several hundred Ainu died of starvation in thewinter and spring.14 The importance of salmon to Ainu is indicated by the Ainu wordfor salmon, which also means “staple food.”

After trout swam upriver in the springtime, Ainu caught the fish, preserving themin a natural spring with flowing fresh water. Covered with small stones, the fish couldbe kept for up to a month in this manner. Unlike salmon, trout did not dry or smokewell, so salmon were the fish eaten in winter. Ainu harvested ocean fish, too, as well asoysters, clams, crabs and kombu. The most highly prized food was meat, bear meat themost valuable of all, though venison was probably the meat eaten most often. Foods usedby Ainu varied somewhat by area, with plants and animals of the sea a more importantpart of the diet in coastal communities.

2. The Ainu 31

Some traditional implements used in obtaining and cooking food are visible in muse-ums today, from bows and arrows to ladles made of shells attached by fiber to woodenhandles. 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, andsome strong-smelling fish-oil, and set the whole to stew for three hours.” Only a few ofthe people smoked, she reported, but they drank a fair amount of sake which was, shewrote, “their curse,” although they drank it only after offering some to the gods.15 Pre-sumably, this occurred only after Wajin introduced sake to the Ainu, though Ainu hadtraditionally made an alcoholic beverage from millet.

Ainu serve a traditional soup at celebrations today. The soup flavors are subtle; Ainulike the taste of the actual foods, some say, and thus use little seasoning. In the soup brothare bits of salmon, quite a few chunks of potato and small amounts of carrot, cabbageand 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 sys-tem features animal, vegetable and mineral gods; anything can be a god, and after a per-son’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 repre-sents 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. JohnBatchelor wrote that Ainu “believe that beasts, birds, fishes and growing trees and all plantshave their own individual lives.... Hence the bubbling spring, the sparking, ripplingrivulet, the gently gliding stream, the rushing torrent, the flying clouds, the whistlingwinds, the pouring rain, the roaring storm, the restless ocean, and all such phenomenahave, in their opinion, real lives abounding in them.” Whenever thunder came, an Ainuwoman reported, people would hurry home, sit in a special place and bow their headsuntil 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. Forlife to prosper, gods and people must respect each other. Gods, or kamui, provide thethings that make life possible. They are helpful, but can cause trouble when people dostupid 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 atonefor bad behavior, people must conduct religious ceremonies.

Perhaps the god of the fire is the most important god, for this god is present in somuch of Ainu life, whenever there is a fire—for cooking or for warmth. Next most cru-cial is the god of food, then the “god of earth and natural things” and after this, thedragon 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 ver-sion, the male god—thunder—struck the female god—elm —leading to the birth ofAinurakkur, 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 thesea from Korea to Japan.


To an outsider, it is the unusual, visually impressive or dangerous practices of reli-gion that excite the most interest. The importance of the bear ceremony in traditionalAinu 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. Thebear ceremony, or iyomante, is not only interesting to observers, it seems to be the mostsignificant part of traditional Ainu worship. The ceremony, for which Ainu from differ-ent communities would come together, involved ritual killing of a bear cub which hadbeen taken from its mother perhaps in February a year and a half earlier and raised care-fully by the community. Ainu women occasionally nursed bear cubs raised for the cere-mony; John Batchelor saw this being done. He noted that younger Ainu denied that thecustom ever existed, since it did not conform to modern ways.18

Ainu performed iyomante in the winter, when men and women were not busy hunt-ing, fishing or gathering food. The ritual enabled the return of the bear’s spirit to theheavens (gods come to earth temporarily as animals or objects), and people presentedmany items to the gods along with the bear’s spirit. This “sending away” is what iyomantemeans; Ainu do not perceive it as a sacrifice. Many people, dressed in their best, wouldgather for the ceremony. Women prepared special foods and millet beer. The people wor-shipped the still-caged cub and one of the men prayed to the cub while singing and danc-ing 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, tiedit to a stake and throttled it to death. More dancing followed. The animal was skinned

2. The Ainu 33

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

and brought into the house through the sacred window. Some of the meat was cooked andoffered 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 developedinto an elaborate ceremony in fairly recent times, perhaps about 1800. The ceremony wasoutlawed for a time by Wajin authorities, but it is now practiced again, sometimes in partfor tourists and sometimes, for Ainu only, as a serious religious ceremony.

Ainu men created several types of implements for specific religious purposes. Onewas the inau, a sacred stick made of wood perhaps a foot and a half or more long, par-tially shaved so that thin curls surrounded it on all sides. It was used to help send prayersand offerings to the gods. The inau had to be created from live wood, which had the abil-ity to guard people from evil. Specially prepared inau would be placed at an outdoor sitefor 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 representa-tions of animals or people. Ikupasuy were used with prayers and to make an offering ofsake to the gods. Observers of the Ainu in the nineteenth century (and later) often referredto 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


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

house of the village chief, which waslarger than other houses, had someceremonial uses, as for portions of thebear ceremony,

Traditional Ainu culture featuredmusic and dance. One dance, at thebear ceremony, ensured that the spiritof the bear did return to the gods. Inperhaps the best-known dance, thecrane dance, women in a circle imi-tated the birds’ movements in theircourtship ritual, especially the flap-ping of their wings. A dance tradi-tional to the coastal community ofShiraoi was the stranded whale dance,in which the animal, portrayed by adancer draped under a robe and hud-dled on the floor, was discovered by ablind woman, who alerted the vil-lagers. The dance portrayed the actionsof the people harvesting the whale’sblubber and meat. At the end, nothingwas left but the whaleskin—the emptyrobe. Along with dance, Ainu hadmusic, many songs, and a kind of Jew’sharp, the mukkuri, made of bambooand a thread. Another instrument, thetonkori, was guitar-like but fretless,with four to six deer tendon stringsabove a flat sounding board.

Each Ainu house featured reli-gious objects. Even the fire pit had aspiritual significance, for when thegod Okikurumi taught the Ainu howto use all the resources of their land toget food and shelter, he showed howto use fire. (He also gave Ainu the bowand arrow and demonstrated how touse poisoned arrows.)

Annie Bradshaw’s study of theAinu led her to think that Ainu womenwere excluded from religion by themen. John Batchelor described beingtold by an Ainu man that at one timewomen had participated in religiousceremonies, but that “our wise ances-tors forbade them to do so, because it

2. The Ainu 35

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Japaneseartists painted many pictures, called Ainu-e, of Ainuactivities. Kawabata Gyokusho painted this Ainu-eduring the second half of the nineteenth century toportray Ainu celebrating a bountiful salmon catch(courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

was thought they might use their prayers against the men.”19 Women, thus, were not sup-posed to pray. This does not mean that women were necessarily considered inferior. Awoman could be a shaman and act as a medium, but men took a more active role in reli-gion. Shamanism was important in healing, as were medicinal plants.

Among Ainu beliefs was the importance of not naming a child at birth, not havinga ceremony nor giving the newborn fancy clothes, for fear of evil spirits putting a spellon the child. Instead, a temporary name or nickname with a negative connotation wouldbe used. Not until the child reached the age of seven or eight years would he or she benamed. Moreover, no one was to be given the name of a person who had died, for thatperson’s spirit could be offended and possibly cause evil to occur.

The Ainu feared death. Ainu communities did not have cemeteries. After the funeralceremonies, two men would carry the person who died to a distant site marked with asimple stick, and Ainu would thereafter avoid the place.

Allied to legends that underlie spiritual beliefs are traditional stories, whetheruepeker—simple folk tales—or yukar—heroic epics. All were passed down by word ofmouth. Mothers sang traditional songs to their children, who thus learned proper con-duct from tales with morals—somewhat similar to Aesop’s Fables—as well as explana-tions about the world and the beings in it. The stories varied somewhat from vicinity tovicinity; one says that while creating the Ainu homeland, or Ainu Moshir, the creatorplaced it on the back of a giant fish, which he mistakenly thought was land. On discov-ering his mistake, he sent two gods to hold the fish steady, but occasionally the fish movesif 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 thesun 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 villagewhere the people were starving, due to famine. Okikurumi went to the ocean, broughtin whales and fish and made a stew from their meat to feed the villagers. Okikurumi’swife 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 leavethe village, though, and did not regain health and happiness until he created a pictureof the village and its surroundings in the sky.

As in other cultures, folk tales explain many aspects of the natural world. One Ainulegend explains why one hears the loud cry of the cicada only on hot summer days. Itseems that an old woman’s cries were disturbing the gods; she would not stop crying aftera tidal wave destroyed her village. To stem her tears, the gods turned the woman into acicada and decreed that she would live with people in the summer and the gods in thewinter. Still she cried, though, and a wise god finally told her that she could cry only onhot, sunny days.

Many tales from different peoples are similar. An Ainu tale tells of a god creatingfood for a hungry family by taking one grain of rice which he made into enough to feedthe family for as long as they lived.

Another Ainu tale explains why men have only one wife. Long ago, a certain manwas married to two women. After his second wife gave birth to a daughter, the first wifebecame jealous of the attention given to the new mother. So the first wife pretended tobecome very ill and proclaimed that in order to recover she had to eat the heart of thelittle girl. The husband sadly ordered two men to take the child to the woods, kill herand bring back her heart. The kind-hearted men killed a dog instead and secretly returned


the child to her mother; then the pair fled. Eventually the evil wife was turned into acrow and the husband had a dream telling him to live again with his second wife anddaughter. Since then, men only marry one wife.

Among the tales drawing morals is a story recounting Hokkaido’s creation by a godand a goddess. The god carefully carried out his task and made the east coast, but thegoddess neglected her work, instead gossiping away, and finally created the west coast ina 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 involveYoshitsune, a tragic Japanese hero, who lived in the twelfth century. Yoshitsune foughtin Honshu with his brother’s forces against the Taira family. The brother ordered Yoshit-sune killed, however, and he became a heroic martyr to common people. But legend tellsthat 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 shrineto Yoshitsune exists where Ainu tradition says he is buried, in the Ainu community ofBiratori in Nibutani Town. Japanese officials encouraged the legend in order to ensureAinu cooperation with Wajin.

Folk tales regarding Yoshitsune abound. One has it that he left Ezo for China andbecame Genghis Khan. The Ainu girl who loved him was so distraught at his departurethat she threw herself into the sea near Cape Kamui, not too far from Otaru. A variantsays that the Ainu girl stood on the shore watching forever for Yoshitsune, and eventu-ally 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 mar-ried the daughter of an Ainu chief. This chief had one ancient book, which he obviouslytreasured. Yoshitsune deviously obtained it and fled, taking the knowledge of written lan-guage with him. Another version describes Yoshitsune fleeing with all the books andother treasures of the Ainu people. In the nineteenth century, when the first railroadtrain in Hokkaido began service, its engine received the name Yoshitsune. The secondengine became Benkei, Yoshitsune’s aide, but at least one observer felt this was not agood choice, since Ainu heartily disliked Benkei for supposed pranks he carried out inSakhalin.

Some nineteenth century observers of the Ainu felt that at least some of the talesthey heard from Ainu informants had come from Wajin tradition and had been adaptedby Ainu. Certainly the assumption of Yoshitsune as a hero, even god, in Ainu lore is anexample of this. Basil Hall Chamberlain, who learned the Ainu language, is one of thebest-known early collectors of Ainu tales. He noted that though it was women who mainlytold the tales, it was men who imparted them to him, because women were too shy tospeak to an Englishman.20

A group of Ainu riddles collected about a century ago shows that Ainu used thisform of humor. What has a puffed belly, but no legs, hands, eyes, or mouth? An egg. Whatgoes up the river with a loud voice? Ice, which forms first at a river’s mouth and worksits 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 obtainsa cuckoo’s nest will become wealthy if he lets no one see the nest. But if a cuckoo landson the roof of one’s house, it means that fire will destroy the house. It will rain if onedreams about rivers or liquids or swimming. If one dreams about meat, disease will fol-low.21

2. The Ainu 37

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

Language

The Ainu language is a distinct language that had different dialects in different sec-tions of Hokkaido as well as on Sakhalin and on the Kurils. Ainu is similar in some aspectsto Japanese, for example in word order, and some linguists hold that Ainu is closer toJapanese than to any other language. Most experts today, however, generally agree thatthey cannot explain the origins of Ainu and its possible relationships to other languages,including Japanese. Japanese and Ainu may have developed from a common languageperhaps as long as ten thousand years ago. On the other hand, the similarities betweenthe two languages may be explained by proximity, that is, the borrowing of words andperhaps even grammatical structure from a language spoken nearby, as English incorpo-rated many French words after the Norman Conquest of England. Illustrating this arethe 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 mighthave borrowed the word from the other. A number of Ainu words clearly come directlyfrom 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 inAinu 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 andfive vowel sounds. Ainu sentences follow a pattern closer to Japanese than to English: theverb comes last in the sentence, and instead of a preposition, Ainu uses a particle afterthe object of a phrase. But, unlike Japanese (and English), the verb does not includetense. 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 regard-less of person (I go, you go, we go, they go, for example) and English has just slight vari-ations (he goes), verb prefixes and endings in Ainu are different depending upon whetherthe subject is I, you (singular), he/she, we, you (plural) or they—as in Spanish or Ger-man. Like all languages, Ainu contains especially precise and colorful words. One isnibushi, meaning “the coldest place.” It is a compound of ni, or tree, and bushi, the soundone hears when a tree splits apart due to the pressure of the water in it freezing. The wordis so evocative that it has been adopted for commercial use.

Many, many Hokkaido cities and towns, and even some on Honshu, have namesderived 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 areaby the river. The name of Wakkanai evolved from the Ainu term “yam wakkanay,” mean-ing “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 dismissthis idea.


Shiraoi, a town on the coast between Muroran and Tomakomai, has long includeda 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 thatit meant “the place where the tide comes out (over the land),” signifying high tides.22 Whenplace names like this from the Ainu language have been adapted into Japanese, they havebeen given written characters that fit their pronunciation. Shira can mean “white” inJapanese and oi can mean “old age.” The two characters with these meanings and pro-nunciations are written today to indicate the town name “Shiraoi.” Near Shiraoi is thehot springs resort city of Noboribetsu. Nobori means “to ascend” or “to climb” in Japa-nese, and betsu is “special” or “different.” The Ainu name, pronounced in a somewhatsimilar way, meant merely “turbid river.” In this case, both Ainu and Japanese names areappropriate, 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 aprominent role. The numbers one to five have their own names, as does ten. Six throughnine are expressed as ten minus a number and the teens by numbers added to ten. Largernumbers 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 peo-ple and Ainu culture has long been overwhelmed by Japan’s majority culture. Few peo-ple speak Ainu today, though in recent years activists have worked to revive the languageand Ainu speakers offer classes in various communities, even Tokyo, for both adults andchildren. Texts and bilingual dictionaries are available for Japanese interested in study-ing the Ainu language.

The Ainu and the Wajin

In the early days of contact, most Wajin considered Ainu uncivilized. Even NitobeInazu, a well-educated, cosmopolitan educator and thinker, described the Ainu in 1912as a people “not yet emerged from the Stone Age.” About the same time, a westernobserver described Ainu as “ almost servile,” unlike the warriors who practiced “savagecruelty” in ages past. Both images, “servile” and “savage cruelty” are far from represen-tative of Ainu culture. In the old days, Ainu fought other Ainu and later fought Japa-nese, but there is no evidence of excessive cruelty. If servility appeared later, it was inresponse to the increasing Wajin domination of Hokkaido. Among other mistaken beliefs,early observers commonly believed that the children of a mixed Ainu-Wajin couple couldnot 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 theanswer, “It depends what you mean by Japanese.” In the eighteenth century, when Japanheld only an outpost on Hokkaido, Japanese definitely considered the Ainu a foreign peo-ple. Thus for Wajin, the question of who the Ainu are is most complex. Because Wajinthink of themselves as the people native to their land, who can the Ainu be? They are cit-izens of Japan (though different laws have been applied to them) but ethnically somewould count only Wajin as Japanese. In the Japanese language, “Ainu” is treated as a for-eign word rather than a native Japanese word, so its foreignness is emphasized wheneverone sees it in print. Wajin today will admit that they know little about Ainu. Scholar

2. The Ainu 39

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 thestrong anti–Ainu prejudice sometimes found among Wajin living in close proximity toAinu, where economic competition colors attitudes.

Ainu people had developed a culture through which they could survive in the harshnorthern conditions of Hokkaido. But over the years, Wajin came to increase their powerin 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 nativepeople. But the Ainu survived, albeit in much smaller numbers than before the Wajinappeared. The coming of the Wajin led to a situation in which the Ainu no longer couldcontrol their environment, and inevitably their world and their lifestyle changed dra-matically.


3 The Matsumae Era

Hokkaido, then called Ezo, was not part of Japan in early times, but this northernisland could not remain merely the land of the Ainu. The story of the Matsumae eradescribes the decisions, policies and events that gradually brought the island more andmore clearly into Japan. The tale contains several themes: the growth and developmentof 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 theseventh century, and over the next few centuries Wajin conquest drove Ainu people far-ther and farther north and across Tsugaru Strait to Ezo. One account indicates that inA.D. 659 Wajin set up an observation post on Ezo’s west coast to monitor activities onthe Asian mainland.1 In the twelfth century, Wajin refugees fleeing warfare in northernHonshu 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 begintrading with the Ainu protected their new settlements with simple fortifications. Theyhunted, fished and traded with nearby Ainu. By the fifteenth century, a formal Wajingovernment was in place in the Oshima Peninsula on Ezo’s southwestern tip. As contactsbetween Ainu and Wajin grew and the Wajin gained more and more sway over Ezo, afamily that took the name Matsumae asserted control, and their headquarters town nearthe tip of the Oshima Peninsula came to be called Matsumae. (It was sometimes knownas Fukuyama.) The era during which the Matsumae dominated the island lasted roughlyfrom 1600 to 1800, when the shogunate, Japan’s central government, took control, laterrelinquishing 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 ofHonshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. This land, under military rule, was led by the shogun nearEdo, as Tokyo was then known. The emperor, leader in name only, resided in Kyoto. Overthe next few centuries, different clans vied for control, and at times some rebelled againstshogunal authority. In the mid–sixteenth century, European explorers reached Japan.Christian missionaries soon followed, but less than a century later the religion was pro-scribed. In 1600, the Tokugawa family gained control of the shogunate and instituted apolicy by which each of the country’s powerful lords, or daimyo, had to spend alternateyears in the capital rather than their own domain in order to ensure their loyalty. Anotherpolicy closed Japan to foreigners except for minimal trade with the Chinese and Dutch

41

at the port of Nagasaki in the far south. Meanwhile, in the distant north, Ezo was onlymarginally 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 famousbeing Yoshitsune. Wajin settlers fleeing from famine, warfare and unsettled conditionsin northern Honshu came to the Oshima peninsula to live and traders came to exchangegoods with the Ainu. Some of those Wajin whose twelfth century penetration of Ezo isdocumented were victims of storms at sea who landed on the northern shores. Othersincluded undesirables sent into exile for political reasons, criminals deported there, orrobbers or pirates out for wealth. One story tells of Wajin going to Ezo at that time todig for gold. Winds carried a small boat out to sea from its Honshu port and it landedon Ezo, near Shiriuchi (southwest of Hakodate). The boat’s cook went searching for freshwater and found a sparkling nugget beneath a waterfall. His master, Araki Daikaku, sentthe nugget to the rulers of Japan in Edo, and Araki received orders to survey the area formore gold. His men—he took more than one thousand to Ezo—built modest fortifica-tions and stayed for thirteen years in the area, but enmity developed between the for-tune-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 cameto Ezo and Wajin-Ainu trade grew, Ainu life changed irrevocably. Ainu began to useWajin goods and, over time, became dependent upon them. Sadly as well as surely, oneof the Wajin trade items was sake, and its introduction to the Ainu led to predictableresults.

For many years, a Wajin clan called Ando controlled the territory both north andsouth of Tsugaru Strait, but in the third decade of the fifteenth century the Ando wereforced to flee to the north, and as they settled down to rule the Oshima Peninsula, a fairnumber of other Wajin drifted into this realm. Most lived by fishing, and the Ando taxedtheir efforts. Meanwhile, Ainu in the area continued to live as they had in the past, butnow they traded with the Ando. Ainu offered carved wooden items, feathers, skins, seaproducts and other such items and received from the Wajin mainly sake, tobacco, rice,cotton cloth and lacquerware, the beautiful storage containers Ainu used for importantitems. Trading between Ainu and Wajin began more or less on a basis of equality, thoughdisputes inevitably arose. Despite some Ainu victories in conflicts, Wajin became moreand more powerful and came to control the trade. Wajin perceived the Ainu as payingtribute, while Ainu thought they were merely trading or participating in a ceremony inwhich the two groups exchanged gifts.

By the mid–fifteenth century, at least twelve small fortified Wajin communities satalong the coastline of the southern part of the Oshima Peninsula, but from the begin-ning, the presence of Ainu in and near this land now coveted and controlled by Wajincreated tension and sometimes violence. Though Wajin and Ainu often lived peacefullyin the peninsula, disputes between them led to intermittent warfare during the next sev-eral centuries. For defense, the Ando regime began placing Buddhist cemeteries aroundfortifications, 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 inpower but not toward the Ainu, merely from one Wajin group to another. A dispute overthe value of a sword sold by a Wajin to an Ainu touched off Koshamain’s War (namedfor the chieftain who led the Ainu forces). Fighting spread and Ainu fighters demolished


several Wajin forts before being overcome. The large scale of this conflict suggests Ainuconcern over increasing numbers of outsiders taking control of land the Ainu consid-ered their own. The war also gives an indication that Ainu culture evolved due to theWajin presence, for leaders such as Koshamain who had authority over a number of Ainucommunities did not exist in earlier times. The scope of the confrontation also hints thatthe Ando did not yet dominate Ezo.

Takeda Nobuhiro defended one of the very few Wajin forts not captured, Hanazawaon the west coast of the peninsula. He was an associate of the Kakizaki family, which bynow ran Ando affairs in Ezo while the Ando stayed on northern Honshu. After Takeda’sexploit, 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 shogunategranted to the Kakizaki the right to claim tax payments from all ships that came to Ezofor trade goods.

Because of the lucrative trade and the rich fishery, there was no impetus for Wajinto try to develop an agriculture suited to Ezo conditions; the Wajin living on Ezo couldtrade with merchants from the south for foods they needed. Though other regional Japa-nese 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


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


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

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 Kak-izaki would have exclusive rights to this commerce. Also, the Kakizaki agreed on thedelineation of a border between the Wajin land on the tip of the Oshima Peninsula andAinu land on the rest of Ezo. Wajin began to recognize important Ainu chiefs and showthem some respect. Perhaps these measures were adopted in order that Ezo could be con-trolled with fewer troops.

About the end of the sixteenth century, the Tokugawa Shogunate officially recog-nized 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 Kak-izaki changed the family name to Matsumae, gave a map of Ezo to Shogun TokugawaIeyasu, and began some two hundred years of Matsumae control of Ezo, first consolidat-ing 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 1606the Matsumae clan built a small castle, the northernmost in all Japan, on high land inthe town of Matsumae very near the southernmost tip of the Oshima Peninsula. Thiswas at the time Japan was emerging from more than a century of warfare, united nowunder the Tokugawa, with individual daimyo holding power in their own domains. Mat-sumae Town was the center of Matsumae power, and with the castle, the Matsumaewould strive to protect their domain, the northern frontier of Japan. The domain con-sisted of the toes of Ezo’s boot and came to be called Wajinchi, or the land of the Japa-nese. 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 rightto operate them. In 1604, the shogunate granted the Matsumae the privilege to prohibitAinu trading except at the trading posts. Matsumae vassals more and more turned overthe business of trade to experienced merchants, mainly from Osaka and Sendai and espe-cially to traders from Omi, in today’s Shiga Prefecture near Kyoto. They brought goodsfrom Honshu that the Matsumae needed, particularly rice. By the 1630s, the Honshutraders were establishing offices in Matsumae to facilitate this commerce. Until late inthe seventeenth century, some Ainu were able to take their trade goods directly to Hon-shu, but most of the trade went through the Matsumae. Meanwhile, Wajin fishermen wereallowed to fish all along the coast of Ezo and establish temporary camps but not spendthe winter in the Ezochi. These camps eventually grew into today’s coastal cities andtowns.

It should be noted, too, that Wajin used Ainu in trading with the wider world. Ainuwere part of a trade network that brought goods from China via the north Asian main-land to Sakhalin Island. Local Ainu then carried them to Ezo, where they could be trans-ferred to Honshu merchants. China controlled Sakhalin until near the end of theeighteenth century and until the mid–nineteenth century held mainland territory northto the Amur River, which empties into the sea across from northern Sakhalin. In thetrade from China, called the Santan trade, came cottons and brocades, beads, coins, pipesand other items. In the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, a Hokkaido Ainu chiefshowed John Batchelor money and decorative brass from Manchuria that had come intrade 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 andoften finally to Edo. Some can be seen today in Hokkaido museums.) To the Chinese the


Ainu supplied fur and dried fish but also goods made of iron, especially weapons, whichthey had received from Wajin, and sake and tobacco. Another trade route extended fromEzo through the Kuril Islands to the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia. Treasured goodsobtained here for Wajin markets included feathers and otter pelts.

By 1615 the Matsumae were trading with Ainu living as far away as Nemuro, andwithin a decade those Ainu were traveling through the Kurils to collect goods to barterto the Matsumae. The Matsumae needed the Ainu to legitimize the clan’s presence inEzo: the Ainu trade was the source of Matsumae wealth. From the Wajin viewpoint, byregulating relations with the Ainu, the clan was protecting Japan from people consideredto be savages.

Wajin adventurers and settlers kept coming, especially after news came out in theearly 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 inter-fered with spawning salmon, angering Ainu in the vicinity. Some Christian groups fleeingpersecution on Honshu came to Matsumae for safety about that time, but later, withChristianity banned in all Japan, Matsumae rulers ruthlessly worked to wipe out the for-eign creed. For most of the time they controlled the island, the Matsumae worked to keepother Wajin out, because a larger population would need more rice, which would haveto be imported. Moreover, the more Wajin in Ezo, the more resistant the Ainu mightbecome. Beginning in 1633, the shogunate periodically sent inspectors to Matsumaeaccompanied by large parties of retainers to investigate the domain, a practice extend-ing throughout Japan and causing financial distress to the domains visited, which had topay for the journeys.

In 1635 the Matsumae opened the Kushiro area to fishing, and, seeing the need fora local work force, moved Ainu communities from upstream on the Kushiro River downto the coast. Ainu lifestyles inevitably changed as both men and women had to work underWajin direction. A trading post in Kushiro dates from mid-century.

Takakura Shinichiro has listed the goods which the Matsumae obtained in Ezo inthese years, mostly from the Ainu: gold dust, sea products including seals, salted and driedfish, fish oil, herring roe, sea otter pelts, kombu, hawks, eagle feathers to be used in mak-ing arrows, deer and bear skins, and strings of shells.3 In addition to the Ainu trade, goldmining and falcon trapping contributed some income to the Matsumae. More than threehundred falconry estates were established, largely in the 1630s. Later these became moreand more scarce, with gold dust running out by the mid–seventeenth century and onlya few hawks available after 1800. Deer and seal both also became rare. Even the numberof fish seemed to decrease.

Though the Matsumae governed in Ezo, the rulers of Japan clearly maintained aninterest in the northern island. Early in the seventeenth century, the shogunate commandedthe Matsumae to create a map of Ezo, as part of a project to map all Japan. It took someyears, but the map—not surprisingly, empty in the middle—finally arrived in Edo in1644.

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


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 forbid-den.”4 But greedy traders tended to cheat the Ainu —for example, by decreasing theamount of rice in sacks they traded to Ainu without changing the price. Some Matsumaeofficials, too, not surprisingly took advantage of Ainu, allowing Wajin to fish in Ainufishing grounds as well as manipulating the values of trade goods both sold to and boughtfrom the Ainu.

In 1669 came a serious conflict, known as Shakushain’s War. It grew indirectly outof disputes between two Ainu leaders; different Ainu groups and leaders had rivalries thatsometimes led to battle. Two clans, the Hae and the Shibuchari, argued over boundariesand who had rights to the fish and animals in specific areas. The Hae chief murdered theShibuchari chief, Kamokutain, in revenge for Kamokutain’s father’s frequent poachingin Hae territory. Shakushain then became chief of the Shibuchari. He carried on the dis-pute over his predecessor’s killing, and intermittent fighting continued. The Matsumaebecame concerned when the warring seriously interfered with trade, and in 1655 twoMatsumae officials convinced Shakushain and the Hae leader, Onibishi, to meet underMatsumae auspices and settle their differences.

For about a decade, relations between the Ainu clans remained fairly peaceful, buthunting and fishing disputes eventually led to serious trouble. Also, Shakushain grew con-cerned that Onibishi might be getting assistance from certain Matsumae officials. In 1668a group of ten men led by Shakushain killed Onibishi’s two younger brothers and, soonafterward, Onibishi himself. With their leadership now decimated, the Hae switched toguerrilla tactics in their conflict with the Shibuchari. Eventually, from weakness, the Haeturned to the Matsumae for help. Officials who recognized the seriousness of events sentemissaries 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, Shakushainrallied other Ainu groups and thus the war that had begun as a dispute between two Ainuclans became a fight between Ainu and Wajin. Trade regulations imposed on the Ainuby the Matsumae as well as general hatred of Wajin also motivated Shakushain and hismen. Ainu leaders hoped to return to earlier times, when they could trade with whomeverthey wished and when no tariffs on trade existed; they may have hoped to free the islandof Ezo from all Wajin. Other Ainu groups began to aid Shakushain because of frustrationat 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 southcoast of Ezo across Uchiura Bay from the Oshima Peninsula. Meanwhile, other Ainuattacked Wajin at Yoichi, across the peninsula on the island’s west coast. Learning ofShakushain’s presence, the Matsumae army marched to Kunnui on the western shore ofUchiura Bay, where Shakushain’s troops attacked, but bad weather and flooded streamshalted 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 shogunatesent a skilled military commander and supplies to the Matsumae, meanwhile warningnorthern Honshu domains to be ready to send troops if needed. The threat seemed seri-ous, for during the fighting, Ainu assaulted nineteen ships and killed between two hun-dred and four hundred Wajin. Though Shakushain had hoped to be able to trade directlywith northern Honshu Wajin should he defeat the Matsumae, the shogunate commanded


these people to support the Matsumae. The eventual outcome of the war was not hardto predict, for the major Ainu weapon was the poisoned arrow, while Wajin fought withfirearms.

When serious proceedings against Shakushain began, different Wajin commanderstook troops to different areas so that Shakushain’s forces were effectively surrounded. Aftermuch loss of life among Ainu and Wajin alike, Shakushain surrendered. He presentedgifts to the winners, as was the custom. Not too long afterward, however, some Mat-sumae soldiers, after drinking too much sake, killed Shakushain and several other Ainucommanders. Matsumae soldiers then burned Shakushain’s fortress.

To Ainu today, Shakushain remains an inspirational figure. His statue stands inShizunai, the town on Hokkaido’s south coast that was the center of his territory. Eachyear Ainu gather near the statue to memorialize him and the other Ainu who perishedin 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 againstculture, Ainu versus Wajin, but records indicate that at least a few Wajin fought for theAinu, while some Ainu fought with the Matsumae and their allies. The war grew out ofeconomic issues, and if the different Ainu groups had not had long rivalries with eachother which kept some from supporting Shakushain, they could have presented a muchmore formidable threat to Matsumae domination.

One outgrowth of the war was enlargement of the Wajin domain in Ezo to includealmost all of the Oshima Peninsula. Moreover, the Matsumae enforced a strict policy ofsegregation: 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 bor-der separating the Oshima Peninsula from the rest of the island maintained the bound-ary and sometimes threatened with death any Ainu who tried to leave the Ezochi. Theguards would, of course, let Matsumae officials travel freely, and since most travel in thearea was by coastal ship, Wajin could bypass guardposts easily. Ainu leaders had to agreeto Matsumae terms: one chief of the Ainu in the west had to promise that his peoplewould carry out commerce to benefit the Matsumae as well as making people availablefor work. Even leaders of Ainu groups who had not participated in Shakushain’s War hadto promise to uphold the peace. And thereafter the Matsumae required Ainu leaders toswear fealty.

Other changes came, too. The Matsumae now prohibited Ainu use of metal or sharp-edged tools; this regulation stunned Ainu communities. The Wajin overlords alsoattempted to systematize the situation by which they ruled in Ezo by seeking to “estab-lish a tradition of Ainu subservience,” in Brett Walker’s words.6 The Matsumae tight-ened their control of trade; a Wajin presence in Ezo had existed long enough and tradebetween Wajin and Ainu had become extensive enough that both groups depended uponit. After this time, only very rarely could an individual Ainu trade successfully with otherWajin without going through the Matsumae, who oversaw additional trading posts setup on the Ezochi coast, as far as Cape Soya in 1684. Contractors who received fishingrights from the Matsumae naturally wanted the greatest possible profits— and to getthem, they continued to cheat and overwork the Ainu. New regulations adopted afterShakushain’s War did not change this.

The history of Ezo in the eighteenth century centers on two main topics: policyregarding the Russians, and economic matters, including relations between Wajin andAinu. Chapter 4 examines the Russian effect upon Ezo. Meanwhile, Matsumae overlord-


ship of the island continued and the wealth produced by the fishing industry became moreimportant than the Ainu trade.

By 1717, fifteen thousand Wajin but only 152 Ainu lived in the Wajinchi.7 The Wajinnumber kept growing, reaching more than twenty-six thousand in 1787. Matsumae fam-ily members ruled many villages directly, but the clan gave some villages to vassals tocontrol, sometimes to reward men who had been effective in battles against the Ainu.Meanwhile, the Matsumae worked to further develop the Oshima Peninsula. For exam-ple, mines at this time were extracting lead, zinc, copper and sulfur. As Wajin popula-tion grew, so did the need for increased commerce, and herring contributed an importantpart of this. More and more fish meal made from Ezo herring found use on Honshu asfertilizer.

The year 1716 was when the Matsumae lord officially became a full daimyo, or retainerto the shogunate. Unlike other daimyo, however, the Matsumae only had to come to Edoevery three to five years and stay there for one month. Even this was difficult for themto do, given their limited economic resources.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Matsumae vassals whocontrolled the Ainu trade parceled out the trading posts one by one to merchants inexchange for fees, and thus began the contract labor system, or basho ukeoi, under whichAinu 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 andmore trade goods, Wajin fishermen continued to go farther afield to take fish.

The trading posts evolved into fishing centers. The contractors running the fishingbusiness for the Matsumae introduced Ainu fishermen to more productive methods, forinstance 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 producegoods for trade. Under the basho ukeoi, Ainu were hired only for the fishing season andsometimes found their resources inadequate during the winter. As various products takenfrom land and sea became scarcer, hard times ensued during some years; In 1725-26 sometwo hundred Ainu died of starvation when the fall salmon run on the Ishikari Riverfailed.8

The herring fishery became more and more important as Honshu farmers adoptedthe practice of fertilizing their fields with Ezo fish meal. As early as 1740, this Ezo prod-uct may have fertilized half the rice paddies in western Japan. Ships loaded with herringsailed from Ezo south in the Japan Sea to a port near Kyoto.9 By now the Omi were invest-ing large monies to build up the fishing industry and expand the resources they controlledalong Ezo’s coasts. During fishing season, Matsumae officials would be stationed at thetrading posts while Ainu worked for the traders there. The Matsumae required Ainu lead-ers to be in charge of the Ainu working in the fishery, and the Ainu leaders received com-pensation, or, some would say, bribes, for doing this. The traders, of course, had to paythe Matsumae for licenses to trade in the area, and the Matsumae forbade the traders fromliving in these fishing centers year-round.

Because of herring, Esashi, on the Oshima Peninsula’s west coast, grew to be one ofthe most important towns in the Matsumae domain, crowded with merchants and peo-ple who came to fish during the seasonal run. So many herring filled the sea that peopleof 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 JapanSea, has a very small harbor. The herring fishery in the vicinity peaked about 1900 and


Esashi is a quiet town today. Matsumae and Hakodate were the other two towns whereHonshu merchants ran their business; these men throve by extending credit to fishermento finance their work until the catch could be sold.

The Santan trade was at its strongest during the eighteenth century. The Matsumaepersuaded Sakhalin Ainu to procure more and more Ezo brocade from China, for it couldeasily be traded to Honshu people who valued it highly. The Ainu traded fur to repre-sentatives of China’s Qing Dynasty, but Ainu found it harder and harder to obtain thefur required to get as much silk as Matsumae traders wanted. Ezo products also arrivedin China through Wajin traders who took them to Nagasaki, where Chinese ships wereallowed to call. Among the items from Ezo were dried sea cucumbers and abalone. A lateeighteenth century report indicated more than 130,000 pounds of these items going toChina in a single year.10

Exploitation of the Ainu continued. Many Wajin seasonal workers who came fromnorthern Honshu for the fishing season temporarily took Ainu women. And thoughShakushain’s War had come about partly because of Ainu unhappiness with unfair tradepractices, these continued. Ainu coveted sake; unscrupulous merchants traded it to Ainuin barrels with false bottoms. Sometimes traders diluted the sake with water. Some mer-chants had the Ainu drink excessively, to muddle their thinking and be cheated more eas-ily. Meanwhile, in order to force Ainu to work in the fishing industry, Matsumae ruleprohibited Ainu from raising crops and buying seeds or the hoes to cultivate plants. Mat-sumae representatives sometimes even told Ainu that raising crops would displease thegods or cause illness— a real worry at a time when epidemics of diseases previouslyunknown to Ezo had invaded Ainu communities. Often Ainu would, however, grow foodsecretly in locations far from their community in order to keep the gardens from the pry-ing eyes of Matsumae officials. The prohibition of grain raising of course led Ainu to wantto 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 becauseof the lack of deer, which were so important to the diet. Sometimes Ainu anxious for peltsto trade overhunted the animals and sometimes the animals perished during especiallyhard winters.

In a number of places, Ainu were prohibited from learning to read or even to speakJapanese, 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 thesandals and raincoats made of straw that Wajin farmers used. Occasionally Wajin evenkilled Ainu who would not do the work asked of them.

Given practices and problems such as these, it is not surprising that Ainu rebellionscontinued to break out. Rivalry over hunting and fishing areas led Ainu clans to challengeeach 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 thatsince Russians had been friendly to the Ainu, Japanese should act the same way to makesure the Ainu did not prefer Russian to Japanese rule and thus imperil Ezo’s security. Hewarned that Russia menaced Japan.11

Meanwhile, late in the eighteenth century came a series of bad years in the Wajinchifishery, but this did not lead to widespread destitution because fish prices increased asthe supply decreased. By this time, Matsumae overlords no longer prohibited Wajin immi-gration, even to the Ezochi, though no Wajin were officially allowed to reside perma-


nently in that part of the island. In fact, Matsumae control became more and more ten-uous.

A frightening uprising with long-lasting ramifications erupted in 1789. Just asShakushain remains a hero to many Ainu, the shocking Wajin response to the 1789 eventsmakes them a continuing spur to Ainu nationalism. At that time, Ainu were restrictedto trading at posts chartered to contractors by the Matsumae. It was often these contrac-tors 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 Hidayaman had come to Ezo as early as 1702 and obtained permission from the Matsumae toset up a lumber business. He brought workers to Ezo with him, sent the lumber his work-ers cut to Honshu cities, and paid large amounts to the Matsumae for the privilege. Inreturn, his family obtained trading posts and amassed wealth. His grandson, HidayaKyubei, expanded his operations, in 1774 opening a trading post on Kunashir. Over thenext few years he gained more and more control over the Ainu there, until they werereduced from a self-reliant society living in a traditional manner to the near-slavery andnear-starvation seen at Hidaya’s other posts. Wajin frequently threatened Ainu with deathor 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. EvenAoshima Shunzo, an Edo official sent later to probe the conflict and its causes, foundthat some blame lay with the Hidaya family, who forced Ainu in their region to work atrates of remuneration impossible to support life.

In 1789, a group of young Ainu, incensed because they believed that several Ainudied after Hidaya officials had given them poisoned sake, instigated hostilities, usuallyknown today as the Menashi-Kunashir War. Ainu attacked Wajin at the Kunashir trad-ing 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 defensivemeasures, but local Ainu leaders who had been away at the time of the attack returnedand persuaded the rebels to desist. To the elders, good relations with Wajin remainedcrucially important, as Ainu livelihood depended on them. Meanwhile, news got back tothe Matsumae, who sent a large force to the affected region near Cape Nosappu east ofNemuro, including troops from other domains ordered by the shogunate to aid the Mat-sumae. The soldiers captured the eighty-seven Ainu they felt were responsible for theoutbreak. Executions of the leaders began. One of the Ainu let out a war-cry; the Wajinsoldiers reacted in panic and speared prisoners randomly, leaving thirty-seven dead. Theirheads were taken for display at the Matsumae capital. Hidaya lost his contract and theMatsumae issued new regulations for trading with Ainu; some improvement may haveresulted.

This was the last serious Ainu challenge to the Matsumae, but as Wajin immigra-tion continued, so did Ainu resentment. Not only were those in the far eastern rampartsof Ezo and the Kurils dissatisfied. More and more Wajin were moving to Ezo; for exam-ple, famine in northern Honshu in the 1780s had encouraged more migrants, many ofwhom settled around Uchiura Bay and became involved in the kombu trade, the economicmainstay of that area. Ainu throughout the island felt threatened.

The Matsumae family had tried to keep as independent as possible from the centralgovernment, being fairly secretive about the Ezo economic base. However, the shogu-nate 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


trade now became a source of income for the center rather than for the Matsumae. More-over, as early as 1717 the shogunate had created an office for Ainu affairs in Ezo, and sup-ported it by taxing the northern fisheries.

In the years near the end of the eighteenth century, some influential Japanese, suchas 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 theJapanese nation. He had traveled in northern Japan while northern Honshu districts suf-fered 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 hesaw planted at a nearby village included “rice, pulses, flax, hemp, beans and tobacco.There were vegetables growing in the kitchen gardens: turnips, radishes, carrots, beet-root, beans, cucumbers similar to Turkish cucumbers, and various sorts of peas. As theJapanese do not use four-legged animals for food, we saw no cattle, but only horses; wesaw no fowls except chickens.”12

In two hundred years of Matsumae rule, Ezo had changed. In 1800, island popula-tion included an estimated twenty thousand Ainu and thirty thousand Wajin. This com-pares with thirty thousand Ainu and twenty thousand Wajin in 1700, and a century beforethat, in 1600, fifty thousand Ainu and only twelve thousand Wajin.13 It had been Mat-sumae policy not to share information about Ezo; the shogunate was not apprised ofchallenges such as Ainu violence and the appearance of Russian ships. No longer couldsuch events remain hidden, though. Over several years, shogunal officials debated Ezopolicy, and by the end of the century the shogunate assumed direct control of part of theisland. Matsumae rule was to return later, however.

Ezo and the shogunate

The shogunate had several reasons to assert more of the management of Ezo. Officialsworried 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 andshogunate officials feared that the Matsumae simply were not strong enough to countereffectively any Russian threat.

In 1799 Edo imposed direct rule in the eastern part of the island and ordered twonorthern Honshu clans, the Nambu of Iwate Prefecture and the Tsugaru clan of AomoriPrefecture, to police Ezo. After 1799, the trading posts assumed a military character, whiletrading also continued. The area of greatest concern was around Akkeshi, Nemuro andthe southern Kurils, where Russians had just tried unsuccessfully to establish tradingposts.

Under the new regime, the shogunate appointed Habuto Masayasu to be a Hako-date bugyo, or magistrate. Habuto energetically supported Ezo development, and amonghis projects was a farming colony near Hakodate, where both climate and soil conditionswere better than near Matsumae. He planned with care, seeing that the immigrants hadadequate 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 thebay from Hakodate, was one of the settlements begun then. Inland from Hakodate andnorth of the city, Nanae counts its beginning from 1786, a census that year counting fiftyhomes and 265 people. Starting in 1802, the shogunate also saw that Buddhist temples


were built in Hokkaido. Another venture begun at this time with the support of officialsin Hakodate was the raising of horses near today’s towns of Abuta, near Lake Toya, andUrakawa, on the coast northwest of Cape Erimo. Some of Japan’s superior horses andtheir trainers were brought from the Nambu region of northern Honshu.

The first colonization directly sponsored by the government came in 1800, when theshogunate, 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, whichalso made available a horse and a gun for every two men. The settlers were to be a defen-sive force as well as farmers. Arriving at Ezo, part of the group headed eastward alongthe coast, settling in Shiranuka, near Kushiro, while the others located at Yufutsu, neartoday’s city of Tomakomai. But neither government nor settlers realized the harshnessof conditions even on Ezo’s southern shore, and within three years, most of the colonistshad died or left these settlements.

In 1802, having decided that the government changes on Ezo were worthwhile, theshogunate moved the seat of Ezo government from Matsumae to Hakodate. This changeseemed to emphasize the break between the Matsumae regime and shogunal control. Italso signaled that Hakodate was overtaking the town of Matsumae in importance. Theshogunate also established small military posts on the coast. A few years later, Edo tookover direct control of all Ezo, resettling the lord of Matsumae and his retainers just northof Edo and making more administrative changes in Ezo’s government, moving variousduties to an office in Hakodate. Shortly afterward, Russian raids in the Kurils and Japa-nese outposts on Sakhalin’s far south caused another policy shift; defense, not develop-ment, would now be the goal. The shogunate sent troops from Edo and the domains innorthern Honshu, with different domains given responsibility for different sections ofEzo. Eight hundred men were stationed at Hakodate, two hundred at Matsumae, onehundred at Nemuro, more in other parts of the island and some in the South Kurils andSakhalin. Ironically, soon after taking control of the entire island, the shogunate scaledback 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 postsdied during the winter for which they were not prepared. During the next few years, theRussian threat seemed to be lessening, and troops were gradually withdrawn.

The shogunate reversed some Matsumae policies toward Ainu, who were now to begiven some education and encouraged to adopt Japanese ways, to become farmers and toreplace their meat-based diet with one centered on rice. The government brought med-ical 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 Ezoagainst Russian threats. Cutting Ainu hair and shaving off beards were also important,for Russians seeing the shorn Ainu would, Wajin officials believed, perceive these Ainuas Japanese.

Total Wajin population of Ezo increased markedly during direct rule from Edo. Per-haps 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 somenotable advances, almost all in its early period. One was in road building. The major roadproject 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 for-midable barriers in some places. The route—more than seven hundred miles long—was


completed after three years’ work. In addition to roads, by 1803, thirty-five inns for trav-elers were built.

Not only did the bugyo construct roads, officials began reforestation and land recla-mation efforts, also improving Hakodate’s harbor and organizing a postal system. Dur-ing this period, exports from Ezo to the home islands increased dramatically. Finally, asJohn J. Stephan has suggested, this period of direct rule established the perception in Japanthat Ezo was, indeed, part of the nation.15

While administering Ezo, the shogunate abolished the basho ukeoi in order to endthe abuses of the old system. Officials planned to run the Ainu trade. The shogunate neverfully implemented direct supervision, though. By 1815 practices resembled those underthe Matsumae, including similar problems and injustices. The Matsumae were allowedto reinstate the basho ukeoi, with contractors running the industry. The contractors sup-posedly provided food for their Ainu workers as well as maintaining roads and way sta-tions. They were to collect a tax from any independent fishermen who came into theirarea. They also, of course, had to pay a fee to obtain any contract. And with the intro-duction of the pound trap—a device whose operation required capital but which caughtlarge numbers of fish—the fishing industry became more and more dominated by wealthyentrepreneurs.

After some years of quiet, in 1821 the rulers in Edo returned Ezo to Matsumae con-trol, probably for various reasons: financial retrenchment, lack of interest and perhapseven bribery by some in the Matsumae family, eager to resume their powerful role inEzo. Most important, the Russians no longer seemed interested in Ezo. The announcedreason for the change was that relations between Wajin and Ainu were now on a settledbasis.

The Matsumae, once more in a preeminent position in Ezo, resumed their policy ofdiscouraging settlement, but a number of Wajin refugees sought protection from a north-ern Honshu famine between 1832 and 1838. This led to a great expansion of the fishingindustry, as people looked for jobs and Honshu farmers wanted more and more herringfertilizer. The extensive trading network of the Matsumae kept Ezo well supplied withfood. Island population grew, despite the Matsumae policy of interrogating and taxingall 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 Wajinarrived to work in the fisheries, establishing themselves independently and taking workformerly done by Ainu.

Matsumae rule of the island brought no important initiatives and received little ifany attention from Edo. In 1854, outside pressures compelled the shogunate to take con-trol 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 Mat-suura 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 boundarybetween the Wajinchi and the Ezochi. Yamakoshinai included a trading post, storehousefor 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 populationof 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 outto the coast, meaning that travelers who planned to continue northward had to go byboat.16 In a few years the division between the Ezochi and the Wajinchi would be abol-


ished, and no longer would travelers be checked at borders such as these. A replica ofMatsuura’s map of Ezo can be seen in the Former Hokkaido Government Office Build-ing, or Aka Renga, in Sapporo.

And what of the town of Matsumae? In 1854, it suffered a catastrophe when all ofits castle except the three-story central tower and the main gate burned down. The shogu-nate rebuilt the castle after resuming control of Ezo in 1855 and once again orderednorthern Honshu clans to guard the island from foreign threats. This reconstructed cas-tle became the final traditional-style castle to be built in all Japan. However, MatsumaeTown irrevocably lost its importance to Hakodate, the capital designated by the shogu-nate, especially after Hakodate was opened to foreign commerce in 1855. For some yearsearlier, 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 steamedpast on its way to Hakodate in August 1855. “The city of Matsumae is very large, and sit-uated on the side of a hill, which gradually rises above it to the height of seven hundredfeet. Rugged ledges of rock, taking the bend of the coast, extend towards the shore inparallel lines. The houses are large, whitewashed, and contrast prettily with the darkgreen trees which shoot up in every open space. The temples are handsome, with pro-jecting eaves and quaint roofs rising at each extremity into upright points.” Of the cas-tle, he noted, “the dwelling of the Governor, who is a prince, is situated at a little distanceright of the town; it is a large and handsome structure, snow-white, ... having turrets oneither end; it is surrounded by gardens, full of evergreens, and sheltered in the rear bylarge trees: here also are the residences of the officials attending on the Prince. The wholeis enclosed by a low white parapet with many embrasures, through which peeped someguns. Hundreds of junks were at anchor before the city. The anchorage is unsafe, beingso much exposed to the south wind.”17 Breakwaters now protect the harbor, but it is stillsmall 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 govern-ment forces and Wajin rebels which destroyed two-thirds of the town. Until then, Mat-sumae remained a thriving place, prosperous because most of the fishing entrepreneurshad kept their headquarters there. But Matsumae’s eclipse by Hakodate was perhapsinevitable because of Matsumae’s lack of a good harbor.

When American William Wheeler traveled through Matsumae in 1877, he reportedthat the old castle’s walls had been used to build breakwaters in the harbor and that theoutlying structures of the fortress were being used as schools and hospitals. H. A. Sav-age Landor visited in the 1890s and found the town “the most picturesque of all the townsin Hokkaido,” for it was old and others he had been in were modern. He admired Mat-sumae’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 1869bombardment. This castle burned down in 1949, but it was rebuilt again—though in con-crete—and still stands, a symbol of Matsumae’s one-time importance. In the castle arehistoric 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 Matsumaefamily held power. Perhaps more than any other place in Hokkaido, Matsumae can evokethoughts of traditional Japan.


4 The Explorers

Ainu and Wajin were not left alone to determine Ezo history and development. Dur-ing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while the Matsumae dominated Ezo andlater, when the shogunate took direct control of the northern land, adventurers andexplorers from the Japanese heartland and abroad appeared in the Ezo area; their pres-ence helped direct the course of the island’s history.

Earlier on, tales circulated around the world about elusive islands rich in silver orgold. An English trader in East Asia named John Saris reported “gold, silver and otherriches” on Ezo in 1613.1 The island began appearing on foreign maps by the mid–seven-teenth century, though not accurately. Even then, geography of the North Pacific arearemained hazy to Europeans and Japanese alike.

The earliest Europeans actually to visit Ezo appeared in the early seventeenth cen-tury. First came Jesuit missionary Jeronimo de Angelis, shortly before 1620, but he didnot report any valuable minerals there and he mistakenly thought Ezo was a great con-tinent. Like many later travelers, he was interested in the Ainu and described them insome detail, noting their earrings, embroidered robes and bamboo armor. Diogo Car-valho, another Jesuit, wrote that he entered Ezo, pretending to be a miner, in 1620. Hedescribed the process he saw people using to extract gold. When a group of men decidedthat gold would probably be washed down from the mountains into a particular riverbed, they would purchase from the Matsumae the right to mine a certain part of thatriver. They would then divert the stream and look for gold dust or nuggets in the graveland rock of the river bed. Carvalho wrote that fifty thousand gold seekers had appearedin Ezo in 1619; his guess is probably wildly mistaken but does suggest that a large num-ber of prospectors came.

In 1643, an expedition sent by the Dutch East India Company from Batavia (nowJakarta, Indonesia) appeared in Ezo waters to look for the treasures of the east, thoughfabulous China was the expedition’s primary goal. Filled with items to trade, the expe-dition’s ship Castricom, commanded by Maerten Gerritsz Vries, sailed north as far as Ezoand anchored briefly at Akkeshi. Vries has been credited with being the earliest Euro-pean seafarer in Ezo’s vicinity, thus “discovering” for Europe Ezo, Sakhalin and the KurilIslands. 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 threehouses. Published with the journal of Vries’ first mate, C. J. Coen, is a description of “theisland called by the Japanese Eso,” incorporating some details of Ainu life—includingthe claim that each Ainu man had two wives. Dutch officials reported that the expedition

56

found “no trade of any importance” on Ezo.2 Vries’s geographical errors influenced futureexplorers, 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 dif-ferent from that of the other nations, whose explorers merely brought alien ideas and thedesire to trade. Hokkaido’s history has been directed again and again by the relationshipbetween 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 northernneighbor. In fact, the possibility that Russia might expand into Hokkaido was the spurto Japanese development of the island, and changes in Moscow’s politics and policiescontinue to affect Hokkaido just as do those in Tokyo.

Japan first became known in Russia in the seventeenth century, but not until the eigh-teenth did the first significant contacts between the two nations come. In 1649, Russiansexploring eastward through Siberia reached the Pacific Ocean, or more specifically, the Seaof Okhotsk. Russians showed growing interest in Japan because of hearsay accounts ofher wealth in gold and other valuables. By the early eighteenth century Russians venturedbeyond Kamchatka, eastward toward America and south along the Kuril Island chain.Looking for sea otters, a Cossack group from Kamchatka reached the northernmost of theKurils in 1711, and within a few years, individual Russians came to the island chain forfur. 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 Chris-tianity 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 and1740s. In 1738 Lieutenant Martin Spanberg, a Dane sailing with a Russian fleet com-manded by Vitus Bering, sailed among the Kuril Islands. A year later, he was dispatchedto Japan with four ships. While Bering pushed eastward toward Alaska, Spanberg sailedsouth from Kamchatka and entered the Bay of Sendai on Honshu’s northeast coast wherehe met local Japanese. Spanberg also landed briefly in Kunashir Island in the Kurils toobtain 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 whetherSpanberg 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 for-eign explorers were near. Spanberg sailed to Japan again in 1742, but because of diseaseamong his crew and fog over the land, this trip was unsuccessful. Meanwhile, one ofSpanberg’s commanders, Aleksei Shelting, sailed along the east coast of Sakhalin, but inthe fog thought he had reached Ezo. One of the Kuril Islands, Shikotan—part of Russiasince 1945 but still claimed by the Japanese—was named Spanberg Island by a Sovietexpedition in 1946, but the name has apparently not taken root.

In 1759, the Matsumae had word that Russians were settling in the Kurils but keptthe news from the shogunate. Twelve years later, the government in Edo first showedconcern about a possible Russian threat, and this was due to a letter sent by a Hungar-ian, Mauritius Augustus Count of Benyovsky, who had escaped Russian capture and fledacross the sea to Japan. His letter claimed that the Russians coveted Ezo. Benyovsky,

4. The Explorers 57

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

however, was simply an adventurer, and though the shogunate believed him, the Russiangovernment had no plans to threaten Japan. The weak Russian presence on the Pacificmade 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 otherat that time through Ainu middlemen, though the Matsumae did not tell the shogunateof this.

As John J. Stephan has pointed out, during the period from 1770 to 1813 the fron-tiers of the two nations came into contact.3 With population in Siberia growing, Russianofficials there hoped trade with the Japanese would help improve their economy, espe-cially by increasing the food supply. It would be much easier to obtain necessary goodsfrom Japan than from distant European Russia. Russians were also interested in Ezo andthe Kurils because of rumors of these islands’ fertility; perhaps they were superior toRussian territory. In 1778 and 1779 Russia sponsored approaches to Ezo, near Nemuroon the easternmost point of the island and at Akkeshi, a little more than thirty miles westof Nemuro. At Akkeshi, Russians asking to open trade with the Japanese were told thatthey could trade only through the Ainu on a specified island in the Kurils or far to thesouth in Nagasaki, where the Chinese and Dutch could trade. The Japanese officialsreturned the items the Russians had brought to Akkeshi as gifts, though the visitors wereallowed to take on the provisions they needed to continue their voyage. Russians con-tinued traveling to the region, however, and in 1783 first landed on Sakhalin.

For many years, Japanese officials were hostile to their countrymen who had driftedto other nations after storms or accidents at sea. Russians living in the western Aleutianswelcomed a group of castaways led by Kodayu Daikokuya, captain of a ship disabled ina storm off the east coast of Japan. The vessel had drifted for six months until spottingAmchitka Island in 1783. Its men spent several years on this Alaskan island and built asimple 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. Peters-burg, the Russian capital, where he even met Empress Catherine the Great. To returnhim and his compatriots to Japan, and to make another attempt to open trade, anotherRussian mission, this one carrying negotiator Adam Erikovich Laxman (of Finnishdescent) headed for Japan. Strict instructions to the crew ordered the men not to getdrunk, which would hurt Russia’s reputation in Japanese eyes, and not to display anysymbols 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 Japa-nese, in mid–October and Laxman sent word to Matsumae that he planned to delivercastaways. Meanwhile, Wajin officials at Nemuro agreed that Laxman and his ship’s crewcould winter there, as they had asked. The Japanese even arranged for barracks so theRussians could live ashore. Meanwhile, as many other foreigners found when they triedto come to Japan, the country’s officials were very slow in imparting decisions to unwel-come visitors. Only after about five months and much consultation among Japaneseofficials 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 grouprefused and finally received permission to sail their ship there. On the way, the shipstopped in Hakodate harbor where the governor welcomed Laxman with ceremony. Thenit was on to Matsumae by land, in a party that included more than four hundred Japa-nese. Laxman himself was carried in a litter. He urged the Japanese to open a northern

4. The Explorers 59

port, preferably Matsumae, to foreigners, but he was told, as others had been in previ-ous years, that only in Nagasaki was trading possible. He was given a document to showat Nagasaki, but instead of sailing southward, on August 6 Laxman left for Russia; hehad carried out his orders. The Japanese castaways he had brought with him gained per-mission to stay in Japan and their leader, Kodayu, became a source of information aboutthe west. Though he was kept under house arrest and did not succeed in establishing traderelations, he is commonly regarded as the father of Russian studies in Japan.

Some historians have suggested that because Laxman was merely a lieutenant andnot of higher rank, Japanese officials might not have taken him very seriously.4 Thesedays, Nemuro honors Laxman’s sojourn as an important episode in city history andthough Laxman did not achieve his objective, his journey did affect Ezo’s future. The fearof Russian influence in the Kurils and the possibility of secret trade between the lord ofMatsumae and the Russians led to a shogunate decision to institute direct rule of theeastern 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 carryout trade and establish agriculture; food crops that could be raised would be welcomedin Kamchatka. These Russians traded with Ainu, but the shogunate wanted the Russiansgone, and therefore prohibited Ainu from the more southerly Kurils from traveling toUrup. Officials made a formal claim that Urup was Japanese territory, installing a markerpole there. With no trade now possible, many of the settlers from Russia left Urup; theothers 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 oneobjective of the first Russian round-the-world voyage, whose general purpose was to exam-ine ways to better provision the Russian outposts in the far northeast of Asia and in North


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 privilegesensued, but Nemuro honors Laxman today with this roadside panorama.

America. Captain A. J. von Krusenstern commanded the sloop Nadezhda, which set offfrom 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 tradewith Japan to replenish supplies for the Russian colonies. He hoped to get permission touse a northern Japanese port to meet both these objectives. Rezanov had the documentthe Japanese had earlier given Laxman, granting permission to go to Nagasaki. More-over, his ship carried another group of Japanese castaways, who had come to shore onan Aleutian Island and subsequently lived for nearly a decade in Russia. The Nadezhdaproceeded to Nagasaki, but after six months of waiting and negotiation—amounting tohouse arrest for the Russians on shipboard, Krusenstern then left and sailed north, crossedTsugaru Strait (which he called Sangar) and sailed past Matsumae, along Hokkaido’s westcoast, through La Perouse Strait and on into the Sea of Okhotsk. He wrote an accountof the voyage which was translated into English and published in London a few yearslater. He described his interest in finding an island called Karafuto. A chart that hadappeared a few years earlier, based on Russian explorations in the area, had shown Kara-futo between “Jesso and Sachalin.”5

While the Nadezhda was anchored near the northern part of Ezo in 1805, Krusensternhad a chance to discuss the geography of the area with a Japanese officer, who confirmedthat the island north across the strait from Ezo was Karafuto, which, of course, is the Japa-nese name for Sakhalin. The officer did not have direct knowledge about northern Kara-futo, which he said “the natives called Sandan,” though he had heard that there was anotherland north of it. Krusenstern did not learn anything definite about Sakhalin or Karafutoas he continued his voyage. He later attempted to sail south through the channel betweenSakhalin 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 namesof 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 Lax-man, and due to this, he knew a few Russian words. The officer was stationed in the farnorth of Ezo to supervise Ainu trade, he said, though he could spend the winters in Mat-sumae 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 totrade, the Ainu exchanging dried herring for used clothing and buttons, and the Wajinbringing pipes, lacquerware and obscene pictures to sell. The Japanese officer askedKrusenstern to depart quickly, warning that as soon as Matsumae officials learned of theRussian vessel’s presence, they would send a fleet to attack. Krusenstern assured him thathis ship would leave as soon as the fog dispersed.

Krusenstern’s comments about Japan are interesting if not always accurate. He notedthe difference in appearance of southern Ezo and what he referred to as Japan (south ofEzo). He wrote that in Japan even the hillsides were farmed, almost to their crests, exceptin the far north of Honshu. He suggested that Ezo’s wild appearance might indicate thatthe island suffered “frequent and terrible” earthquakes. The northern part of Ezo wasbetter than the south because there was more flat land, he thought, and added that springwas very late in coming to the north of Ezo; he felt that parts of Kamchatka quite a bitfarther north were more advanced in springtime than was northern Ezo.7

4. The Explorers 61

Meanwhile, Rezanov had departed on another ship. Frustrated after having spentlong months in Nagasaki trying to establish trade between Japan and Russia but to noavail and determined to compel the opening of trade between Russia and Japan, he orderedtwo young officers to raid Japanese settlements in the north. Rezanov also suggested thatRussia establish a fort on Sakhalin, supporting it through hunting.

Lieutenant Nikolai Alexandrovich Khvostov and Midshipman Gavril IvanovichDavydov, both serving with the Russian-American Company, led the raids, Khvostovcommanding the Yuna and Davydov the Avos. The Russian raiders torched several Japa-nese outposts on Sakhalin, Iturup and Rishiri Island as well as ravaging some Japanesejunks at sea in 1806 and 1807. When Russians attacked Iturup, Japanese explorer and sur-veyor Mamiya Rinzo happened to be on the island. He urged the local Japanese garrisoncommander 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. Rumorsabounded in Ezo that the Russians planned more attacks, even on Ezo itself, and thatthey had already landed at Cape Soya or Akkeshi. In reality, Rezanov had not received ananswer from Emperor Alexander I regarding his proposals and had authorized only theKhvostov and Davydov raids. (Rezanov had died en route back to Moscow.) In Hako-date, fearing further attacks, bugyo Habuto Masayasu asked the lords of domains in north-ern Honshu to send assistance. Hakodate townsmen assumed guard duty and sent thecity’s women and children away. The vessels that the Russians plundered and destroyedincluded 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 hap-pening; meanwhile, several of the north Honshu domain lords had responded immedi-ately to Habuto’s call, sending three thousand men to Ezo. Habuto arranged that thesesoldiers be divided, to guard Hakodate, Urakawa, Kunashir in the Kurils, Soya at thenorthern tip of Ezo, Esashi north of Matsumae, and other places. But because, accord-ing to the shogunate, Habuto did not have the right to request assistance from otherdaimyo, 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 fur-ther planned attacks turned out to be rumors only, but the shogunate decided it was timeto 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 clan-destine trade between Wajin and Russians through Ainu intermediaries.

Writing in the later nineteenth century, Thomas Blakiston reported another precau-tion taken against Russians, presumably after Khvostov-Davydov raids. Great piles offirewood 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 south-ward, each fire would be a signal to light the next one, until the news reached the author-ities.8

Another Russian sailor appeared in Japan a few years later and soon found himselfimprisoned. This was Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin, a Russian naval captain from anoble family. Sailing around the world in 1811 on the ship Diana, his main task was toexplore the North Pacific and to find and map areas of it near Russia. His plan called forsailing to La Perouse Strait between the island he called Matsmai and “the Peninsula ofSagaleen.”9 Ordered to survey the Sea of Okhotsk, Golovnin anchored near the south-ern tip of Kunashir, one of the Kurils closest to Ezo, desiring to obtain firewood and waterfrom the Japanese. He led seven men ashore despite having been warned by Ainu that


the Wajin were suspicious. Alarmed by the Davydov and Khvostov raids several yearsearlier, 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 partof the way by mountain trail, the journey taking almost a month. Golovnin was surprisedat the number of large villages his group saw in eastern Ezo after they had been broughtover from Kunashir; he estimated that there was a village every two miles or so. Heobserved 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 Golovninand his men received meals that varied little, usually rice with pickled radishes, soup, “akind of maccaroni” and a piece of fish.10 Thus even in the early nineteenth century ricewas available in Ezo for the Wajin who lived there. (And since rice had to be importedto Ezo, the Wajin felt they were treating Golovnin well by offering him this expensivefood.) The ordinary people the Russians encountered on their difficult trip acrossHokkaido were helpful. The Wajin guards were kind, too; they even drove bothersomeflies away from the bound captives. They did keep the men roped up to prevent escapeattempts, 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 ina barn-like structure apparently newly built to imprison them. After some months, theywere moved to more spacious quarters which included even a garden. Aside from crampedconfinement, the Russians received kind treatment in Hakodate and Matsumae. In bothtowns, Japanese who wanted to increase Japan’s knowledge of Russian language and con-ditions managed to ask the prisoners a great many questions despite the language diffi-culty, and the captives imparted a wealth of useful information. Golovnin helped compilea Russian-Japanese dictionary and helped the Japanese understand Russian grammar,but at times he and the other Russians purposely misled their interrogators. For exam-ple, the Russians exaggerated the superiority of Russian military forces. This may havebeen influential, for even after Russian power was humbled by Britain and France in theCrimean War more than forty years later, the Japanese believed that Russia was the strong-est power in the world.

Golovnin and his companions were imprisoned for over two years. They met explorerMamiya Rinzo when he visited them in their quarters in Matsumae. He brought themcitrus fruits to ward off scurvy and spent some effort to get the Russians to explain howvarious European astronomical instruments worked; he wanted to learn more about sur-veying, 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 consideredtrying to escape, hoping they could find some kind of boat to sail westward to the Asianmainland. 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 findany suitable boats and when they did spot several on the shore, they were unable to pushthem off the beach. Eight days after their escape, the men were detained in the nearbyhills and their imprisonment continued, in less pleasant conditions.

While Golovnin’s party was kept captive, Petr Ivanovich Rikord, now the seniorofficer on the Diana, sailed the ship back to Russia, as he felt he did not have enough mento rescue the captives. In September 1812, he and the Diana crew, still anxious for their

4. The Explorers 63

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 capturedTakadaya 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 Kurilswith Takadaya and began negotiations for the release of Golovnin’s party, asserting thatthe raids of Khvostov and Davydov had not been instigated by Russian authorities. Rikordhad 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 hadbeen 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, how-ever, 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 Okhotskto obtain an official statement, complete with seal, from the Russian commandant there,explaining that the government had not sanctioned the Khvostov-Davydov raids. Withthis, Rikord sailed to Hakodate. Finally, after he repeated his assurance that the Russiangovernment had not sponsored and, in fact, had condemned the raids, Japanese officialsliberated Golovnin and his companions in October 1813. Golovnin later noted that thegroup 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 suggestedthat the release of the Russians was important to ensure both fishing and the smooth flowof trade along the Japanese seacoast. Fishing would again come to play a leading role inU.S.S.R.–Japan relations in the twentieth century.

When Golovnin finally reached St. Petersburg, it was seven years since he had leftthe city on the journey that led to his captivity. Once home in Russia, he wrote an accountof his experiences. Published in Russia and soon translated into English, his descriptionsof Ezo were sought after, as he was one of very few Europeans who had penetrated theisland. Based on his adventures, he urged that any negotiations with the Japanese be car-ried out with “prudence, patience, courtesy and candour.”11 His release began a periodof good feeling between Japan and Russia, especially because despite his captivity, whenhe returned to Russia Golovnin spoke well of the Japanese.

Takadaya Kahei, who had learned Russian, also worked to establish good relationsbetween Russia and Japan, and in Hakodate today stands his statue, commemorating notonly his role in helping develop the city but also his important part in resolving theGolovnin question. Golovnin is recognized today in the Kuril Islands, as a peak onKunashir Island has been named for him.

After Golovnin’s Ezo sojourn, Japan and Russia agreed to send representatives tomeet on the Kuril island of Urup in to settle a border between the two nations. Both in1814 and 1815 Russians sailed to the Kurils to make contact. The Russian officials alsohoped to establish trade. The two nations’ envoys did not meet, however; in 1814, theRussian ship’s captain merely cruised near the island instead of landing, and in 1815 fogprevented contact.

A generation after Golovnin’s experiences in Ezo, some shipwrecked Japanesebenefited 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 destroyedtheir ship’s rudder, mast and sail. The men drifted through the Pacific Ocean for five months


before being rescued by an American whaler, which dropped them off when making portin Hawaii. The Japanese group wanted to return to their country; a British ship took themto Kamchatka. Later they were sent on to Okhotsk, where the Russian-American Com-pany would be responsible for them. Okhotsk Governor Nikolai Vukovich saw to it thatthe Japanese were treated well, explaining that his uncle was Golovnin. Vukovich toldthe men that once when Golovnin feared he would starve to death, his Japanese guardsecretly gave him a ball of rice. This was just one of many helpful acts; thus Golovninand later his nephew wanted to repay the kindness.

Eventually, via Sitka, Alaska, a Russian ship took the men towards Ezo. Because ofprevious conflicts between Russians and Japanese, the ship’s captain feared a possible Japa-nese attack, and he approached the Kurils and Ezo with care. Spotting an Ainu boat inwhich a Matsumae samurai, Kobayashi Chogoro, was riding, the Russians sent the ship-wrecked Japanese with Kobayashi, who took them back to Matsumae. Here they weredispatched to Edo where they faced long interrogation. After several years of questions,only four of the Japanese fishermen were still living. Including their drifting, subsequentvoyages on American, British and Russian ships, and interrogation in Japan, they weregone from home for eight years.

Other explorers

The quest for better knowledge of Ezo increased during the seventeenth centuryamong Japanese, but it was in the late eighteenth century that serious and sustained Japa-nese exploration of the northern island began. By that time, too, ships from westernEurope were appearing, and when the whaling industry grew in the early nineteenth cen-tury, adventurers from around the world seemed to come to Ezo’s seas.

Word of Shakushain’s war reached far beyond the Matsumae domain, stimulatinginterest in Ezo. During the seventeenth century, the Matsumae arranged for explorationof the island, having it mapped (with limited accuracy). Such maps and expedition recordsdo not now exist however. Tokugawa Mitsukuni, who hoped to expand into the north-ern island from his domain—Mito, on northern Honshu—ordered construction of aship, the Kaifu Maru, to explore Ezo. He outfitted it with navigational instruments mod-ern for the time, which he had obtained from the west, and in 1687 the ship reached theIshikari River. Here its men explored the wide Ishikari Plain, where the city of Sapporonow 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 govern-ment-sponsored exploratory journey in 1737, however, sent Sakakura Genjiro to Ezo tolook for gold and silver. Though he found no great deposits of precious metals, he broughtback 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 theaims was to learn the smuggling routes used to bring goods from Russia to Ezo; anotherwas to continue to look for valuable resources in the northern lands. The expeditionreported that the Matsumae had a policy of keeping the Ainu both indigent and unin-formed. The explorers analyzed the farming possibilities of Ezo and reported that sev-enty thousand people could successfully live there—and grow rice. Though one of theexpedition’s tasks was to study winter weather conditions in Ezo, the extreme cold and

4. The Explorers 65

insufficient supplies led to illness and death of some of the members. In fact, all of themembers 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 thenorth, had urged that one of his students, Mogami Tokunai, be included on the expedi-tion. Mogami, merely a farmer’s son, was hired to carry surveying equipment. He morethan proved his abilities on this journey; he learned the Ainu language and played a cru-cial role the next year in producing charts of the Kurils. He claimed to be the first Wajinever to land on Iturup. To his surprise, he found three Russians living among the Ainuthere and he developed a friendship with the Russians.

Mogami’s increasing knowledge of and interest in the north led him to take moretrips there both on his own and as a shogunate official, and his skills as an Ainu inter-preter proved crucial. All told, Mogami visited Ezo nine times. When the shogunate sentAoshima Shunzo to investigate the Menashi-Kunashir revolt, Aoshima took Mogamialong as guide and interpreter. Accused later of spying during the journey, Mogami wasimprisoned, but after release and with Honda’s backing, he prepared an extensive reportabout northern regions for the shogunate. Officials sent him north again in an officialcapacity. His travels led Mogami to counsel fair treatment for the Ainu and recognitionof their abilities and their rights to traditional practices. He also criticized the shogunate’srefusal even to discuss matters with Rezanov; Mogami wished that it were possible forJapanese and Russians to open trade relations. Scholar Donald Keene says of Mogamithat his “life was one of discovery.”12

After Vries’ 1643 journey, not until 1787 did any western explorers other than theRussians arrive in the neighborhood of Ezo. European conception of the geography ofthe area was hazy; a 1754 European map, for example, labeled two separate islands asMatsumae and Ezo.

French explorer Jean-Francois de Galaup, Count of La Perouse, explored in both theAtlantic and Pacific in the second half of the eighteenth century, visiting, among otherplaces, Alaska, Hawaii, Australia and Hudson’s Bay in Canada before meeting his deathon a South Pacific island. The name “La Perouse” now appears on the map in Hawaii; LaPerouse Bay is off the southwest coast of Maui. Another La Perouse Bay (Bahia La Per-ouse) touches Easter Island’s northern coast, and, perhaps most important, the explorerhas been commemorated in La Perouse Strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, which hediscovered in 1787; Vries had missed it in the fog. What La Perouse missed, however, wasdiscovering that Sakhalin was an Island. He had sailed northward from Korea along thecoast but when off the west shore of Sakhalin, stormy seas, an accident injuring severalsailors, and contradictory interpretations of what he heard from local people led him toturn back, fairly sure that he had seen a peninsula, not an island. Then he headed throughthe strait that bears his name, exploring the Kurils en route to Petropavlovsk on the Kam-chatka Peninsula. La Perouse was mistaken in several ways; he thought that Rishiri Islandoff the northern extremity of Ezo’s west coast was a mountain rising on the main islandand he also followed Vries’s belief that the strait between Honshu and Ezo was 110 mileswide.

Only a few years later, Captain W. R. Broughton came to Ezo waters. (He had sailedearlier with Captain George Vancouver to the northwestern American coast. Broughtonwas the first British naval officer to sail into the Columbia River, which he claimed forBritain, not knowing that Robert Gray had earlier explored the region for the United


States.) In 1796, while Broughton was prospecting in the Northwest Pacific, Ainu saw hisship, the H.M.S. Providence, in southwest Ezo, sailed out to it and invited Broughtonashore. A local Wajin official discouraged the communication, though. Broughton’s goalwas to map the coast of Japan more accurately, and several times he managed to havevery brief contact with people on Ezo, in the vicinity of Uchiura Bay, which Broughtonnamed Volcano Bay. (There are impressive volcanoes both north and south of the bay’sentrance.) Here he stopped to stock up on water and wood, as well as to learn what hecould about Ezo and its people. He exchanged charts of the area with the Wajin. He hada chance to observe some Ainu, their attire, their homes and their foods, their boats andfishing implements.13

One of Broughton’s crew, a Dane named Hans Aldson, was killed when felling a treefor firewood. He was buried on Daikoku Island in Uchiura Bay just west of today’s cityof Muroran. A small representation in granite of the ship Providence now stands in Muro-ran; visible beyond it is Daikoku Island. And when the American expedition led by Com-modore 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, com-manding 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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British explorer William Broughton sailed in Hokkaido waters in 1796 and 1797. One of his crew-men died during the ship’s travels and was buried on Daikoku Island, in Uchiura Bay near Muro-ran. Here, on the Muroran shore, is a representation of Broughton’s ship and in the distance isDaikoku Island.

respected the remains, though they had been interred more than three-fourths of a cen-tury, and built on the spot where they rested one of the usual tombs of the country, withthe 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 andarrived in Ezo in July but in a smaller ship. The Providence had sunk after encounteringa coral reef off a small island between Okinawa and Taiwan. He reported that Wajin inEzo were exceedingly anxious for his expedition to leave, but instead Broughton sailedhis ship Swift to the town of Matsumae. For more than a century no English ship hadapproached a settlement of this size in Japan; the town’s samurai prepared for battle. Butthe ship sailed past.

On this journey, by the way, Broughton sailed up the channel west of Sakhalin, goingfarther than La Perouse, but the British explorer also turned back, convinced Sakhalinwas but a peninsula. As late as 1855, Commodore John Rodgers on a surveying expedi-tion in the western Pacific for the United States, noted, “It is not certainly known whetherSaghalien is an island or a peninsula.”15 Another Broughton error was estimating thewidth 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 andthe Russian settlement on Urup Island, of which they had recently learned. Thus therulers began to pay more attention to Ezo. Moreover, Ohara Sakingo, who had traveledto Ezo in 1795, wrote a detailed analysis for the government of the reasons Ezo shouldbe developed. He had taught painting in Edo and went to Matsumae to become a tutorfor the young Matsumae who was then lord of the domain. While there, Ohara learnedof secret Matsumae trading with Russians in the Kurils. Ohara determined to report allthis to the shogunate, but before he could leave Ezo, Broughton sailed his ship intoUchiura Bay. Ohara heard that Broughton had given a map of the world to a Matsumaeretainer in exchange for one of northern Japan. Such an act was most definitely prohib-ited. 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 hisnews to the shogunate. In response, in 1798 the shogunate sent a large expedition—180members—to investigate conditions in Ezo, Sakhalin and the Kurils. Another achieve-ment of the expedition was a journey up the Teshio River to its headwaters with a returnto 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 erectedposts claiming Japanese sovereignty over the island. In 1807 he went to Ezo to assess theimpact of the Khvostov and Davydov depredations. He traveled over a surprisingly largearea and, perhaps most significant, visited the Ishikari River and the land it watered. Inreporting to Edo, he had a personal audience with the shogun, and he urged expandedcolonization of the north, particularly on the Ishikari plain which he envisioned as pros-perous farmland. He noted that since this area was inland, it was not so apt to suffer raidsby 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 ofthe island. Ino had become wealthy as a brewer, but when fifty years old, he retired andbegan to study astronomy and surveying and he is rightly honored today as a geographerand cartographer. In 1799 he requested permission from the shogunate to travel to Ezoto conduct a survey; he proposed to bear the expenses of the undertaking himself. Heobtained permission (and a small subsidy) after some months, because the government


thought the information to be gained couldhelp defend Ezo from possible Russianincursions. Ino and several others plus twoservants set out in June 1800, travelingoverland in order to make measurementsen route. Once on Ezo, the party journeyedeast from Hakodate, accurately mappingthe coastal region as far as Akkeshi andmaking preliminary observations fromthere to the Nemuro area. As the seasonprogressed, they returned by the sameroute and checked their data. They alsosurveyed the route from Hakodate westand south to Matsumae. Ino intended toreturn later to Ezo for more surveying, butwas directed to work instead on Honshu.He eventually surveyed much of Japan,walking more than 27,000 miles through-out the country. He is commemoratedtoday by a plaque atop Mt. Hakodate, theGibraltar-like eminence that shelters thecity of Hakodate.

In 1808, Mamiya Rinzo, with MatsudaDenjuro, determined through explorationthat Sakhalin truly was an island. Unlikethe westerners who had concluded that itwas probably a peninsula, these men trav-eled by land. But their knowledge was keptfrom western nations and explorers.

Mamiya’s discovery was part of agreater work: surveying all Ezo and nearbyterritory. Mamiya, like Mogami, was bornpoor but rose through ability. Becominginterested in surveying while traveling in Ezo and the Kurils, he met Ino Tadataka andstudied under him. Mamiya traveled extensively in Ezo, where he met Mogami. In 1808and 1809 Mamiya visited Sakhalin and the mainland area near the Amur River. His accom-plishments are impressive. For twenty years he traveled in the northern lands, and he isknown today for the map of the island he produced.

Other Japanese, too, brought knowledge of Ezo back to Edo. The shogunate dis-patched Tani Buntan, a physician and artist, to Ezo even before 1800 to survey the veg-etation of the island, looking for plants of possible medicinal value. And in 1810 botanistSo Shokei wrote a work on Ezo flora.

During these years, whaling interests around the world became interested in thewaters near Hokkaido. The industry had grown since its mid–eighteenth century incep-tion. Lamps used throughout the world burned whale-oil in pre-electricity days, andwhalebone, or baleen, became important as the styles of European women’s clothingchanged; it was used as corset stays as well as in umbrellas. Thus the number of the world’s

4. The Explorers 69

Mogami Tokunai explored Ezo (Hokkaido) andthe Kuril Islands in the late 1700s and early1800s, making nine visits to Ezo. He submittedextensive reports to the shogunate. He learnedthe language of the Ainu and urged that Ainu betreated fairly. He also suggested that Russiansbe allowed to trade with Japan (courtesy Hok-kaido University Library).


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

whaling ships grew, and those who sailed them learned of the rich pickings off northernJapan and Siberia.

An American whaler appeared off the coast at Hakodate on June 24, 1807, but it didnot attempt to land. This was the Eclipse, out of Boston, returning to the northwesternUnited States from China. The winds had been bad, its barrels were leaking, and desper-ate 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 “wasthought to be Russian,” wrote a Japanese chronicler.16

In 1820, a Massachusetts ship captain spotted sperm whales off the northern Japancoast, 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 theMatsumae in 1821, the Matsumae regime found it harder and harder to deal with foreignships, 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 Australianisland of Tasmania, put in to shore in southeast Hokkaido after many days in stormyseas. Accounts of the crewmen’s actions on land differ; the Australians traded goods, orstole from local people or carried out violent depredations. Another Australian contactin that area came in 1850 when the whaler Eamont was shipwrecked near Akkeshi, notfar from where the Lady Rowena had landed. Local people sheltered the Eamont victims

4. The Explorers 71

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 com-merce at the age of fifty, studied surveying and began his travels.

until they could be taken back to Australia. These two early meetings provided the impe-tus for twentieth century sister-city ties between Akkeshi and Clarence, Australia.

Before the Eamont disaster, other encounters occurred when foreign ships haddifficulties in Japanese waters. In 1843 a foreign vessel was spied off Ezo, but when thelocal official who boarded it could not communicate with anyone on board, the shipdeparted. A similar incident occurred at Muroran in 1844. Three years later, a Germanwhaler rescued nine Osaka men near the Hawaiian Islands, and about a month later putthem aboard a Japanese boat in Tsugaru Strait.

Other whaling vessels ran into trouble in Japanese waters in those years. When thePoughkeepsie, New York, whaling ship Lawrence sank in May 1846 in heavy surf aftersmashing against rocks in the Kuril Islands, eight sailors, led by Second Mate GeorgeHowe, managed to get away in a small boat. The men rowed for a week. One died, butthe others made it to Iturup Island, where they managed to capture a seal. They cookedits meat, two Ainu spotted them, and while the sailors ate, men armed with swordsapproached and took them captive, for the Ainu who had discovered the group reportedthis to Wajin officials a few miles away. Officials held the sailors in the guardhouse atRubetsu, Iturup, and notified the district governor, who in turn contacted the shogu-nate. The decision was to bring them to Nagasaki via Ezo where they could be kept untiltransport south was convenient. By the time this information was reported from Edo toMatsumae, however, and then to the Kurils, it was mid–October, and early winter stormshad already made transportation impossible. Finally, May 31, 1847, the group was escortedfrom Iturup, arriving at Nagasaki in August. After more than a year in confinement, themen 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 inJapan, in worse conditions than the Lawrence crew. These fifteen men, including eightfrom Hawaii, fled in three small boats from the New Bedford, Massachusetts, whalerLagoda under Captain John Finch after it struck rocks near Matsumae in the fog. Evi-dence suggests that the men were anxious for an excuse to escape harsh conditions onboard and thus deserted at an opportune moment. (Not badly damaged, the ship returnedto 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 pos-sible, village officials gave over their prisoners to Matsumae officials. These men gave thesailors 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 hadfoundered. 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 theyagreed 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 attemptsto escape. Unruly behavior and unsuccessful attempts at flight led to confinement inwhat they charged were inhumane conditions, and several of the men died. Hearing ofthe Lagoda men from Dutch officials in Nagasaki, American officials in China dispatcheda ship to Nagasaki to rescue them. After applying some pressure, American envoys suc-ceeded in arranging the men’s release.

It was about this time that one of Japan’s great explorers, Matsuura Takeshiro, beganhis travels to the northern islands. A man with wanderlust, in his mid-twenties Matsuura


headed by himself for Ezo. Formalitiesfor entering Ezo were so strict that itwas a year after he reached TsugaruStrait before he was able to proceed tothe northern island. He traveled exten-sively in Ezo and Sakhalin, returningto Honshu after about three years.Two years later he headed north again,this time ranging into the South Kurils.Matsuura believed that Wajin and Ainuwere related long in the past. He learnedthe Ainu language and often traveledwith Ainu guides. Unlike most Japanese,he thought well of Ainu and admiredtheir generosity. He also felt stronglythat Japan should keep Ezo and nearbyislands safe from the Russians. As aresult of his explorations, he produceda remarkably accurate map of Ezo basedupon no more than counting his stepsand consulting a small compass. Hisjourneys enabled him to describe inlandareas of Ezo that Mamiya and Ino hadleft blank. Matsuura also wrote exten-sively about the northern islands,including details about natural history,human habitation, geography and geol-ogy.

Ranald MacDonald

An unusual adventure ensued when a brave and curious young American made hispersonal attempt to penetrate the closed nation of Japan. Ranald MacDonald, born inOregon to a Chinook Indian mother and a Scots father, shipped out on a whaler andarranged a seeming accident off the Ezo coast. He had been intrigued by the adventuresof three Japanese who had drifted all the way across the Pacific Ocean after their ship hadfoundered off Japan in 1832, finally reaching land at the area now the northwest cornerof Washington State. He wondered whether there were a racial connection between Amer-ican Indians and Japanese, and even though he knew that Japanese policy kept foreign-ers away, he determined to go to Japan partly for the adventure but also to learn aboutthe Japanese people. One of his shipmates wrote that MacDonald thought that he per-haps could learn the language, and, as an interpreter, do his part to help develop tradebetween 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 wasjust west of Ezo’s northern peninsula, and on June 27 MacDonald left in a twenty-seven

4. The Explorers 73

Mamiya Rinzo traveled on Ezo (Hokkaido), Sakhalinand the Asian mainland for some twenty years earlyin the nineteenth century, producing a good map ofEzo. A museum near Tokyo celebrates this explorer(courtesy Museum of Rinzo Mamiya, Tsukuba-MiraiCity, Japan).

foot boat, arranging things to look as though he had been shipwrecked. He managed tomaneuver his craft to tiny Yagishiri Island. He stayed there three days, having broughtsome 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 theisland, sailing north to intercept another island he saw in the distance, which he estimatedto be some ten miles away. This would have been Rishiri Island, actually some forty-fivemiles from Yagishiri.

As he arrived at Rishiri, Ranald MacDonald purposely overturned his boat, to addcredibility to his tale of foundering. Four Ainu men in a boat, “stroking their greatbeards,” met him. Once MacDonald was on shore, some hundred people watched theaction 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, aswell as “grog-yes,” which turnedout to be sake. MacDonald wroteabout later learning that the sur-vivors of the Lawrence, when prof-fered sake, had answered “Grog?Yes! fetch it on,” and thus the Wajinofficial called sake “grog-yes” for theforeigner’s benefit.17

MacDonald remained onRishiri Island for several weeks.Visited by Ainu leaders interestedin all his possessions, he began mak-ing a list of words from the Ainulanguage. Carefully he observedeverything he saw. For example, herealized later that while Wajin wor-shipped at altars in their homes, theAinu did not. The Ainu, he reported,really loved sake, but always offereda bit to the gods before partaking ofit themselves. When he returned toAmerica from Japan, he found thatpeople were very interested in theAinu. It was only on Rishiri that hehad much contact with them, andhe wrote, “To me they seemed asimple kindly people; and I shallever gratefully remember theirSamaritan kindness to me.” (Healso noted that they appeared dirtyand unkempt in comparison withthe “clean, refined, and cultivated


Matsuura Takeshiro explored Ezo (Hokkaido) exten-sively in the mid–nineteenth century and created a mapof the island that described inland areas which earliercartographers had left blank. He visited Ainu commu-nities and compiled records of the large numbers of Ainuwho had been conscripted for forced labor far from theirhomes. Also, Matsuura was the person who suggested anew name for Ezo: Hokkaido (courtesy Hokkaido Uni-versity Library).

Japanese.”)18 Several days after MacDonald’s arrival, a group of Rishiri men went to reportthe American’s presence to the nearest military officials at Soya, Japan’s northernmostcape and about thirty miles across the sea. For a few days, MacDonald waited for the returnof the party.

Meeting a Wajin on Rishiri who wanted to learn English, MacDonald began study-ing 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 showedMacDonald 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 Hokkaidoas one island, whereas the Japanese map, more accurately, included La Perouse Strait.

The emissaries to Soya returned, accompanied by Wajin officials who questionedMacDonald in detail and studied all his goods with care. They walked him to a house inanother village some three miles away. Here, for a month, he was confined in a roomsome 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 obvi-ously was a military port, MacDonald could see, for many soldiers were about. Clearly,the Wajin were apprehensive of Russian aims. As soldiers marched Ranald MacDonaldto his new prison, buildings along the route were all hidden by curtains, just as on RishiriIsland. He was taken to a specially prepared room, or cell, in Soya’s official building, andagain all his belongings were carefully inspected.

Once again, MacDonald’s prison proved temporary. After about two weeks, he wastaken 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 junkcruised southward, sailing just offshore toward Matsumae, MacDonald had a chance tolook at Hokkaido’s west coast. The boat put in to shore just once during the voyage, inorder 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. MacDon-ald was instructed to stay out of sight during docking. Here, officials more splendid thanany MacDonald had yet seen boarded the junk and took the prisoner ashore, maneuver-ing through crowds of boats. Once on land, MacDonald traveled to his new prison in asedan chair, curtains drawn. Not until the middle of the night did his procession reachits goal, a town he noted as “Erametz” some ten miles north of Matsumae and probablytoday’s Era Village. He estimated that Erametz had about fifty houses.

To MacDonald’s surprise, he discovered that the room where he would now beconfined 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 beforeMacDonald was brought to the room. The plan was to send him on to Nagasaki as soonas possible, but the need to make arrangements—to repair the junk which would takehim there, MacDonald understood—led to a three week stay near Matsumae.

Again the Japanese treated the young adventurer leniently, though he was definitelya prisoner. He received ample food—rice, fish, kombu, pickles—and clothing: Japaneserobes and trousers. He was watched while he ate—and, before he took a bite, an officialtaster tried the food. During MacDonald’s confinement here, he was allowed to read onlyhis Bible among the several books he had, and he was given permission to do this onlybecause he indicated it was a religious work.

4. The Explorers 75

Finally, MacDonald was escortedto the nearby shore where a boattook him out to a large armed junk.On this he sailed October 1 for Naga-saki. He noted the grand ceremonialcrowd attending his departure fromEzo: military officers wearing armor,and common soldiers in colorfulformal attire as his boat drew upanchor in a harbor he estimated fullof more than one thousand boats.And as MacDonald departed, theofficer who had been in charge ofhim presented him with someapples. Thus ended his adventures inEzo.

Because of MacDonald’simprisonment, he had seen little ofEzo and this continued in Nagasaki.Here, though, one attendant was asamurai, Moriyama Einosuke, whoknew a little English. Though Mac-Donald was kept confined in Naga-saki, he gave daily English lessons tofourteen Japanese, including Mori-yama.

In April 1849, more than sixmonths after he arrived in Nagasaki,Ranald MacDonald was released inorder to leave for America, and hemet the Lagoda group, who were stillconfined. (MacDonald blamed theLagoda men for their own troubles,later writing that they were “young,violent, habitually quarreled amongst

themselves, and gave much trouble.”)19 They all left Japan together on the American shipPreble.

Ranald MacDonald did not accomplish all his desires during his sojourn in Japan buthe played an important role in the developing relations between Japan and America. Hispolite manner and friendly interest in the people he met may have helped make possiblehis “school” for interpreters. His students became the interpreters for the Perry expedi-tion 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 sympa-thetically because his half–Indian heritage meant he did not look as foreign to them asdid other westerners they saw. His story is told in a textbook used in Japanese junior highschool English classes and today there is an organization called “Japan Friends of RanaldMacDonald,” with members both in the United States and Japan.


In 1848, an adventurous young man from the west coastof North America, twenty-four-year-old Ranald Mac-Donald, arranged to be set adrift in a small boat off theEzo (Hokkaido) coast. Ashore, he met Ainu and ethnicJapanese but soon was placed in confinement. Hetutored several Japanese in English, and these menacted as interpreters when Japan was opened to Amer-icans in 1854. This stone appears at MacDonald’s gravesite in remote northeastern Washington State, near theCanadian border.

Matthew C. Perry and opening up Japan

Just a few years after Ranald MacDonald’s adventures, Commodore Matthew Cal-braith Perry made his history-making voyages to Japan and gained credit for “openingup” the reclusive land. The Japanese decisions made after Perry appeared led to greatchanges 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 inthe northwestern Pacific, nations wanted access to Japanese ports so that whalers couldrestock their supplies. Western nations also were anxious for trade opportunities, and anopen port in northern Japan could even have military significance, enabling the differ-ent 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 tobe stranded in Japan. The frequent summertime fog over some of the waters aroundHokkaido and the strong tidal currents around the Kuril Islands in addition to occa-sional severe storms meant that shipwreck was always possible. Each western nation wasalso 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 in1850 Petr Rikord, now an admiral, strongly urged this, but not until 1852, when theyheard that the Americans were sending an expedition, did the Russians take action. InOctober 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, how-ever, and the voyage was slow. Putiatin spent three months in Nagasaki in 1853, unsuc-cessfully trying to negotiate. Talks in January 1854 also led nowhere, and soon Europeanaffairs dominated Russian policy, as usual, with the opening of hostilities against Britainand France in the conflict now known as the Crimean War.

Meanwhile, the Russians claimed Sakhalin in 1853, despite the presence of someJapanese settlements there. In 1849 Russian Captain Genadii Ivanovich Nevelskoi in theBaikal had proven that Sakhalin was an island, and that the channel now called by hisname is actually four miles wide. The Russians established a small outpost near the south-ernmost point of Sakhalin, where a detachment lived through the winter peacefully butsomewhat uneasily with the local Ainu—who chafed under orders from the Japanesealready established there. The Russians were withdrawn in 1854, though, largely becauseof the war.

While Russians were active in and around Japan during these years, so were Amer-icans. As American settlements in California and elsewhere in the west grew, the Japantrade beckoned. Missionaries and others who felt that the spread of American civiliza-tion 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 todevelop a number of coaling stations around the world for refueling.

The United States government had contemplated action to open trade with Japan asearly as 1815, and in 1846 actually sent an emissary across the Pacific, without success. In1853, though, the U.S. dispatched a powerful expedition, led by Commodore Perry, tomake 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 Fill-more urging that Japan be open to trade with the United States. The letter also requestedthe 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 thenwithdrew 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 andthe shogunate, feeling there was no choice but to accede, reluctantly agreed to open Japana bit. In the previous decade, Britain and France had wrested privileges in China, andthe Japanese knew that Russians in ships nearby led by Admiral Putiatin had the samegoal as Perry. No longer could Japan resist pressure from western nations; moreover,concern about Russian plans helped convince the Japanese government to negotiate withPerry. The proposed treaty made two ports accessible to American ships for fueling, pro-visioning and dealing with emergencies: Shimoda, on the east coast of Honshu betweenTokyo and Kyoto, and Hakodate on Ezo. The treaty also included provisions to ensurethat shipwrecked foreigners could no longer be incarcerated while in Japan.

Both of the ports to be opened seemed chosen to thwart the foreigners; Hakodatein particular was as distant as it could be from the centers of Japanese power. Treaty

negotiations had been difficult.Perry had requested that Mat-sumae’s port be opened, but theJapanese commissioners repliedthat this question required morethought, because “Matsmai isalso a very distant country, andbelongs to its prince.” In otherwords, since the Matsumae lordhad responsibility for the area,the shogunate supposedly couldnot make the decision. Perrypressed for an answer, and onMarch 23 the Japanese delega-tion presented a draft grantingU.S. ships access not to Mat-sumae but to nearby Hakodate(spelled “Hakodadi” in English-language expedition documents)from Sept. 17, 1855. “Some timewill be required to make prepa-rations, inasmuch as this harboris very distant,” the Japaneseadded.20 Representatives of Japanand the United States signed thehistoric Treaty of Kanagawa onMarch 31, 1854.

Despite Japanese assurancesthat Hakodate harbor was supe-rior to Matsumae harbor, Perryfelt he had to see for himself. Hethus sailed north and on May 17,1854 Perry’s flagship Powhatan,


Commodore Matthew C. Perry led the American expeditionto Japan that succeeded in gaining access to the country forships needing fuel or provisions. Hakodate was one of twoports to be open to Americans, and Perry sailed there in1854 to inspect the city. This statue of Perry was installedin 2004 to commemorate his visit 150 years earlier.

along with the Macedonian, Mississippi, Southampton and Vandalia, entered Hakodateharbor. This visit was not of major importance to Perry’s Japan mission, but it had asignificant impact on Ezo and, specifically, Hakodate. The harbor was excellent, Perryfound. Sheltered somewhat by a headland south of the city, it is much better protectedfrom 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 publishedaccount of the expedition prepared by Francis L. Hawks, but the narrative includes sail-ing instructions for finding the harbor should fog or cloud obstruct the view. Perry hadhis men chart the harbor. He wrote in his diary, “As to expansiveness and entire safetyfrom all winds it has not its superior in the world, with anchorage in the inner harborof five to seven fathoms, good holding ground and clear bottom, and room to moor ahundred sail. What more could be desired?” Perry compared the setting of Hakodate toGibraltar. Lieutenant George H. Preble (later a rear admiral) also was reminded of Gibral-tar, but he said the place was “as cold as Greenland” and clerk J. W. Spalding, after not-ing 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 shut-ters and not looking out at the visitors. Only in the outlying areas did women and chil-dren 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 foreign-ers, who were known to overimbibe, leading to misbehavior. Drinking establishmentswere to remain closed during any American visit. Memorial ceremonies were to be post-poned; 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 theAmerican visit, nor could they put boats into the sea.

When American ships appeared in the harbor, streams of panicky townspeople andhorses headed for the hills. Some of Perry’s men thought the people were fleeing in fearbecause they thought these Americans, with their huge ships, were coming to get revengefor what they felt was poor treatment earlier American sailors had received from the Mat-sumae. 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 harborsailed 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, andPerry urged officials to bring back the fleeing populace. Americans reported that they sawno women during their stay in Hakodate. (This was reminiscent of the men of Hakodatesending 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 thenew treaty along with an explanatory letter from the Japanese negotiators in Edo. Con-sultations took many days. The top local official not unexpectedly wished to wait foremissaries from Edo before allowing the Americans any concessions. He explained theremoteness of the area, noting that the journey from Edo took thirty days during sum-mer (and thirty-seven in the winter). But given the powerful vessels sitting at anchor inthe harbor, the Japanese officials finally agreed to give temporary privileges to the Perryexpedition.

When Perry’s crew went ashore, tension arose from misunderstandings betweenmen 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 (matcovered) as well with their boots on, their manners were bad but that seemed to be thecustom 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 Amer-icans to buy. The expedition’s agricultural expert, James Morrow, bought a number ofordinary 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 thegoods 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 muchin Hakodate as it was in Shimoda.

Some of the crew members went beyond the city and tried hunting but only man-aged 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 penin-sula north of the city. It could prove a good harbor, purser’s clerk Thomas Dudleyreported, 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 preva-

lent 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 sta-tion.” 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 representa-tive of the “Prince of Matsmai”).25 Perry had hoped to meet the prince, or daimyo, him-self, but finally agreed to discuss the treaty with his representative instead. The documentrestricted the Americans to a specific area in the Hakodate district but Matsumae Kageyuwould not make an agreement with Perry specifying the exact boundaries. The two mendid agree, finally, to refer the question to the Japanese officials who would meet Com-modore Perry when he later proceeded to Shimoda.

Finally, the commodore was able to meet briefly in Hakodate with officials fromEdo, but they intimated that, as they were on their way to Karafuto, they were only mak-ing a courtesy call on Perry and could not officially discuss the treaty. Samuel WellsWilliams, an American missionary in China who had been prevailed upon to join theexpedition as an interpreter because of his knowledge of Japanese, noted, “Fortunatelyfor the visitors the Commissioners from Yedo arrived too late to seriously interrupt bytheir objections or restrictions the amicable arrangements concluded between Com-modore Perry and a delegate from the Prince of Matsmai.”26 In all, the visit to Hakodatehad gone well, despite the surprise when Perry’s ships arrived and Ezo people first heardthat the shogunate had agreed to let American ships use Hakodate’s port. Perry evenarranged to provide entertainment for local officials by presenting a minstrel show forthem on one of his ships.

Historian Samuel Eliot Morison has suggested that the success of the Perry visit toHakodate 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: theybought a thousand eggs to supplement their food supplies, but out of the thousand, Spald-ing wrote, only one was not spoiled.

When the expedition prepared to leave Hakodate, Americans and Japanese exchanged


farewell gifts, among them a block of granite for the Washington Monument then underconstruction in the District of Columbia. The Hokkaido stone is visible now along withother gift stones from states, foreign countries, individuals and organizations along theinner wall of the monument. The inscriptions on the stones can be read if one is able toclimb the monument’s steps. One hundred fifty years later, the city of Hakodate raiseda statue of Matthew Calbraith Perry to commemorate his visit.

On June 3, 1854, the last of the American ships pulled away from Hakodate at day-break—but at the mouth of the bay they put down their anchors to await the lifting ofa thick fog. Later that day, they were able to resume their voyage.

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

After Commodore Perry left Hakodate, the British soon appeared briefly, and RussianAdmiral Putiatin stayed at Hakodate for just over a week in October 1854. He sailed backsouth to the Bay of Osaka, taking only one ship this time, because he feared possibleBritish or French attack as the Crimean War continued. Most of the fighting in this con-flict was far from Japanese waters, but opposing ships from the countries at war did seekout 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 Japanesesigned a similar one with Britain and the British found Hakodate harbor useful for repro-visioning their warships. A Russia-Japan treaty came in February 1855 with ratificationthe next year. Russian ships could now put in for repair and supplies at Hakodate, Naga-saki 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 severaltimes in future years). The 1855 agreement put the line of demarcation in the middle ofthe Kuril Island chain, between Iturup and Urup. The process of boundary determina-tion was not yet complete, however, for the negotiators agreed to postpone a border deci-sion regarding Sakhalin, because both nations wanted all of that island. After the treatywas signed, the shogunate took several actions to strengthen its position in Ezo, sendingmore troops there and taking over from the Matsumae the small Japanese outposts onSakhalin. After Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, the suggestion even sur-faced in Japan that the government should sell the Kuril Islands to America, in order togain a strong buffer in the north against Russia.28

Not until 1875 did Japan and Russia decide the Sakhalin question. Fearing violentincidents between Russians and Japanese there, Kuroda Kiyotaka, then the leading officialin Hokkaido, counseled settlement. He argued that government resources would be bet-ter used to develop Hokkaido than the even more distant and unpromising Sakhalin. Heeven argued that Sakhalin promised to be unproductive, like Alaska; lack of promise wasthe reason Russia had sold Alaska to the United States. Soon the Japanese governmentdecided that it should no longer claim Sakhalin, as there were no funds to provide forthe island, and in 1875, Japan and Russia agreed that all of Sakhalin should belong toRussia 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 aprobable war with Korea. Japan maintained the continuing right to fish in Sakhalinwaters, however. Japan added the Kurils to Hokkaido Prefecture and, with this treaty inplace, did not put so much emphasis on Hokkaido defense. The agreement also confirmedthe 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 hisdiary that “all the Russians with whom I conversed made no secret that they hoped forand 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 andcountries far beyond. For Japan, this era culminated in the Perry expedition, whichchanged history. The foreign explorers helped lead to the end of the shogunate in 1868and certainly spurred the nation’s modernization as its leaders sought to learn everythingthey could about technology, education and forms of government in prominent westernnations. Many have called Perry’s accomplishment the “opening up” of Japan. For Ezo aswell as the rest of the nation, it meant change and development. But if Perry had not forced


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

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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 dom-inated the island’s history for the next several decades. Located so near Ezo’s southern-most tip, this was for a long time the first city that travelers to Japan’s northern islandwould see, a bridge between the old Japan and the new. As one of only a few ports in theentire nation open to foreign travelers, its time in the sun came in the last half of thenineteenth century.

Until the beginning of that century, Matsumae Town, about sixty miles southwestof Hakodate by road, outshone Hakodate, which slowly grew from a small fishing vil-lage. It supposedly got its name, meaning “box mansion,” because of a prominent, box-shaped house built in the fifteenth century, though John Batchelor thought the namereferred to a fort shaped like a box. The town was important enough to have a Buddhisttemple at least since the seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century more Wajincame, began businesses and built homes. But Hakodate remained a “frontier town” inthe early nineteenth century, wrote John J. Stephan, though as Edo officials came to Ezoin connection with direct rule of the northern island, Hakodate became the commercialcenter of the north.1

Hakodate sits at the foot of a mountain measured at 1,136 feet by the Perry expedi-tion (but, more accurately, it is 1,096 feet high). Today visitors can take an aerial lift tothe mountaintop and gaze southwards, away from the city, toward the wide Tsugaru Straitin 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 werean island, and in the city’s early days part of its peninsula was marshland. Now, all isdeveloped. 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 shipput in for a day in Hakodate harbor. Inspired by the beauty of the place, she struck outfor the top of the mountain. She saw “scores of vessels at anchor, and the gray townclimbing a short distance up the hillside. Surf was beating high on the sea side, fog drift-ing 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 atopthe mountain a statue of the Buddha twelve feet high in what the artist described as ashrine. 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 shipmovements; some Japanese observers told Perry expedition members that men at the post

84

had seen 161 American ships traverse Tsugaru Strait in the previous year (but perhaps theysometimes sighted the same ship more than once). For the first half of the twentieth cen-tury, most people were not allowed on the mountain; it was a military site. Nineteenthcentury photographs of Hakodate and its promontory show a denuded mountain, whereastoday 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 principalcity, and now that people can fly directly from Tokyo to Sapporo in little more than anhour, Hakodate’s location as the Hokkaido port closest to Honshu means little. The citycharms visitors, however, with its remnants of a past when westerners helped bring a strik-ing architecture and a commercial importance to this port.

An open port

Before being opened to foreign ships, Hakodate had been a fishing town, its harborfull of junks involved in coastal trade, taking away sea products and bringing in rice andgoods used in daily life. The export items most frequently shipped from there (usuallyvia Nagasaki to China) were kombu and other ocean products. Opening the harbor towestern ships brought change, though at first, briefly, the port was to be used by foreignvessels only for provisioning and in case of emergency. Later, some of the foreign whalerswintered in the city.

Once the Perry expedition obtained permission for American ships to use Hakodateharbor, the city became the focus of western relations with Ezo. American shippersthought Hakodate’s location excellent, for it lies on the great circle—the shortest dis-tance—between San Francisco and northern China. In the days when coal was power-ing ocean-going ships, having available coal was crucial, and Hakodate, near Ezo coalmines, would thus be a good location for a coaling station. To Japan, the city had anothervalue. Writing in 1874, Sir Harry Parkes, British Minister to Japan, asserted, “The open-ing of the Hakodate port saved Yezo,”3 meaning that the Russians did not get control ofthe island.

Writings of men on Perry’s ships give a vivid picture of Hakodate in 1854. At thedirection of the U.S. secretary of the navy, Perry forbade members of his expedition fromkeeping 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, how-ever.

The city’s bay and harbor impressed those who approached by sea, and J. W. Spald-ing wrote enthusiastically: “The bay of Hakodadi is most spacious and majestic in itssweep, and for facility of entrance and security of anchorage, it can scarcely be surpassedby any other in the world. The width at its mouth is so great that no two fortificationscould command or protect it, yet the curvature of the high land around is such as toafford the greatest shelter.” While many others compared Hakodate to Gibraltar, AnnaHartshorne, who taught in Japan for some years, wrote in 1902 that Hakodate remindedher more of Naples, with Vesuvius as a backdrop, while Sir Rutherford Alcock, first Britishminister to Japan, compared the northern city to Hong Kong as well as Gibraltar. NeillJames, an American travel writer who first glimpsed Hakodate from the Aomori ferry in1940 wrote, “The harbor at Hakodate was like a tropical seascape without the fringe ofpalms,” and to a twenty-first century visitor, the city brought thoughts of San Francisco.4

5. Hakodate 85

Not only its harbor and location impressed visitors. The Perry Expedition found aclean, quiet town of some eight thousand people (though William Heine estimated twentythousand). William B. Allen thought Hakodate’s streets “finer and more regular thanother ports of Japan.” Thomas Dudley wrote his sister that Hakodate: “is a very largecity—abounding in fine houses and magnificent temples.” As expedition members ven-tured into the nearby countryside, some climbed Mt. Hakodate. On the summit Allenmused with pride that his nation had successfully and peacefully made an agreement totrade with Japan, contrasting his own circumstances with those of “the unfortunate Rus-sian Captain Gowlowin [sic], I being free as air while he a poor tired prisoner almostwishing for his death, because his fate seemed to be that he should remain a prisoner forever.” Some of Perry’s crew visited the different temples in Hakodate to find the one inwhich Golovnin had been incarcerated, but the Japanese would not say anything on thissubject. 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 hopesof 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) whichreminded him very much of the way the Virgin Mary was portrayed in Roman Catholicchurches. In this temple he also noted the many carvings of animals: “deer, dogs, mon-keys, 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 warehousesand sea and yellow hills—reminds me of a New England town, wanting however thepointed spires and pepper box bellfrys of our New England temples of worship.” Spald-ing 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 instreet fighting. He also noted that the city seemed to be doing everything possible to fightfire, 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 thosein the Japanese heartland. Often the front room of a house on the main street would beopen to passersby, as the residents sold goods there. Spalding saw a few cross streets andparallel ones. The city’s four temples, the most notable structures in Hakodate, were builton land uphill from the houses.

Expedition members enjoyed Hakodate, several indicating their warm feelings towardthe city. Interpreter S. W. Williams, who had been living in China as a missionary, calledthe expedition’s stay in Hakodate “one of the pleasantest episodes in my life in Asia. Iexpected a dull visit at a miserable fishing village” but he found the people open-mindedand friendly. (But a Japanese observer, Hakodate merchant and district head KojimaMatajiro, described Williams as “a bad and haughty person.”) “This is the best place wehave visited yet in Japan,” wrote Thomas Dudley.8

In Hakodate, expedition daguerrotypist Eliphalet Brown, Jr. reportedly took the old-est surviving photograph ever made in Japan. Brown’s picture of his samurai guide isdisplayed today in Hakodate’s Museum of Photographic History. Brown and expeditionartist William Heine stayed for a few days in a small temple which could serve as theirstudio, and Brown photographed various local people there. “In making the pictures,” aJapanese wrote, “they set up a mirror and the image of the person was reflected perfectly


on it. When the mirror was taken to a different place the image still remained on it. Thiswas rumored about the city to be magic.”9

One gracious action of Hakodate officials was to designate a small plot of ground asa cemetery for the foreigners’ use. The chosen site on the city’s outskirts sits on a gentlehillside 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. Wolfehad been ill for some time and Remick had suffered from typhoid fever for nine days; bothdied while the American ships were anchored at Hakodate. After memorial services heldfor the two on shipboard, and with all flags flying at half-staff, the bodies were taken tothe new cemetery in processions marching “with slow step and muffled drums.”10 HereChaplain George Jones read the Episcopal burial service. Jones, thinking of the stronganti–Christian sentiment which had been fostered by Japanese authorities for so manyyears, was struck by the respect that Hakodate officials showed for the American religiousrituals. 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 thesite and chose a poetic inscription for it. Japanese masons cut the words, in English lettersthat must have been meaningless to them. Later, Japanese authorities had a picket fenceplaced around the cemetery. The stone still stands, its letters still legible, in a corner atthe top of the cemetery. On the opposite side of the stone is a text in Japanese. Thesedays, the historic burial ground is neatly maintained, and includes graves of some west-erners who have died in Hakodate since Perry’s visit. When eight United States Navyships 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 justabove is the Russian cemetery and next to the Protestant cemetery where Wolfe andRemick are buried lies a Chinese one.

Meanwhile, some American ship captains in the vicinity were eager to use the portof Hakodate. While Perry’s ships were there, the Massachusetts whaler Eliza F. Masonanchored in Hakodate harbor. Captain Nathaniel M. Jernegan had brought his wife andson on the journey. They all went ashore and stayed overnight in the city, the first Ameri-can 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 wasthe whaler Brutus, which arrived just a few days after Perry’s treaty was signed, its cap-tain requesting water and firewood. The Brutus departed a few days later but not beforeits sailors had a chance to visit the port. Several other American ships appeared brieflyat Hakodate. Soon many whalers and navy ships from various nations began to appearin the harbor.

Russian Admiral Putiatin landed in Hakodate in October 1854, and learned thereabout 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, agreat earthquake struck Japan’s heartland, destroying Putiatin’s ship Diana, then in theharbor at Shimoda. In Hakodate the townsfolk fled up the mountainside to escape thetsunami that left the mountain nearly an island. Luckily, Perry’s fleet had left Japan beforethe water rose.

Three men who arrived on the U.S. whaler Leverett early in June 1855 tried to getpermission to stay in Hakodate. As passengers from Honolulu the men had become knownas troublemakers, and in Hakodate they wanted to sell liquor. This, not surprisingly, wasnot permitted; the men were sent away.

5. Hakodate 87

In mid–June, the schooner Caroline E. Foote arrived. On it were six merchants, threeof them with wives, and two children. This group proposed to live in Hakodate andestablish a business to provision visiting ships. The group’s life there would be tempo-rary, the merchants asserted, because the treaty allowed only temporary residence. Tothe Hakodate bugyo, however, the presence of wives and children clearly indicated thatthe sojourn in Hakodate would be anything but temporary. The Americans pressed theircase and got the backing of Lieutenant John Rodgers, then in port with an official Amer-ican surveying expedition; the bugyo wrote to Edo for instructions and, after waitingabout two weeks without progress, the merchant families left on the Foote, their attemptto settle abandoned.

Though commerce was technically forbidden, ship provisioning continued, and withthe Perry treaty in force, the bugyo ordered that coal be mined in Shiranuka, a site nearKushiro, where surveyors had discovered coal deposits. Ainu and prisoners worked withfour miners brought from Edo to operate the mine. This coal’s quality was poor, how-ever, and after less than a year officials closed the mine and concentrated on the devel-opment of Kayanuma mine near the west coast of the Oshima Peninsula, in the vicinityof today’s Iwanai Town. Mining success was sporadic here, though, and several foreignexperts 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 thefirst Americans ever to be in Korea. Different accounts of these Americans’ adventuresexist, but however the men happened to arrive in Korea, they were taken to nearby Chinaand repatriated from there.

French Admiral Nicolas-Francois Guerin approached Hakodate in his ship in May1856 and reported that there were no Europeans in the town. The two missionaries trav-eling with him were grudgingly allowed to visit Hakodate briefly, and they noted that thetownspeople were afraid of the government officials in Hakodate who, indeed, had policefollow the missionaries.

Commerce grew in Hakodate though foreign trade was not yet officially allowed. In1856 J. M. Tronson noted these items in shops for the residents: “charcoal stoves, crock-ery 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 lacquer-ware, common silks and oiled paper garments.” Crewmen with Perry two years earlierhad also seen cotton, tea and perfume. When Perry Collins’ ship stopped at Hakodate inSeptember 1857, he found a bustling town, with “cooper shops, blacksmiths, tinkers, bar-bers, bath-houses, ... silk mercers, shoe stores, fruit and vegetable stalls, fancy shops, teaand tobacco vendors.” From shipboard he had noticed an American flag flying from ahigh pole, a surprise to all on the ship, who had not known of the appointment of anAmerican consular agent. Collins’s ship obtained stores—and more: “We procured pota-toes, onions, tomatoes, rice, eggs, chickens, fish, apples, pears, tea, lacquered ware andsilks.”11

Russian visitors appeared, too. During the same decade, Sergei Maksimov thoughtHakodate “a really remarkable town that stretches out before us on the slopes of the tallcoastal 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-


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. Harrissigned a second treaty with Japan in 1858 which included trading privileges. A monthlater, Japan agreed to similar treaties with Britain, France and Russia. Trade began inmid–1959 and in the first year, sixty-four ships from abroad came to Hakodate: thirteenmilitary vessels, twenty-one whalers and thirty merchant ships.

Consuls, businessmen, mariners and adventurers

Opening the port of Hakodate to foreign trade brought businessmen, ships andofficials 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 UnitedStates. On June 26, 1856, Elisha E. Rice received appointment as the first American con-sul at Hakodate. (Technically, he was called a commercial agent until 1865.) VisionaryAmerican merchants dreamed of opening commerce with the Russian Far East, using thisnorthern Japan port as a convenient entrepot. More immediately, U.S. whaling shipsmight tie up for the winter at Hakodate, and given the propensities of sailors with freetime on a foreign shore, the presence of a consul could help keep order. (Ill behavior ofthe foreigners appearing in Hakodate in that era helped lead to the dislike displayed bymany Japanese.) A consular office had not been specified in Perry’s treaty, but the Hako-date bugyo could not induce Rice to leave the city and finally reluctantly allowed him totake up temporary quarters in a temple. (Large Japanese temples included extra roomsused 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 perhaps225 pounds, “with handsome long black whiskers, and a sharp, keen eye.” He kept hisoffice for well more than a decade, serving under five American presidents. But Rice’spersonality was not altogether suited to the job. He was a “loud talker,” thought RichardHenry Dana, Jr., author of Two Years Before the Mast, whose ship stopped in at Hako-date 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 servein Japan. Living in the premises of Jogenji Temple, he had Japanese soldiers for his ser-vants. Since Rice was engaged in commerce while in Hakodate, though, he did not getas 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 activitiesto Edo every ten days.

Rice’s activities varied. He arranged to have Hakodate harbor surveyed and buoysput into place to prevent shipping accidents. In the museum now operated in the OldBritish Consulate in Hakodate is a small model of Rice milking a cow, his action said tobe the introduction of dairying in Hokkaido. (Meanwhile, the Hakodate bugyo arrangedto 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. GeorgeM. Bates from Honolulu began a medical practice in the city.

Hakodate today thrives on the buildings remaining in the city from the time it wasa busy port for American and European whalers. If a building of important historicalsignificance 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 buildinghousing the consulate (no longer in the temple), the American consular agent reportingthat everything was gone, including letters and archives, except fifteen books. Consularfunctions were transferred to Yokohama in 1883, and in Hakodate the British Consulatehad to deal—not always happily—with problems there involving American sailors. Whena U.S. Consulate opened once again in Hakodate, it carried out business in the home oroffice of an American who happened to be in Hakodate in missionary work or commerceand in addition carried out the consul’s duties. An American consulate operated on andoff in Hakodate until 1918.

The Russians, who were very anxious for access to Japan, opened a consulate in Japanin 1858. They sited it at Hakodate, not Edo, for while other foreign nations were inter-ested mostly in commerce with Japan, Russia’s purpose was to protect her own far easternterritory and secure a favorable border between the two nations. Thus Hakodate ratherthan 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 westernrivals also expressed concern. At the end of 1857, Townsend Harris imparted his view-point to a Japanese official. Britain and Russia had recently signed a treaty ending theCrimean War, and Harris thought Russia had designs on Manchuria and possibly all ofChina. If Russia took this territory, he said, war between Russia and Britain could breakout again and Britain could be expected to take over Sakhalin and all of Ezo. None ofthis 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 aBritish warship to examine the situation; no reason for concern surfaced. It remainedclear to the Japanese and foreigners alike, however, that Russia was anxious to developPacific 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 sphereof this great power’s influence.” Pemberton Hodgson, British Consul in Hakodate, evensuspected that Americans might be encouraging the Russians to take Hakodate; thus hewas relieved when civil war broke out in the United States in 1861. Writing two decadeslater, British merchant Thomas Blakiston felt it would not be surprising if a Europeanpower took control of Hakodate, for its harbor, strategic location vis-a-vis Russia, andsupplies of Japanese coal.14

During the 1860s, political turmoil erupted in the Japanese heartland as powerfulsouthern 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 theintention 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 contin-ued. Rice noted that the Russian consulate in Hakodate had a forty-man marine guardand a man-of-war in the harbor. “They can hold this island versus Japan with but a smallforce, 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 inJapan in 1858. An Orthodox seminary graduate, he had been with the Russian Orthodoxmission in Peking for nine years. Returning to Russia, he joined the foreign ministry andbecame Admiral Putiatin’s Chinese interpreter in 1852. For a time during the CrimeanWar, Goshkevich was a captive of the British. In Japan with the Putiatin expedition, hecame into contact with an enterprising and daring Japanese named Tachibana Kosai, whotaught Goshkevich Japanese despite Japanese law then prohibiting this. Tachibana was


smuggled out of Japan, and Goshkevich and Tachibana together produced the first trueRussian-Japanese dictionary. Published in Russia, the technical aspects of its creation areunusual. First the Russian part of the work was printed; next, the Japanese text was addedby hand, and then the entire work was lithographed.

When Consul Goshkevich came to Hakodate in 1858, with him came his own fam-ily, a priest, a naval officer, a medical doctor and his wife, and several servants. Goshke-vich asked that the doctor, Mikhail Albrecht, be allowed to treat Japanese patients as wellas the small Russian community. Receiving permission, the doctor did so and also taughtwestern medical techniques. But this aroused controversy, and for a time his practice wasclosed down, though instruction in medicine continued. Soon, a Russian hospital openedin Hakodate and Dr. Albrecht again treated Japanese patients. In 1866, the hospital wasmoved to Nagasaki.

Consul Goshkevich was probably the most effective nineteenth century consul inHakodate. He introduced several technical advances to the city—the first barometer andthe first light which gave out illumination throughout the night. This was installed at theharbor 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 receivedthe honor of such a visit. Goshkevich introduced western tailoring to Hakodate when hearranged for a local tailor, Kizu Kokichi, to copy a suit of his. Kizu became interested inphotography and asked Goshkevich to show him how to take pictures. Soon Kizu openedthe 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 amountof Russian influence was visible in the city, as Rice had noted. “In Hakodate everybodyunderstands Russian; the Japanese learn that language with great speed,” wrote a Dutchobserver.16 This was not literally true, but Goshkevich had an advantage over the otherconsuls because he had some knowledge of the Japanese language. Moreover, he camewith a larger number of his compatriots than had Rice and was clearly a man of greaterimportance.

Goshkevich was instrumental in helping calm the city when word came in 1863 ofan imperial edict ordering that all foreigners be expelled. Foreign officials were quietlytold that this would not happen, but many people in Japan at the time wanted the for-eigners gone. In Hakodate, some local people, fearing violence, began to gather necessi-ties and flee the city when news of the expulsion order came, but Goshkevich walked thestreets 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 renamedin 1868). A consulate was reopened in Hakodate, however, and a consul or vice-consulremained 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 lastinginfluence in Japan. The first chaplain, Vasilii Makhov, did not stay long, but during hisshort stay in the city oversaw construction of the first Orthodox church in Japan. Hissuccessor became known to the world as Father Nikolai. Born Ioann Dmitrievich Kasat-kin, he gained appointment to Hakodate when just twenty-four years old, arriving in1861. He served the church in Japan until his death in 1912 and deserves recognition asthe 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 wantto go to Japan to spread the word about his religion. Arriving in Hakodate when conver-sion 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 Japa-nese and soon converted three well-educated men, who became known as Paul Sawabe,John Sakai and Jacob Urano. Hearing that the longtime prohibition against Christianitymight be invoked against them, the three men fled Hakodate. Sawabe, however, soonreturned and found that he no longer had to fear being known as a Christian. He becamea teacher of Orthodox Christianity as did Sakai later. In 1872 officials in Hakodate arrestedSakai and two other Japanese orthodox teachers, but after a few months’ confinementthey 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 Niko-lai left the city in 1872 to become the first Russian Orthodox bishop in Tokyo. AnotherRussian priest, Father Anatolii, was sent to take his place in Hakodate and he continuedteaching as well as holding services. He introduced the beautiful choral music that onehears in Hakodate’s Orthodox Church today, for Japanese Orthodox priests and congre-gation continue services here. The church, a small building in Orthodox style inside andout, consists of a square room with an iconostasis, as in all Orthodox churches, separat-ing the room from the small one beyond, where only priests may go. This being Japan, avisitor 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 distinctivebeauty 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 Ortho-dox Church.

Another prominent Russian, botanist Carl Johann Maximowicz, came to Hakodatebriefly and left his mark on Japan. He arrived in 1860 and for more than a year studiedplants in the Hakodate vicinity before moving on to Yokohama and Nagasaki. His meth-ods influenced later Japanese botanists. Dr. Albrecht was also interested in botany. Aflower he discovered in the Hakodate area in 1860, the pink rhododendron albrechtii, isfound in North American gardens today.

Despite the opening of a Russian consulate in Japan, trade did not grow quicklybetween the two nations. The Russians lacked merchant ships in the Pacific, and givennorthern winter conditions, sea routes between Ezo and the Russian port at the mouthof the Amur River, Nikolaevsk, were closed in the winter. The Japanese had no particu-lar 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 nationsprohibited this. Despite the lack of significant trade, Russian signs and advertisementscould be seen in Hakodate well into the twentieth century.

Hokkaido did, however, prove a useful route for people who wanted to leave Rus-sia. Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary who became the most prominent anar-chist 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. (Beforethere was a British consul in Hakodate, U.S. Consul Rice had had to arrange passage onships leaving the city for shipwrecked British seamen.) Rice expressed amusement at thepretentious formalities of Hodgson’s arrival, including firing of the ship’s guns and march-ing of marines in formation. Fourteen people made up Hodgson’s party, including, Ricewrote, a “crownbearer.”17

Hodgson had a number of responsibilities in Hakodate, for he represented France,


the Netherlands and Portugal as well as Britain, though Jesuit Priest Jean Mermet deCachon did carry out the duties of secretary for French consular matters. Japanese officialsin Hakodate welcomed Hodgson graciously when he arrived. “The reception was muchkinder, the welcome much warmer, than what I had experienced at Nagasaki,” hereported.18 But life in the city could be lonely, for he and his wife and daughter were theonly 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 Ameri-can and Russian consuls lived; temples were the only places that seemed at all suitablefor foreign consulates. Hodgson obtained temple accommodations only with difficulty,however. The city’s large temples were already in use by the Russian and American con-suls except for one which was reserved for the use of the local magistrate. Eventually, thebugyo who was about to depart arranged for Hodgson to use the final temple, while smallerquarters were arranged for the new Japanese official.

Hodgson’s understanding was that Hakodate was but “a poor insignificant fishingvillage” until the “Prince of Matsumai” transferred it (for a fee) to the shogunate so thatit 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 populationwas about eight thousand, but that in less than a year it tripled, reaching twenty-fourthousand. His own career there lasted only a year; it was cut short because of concernboth by the Japanese and other consular officials about his nasty temper and frequentinebriation.19

A new British Consulate opened for business in 1863, and Richard Eusden assumedconsular duties in 1867, serving here until 1880. He was by far the most effective Britishconsul in Hakodate. Both he and his wife became involved in the community; she helpedcreate the city’s public garden. Over the years several fires damaged the consulate and itburned down in 1907. A few years later, the British government’s Shanghai ConstructionBureau built a new consulate, a two-story-high tile-roofed structure on a site a few blocksaway. 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 west-ern experiences in Hakodate, an English tea room and a souvenir shop carrying articlesfrom 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 Rus-sian consuls, the Hakodate bugyo and other Japanese and western men sat at the courtand agreed that the defendant was not guilty, for he had shot in the darkness at a bur-glar.

Hakodate at different times had consulates representing not only Russia, the UnitedStates and Great Britain, but also France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Switzer-land, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Hungary and Spain, though these other nations were mostlyrepresented by men who were consuls of other countries. Even Hawaii, when it was anindependent nation, briefly had consular representation in Hokkaido. The foreignersperceived 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 foreign-ers do in Yedo,” wrote E. E. Rice20 and, while Yokohama had a specific area set aside fora foreign settlement, Hakodate featured no special area for foreigners, though the vari-ous 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 Hako-date, merely taking on supplies there. When Richard Henry Dana, Jr. climbed to the topof 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.” Ofthe sixty-eight foreign vessels which stopped at Hakodate that year, twenty-four whalersand nine merchantmen were American, while thirteen merchantmen and eight naval ves-sels were British.21

Official Japanese trade figures were not trustworthy, because of smuggling (even bysome Japanese officials). Any Japanese who sold goods for export was required to pay atax; thus smuggling was common. Scottish shipmaster John Will later wrote that overhalf the items subject to a tax would be smuggled ashore whenever his ship came to Hako-date. Also, because Japanese cash could be bought cheaply in Hakodate and exchangedfor 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 wereallowed to trade, others being turned away after acquiring emergency provisions. Foreign,not Japanese, ships carried on almost all of the foreign trade, though Japanese interestswere active in the coastal trade.

For Hakodate officials and merchants, the opening of trade presented challenges. By1860, many Hakodate merchants could speak enough English to carry on trade with for-eign visitors. Few Japanese shops were allowed to carry foreign merchandise, though, andif foreigners wanted to exchange their money for Japanese currency, the procedure wasdifficult and time-consuming. Moreover, the goods desired for ships stopping at Hako-date were not all easy to obtain. Water was no problem, but foodstuffs were, for little wasproduced in the vicinity. This led the government to begin a farming operation, espe-cially for raising beef cattle. Western seamen craved beef, which was not a regular partof the Japanese diet. Supplies of coal, too, had to be available.

The government at Hakodate was hard-pressed to meet the new demands thatresulted from the foreigners’ presence. Not the least of the problems was the need forinterpreters. The Hakodate bugyo soon notified Nagasaki—long the foreigners’ center inJapan—of his problem, and one man who was then sent to Hakodate to act as interpreterwas Iwase Yashiro, who had been a student of Ranald MacDonald during MacDonald’sdetention in Nagasaki.

John Will first came to Hakodate in 1860. He called the port “one of the finest har-bours in Japan,” but he was surprised that the city was so small; “all or most of the houseswere 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 officialsstationed in the city to see that no harm came to foreigners.23 Fearing the samurai, thetownsfolk 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 har-bor, 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 will-ingly—or by force—on a later vessel. Some of the seamen who stopped at Hakodate werenot impressed with the city. It may have been because he was unable to buy kombu to sellin China, but British Captain Henry Holmes thought Hakodate a “cold, cheerless place.”24

Despite the foreign presence, Hakodate usually remained quiet. One American vis-itor in 1860 felt that the city suffered less from the excesses of officialdom than did


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 prob-lems on their own.25 Other factors probably impeded business in Hakodate. Not yet hadHakodate harbor surveying begun, and high or adverse winds, erratic currents and fogin 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 onrocks some fifteen miles from Hakodate. When news of the accident reached Hakodatetwo days later, the Caroline E. Foote, then in port, was sent to aid the stricken vessel, andwith the help of about one hundred men provided by the Japanese government, rescuedits 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-goingships, 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 Ministerto Japan, wrote that in Hakodate in 1861, “nothing deserving the name of trade had beenfound possible, and at this time not a single British merchant or agent was left on thespot, nor of residents of any other nation who could really be placed in the category ofmerchants.”26 But with Hakodate both the island capital and its commercial center, anumber of Chinese came, looking for commercial opportunities. The city had become asizable 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 1862to survey the mines, Hakodate was his base. He taught mining techniques when he wasnot working in the field, but he had time for some relaxation. More entertainment for theforeigners must have been available than in Hodgson’s time just three years earlier. In hisReminiscences, Pumpelly reported upon a masked ball held at the Russian Consulate. Hedressed as a Japanese warrior and approached the consulate on the back of a horse madeskittish 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 everto climb there.27

In these early days of foreign commerce, little was imported to Hakodate and the mainexport remained kombu sent to China; once the foreign ships were allowed to trade, theybecame involved in this commerce. Other sea products also important included driedsquid, abalone and sea cucumber. In the 1860s, John Will’s ship sailed mainly betweenShanghai and Hakodate; in addition to the kombu and other sea products he took toChina, his ship carried other items, mainly timber. On some of the voyages to Hakodatethe 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 Amer-ican whaling vessels stopped at the port. Russian ships would sometimes winter in Hako-date, 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 scientificdiscovery. Thomas Wright Blakiston of Great Britain traveled extensively in northernJapan, residing in Hokkaido for twenty-three years. Blakiston penned detailed descrip-tions of Hakodate and of much of the rest of Edo. He came to Hakodate in 1861 hopingto open a lumber mill and sell his product in China. Upon his arrival in the city, he wasoverwhelmed by the “all-pervading stench of dried fish and seaweed.” He noted the “uni-versal 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 matswhich 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 ket-tles would be hung above the fire, from which smoke would rise through an opening inthe roof.28

Blakiston wrote a scientific paper published in 1883 noting that animal species inHokkaido and farther north differed from those in the south. Though monkeys lived inthe wild in Honshu, he pointed out, they were not found in Hokkaido. Blakiston con-cluded that Tsugaru Strait separating Hokkaido from Honshu was much older geologi-cally than La Perouse Strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin. Recognizing the importanceof 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 nolonger.

Blakiston explored the country near Hakodate; during the first few years of openports, foreigners were allowed to go only about twenty-five miles from the city. He com-mented on how many officials—samurai carrying two swords—and how many dogs hesaw. He had a steam-powered mill brought to the city, where for the first time in Japanlumber was sawn not by hand but by machine. A few years later, though, Blakiston closedthe mill because all the trees that could be brought to it using transportation methodsthen available had been cut down. For a time he ran another mill in Kushiro, but run-ning out of trees there, he returned to Hakodate and opened a shipping business, Blak-iston, 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 tech-nological improvement in Hakodate, Blakiston planned the city’s water system. Hisinfluence led Fukushi Naritoyo to establish the first weather station in Japan; Blakistonprovided up-to-date equipment from England. Today this installation is the HakodateMarine Observatory. A monument to Thomas Blakiston now stands atop Mt. Hakodateand his collection of more than one thousand bird specimens is owned by Hokkaido Uni-versity. He has been commemorated by the name of that magnificent bird, Blakiston’sfish owl.

Domestic commerce in Hakodate included everything from local farmers bringingtheir produce into the city to shiploads of merchandise sent to heartland cities. Much ofHakodate’s food was grown in the flats around nearby Nanae, and villagers in tiny settle-ments scattered along the coast collected firewood and made charcoal, which they carriedto 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 thesecoastal vessels might appear or leave on a single day. From other islands, boats broughtmainly rice and manufactured goods to Hakodate, with marine and wood products andfur leaving the city. Daimyo in northern Honshu sent their agents to Hakodate, estab-lished warehouses, and entered the shipping trade, sending ships to Nikolaevsk and Shang-hai. 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 includedmainly kombu to take to China, but also “silk, silkworm eggs, salmon, deer-skins, gins-ing and other medicines, cuttle-fish, irico-fish, awabec oysters, hotadikaimi oysters, sul-phur, 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.)


Foreign traders found it difficult to identify goods to sell in Hakodate: “The Japanese donot 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 (westernershave anglicized his name in several ways and have referred to him as Joseph Hardy Nees-ima). He became a prominent Christian in nineteenth century Japan and is honoredtoday as the founder of a distinguished private university in Kyoto, Doshisha. Niijimagrew up in Edo. When he was a youth, a friend who knew of his interest in boats andseamanship told him of a vessel soon to sail to Hakodate. Niijima, who had a secret desireto visit a foreign land, thought he might be able to do so from Hakodate. He knew aninfluential man who obtained permission for the young man to take the trip north. Afterarrival in Hakodate in 1864, Niijima’s goal was to meet foreigners who could help himtravel 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 prohi-bition of this. After several months in Hakodate, his dream took shape. He made arrange-ments to slip out of the city and secretly board an American ship. Arriving in the UnitedStates via China, he studied for some ten years and adopted Christianity. After being bap-tized, he chose his western name to honor Alpheus Hardy, owner of the ship that hadtaken him to America. Niijima graduated from Amherst College, the first Japanese stu-dent ever to obtain a college degree in the United States. Returning to Japan, he foundedthe school in 1875 which grew into Doshisha University.

As Niijima’s story shows, because foreigners from several important nations lived inHakodate, Japanese found the city a good place to study foreign languages and foreignways, and a number of men who later served as interpreters learned languages there. Yetmost Japanese continued to perceive Hakodate, indeed all Ezo, as distant, not a part of thenaichi.

War

The shogunate saw Hakodate as the northern bastion of the nation and because ofthe city’s increased importance, decided to construct a fort there to protect the city incase of conflict; the top officials in Hakodate would have their offices inside its walls. Tobuild a fort in the 1850s the government turned to modern technology and decided upona stronghold modeled on up-to-date European fortifications which could stand up to cur-rent weapons. By now the Japanese were designing structures that might repel foreigninvaders—especially Russians—while the earlier castles built in customary Japanese style,like Matsumae, had been planned to cope with threats from elsewhere in Japan, thefighters using traditional Japanese weapons, not nineteenth century firearms. Hakodate’sdefenses saw use not against a foreign threat, though, but in a brief but decisive domes-tic 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 yearsafter Commodore Perry’s visit, this western-style fortification is located on a site aboutthree miles northeast of the compact city of that day. After Edo opened Hakodate tocommerce with foreign nations, the government continued to fear possible conquest.American merchant Francis Hall wrote in 1861 that Hakodate’s defenses were intended

5. Hakodate 97

mainly to deter Russian threats. He heard that at least one Russian ship was always inHakodate’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 designsof French architect Sebastian Vauban, who had built this style of fortress in Europe. FortMcHenry in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Citadel in Halifax, Nova Scotia, are structuresof this type. Goryokaku is unique in Japan. It is low to the ground—a necessary featurein 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 theembankments inside the moat were built of dirt excavated in digging out the water bar-rier. The name Goryokaku simply describes the fort’s shape.

After seven years of construction, Goryokaku was completed in 1864. The nearbyarea, rural before the fort’s construction, soon became built up, with officials erectingresidences in the neighborhood; some two hundred officials involved with Ezo govern-ment 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 thirty-two years. As the nineteenth century came to an end, this stronghold no longer seemednecessary 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 theRussians. The Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Japan since 1600, was considerablyweakened by the mid–nineteenth century. Two strong southern clans, Choshu and Sat-suma, led opposition to the government and a number of influential men began to thinkabout ending the shogunate system and returning authority to the emperor. Policytowards foreigners in Japan stimulated some of the opposition to the shogunate. Open-ing Japanese ports to foreign ships was extremely controversial; the factions supportingrestoration of imperial rule generally wanted foreigners banished. Anti-foreign demon-strations 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 becameknown as the Meiji emperor, intensified struggle began between forces wanting therestoration of imperial power and those supporting the shogunate. In early 1868, impe-rial forces defeated the shogun’s troops in a battle near Kyoto, and this was the end ofTokugawa control of the government. The shogun asked that his family be allowed to goto 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 frompossible foreign — mainly Russian — attack, but only once did it see warfare. In 1868, samurai whosupported the recently deposed Tokugawa Shogunate fled to Hakodate, where they establishedtheir headquarters in Goryokaku. The next spring, forces of the new Meiji regime defeated therebels 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. ThisNASA photograph was taken from the International Space Station, Aug. 22, 2002. Photo #ISS005-E-10643, Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA–Johnson Space Center. “The Gateway toAstronaut Photography of Earth.” http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop.pl?mission=ISS005&roll=E&frame=10643.

Restoration. New forces under the Meiji regime held the reins of government, but chal-lenges to their rule continued. Hakodate felt the effects of the turmoil, for domestic tradedropped off precipitously and few of the junks appeared that usually sailed north withgoods for the city’s residents. Meanwhile, the new regime replaced the Hakodate bugyowith a governor, Shimizudani Kinnaru.

Some of the defeated Tokugawa men fled north, eventually to Ezo, where they hopedto establish an independent nation. Samurai who had been the shogun’s retainers had nopurpose 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 Japa-nese naval officer ever sent to a western nation to study. Enomoto learned about navalmatters in the Netherlands, where he spent five years. He was thus certainly aware of mod-ern military practice. He fled from the heartland with eight warships, but told the Meijigovernment that he intended to settle in Ezo and strengthen the island in order to keepthe Russians away. His men had to fight their way to power on Ezo, however, facing oppo-sition in several places, including Matsumae. After subduing their opponents in varioussettlements, 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 warningthe foreign consuls in Hakodate that Enomoto’s forces would soon take over the city, Gov-ernor 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 theisland to govern. His request was refused, so he set up an alternative government, its head-quarters at Goryokaku. The British and French governments recognized his new “EzoRepublic” and Artillery Officer Jules Brunet and four other Frenchmen in Japan with amilitary mission joined the rebellion, assisting Enomoto in training his troops and build-ing up fortifications. In accompanying Enomoto on his journey north, Brunet assertedthat his motive was to keep his nation’s influence strong in Japan. Brunet had been a pop-ular teacher of military technology in Japan; he had secretly been asked to join the rebel-lion, and possibly because of a romantic, adventurous spirit, he agreed. The rebels courtedother foreigners, and some Meiji officials feared that the Russians might support theTokugawa men. Hoping for German support, Enomoto ceded some land to Germans forninety-nine years. (The Germans ceded it back to Japan in 1871.)

Enomoto faced some difficulties in governing his new realm. He had to arrange forfood supplies, because most of what was eaten in Hakodate was imported. He worked toencourage more planting of crops that could be raised in the Hakodate climate with thetechnology of the time. He told Consul Rice that the rights of foreigners would berespected. (Living in Hakodate at that time were 112 foreigners: fifty-four Chinese, sev-enteen Russians, fourteen Americans, twelve English, eight French, five Germans andtwo Danes.) Enomoto reported to Rice that the French and British had said they wouldconsider the rebel government the de facto regime. Enomoto also asserted that he couldprevail 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 pro-nounced Enomoto’s government more “liberal and enlightened” than both its predeces-sor and its successor governments. Journalist Richard Hughes has described the rebelregime 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


come with Enomoto, and they facedshortages, uncertainty and cold in thisnorthern city. Might the Meiji govern-ment send forces to challenge Enomoto’sregime? The foreigners in Hakodate werenervous, and hoisted national flags onall their buildings. Pat Barr quotes theBritish consul: “As the enemy approachwe shall retire towards the hill, if hecomes nearer we shall go up the hill, andshould it come to the last extremity weshall have no resource but to put ourtrust in an over-ruling power.”32 Theforeign consuls sent word to Yokohamaand Tokyo and, in response, several for-eign warships came to the Hakodatearea. Almost all of the foreign residentsof Hakodate, including U.S. Consul Rice,his wife and children, fled to the ships.One woman, a Mrs. Wilkie, gave birthto a baby girl on shipboard.

Thomas Blakiston found his com-mercial operations disrupted. One ofhis vessels was unable to land at Hako-date because of a standoff betweenAdmiral Enomoto’s forces in the cityand foreign ships; men-of-war fromFrance, Britain and the United Statesstanding offshore dominated the harbor.Blakiston’s ship was carrying live cattleand the captain, John Will, wanted tounload the animals. He insisted on mak-ing way to a place where he could signal Blakiston for instructions. Blakiston indicatedthat Will should bring the ship as close as possible to Nanae beach some miles north ofHakodate and then lower the cattle into the water where they could be towed in by smallboats. Will carried out the operation, and noted that the cattle made it to land success-fully.

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 thethree most important communities, along with Matsumae and Hakodate, that the rebelshad taken. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1869 the Meiji government acquired the UnitedStates warship Stonewall Jackson and renamed it Kotetsu. The ship’s history is compli-cated. The American Confederacy had bought the European-built vessel, but when theAmerican Civil War ended, the United States obtained the ship. It went to Japan in a dealentered into by the shogunate, but when the ship arrived in Yokohama, the United Statesminister there stopped its delivery, as his country had proclaimed neutrality in the strug-gle then going on in Japan. Rescinding neutrality in February 1869 and thereafter able

5. Hakodate 101

Enomoto Takeaki was one of the first naval officersof Japan to study abroad. Later, challenging Japan’snew Meiji government, he led a group of samurai toHakodate in 1868. In May 1869, Meiji troopsattacked the city and defeated Enomoto’s men.Enomoto himself was pardoned and among his laterposts was that of Japanese minister to China (cour-tesy National Diet Library, Japan).

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 westcoast of the Oshima peninsula, split into three groups and separately marched towardsHakodate. This was civil war. The imperial forces took various sites on their way, includ-ing Matsumae Castle. On May 11, the imperial forces attacked Hakodate, both by landand sea. Preparing for hostilities, Enomoto had worked on fortifying the city. He broughtthe cannon from Benten Cape Fort to one of his ships, but the weapons proved inade-quate; 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 dam-age 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 servicesduring the period that Enomoto controlled Hakodate. He may have done the same forthe British government. He certainly helped a number of Japanese escape from Hakodateduring the turmoil.

While the struggle continued, townsfolk fled, coming back into the city to sleep whendarkness brought a pause in the battle. Relatively little fighting occurred, but govern-ment troops leading the attackers into the city killed a number of Enomoto’s men hos-pitalized at Koryuji Temple and then burned the building. Enomoto’s forces sank the Meijiwarship Choyo, and names of seventy dead from the ship are memorialized on a monu-


The Kaiyo Maru was the most powerful Japanese ship in the mid–nineteenth century. Rebel sup-porters 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.

ment in Hakodate. The emperor’s forces easily overwhelmed Enomoto’s troops exceptfor those holding Goryokaku, Benten Cape Fort and one other fort; some one thousandmen had sought refuge in Goryokaku.

After one last week, the final holdouts surrendered at Goryokaku. Some men fromthe imperial invasion fleet had landed overnight on the back side of the mountain. Theyclimbed it and came into the city behind Enomoto’s men, taking them by surprise. OtherMeiji fighters marched toward Hakodate from the north, and the rebels found them-selves boxed in. Some were taken prisoner and locked up in the fort until they could bereturned to their domains. Left were many military and civilian dead and a city perhapsone-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 Kyototo 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 KaiyoMaru. When battle raged in Hakodate, Hijikata was shot while leading his troops in acounterattack. At this site sits a shrine to honor him. Fresh flowers always appear, as theydo at a different monument in Hakodate built to commemorate all the fallen Tokugawawarriors. Once the conflict ended, the victors ordered that the bodies of the slain rebelsbe left unburied, with no memorial ceremonies. But with the assistance of a priest, laborcontractor Yanagawa Kumakichi had the men interred in a local temple. Later the war-riors were reburied on the side of Mt. Hakodate and after four years, a monument wasplaced 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 shogu-nate and the samurai. For Jules Brunet it meant disgrace and eventual rehabilitation. Hedeserted 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 careerresumed and he eventually became a general. For the next few years, however, the Meijigovernment did not altogether trust Frenchmen and their ships. For Admiral Enomoto,defeat meant honor and a pardon. Kuroda lobbied for the pardon, because of generaladmiration for Enomoto’s heroic stand at Hakodate and because his experience andknowledge would be valuable to the new regime. (Afterward, his son and Kuroda’s daugh-ter were married.) The admiral later became Japanese minister to China. Significantlyfor Hokkaido, he negotiated the 1875 treaty between Russia and Japan to settle the bor-der in the Kurils and Sakhalin. Arai Ikunosuke, who fought with Enomoto, also was reha-bilitated afterward. Thanks to his technical training, he worked in Hokkaido developmentand 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. Oneof the naval officers in the fleet which sailed north to challenge Enomoto was the futureAdmiral Togo Heihachiro, famed for his exploits as commander-in-chief of Japanesenaval forces in the Russo-Japanese War. Kuroda Kiyotaka, as we will see, later played a keyrole in Hokkaido development.

Goryokaku saw changes too. In 1871, the government demolished the office buildinginside Goryokaku. The fort remains, however, and is visible even from space; a photo-graph taken of Hakodate from the International Space Station in 2002 clearly shows thecity’s unique setting—its peninsula and mountain—and right in the middle of the built-up area is a prominent five pointed star: Goryokaku.

5. Hakodate 103

Hakodate’s rebuilding proceeded quickly and the foreigners who had taken refugeon shipboard returned. Many of the city’s Japanese residents had suffered, though, losinghouses 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 theend of the nineteenth century. This unprepossessing structure atop Mt. Hakodate wasnamed Hakodate Fort and in 1927 renamed Tsugaru Fort, for the straits it protected. Thefort’s significance today lies in the flora of the mountain which grew at will during thehalf-century the public was kept from the mountain and the fort. Some six hundred species


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 theshogunate. This shrine adorns the spot where Hijikata was killed in the Battle of Hakodate. Eventoday, people honor him with fresh flowers for his shrine.

have been found there; the lush vegetation has drawn many birds. Another Hakodate spotwas also a fortress site earlier in the city’s history. Very late in the eighteenth century theshogunate had built a fort at Cape Tachimachi, the southeast point of the land mass thatis 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 manyyears, this unusual fort has attracted visitors. A tower has been built nearby so that peo-ple can have a good view of its star shape. Carp swim in the moat, and each May the six-teen hundred cherry trees planted all around the fort attract sightseers and flower-viewingvisitors. Since cherry trees are a symbol of Japan, the ones planted here (and in otherHokkaido cities) help tie Hokkaido firmly to the nation.

Quieter years

After the defeat of Admiral Enomoto’s forces, the new Meiji government made thedevelopment of the northern island a priority. It now had a new name. No longer wasthe 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 twocharacters, the first meaning “box” and the second meaning “building” or “mansion.” Inthe revision, the first character was changed from the common one used for “box” withthe “hako” pronunciation to one which is rare and more elegant, but which carries thesame 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’scapital — Sapporo— and thus deprive Hakodate of some of its influence. Hakodateremained the temporary capital until facilities were ready for the administrative move toSapporo in 1871. An American medical doctor employed by the government, StuartEldridge, established a hospital and a medical school in Hakodate in the 1870s. He con-tributed to other aspects of the city’s development, too, for example recommending anew method to dispose of human waste, as he feared the traditional method—burial inthe 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 improve-ments encouraged trade, too. In 1871, Alexander Porter, appointed to supervise foreignships in the port, surveyed the depths of the harbor and placed buoys at which shipscould anchor. Shipbuilding soon became important in Hakodate, with a dry dock builtin the 1870s. But a change in government policy in 1875 in order to benefit Japanese firmsat the expense of foreign ones made it much more difficult for foreign shippers to profitby stopping in Hakodate, and shipping came to be dominated more and more by Japaneseinterests. Meanwhile, Japanese workers in Hakodate shipyards were building schoonersbased on western models.

The city gained postal service in 1872, though at first it took almost three weeks fora letter to get to Tokyo. The telegraph link to Tokyo came in 1875. Improvement in trans-portation and communication continued. Horace Capron enthused over his journey fromYokohama to Hakodate on a steamship newly in service on this route in 1874, for thetrip took only two days and two nights. Meanwhile, regular passenger service betweenAomori and Hakodate, scheduled every four days, began about 1873. Capron, whom the

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Japanese government hired to advise on the development of Hokkaido, had disembarkedin Hakodate in 1872 on his first visit to Hokkaido. His interests and knowledge lay mainlyin agriculture and thus he did not exclaim over Hakodate’s wonderful harbor as did navalvisitors. Indeed, Capron wrote, “At this time a more dilapidated old place was never seenthan Hakodate,” though a year later he found the city much improved.33

The Hakodate Shimbun began publishing in 1878, at a time when newspapers werespringing 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 Rus-sian Orthodox church building there was the first Christian church built in Japan for morethan 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 one-year-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 specializ-ing in dairy products, which they supplied to nearby communities. Peuillier became anaturalized Japanese citizen, changing his name to Okada Furie. Japanese monks joinedthe order, and soon a chapel served Catholics who lived nearby. The monastery remainsfamous today; tourists come to view the grounds and buy cookies and butter. Perhapsthe Trappists’ most valuable service to Hokkaido has been the Holstein cow; the monks


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

imported some of the animals from Holland in the early years, and the breed became themost common one on the island.

In 1898 eight French nuns established a convent nearer Hakodate. This Trappistineconvent also still functions, though during World War II Japanese officials expelled allbut one of the French nuns; the Japanese nuns kept the institution going. In 1948 theconvent had over one hundred nuns; only four were not Japanese. Now seventy nuns raisetheir own food and package cookies, candies and even dolls for tourists to buy in Hako-date sightseeing spots. Just as do the monks, Trappistine nuns remain silent and in seclu-sion.

The first Protestant missionary to come to Hokkaido, the Reverend M. C. Harris ofthe Methodist Episcopal Church, arrived in Hakodate with his wife in 1874. For a timehe was the acting United States consul in Hakodate. His wife, Flora Best Harris, gainedfame in Japan in her own right for opening in Hakodate the first high school for girls inHokkaido. The Episcopal Church in Hakodate also dates from 1874. Anglican Mission-ary Society members first arrived in that year, though they did not construct a churchbuilding until 1878. This church, like others, was several times destroyed by fire, but thecurrent cruciform-shaped modernistic structure is a striking building on the site of theoriginal church.

Not all Japanese welcomed foreigners to Hakodate and the other ports that were

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

open to them. In 1863, Father Mermet de Cachon was attacked by a man he had hired asa groom, who struck the abbot on the back of his head with a shovel. There were suspi-cions that the villain had been hired by others to do the deed because they feared Mer-met had learned too much about Japan.

On August 11, 1874, a samurai murdered thirty-two-year-old Ludwig Haber, theGerman 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 anysort. He was cut down by a sword that the assassin had hidden within his clothing. Theapparent motive was hatred of foreigners; after committing the crime, the murderer con-fessed freely, claiming that while he was dreaming, the gods had told him to kill foreign-ers. He received a trial and a guilty sentence and a month after committing the crimewas beheaded, all the foreign consuls in the city attending his execution. Meanwhile, atthe behest of the consuls in Hakodate who feared the presence of great crowds in Hako-date shortly after the crime, officials canceled the festival which had been scheduled forthat August. When he was consul, Ludwig Haber had founded the Japan-German Soci-ety; members today hold a ceremony on the anniversary date at the site of his attack.

Haber was buried in the foreign-ers’ cemetery but on the fiftiethanniversary of his death, histombstone was moved to a spotat the top of the park near the siteof his death; a replica now standsin the cemetery.

Other acts of violence in-volving foreigners also occurredfrom time to time. Russian Con-sul Goshkevich had been the sub-ject of a proposed assassinationplot in 1861, perhaps because hewas considered to be champion-ing Russian culture too strongly.In 1891, a group of foreign sailorswho had drunk too much beganbreaking windows and soonmoved on to attacking passersbywith broomsticks. A generalbrawl ensued. In 1898, a crew-man from an American seal-hunting schooner got into ascuffle in a drinking establish-ment after claiming he had beenrobbed, and in the ensuing fraya Japanese man was shot. Vari-ous other similar incidents oc-curred.

Despite such occasionalaltercations, Hakodate contin-


In 1874, a samurai who opposed the presence of foreignersin Japan went to Hakodate and, with his sword, killed youngGerman consul Ludwig Haber. This gravestone stands atthe summit of Hakodate Park, near the assassination site.

ued to grow and develop, as Thomas Blakiston observed. Writing in 1883, he noted therecent strides that had been made in travel to Hakodate, with steamers from Yokohamamaking 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 wayto Nemuro, and sometimes even beyond, to Iturup in the Kurils. Blakiston commentedthat Hakodate had changed impressively in the twenty years since his first visit, and hegave the credit to Japanese settlers and merchants, as the number of non–Japanese in thecity had hardly varied. (He also felt that once foreign governments and merchants hadconcluded that Hakodate would not be of consequence in international trade, govern-ments often sent relatively incompetent people to represent their nations in the northerncity.)34

Twice the Meiji emperor visited Hakodate. He first came in 1876, on a tour of thenorthern part of Japan planned both to acquaint him with his country and to please thepeople of the regions he would visit. Flags and banners raised on the ships at anchorgreeted the emperor as his ship entered the harbor. He saw Goryokaku, received an Ainugroup, and viewed an Ainu dance. He also visited the local hospital and while therelooked through a microscope for the first time in his life—at a toad. The Emperor madehis second visit in 1881, putting in at Otaru, going to Sapporo, then overland to Hako-date. Three men-of-war steamed north to be in the Hakodate harbor to greet him. Thecity put on a grand welcome, installing temporary street lamps and many booths withpaper lanterns for light. The townspeople dressed in their best and stood along the streetsto watch the emperor’s carriage pass by. Following the emperor came the cavalry, ridingHokkaido ponies, one accompanied by a foal trotting alongside. After dark were fireworksin the harbor. This was a short visit, though; the emperor departed the next morning byship for Honshu.

By 1885, Hakodate’s population was some forty thousand. The figure always increasedin the warmer seasons when fishermen, traders and laborers came north, and the cityremained commercially important mainly for the trade of sea products to China. Forty-three Chinese were counted as living in the city then and thirty-eight foreigners fromother nations. The Chinese were especially important in trade and helped bring prosper-ity to the city as well as to themselves. An example is Chang Tsun-san, who spent forty-six years, from 1870 to 1916, in Hakodate. One story told of him is that he happened tonotice fishermen discarding sharks’ fins, so he developed a method of preserving themfor export to China, where sharks’ fins were a delicacy.

Much more of the foreign trade with Japan in the last twenty years of the centurywent through the other ports then open—Nagasaki, Yokohama, Kobe and Osaka—thanthrough Hakodate. Even in Hokkaido, Hakodate was eclipsed as a coaling station byMuroran before the turn of the century. But Hakodate was far from moribund; in 1888the number of foreign ships calling there strained the resources of the area. During thatyear, twenty-one men-of-war anchored in the bay (twelve British, five French, two Amer-ican and one Russian), spending a total of 516 days there. Finding provisions for all 4,434men in the ships’ crews was a problem. On the other hand, the sight of seventeen men-of-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 itszenith, but trade in both otter and seal skins grew important, with Hakodate the trans-shipment center. Starting in the 1890s, foreign ships came into Hakodate with seal skinsto be shipped to Europe. As the 1890s progressed, Hakodate saw an increasing number

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of foreign schooners involved in the seal hunt. But, unfortunately, when a foreign shipcame in to port, “beer shops spring up as if by magic,” the result being that ladies hadto avoid the waterfront for fear of meeting drunken sailors. The international seafaringcommunity knew the city well, and it appears in stories by Jack London and Rudyard Kip-ling.35

By the turn of the century, foreigners came to Hakodate as tourists as well as forbusiness. Anna Hartshorne, who taught in Japan for some years, described Hakodate as“a prosperous, growing, commercial city, getting small share of foreign trade, but verybusy with the coastwise service.” She mentioned that the moat which remained afterBenten Fort was razed now served as a skating rink in the winter. While Britain’s Asianfleet 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 summerheat. Polish ethnographer Waclaw Sieroszewski spent some days in Hakodate in the sum-mer of 1903 and noted the many conversations he had in a sort of pidgin language, com-posed of “a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, English and Russian words.”36 Hakodate, thoughsmall 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’spraises: “Hakodate has now its waterworks, its Public Gardens, its three tram lines, its


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

electric light, its well-laid out roads, its hospitals, museums, numerous schools, and itsindustrial and commercial companies. It only needs a railway to connect it with otherHokkaido centres to make its prosperity complete and unrivaled in the northern island.”37

The railway soon came, but the prediction was not realized. Hakodate neverthelessremains a charming and unique city.

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PART II

Development

6 The Pioneers

Hokkaido has a pioneering tradition, and it was in the early years of the Meiji erathat the serious pioneering effort began. One visualizes hardy migrants making their wayto 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 differentfrom their homeland. This applies both to Japanese pioneers trying to establish them-selves in the north and to pioneers settling the North American west. Early migrants toboth these regions saw themselves going to a land that needed settlers. In nineteenthcentury 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 encroachmentby another nation, Russia. Hokkaido was, as various scholars have pointed out, a border-land as well as a frontier.1

In Japan, the new Meiji government assumed power at a time of concern about theforeign ships visiting Hakodate and about Russian designs on the northern island. Ezo,renamed Hokkaido, was now defined officially as part of Japan and government policyencouraged permanent Wajin settlement throughout the island. In addition, with tradein Hokkaido products growing and becoming more lucrative, the government wanted arole in its control. Just a few months after the Meiji government assumed power in Jan-uary 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 onewho suggested a new name for Ezo. Government officials respected him; while Perry’sships were in Japan, Edo had ordered Matsuura to observe the Americans’ actions andcounsel the government on policy. Soon after the defeat of Admiral Enomoto and hisrebel forces at Hakodate came the name change. On August 15, 1869, the island becameHokkaido, or “northern sea route.” James E. Ketelaar has suggested that the “Do” ofHokkaido, which is usually translated as “route,” be understood also to suggest “the wayof,” as it is in chado, the tea ceremony (the way of tea) or shodo, calligraphy (the way ofwriting). It would symbolize the “way” of the new regime. Another interpretation is thatthe name means “an island floating on northern waters.”2 The new name bound the islandmore 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 wehave seen. The group sent by the Edo government to survey Ezo in 1785 had urged devel-opment; the government could then receive income through taxes on cultivated land. Bythe 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 didnot settle the border on Sakhalin, the Japanese government continued to fear possibleRussian threats and thus wanted to strengthen Japan’s hold on Ezo. Officials sent migrantsto the island to settle, clear the land, and begin farming. But most people who went didnot have the skills or knowledge required, government support dried up, and many peo-ple soon left.

The opening of Hakodate to foreign ships also spurred settlement. Lieutenant GeorgePreble in Hakodate with the 1854 Perry expedition noted seeing horses and cattle in thehills near the city. The American sailors, not having tasted fresh beef in a long time, triedto get some—but the Japanese told them they “never killed the cattle,” which were usedas draft animals. Agricultural development to meet the needs of foreign ships’ crews soonbecame a priority, though. By 1857 Hokkaido had some milk cattle, and a beef cattleindustry 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 Yessowhere agriculture is followed.” He reported seeing “an inferior kind of hardy rice” andwrote that “enough silk is produced to supply the raw material for a factory.” He notedthat the government promoted immigration to Ezo, encouraging farmers—even supply-ing horses to them —and fostering “all the occupations necessary” for the island’s devel-opment.3 Meanwhile, opportunities in fishing also brought people to the northern island.

With the arrival of foreigners, Japanese officials had yet another reason for encour-aging Wajin migration to the northern island. Foreigners visiting Hokkaido showed inter-est in the Ainu, and officials feared the possibility that westerners’ concern for the Ainumight incite rebellion. The more Wajin in Hokkaido, though, the less chance any Ainuuprising would succeed.

Migrants who settled in Hokkaido pushed the Ainu into a more and more marginalposition, making Ainu traditional life impossible just as the westward movement in NorthAmerica destroyed traditional Native American life. Starting in 1855, Wajin could settlepermanently in the Ezochi. The Japanese government perceived Hokkaido land as emptyand thus available for settlement, dismissing Ainu use of land just as American politi-cians and pioneers violated Native American land rights. This story of settlers over-whelming native cultures occurred elsewhere, too, as in Siberia, Australia and NewZealand.

The Kaitakushi

In 1869, facing no immediate challenges in the north after defeating the rebel forcesled by Enomoto Takeaki, the Meiji government established the Kaitakushi, or HokkaidoColonization Commission, to develop Hokkaido, referring to the island as “the north-ern gate of the empire.”4 The government urged development for many reasons: becauseof the nearby Russian presence, to find a role for samurai who had lost their function insociety with the defeat of the shogunate, to make the island’s resources available forJapan’s modernization and to settle a stable agricultural population. Hokkaido wouldthus become a source of wealth for the nation rather than a destination for governmentfunds. The Meiji government had ordered a number of clans to establish colonies inHokkaido, but since this proved financially impossible, officials passed responsibility tothe 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, betweenfour and five percent of the Meiji regime’s total budget. The organization would havecontrol of all development; its chief would be the island’s governor. Even those wishingto 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 fromforeign advisers that the Kaitakushi published in 1875 includes the notation that “theword Kaitakushi means ‘Commission for opening up and developing.’” Foreigners inJapan at the time used the term “Colonial Department.” Sometimes one sees “Coloniza-tion Commission.” The idea that Hokkaido was “colonized” suggests that it was not andcould not be an integral part of Japan and as Michael Weiner has pointed out, Wajin rela-tions with the Ainu during this period were those of colonizers and the colonized. In theworld today the word “colonization” has a negative connotation, suggesting the conquestof foreign lands, and to Hokkaido Ainu, this is what was done to their homeland. Thisera in Hokkaido history has even been called the “Exploitation Period.”5 Japanese-Englishdictionaries define kaitaku as reclamation,cultivation, development, or opening upland, and some publications call the Kaita-kushi the Hokkaido Development Commis-sion. To those who came from elsewhere inJapan to settle the island as well as to Japa-nese in general, Hokkaido was changedfrom a mostly empty land to a productiveone, benefiting everyone.

A young man named Kuroda Kiyo-taka gained appointment to the Kaitakushiin 1870. Born in 1840, a samurai of the Sat-suma clan on Kyushu, he went to Edo as ayoung man to study military technologybrought to Japan from the west. The Sat-suma clan, though large and potent, hadnot been close to the Tokugawa Shogunate,and the Satsuma were active in the move-ment that led to the Meiji Restoration.Young Kuroda worked effectively for thecause and thus was chosen to lead thetroops sent to Ezo to defeat Enomoto’srebels. W. S. Clark, whom Kuroda broughtfrom the United States to head SapporoAgricultural College, called him a “veryremarkable man” and “as active and coura-geous a man as you could wish to see.”6 In1870, Kuroda prepared an analysis of whatwas necessary to administer the develop-ment of Hokkaido, estimating that theKaitakushi would need twenty years toaccomplish this. By late 1871 Kuroda effec-

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Kuroda Kiyotaka was perhaps the one man whohas had the greatest impact upon Hokkaido. Heled the Kaitakushi, or Colonization Commis-sion, which instigated systematic developmentof Hokkaido, mainly in the 1870s. Kuroda hiredAmerican advisers in fields from agriculture togeology to education. Kuroda directed activitiesin many fields to encourage settlement and pros-perity in Hokkaido. He briefly served as primeminister of Japan, from 1888 to 1889 (courtesyNational Diet Library, Japan).

tively ran the Kaitakushi; in 1874 he was officially appointed its head, and he maintainedthat position until abolition of the agency in 1881. He brought American experts to Japanto advise on Hokkaido development and urged that migrants from elsewhere in Japanbe encouraged to come to Hokkaido to establish agriculture there. Thus Kuroda playeda crucial role in the settlement of the island. Later, in 1888 and 1889, he served as Japan’sprime minister.

As the Kaitakushi’s purpose was Hokkaido development, the agency created a pro-gram to encourage immigration to the island. The Kaitakushi planned to establish agri-cultural communities and encouraged settlers to grow wheat and other northern cropsthere. The officials discouraged rice-growing because, influenced by American advice,they thought that cool climate crops would be Hokkaido’s future. In 1869, the organiza-tion recruited some five hundred men from the Kanto region (around Tokyo) to settlein the north, specifically in the Soya, Sakhalin and Nemuro areas. These specific loca-tions, Soya at Hokkaido’s northern tip, Sakhalin to the north, and Nemuro on Hokkaido’seasternmost peninsula, were all strategically significant locations, given the anxiety toprevent Russian aggression against Japan. These areas, however, also had winter weatherconditions more severe than much of Hokkaido. Not surprisingly, this colonization effortcollapsed.

During the first two years of Kaitakushi-sponsored immigration, 1869–1871, eight-een groups of immigrants came to Hokkaido. Eleven of the groups consisted of formersamurai, mostly from the Sendai region in northern Honshu; commoners made up theother migrant parties. Group migration became the basis for the establishment of Hok-kaido communities, and the largest number of immigrants continued to come fromnorthern Honshu.

General Enomoto’s followers were among the first immigrants settled by theKaitakushi. They went to the Ishikari Valley, a place where newcomers were more likelyto succeed, and the organization supplied them with necessities for three years. Over thenext few years, perhaps twelve thousand people moved to Hokkaido in this program andmany were directed to the Ishikari Valley; some of them made up much of the originalpopulation of Sapporo. Some Kaitakushi officials also received Ishikari Valley land, andrecruiters 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 evenbrought prostitutes to Hokkaido and built dwellings for them.) Kuroda maintained a pol-icy of subsidizing only those who came to Hokkaido to farm rather than helping allprospective migrants, and some historians have suggested that this retarded the growthof Hokkaido long beyond the time the Kaitakushi existed.7 Kaitakushi policies changedover 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 forcrops, and clearing land from forest when one had only hand tools to cut down and thencut up the trees was daunting. Too many migrants took advantage of Kaitakushi aid aslong as it lasted and, when it ended, gave up farming and returned to Honshu or wentoff to the coast to work in the fisheries.

After the first few Kaitakushi years, Edwin Dun, an American who went to Japan in1873 to advise the organization on livestock, described Hokkaido, noting that while “therewere towns and villages around the entire coast of the island and Hakodate was an impor-tant 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 inte-rior and the dense growth of scrub bamboo that covered the highlands rendered progresson horse back or even on foot difficult.... The fisheries were the only profitable enterprisethat Hokkaido offered at that time.” He pointed out that “thousands of men” came tothe 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. Noneof the programs brought the hoped-for number of settlers or led to general pioneer pros-perity. Eager to increase Hokkaido population, Kuroda even brought in a few Chinesefarmers.

From the first, attracting immigrants to Hokkaido has been difficult. Whereas NorthAmericans descended from people who had left their native countries in Europe to crossthe ocean found no philosophical hardship in moving on from one part of America toanother, Japanese have always felt ties to their ancestral homes and this was true even ifone 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 inthe Tokyo press. Too often, only the poorest and least motivated seemed to want tomigrate to Hokkaido.

Traditional Japanese practices of government and administration were not suited toan enterprise such as pioneer settlement. Allowing freedom and adaptability rather thanfollowing 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 Tokyoand others in Sapporo and the slowness of communication at the time, administrationwas bound to be difficult.

In 1874, the Kaitakushi gained official permission to recruit ex-samurai to go to thenorthern island as tondenhei, or farmer-soldiers. These former samurai whose feudallords had not supported the Meiji Restoration now had no means of making a living; theirlords encouraged emigration to Hokkaido. As early as 1854, several shogunate inspec-tors in Hokkaido had recommended a tondenhei system; perhaps the Russian policy ofsetting up Cossack outposts in Siberia inspired the scheme. The first such Hokkaido set-tlement appeared in 1875, when 198 farmer-soldiers and their families came to Sapporoand established homes in the Kotoni district, northwest of today’s city center. The gov-ernment furnished each former samurai with eight acres of land and a house completewith a Russian stove to cope with winter cold. The men even received cold weather uni-forms. In return, the eighteen to thirty-five year old male settlers were placed in regi-ments and participated in military exercises (mostly in the winter, when farming tasksdid 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, asformer samurai, swords. By the end of 1876, more than two thousand tondenhei soldier-farmers had gone to Hokkaido in the program, many simply because the Meiji Restora-tion had deprived them of their livelihood. Though at first only former samurai wereincluded, later the scheme was opened to others. After the 1875 treaty settled the borderwith Russia, the military justification for Hokkaido colonization no longer seemed soimportant, and few more tondenhei were recruited. In 1903 they were incorporated intothe nation’s army. During the years of recruitment, over seven thousand tondenhei fam-ilies participated in establishing about forty villages in Hokkaido.

6. The Pioneers 119

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 wereplaced in the Ishikari Valley, around Sapporo and Takikawa and upstream in the Kami-kawa basin, in which Asahikawa sits. A few tondenhei villages were along the coast, atMuroran and near Akkeshi and Nemuro far to the east. The eastern settlements, estab-lished from 1886 to about 1890, were planned as defense posts because Russian encroach-ment via the Kuril Islands seemed a possibility despite the border treaty adopted in 1875by Japan and Russia. Three tondenhei villages were placed upstream on the Tokoro Riverand two on the Yubetsu, both streams emptying in to the Sea of Okhotsk on Hokkaido’snortheast coast. The most prosperous area of tondenhei settlement, though, was in theKamikawa 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 hardystrains of rice later became available, farmers shifted more and more of the land to ricecultivation, which dominated the area by the early twentieth century.

The tondenhei lived a regulated life, for example working a twelve hour day in thefields from April through September. During the colder part of the year, the workdaywould last for only eleven hours, men either clearing land or participating in military

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

drill. Many of the tondenhei had a hard time, as they were not used to farming. But fam-ilies did work together—each family recruited had to include two able-bodied memberswho could work in addition to the farmer-soldier—and lend a hand to each other. Someof the tondenhei served in the Russo-Japanese War.

Tondenhei settlements were more successful than other new communities in Hok-kaido. The Kaitakushi set aside good land for the tondenhei villages, which also receivedother special benefits. Moreover, as former samurai, the farmer-soldiers were often peo-ple 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 Divi-sion in the Army of Japan.

Another successful effort that grew from the Kaitakushi’s early efforts in establish-ing 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—forfarm work, transportation and military use. Thus the Niikappu stud farm and ranch wasorganized. Here Japanese horses from the Nambu District of northern Honshu were cross-bred with imported stock, creating a superior animal. For many years, Niikappu was animperial ranch, featuring an elegant dwelling suitable for visits by the emperor and hisfamily and guests.

The Kaitakushi set up factories to produce many items the Hokkaido settlers wouldneed, from soy sauce to saddles. Print shops, tanneries, flour mills and textile factorieswere among the many enterprises started. The organization also became involved in com-

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

merce in order to market products from the new Hokkaido farms. The Kaitakushi boughtfarm 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 dis-patched several merchants plus an interpreter and four officials on a visit to Vladivos-tok, directly west of Hokkaido, taking along the kinds of Hokkaido products the Japanesemight be able to trade. He followed on a warship. The Japanese visit to Russia stimulatedRussian interest in Hokkaido products, but given Vladivostok’s small population (lessthan forty-five hundred) and its almost uninhabited hinterland, the Japanese decided thatestablishing ongoing trade with Vladivostok merchants would not be profitable.

Looking for ideas that could be useful in Hokkaido development, Kuroda visited aRussian settlement on Sakhalin island. Seeing buildings with window glass, the Kaitakushiordered glass windows put in their structures. One of Kuroda’s ideas was to adapt Rus-sian techniques to make sleighs that horses could pull over snow-covered ground. Thesleighs he saw in Russia featured logs steamed into the characteristic half-round shapeof 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 ofHokkaido 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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Farmer-soldier families first came to the community of Ebetsu, just east of Sapporo, in 1878. Thistondenhei house, dating from the late nineteenth century, stands today in Ebetsu’s Yukawa Park.

stove in a British ship’s cabin. Thinking that such a stove would be very useful, he madea model based on it.)

The Meiji regime abolished the Kaitakushi in 1881, despite Kuroda’s opposition tothe move. He feared that if the government agency were not at work, Hokkaido devel-opment 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 beenefficient, but that was generally true of all governmental bodies. Partly to give employ-ment 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 assetsto officials of the organization at an extremely favorable rate, just one thirty-sixth of theircost. His motive for the sale was to see Kaitakushi projects continue, he stated. WhenTokyo officials approved the deal, furor erupted and the government instead disbandedthe Kaitakushi in disgrace, the deal unconsummated. (The scandal was a major factor inprecipitating promulgation of the first constitution of Japan a few years later. The con-troversy also spurred the popularization of newspapers in Japan, for the papers coveredthe Kaitakushi debacle assiduously and probably were at least partly responsible for can-cellation of the sale.)

6. The Pioneers 123

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 thekettle hanging over the fire pit. This house, where a five-member tondenhei family once lived, nowsits in the Historical Village of Hokkaido on the eastern outskirts of Sapporo.

Despite problems during the Kaitakushi years, Hokkaido population quadrupledunder Kaitakushi tutelage. Cultivated lands grew from about two thousand acres to nearlyfifty thousand. A number of schools opened in Hokkaido; by 1877, about fifteen hun-dred boys and three hundred girls were attending elementary schools in the island’s mainsettlements. And, as one newspaper noted during the discord over sale of the Kaitakushiassets, Hokkaido was “Japan’s treasure chest.”9 Notwithstanding the real problems facedby 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 andmuseums and libraries in these communities recount stories of intrepid founders. Hereare a few brief examples of early days in various island communities.

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

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

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

to an institution established there to instruct settlers in their use. Date Kunishige appor-tioned 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 toform its first temple, Zenkoji, which is celebrated as the first and one of the most reveredBuddhist temples in Hokkaido. Tradition—or myth—tells that the monk Kuya went toEzo in the tenth century to preach to the Ainu, and during his time there he foundedZenkoji.

Ebetsu, on the Ishikari plain just a few miles east of Sapporo, saw its first settlers in1871: 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 brickstructure roofed with tile, a powder magazine used to store powder for about twenty yearsafter 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 Tomako-mai, about half way from there to Cape Erimo. Just over a decade later Takeoka openeda grocery. The family prospered enough to replace it in 1898 with a long, impressive one-story building containing living quarters in the back.10

Not all the settlements prospered, however. The migrants who started a communityat Ikeda, east of Obihiro, in 1880 failed for an unusual reason. This group of about twohundred 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 inthe deer population in 1882, almost all the settlers left. A community later grew thereand the town of Ikeda has become famous as a winemaking center.

Many other Hokkaido communities trace their beginnings to the late nineteenth cen-tury. Kita Hiroshima City, about twelve miles southeast of Sapporo on the way to Chi-tose, received its name because the first sizable number of settlers, some twenty-fivefamilies 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 Asahikawaon the main route to Sapporo, in 1892, and a thousand tondenhei families came in 1895and 1896, spurring the town’s development. Fukagawa grew further after 1898 when therailway came through. Muroran rose in prominence when it became a coaling station forocean 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 inthe large Kamikawa basin. In 1888, prisoners built a road from Sapporo to the Asahikawasite. 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 morethan five thousand people when the railroad reached it in 1898. In 1899 a newly-estab-lished army division was stationed at Asahikawa to provide defense for Hokkaido. Anarmy base was built, land values rose, and more settlers came, the population rising tomore than eighteen thousand by 1903. As early planners had hoped, the entire area hasbecome highly developed. Today Asahikawa is Hokkaido’s second largest city, havingpassed Hakodate in population after World War II.

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Many settlers, including people recruited as tondenhei, came to Hokkaido to escapeprivations 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 set-tled in the Ishikari Valley about thirty miles south of Asahikawa in the direction of Sap-poro. The first winter was a trial, even with government assistance; the group lived intondenhei-built huts, three families in each dwelling. But spring came, they planted cropsand caught fish. They called their new home Shintotsukawa, or “New Totsukawa,” aftertheir old home town.

Nakatonbetsu, an isolated inland town in Hokkaido’s far north, began with the dis-covery 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 dairyingand 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 Hok-kaido, a bit south of Nayoro; the railroad line to Wakkanai at the northern tip of the islandcame through in 1903 and more settlers appeared. In 1938 the village adopted the nameof Furen and in 1953 it achieved the status of a town. Furen is one of the many Hokkaidoplace names taken from Ainu words but given Japanese characters that can add an addi-tional 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 mergedwith 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 anempty upland area between central Hokkaido’s two mountain national parks, he was thefirst settler in what became the town of Rikubetsu. Seki’s son, a Sapporo Agricultural Col-lege graduate, helped, and additional settlers came after a railroad reached the area, morethan a decade later. In recent times the town of about thirty-five hundred people cele-brates its extremely cold weather, and because of exceptionally clear skies, an astronom-ical 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 weekof September 1898 so much rain fell that the Tokoro River overflowed, carrying awayrocks and trees and destroying ninety percent of the settlement’s newly-established crop-land. Tokyo provided some relief funds (but none for flood protection). Many of the set-tlers left, but the tondenhei families had no choice but to stay and toil to rebuild theircommunity. Settlers in the area had to overcome transport difficulties; Abashiri was theport from which people and supplies were taken to the Kitami area, and adverse weatherconditions, including an icebound sea, obviously impeded travel. From the coast, set-tlers and their belongings went by horseback. Kitami eventually grew into a city of morethan one hundred thousand people.

Long-established towns in Hokkaido saw increased growth and trade as more andmore people came north. Thomas Blakiston described Nemuro, a fishing center from longbefore the Meiji era, as having in 1881 “about seven hundred houses about one-half occu-pied by fishermen and labourers, the other being the residences and business places ofmerchants, shop-keepers, and others— not omitting females of uncertain fame whoinvariably swarm at such a place, especially during the fishing season.”11 Kushiro, to thewest 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 traditionalJapanese religious institutions was an urgent priority. By the end of the nineteenth cen-tury there were well over two hundred Buddhist temples in Hokkaido, representing anumber of sects. Most of them appeared during the Meiji years. A crucial step in the lifeof a new town was the arrival of a Buddhist priest. (In a place with harsh living condi-tions and a challenging climate, having a priest to carry out the rituals surrounding deathwas important.) Even before the Meiji government took power, authorities of the maintemple of an important Buddhist sect, Higashi Honganji, which had had a temple inHakodate for many years, asked government permission for a role in Hokkaido devel-opment. This would indicate the religious group’s loyalty to the new regime. The secthad in mind sponsoring parties of colonists and doing missionary work among thesecolonists as well as the Ainu. Permission came easily; among other reasons, Higashi Hon-ganji-sponsored colonization might effectively counter Orthodox Church efforts at pros-elytization.

As communities appeared and grew, the successful ones often owed their survivaland prosperity to the effectiveness of their leaders. Praised for their “courage, intelli-gence and vision,” these men exhibited tenacity as well as the ability to guide a group ina difficult undertaking: that of creating a community in an isolated and challenging envi-ronment.12 Along with good leadership, sustaining a group spirit played a strong—thoughelusive—part in community success.

Pioneering

The pioneers came in ships that docked mostly in Hakodate, Muroran or Otaru andcontinued to their place of settlement by train, small boat, wagon or even on foot. Pio-neer life challenged the newcomers, as it has wherever in the world people have carvedout new settlements in a wilderness. In 1877, William Wheeler, hired to teach at the newSapporo Agricultural College, described Hokkaido farms. Wheeler estimated the aver-age farm to have from one to five acres of land that had been covered with timber, bam-boo and brush before being cleared for cultivation. The farmhouse would be framed withpoles tied together, the walls then thatched or finished with clay adhering to a loose fibermatting. The roof would be thatch, with a hole for smoke to escape from the fire in thedwelling’s only room.13 Such a house was startlingly similar to those of the Ainu. A poorpioneer family would have no furniture, maybe just a box or two, and might hang clotheson pegs on the poles in the walls. The house would be small, its single room about tenby eighteen feet, with a fire pit in the middle and perhaps only one pot available for cook-ing. Companies that brought groups to settle Hokkaido often built dwellings of this typefor the migrants. Sometimes the families who had to live in the flimsy houses feared thatbears could break down the walls and attack sleeping children; the dwellings would haveto be strong enough to keep bears out.

Poor farm families elsewhere in Japan also lived in dwellings that could be charac-terized as hovels, but in Hokkaido the pioneers faced frigid winters. The Hokkaido new-comers’ experience was not too different from that of Ukrainian migrants who settled inthe Canadian prairie provinces in the late nineteenth century, where not only did theyface the privations of poverty, they found winter weather much colder than they had everknown.

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More prosperous farmers would have houses with clapboard walls and shingledroofs, the shingles kept in place by stones placed on boards atop the roof. It usually tookthe Hokkaido pioneers four or five years at the very least before they could build such asubstantial dwelling. The Japanese admired wood’s natural finish, so many of the clap-board houses and shops from pioneer times were unpainted, giving them a misleadinglyprimitive 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 besurprisingly Japanese inside, with tatami mat floors, sliding doors with paper panelsbetween rooms, and Japanese-style furnishings. The main room in traditional Japanesehomes and shops in those days featured a small fire pit beneath a pole from which ateakettle hung, but as time went on, stoves to replace or sit next to the firepit becamemore common. Many dwellings and inns featured a corridor between the rooms and theoutside wall. This feature was adopted from homes in the Japanese heartland, where itsfunction 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 ani-mals. 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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Many, probably most, late nineteenth and early twentieth century migrants to Hokkaido had lit-tle money and were forced to construct primitive huts of this sort as their first dwellings inHokkaido. Typically, it took a family about five years to amass enough wealth to build a more sub-stantial house. This representation of a peasant hut is in the Historical Village of Hokkaido.

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 foodin 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, peo-ple generally provided the energy required for agricultural work, but on the larger Hok-kaido 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 migrantsreceived 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 axesand, more difficult, digging out the stumps and roots. The felled wood was useful, ofcourse, for fuel. Some families found they could clear only about two acres during theirfirst year in Hokkaido. Many settlers suffered injuries while felling the trees. Sometimesthe pioneers tried to burn away undergrowth so they could plow, but this could causeforest fire.

Around the turn of the century the Higashide family left Ishikawa Prefecture onHonshu for Hokkaido. Ruined by bankruptcy because the family head did not managehis expenditures carefully enough, his son felt emigration to Hokkaido a necessity. Thefamily settled in Otoe Village, a small community nestled among the forests and hillsdownstream and across the ridge from Asahikawa. (Otoe Village is now part of Fuka-gawa City.) Here the Higashides lived among many other struggling farm families. Every-one 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 wintermeals consisted only of miso soup and pickled vegetables along with this mixture. Veryoccasionally, salted salmon would make the meal special.15

During growing and harvesting seasons family members worked in the fields allthrough 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 cut-ting trees by hand in a government forest, then bringing the wood home. Withoutfirewood to heat the house, life in the winter would have been impossible, and trees couldbe felled and cut up even when land and water were covered with snow and ice. Despitea fire, the Higashide family home, a mere thatched hut, was uncomfortable in the win-ter chill, snow blowing in through cracks in the structure. Blizzards like those in pioneerdays in the Dakotas or Saskatchewan brought real danger of death in the blinding snowwhen people were not safely indoors.

Thomas Blakiston heard late in February 1871 that Otaru people desperately neededrice. 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, almostcapsized, 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 bothship and rice survived. Like the Higashide family, though, poor migrants could not evenafford rice and their typical meals would include a bowl of millet, not rice, along withmiso soup and pickled daikon, or radish. Michael Lewis has written that migrant fami-lies generally did not produce enough food to sustain themselves until they had spentfour or five years in Hokkaido.16 In the first two decades of the Meiji era, most of the poorWajin who came to Hokkaido settled in Ainu villages, and aid from the local Ainu helpedthem survive.

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Not all the pioneers who helped develop Hokkaido were farmers. By the end of thecentury fewer than sixty percent of the new immigrants went into agriculture. Somemoved to the northern island to work in business or industry. It is not surprising, giventhe pioneering tradition in late nineteenth century Hokkaido, that Japan’s first femaledoctor went into practice there: Ogino Genko migrated to Setana, a town on the westcoast of the Oshima Peninsula, to set up a clinic in 1897. Not licensed until she was forty-seven years old, she worked at her clinic for ten years. She is just one example of the manysupport workers necessary in a successful community.

The fisheries boomed. It was in the pioneer years that the Hokkaido fishing indus-try reached its zenith, though unlike agriculture, fishing’s roots in Hokkaido stretchedback many, many years. The Kaitakushi abolished the basho ukeoi, opening up the indus-try to anyone who wished to participate in it. This, however, helped cause the overfishingthat led to the near-demise of the herring fishery in the early twentieth century. In addi-tion, large-scale operators became more and more important in the industry; the fisher-men worked for them. The markets for both food fish and fish fertilizer grew, and for theHokkaido pioneer, a few weeks’ seasonal work in the fishery could help family financesimmeasurably. 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 entireisland sat scattered houses or villages, though many would be closed up except when peo-ple fished there. A number of fishery workers were only seasonal Hokkaido residents. In1886, a government edict ordered the creation of local fishermen’s associations, largelyin order to settle—or prevent—disputes over the fishing grounds. Despite all the effortsto encourage farming, fishing long remained more important to the Hokkaido economy

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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 Histori-cal Village of Hokkaido and is visited by tourists. Instead of nails, stones on the roof hold the shin-gles down.

than agriculture. In 1891 more than seventy percent of Hokkaido residents participatedin 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, acrossthe toe of the Oshima Peninsula from Hakodate, rioted in 1873 over the imposition oftaxes they felt excessive. All the Hakodate police were sent to quell the turmoil, whichdestroyed some buildings. Several people died during the violence.

The Kaitakushi opened an experimental salmon cannery near the Ishikari River estu-ary. It was the needs of the Japanese Navy that spurred the growth of the salmon canningindustry, particularly during Japan’s brief war with China, 1894-95, and the Russo-Japa-nese War of 1904-05. Other sea products also found markets. The first crab cannery inJapan opened in the Otaru area in the early 1890s and the first fish hatchery in the nationwas constructed on the Chitose River in 1888.

The kombu harvest was important, especially in the China trade. Traveling in Hok-kaido in 1874, Benjamin Lyman noted that the main activity he saw around Akkeshi wascollecting and drying kombu.17 In the Erimo district, villages sprang up based on thisharvest; in the mid–nineteenth century the area became the source of more kombu thananywhere else in Japan. Once the Kaitakushi opened up the fisheries and allowed accessto coastal waters, many people moved to the shoreline area near Cape Erimo, and so much

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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 yearsof 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).

kombu was taken that the future of the product there was in doubt, leading to carefulregulation of the harvest even before the twentieth century began.

The sea otter trade also flourished in these years. Ainu and Russian fishermen hadlong harvested small numbers of the sea creatures, but after an American sailor foundlarge numbers of sea otter in Kurils waters in 1872 and recognized their value, the huntexploded. Over the next ten years many otter were taken for their valuable skins, usuallyby foreign ships employing local crewmen. Hunting the otter brought danger from thestormy 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 andwalked or rode horseback all the way to Hakodate with their skins, a twenty-three daytrip. German Consul Ludwig Haber bought the skins in Hakodate. Henry Snow esti-mated the size of the otter harvest during the era it flourished: from 1872 to 1881 the otterhunters took ten thousand skins, from 1882 to 1891 more than one thousand, from 1892to 1901 about eight hundred and from 1902 until 1909, when he was writing, about threehundred fifty. The otter’s near-extinction killed the industry.18

Miners, as well as farmers and fishermen, must be counted among Hokkaido pio-neers. Establishing the mining industry in Hokkaido posed a challenge. No mining tra-dition—or understanding of the craft—existed there, nor did transportation links fromthe mining districts to the sea. Hokkaido did not have a surplus population, so peopleto work in the mines were often not readily available, and because the island was largelyundeveloped, prospective markets for coal and other mine products were far away.

In the Meiji era, the most important Hokkaido coal mining regions were at Horonaiand Yubari. Both sites were in the mountain range east of Sapporo. First, Horonai, lessthan 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 hisengineering background strongly qualified him. The Kaitakushi began mine developmentin 1878 and opened a railroad to Otaru at the end of 1881 to transport the ore. In 1889the government sold the mine and its railway to a private firm, the Hokkaido Coal MineRailway Company (later renamed the Hokkaido Coal Mine Steam Ship Company andusually known as Hokutan). In the three decades following the Horonai purchase, Hoku-tan bought mining rights and opened mines at various other Hokkaido locations.

In the narrow Yubari valley in the same mountain range as Horonai but farthersouth, American geologist Benjamin Lyman suggested that coal mining could be prom-ising, but not for fifteen years was this area thoroughly examined. Then, in 1888, BanIchitaro, a samurai who had been on the Lyman prospecting team, went to the Yubariarea with Ainu guides and discovered extensive coal deposits. Soon he arranged for theopening of several mines. Hokutan took over in 1892, and with mines in operation, thedevelopment of Yubari began. The opportunity for work here drew many migrants, mostlyfrom northern Honshu. Yubari grew to a city of more than one hundred thousand peo-ple when the coal industry reached its peak.

On the Shiretoko Peninsula, almost as far as one could travel from Sapporo and stillbe 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 mineraldown the mountain. Over the next decade most of the sulfur was taken out; thereafterthe 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 andin the winter even colder than the Hokkaido plains. It is difficult to imagine the priva-tions of the early miners, but a number of mining communities, not just Horonai andYubari, flourished in Hokkaido in the late nineteenth century. The Kaitakushi hadbrought in a number of newcomers from northern Honshu. The miners usually stayedin bunkhouses run by contractors and some of these contractors, often recruited by theowners from criminal gangs, mistreated and cheated the miners. Strikes and riots some-times broke out. Even women and children worked at some of the mines. Housing avail-able for mine families was often dreadful, one 1900 description noting that shacks hadrotting floors and leaking roofs and that the one latrine that served twenty of these shackswas inaccessible when it snowed.19 Moreover, from the beginning, mining was danger-ous.

Some migrants to Hokkaido did not come of their own volition. Having read of thesettlement of Australia by convicts, Kaitakushi director Kuroda set up several penalcolonies on the Ishikari plain. Prisoners had to work on road construction and in themines. To open up the north of the island, a prison was built in Abashiri about 1890, theidea being that the prisoners would work on infrastructure projects. Abashiri’s locationon the Sea of Okhotsk, distant from Hokkaido’s busy ports and railroads, meant thatsupplies could not be brought in during the winter months when the harbor was ice-bound, but the isolated location made prisoner escapes less likely. Partly because of itscold and remoteness, this prison gained a fearsome reputation. Hokkaido became the sitefor incarceration of long-term prisoners in Japan, one more disincentive for attractingsettlers. For some prisoners, though, Hokkaido was a refuge. A few escaped from Sak-halin—then a Russian prison island—to the Japanese island. In 1905, seventeen convictsfrom Sakhalin (sixteen of them Turks) appeared in Wakkanai.

Many convicts worked in the Horonai mine and from 1886 through 1890, fifty-fivethousand of them were injured and eighty-two killed in mine explosions. Some eightypercent of the Horonai miners were convicts when Hokutan bought the mine.20 Aboutfive years after the purchase, Hokutan phased out convict employment. Convicts con-tinued to be employed in Hokkaido in other ways, though, and when locusts plagued theisland in the 1880s, convicts fought pests for a time. In Kaitakushi days, prisoners wereseen as a boon to Hokkaido because they could aid in its development. As time went onand more settlers appeared, fear grew of prison escapes as well as of the deleterious effectreleased prisoners could have on society; starting in 1894, convicts were no longer allowedto settle on the island after serving their sentences.

In Japan in those days, political undesirables faced persecution or exile. In the heart-land, a number of people agitated for peoples’ rights, and some of those labeled trouble-makers were shipped off to Hokkaido. Moving the burakumin, Japan’s untouchablecommunity, 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 afterthey announced their religion came from Urakami district in Nagasaki. Other Christianscame voluntarily; in 1881 and 1882, more than one hundred Christians, mainly fromHiroshima and Kobe, settled in Urakawa, on the coast southwest from Tomakomai. Aswith most immigrants, their first years were very difficult, but as early as 1884 they con-structed 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, mis-sionary movements and women activists became much more active than in the Japaneseheartland, the same progression that took place in pioneer communities in other placessuch 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 farmsand 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 familiestoday look back with pride at their ancestors’ accomplishments, despite hardships, inmaking a productive island from a wild land.

Transportation

Development of Hokkaido land depended on available transportation links. Coastalcommunities came first, of course. Inland, successful settlement and development of aregion was much more likely once the railroads came, because farmers had to get theirproducts to market. Thus while some communities and farms preceded the railroad, mostcame after a rail link was assured. The earliest lines, more or less in a corridor fromMuroran to Asahikawa and west to Sapporo and Otaru, came by the end of the nine-teenth century, but the most distant northern and eastern parts of Hokkaido were notreached by rail until the 1920s and 1930s.

Hokkaido’s first railroad was not built not to serve farms but to bring coal fromHoronai 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 Chapter8; that part of the track, partly along a rugged coastline, challenged the engineers. Extend-ing the railroad to the mine was a comparatively straightforward task. Passing throughswamp and forest, the section between Sapporo and Horonai opened in 1882. For somemiles, the track passed through the wide Ishikari plain, but before reaching Horonai, theline turned up a narrow valley, gaining altitude, finally reaching the mine after travers-ing a tunnel through a ridge. By 1883, the railway line was complete and Horonai coalcould now be delivered to Sapporo and Otaru.

Several other rail lines in Hokkaido opened in the next few decades. By 1890, a lineextended beyond Sapporo farther into the Ishikari plain, making farming feasible there.By 1892, Hokutan constructed another line to transport coal, running northeast up thecoast from Muroran through Tomakomai, but instead of heading from Tomakomai toSapporo, it went north to Iwamizawa, now a city a little more than twenty miles north-east of Sapporo. Here it met the line from to Horonai. South of Iwamizawa, a branch linewas built to the Yubari coal fields.

A railroad network in Hokkaido could not reach its potential without a link fromnorthern Honshu to the heartland. By the end of the century, a railroad had been com-pleted from Tokyo to Aomori, the port for Honshu’s far north and the main Honshu ter-minus for ferries to Hakodate. Hokkaido passengers could then cross Tsugaru Strait byboat to reach the northern island. By 1898, one could travel by train as far north asAsahikawa 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 withfamilies 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 remainedonly a dream, though. Without feeder roads, the trunk roads did not get the use—andupkeep—they should have had. In fact, the lack of good transportation on the islandtruly 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 toserve their sentences in Hokkaido and Ainu forced into the work. Resentment engen-dered 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 pro-gram, but despite this, when C. S. Meik visited the island in 1897 he noted very few roadsin Hokkaido “suitable for wheeled traffic.22 It took a long time before travel in Hokkaidowas easy.

One roadbuilding project proposed in the late nineteenth century would connectAbashiri, on the northeast coast, with Asahikawa and, thus, Sapporo. Such a road wouldopen the northeast to settlement, it was thought, as well as making that part of the islandeasier for the military to defend. Since it would traverse twenty-seven hundred footKitami Pass over Hokkaido’s central mountain spine, the road presented a constructionchallenge. The authorities thus took eleven hundred men from a Kushiro prison toAbashiri and worked them inhumanely for seven months so that a road from Abashiriall 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 prison-ers could sleep when they were too far from Abashiri. The completion of the route fromAbashiri to Kitami Pass helped open a large area to settlement but more than 180 pris-oners 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 formalmemorial service, and a monument to their efforts now sits atop Kitami Pass. The his-toric 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 toCape Soya. The trip from Abashiri was “monotonous in the extreme,” however, accord-ing to a guidebook.23

As roads were built, so were way stations where travelers could rest or spend thenight. The stations’ stables accommodated travelers’ horses. J. M. Dixon, writing in 1881about his sojourn in “Yesso,” noted the clean, spacious inns he found. He reported thattravelers 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 famousof the travelers’ inns was in Shimamatsu Village in today’s city of Kita Hiroshima (thesedays less than half an hour from central Sapporo by train). The Shimamatsu location isa national historic site now; in 1881 the Meiji Emperor stopped there overnight while tour-ing Hokkaido.

Mail delivery in Hokkaido started in the 1870s, and in 1876 island-wide servicebegan, using the way stations and their stables, but caring for the horses used in the serv-ice presented problems. The Kaitakushi found that too many of them died due to thecold and snow or from attacks by predators. Weather problems were not easily surmount-able, but officials instituted a bounty system to destroy the wolves and bears that wereattacking 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 frightenaway bears and in winter they traipsed across the snow on skis or snowshoes. Enhanc-ing communication, telegraph service became available to the public in 1876, connect-ing Sapporo, Otaru and Hakodate with Aomori and Tokyo.

Sleighs based on ones Kuroda Kiyotaka had seen in Russia became a common fea-ture not long after they were introduced in Hokkaido. In winter, many rivers froze firmlyenough that a horse could pull a loaded sleigh safely across. Other adaptations to winterconditions appeared; for example, horses were shod late each year with shoes especiallydesigned for use on snow and ice.

The Kaitakushi and its successor organizations did not ignore water transportationwhile developing Hokkaido. Thus in the early 1870s the Kaitakushi bought three shipsto serve the island, modern steamships rather than sailing vessels. Tsugaru Strait couldsee terrible storms, though, and all three ships were wrecked along Hokkaido’s coast. TheKaitakushi meanwhile built lighthouses and upgraded harbors to encourage shipping. Notall their efforts succeeded. Horace Capron, the Kaitakushi’s principal foreign adviser,commented that building docks and warehouses on the Ishikari River had been wastedbecause the river was too shallow for modern ships.25

In 1891, construction began in Russia of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and in a speechgiven early in 1892, Governor Watanabe Chiaki of Hokkaido prophesied that “when theSiberian Railway is completed and Vladivostok becomes one of the great eastern sea-ports, communication between our country and Siberia thus becoming more convenientand frequent, it is safe to predict that the condition of Hokkaido will undergo speedyand material improvement.”26 Governor Watanabe’s prediction did not, however, cometo pass, despite the railway’s completion.

Reginald Farrer traveled to Hokkaido early in the new century, taking a boat fromAomori to Hakodate and another from Hakodate to Muroran, where he could board atrain to Sapporo. Yet this train journey through a land just beginning to be developedleft him doubting Hokkaido’s potential. “Once the Japanese had the insanity to think ofestablishing horse-farms and orchards. Needless to say, they incurred a vast and futileexpense. No doubt the horses died of melancholia, and the apples swiftly degeneratedinto crabs. The Hokkaido is a vain land and profitless.” Yet today, from a train betweenMuroran and Sapporo one can see well-groomed pastures with healthy and sometimesvaluable horses contentedly grazing. The Japan Weekly Mail noted in 1893, “In the pop-ular mind, Yezo remains a place buried under snow and ice for the greater part of theyear,” but the publication prophesied five years later that, given the delightful summerclimate, Hokkaido would become the nation’s sanitarium.27

Changes, successes, failures

Over the years following the Kaitakushi’s termination, colonization and develop-ment continued, while from Tokyo came changes in policy and island administration.Technological advances slowly made the northern island more productive and Hokkaido’sJapanese character became more and more pronounced. Some of the new communitiesestablished themselves successfully, as Date had, but new immigrants faced the sameproblems 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 wel-comed the division, charging that too large a proportion of Kaitakushi funds had goneto Sapporo and its immediate environs, leaving the rest of the island in need.28 This divi-sion lasted only until 1886, however, when for the sake of uniform development through-out Hokkaido, Sapporo was designated capital of the entire island, presided over by agovernor 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 haveto be a Hokkaido man) and because this was a political appointment he was frequentlyreplaced. The more effective a governor was, the more chance he would be sent to a partof Japan deemed more important than Hokkaido.

By 1885, more than 280,000 Wajin were living in Hokkaido, almost all in coastal set-tlements 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 loathto leave their home towns, and they feared the cold, the hard work required for successand Hokkaido’s reputation as a prison island. Many people who did go to the northernisland were unsuited to pioneering; they had been destitute before and did not have thefortitude to meet Hokkaido’s challenge. Moreover, the information most prospective pio-neers received about conditions in Hokkaido was usually either inadequate or inaccu-rate. The new residents did not want to replace rice as the staple food in their diet, andmost of the land available for settlement could not grow rice successfully until later, whennew strains and methods were developed. A postwar Japanese novelist has a Tokyo boyrecall, about 1900, the saying, “Even the birds do not fly to Ezo Island” and his grand-mother saying, “Hokkaido is the place for the penniless and people who have done wrongand have no other place to run to.”29 When in 1891 a Japanese policeman tried to assas-sinate the Russian crown prince near Kyoto during an official visit to Japan, the Japanesewas sentenced to penal servitude in Hokkaido. The injuries to the crown prince, laterCzar Nicholas II, were minor, but publicity surrounding the event and the assailant’s pun-ishment in Hokkaido did not help attract settlers to the northern island.

As Hokkaido development continued, some things worked and some did not. A keyto growth was the development of rice which could be successfully grown despite thecold 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 Hok-kaido, he found a teahouse at Chitose with a corral, several small houses, some large ware-houses 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, butafter the change in administration and encouragement by the new government, manymore farmers tried rice, especially in the Ishikari and Kamikawa basins. A 1902 law pro-moted formation of irrigation associations, which could enable large-scale creation ofpaddy fields. This meant community cooperation to build and manage the necessary irri-gation system.

Nakayama Kyuzo grew rice in what is now Kita Hiroshima, planting a cold-resist-ant variety called akage and using warmed water, which he carried from a tub, to floodhis fields. He saw success by the early 1880s. Over the years, enormous effort has goneinto developing strains of rice that would do well in Hokkaido; the Hokkaido Agricul-tural 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 inearly years, spreading the knowledge gained through agricultural research was difficult,not the least because so many Hokkaido residents then could not read or write. NowHokkaido grows more rice than any other prefecture in Japan and one advantage claimedis that Hokkaido rice is more healthful than rice grown farther south, since harmful bac-teria do not thrive in a cooler climate. By 1916, rice accounted for almost ten percent ofHokkaido’s gross agricultural product, and by 1926, more than twenty percent.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, silkworm raising took root in Hokkaido inareas 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 marketsfor silk declined, and shortly after the end of World War II and the advent of nylon, Hok-kaido silk production ceased.

In 1886 new land laws came into effect. Now a farmer could live on virgin land forup to ten years without having to pay anything. After that, he could buy the land—at alow rate of interest—but the land also became subject to taxation. As an aid to settle-ment and administration, teams were sent out to survey unsettled parts of the Ishikariplain in 1886 and 1887, looking for land areas suitable for agriculture. The rectangularfields one sees in Hokkaido today had their start then. An 1889 land survey designatedtwelve and one-half acres as the size a farmer could obtain. But peasants found it verydifficult to find and borrow the funds to buy the land, which they often lost to prosper-ous people who became large landowners. The peasants became tenants on the propertythey had been purchasing from the government.

Because of heartland overpopulation, various publications featured articles highlight-ing migration to the northern island. Some Japanese perceived Hokkaido as a land ofopportunity. Shimizu Shikin’s 1899 short story, “A School for Emigres,” features a fam-ily that goes to Hokkaido to escape prejudice against burakumin in the Japanese heart-land. 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 inthe hands of affluent or influential men, often one-time daimyo. From the latter 1880sthe number of tenant farmers grew greatly, as did the problems that can arise when absen-tee landlords are numerous. Landowners found it was more economical to have tenantsclear the land and then farm it than to buy foreign machinery to fell the trees and dig upthe roots. In 1900 families renting farms in Hokkaido numbered almost 30,000; by 1906more farmers were renters than owners.32 Tenant farmers usually found themselves inpenury 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. Farmchores were few then, so many Hokkaido pioneer farmers supplemented their income bymaking charcoal; local people were allowed to fell trees in certain portions of govern-ment-owned forests. Hokkaido pioneers made snowshoes and skis to get around in thewinter and even fashioned ice skates, with the blade mounted on one edge of a triangu-lar piece of wood and straps on the opposite side.

Higashide Seiichi wrote of a family forced into tenant farming when no other workwas available, but inexperienced and faced with difficult weather conditions, family mem-bers did not produce enough to give the required quota to the landowner. Their onlysolution was to flee, secretly, at night.33

In his 1883 account of Hokkaido, Thomas Blakiston averred it was only natural thatmany 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 witha rigorous climate.” He pointed out that many who failed at farming avoided becomingtenants; compared to farming, “so many other employments were open to them morecongenial to their tastes, and more lucrative.” A number of older former samurai hadleft farms to go into employment in the postal service or in schools, he wrote, whileyounger men sought work in the fisheries, and many people returned to their homes onHonshu.34

Arishima Takeo, 1878–1923, also wrote about Hokkaido tenant farmers in his mostfamous short story, translated by John W. Morrison as “Descendants of Cain.” Arishimadescribed the lot of poor Hokkaido tenant farmers: their struggle merely to exist overwinter, their miserable hovels, their hard work and their desperation to meet the pay-ment owed to the landowner. Arishima’s main character, brutalized by the death of hischild and by the struggles of his own life, loses all hope, succumbing to alcoholism andanger. Arishima also wrote favorably of Hokkaido, however, recording in his diary in1897, “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 cleanbeauty makes a magnificent panorama that one could not find elsewhere in Japan, nomatter where one looked.”35

As settlers came to Hokkaido, the natural environment changed. Edwin Dun wroteof 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 alivelihood, the presence of more and more Wajin with guns, a terrible winter in 1878-79and a lack of government policies to protect the deer—“the result was practical extermi-nation.”36 About 1873 a company purchased some ten thousand hides at thirty-five centseach to send to Europe; in the next five years, hunters killed more than five hundred thou-sand, to respond to export markets for antlers and hides. In 1892 the government tem-porarily banned all deer hunting on Hokkaido. The Kaitakushi had opened a venisoncannery 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 widespreadon the island, was hunted and, later, systematically poisoned to extermination late in thenineteenth century in order to protect livestock. Partly because their natural prey, thedeer, had become so rare, wolves—and bears—had begun searching established farms forprey. The last wolf was killed in 1896.

The wolf disappeared but forests remained, though as the railroads came, the woodsreceded. A logging industry developed, and until as late as the 1950s, logs to be used inconstruction often would be floated down rivers to the mills. Even before 1900, somefeared the destruction of forest land and began planning for reforestation and sustain-able logging. Trees were cut so wantonly that starting in 1907, forest laws regulated log-ging. Meanwhile, high in the mountains, the forests remained relatively undisturbed.

Hokkaido settlement left a different rural landscape than one finds in the rest ofJapan. American-style barns dot the countryside. In the Japanese heartland, farmers livein clusters of houses—villages—and walk out to their fields, but in Hokkaido most farmfamilies live on the farm. This again makes the landscape resemble America. Also miss-ing from heartland farms was the woodpile, which provided winter warmth to Hokkaidofarmhouses via the house’s heating stove.

Increased settlement spurred Hokkaido development, and by the end of the centurythe 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 con-glomerates, or zaibatsu, became involved in these years of Hokkaido settlement, Mitsuiin mining and financial support and Mitsubishi in transportation. The island’s urbanpopulation was growing; at century’s end, Hakodate was the leading metropolis, with53,000 people. Otaru, prominent in trade and the herring industry, followed with 26,000,Matsumae, still important, with 23,000, Kushiro, the center of commerce, transportationand fisheries for the eastern part of the island, with 13,000, Sapporo 12,500 and Nemuro11,000. Horonai, the early coal-mining center, had 9,500 people and Akkeshi, a southerncoastal town known for its oysters, 8.500. These figures illustrate the prominence of themining and fishing industries.

Though the movement to settle Hokkaido was not completely successful, island pop-ulation did grow substantially. (Instead of going to Hokkaido, though, many Japanese indire straits opted instead to go to Hawaii, the American west coast, or Latin America whenthese opportunities became available after the government allowed legal emigration in1884.) Between 1869 and 1881, while the Kaitakushi administered Hokkaido, some sev-enty thousand migrants came to the island, more than half of them former samurai fam-ilies. Total island population was about 67,000 in 1870 but 427,000 in 1890. Twenty yearsafter that, it had risen to 1,600,000. From 1890 to 1936, about 1,900,000 people came toHokkaido to live. Yet large numbers of people left the island, too: more than 70,000 inthe 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 centurycan be described as an imperialist adventure, comparable to the activities of Europeannations 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 econ-omy created on the island extracted natural resources from Hokkaido’s waters and landsand shipped them elsewhere for processing or manufacture, in the classic colonial man-ner.

Whatever were the motives of government officials in supporting Hokkaido devel-opment, 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 beenrelocated, rebuilt or recreated here at Nopporo, on Sapporo’s eastern outskirts. The vil-lage tells the development story, and thus when China’s Communist Party Chairman HuYaobang visited Japan in 1983, his Japanese hosts took him to the village, “To ObserveFrontier’s Progress,” proclaimed a Japan Times headline. Perhaps the Hokkaido experi-ence had lessons for China as it strove to modernize, said China’s Foreign Minister WuXueqian.38

The “village” includes shops and businesses of many sorts—a barber shop, a sweetshop, a brewery, an inn, a grocery, a post office, a police box, as well as houses of differ-ent styles. Farm and fishing buildings are there, too. The oldest date from the 1880s andthe newest from the 1920s. One very poignant building is the small and primitive thatchedhut typical of the dwellings that poor families first lived in as they faced the rigors of anorthern winter. Almost all of the Historical Village buildings, however, reflect a moreprosperous life style. Though most of the exteriors are western in architectural style, theinteriors are Japanese in spirit and feature tatami floors. These buildings reflect a satis-factory if not affluent standard of living, far beyond what was possible for the strugglingmigrants 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 thepicture of Hokkaido becoming Japanese.

Celebrating, too, the pioneers of Hokkaido were the two visits to the northern islandby the Meiji Emperor, signaling Hokkaido’s increasing importance in Japan. Though his1876 visit was brief, he took a more extensive journey five years later, including arrivalat Otaru followed by travel to Sapporo and through the island to Hakodate. During histour, he saw horse races in Sapporo arranged “for His Majesty’s pleasure,” wrote EdwinDun.39 The emperor’s 1876 visit, by the way, has been commemorated by a national hol-iday 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 July20, 1876 return from Hokkaido to Honshu.

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7 The Foreign Experts

A number of foreign advisers are linked with the story of Hokkaido and its devel-opment in the Kaitakushi era and for a few years afterward. Many Wajin from the southhad been enticed to move to Hokkaido, but living conditions there as well as methodsfor successful farming differed so much from those in most of Japan that in 1871 KurodaKiyotaka 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 Hokkaidodevelopment. They did not turn the island into a foreign piece of America, for the Japa-nese made the decisions, choosing and adapting the ideas of the foreigners that seemedpractical and compatible with Japanese ways of life. The foreign experts made a real con-tribution, though, and their writings have provided us with a window through which wecan view the land they came to and influenced.

The foreigners arrived at an undeveloped island. “The whole of Yesso is practicallya terra incognita to the inhabitants of Nippon,” wrote William P. Blake after working onHokkaido. Horace Capron felt that “on this wild coast, in this almost unpeopled islandthus remote, I stand solitary and alone, a pioneer, as it were, upon the outpost of civili-zation.” 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 ofimprobable stories here without much fear of being found out.”1 The island truly wasmostly wild and undeveloped.

Before the 1868 Meiji Restoration the shogunate brought a few foreign experts toHokkaido, notably two American mining engineers, Raphael Pumpelly and William P.Blake, hired in 1862 to survey mineral resources in Japan and teach modern mining tech-niques. These men were well-qualified for the task; Pumpelly was the first graduate min-ing engineer in the United States and Blake had participated in the expedition of theUnited States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers which surveyed land for a trans-continental railroad line. The Pumpelly-Blake mission to Japan became embroiled inquestions both of protocol and politics, however. The two men were to work well awayfrom the treaty ports, as the ports opened to foreign ships were then called. Since for-eigners had been forbidden to venture beyond these ports, Japanese officials felt uneasyabout hiring the foreign mining engineers. Negotiations regarding their employment hadto be carried out in Dutch, the only European language Japanese used at that time. (Injust a few more years, English studies burgeoned and English became acceptable.) Whenthe two Americans arrived, the Japanese government in Edo hesitated for a month beforereceiving 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 welcomedwith honor—but the shogunate was facing more and more criticism over Japan’s newpolicy of accommodation with foreign nations. Thus the officials sent the two experts tothe place where they might be least offensive to government opponents: Ezo.

Pumpelly and Blake took to the northern island a number of technical books andsome 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 theOshima Peninsula. Pumpelly noted the lack of modern mining equipment; the Japanesehad neither pumps nor blasting powder, using instead pick and hammer. Pumpelly car-ried out the first blasting ever done in a Japanese mine and he and Blake introducedmachinery to pump water out of mines. Confined for two months in Hakodate becauseof a measles epidemic and later because winter conditions made travel and inspectiontoo difficult, the two Americans taught modern mineral extraction methods to an eageraudience. One of their students, Oshima Takato, later took a leading role in developingJapan’s mining industry.

In February 1863, the shogunate withdrew the foreigners’ contract — because ofincreasing anti-foreign feeling in Japan, Pumpelly understood. Some of the daimyo evenaccused the two men of spying. Pumpelly later wrote about his experiences2 and had amineral discovered in Hokkaido—pumpellyite—named for him. As for the future ofmining, the two men suggested that based on what they had seen on the Oshima Penin-sula, the island’s rugged and heavily forested terrain would preclude systematic miningdevelopment.

A few years later, in 1867, the shogunate hired two British mining engineers, Eras-mus 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 Hako-date wanted Gower to develop the Oshima coal mines, which he did. Working at the Kaya-numa Mine near the peninsula’s west coast, he built the first inclined railway in Japanfor 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 fam-ilies 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 Germanmerchant, R. Gaertner, received a ninety-nine year lease on almost twenty five hundredacres of land in order to establish a model farm in Nanae, about ten miles north of Hako-date. Though Gaertner renewed his lease when rebel forces took control of the Hakodatearea 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. Americanadvisers 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 thecrews of foreign ships stopping at the port. One 1881 visitor, Arthur H. Crow, wrote thatinspecting the farm brought on pangs of homesickness. He recalled “the manager’s prettywhite, 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 manyforeign experts to Japan. Most of these men were European, but Kuroda Kiyotaka choseto go to the United States to seek experts. He felt that climatic conditions in Hokkaidowere similar to those in New England, where successful agriculture had long been estab-lished. Also, American farmers used agricultural machinery more than did Europeans.

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

Horace Capron

Horace Capron became the leader of the team of American advisers recruited by theKaitakushi to advise the organization on Hokkaido development. To find the best per-son to employ, Kuroda Kiyotaka set sail for the United States on January 1, 1871. First heheaded for the nation’s capital, where Mori Arinori, Japanese charge d’affaires, helpedarrange a meeting with President Ulysses S. Grant. Grant suggested that Secretary ofAgriculture General Horace Capron was the man whom Kuroda ought to see, and Kurodatherefore asked Capron to suggest someone who might assume the position. Kuroda indi-cated to Capron three important fields of endeavor: first, agriculture—specifically in regardto soil, manure and machinery; second, transportation and irrigation, including roads,canals and dams; and third, the sciences related to natural resources—botany, geologyand mineralogy. All these would be under the purview of the foreign expert Kuroda hopedto hire. The perfect candidate did not appear, and eventually President Grant recom-mended Capron. The Secretary of Agriculture consulted William P. Blake, who was enthu-siastic about Hokkaido’s possibilities. Capron agreed to take the job, after specifying thegenerous salary and benefits he would expect.

On August 1, 1871, Horace Capron left San Francisco for Japan, taking along threeassistants. It did not prove easy to find them (though once Capron was in Japan, manypeople expressed their interest in joining him there). He hired a chemist, Dr. ThomasAntisell, to be in charge of geology. Major A. J. Warfield, a civil engineer with the Balti-more and Ohio Railroad, would direct civil engineering and Stuart Eldridge would beCapron’s secretary.

Sixty-seven years old when he arrived in Japan, Horace Capron was “a fine dignifiedlooking, 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 managerof a mill in Maryland, married there, opened his own mill and helped build a village. Hebegan farming, too, and gained a great deal of knowledge of agriculture. Later he movedto Illinois, where he raised cattle and horses, and when the Civil War began, he organizeda regiment and led his troops in battle. He was a brigadier general when discharged afterbeing injured. After the war, his supporters both in Maryland and Illinois obtained forhim the position of United States Commissioner of Agriculture, the head of the Depart-ment of Agriculture in Washington which had been created five years earlier. He heldthis position when the chance to go to Japan came his way.

Arriving in Japan August 25, Capron established his headquarters in Tokyo. He andhis assistants were lodged in a Tokyo temple complex. They received an effusive welcomeand were even presented to the twenty-year-old emperor.

Capron visited Hokkaido only during the summers, but about a month after theparty arrived in Japan he sent his two technical assistants, Warfield and Antisell, to the


northern island, whose southwestern area they studied for more than two months. Theywere to report on soils, trees and grasses, minerals, topography, possibilities for waterpower and climate. The two men reached wildly different conclusions. Antisell, fearfulof winter’s cold and snow in the Ishikari Valley, which had been chosen for the site ofHokkaido’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 theprospects of the Ishikari plain for agriculture.

On the basis of the survey, Capronsubmitted recommendations to Kurodain January. Capron played down theproblems of Hokkaido’s winter weather,comparing the climate to that of thenorthern United States. He praised theisland’s abundant fishery, forest andmineral resources and potential foragriculture, suggesting the cultivationof fruit trees as well as grains not com-mon in Japan. He advocated using farmmachinery to supplement human labor.He urged a thorough survey of theisland’s resources, the development ofroads on the island, and implementa-tion of a better transportation systembetween Hokkaido and Honshu. Hestrongly recommended settlement ofan agricultural population, which hethought would become the backboneof the island. He thought that settlersshould adapt their life style to thenorthern region, for example giving uptheir dependence on rice. He describedthe laws that had been developed in theUnited States to support homestead-ing. His suggestions were positiveenough to encourage the Kaitakushi tocarry out their plans for development.

Capron recommended that anagricultural school and experimentalfarm be established, and they were, inthe Tokyo area in 1872, in order toinstruct young men in agricultural tech-niques they could apply in Hokkaido.A few years later, the school, now relo-cated to Hokkaido, became SapporoAgricultural College. (It evolved intotoday’s Hokkaido University.) Capronadvised establishment of experimental

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The Japanese government hired Horace Capron asleader of the American experts brought to Japan inthe 1870s to advise on Hokkaido development. Cap-ron spent four years in Japan, and continued hisinterest in Hokkaido and his advice on its develop-ment after he returned to the United States. Hisstatue stands in Sapporo’s Odori Park.

stations in Hokkaido, too, and the Kaitakushi set up farms for agricultural research atNanae, at Nemuro and near Sapporo.

It is thanks to Horace Capron that many western implements were introduced tothe country. One of his first orders upon reaching Japan was to order sawmill construc-tion 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 ani-mals—horses, cows and sheep—and machinery delivered to Japan. A small grist mill fromone 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, hestayed for almost three weeks in Hakodate and then set out overland, on horseback, forSapporo. 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 betterweather, crossed Uchiura Bay in a “frail bark,” almost a seven hour trip.6 He reportedthat lumber was being cut under his team’s direction already and that canals and reser-voirs had been made ready for moving and storing the lumber. When his sawmill was inoperation 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 to85o in the shade.” Seeing mountains and hills awash in wildflowers in full bloom, hecould not understand Antisell’s negative reports. Capron was delighted to find that con-trary 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 alsowrote 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 onlythree visits to the northern island during his almost four years in Japan. What he sawsometimes pleased him, but not always. During his second visit to Sapporo, he com-mented on the number of houses that had been built “after our American style of archi-tecture, more suitable for colder regions.... The thin paper and bamboo houses universalthroughout Japan and followed upon this island, were actually uninhabitable in the win-ter.” But the settlers in Hokkaido did not take to American-style homes with woodenfloors, chairs and high tables. (American mining expert Benjamin Lyman suggested thepolicy that should have been tried: adapting “the ordinary Japanese house to the winterclimate.”)8 Nor did many of the farmers use the farm machinery brought to Japan, largelybecause of its cost and limited availability. The use of horses, also new to farm work inJapan, 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 onthe island.

Some of Capron’s ideas were not applicable. Consider rice, for example. Capron rec-ommended to Kuroda that wheat and other grain crops naturally suited to Hokkaido beplanted instead of rice. Kuroda reported this to other Kaitakushi officials, but as rice wasthe mainstay of the Japanese diet, Japanese farmers made repeated attempts to grow it inHokkaido. Capron was mistaken that people needed to base their diet on grains suitableto the climate in order to stay healthy. A wheat-based diet made economic sense butchanging people’s diet proved a losing cause, even though for a time the Kaitakushi for-bade 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, ismade from buckwheat, a grain also admirably suited to Hokkaido’s climate. The Dosanko,however, eat a lot of rice just as do other Japanese.


Capron feared that the Japanese people did not have the strength and endurance todevelop Hokkaido, and he wanted pioneers from Europe and North America brought tothe island to settle and set examples for the Japanese; this the Japanese officials wouldnot allow. Capron also predicted that Americans would one day come to Hokkaido forits 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 Kaitakushiand, like other foreign experts, he sometimes chafed under Japanese leadership. He wasa “charming companion but nil as an organizer or leader of men,” wrote livestock expertEdwin Dun, who, however, praised Capron’s American staff. Capron took offense whenthe Kaitakushi did not implement his ideas, and it vexed him when the Japanese modifiedhis suggestions. The Japanese penchant for hiring unneeded officials frustrated him. Hehad fixed ideas regarding changes in Japanese living styles which should be adopted inHokkaido and he did not realize how much a people — any people — will resist suchchanges. But much of his work did see fruition. Among the accomplishments for whichhe deserves at least some of the credit are creation of a Hokkaido livestock industry, mod-ernization of the Hokkaido mining industry, construction of roads and railroads, andthe introduction of agricultural education in Japan. Before his departure, Capron had anaudience with the Emperor, who praised him for his “valuable services.”9

Horace Capron and Kuroda Kiyotaka continued to correspond after Capron’s returnto Washington. At the Kaitakushi’s request, Capron sent various items to Japan, and onceat home in the United States, he spoke out to urge close relations between the two coun-tries. 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 cameto work on Hokkaido development under his direction carried out their tasks. Some ofthe men stand out: the achievements of Benjamin Lyman, Joseph Crawford, Edwin Dunand Louis Boehmer are remarkable—but all of the “western exports,” even those withmixed records, contributed positively to Hokkaido.

Thomas Antisell, born in Ireland and educated in Europe, where he studied chem-istry and qualified in medicine, emigrated to the United States when he was just overthirty years old and subsequently worked in various fields. Capron hired him because ofhis strong background in chemistry and, thus, some knowledge of geology. In additionto disagreeing with Capron about whether Hokkaido’s winter climate would precludedevelopment, 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, theKaitakushi hired a new geologist and Antisell’s report on his 1871 trip to Hokkaido is notincluded in the volume of official reports issued in 1875. Instead, one can read the reportWilliam P. Blake wrote after his time on the northern island several years before theKaitakushi hired Capron. Antisell served out the time in his Kaitakushi contract by work-ing at the Tokyo Temporary school, afterward serving for two more years as a chemistfor the Japanese Finance Ministry.

Benjamin Smith Lyman came to Hokkaido as the new mining expert. He would takeover 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 hisarrival in early 1873, he studied the Japanese language and, with Henry Smith Munroeand several Japanese assistants, began extensive surveying in Hokkaido. That spring,while inspecting the Ishikari River basin and going to Horonai because a Sapporo manhad found lumps of coal in the area, Lyman’s crew discovered a rich deposit. He alsoexamined potential sites in the Oshima Peninsula that year.

In each of the three summers he worked for the Kaitakushi, Lyman traveled in Hok-kaido, prospecting and exploring. In 1874, he led a group far up the Ishikari River. Oneday in mid–July the men camped at what is now the city of Asahikawa. Lyman enthusedover the area, comparing it to Kashmir, the idyllic mountain land in northern India andPakistan. Just as India’s Mughal emperors used to travel to Kashmir for respite from sum-mer’s heat, Lyman thought the Emperor of Japan should come each summer to this “lit-tle paradise” where “a fine summer palace and baths” could be built.10 On this trip, Lymancontinued eastward, traversing the mountains and then heading to the island’s southeastcoast, exploring the Tokachi district, proceeding to Kushiro and Nemuro in the far south-east, then going north all the way to Cape Soya. He returned south along the island’s westcoast. This was his longest journey. In 1875, Lyman traveled in different parts of westernHokkaido, looking closely at different coal mines.

All in all, Lyman saw a great deal of the terrain of Hokkaido, and he estimated aprobable sixty-five billion tons of coal on the island. Lyman and his men also reportedon other mineral deposits they found, though Lyman’s emphasis was on coal. He alsostudied sites for possible harbor and water power development. On his travels, Lymanused 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 sogood that they require only half as much rice as the Japanese coolies ... and that withoutmaking 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 achieve-ments helped lead to Hokkaido’s future development. His Hokkaido research continueduntil 1876, though he wintered in Tokyo each year, using this time to construct accuratemaps 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 thegovernment of Japan until 1879, surveying Honshu for petroleum deposits. Even afterhis contract with the Japanese government expired, he toiled without pay on reports andmaps to ensure that his efforts would have lasting value. One of his most useful accom-plishments was the training in Hokkaido of his young Japanese assistants, who contin-ued to carry out scientific work after Lyman left Japan. One suggestion of his that theKaitakushi did not adopt, though, was to allow foreign investment in Hokkaido develop-ment.

Capron’s civil engineer, A. J. Warfield, contributed to the creation of Hokkaido’sinfrastructure, but his misbehavior outweighed his accomplishments. His work was com-petent; he recommended development of Muroran harbor and surveyed and directed thebuilding of roads, the most important of which went from Hakodate north across themountain ridge to Uchiura Bay and on to Sapporo. Officials pressured Warfield to getthis work done quickly, but while supervising the work, he had difficulty in having his ordersunderstood. He had to use an interpreter and perhaps more significant, the Japanese


workers did not understand American methods. His frustrations probably contributedto Warfield’s excessive drinking. When intoxicated he could be violent; once while appar-ently inebriated he fatally shot five dogs belonging to Ainu men. This was more seriousthan 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 hisdrinking even before breakfast. Becoming angry, he pulled a knife on both his interpreterand a student, cutting the interpreter slightly. Warfield did apologize later, but the dam-age was done; the Kaitakushi fired him despite his engineering competence. Warfieldresisted the dismissal, then insisted he be paid his complete salary including that for theperiod 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 set-tlement, Warfield got half his salary as well as the cost of his travel back to the UnitedStates.

Warfield carried out useful surveying work, which was extended by James R. Was-son, whom the Kaitakushi had hired in 1872 to teach English and mathematics at the tem-porary 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 whoplaced official survey markers atop island peaks.

Stuart Eldridge, hired to be Capron’s secretary, also had a mixed record. He hadbeen trained in medicine and employed as a United States Department of Agriculturelibrarian. Once in Japan, Eldridge was more interested in furthering his career in med-icine 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 Eldridgetook for his own use some of the funds meant for other expenses. A revised contractchanged his title to “Secretary and Surgeon of the Kaitakushi.” For two and one-half yearshe worked for the organization in Hakodate. In addition to founding a hospital and estab-lishing a medical school, he taught classes in many different medical disciplines. Feelingthat it was most important to establish modern medical practices in Hokkaido, he pro-duced the first medical journal in Japan. He also inspected Sapporo hospital facilities andmade recommendations for expanding medical care in Sapporo. The breach with Capronwas not mended, however, and after fulfilling his contract, Eldridge went to Yokohama,practicing medicine at the foreigners’ hospital there until his 1901 death. Whatever therelationship between Eldridge and Capron became, Eldridge has been credited as the per-son who “laid the foundation of modern medical science in Hokkaido.”12 The officialreport Capron submitted to the Kaitakushi included nothing from Eldridge, just as itignored Antisell.

Edwin Dun is honored in Hokkaido today, recognized as “the father of Hokkaido’sdairy industry.”13 Of all the foreigners hired to work on the northern island during thisperiod, it was he who found the place and the people the most congenial. Horace Capron’sson 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 thatif 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 importedsome dairy cattle, not just beef cattle, and that much of the farm machinery importedfrom the United States would be impractical if not useless in Japan. He thought thatAmerican advisers should have actual, not theoretical, experience and was not impressedby 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 careercame when the Emperor visited. Dun demonstrated some of the machinery the Ameri-cans had imported for Hokkaido use, and while in top hat and evening dress, operatedthe steam-driven threshing machine.

Dun’s achievements were varied. He worked on improvements to the Kaitakushi’smodel farm at Nanae, for example recommending an expansion of the drainage systemand the creation of pasture lands. He concluded that the Ishikari Valley would be a moresuccessful location for farming because of its amount of usable land, fertility, and theavailability of nearby timber. With an imported churn, he introduced butter making toJapan.

An example of the useful suggestions American advisers made is illustrated by Dun’sexperience with sheep in Hokkaido. He found sheep raising quite practical and was ableto increase substantially the amount of wool per animal. Given the need to feed sheepthrough the long Hokkaido winter, however, he recommended that sheep raising not beestablished 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 thepossibility 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 theend of the experiment, Dun did not recommend the crop. The sugar content of themature beets was too low, he said, apparently because of the cold climate. Several yearslater, after the Kaitakushi was disbanded, the Hokkaido government had sugar mills builtnear Muroran and at Sapporo. The first mill failed and the second one never began oper-ation. Dun was not surprised, but he had kind words for those who had planned the ill-conceived project: “I am disposed to attribute it to their optimistic temperament thatprevents the recognition of even the impossible.”14 Many years later, however, a beet sugarindustry based in the Tokachi area became successful.

Dun oversaw development of two extensive areas for raising livestock. In the Mako-manai area (now in the south part of Sapporo) he established a large dairy farm. He super-vised 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 thatthe native scrub bamboo on the site made an excellent food for the animals during thewinter. Wolves almost totally destroyed the first crop of foals, so Dun recommended theextinction of wolves and arranged for the use of strychnine to accomplish this. Thoughin pioneer days this seemed appropriate, today it is hard to justify the complete elimina-tion of a natural species. The farmers eventually put out poisoned meat to kill the wildanimals. It worked, and the horse breeding continued without real difficulty during Dun’syears in Hokkaido, except for once when a plague of locusts devoured what seemed tobe every single green plant for miles. Even now Niikappu is known for its horses; someof its stallions claim very high stud fees.

Edwin Dun enjoyed his time working for the Kaitakushi more than did some of theother Americans. He married a Japanese woman and settled in Sapporo, living there from1876 to 1883 and working with livestock. He came to have a more thorough and realis-tic understanding of Hokkaido’s potential than did the other foreign advisers. He sub-sequently spent most of his life in Japan, becoming American minister to the Asian nationfor four years and then working in private business, but he said his best years were thosehe spent in Hokkaido.


Among the American experts working in Hokkaido during these years was LouisBoehmer, hired by Capron as “nursery-man and gardener.” Boehmer was born in Ger-many 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 vineyardand made wine; for the beverage he tried local fruits, wild grape and kokuwa, a fruitapparently related to kiwi that had, he wrote, “a very agre[e]able flavor and may turn out

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In the late 1870s, American engineer Joseph Crawford directed construction of the first railroadto 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 ofthe railroad he built.

something quite new in the Wine market.” He found wild hops growing and suggestedthat hops raised on the island would make a brewing industry practicable. Thus hearranged to import cultivated hop varieties for planting in Hokkaido. The beer brewedin Sapporo with native hops before imported ones were ready, he wrote, was so pure thatit “can be recommended to everybody even Temperance people might be induced to takethis Beer as a light Beverage.” (When England reported a shortage of hops in 1886, theJapan Weekly Mail suggested growing hops in Hokkaido for export to Europe.) Boehmeralso 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 Hokkaidoflowers to Europe and America, including one Thomas Blakiston admired and describedas a climbing hydrangea. Boehmer carried out extensive botanical exploration on Hok-kaido and found many useful native plants, including raspberries, blackberries and redcurrants as well as many trees, some similar to European and American species and somedifferent.15

An American railroad engineer, Joseph Crawford, supervised construction of thefirst railroad line in Hokkaido, from Otaru eastward to Sapporo and beyond, throughEbetsu 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 afterit opened, Crawford continued work on it, making improvements such as straighteningout the curves. He trained a number of young Japanese, including Matsumoto Soichiroand Hirai Seijiro, who continued Hokkaido railway development after Crawford leftJapan. Matsumoto and Hirai essentially created the railroad infrastructure that servedHokkaido for the next century and each later served as director of the entire nation’s rail-way system. “Shoulder to Shoulder to Open a Way” reads the plinth on the statue ofJoseph Crawford now displayed in front of the Transportation Museum in Otaru at thesite of the end of this rail line he built.

Other Americans working in Hokkaido in those years included N. W. Holt and JamesIrwin. Mechanical engineer Holt planned a water mill to provide power at Nanae. Healso built lumber mills and constructed the first bridge across the Toyohira River in Sap-poro. Irwin was charged with accompanying a shipment of animals across the PacificOcean to Japan: nineteen cows and eighty-nine sheep. A storm at sea tossed the animalsaround 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 EnomotoTakeaki after his abortive attempt to found an independent Hokkaido, but he felt theAmerican experts did not accept his judgment and he soon resigned from the organiza-tion. And when the government imposed high taxes, some islanders—fishermen, forexample—blamed the foreign experts for the high levies, feeling that their salaries werea wasteful use of government funds. Some American advisers, meanwhile, criticized theKaitakushi for various practices: hiring great numbers of Japanese workers for jobs whenonly a few were needed, not following the foreigners’ advice, misusing funds and employ-ing secretive methods, such as failing to apprise the foreign experts of policy changes.

The western experts introduced many things to Japan, including the farm machin-ery Horace Capron arranged to be sent there. Some of the machines, especially plows andmowers, eventually caught on because the large Hokkaido fields were more than farm-ers could work easily with hand tools. Among the vegetables the Americans first broughtto Hokkaido were asparagus, tomatoes, celery, carrots, lettuce, onions and peas. The


foreign advisers brought wheat from America in 1872, and its use spread slowly beyondHokkaido south to Honshu. They imported oats and corn too, and introduced cloverand grasses as hay crops. They also brought in trees and flowers. Upon American rec-ommendations, 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, eightgooseberry, ten currant and a few types of peaches and apricots.16 The American vegeta-bles and fruits were new—and they did not find a market immediately, because the Japa-nese 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 inHokkaido’s economy included only wheat, oats, hay crops, corn, sugar beets, barley, pota-toes, apples and cherries.

William Smith Clark

In Japan today, William Smith Clark is the best known of all the foreign adviserswho worked for the Kaitakushi. The organization recruited him for the agricultural col-lege that Capron prescribed be built in Sapporo. This recommendation may have beenCapron’s most important contribution while he served in Japan and establishment of thecollege has been described as the Kaitakushi’s greatest accomplishment. Kuroda agreedwith Capron that a college was important and that an American educator should be cho-sen 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., YoshidaKiyonari, recommended William Smith Clark for the position, and he accepted in 1876after specifying a high salary, stating that he could only take the appointment for oneyear, and stipulating that his title would be president. Though he took that title, in real-ity he was second in command under college director Zusho Hirotake. Clark would alsobe “professor of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics and the English language.” (TheJapanese 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 teach-ing at Amherst College where one of his students was Niijima Jo, whom Clark describedas the first Japanese he had taught. Soon afterward, Clark played an important role inthe founding of one of the first land grant colleges in the United States, MassachusettsAgricultural College, located in Amherst, and had been president since its first classesmet in 1867. (It grew to become today’s University of Massachusetts.) Horace Capronknew of the college and had recommended it to a Japanese student searching for an Amer-ican institution to attend. Several other Japanese sent by the Kaitakushi also went toMAC.

A model for the Sapporo college could be American land grant colleges, thoughtMori Arinori. (Legislation adopted during the American Civil War specified that federalland 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 usedto support the American colleges.)

MAC was a land grant college; in addition, similarities of climate and terrain inMassachusetts and Hokkaido suggested that agricultural techniques understood by anAmherst professor should be applicable at the Sapporo College.

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Clark, who reached Sapporo on his fiftieth birthday, was impressed that Kurodawanted to establish an agricultural college in Hokkaido at a time when few such institu-tions existed anywhere in the world. He arrived in Japan full of enthusiasm for his newtask, partly influenced by Japanese students who had come under his wing at Amherst.One Japanese student had not met Massachusetts Agricultural College qualifications, butcame from an important family; Clark had agreed to admit him to the college. This youngman, Naito Seitaro, repaid the favor by interpreting for Clark during the professor’s timein Sapporo.

Clark established a curriculum in Sapporo similar to that of his MAC but he alsobegan informally proselytizing, urging the students to become Christians. Officially,Christianity was not allowed in Hokkaido, though prohibition of the western religionhad 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 throughChristianity could he teach this. Kuroda assented to the idea that the Bible become a class-room text in the college; he may have been wary of the controversy that would ensueshould Clark give up his position over the question. A number of the early college stu-dents did convert to Christianity. (Some may have thought that because Christianity wasthe religion of highly developed western nations, this religion could help spur modern-ization in Japan.) In fact, the group of Christian converts at the college became knownas one of the three “bands” responsible for the early development of Protestant Chris-tianity in Japan. (The other bands were in Yokohama and Kumamoto.) In 1914, some ofthe 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 manyfields. He instituted required military training as part of the curriculum. This was newto Japan, but he modeled it upon practice in United States land grant colleges. Clarkbrought in sports. He arranged for the creation of a model farm to be established in con-junction with the college and it was built, complete with an American-style barn, thusintroducing a typical American building style into the Hokkaido landscape. Clark andthe other American professors introduced various farm animal breeds and plant varietiesthey thought would suit Hokkaido. Clark even worked to develop pasture crops fromnative plants and imported seed in order to produce a superior animal feed. He gave adviceon forest practices. Like Capron, he suggested establishing a settlement of migrants fromAmerica in Hokkaido. Clark felt that such a colony would take a leading role in spread-ing modes of life and agricultural practices suitable for a northern climate.

William Smith Clark was a dedicated teacher. In addition to all the practices andpolicies he established or recommended, he inspired his students. He taught classes inbotany and English, and not only did he persuade them to adopt his religion, he was ableto convince them to be proud of manual labor, something altogether foreign to educatedJapanese. But Clark’s writings make clear his opinion that American agriculture was supe-rior, and thus he felt his task was to teach American farming practice to the Japaneserather than to introduce it with a sensitivity to traditional Japanese values. His dismissalof Japanese traditions would certainly have ruffled a few feathers.

One story about Clark is told, with illustrations, on a wall in a Hokkaido Univer-sity museum today. In January 1877, Clark led a group of eleven students and two pro-fessors on an ascent of nearby Mt. Teine (3,360 ft.) Near the summit Clark spied a lichenhigh in a tree. Wanting to know whether it was a newly-discovered one, he asked a student


to pluck it. Professor Clark leaned over and directed the student to stand on his back inorder to reach the plant. Standing in the snow, the student began to take off his shoesfirst, but Clark stopped him, and, shoes on, the student stood on his professor’s back andreached the lichen. Study showed that it was not an unknown variety, but Clark’s actionimpressed the students.

Clark carried out a number of tasks for the Kaitakushi. As so many ventures in andaround Sapporo were beginning at that time, officials sought Clark’s opinion on manymatters: how to breed oysters, where to locate barracks, where to quarry stone, how tocan salmon. He gave advice on the care of a mulberry orchard. Even after he returned tothe United States, he continued advising Kuroda by mail on many subjects, from estab-lishing a paper industry to producing the type of silk that would sell best in America. Onhis way home, he studied the salmon industry in the American Northwest in order tosend suggestions on this subject to Kuroda.

The college president from America also had various suggestions for improving lifein Sapporo. He urged that houses have stoves and chimneys, not simple openings in theroof through which charcoal smoke could escape. He urged glass windows to replace paperones, both to hold the heat and to let in more light. He also urged thicker walls to con-serve heat.

Clark left Hokkaido in April 1877, only eight months after his arrival, but he had alasting impact on the island. (Perhaps his influence is so strong because he did not staylong, Dallas Finn suggests; Clark left at a time when his impact was immediate.) Clark’sHokkaido experience was the high point of his life. Back in America, an ambitious edu-cational venture failed, his investments went sour and he died in 1886, a few months shortof sixty years of age.19

By far the best known story about William Smith Clark concerns his departure fromSapporo. He made the overland journey on horseback, traveling south from the cityinstead of taking ship from Otaru because he planned to stop in Hakodate and visit thefarm at nearby Nanae. All of the faculty and students accompanied him from Sapporofor perhaps ten miles. When he left them in the village of Shimamatsu, now part of thecity of Kita Hiroshima, it was with the words, “Boys, be ambitious!” These words mayor may not have been uttered by Clark, and if they were, they were probably part of alonger phrase. One version is that he actually said “Boys, be ambitious for Christ,” whichsound like words Clark clearly might have spoken, but the three simple words are whatpeople today remember.20 “Boys, be ambitious” has been printed and restated through-out Japan in the years since. A memorial at Shimamatsu commemorates the event and abust of Clark appears on the Hokkaido University grounds now. In addition, a “Boys, beambitious!” 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 thecity of Sapporo.

The college professors

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

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William Wheeler had been inthe first freshman class at the Mass-achusetts school. After graduatingin 1871 he worked as a civil engi-neer in the eastern United States.His contract with the Kaitakushiwas for a two year appointment atthe new college, to teach civil engi-neering, mechanics, and English.In addition to teaching, Wheelerrecorded weather conditions threetimes each day and planned andcarried out various engineeringprojects. He surveyed locations forboth road and railroad betweenSapporo and its port city, Otaru,and recommended constructing arailroad line from Sapporo south toMuroran. He suggested that theKaitakushi send agricultural teach-ers to the island’s farming commu-nities and that educating men to bethese teachers should be a leadingpriority of the college. It wasWheeler who drew up the plans forthe college farm’s barn.

Wheeler explored land aroundSapporo on horseback, on foot andby boat. He also traveled fartherafield, mostly investigating theterrain around Uchiura Bay andfarther south on the Oshima Pen-insula. Once while traveling in themountains near Jozankei spa highin the Sapporo hills, he tried to forda stream on horseback though hisAinu guide discouraged this;Wheeler was lucky to survive. When Clark left Sapporo, Wheeler became acting presi-dent and then president of the college, but he did not relish the administrative part ofthe job. (He did not enjoy his contacts with Japanese officials, who were uneasy thatsomeone so young held the job.) He served as president until December 1879. WilliamWheeler’s contribution to the college and its students was as important as Clark’s. Wheelerlacked Clark’s vigorous personality, but from Wheeler the students learned the impor-tance of both independent thinking and practical learning.

David Penhallow came to the college to teach botany, chemistry, mathematics, agri-culture and English. He collected many biological specimens and wrote about them aswell as analyzing soil. He designed the college arboretum, carried out experiments in


William S. Clark came from America in 1876 to helpfound Sapporo Agricultural College, which grew intotoday’s Hokkaido University. Clark is best known for hisparting words to his students, “Boys, be ambitious!” andthis statue in Sapporo’s Hitsujigaoka Park portrays Clarkdelivering his message.

growing hops and mulberries, gave advice on how to make whisky, and analyzed fish bonesfor their phosphorus content. He succeeded Wheeler as president, and when he left in1880, William Brooks assumed the presidency.

Brooks introduced ice skating to the college students. This is a fitting memory tokeep of him, for he arrived in Hokkaido in the midst of the 1877 winter to take up thepost of agriculture professor and college farm superintendent. He had an eventful jour-ney to Sapporo. The steamer trip from Yokohama to Hakodate took three and one halfdays. After several nights in Hakodate at a Russian hotel, he left for Otaru by ship—butthe weather was so bad the vessel turned back; later he endured a stormy but successfulvoyage. From the coastal town he and his companions rode horseback through the win-ter landscape to Sapporo, stopping for the night about halfway along.

Brooks wrote positively about his life in Sapporo—though he said that he and theother Americans did not like the Japanese cuisine. When he made a trip to Otaru in Aprilthat year it was the midst of herring season. “Herrings, herrings everywhere, men womenand children wallowing in herrings and bedaubed with herrings from head to foot.” How-ever, the Americans had plenty of meat and vegetables in addition to fish and even breadbaked by their Japanese cook. Brooks understood that using animal power on the farmwas not a Japanese tradition, but he tried to get his students to see the advantages of farm-ing with animals. He showed them, for example, that working with oxen he could carryout a job much more efficiently than it could be done by manpower alone.21 Not until1888 did Brooks leave Sapporo, after he served the college for twelve years, the final eightas president. When he returned to America, he was instrumental in helping introducethe Japanese soybean as an important crop in the United States. He brought the first Japa-nese elm to the United States, and it now graces the campus of Mount Holyoke Collegein Amherst, Massachusetts.

The Americans who came to teach at the college saw Hokkaido as a frontier to beopened 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 thestudents out on their own. During the summer vacation in 1877, the three Americanteachers at the college each took an exploratory trip. With six students, Brooks exploredsouth and west of Sapporo to collect plants, riding some 275 miles on horseback. He andhis students traveled to Muroran, along the northern coast of Uchiura Bay, past Mt. Usuto Oshamambe on the bay’s west coast, across the peninsula to Iwanai, to Otaru and backto 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 Penhal-low traveled up the Ishikari River system with more students. The American professorsalso introduced the concept of a sports day at the college, the first such event ever heldat a Japanese school. By now, sports days are common in Japanese institutions, much moreso than in the United States, whose teachers inspired the idea.

The Kaitakushi tried hard to make the western experts at the college feel comfort-able, with furnishings and foods, among other things. In a letter to his family, W. S. Clarkdescribed 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 calledKokuwa.” 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 collegein 1885, noted the foods they raised while living in Sapporo. They grew fruit for winterjams 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 throughNovember. They kept a cow for milk and crowds would come to watch Horace Stock-bridge milk her, because this was an unusual sight in Japan. Once the cow got away andburst into a private home, causing a lot of damage, but the Stockbridges arranged forrepairs. Mrs. Stockbridge commented, by the way, that there was only one other Amer-ican woman in Sapporo when she arrived—another professor’s wife.22

Kuroda Kiyotaka emphasized that the foreign experts should teach their techniquesto Japanese students, who would subsequently run the development programs. Afterabolition of the Kaitakushi in 1882, few foreigners came to Hokkaido in an official capac-ity. 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 taughtin Hokkaido, however, had absorbed what the Americans had imparted to them, and thusthe impact of the foreign experts lived on.

In 1983, Hokkaido Governor Yokomichi Takahiro summarized the work of thesemen, from Capron and his assistants to the college instructors. “These foreigners intro-duced topographical surveys, geological and mineral surveys, and Western-style farming,helped Japanese manage state-run factories, built roads, improved shipping, constructedrailways, developed coal mines and inaugurated the Sapporo Agricultural School, con-tributing 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. Notdesignated the Hokkaido capital until after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, by the end of thetwentieth century Sapporo had become a metropolis of more than 1.8 million people andthe fifth largest city in all Japan. In addition to being a provincial capital, Sapporo maybe 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 Uni-versity were especially consequential for the city. Not only was the college built in orderto assist utilization of Hokkaido’s resources, in its early years the institution accountedfor much of Sapporo’s activity and economy.

Early days

An Ainu village Isabella Bird tells us was named Satsuporo sat in the valley wheretoday’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 inthe vicinity that year. Officials noted the promise of the Ishikari Valley, in which the vil-lage was located, and sent Otomo Kametaro to the region in 1866. Otomo, from the Yoko-hama area, had been dispatched to Hakodate in 1854 to help establish pioneer farmsnearby, and due to his success was then ordered to the Ishikari Valley, to draw settlers tobegin farming near Satsuporo Village. A few years later came the Sosei canal, a straightchannel 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 becameknown for the onions grown there. Onion fields stretched along for several miles; claimedas the best in Japan, some of the onions were even exported. (Onions have continued tobe an important crop in Hokkaido, with some thirty thousand acres of the bulb plantedannually at the end of the twentieth century.)

When the Kaitakushi decided in 1869 to rename Ezo and develop the island, part ofthe 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 pointedout, Sapporo and Kyoto are the only two major cities in Japan not on the shore, wherecities tend to develop because of the need for sea-borne trade.2 Kuroda Kiyotaka urgedthat 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 Ishikariand on the edge of what gave promise to be a prosperous agricultural region. Placing thecity on the sea would have made transportation links to Honshu and the outside worldmore convenient, but the landforms of the area made that impractical; there was no goodharbor with sufficient level land and easy access to the interior. And while much of theIshikari plain near the coast was marshy peatland, the site chosen for the new capital citywas 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 travelerscame to Sapporo on the canal, but a railroad line from Otaru soon superseded it. Now ahighway sits along the Sosei, cars on one side of the canal heading south, those on theother side going north. A suggestion has been made to send automobiles undergroundthrough the Sapporo downtown area, creating parkland along the historic canal.

South of the city center the Sosei Canal meets the Toyohira River, which early plan-ners developed to supply power for industry. American Belle Stockbridge described theriver in 1885 as a “roaring, raging, brawling, picturesque river that ... furnished motivepower for several mills that gave the town a New England appearance.”3 Now the Toy-ohira is dammed as it emerges from the hills south of the city’s built-up area and it pro-vides 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 stud-ied the area and then, inspired by the square grid of streets in Kyoto, created such a planfor Sapporo. He envisioned a city center a mile and a half west of Otomo Kametaro’s Sap-poro Village home and office. Shima projected a city bisected by a long, almost block-widestrip which could act as a firebreak. This strip, now Odori Park, provides a welcomingribbon of greenery in the midst of an urban landscape. The city plan called for govern-ment buildings north of the greenbelt, with the business and entertainment districts tothe south. Plans from the early 1870s show a city laid out in perfectly square blocks northand south of Odori Park. Just as a block of undeveloped land split Sapporo into north-ern and southern sections, the Sosei Canal divided it into east and west. East of the canalwas 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 theSosei Canal. In the central part of today’s city, the streets mostly run either almost north-south or almost east-west. Thomas Blakiston wrote that the surveyor laying out the cityapparently misused his compass; in compensating for the difference between magneticnorth 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 heapparently had to do were he to carry out his instructions, and the Kaitakushi soonreplaced him. Iwamura Michitoshi, who finished the planning, called for wide streets incontrast 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 road-ways suggested that this would be a modern city; soon the Kaitakushi hired some fivethousand men to construct the city’s first buildings. In 1886 Iwamura became the firstgovernor of the newly established Hokkaido Prefecture.

The Kaitakushi had twenty square blocks set aside for its headquarters area and thesplendid building to be erected there. This two-story western-style structure had four

8. Sapporo 161

chimneys and a central cupola rising about as high above the second floor ceiling as thefoundation was beneath it. Like the city’s other public buildings of that era, it was for-eign in design. The building burned in 1879, only five years after it was opened, and wasnot replaced. A replica now stands in the Historical Village of Hokkaido.

In 1871, Sapporo officially became the capital of Hokkaido and Sapporo Shrine wasconsecrated, with effigies of its gods being carried to the city. Shima Yoshitake had chosenthe 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, whowere chosen by the Meiji Emperor to watch over the settlers. The principal god of theshrine, Okunitama, is the god of Hokkaido’s land, who ensures its bounty. The othersare 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 theshrine was renamed Hokkaido Jingu, or Hokkaido Shrine. Creation of Sapporo Shrineencouraged settlement in the new capital, for the shrine made the area seem more a partof the naichi. Sapporo now had its deities just as did the heartland.

When Horace Capron sent his assistants Antisell and Warfield to survey “Yesso” in1871, the new city had just 624 residents. Among the places the two Americans were tostudy was “the tract designated for the city of Sapporo and for the Department of Agri-

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

culture, Agricultural College &c. about to be established there.” Also, “the most avail-able sea port in the neighborhood of Sapporo should be determined and an examinationmade as to the general character of the country intervening between it, and the new cap-ital, 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 beestablished on the banks of the Toyohira River in the new city, outstripping even Hok-kaido’s abundant fisheries in importance.

The city site required clearing; William Wheeler, who arrived in 1876, wrote to hisfamily that Sapporo was “located upon a large forest covered plain.” To the small city, inJuly 1872, he had noted, “The last fifteen miles of our journey was mostly through adensely wooded country with now and then open prairie.”6 Trees, shrubs, grasses andsmall flowering plants covered the land.

The Kaitakushi started many small industries in Sapporo. Among the earliest was atool foundry opened in 1872. In 1876, W. S. Clark reported that “there is abundance ofwater power and already mills for manufacturing wood, grain, silk, iron, etc., are in fulloperation.”7 The Toyohira River that powered the new factories was newly spanned by awooden truss bridge but flood waters badly damaged it, carrying off almost all of itssuperstructure. Before the bridge was built, workmen had inquired locally about the pos-sibility of flood surges but because Sapporo was so new, none of the men asked had livedin the vicinity for very long. Horace Capron, however, claimed that the Japanese engineershad not listened to American advice before building the inadequate structure. WilliamWheeler designed changes to prevent future damage.

More people came to Sapporo; new industries and services began. By 1874 the city’spopulation had grown to 2,161 and according to one estimate, Hokkaido’s new capitalgained six hundred more residents in the following year. Most of the people in the citycame 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 yearslater and soon Sapporo produced western-style agricultural tools. In the early years, thecapitol grounds sported a mulberry plantation, under Edwin Dun’s management, forsilkworm production; Wheeler commented on the newly established silk factory. Boththe machinery to be installed in the factory and the young women to work there weretransported by ship from Tokyo. Wheeler also noted the flour mills, smithies andmachines in operation in the city. Mail from Sapporo, he wrote his mother, was carriedby 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, WilliamSmith Clark noted the “broad, straight streets” aligned to the compass directions. A yearafter the college opened, students arriving in Sapporo saw a town based “in most detailson 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 Boehmerdiscovered native hops growing in Hokkaido. The local climate also suited barley, anotherkey 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 becamethe 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 Germanlicense in the craft.

Modeled after Bavarian breweries, the Kaitakushi brewery in Sapporo began operation

8. Sapporo 163

in 1876. David F. Anthony has reported a sign at the ceremony opening the brewery read-ing “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 bev-erage called “Sapporo Beer” appeared in 1877. Soon the lager produced in Hokkaido wonpraise, 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 pro-duces Sapporo Beer today. The beer label still features the red star—the Kaitakushi sym-bol—that appeared on the first bottles and is on the factory chimney. In 1886 the JapanWeekly Mail wrote that the brewery was “one of the few official enterprises which cov-ers its expenses and even shows a small margin of profit.”10 In 1903, to expand beer man-ufacture, Sapporo Beer purchased its second factory; it had been built in 1890 to processbeet sugar. Now it is the Sapporo Beer Museum.

Four tondenhei villages populated and helped protect the area that grew into SapporoCity. First came the Kotoni settlement. which grew to 240 households during the ton-denhei era. In 1876, more tondenhei migrants established Yamahana Village south of Sap-poro’s center and in 1877 and 1888 about 800 people —farmer-soldiers and theirfamilies—settled in the third village, Shin Kotoni. These pioneers came by ship from theirhomes in Kyushu and Shikoku. Disembarking in Otaru, they took the train to KotoniStation 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 far-ther north, in what is now the neighborhood of Sapporo called Tonden. Records tell usthat during the next year the village opened an elementary school. It offered only threeyears of instruction, as the pioneer family members had to work hard in the fields. Ton-denhei also built roads and drainage systems in Sapporo. A few tondenhei houses remainin Sapporo today as small museums, surrounded and dwarfed by the streets and struc-tures of the modern city. Three other tondenhei settlements grew just east of Sapporo, atNopporo, Ebetsu and Shinotsu, just northwest of the center of Ebetsu.

Several other historic buildings from Sapporo’s early years remain today. One is theHoheikan. Constructed in 1880, this is a two story Victorian structure resembling a smallNew England hotel. Here the Meiji emperor would stay when he visited Sapporo the fol-lowing year. Several items used during the visit, from lamps to dishes, are now on dis-play. In 1896 Mabel Loomis Todd stayed briefly at the Hoheikan and wrote, “the cook isan artist, the attendants delightful.” She was carefully looked after, even accompaniedon her way to the Japanese bath.11 Hirohito stayed there when he made his 1922 visit toHokkaido as Prince Regent. In 1958 the Hoheikan was moved to its present location inNakajima Park and the building now is available for parties and ceremonies, though itsinterior looks a bit worn.

A building known as the Former Hokkaido Government Office Building dates from1888. Japanese familiarly call it Aka Renga, meaning “red bricks.” This red brick struc-ture looks as though it might have graced a late nineteenth century European city. Some2,500,000 bricks for the edifice came from two villages, Shiroishi and Toyohira, now bothparts of Sapporo. For its day Aka Renga was large and tall—two full stories with dormerwindows under the roof. A small octagonal dome crowns the building. Notably, it fea-tured electric power and a steam heating system.

One historically significant detail of Aka Renga is the five-pointed red star repre-senting 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, perhapsbecause that more closely resembled the shape of the island. Said to be based upon theMassachusetts capitol building, Aka Renga’s red brick facade and crowning tower maycall the Boston building to mind, but the roof lines of the two buildings are very differ-ent 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; thatbuilding is now enveloped by huge additions.) Ginkgo trees planted in a row leading tothe Sapporo building form the first row of trees planted in Hokkaido. These days evenin 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 takendown only seven years after the building opened. Fire destroyed Aka Renga in January1909, obliterating a number of official records. Fire fighting was poorly organized then,and during freezing weather, water for fighting fires difficult to obtain. Ironically, twodecorative ponds had been placed in the building’s grounds to provide a source of waterin case of fire, but when fire did break out it, the ponds were frozen. Sapporo Agricul-tural College offered temporary space to government officials after the disaster, and twoyears 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, andnow it more closely resembles its original state. A 2004 typhoon severely damaged anumber of graceful trees in the grounds, however.

The city of Sapporo grew and adopted modern practices, just as have other cities allover the world. Before the end of the nineteenth century, Sapporo received its first elec-tric lights, and telephone service began in 1900. A visitor to Sapporo in 1888 comparedthe city to a “western American” city, noting its “newness and bustle, and a sense of rapidprogress.” (1886 figures showed 14,935 residents.)12 Setbacks came, too, for exampleIshikari basin floods, as when a 1898 torrent almost destroyed the tondenhei village Shi-noro, buildings and fields alike.

Getting to Sapporo

Because Sapporo was not located on the seacoast, development of a transportationlink to a nearby port was an urgent priority in the city’s early days. Supplies had to bebrought in by horses or by small boats rowed or towed up the Ishikari River—both slowand inefficient methods. Moreover, only during parts of the year was navigation on theriver 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 devel-oped at Muroran, on Hokkaido’s south coast. The other port location under serious con-sideration was Otaru, then a small fishing settlement nestled under the outlying hills ofthe mountain cluster west and south of Sapporo. Ishikari, near the mouth of the IshikariRiver, was closer than was Otaru to Sapporo, but land there was swampy and the sea fartoo shallow for harbor facilities.

Although Otaru was much nearer the capital city than was Muroran, the Americansfeared that using Otaru’s harbor would be problematic because of winter storms. Muro-ran has milder winter weather and is closer to Tokyo than is Otaru, but because of thedistance from Sapporo to Muroran and because of limited finances, the Kaitakushi decidedto build the transportation route to Otaru. Though Warfield had felt that Otaru could

8. Sapporo 165

be only a summer port for Sapporo, others thought the port project feasible despite pos-sible danger from northeasterly winds in the small and shallow harbor. The necessity forusing lighters to load and unload cargo there makes the unimproved harbor inefficientby today’s standards but in the nineteenth century it could serve well.

Wheeler studied the transportation problem and strongly recommended a railroadfrom Sapporo to Otaru instead of yet another alternative, a canal from Sapporo to thecoast. He described his journey on horseback from Otaru to Sapporo in 1876. “The firstnine miles of the route lies along the coast; almost at the very edge of the sea; at the footof bold bluffs and rocky cliffs, several hundred feet high, sometimes overhanging the nar-row pack-horse road; twice piercing the jutting rock by tunnels, the top, or either sideof 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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The Hokkaido Government Office Building, 1888, was inspired by the Massachusetts State Capi-tol in Boston. The Sapporo building was restored in 1968 to reflect its original grandeur, and nowholds historic records and exhibits illustrating Hokkaido’s history. The brick structure is famil-iarly known as “Aka Renga,” or “red bricks.” Almost always, one sees tourists posing in front ofthe historic edifice as the author did in 2006. Photograph by Mayumi Kayoko.

tains; the swamps give way to cliffs. If one leaves the plain and traverses the coast by trainor 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 becamea priority. (This line would also serve Horonai, farther inland from Sapporo, where richdeposits of coal had recently been discovered.) Joseph Crawford headed the rail construc-tion project. Building the line from Zenibako on the coast inland to Sapporo provedfairly straightforward, but constructing it along the rugged coast from Zenibako to Otarupresented a serious challenge. Wheeler and others had inspected the land above the cliffsand determined that an inland route to Otaru would be impossible, so the track fromOtaru ran under the cliffs to Zenibako, where the flat land began. Alongside the foot ofthe bluff, tracks were laid in some places on the road that had been completed a year ear-lier. Construction included landfills as well as protective retaining walls. The line ranthrough five tunnels and crossed several bridges between Otaru and Zenibako. FromZenibako to Sapporo, where the track ran partly on swampland, a stable foundation hadto be provided. Both in Otaru and Sapporo, turntables were built. The terminus of theline in Otaru was at Temiya Station, where the track extended on to a trestle sixty feethigh, built so ships could dock next to it and coal from Hokkaido mines could be loadedthrough chutes directly from railroad cars on to the ships. American engineers super-vised and trained Japanese engineers in the construction work. They completed it in justeleven 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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When Aka Renga had stood for only seven years, its tower was removed for fear that it was unsafeand this old postcard, probably from the early twentieth century, shows how the building longappeared. The tower was restored during the 1968 renovation. Note that no tall buildings stoodbehind Aka Renga in its early years.

mile route between the two cities, and it was often late. By the end of the century, thiswas 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 railroadbegan operation and harbor facilities in Otaru were available, Sapporo’s future prospectslooked good, but keeping the railroad line open proved to be almost as challenging asbuilding it. In early September 1892, storms and flooding destroyed nine railroad bridgeson this route.

When Belle Stockbridge first came to Sapporo in 1885, she appreciated the train aftera cold ship journey from Hakodate to Otaru. “I was glad to exchange the steamer for the20 mile run on the only American-equipped R.R. line in Japan. It was good to be in anAmerican car again, and to hear the familiar puff and swish and whistle of a real liveAmerican engine.”14

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

Travelers from Hakodate to Sapporo could not make the entire trip by rail untilafter the end of the century, but after Sapporo became the capital in 1871, the Kaitakushiexpedited construction of a road between the two cities by way of Muroran. The link toHakodate was important because Hakodate was still Hokkaido’s largest city and mostimportant commercial center. From Hakodate, where construction began, the route byroad headed north through Nanae and over a low pass across the Oshima peninsulabetween low mountain ranges to Mori on the coast of Uchiura Bay. From here travelerswould cross the bay by boat to Muroran, an adventurous voyage when the winds werehigh. Planners envisioned a coastal road from Muroran to Tomakomai. Then the routewould head north through lowlands to Chitose and finally Sapporo, just as the railroadand expressway do today. Construction started in 1872, though not before the workersbrought from Tokyo had to fight for their lives when their ship foundered on the Hok-kaido shore. Despite losing most of their tools, the men soon began to work with what-ever implements could be found or improvised. A. J. Warfield surveyed the area to decidethe precise route. The groups of laborers followed him: first the tree-cutters, then thoseclearing 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 Sapporodownstream by canoe, but by June 1873 the road was completed. The Kaitakushi was notable to keep it in good repair, though. Every year brought a spring thaw and impassiblemud, while floods down river valleys destroyed the bridges. In Hakodate in the springof 1896, “Every level road was a ditch and the roads down from the hill were roaring tor-rents 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 fol-lowing similar speeches in Japanese prepared by Hokkaido Governor Kuroda Kiyotakaand Zusho Hirotake, director of the school and Clark’s supervisor. After Clark’s addresscame another official’s speech and then one on behalf of the students. All present, exceptthe governor, remained standing throughout the ceremony.

Clark’s remarks praised the founding of the school and urged the students to workhard and behave well, but he betrayed that feeling of western cultural superiority so com-mon in Europe and America in the nineteenth century when he said, “This wonderfulemancipation from the tyranny of caste and custom, which in ages past has envelopedlike a dark cloud the nations of the East, should awaken a lofty ambition in the breast ofevery student to whom an education is offered.” He took great pride in the “successfulopening of our college, the first Agricultural College in the Orient.”16

Preliminary activities accomplished for the new college included the establishmentof a temporary school in Tokyo and examination of prospective students. Even beforethe college opened, one American taught in Sapporo. Since 1875, William R. Corwinehad been teaching at a preparatory school established in the city to prepare students forthe 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 limiton numbers of students was lifted in 1879, the college grew rapidly for a few years; in1881 the college enrolled three hundred students. The government met student expensesin the college’s first few years, for fear that otherwise no one would consider attendingthis new institution in a new city in a frontier land. In return, after graduation the stu-dents would be employed by the Kaitakushi in Hokkaido for five years. On campus, thestudents also received pay when they worked in the college’s experimental fields.

After the demise of the Kaitakushi, financial support declined and the number ofstudents dropped each year, to about 175 in 1897. For several years the future of the insti-tution was in doubt; the government no longer paid tuition, though loans remained avail-able. 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 sportedtwo buildings for offices andclasses and one for a dormitory,all built in a mixed Japanese andwestern architectural style. Thestudents lived in two-man dormi-tory rooms furnished in a westernway with beds, desks and chairs.The young men wore western-style uniforms and ate westernfood for breakfast and dinner,though a Japanese lunch wasserved. Students were to spendfour hours daily (except Sunday)in class, studying mainly mathe-matics, chemistry, English andJapanese. The rest of their timewould be taken up with at leastthat much daily study and in theafternoons, manual labor andmilitary drills. Study was crucial,as the English language presentedproblems for the students. Evenafter a very busy day, they wouldget together in the evening tostudy. It must have helped; thestudents’ high caliber impressedtheir American professors.

Four years after the collegeopened, the first commencementexercises took place. Thirteen ofthe original twenty-four studentsreceived bachelor of agriculture

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Here the author stands by the bust of William S. Clarklocated on the grounds of Hokkaido University. Firstinstalled on the campus in 1926 to commemorate the uni-versity’s fiftieth anniversary, Clark’s bust was sacrificedto the war effort during World War II but was replaced in1948. Photograph by Mayumi Kayoko.

degrees (though they would have preferred recognition as bachelors of science). At theceremony, the entire student body carried out a military drill. The governor, vice gov-ernor and acting president, now David Penhallow, offered speeches as did each of the grad-uates. Some three hundred people attended, and a fireworks exhibition crowned theoccasion.

Preserved on the campus are some of the early buildings from the college farm whichWilliam S. Clark had recommended so that a foreign teacher could give “instruction boththeoretical and practical.” The model barn, fifty by one hundred feet, was the first barnbuilt in Japan. It no longer exists, but a later, similar one is among the historic structuresremaining today. The farm buildings and the rest of the campus are not in their originallocation, though. College buildings first stood between today’s Sapporo Station and OdoriPark. Groundbreaking at a new and more expansive location began in 1899 and the col-lege officially opened on its present site in 1903. The farm buildings were once in the areawhich became the heart of today’s university grounds. In 1911 they were moved and nowsit near the northeast corner of the campus. Here one can see the nineteenth century struc-tures: a large dairy barn, a silo, a corn storage barn, a building for threshing and hullinggrain, a milk processing plant and a food processing plant. These are the oldest western-style agricultural buildings in Hokkaido, as a brochure for the site notes. From America

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

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 rakesand 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 andhemp.”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 toNemuro by an inland route. Their journey took them through the area that is now AkanNational Park. Here they climbed and explored, in awe of the volcanic landscape. Theyemerged on the east coast at Abashiri, far from Nemuro, however, “and after much strug-gle 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 graduatingclass. Originally of a samurai family in Morioka City in northern Honshu, he became aChristian through William Smith Clark’s influence, even though Clark departed beforeNitobe came to the college. After graduating with a degree in agricultural development,

Nitobe studied at Tokyo Universityand then in the United States,mainly at Johns Hopkins. He com-pleted his studies in Germany, wherehe attained a doctorate in agricul-tural economics. All of this helped inpursuit of his dream to be “a bridgeacross the Pacific.”19 For a time aprofessor at Sapporo AgriculturalCollege, he inspired his students topursue their dreams. In 1891, Nitobeand his American wife established afree night school in Sapporo toenable young people to continuetheir education even if forced to earna living. Nitobe achieved his owndream, writing a number of books,including Bushido: The Soul of Japan,an influential work explaining Japa-nese thought to the western reader.When he came to Brown Universityin 1911, Nitobe became the firstexchange professor from Japan toteach in the United States. Later herepresented Japan in the League ofNations, becoming an undersecre-tary general for the organization. Fortwenty years his portrait appeared onJapan’s five thousand yen note.

One of Nitobe’s close friends,

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The American professors who worked in Hokkaidodevelopment introduced the silo to the island. Thisexample, built for Sapporo Agricultural College’s modelfarm and originally designed by William S. Clark,stands by the barn on the Hokkaido University campus.

Uchimura Kanzo, arrived at Sapporo Agri-cultural School just after Clark left and,like Nitobe, converted to Christianity.Uchimura called the college “my ‘wet-nurse,’” and fondly remembered his luckin being able to live “in the virgin woodsof Hokkaido” rather than “muddy Tokyo,”where he was born.20 He specialized infisheries and after graduation worked sev-eral years for the government. He went onto the United States, where he toiled in ahospital and attended Amherst College,graduating in 1887. Back in Japan, con-centrating on study and writing, Uchi-mura gained a reputation as a prominentJapanese Christian and intellectual. Histeaching career ended in 1891 after herefrained from bowing in respect to thesignature of the Emperor on the newlypromulgated Imperial Rescript on Edu-cation; he held that bowing would com-promise his Christian principles. Hesupported Japan’s war against China in1894, but soon afterward became a paci-fist.

Miyabe Kingo, the third of the college’s prominent Christian converts, was a botanystudent and a friend of Nitobe and Uchimura. After his graduation from Sapporo Agri-cultural College, Miyabe went on to Tokyo University and then Harvard, where hereceived a Ph.D. degree. He wrote his dissertation on the flora of the Kuril Islands. Miyabebecame a leading botanist in Japan, taught for many years at the Sapporo AgriculturalCollege, and served as college president. A museum dedicated to him stands in Sapporo’sBotanic Garden.

A student in the first class, Sato Shosuke, studied agriculture and technology in theUnited States for four years after his graduation and was the first graduate of the Sap-poro college to earn an advanced degree in America, a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. in agricul-tural economics. He returned to Sapporo Agricultural College as a teacher and soonbecame its president, an office he held until 1930. The college’s growth and prominenceowe a lot to Sato. When proposals came in the 1880s to close the college or to reduce itssize, he had just returned from his studies in the United States. He urged upon the Hok-kaido government the importance not only of maintaining the college but of expandingit. He wanted creation of a department of practical agriculture designed specifically formen who intended to farm in Hokkaido. It was duly authorized and among the manyskills taught were dairying, haymaking, milking cattle, feeding animals, growing fruit,draining and breaking up land and even managing a farm and bookkeeping. Later, Satowas the man who presided over the transition from college to university.

One prominent Sapporo Agricultural College graduate who rejected the westerninfluences he found at the college was Shiga Shigetaka of the class of 1884. Shiga briefly

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Nitobe Inazo graduated in 1881 as a member ofSapporo Agricultural College’s second class. Helater studied abroad, dedicated himself to achiev-ing his dream of becoming “a bridge across thePacific” and gained worldwide fame. This is hislikeness as he appeared on Japan’s 5000 yen note.Photograph by L. A. Irish.

taught botany in Nagano and then traveled extensively in the South Pacific, studyingbotany and the wider environment in various island groups. He deplored the influenceof 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 cultureand values while importing only compatible knowledge from the west.

Not even all the Americans in Japan were enamored of the college. Edwin Dun, afirm believer in practical work in the field rather than book learning, admitted in his mem-oirs written many years later that the college had been successful and had become “a mostadmirable institution of learning,” but he felt that it had not been a practical help in devel-oping 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, heroomed for awhile with the Nitobe family when he arrived in Sapporo. When Arishimadecided to attend the Sapporo college, his father bought almost eight hundred acres ofland in Hokkaido, thinking that the young man could become a landed proprietor. Theyoung Arishima, however, became concerned by class differences between landlord andtenants and eventually gave the land to the tenants who worked it. He became a Chris-tian for a few years and taught at the college and its preparatory school for about a decade.

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Left: Uchimura Kanzo came to Sapporo Agricultural College in 1877. He converted to Christian-ity, 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 itsbotanical garden in 1886. The college campus later moved north, but the garden remains in down-town Sapporo today (both photographs courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

He traveled fairly extensively in Europeand the United States and his writings,including his most famous work, thenovel whose title in English translation isA Certain Woman, show his concern forfreedom and equality. The double sui-cide of Arishima and his mistress in 1923enhanced the author’s fame.

The prominence of these men inlater life reflects the impressive standardof the college in its early years. Nitobe feltthe name Sapporo Agricultural Collegewas misleading because of the strongeducation offered in English and thehumanities. As a center of liberal educa-tion, the college played a significant rolein Japan’s modernization, not merely inintroducing practices leading to success-ful farming in Hokkaido but more impor-tant, equipping young men with theintellectual vigor that enabled them toplay a significant role in Japan.

By the time the final American pro-fessor on the campus left in 1893, someof the college’s graduates who had beensent abroad to continue their studies hadreturned and could carry on the work theAmericans had begun. One change thatresulted was that less emphasis was placedupon the study of English, while agricul-tural education assumed a more centralrole in the curriculum.

When the Kaitakushi was disbanded,the college came under several differentgovernment departments before beingassigned to the Hokkaido government in1886. 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 exper-imental crops. Officials did not want the college to compete with private agriculturalconcerns. Dependent upon government funding, the college several times barely escapedclosure, but pressure from influential supporters kept it going.

The famous Clock Tower, one of Sapporo’s most beloved structures, began life aspart of the college. Built in downtown Sapporo when the campus was located there, itwas designed to be the college’s military drill hall. The ground floor held a museum aswell as classrooms, while the upper floor was the drill hall. The Clock Tower was dedi-cated on Oct. 16, 1878. Among the several students who spoke on the occasion was futurecollege president Sato Shosuke.

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More than any other Sapporo Agricultural Collegegraduate, Sato Shosuke has served his alma mater.He fought for the college in the 1880s when itsfuture was in doubt, and from 1907 until 1930 washead of the institution. This bust of President Satosits near the main entrance of Sapporo University.

The clock would furnish the correct time to the entire city. Most people in thosedays would have had no way to know the precise time of day, so a clock that chimed peri-odically would benefit anyone who had a schedule to keep, not just college studentsattending classes. The clock did not begin operation until 1881, though. Its installationembroiled 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 thebuilding. Even though he warned that the tower under construction would probably notbe large enough to accommodate a suitable clock, he was told to order one—and whenit came from Howard of Boston, all could see that it clearly would not fit. Wheeler, thencollege president, found himself criticized for the debacle, but he saw to it that a suit-able tower was built atop the building. The clock was duly installed and remains thereyet, all four faces showing the hours in Roman numerals and the chimes still ringing. Aclock tower myth says that Sapporo women, wanting to do their part in pioneering, had

their rings melted down to helpcreate the bell and this created itssweet sound. The city moved theClock Tower to its present site in1906 and it now stands sixteenhundred feet south of its originallocation. Here it served as a postoffice and for many years as alibrary. Now the Clock Tower isa museum, displaying importantaspects of the history of SapporoAgricultural College and its ClockTower. It is best seen in winter,when the trees around it have losttheir leaves. This modest build-ing is a symbol of the city; the1963 Citizens’ Charter of Sapporobegins, “We, the citizens of Sap-poro, where the chimes of theClock Tower can be heard....”22

Sosei Elementary School, aSapporo school which had openedin 1871, held its final graduationceremony at the Clock Tower in2003. The school’s own buildinghad been torn down; the numberof children in the area served bythe school had fallen greatly andso the school was merged withseveral others. It seems appropri-ate that this historic school’s finalceremony was held in anotherhistoric building.

Emphasizing Sapporo Agri-

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Arishima Takeo, a 1901 Sapporo University graduate,taught in Sapporo for about a decade and traveled exten-sively abroad, but gained fame for his fiction, which exam-ines people’s dilemmas in the modern world (courtesyHokkaido University Library).

cultural College’s central role in Hokkaido development, the Meiji Emperor visited thecampus on his 1881 trip to the island. He observed students mowing with scythes andworking the soil with a horse-drawn plow. In the barn he saw a cow and horse beingweighed on the scale installed there. The Emperor visited the Clock Tower, where pro-fessors were lecturing in English. He looked at the natural history exhibits and he watchedstudents do chemistry and physics experiments. (During his three-day Sapporo visit healso observed tondenhei troops, met an Ainu group and, according to legend, ate a dishcalled “ice cream” at the Kaitakushi office.)

Sapporo Agricultural College influenced Sapporo in many ways. The sight in 1877-78 of horse-drawn vehicles hauling herring fertilizer from the coast for the college’s farmattracted the interest of the populace, and soon draft animals replaced men in pullingcarts throughout the city. In 1878, instigated by Professor Brooks, the college held an agri-cultural 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 collegebegan selling fresh meat, unavailable in Sapporo until then except for venison.

The college continued to be an important institution in Sapporo despite occasionalsetbacks, including a fire which consumed the home of the acting president in 1884,unfortunately destroying agricultural experiment records. Part of the university’s sprawl-ing campus is still planted in crops; aerial photographs show a number of rectangularplots in the heart of this city of well over a million people. Surely this must be one of thefew major cities in the world to devote acres of land within easy walking distance of itscenter to farm crops.

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Probably the most famous of Sapporo Agricultural College’s buildings, the Clock Tower sits indowntown Sapporo and now belongs to the city. Designed to be the college’s drill hall, the build-ing was dedicated in 1878. These days it is surrounded by trees and tall buildings, as shown in this2004 photograph.

It was students from the college who carried on Louis Boehmer’s work, raising seedsand planting flowers in Sapporo. Miyabe Kingo established a botanical garden as part ofthe college in 1886, and it still sits on land donated to the college by the Kaitakushi andprovides a verdant space in the middle of the city. About thirty-two acres in size, at firstglance much of the garden suggests the natural forest that once covered the area. One canimagine what the Ishikari plain looked like before it was cleared and developed as cityor 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 arti-facts here became part of the museum collection under the Kaitakushi. Some were col-lected by missionary John Batchelor, whose nineteenth century clapboard house, movedfrom its original location, sits in the middle of the garden. It is closed and inaccessibleto the public, however, and looks forlorn. Next to the house, in another nineteenth cen-tury 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’swestern-style plans, which had to be converted from feet and inches to Japanese meas-urements before construction could begin. Specimens visible here are not only interest-ing 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 amounted Ezo wolf.

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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 thenineteenth century and include birds collected by Thomas Blakiston and minerals found by Ben-jamin Lyman (courtesy Hokkaido University Library).

Tree-lined Poplar Row onthe Hokkaido University campusis a site popular with Japanesetourists, for except in Hokkaido,these trees are an uncommon sightin Japan. Poplars were introducedto the northern island during thepioneer era to create windbreaksand this walkway at the Hokudaicampus is lined with the trees. A2004 typhoon with 111 mile perhour winds affected them severely,however, felling nineteen anddamaging more than half of thefifty-one trees. For about twentyyears before the storm, people hadnot been allowed to walk alongthe path between the trees. Pop-lars normally live about sixtyyears; some of these were ninetyyears old, so the walkway wasclosed for safety reasons and thepoplars could only be viewed fromafar. By June 2005, forty youngtrees had been transplanted toPoplar Row and the walkway wasonce again opened, while some ofthe downed timber has been pre-served in a newly constructedcembalo (a harpsichord or dulci-mer). The 2004 storm also downedmany trees elsewhere on the cam-pus—about 1500 in all—and oth-ers in the Botanic Garden.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, college students began to take a seriousinterest in Ainu culture and stimulated the creation of several organizations, includingthe Hokkaido Anthropological Society, to pursue this field. More recently, excavationson campus have uncovered artifacts and seeds from Satsumon-era settlement and havehelped 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 enlargeand transform the school into a university offering instruction in such fields as law andthe arts in addition to agriculture. Instead, when Tohoku Imperial University opened inSendai in 1907 to serve northern Japan, the Sapporo campus became the College of Agri-culture of Tohoku Imperial University and soon one could study forestry, fisheries andcivil engineering as well as agriculture in Sapporo. The Hokkaido campus’ life as part ofTohoku Imperial University did not last long; pressure soon grew in Hokkaido for thecreation of Hokkaido Imperial University. The prominent Hokkaido newspaper of the

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One of the oldest museums in Japan, the building shownin the previous picture is administered by Hokkaido Uni-versity. It sits in the middle of the Sapporo Botanic Gar-den and among the many specimens in its natural historycollection are a large Hokkaido brown bear and the now-extinct Ezo wolf.

day, the Hokkai Times, suggested that this be accomplished by 1918, which would markhalf a century since colonization of Hokkaido had formally begun.23 In 1918 the Sapporocampus was separated from Tohoku Imperial University and became Hokkaido Imper-ial University, one of only nine universities so designated in the Japanese Empire.

The new university revised policies and added programs, and student numbers con-tinued to grow. A landmark step came in 1918 when the institution became the first pub-lic university in Japan to admit women, though for awhile not as regular students. In1919 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 ofEngineering graduated in 1928, seventy-eight received degrees, in civil, electrical, mechan-ical and mining engineering. The university opened more new departments, includinglaw and literature. In 1960, Hokkaido University had about five thousand students, andby 2006, the number reached eighteen thousand.

The one-time Sapporo Agricultural College truly is one of Japan’s leading universi-ties today, with more than half its students coming from outside Hokkaido. The univer-sity includes the widely-respected Slavic Research Center and the Institute of LowTemperature Science as well as facilities beyond Sapporo now; among them a branchcampus in Hakodate, a marine laboratory in Muroran, several experimental forests, theAkkeshi Marine Station for studies of marine plants and animals, and the Toya Lake Sta-tion for environmental biology. After World War II, the institution’s name became whatwe know today: Hokkaido University. Familiarly known as Hokudai, the university con-tinues 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 eventsshaped the island capital’s evolution: depression, war, defeat, occupation, Japan’s “eco-nomic 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. Trans-portation facilities modernized and expanded, while parks, stadiums and museumsopened or were redeveloped. New strategies for dealing with winter snow and coldappeared, from underground shopping malls and passages to advanced snow removaltechniques. As amenities abounded, though, the city also found itself faced with prob-lems of the modern world such as poverty and crime.

As the new century began, Sapporo remained smaller than Otaru and Hakodate. PoetIshikawa 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, mem-ory as Sapporo ... a large country town with wide streets, quiet with many trees, withwestern style houses forming a line dispersedly, and each large building appearing to bepressed 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 andflax factories and a brewery,” adding that “Sapporo Beer enjoys much favour.”24

When Reginald Farrer visited at the beginning of the twentieth century, he foundSapporo “most pompously laid out,” its streets too wide for the traffic they carried, itsoutskirts empty. As late as 1922, Sapporo’s streets were “quagmires,” reported anothervisitor 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 theground froze in the winter, the wooden bricks rose up above the surface. So, six yearslater, the street was repaved with asphalt.

Rail service to Sapporo improved, as by 1904 one could take the train from Hako-date to Otaru via the new Hakodate line and then continue on to Sapporo. When the linewas put through, it did not follow the route most travelers take today. From Hakodateit struck almost directly north across the heel of the peninsula’s foot and then continuednorth along the west coast of Uchiura Bay. At Oshamambe near the northwest corner ofthe bay it diverged from today’s main line, striking through the mountains across thepeninsula 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 dis-tricts were to be located south of Odori Park, but the business district has spread fromthere to the north. The entertainment district, Susukino, remains south of the park. Itgot 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 inJapan north of Tokyo, with hundreds of eating and drinking spots, huge brilliant neonadvertisements, and, of course, prostitutes and pimps.

A 1918 exposition held in Sapporo and Otaru celebrated Hokkaido’s fiftieth year ofdevelopment. Sapporo greeted visitors with a three-arched, three-color welcome gate atthe 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. Exhibitsdemonstrated aspects of education, agriculture, industry, forestry, colonization and engi-neering, among other things. As well as illustrating development and prosperity, theexposition was meant to attract visitors and prospective settlers from the other Japaneseislands. It was at this time that streetcars replaced the city’s horse-drawn trams. Onestreetcar 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. Whenthe island capital gained official status as a city in 1922, it was the thirteenth largest cityin the nation. Japan’s first nationwide census, held in 1920, reported Sapporo’s popula-tion as 101,601. Foreign-inspired buildings and wide streets gave Sapporo a look some-what unusual to Japan, though residential areas tended to resemble those elsewhere inthe country. In 1926 a telephone line began service between Sapporo and the island ofHonshu. In 1928 came the first radio broadcast in the city, and in the next year the city’sfirst reinforced concrete building appeared, the Sapporo Teachers’ School.

Within Sapporo’s city limits is an airport, not today’s international airport a littleover twenty miles away in Chitose, but Okadama Airport, only about three and one-halfmiles northeast of Sapporo Station. Flights still operate from Okadama to other Hokkaidocities, but Chitose’s facility later became Sapporo’s main airport. In 1926, the village madeland available for aviation; the area around Chitose had not been settled for farming inthe early days, due both to poor soil and a poor water supply. The “Hokkai One” was thefirst plane to take off from the new field.

Scheduled service between Tokyo and Sapporo, via Sendai and Aomori, began onApril 1, 1937. Soon, the Imperial Navy assumed control of the Chitose airfield, whichpassed 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 itto 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 threerunways are reserved for Japanese military use, while the other serves commercial andprivate planes. In the early days of Hokkaido settlement, the journey from Chitose toSapporo could be accomplished in one long day, but now one can catch a train at the air-port 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 openedDecember 11, 1934. The Emperor’s brother, Prince Chichibu, urged its construction. Afterstudying abroad, he predicted that the Winter Olympic Games would be awarded to Japansometime, with Sapporo the best venue for the events. Thus an international-style hotelwould be an asset to the city. When the national army held special maneuvers in Hokkaidoin 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 preparean outdoor banquet for more than three thousand people, which the Emperor wouldattend. This was the first imperial visit to Hokkaido since 1881, and the hotel staff pre-pared elegant lunch boxes for the guests.

During the American occupation of Japan, the U.S. Army requisitioned the GrandHotel and used it for seven years. Before the Grand could reopen to the public camerefurnishing and refurbishing; the management had removed some of the hotel’s equip-ment before the Americans came, and many more items were worn, damaged or gonewhen the occupation troops left. With some government help, the hotel was ready to wel-come guests again in November 1952. In the years since the war, groups ranging fromthe Vienna Boys’ Choir to the New York Yankees have stayed there and in 1966 a twohundred room annex opened.

The war and occupation disrupted Sapporo life in other ways, too; the city couldnot remain the place remembered by Richard Storry. He recollected the Sapporo of theera shortly before World War II as “rather quiet and dignified, with an atmosphere almostreminiscent of an English cathedral city.”26 Food crops replaced Odori Park flowers dur-ing wartime and the statue of Kuroda Kiyotaka that stood in the park was sacrificed tothe war effort. Sapporo citizens who had been growing onions were ordered to clear theirfields to make room for Okadama Airport facilities.

It was not until after World War II that Sapporo emerged as the island’s dominantcity. In the early postwar years, Sapporo had an advantage matched by few other majorcities in Japan, having an infrastructure undamaged by wartime bombing. The city con-tinued to grow and evolve, though when Joseph Campbell, the well-known scholar ofmythology, visited in 1955, he still perceived a “frontier atmosphere,” which brought tohis mind “a combination of Alaska [Juneau] and the West.”27 Sapporo’s population dou-bled in the period from 1935 to 1955; by then Sapporo was definitely Hokkaido’s premiercity. Some population growth had come with land annexation. In 1950, Sapporo absorbedShiroishi Village, south across the Toyohira River. Population doubled again from 1955to 1965, by which time it reached almost eight hundred thousand. Toyohira Town joinedSapporo in 1961. The city reached a population of one million by 1970, just over a cen-tury from its foundation. As the dominant city in Hokkaido, Sapporo has drawn peoplefrom Hokkaido villages and towns which have seen their economies collapse from mineclosings or the disappearance of sea life. People merely looking for greater opportunityand the city lights also came. Also, of course, Sapporo people themselves sometimes havemoved 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 andKarafuto, settled in the city. Most new firms were in the service sector, a pattern that hasheld to this day. The retail sector expanded, and Sapporo’s downtown became an impor-tant shopping area, with major department stores opening there.

The Makomanai district in the southern part of Sapporo has changed drasticallysince Edwin Dun established a stock farm on its flat land. Many tondenhei and their fam-ilies settled nearby during Sapporo’s early years. Now the area is incorporated into Sap-poro and is the site of the southern terminus of one of the city’s three subway lines. WhenAmerican occupation forces settled in Sapporo after World War II, they took over theMakomanai farm’s land and established Camp Crawford. Farm operations were movedto Shintoku—far from Sapporo—some miles up the Tokachi River from Obihiro. Theexperimental farm in Shintoku remains in operation today, while the Makomanai facil-ities reverted to Japanese military use at the end of the American occupation and housean army base today.

Odori Park is now a strip of green stretching for eleven blocks, crossed by Sapporo’sdowntown north-south streets. At the east end of the park is the Television Tower, fromwhich one can gaze over all the city. Built in the 1950s, the tower marked the beginningof television broadcasting in Hokkaido. The building at Odori Park’s west end is a his-toric one now known as Sapporo Archives Museum. It began life in 1926 as the SapporoCourt of Appeals and later became the Sapporo High Court. Between these two structuresare many blocks of park. You can see a rose garden, a children’s play area and a waterfountain from which four people can drink at once, which was a gift from Sapporo’s sis-ter city, Portland, Oregon, and a replica of fountains found in downtown Portland. Addedin 1967 as part of the commemoration of Hokkaido’s one hundred years of developmentwere statues of two nineteenth century gentlemen who played important roles in Sap-poro’s early years. A figure of Horace Capron now accompanies one of Kaitakushi leaderKuroda Kiyotaka. Odori Park plays a central role in different festivals celebrated through-out the year and is best known as the main venue for the gigantic, intricate ice sculp-tures 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 anddecorations 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 thanfifty thousand people came to see the statues and a tradition had begun. Members of the1950 student group still build a sculpture each year.

Hokkaido University has continued to add to Sapporo’s prosperity, but the city hasother universities and colleges too. One is Hokusei Gakuen University. In 1880, a Protes-tant missionary in her late twenties named Sarah Clara Smith came to Japan. After work-ing in Tokyo, she moved on to Hokkaido in 1883, living for a few years in Hakodate andthen in Sapporo, where she opened a school for girls—the first one in Sapporo. Some ofthe early Sapporo Agricultural College graduates who returned to their alma mater toteach also taught girls at Miss Smith’s school. One of her students, Kawai Michi, lateropened a school of her own in Tokyo. She singled out among her teachers in SapporoNitobe Inazo, who taught the girls history. Miyabe Kingo taught them biology. Sarah ClaraSmith’s school evolved into Hokusei (northern star) Gakuen, and in 1962 a universitywas 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 reg-ulation and antipathy to English-speaking enemies forced curriculum changes. After thewar, education in these two subjects resumed.

Among other educational institutions in the area are Sapporo Medical Universityand, in nearby Ebetsu, Sapporo Gakuen University and Rakuno Gakuen University, aschool for agricultural studies. Hokkaido produces many graduates in technological fields,but career opportunities on the island for all of them are inadequate. Meanwhile, schoolsthroughout Japan are facing decreasing enrollment as the nation’s birthrate has declined.One institution, the private Sapporo University, ran into trouble trying to boost studentnumbers. In recruiting foreign students, the university for a time abetted the entry ofChinese connected with organized crime, enrolling as students people who had reallycome to Sapporo to work in the sex industry. Unfortunately, such practices damage thereputation of a school that can offer a good education to many students, Japanese andforeign. Since the scandal, former Governor of Hokkaido Hori Tatsuya has become uni-versity head. Consul General Marrie Schaefer, who represents the United States in Sap-poro, taught English at Sapporo University in the 1980s, long before the scandal erupted.

A noted religious leader, Makiguchi Tsunesaburo, studied in Hokkaido, graduatingfrom Hokkaido Normal School (which later became Hokkaido University of Education)in 1893. He began teaching geography and later moved to Tokyo, where he founded SokaKyoiku Gakkai (Value-creating Educational Society), which became Soka Gakkai, theprominent and politically influential Buddhist laymen’s organization. In 1964, SokaGakkai established a political party, Komeito, and though there is little formal connec-tion between religious group and party today, Soka Gakkai members still wield power inKomeito.

Thanks to sports, Sapporo has gained international recognition. Sapporo hosted the1972 Winter Olympic games, the first winter Olympics to be held in Asia. This event firstmade the city known to much of the wider world. At that time the largest city ever to hostthe winter games,29 the city had been scheduled as the site for the 1940 games but warcaused their cancellation. Sapporo had long been an important winter sports center inJapan, having held the first national ski championship meet in 1923. Already the cityboasted world-class venues for some sports; the 1954 world speed skating championshipswere held outdoors in Maruyama Stadium —during a heavy snowstorm. Sapporo com-peted to hold the 1968 Winter Olympics, but Grenoble, France won those games (andmore than half of the eighty-five Japanese who qualified for the Grenoble games camefrom Hokkaido.)

For the 1972 Olympics, Sapporo’s city fathers determined to make improvements inthe 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 Airportso that international jets could serve Sapporo. Also, Sapporo’s first subway line, from themain railway station to the Makomanai rink, where skating events would be held, wasbuilt for the Olympics. This was the first subway line in Japan north of Tokyo. A hugedowntown underground shopping center opened as did new expressways, and a centralheating system was installed for downtown buildings. After the games, the Olympic Vil-lage built to house the athletes became a housing complex; the foreign competitors hadfound their rooms uncomfortably small, though.

A 1971 sports meet in Hokkaido tested the city’s winter sports facilities. For a weekin 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 firstlarge-scale sports meet ever held in the winter in Japan.

Several thousand troops helped prepare the snow for Sapporo’s 1972 games. Mili-tary troops and three hundred riot police brought from elsewhere in Japan were on handto cope with possible problems ranging from excessive snowfall to demonstrations byradical students or left-wing agitators. Special bodyguards received training to protectVIPs planning to attend, and the Red Cross put out a call for Rh negative blood, becausefew 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 coun-tries were unable to make their scheduled landings at Chitose due to a snowstorm andwent to Tokyo instead. Also, plans to identify each nation’s teams in both Japanese andEnglish had to be changed; Japanese was scuttled because there was no official designa-tion for North Korea in the Japanese language. (Japan did not recognize the North Koreanregime.) Too few hotel rooms were available despite use of ships anchored at Otaru asfloating hotels. Both a Soviet ship, which served as the hostelry for Russians visiting thegames, and the American S.S. President Wilson, which also brought guests, stayed in theharbor for the games.

The Emperor and Empress opened the Olympics and saw several events, and theCrown Prince and Princess attended others. For the formal opening at the new Mako-manai outdoor ice rink, the temperature was below freezing, though the sun shone forthe ceremony. Later, some of the practices as well as actual events had to be postponedbecause of too much snow, but good weather, with only a few snowstorms, prevailed formost of the contests.

Sapporo Beer advertised to Olympic visitors that Sapporo, like those other twofamous brewing cities, Munich and Milwaukee, lay at 45 degrees north latitude, “Cli-matically best suited for brewing the finest beer.” (In 1962, the Japan Times had calledSapporo “the mecca of Japanese beer production.”)30 Meanwhile, city officials requiredstrippers in the Susukino entertainment district to keep more clothes on than usual whilethe many foreign visitors were in Sapporo.

Due to the games’ success, the city bid for the 1984 winter games, but was not cho-sen. Japan expressed interest in hosting the 2016 summer Olympics, with Sapporo,Fukuoka and Tokyo each seriously considering the idea. Concerned about costs, how-ever, Sapporo Mayor Ueda Fumio decided to poll citizens on the proposal. A slight major-ity opposed hosting the games, possibly due to the cost, and Mayor Ueda declined to bidfor 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 forthem a multipurpose dome. The Sapporo Dome features a retractable soccer field of realgrass, which can be wheeled into the dome. This means that soccer can be played evenwhen snow carpets Sapporo, and the professional soccer team based in the city, ConsadoleSapporo, is now able to play all of its home games in its home city. Baseball is also playedthere, but games take place on the permanent artificial field under the dome, which seemsa pity since Sapporo often has summer weather perfect for baseball. In 2004 the domebecame the home field for one of Japan’s major league baseball teams, the Nippon HamFighters, who had been using the Tokyo Dome as their home. Now the team is knownas 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 SkiChampionship contest took place in Sapporo in 2007, workers trucked in snow to coverthe dome’s floor for some events.

Sapporo has impressive facilities dedicated to art as well as to sport. The Museumof Modern Art downtown contains a wonderful painting, Iwahashi Eien’s “Retrospec-tion of Hokkaido.” Iwahashi spent his first twenty-one years in Hokkaido; this paintingis a scroll ninety-seven feet long which displays the Hokkaido landscape throughout thefour seasons, from winter to winter.

In recent years, two grand parks related to art have opened in the city. South of thecity center, the Sapporo Art Park includes a museum of contemporary art, a sculpturegarden, 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 Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi. When shown the site, a landfill mostly enclosed by anow-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 com-plete. The park includes various structures of Noguchi’s design, most impressive the pyra-mid-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 streetwas actually closed for a block in order to place the work where Noguchi wished. Thegranite sculpture is called Black Slide Mantra, which describes it well; this children’s slidewas designed to contrast with Sapporo’s snow, Noguchi explained.31

The city has made many other improvements, too. The city hall and the main build-ing of the Grand Hotel were torn down in 1973 to make way for more modern struc-tures. 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 havebeen made to all three lines since they first opened, and thanks to the subway, downtownstreets 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 suggestthe north, as kita means “north” in Japanese; also, Apollo’s lyre was a kithara. Yet plac-ing this large edifice in Nakajima Park at the expense of grass, trees and flowers seems asad choice. Other park attractions from earlier days have been lost, too, including a base-ball 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 combinestraining of young musicians with concerts for the public, both indoors and out. For thisand 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 othersites, including the military base in Makomanai. The number of sculptures has grown toover three hundred. Since 1955, members of Japan’s military forces have built the largestsculptures (as a cold weather training exercise) and American troops stationed in Japanhave also contributed sculptures in various years. In the early twenty-first century, how-ever, Japan’s army has been reduced in size; also, some of its troops have been deployedabroad, not so many military men have been available for the festival, and city workershave been called in to help. In 2004, the Japanese military announced that it would bemaking fewer figures than usual because training for duty in Iraq took precedence. The

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8. Sapporo 187

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

Makomanai site would no longer be used for the festivals after 2005; a new site in thenortheastern part of Sapporo has been opened. Meanwhile, other Hokkaido cities haveincluded ice sculptures in their winter festivals.

Since 2004, some Sapporo businesses have experimented by changing summer workschedules, giving employees the equivalent of daylight savings time. Daylight time hasdrawn 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, meaningthat daylight comes very early but darkness comes early, too.

Of course winter still causes problems in Sapporo. Because fifteen to twenty feet ofsnow falls upon the city in an average winter, its removal strains the city budget. In theearly 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 avail-able to the city. Development of ever more sophisticated snow removal systems contin-ues, 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 andeven some driveways and sidewalks. Both snow removal and application of freeze-pre-vention agents are common practices now. Among the city’s tanks for collecting snow-melt 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. Wintercold and snow impact homeless people, who sleep where they can find a little shelter orvisit twenty-four-hour convenience stores to soak up a little warmth. Homeless peoplelive in the city despite Sapporo’s cold winters. Other troubles are those found in manyof the world’s major cities these days. Sapporo’s dark side includes problems from shoplift-ing to drugs or alcoholism, poverty to illegal gambling and police corruption. Some ofthe many Susukino sex shops have ties to organized crime. In addition, development hastoo often meant throwing money into projects not adequately thought out, which there-fore do not enhance the city as they might have. Using some of the downtown area’s lim-ited parkland as the site of a new concert hall is an example. And it is sad that with almostall prewar structures torn down and replaced, the old city is lost. It is almost impossibleto imagine that at one time almost every building in this city had a wooden facade. AkaRenga, that red brick edifice, and the Clock Tower, finished with white-painted woodsiding, are among the few historic buildings still standing. Despite the many redevelop-ment projects that Sapporo has seen, the city’s architecture remains mostly undistin-guished.

Like other cities throughout the world, Sapporo faces the challenge of increasedautomobile use. Public transportation is available via tram, bus, subway and train, butmore and more private cars appear on the city’s streets. By 2004, Sapporo residents ownedmore than one million cars, and transportation authorities have met very limited successin trying to decrease traffic congestion.

Possibly luring more people to downtown Sapporo by train instead of automobileis the redevelopment of Sapporo Station and its surroundings, which has made this areaan attractive destination rather than merely a place to catch a train (though by 1960 thestation served about one hundred thousand passengers each day.) The station complexincludes hotel, theater, department store and large underground mall and presents amodern 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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8. Sapporo 189

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

The developed areas around Sapporo Station and Odori Park are convenient for trav-elers to the city. Sapporo’s hinterland, exceptionally large for Japan, means that many trav-elers come. Sapporo is six hundred miles from Tokyo and is by far the largest city northof the national capital. While most of the other large cities in Japan are located fairly nearother very large urban centers, Sapporo is not. Here is where governmental functions onHokkaido are clustered and where policies affecting the island (except those made inTokyo) are decided. Sapporo is Hokkaido’s center for commerce, education and enter-tainment.

Sapporo in the early twenty-first century is not a perfect place, but it remains apleasant, inviting, and busy city, making the most of its northern climate, from displaysof temperate zone flowers in spring and summer to ice fantasies in the winter.

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9 Development and the Ainu

While official policy in Japan stressed migration to Hokkaido and development ofthe island, Ainu were already there. The Kaitakushi implemented a colonial regime;though large Ainu reservations were not created as were Indian reservations in the UnitedStates, officials relocated many Ainu families and communities. The Meiji governmentand colonial officials treated Hokkaido as an empty land for Wajin to develop, and manyWajin truly believed that official policies designed to impose a Wajin lifestyle on Ainuwould benefit these native people of Hokkaido. Not until after World War II did worldattitudes about colonial policies change significantly, and in Japan the twentieth centurysaw a new Ainu consciousness develop. In response, government attitudes toward theAinu 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 aplan to assimilate the Ainu, who were now to speak, live and act Japanese. Ainu weremeant to feel Japanese and thus support the nation in case of any foreign—meaning Rus-sian — incursion. In addition, officials felt, Ainu would then not be tempted to leaveJapan. Ironically, not only did Ainu resist “becoming Japanese,” the Matsumae alsoopposed 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 intoa loyal, stable and productive populace.

One goal of the assimilation policy was to prevent Ainu from practicing Christian-ity. This religion had been proscribed in Japan for two hundred years; thus when shogu-nate officials took control, they acted forcefully to exterminate the Russian OrthodoxChristianity they saw some Kuril Island Ainu practicing. The officials supported the spreadof Japanese Buddhism and Shinto and encouraged temple and shrine construction inHokkaido. They also prohibited the traditional Ainu bear ceremony, iyomante (but thatdid not stop the ceremony’s practice).

Many Ainu did not comply with the various orders, and local officials did not applythe 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 takento see that trade is fairly conducted,” read the shogunate’s new policy. Traders and oth-ers who dealt with the Ainu were expected to treat them justly and humanely. For exam-ple, 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. Evenenlightened Japanese like Honda Toshiaki compared the Ainu to children.1 Governmentpolicy, 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 withAinu on a daily basis, as in the fisheries, did not change their attitudes and continued todiscriminate against and take advantage of Ainu, whether or not these Ainu accepted gov-ernment regulations.

Ainu policy was far from stable, however. When the Russian threat ebbed and theshogunate returned the administration of Ezo to the Matsumae in 1821, the reason givenfor the change was improvement in relations between Ainu and Wajin. Such improve-ment was hard to see, and with the Matsumae once more in control, regulations for Ainuchanged again; many Wajin living in Ezo considered Ainu as less than human. No longerwere they to be made into Japanese, and no longer were they even allowed to speak theJapanese language or live in a Japanese manner. Under Matsumae rule, conditions forAinu life deteriorated. Officials tried to turn some Ainu into farmers and others werecoerced 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 shogu-nate rule. From 1800 to the present, Ainu population measured in Hokkaido has variedbetween 15,000 and 20,000. Brett Walker cites official estimates of Ezo’s Ainu popula-tion: 26,256 people in 1807 but only 17,810 in 1854. Another estimate for the island showsa twenty-five percent population drop from 1804 to 1854.2

Diseases—especially smallpox—contributed largely to the population decline. Ail-ments new to Ainu attacked them, from influenza to smallpox to syphilis, because thesepeople 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 fromsmallpox during a late eighteenth century outbreak in neighboring Mashike. The Ainuchief in Rumoi told a Japanese official that he was considering having all his people runfrom the town to escape the disease. But the official suggested that would make it difficultto get food to people. He advised instead cutting off access to Rumoi. Everyone’s fishingnets were gathered and installed to encircle the town. With signs, guards and fetishes alsoput 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 theshogunate reinstated direct rule of Ezo in the mid–nineteenth century, officials madeefforts to stem disease, including the 1857-58 inoculation of more than six thousand Ainuagainst smallpox. In the latter years of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis also devas-tated the Ainu, as they were exposed to it for the first time. The Ainu mortality rate fromTB 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. AfterCommodore Perry made his epic voyage to Japan and Russian ships too appeared, theshogunate assumed direct control and once again a Japanization policy began. Officialsalso made some efforts to placate Ainu, with an order that no longer could Ainu womenbe 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 haswritten of his great-grandfather, who was taken in 1858 at the age of eleven or twelvefrom Nibutani Village on the Saru River to Akkeshi on the coast, a journey of at least 175miles. 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 towork in Akkeshi at that time. Forty-three of the 116 villagers were “drafted for forcedlabor,” including all or almost all the men of working age. Even some women and chil-dren were included.4 Matsuura also visited Ainu households in Kitami whose able-bod-ied members had been taken to Rishiri island, far from their homes, to work in thefisheries. A later example of Ainu relocation took place in Kushiro in 1885. Ainu weremoved inland, beyond the town, in order to prevent confrontations between Ainu andWajin living in the same area. Also, this would make it more difficult for Ainu to pickup day jobs and to spend their money on alcohol.

The Japanization policy continued after the 1868 Meiji Restoration. In fact, as RichardSiddle has pointed out, the renaming of Ezo as Hokkaido in 1869 emphasized that theisland 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 organiza-tion assumed responsibility for the island’s Ainu. Leaders in Tokyo adapted some “mod-ern” ideas from western nations, including racial theories which suggested the Ainu werea lesser people, and Kuroda Kiyotaka said, “the natives should be treated with affection,protected, and educated,” but he noted their “repugnant practices” and “inferior cus-toms.”6 Over the following years as government policies continued to undermine Ainuculture, most officials felt that what they were doing was in the best interests of the Ainuas well as the Wajin. Ainu children would now attend school and would be taught in theJapanese language. Kuroda arranged for several Ainu to be educated in Tokyo. TheKaitakushi outlawed traditional Ainu practices that officials felt uncivilized, including tat-tooing of women, wearing earrings by men and hunting with poisoned arrows. Not onlywere such practices perceived as uncivilized, some of them made the Ainu look differentfrom Wajin. Japanese officials feared that if Ainu continued to appear distinctive, Rus-sians would be tempted to gain Ainu support. On the other hand, if Ainu shaved, adoptedWajin 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 Japaneselegal system rather than Ainu traditional law. They were officially recognized with Japa-nese 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, how-ever, and were known as kyudojin, or “former natives.” Whatever policy Tokyo imposed,Ainu remained Ainu and suffered discrimination under Hokkaido Wajin regardless ofwhether or not they left the Ainu way of life for the Japanese way. At least, as Siddle haspointed out, by now Ainu usually were called “natives” rather than “barbarians,” as theywere earlier known. Ainu, of course, had no role in planning these or any other Hokkaidodevelopment policies. They became victims but, unlike some Native Americans, Ainudid not forcibly resist, nor did they attack settlers. Scholar Katarina Sjoberg has writtenthat the Ainu of that time based the troubles that had come to them on the disintegra-tion of their relations with the Ainu gods. Perhaps the Wajin gods had more power thanAinu gods, some Ainu came to think, and thus these Ainu did not challenge the Wajinway of life.7

In negotiations with the Russians over the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin, the shogunatedid not take the Ainu of those areas into consideration. During nineteenth century talks


with the Russians over the boundary between the two nations on Sakhalin, Japaneseofficials argued that Sakhalin had been Ainu territory and since the Ainu had long beenunder Matsumae suzerainty, Sakhalin was therefore Japanese territory. However, whenthe treaty reached in 1875 gave Russia title to all Sakhalin, more than eight hundred Ainuliving there lost their homes. The Russians plundered and pillaged as they proceeded southon Sakhalin, so many Ainu reluctantly decided they would be wise to leave and relocatein Japan. (Miyajima Toshimitsu has written that Japanese officials forced the Ainu toleave Sakhalin.)8 The Ainu refugees from Sakhalin moved first to the Soya area at thevery north of Hokkaido and then to a site on the Ishikari River called Tsuishikari (nowin the city of Ebetsu). Kaitakushi officials had promised these people that they could stayin Soya, not far from Sakhalin, but Kuroda Kiyotaka apparently decided that they wouldbe more useful in the Ishikari basin, where the Kaitakushi hoped to begin coal miningand Ainu could work as miners. In this way, officials tried to change the way of life ofthese people but it did not work out; many died in epidemics and a number of survivorsreturned to Sakhalin. In the early twentieth century, when Japan once more obtained titleto southern Sakhalin, the remnants of the Sakhalin group returned to their original home-land. But half a century later, as World War II drew to an end, many of their descendantsfled from Sakhalin to Hokkaido to escape the invading Russians, and almost all the restwere repatriated to Japan after the war.

The Kuril Ainu suffered too. In 1884, concerned about the loyalty of the Ainu in theNorth Kurils where under Russian influence they had become Orthodox Christians, Japa-nese 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 fiveyears of their exile. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki has pointed out, it was important to con-sider the Ainu as true Japanese in order to substantiate Japanese claims to the places thathad been Ainu homelands (southern Sakhalin and the Kurils as well as Hokkaido) butin order to support the policy of destroying Ainu culture and turning the Ainu into Japa-nese, they had to be seen as a separate people—two antithetical theories.9

Ainu occasionally resisted Wajin decisions but were friendly to settler families. Assettlers came to Hokkaido, Ainu often cooperated with them; the newcomers neededboth Ainu expertise and assistance. It was when greater numbers of Wajin came, puttingpressure on Ainu and their land, that tension and prejudice surfaced. The appearance ofmore and more settlers could not help but impact Ainu life. Administrative districts setup by the new Wajin authorities often cut across traditional Ainu community bound-aries. Also, Ainu could no longer depend upon hunting as they traditionally had; not onlywere 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 forthe Ainu. The weather during the extra-severe 1878-79 winter added to the dislocationsin 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 starva-tion for some. Perhaps as many as one-fifth of the Ainu suffered near-starvation in thelate nineteenth century.10

In Hokkaido, just as in North America and Australia, alcohol helped destroy tradi-tional aboriginal culture. The invasive group supplied drink to the minority indigenousgroup, leading often to debt, illness or even suicide. Alcohol could have a devastatingeffect on a society already crumbling by forced changes in lifestyle, whether Ainu, NativeAmerican, or Australian Aboriginal.

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The Land Regulation Ordinance of 1872 also hurt Ainu communities. It designatedHokkaido 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 beingremoved to whatever spot was specified for them. Many times in the next decade or so thishappened. This policy brings to mind the establishment of Indian reservations in the UnitedStates. 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 Ainuinto 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 Ainupolicies were also hampered by lack of funds and lack of attention. After the Kaitakushiwas disbanded in 1882, efforts to turn Ainu into farmers continued. Officials hoped tosettle Ainu on the land as successful (and busy) farmers so that the land which they hadpreviously used for hunting and collecting food plants could be opened to Wajin settle-ment.

Compelling some Ainu to move to the newly created farming communities wasunsuccessful, partly because the people were made to live in communities built in waysalien to Ainu practice. Traditionally, each Ainu kotan had been very small. Under 1882regulations, however, the new Ainu communities were much larger, in order to properlyadminister villages and to be able to have one agricultural expert guide a large numberof people in farming techniques. These large villages tended to be far from the originalAinu communities and they were totally separated from Wajin communities. Officialshired agricultural experts to show Ainu how to farm. This too did not succeed, partlybecause 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 forfarming proved too little to enable an Ainu family to make a living from agriculture (andmake the payments required once the land was productive) even if family members workeddiligently. Often, the land made available to Ainu was swampy and unhealthy, unsuitablefor farming. As more and more Wajin migrated to Hokkaido in the last decades of thenineteenth century, pressure on the land grew and the Ainu who held land and had beenstruggling to make ends meet often ended up selling or leasing their land on terms unfairto themselves. All in all, the program to turn Ainu into farmers was a failure, even thoughofficials may have genuinely believed that what they were doing was good for the Ainuas well as for the Wajin. Gradually, Ainu men went back to seasonal work in the fisherieswhile the women did what farming continued.

Ainu who depended on fishing also struggled. As the Ainu population dwindled inthe nineteenth century, fishery contractors brought in prisoners or north Honshu labor-ers to work; Ainu still employed in the fishery found they could not make an adequateliving. Despite the hardships, most Ainu men ended up doing seasonal fishing work orinland forestry and surveying. These Ainu returned as much as they could to their tradi-tional 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 wererelocated by officials, and Ainu had to pay taxes and face a possible draft, just as did oth-ers in Japan. On the other hand, as official policy evolved, it actually took effect only spo-radically, as local officials saw the need. In addition, the policies did not call for usingviolence to impose new rules upon the Ainu.


Miyajima Toshimitsu has suggested that much of the prejudice today against theAinu stems from the pioneer days. Because Wajin newly arriving in Hokkaido saw Ainuliving in degrading circumstances, the newcomers assumed this was the Ainu naturalstate, 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 idlenesshe saw. He also saw Ainu poverty, though it is only fair to point out that many Wajin peas-ants were poor, too.11

Travelers, missionaries, scientists and the Ainu

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of travelers to Hokkaido, bothJapanese and foreign, wrote about the Ainu. Most who observed Ainu emphasized thealien aspects of their culture, though a few perceptive travelers including Mogami Toku-nai and Mamiya Rinzo described Ainu practices thoughtfully. Mogami in particulargained detailed knowledge of Ainu life from several years spent living among them. Mat-suura Takeshiro, of course, was also sympathetic to the Ainu. He vigorously inveighedagainst Ainu forced labor. He collected Ainu artifacts and presented some of them toProfessor Edward S. Morse, a noted American biologist and archaeologist who publishedinfluential studies of Japan. Morse, in turn, gave a collection to the Peabody Essex Museumin Salem, Massachusetts.

An earlier traveler, Uehara Kumajiro, interpreted for the shogunate and as a resultput together the first Ainu-Japanese dictionary in 1804. This was the first time the Ainulanguage was ever expressed in written form, though travelers from much earlier times—even Friar Jeronimo de Angelis in the early seventeenth century—had collected Ainuwords.

Many otherwise enlightened Japanese theorized that the Ainu were an inferior peo-ple. 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 any-thing else was “spiritual progress,” while Nitobe Inazo, who had studied in America andEurope, said in the early twentieth century that Ainu were “barbaric” and incapable ofmuch work.12

In 1876, Christian missionary work began among the Ainu, when the Rev. WalterDening went to live in an Ainu village, study the language and impart the teachings ofChristianity. The westerner most identified with the Ainu, though, was missionary JohnBatchelor, an Englishman who lived among them for many years. Arriving in Hokkaidoin 1877, he went with Dening to visit Ainu villages and from 1882 until the beginning ofthe Second World War he largely devoted his life to the Ainu. For awhile, he and his wifelived in a room built onto an Ainu chief ’s house. The Batchelors adopted a young Ainugirl 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, cultureand language. He was the first to translate the New Testament into Ainu; he was respon-sible for the first items (including the Lord’s Prayer) ever printed in Ainu. This was in1885. In 1887, he published the first grammar of the language ever to appear. FrederickStarr, writing in 1904, reported that Batchelor had converted perhaps nine hundred Ainuto Christianity.13

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Batchelor became recognizedduring his lifetime as the world’sforemost authority on the Ainu.He liked Ainu and was irate atWajin characterizations of them asonly half human. Even he perceivedAinu as victims, however, as apeople who would always needhelp rather than ones who couldstand up for their own rights, andhe tried to convince them to stopsome of their practices, such as tat-tooing girls. (He was unsuccessfulin that effort.)

John Batchelor’s life was notalways easy; he faced legal actionin 1885 for living in an area notopen to foreigners. The real reasonfor his prosecution apparently wasthat he was working to revive theAinu language; officials opposedhis attempts to study and encour-age Ainu culture because theywanted the Ainu to adopt Japaneseways. But he later won officialrecognition, receiving an honorfrom the Emperor in 1909. OneAmerican who met him in Sap-poro in 1940 felt, however, thatBatchelor was “more interested inpreserving the Ainu for posteritythan in alleviating the suffering ofthose living today.”14 Batchelorlived in Japan until he was forcedto leave during World War II. He died in England in 1944, ninety years old. Since Batch-elor’s time, scholars have pointed out mistakes in his interpretations of Ainu languageand culture, but his insight was pioneering in an age when many people took for grantedthat “native” people were inferior.

Many westerners who traveled to Hokkaido to work for the Japanese governmentwere curious about the Ainu. American mining engineer Raphael Pumpelly, surveyingHokkaido in 1862, came upon an Ainu village. “The Japanese look upon the Ainos withcontempt,” he wrote, and described the Japanese theory he had heard that the Ainu weredescendants 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 defendedtheir lands successfully. Horace Capron compared the Ainu to American Indians, sayingthat 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


British missionary John Batchelor (1854–1944) devotedmost of his life to work with Hokkaido Ainu. He pioneeredthe study of Ainu language and tradition, publishing sev-eral books and articles on Ainu life and beliefs as well asa detailed Ainu-English dictionary. He is about seventyyears old in this photograph (courtesy Hokkaido Univer-sity Library).

not fight wars, “all individual disputes being settled by the Fathers of the different com-munities in which they live.” Many aspects of Ainu life reminded Capron of AmericanIndians. Both groups depended on fish and game for their food and their dwellings weresimilar, with a fire spot in the middle of the house from which smoke escaped througha small opening in the roof. Capron also noted a similarity of clothing and the practiceof carrying babies on people’s backs. William S. Clark found “fine looking savages of apeaceable disposition ... and a language very smooth and agreeable to the ear.”15

Visitors to Hokkaido expressed extremely varied opinions about the Ainu. One pos-itive quality many nineteenth century observers noted was Ainu kindness, though othervisitors judged Ainu negatively. H. C. St. John wrote in 1873, “The Ainos are good-natured, 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, andinvariably in their peculiar way salute you.” As several travelers have pointed out, Ainucould have fun at the expense of people who studied them; upon occasion, they no doubtmade up tales to get a rise out of a credulous listener. They were “a very matter-of-factrace,” thought John Batchelor. On the other hand, Henry Savage Landor wrote that theAinu “are the furthest behind in the great race of human development.” He judged themto be probably less civilized than the Australian aborigines and others “among the low-est races in creation.” (But he admired Ainu horsemanship.) John R. Black claimed aboutthe Ainu, “religion they have none; unless the occasional idolatrous ceremonies per-formed 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 theculture he observed. Thomas Blakiston suggested that the Ainu would be effective sol-diers should the Japanese need to defend Hokkaido, but he doubted that the Japanesewould want to “teach the Ainu to know their own strength.” In the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, western writers often called the Ainu the “hairy Ainu,” but asmore astute observers have pointed out, Ainu were hairy not in comparison to western-ers but to Japanese, among whom beards are rare. A number of western writers disap-proved of the dirtiness of the Ainu.16

The nineteenth century traveler in Hokkaido most often cited is Isabella Bird, anEnglishwoman in her forties when she went to Japan in 1878. Ainu in the settlement ofBiratori, up the Saru River about ten miles from Hokkaido’s southern coast, welcomedher generously, and she wrote of her experiences with them. While on her travels she sentletters 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 acces-sible and interesting to read, and perhaps it draws attention because her journey was, asshe wrote, “the first foray made by a lady into the country of the aborigines.” The bookwas praised in its day for its full and accurate portrayal of the Ainu, though one reviewercriticized Bird’s use of the word “savages” to describe the Ainu because it implied thatthe Ainu were “a fierce, cruel, brutal race,” which Bird’s description otherwise did notsuggest.17 Her work inspired European and American interest in the Ainu.

In 1896 Mabel Loomis Todd, visiting Hokkaido with a scientific expedition to viewan eclipse, was anxious to collect Ainu artifacts. She wrote, “an event in one’s lifetime isthe first sight of an Ainu. A ‘civilized’ specimen soon crossed my path, the most extraor-dinary figure in my experience. With his wild head of electrified black hair parted in themiddle and standing out under a round-crowned and very dingy Derby, huge hoops ofbrass 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 vanishingnation was infinitely more pathetic than his veriest savage kinsman.” Wajin had “brighterintellect” than Ainu, she thought.18

Most western visitors and observers merely collected artifacts or wrote books orarticles about their experiences with the Ainu, but western insensitivity to Ainu culturecaused a furor in Hakodate in 1865. Several Englishmen from the city opened Ainu gravesin the village of Mori on the south shore of Uchiura Bay and removed skulls, presum-ably for European anthropologists to study. This was clearly forbidden, and one accountsays that a foreign consul publicized the event out of disappointment because he had notbeen able to obtain such bones. The British Consul in Hakodate, Howard Vyse, who wasimplicated in the theft, ruled the accused men innocent of any charges, holding that theirguilt was not proven. But this caused dismay, and Sir Harry Parkes, British Minister toJapan, found the question referred to him. Both the incident and Vyse’s inept handlingof it outraged many Ainu. The miscreants did confess and Parkes fined them and sen-tenced them to about a year’s confinement with hard labor. Eventually, the purloinedbones, which had been sent to Vyse’s brother in England, were returned to the Ainu alongwith the money collected from the fines—and Vyse lost his job.19

By the 1880s, a few Japanese tourists ventured to Hokkaido; the government publi-cized the Ainu to attract visitors. Most important, the Meiji Emperor visited the Ainucommunity at Shiraoi, where Ainu were working in the Wajin-run fisheries.

Twentieth century scholars have contributed significantly to Ainu studies. Amongthe Japanese, Kindaichi Kyosuke, who carried out significant studies of Ainu culture, hasbeen described as “perhaps the foremost Ainu specialist in the world.”20 Working withAinu Kannari Matsu, he put together a collection of eight volumes of yukar. Kindaichialso encouraged a young Ainu, Chiri Mashio, to pursue studies in Ainu linguistics. Chiribecame a Hokudai professor and eventually published three volumes of what he plannedto be an eleven volume dictionary of the Ainu language. He died of heart disease in 1961when 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 Hok-kaido and studied Ainu culture and language, wrote in 1937, “I am only interested in theAinu because I see in them good stuff which only needs opportunity AND TIME to makethem worthy citizens of the country.”21 The Hokkaido government solicited Munro’sadvice about the Ainu. How could their situation be ameliorated? He recommendedimproving housing and education and investing more funds in public health, especiallyin taking steps to lessen Ainu consumption of alcohol. Munro tried to teach habits ofgood sanitation to the Ainu, for he feared that tuberculosis, which came to the Ainuthrough Wajin, was one of the dangers of not practicing cleanliness, and he personallytried to convince Ainu to stop drinking. (When accused in 1938 of being a spy againstJapan, 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 inHokkaido 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


welfare called for reform. Most Ainu did not overtly oppose Japanization, but one excep-tion was Kannari Taro. In 1883, when he was seventeen years old, he sent a petition toofficials urging education for the Ainu. Soon he met missionary John Batchelor, workedwith him and continued his efforts for Ainu interests. But, eventually, discouraged, Kan-nari 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 consult-ing any Ainu, instead looking at legislation from other nations, including the Dawes Actadopted in the United States in 1887 under which individual Native Americans couldreceive titles to their own parcels of land. The American policy failed; though it did dis-rupt traditional ways of life, it did not turn Indians into farmers and therefore was nota 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 referencesto Ainu inferiority. One of the reasons it took some years for a reform law to pass wasthe feeling among some Diet members that innate Ainu inferiority meant that peoplecould not improve; thus, there was no reason to try to better their status. The Diet finallyadopted the “Law for the Protection of the Former Natives of Hokkaido,” or, more famil-iarly, the Ainu Protection Act, in 1899. Officials intended it to improve Ainu conditionsby preventing practices through which Wajin took advantage of the Ainu. Again, the pol-icy was genuinely meant to foster improvement by making the Ainu into Japanese, butthe act’s title, emphasizing protection, implicitly asserted Ainu inferiority. The referenceto “former natives” made clear that Ainu now had supposedly been assimilated into thegeneral Japanese population.

The Act was the most serious effort yet to ameliorate the plight of the Ainu. BecauseAinu were widely portrayed as a “dying race,” victims of the “survival of the fittest,” thelegislation was intended to be a sympathetic means to protect them.22 Under the law’sprovisions, up to twelve and one-half acres of land would be available for individual Ainuwho wished to farm. The government would provide tools and seeds and the Ainu farmerwould receive some protection from taxation. Ainu land had to be cultivated withinfifteen years or it would revert to the state. Schools and medical care would be providedwhen needed, though schools would be segregated and Ainu would be taught in the Japa-nese language. Finally, the government would control Ainu community assets and decidewhen to extend financial help to needy Ainu.

Ainu history in the early twentieth century measured the success and failure of theAinu Protection Act. Ainu generally wanted a plot of land only big enough for the womento cultivate while the men worked in the fishery or in town; therefore, more and morefamilies resorted to renting out much of their land to Wajin farmers. Often, when timeswere bad, Ainu families even felt they had to sell their land. The legislation thus did notcreate Ainu farmers. One study, centered on the Shizunai District on the southern coastof Hokkaido, showed that nearly eighty percent of the land reserved for Ainu had to bereturned to the state. Just as Wajin settlers on Hokkaido would not give up rice for awheat-based diet, Ainu men respected their tradition by which only women did the farm-ing.23

The Ainu Protection Act’s attempt to make medical care available to the Ainu waslaudatory, 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 unableto 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. Inpractice, however, Ainu did not fare any better in the fisheries than they had before,because powerful entrepreneurs and associations dominated the industry. As the herringand salmon runs had declined due to overfishing, Ainu as well as Wajin lost employmentand thus livelihood.

A few Ainu found a very different sort of employment, for in the early years of thetwentieth century, Ainu became actors on a world stage—literally—when they appearedin expositions on three continents. Ainu went on display at an exposition in Osaka in1903 in a “native village” exhibit; several other groups including Taiwan’s aborigines werealso presented. In the 1912 Colonial Exposition in Tokyo, Ainu were again shown to vis-iting crowds. On the international stage, such an exhibit of Ainu first occurred at theLouisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. Frederick Starr, a University ofChicago anthropologist, went to Japan to recruit a group of Ainu to appear in the fair’santhropology section, where “natives” from various parts of the world, including Fili-pinos, American Indians and African pygmies, would be shown. Ainu were includedbecause of their “primitive” music and their “primitive agriculture which has produceda distinctive form of millet” as well as for their bear cult.24 In reality, however, publicinterest in the “Hairy Ainu” may have been at least part of the reason exposition organ-izers wanted to exhibit them.

Arriving in Hokkaido in January 1904, Frederick Starr approached John Batchelorfor assistance in locating some Ainu to participate in the exposition. After the governorof Hokkaido approved the project, Batchelor agreed to help. Starr visited various Ainucommunities while recruiting for the fair and he concluded, like Batchelor, that Ainu dayswere numbered. “Now Yezo is filling with vigorous, incoming Japanese, before whomundoubtedly the Ainu must yield.... To-day the Ainu is ‘a ward,’ to be guarded by a pater-nal government, to be ‘elevated’ by civilization.”25 Starr’s party of nine Ainu, whom hethought were the first Ainu to leave Japan in modern times, duly obtained passports ata police station and the group set off for St. Louis in March. Starr brought various Ainuartifacts, too, for the exhibit, including a small but complete house. When the travelerscrossed the Pacific, a separate section of the ship—in steerage, of course—was arrangedfor the Ainu. Traversing the United States by train, the Ainu attracted visitors at everystop. At the fair, the Ainu lived in the house brought from Hokkaido, visited with theother native peoples and, to the surprise of some observers, attended Christian churchservices. Though the exposition certainly exploited the Ainu, there was some benefit forthem. One woman at the St. Louis Exposition made enough money selling handmadeitems 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. Anumber of Japanese visited, too, but the exploitation of the Ainu embarrassed many whosaw them.

Ainu also went on display in their own communities in Hokkaido. In those days, aprime reason for tourists to go to Hokkaido was to see an Ainu settlement, so a 1914 travelguide 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 awell-frequented tourist route because of its Ainu village. Travelers could check their lug-gage at the train station and hire a “station-boy” to be a guide to the nearby Ainu settle-


ment. The tourist was advised to come prepared with trinkets and candy for the Ainuwomen and children; the visitors would then be shown Ainu treasured belongings. Somesixty Ainu houses, “wretchedly poor huts,” stood in the settlement, apart from the Japa-nese dwellings in Shiraoi. The guidebook author opined that “Ainu have never shownany capacity, and are merely adult children, they seem to suggest water on the brain ratherthan intellect.” He also noted that “present-day marriages between Japanese and Ainuare 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 Pro-tection Act went into effect, the education they got was substandard. Details of the lawlaid a foundation for this, specifying three years of segregated schooling for Ainu butfour years for Wajin children. Education helped disrupt traditional Ainu life; the newschools used the Japanese language, which helped lead to the near-extinction of the Ainutongue. Many families needed children to help earn enough for the family to live on, sonot too many children went to school at first. Also, finding Wajin teachers to teach Ainuchildren proved difficult. By the time of the First World War, most Ainu children actu-ally attended school as required, and once they did, the education they received playeda major role in assimilating them into a Japanese cultural world, speeding the decline ofAinu 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 compelledto attend for four years, where they studied mostly vocational subjects, including sewingand farming. Wajin students, meanwhile, had six years of schooling. Though Wajin chil-dren entered first grade at age six, Ainu children could not do so until age seven, asofficialdom felt them “not as mature as Wajin children of the same age bracket both emo-tionally and intellectually.”27 The 1916 rules only lasted until 1922, when Ainu schoolswere made to adopt the Japanese curriculum and years of schooling, but Ainu and Japa-nese did not attend the same schools for another fifteen years.

When Japan’s crown princes came to Hokkaido on official visits in the early twenti-eth century, they were shown Ainu schools but, more important, Ainu were exhibited innative 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 margin-alized group striving to better themselves (which they were) but as a picturesque groupneeding the protection of the state. He even suggests that the Ainu were “cast again intheir 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 govern-ment 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 gradesto the Wajin students and making sure Wajin children did not mix with the Ainu. Schooltexts used in Japan portrayed Ainu as primitive or inferior, and the perception that Ainuwere 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 localWajin felt Ainu behaved too assertively and were lazy spendthrifts. Poor Wajin farmersstruggling with harsh conditions—oppressive landlords as well as poor soil and challeng-ing weather—sometimes oppressed Ainu in turn. Even Ainu children recognized theprejudice against them. Ainu artist Sunazawa Bikky and his brother Kazuo describedplaying “cowboys” as children in the 1930s. When asked who were the cowboys and whowere 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.” AinuKayano Shigeru, writing of his childhood in the 1920s and 1930s, noted that when hisfamily ate salmon it had to be in secret. Though this fish had once been a staple of theAinu diet, under the Wajin regime Ainu could not catch salmon for personal use.29 Andto encourage Ainu to live in a “modern” way, official and unofficial efforts continued tomake 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 organ-ization 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 prac-tice of Ainu leasing their land to Wajin to farm. The Docho began implementing farm-ing cooperatives among Ainu, and they were fairly effective, despite usually being run byWajin who thought Ainu incapable.

Ainu consciousness

While the outside world exhibited the Ainu, Ainu efforts at community improve-ment 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 Asahikawafamously asserted their rights. The pressure of Wajin settlement in the 1890s had dis-placed these Ainu from their Ishikari Valley home areas. But when an area next to theirnew Chikabumi home became an army base, pressure grew to relocate the Ainu onceagain. The company constructing the base petitioned the Hokkaido government to removethe 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 movedto Teshio, far to the north. But Ainu leaders in opposition found backing from a num-ber of Wajin who opposed the company’s policies. They petitioned the Docho, and a del-egation—one Ainu and two Wajin—even went to Tokyo, spoke to newspapermen andlobbied politicians. They were successful and the Ainu got to keep their land—but by1906, facing increased pressure from Asahikawa authorities to use the Ainu land, theDocho agreed to lease it to the city upon condition that the Ainu could continue to livethere. Of course plans made for the Ainu were inadequate, the Ainu community becameembittered and problems were stored up for the time the lease would expire thirty yearslater.

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 tosupport unconditional return of the land to the Ainu. Finally, in March 1934, the Dietpassed a compromise law: some of the land would go to the Ainu but their individualplots would be very small, and the rest of the land would be controlled for the Ainu bythe Hokkaido government as community property. Dissatisfaction continued to simmeramong the Chikabumi Ainu, however.

It was about this time that Ainu in Sakhalin finally got Japanese citizenship. A youngSakhalin Ainu, energized by Chikabumi Ainu activism, traveled to Tokyo to assert hiscommunity’s rights both to citizenship and to control of traditional Ainu fishing grounds.


Several Tokyo officials visited Sakhalin (the southern half of which was then Japaneseterritory), 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 asdid other settlers. Others moved to Manchuria; both groups had to return to Japan at theend of World War II.

Ainu activism reached a milestone in 1930 with the founding of the Hokkaido AinuKyokai (Ainu Association). This was the first all–Ainu organization, though it was gov-ernment sponsored, assisted by the Docho social service section. For a few years, theAinu Kyokai published a journal, The Light of Asia. Kyokai efforts tended to deal largelywith economic welfare, especially in finding employment for Ainu. Meanwhile, educationofficials in Hokkaido, feeling that the Ainu had been successfully assimilated, decided thatAinu children need no longer be educated separately from Wajin youngsters. The edu-cation they now received, however, followed the national curriculum and paid no atten-tion to Ainu traditions, interests or needs. A 1931 article in the American journal Schooland Society about this change in policy claimed, “Relations between the Ainu and Japa-nese today are entirely friendly.”30 Ainu Kyokai activities in subsequent years, however,show how mistaken was this foreign view. Ainu children attending Wajin-majorityschools continued to suffer taunts from their Wajin classmates.

After founding the Ainu Kyokai, members strove for revisions to the Ainu Protec-tion Act. Partly in response, bureaucrats traveled to Hokkaido to inspect Ainu livingconditions. It took some time before legislation was formally approved, but the first billpassed by the Diet in 1937 amended the Protection Act and included much of what Ainuactivists had hoped for. Now Ainu could sell their property just as Wajin could (exceptthat Ainu needed the Hokkaido governor’s permission) and they could qualify for govern-ment assistance even if they were not farmers. In making the 1937 changes, the govern-ment felt that the goals of the original act had more or less been met. That is, Ainu hadadopted the Japanese way of life. The legislation took effect at a time Japan was becom-ing more and more immersed in war in China, however, and issues such as policiesregarding Ainu were set aside for many years.

A number of Ainu served in the Japanese forces during the war. Since the end of thenineteenth century, most had faced the draft, but unlike blacks and Asians in the UnitedStates during World War II, Ainu were not placed in segregated units. Many lost theirlives; thirty-nine died in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. They fought on the Asian main-land too, and the Japanese captured by the Russians and imprisoned in Siberia until wellafter war’s end included Ainu soldiers. Shortly after the war, Kindaichi Kyosuke heldthat for some thirty years most Ainu had wanted assimilation with the majority Wajinand 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 Ainuwere sent to Hokkaido, one more step in a series of forced moves. (According to a Sovietwriter, 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 Hok-kaido, which had never been their home.

After World War II, Ainu groups became more militant and non–Ainu even protestedon behalf of the Ainu. In 1946 Ainu activists organized a meeting in Shizunai, the coastaltown 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 thousandpeople joined the new association.

Renewed Ainu activism could not prevent the land reform measures adopted underthe American postwar occupation of Japan from undermining Ainu land rights. Thoughthe reform was intended to see that land was owned by those who worked it, the new lawalso deprived the Ainu of about forty percent of their land. This was land that Ainu rentedto Wajin farmers while the Ainu worked in the fishing industry or elsewhere. Intense lob-bying 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 commu-nity loss helped fuel postwar Ainu activism. On the other hand, when an occupation officialsuggested that Ainu might gain independence, Ainu showed no interest, not trusting theAmerican motives.33 But Americans who visited Hokkaido or were stationed there dur-ing the Occupation helped the Ainu economy by buying many tourist items.

Other changes occurred in the immediate postwar years. Amendments to the AinuProtection Act removed some safeguards that had aided Ainu, ending certain tax pref-erences and rights to medical care, for example. All these setbacks discouraged Ainu lead-ers, and the Kyokai became inactive. But with educational reforms adopted during theoccupation, schooling became more available to Ainu children. Now nine years of school-ing were required for everyone, though not all Ainu children graduated from junior highschool 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 highschools and beyond.

The Ainu Kyokai regrouped and in 1961 changed its name to Utari Kyokai becausemany members felt that non–Ainus used the term “Ainu” in a derogatory way. (In theAinu language, utari means “our people.”) The organization could still be useful; a gov-ernment survey carried out in one Hokkaido region in the 1960s made clear the relativepoverty of the Ainu community. One-third of the Ainu eligible for employment eitherhad 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 Ainuwere among the tourist attractions in Hokkaido. In 1964, more than half a million peoplevisited the Shiraoi Ainu village. The next year, Shiraoi’s Ainu tourist activities were relo-cated to a lakeside site. The visitor today traverses a huge shopping area before enteringthe “village,” where the buildings have been designed more for tourist convenience thanauthenticity; the “houses” seem much larger than were Ainu traditional dwellings. TheAinu Museum at Shiraoi, however, beautifully presents items used in Ainu traditional life.

Tourism helped stimulate other activities, too. In 1968, the Utari Kyokai and com-mercial organizations sponsored a bear ceremony. Supposedly based on tradition, theevent raised money for Ainu causes, with spectators (including Ainu) charged a fee toattend 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 visi-tors to the city. Many Ainu, especially young people, complained that city officials hijackedAinu culture for a commercial enterprise. A number of Ainu from elsewhere in Hokkaidocame to Asahikawa and received one thousand yen per day from the government for theirattendance. On the other hand, when Hokkaido celebrated its centenary in 1968 with anumber of events throughout the island, Ainu were almost entirely left out.


Because of Wajin prejudice, many Ainu were ashamed of being Ainu and assumedthat 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. Theystrove to help poorer Ainu improve their communities’ appearance and, more impor-tant, their personal behavior. Such activities inspired Japanese Ainu as well as others whowanted to take up the issue of Ainu rights. The late 1960s and the 1970s saw activismthroughout the world, inspired partly by civil rights demonstrations and rebellion againstthe Vietnam War in the United States, and in the name of Ainu rights both Ainu andWajin in Japan organized protests and, sometimes, acts of violence.

Ainu groups publicized their unhappiness about not being considered during the1968 Hokkaido centennial celebrations and in response, well-meaning Wajin collectedfunds from Ainu and non–Ainu to erect a statue of Shakushain in Shizunai. Installationof the statue came in 1970, complete with a plaque on the pedestal with words writtenby Hokkaido Governor Machimura Kingo. On September 20, 1972, a group chiseled thegovernor’s name from the plaque. One Ainu, Yuki Shoji, was implicated in the deface-ment. He was incensed that the name of a member of the oppressive majority appearedin the monument to an Ainu hero who had resisted the majority. The Wajin activists whoparticipated in the defacement had a different motivation; they did it as part of their move-ment to seek world revolution.

In October 1972, explosions went off simultaneously in Sapporo and Asahikawa, inSapporo to destroy Ainu artifacts displayed at the University of Hokkaido and in Asahi-kawa to blow up a statue depicting heroic Japanese pioneers standing around a seatedAinu—a sculptural group Ainu activists had seen as demeaning to them ever since it wasunveiled in August 1970. Wajin extremists, who carried out various other violent actionsthroughout Japan while protesting Japanese treatment of minorities, were responsible forthe bombs. The Asahikawa statue had been planned several years earlier to commemo-rate the city’s eightieth anniversary. Ainu and others protested when the Tokyo sculptorunveiled his proposed model for the work, for it showed four strong young pioneersupright, while a heavily bearded Ainu knelt, suggesting the Ainu’s subjugation. Thefinished version therefore showed the Ainu seated, not kneeling, though the pioneers stillstood above him. After the statue’s destruction, many local Ainu pled for cooperationbetween Wajin and Ainu, and a rebuilt statue, erected in 1977, stands in Asahikawa’s TokiwaPark today. Some Ainu handed out protest leaflets at the unveiling of the new statue, justas 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 lowwages performing and making artifacts while Wajin investors reaped the profits. Themayor recovered, but in September, another Wajin with a similar motive set the Shiraoitourist office on fire.

In July 1975 a bomb damaged the police headquarters building in Sapporo and inMarch 1976 another killed two government workers when it exploded in the Docho build-ing in the city. Statements left at both scenes claimed these as responses to Japanese poli-cies toward minority groups including, specifically in Hokkaido, the Ainu. A group callingitself the “East Asia Anti-Japanese Armed Front” claimed having arranged the blasts “inprotest against Hokkaido police’s colonial rule over the Ainus.”34 Groups claiming to actin the name of Ainu liberation also exploded bombs in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1977. A few

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weeks after the 1976 Sapporo bombing, JNR, the national railway system, received a mes-sage written partly in Japanese and partly in Ainu, threatening explosions on rail linesin 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 butwith 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 themexperienced police harassment and incarceration despite their innocence. Many Ainuworried about being connected in the public mind with the agitation. On the other hand,these actions stimulated Ainu consciousness.


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 Japa-nese pioneers. Protesters destroyed the statue in 1982 because they thought it demeaned the Ainupeople. This newer version, showing the Ainu man seated, not kneeling, was later erected. It leftactivists partly satisfied.

More positive developments also occurred. In 1973 an Ainu group marched in Sap-poro’s annual May Day parade for the first time, an illustration of the more assertive moodof many Ainu. Sunazawa Bikky designed an Ainu flag. It features a red arrow held by awhite Ainu symbol, both on a blue ground. The white stands for Hokkaido’s snow, theblue 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 hehad collected. He also achieved personal milestones on behalf of the Ainu; he became thefirst 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 anactive spokesman for Ainu rights, pointing out, among other things, that in the UnitedStates, treaties (whether adhered to or not) were made between government and nativepeoples, while in Japan, government simply confiscated Ainu land.

Ainu affairs attracted growing public attention. Several delegations from the nationalgovernment made visits to Ainu areas in the late 1960s. Japan’s Socialist and CommunistParties both urged policies sympathetic to Ainu recognition, economic advance and anend to discrimination. Okada Haruo, a Socialist Party legislator from Hokkaido, pointedout 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 discrim-inate against Ainu. The Docho organized an agency in 1973 to coordinate policies withan impact on the Ainu community and proclaimed a seven-year plan for Ainu develop-ment—a welfare policy. When this plan neared an end, the government implemented anadditional such plan. The money provided scholarships and low interest loans for Ainuas well as support for the Utari Kyokai.

Ainu activism continued. Protests against derogatory or insulting presentations ontelevision, in advertisements and in magazine articles led to withdrawal of the offendingmaterial. Ainu and others have criticized the way they are portrayed in Japanese textbooksand they have continued to work for fishing rights, especially to catch salmon. In 1984the Utari Kyokai called for outright abolition of the Protection Act, specifying the pro-visions the organization wanted to see in new legislation. These included recognizing Ainuculture, establishing programs and reserving additional land for Ainu, teaching the Ainulanguage to children and university students and setting aside seats in the Diet and theHokkaido 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 measuredAinu, photographed them wearing few clothes and asked questions about intimate mat-ters and sacred beliefs, but rarely recorded Ainu feelings about such activities. (The furorregarding the bones taken to England in 1865 is an exception.) In recent years HokkaidoUniversity has been returning bones to Ainu organizations. After negotiations with Ainurepresentatives, Hokudai authorities arranged that a modest memorial hall be built forthe Ainu remains, and an annual memorial ceremony has been held. Yet still at issue arethe many artifacts Kodama and others collected from Ainu graves.

Kayano Shigeru wrote of his attitude to scholars’ activities: “I despised scholars ofAinu culture from the bottom of my heart.... Under the pretext of research, they took bloodfrom villagers and, in order to examine how hairy we were, rolled up our sleeves, thenlowered our collars to check our backs, and so on.” Once his mother had had so much blooddrawn 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 thatscholars were helping to save aspects of Ainu culture, Kayano began to look upon schol-ars’ efforts more positively and he helped with some research himself.35

Ainu scholars had other concerns regarding the academic world. Yuki Shoji organ-ized a protest in 1977 against a Hokudai professor whose lectures included belittlingremarks about Ainu and their culture. When the professor, Hayashi Yoshishige, wouldnot apologize, a student group barricaded him in the classroom. Police eventually brokeup the protest. Later, still seeking an apology, Yuki erected a tent on the Hokudai cam-pus in the middle of winter. As he stayed there, public pressure grew, and the professorfinally made a formal apology. Note that many in the field of education supported Hayashion the grounds of academic freedom.

Traditional Ainu religious rituals began to disappear as Ainu adopted more andmore Wajin practices. Many Ainu pay at least nominal obeisance to Buddhism and Shintoand have Buddhist altars in their homes, as do other families in Japan. Few Ainu areChristian, despite John Batchelor’s efforts. It was his personal influence that led to manyof the conversions, some feel, and thus the religion declined among Ainu after Batche-lor’s death. In recent years, Ainu religion has seen a revival, and sometimes families carryout traditional rites along with Buddhist or Christian ceremonies. The Ainu observancestend 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 iyomantebe 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. Ainuhave also, of course, continued to carry out private iyomante ceremonies.

Internationally, Ainu have gained more recognition. In 1974, the China-Japan Friend-ship Association invited fifteen Ainu to visit China for three weeks, specifically to meetwith China’s minority groups. Ainu groups have visited indigenous communities in var-ious other countries too, including Alaskan Inuit villages and First Peoples’ communi-ties in British Columbia, Canada. There is special interest among Northwest Coast Indiansof Canada and the United States because cultural similarities, for example in styles of artas well as ceremonies to honor the salmon suggest a possible ancient link. (The earliestrecorded modern contact between Ainu and any American Indians apparently hadoccurred in conjunction with the 1904 St. Louis Exposition.) A Navajo visiting Hokkaidoabout 1990 was amazed at the similarities he saw between Ainu culture and his own, say-ing about the Ainu, “They are Indians, too.”36

Cultural borrowings have occurred—if this is how the carving of totem poles byAinu artisans can be described. To attract tourists, these started appearing in Hokkaidoafter the Second World War. They have been adapted to Ainu culture, featuring Ainudesigns and motifs rather than Native American ones.

Since 1987, Ainu have been involved with the United Nations Working Group onIndigenous Populations and in 1992, Nomura Giichi, chairman of the Hokkaido AinuAssociation, addressed the United Nations General Assembly. In traditional Ainu attire,he spoke on the occasion of International Human Rights Day. In 1993 Ainu participatedin the United Nations’ International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. In conjunc-tion with the U.N. year, Ainu hosted a forum of indigenous peoples, and the ties betweendifferent groups have continued to blossom. Other indigenous peoples’ activism has stim-ulated Ainu activity, as well as Ainu pride. An Ainu group has joined the World Council


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 impres-sive exhibit of Ainu history and culture, traditional and modern. Japanese Prime Min-ister Obuchi Keizo visited the exhibit while he was in Washington. (But Ainu KawamuraKenichi, 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 nominority 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 PrimeMinister Nakasone Yasuhiro once again asserted the view that Japan was free of ethnicminorities. Moreover, he claimed that Japan’s economic success was due to the nation’shomogeneous population. (He had been trying to explain earlier comments he had madedisparaging American blacks.) Nakasone thus inadvertently stimulated greater Ainuefforts to gain recognition and equal treatment. He continued to assert that Japan hadno ethnic minorities because, he claimed somewhat inaccurately, no minorities in Japansuffered discrimination and, furthermore, were mostly assimilated.

The question of whether Japan had minorities did not go away. In 1987 the Japanesereport to the U.N. Human Rights Commission did finally admit that the nation includedminority peoples but did not agree that they suffered from human rights problems. TheUtari Kyokai presented a report to the U.N. that year, though, asking for a study of Japa-nese government policies toward Ainu. To cite one example, Ainu felt that textbooks inuse by Hokkaido students continued to slight Ainu culture; it was rarely mentioned inthe books, and when it was, the information was often inaccurate. Some improvementhas occurred, the Hokkaido Board of Education ruling in 1992 that high school teachersshould 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 adam inundating Ainu land, not the least because it would be in Biratori Town’s Nibu-tani Village, which is generally recognized by Ainu and Wajin alike as the center of Ainuculture 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 industrialdevelopment some distance away, in Tomakomai. Though the industrial project was latercanceled, 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 gov-ernment had, in fact, violated Ainu rights by not taking Ainu concerns into account beforegoing ahead with the dam. The Ainu should receive compensation for this, the courtruled—but the dam remained. As part of recompense for constructing the dam, the gov-ernment built a new museum in Biratori. Opened in 1992, much of Kayano Shigeru’s col-lection of Ainu artifacts is exhibited here, while Kayano continued to show other Ainuitems plus some from other indigenous peoples in his museum, renamed the KayanoShigeru Ainu Memorial Museum.

Though Ainu activists could not stop the Nibutani Dam, they have been able to takean active role in planning for another dam on the same river. The government author-ized construction of the Biratori Dam farther upstream, both to limit flooding and toprovide hydroelectric power. This time, however, the team surveying the river area andcompiling data for the Japanese equivalent of American environmental impact statementsincludes Ainu members. Although the local Ainu community has been consulted duringplanning, 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, wherecourts have affirmed the right of Northwest Native Americans to half the salmon harvestin 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’sremarks in 1986 had inspired a Health and Welfare Ministry study to consider changingor scrapping the 1899 law. Then, in 1988, Hokkaido Governor Yokomichi convened agroup to study the Ainu situation, which resulted in a recommendation by the Dochofor new legislation. Kayano Shigeru’s presence and activity in the Diet also increasedpressure for change. Publicity about his attainment of office and his calls for ameliora-tion of Ainu problems led to heightened awareness in Japan of the Ainu and was animportant 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 wouldthe governor of Hokkaido control Ainu group property. The Docho would return assetsto the Ainu, but government and some Ainu spokesmen did not agree on the value ofthe assets or on the method of allocation; the courts rejected an Ainu lawsuit on the mat-ter. Ainu Shinpo’s provisions, designed to preserve Ainu tradition and language, werevery different from the proposal submitted by the Docho and Hokkaido Ainu. The newlaw did not go far enough, thought many who had worked for it, since it dealt only withculture, not economic and political needs. Moreover, much of the power in deciding howto 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-bindingresolution adopted in conjunction with the law did, however, describe Ainu as an indige-nous minority and this was significant because of the implication that people who areindigenous 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 educa-tion, with only 17.4% achieving a college education, not quite half the rate for other peo-ple. Meanwhile, 38.3% of Hokkaido Ainu received public assistance according to 2006figures. Ainu thus have remained economically marginalized. Many hide their Ainu blood,and alcoholism remains a problem in the Ainu community. Many Ainu have undoubt-edly felt culturally Wajin, not Ainu, but also perceive that prejudice against them stillexists. In a 1974 report, George DeVos and William Wetherall suggested that the generalview 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 fes-tivals, yet in these settings it is too easy to picture them as exotic primitive people ratherthan individuals who have every right to participate freely in national life. Kayano Shigerucomplained 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 representsthe way Ainu live today. He wrote of being a “display Ainu” at the tourist center, but onlybecause he needed the money he would earn.40

Ainu practices have been adapted to present to tourists; traditional ceremonies aresometimes held only to appeal to visitors. Also, Ainu art is often modified for sales totourists. 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 carvedbears sold to tourists in Switzerland. Wajin actually carve many of the “Ainu” bears sold


in Japan. Douglas Sanders, writing about the Ainu in 1986, suggested that the number ofAinu carved bears for sale in Hokkaido was probably greater than the number of Ainupeople.41

To some people, Ainu tourist villages are a way to take advantage of Ainu, to den-igrate them as colorful primitives. A survey in the mid–1980s showed that fewer than tenpercent of Ainu people worked in the tourist sector, however.42 And the villages do playa role in stimulating the revival of Ainu culture and crafts, and in offering a “safe” placeto be Ainu to people who find difficulties in trying to live in Sapporo or other cities. Ainueven run a new festival now. Since 1950, Ainu have been celebrating the Marimo Festi-val at Lake Akan, centered around the unusual and beautiful marimo plant that growsin the lake. Some have criticized this festival as meant merely to attract tourists, but Ainuwho participate in it defend it as a means to offer thanks for nature’s bounty. An Ainugroup from Shiraoi was invited to dance for the Emperor at the celebration of his birth-day 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 Amer-ican school children learn about the Ainu as they study Native Americans and the impactof a more technologically advanced society upon aboriginal peoples. Today, however, onetends not to recognize an Ainu upon the street, as Ainu wear the same clothing as otherpeople in Japan. Times have changed; when David Penhallow, a scientist, wrote of theAinu in the nineteenth century, he felt that “the appearance of the Aino is so differentfrom that of the Japanese as to determine a wide separation of the two people, even uponthe most casual inspection.”43

In recent years, Ainu culture has been showing a revival. The Japanese governmentnamed traditional Ainu dancing as a cultural treasure in 1984. In the field of art, sculp-tor 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 ofpeople 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 wasAinu. 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 cul-tural activities.

What is the future of the Ainu language? It will continue through the recitation ofyukar, songs, greetings and prayers, many think, but whether it will be used in daily lifeis extremely doubtful. In 1998, however, an oratorical contest in the Ainu language tookplace for the first time and in 2001 an Ainu language radio station in Hokkaido beganbroadcasts. College courses in Ainu language became available and even manga have beenwritten 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 thereturn of the salmon to the rivers. In Sapporo, Ainu commemorate the salmon’s reap-pearance at the side of the Toyohira River, with traditional food served before the cere-mony. These days Ainu show more pride in their heritage than has been the case formany, many years.

How many Ainu are there today? When Ainu population figures are estimated, italways is with a caveat or two. The number of Ainu today is impossible to say. In officialstatistics, 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 annualreturn of salmon to the river.

Ainu hide their ethnicity in order to escape discrimination. While Ainu in villages ortowns with large, cohesive Ainu communities like Nibutani or Shiraoi may not deny theirheritage, Ainu living in large cities or their suburbs often do. In addition, there has beenenough 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 Wajinto have entered the Ainu community, though Ainu do not see them as true Ainu. Mean-while, intermarriage between Ainu and Wajin has become fairly common. Estimates ofAinu population today range from the almost twenty-four thousand in Hokkaido whoare officially counted as Ainu to as high as three hundred thousand nationwide. MoreAinu probably live in Hokkaido’s Hidaka District, and particularly Nibutani, than any-where else in Japan. Whether or not Ainu can be counted accurately, many of them havenot supported ethnic activism, often because of the belief that assimilation into the major-ity community offers more benefit.

A popular view in Japan of Ainu culture is of a people living with nature in a pre-industrial environment, a culture admired as a lost ideal. As we have seen, though, greaterunderstanding of today’s Ainu is developing, but even in 2005, a cabinet minister talkedof Japan consisting of “one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and onerace.”44 Recognizing a distinct Ainu culture has been problematic in Japan, because eth-nic 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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Herring were plentiful in 1918, when these men harvested the tiny fish off the Hokkaido shore. Yearsof overfishing, though, have severely depleted the herring supply (courtesy Hokkaido UniversityLibrary).

An international event in 2008 finally led the Diet to recognize Ainu as an indige-nous people. It was Japan’s turn to host a Group of Eight international summit confer-ence, and Tokyo decided to hold it at Lake Toya in Hokkaido, probably because similarmeetings have been accompanied by demonstrations and protests in recent years, so anout-of-the-way but attractive venue seemed appropriate. For Ainu, however, this was anopportunity to hold a summit of indigenous peoples just before the G-8 meeting. Herethey would press for government recognition. Hokkaido Diet members, meanwhile, ledefforts 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 studypossible policy changes. The group, including Ainu leaders, Hokkaido Governor Taka-hashi 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 Ainuand Japanese. These days the Ainu tourist sites bring Ainu together for festivals and forcultural study, working to maintain a vibrant Ainu culture and society, but many Ainudo not participate in Ainu cultural or political activities, and some Ainu do not even knowthat they have Ainu ancestors. In the twenty-first century, one hopes for an end to dis-crimination 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 historyso different from that of the Japanese heartland was over, and much of the island’s sub-sequent story has been that of Japan. If there was any theme that set Hokkaido apart inthe first part of the new century, it was the continuing effort to urge settlers to migrateto 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 encom-passed the time during which Japan was first recognized as a significant modern militarypower. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was fought not in Siberia and Hokkaido, asone might expect from its name, but mainly in Manchuria, where Russia and Japan werevying for dominance in northeastern Asia. The conflict did impact Hokkaido, however.Anticipating war with Russia, the government established the army’s new Seventh Divi-sion and assigned it to Asahikawa, beginning a long association with the city and help-ing bring prosperity to it.

The Dosanko worried that fighting might spread to their island. Days after a Feb-ruary 8, 1904 surprise Japanese attack on Port Arthur (now Lushun, on the tip ofChina’s Liaoning Peninsula) began the war, the New York Times reported a rumor thatRussian ships had attacked Hakodate, still Hokkaido’s most important city; luckily forHakodate, the account was false.1 A few days later, though, hearing that Russian war-ships were off the coast nearby, many people fled the city, some taking cart loads ofbelongings, others filling the trains to overcrowding. Most people soon returned after noRussians appeared.

A military camp was established at Hakodate and Russian gunboats operated innearby Tsugaru Strait, disrupting commerce and the ferry service between Hakodate andAomori. On February 11, Russian ships fired on two merchant steamers headed for Hok-kaido, sinking one immediately but rescuing some passengers and crew members. Theother ship, though damaged, managed to escape, thanks to bad weather. Crew memberslightened the ship’s load, throwing overboard many of the bales of rice being transportedto Otaru, and the ship sped away from the Russians as quickly as possible.

Towns and villages along the Tsugaru Strait shore took precautions. Townsmen setup warning systems so that should enemy ships appear, noncombatants could hurry tothe hills while men and boys would grab whatever could be used as a weapon and makeready 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 treacher-ous.

The vessels at risk during the war were not all Russian and Japanese. In one widelypublicized case, Russians seized a British steamer which had picked up coal in Muroranto be delivered to Singapore. The Russians intercepted the ship in Tsugaru Strait, tookit to Vladivostok to confiscate it and its cargo but released the ship four months later. Inanother case, the Tacoma, an American ship on its way to deliver supplies to Vladivos-tok, became trapped in La Perouse Strait ice during the 1904-05 winter and, when freedmuch 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, peoplewelcoming them home in triumph. Peace negotiations granted Japan the southern halfof Sakhalin, which the Japanese called Karafuto. Tokyo maintained control of the newly-acquired territory (unlike the Kuril Islands, which Hokkaido administered). A numberof Hokkaido residents headed to Karafuto to settle, including some Ainu returning totheir ancestral homes and many fishermen hoping to escape the domination of largeoperators in the Hokkaido industry.

Japan’s acquisition of Karafuto also meant that much national development moneythat might have gone to Hokkaido was spent on the island to its north instead. Fundsalso went to Taiwan, which Japan had controlled since the end of the Sino-Japanese Warin 1895, and to Korea, governed by Japan from 1910.

Development

In the twentieth century, Hokkaido was finally allowed to begin to catch up withthe rest of Japan politically and administratively. In 1897 the Docho divided the largeisland into nineteen subprefectures for administrative purposes; in 1910 the number wasdecreased to fourteen, and these remain today. In 1901 the government of Japan allowedthe establishment of a Hokkaido assembly, though it had little real power, and in 1902came the first members elected from Hokkaido to the national legislature, the Diet inTokyo: one each from Hakodate, Sapporo and Otaru. The rest of Japan had received thevote a decade earlier, and agitation in the northern island for suffrage finally helped bringthe 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 WorldWar II. Government development plans for Hokkaido appeared in the first two decadesof the century: a fifteen year scheme in 1910 largely for infrastructure improvements anda 1927 proposal which included increasing both island population and food production.Some projects saw implementation, but national and world events have a way of affect-ing such plans, and both World War I and the Great Depression influenced what actu-ally 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 islandassets, especially coal, played an important role in Hokkaido’s economy in the early twen-tieth century. On the island, the mining industry prospered. Towns such as Akabira,


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 couldnot replace the human workers. Miners sometimes rebelled against poor working con-ditions and low wages, though. More than a thousand men at Hokutan’s Horonai minewent on strike in April 1907 for higher pay. The strike soon turned into a riot, strikerssetting some company buildings on fire and clashing with police. After the violence, acompany spokesman told the strikers that the firm would not raise wages but woulddonate rice to the workers’ families. The trouble subsided, but Yubari miners also struckin 1907.

Mining continued to be hazardous; increasing mechanization did not end the per-ils miners faced. Gas explosions in a Yubari mine in 1908 killed ninety men. In April 1912another killed 269 and in December, 216. Yet again in 1914, more than 400 died in aYubari gas burst. Though companies put efforts into increasing mine safety, these mineswere inherently dangerous because methane gas would build up around the deep coaldeposits and this gas could easily explode.

In the second and third decades of the century, Japan’s zaibatsu firms—large nationalconglomerates—purchased most of Hokkaido’s mines. In 1913 Mitsui took over Hoku-tan, which had more than five thousand workers by then and produced more than halfthe 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 notyet studied. Mechanization in the mines continued, with some machinery imported andsome built by the mining firms.

Japan’s coal was especially important during World War I, and because of a short-age of labor the government brought Korean workers to work in the mines. Hokutan hiredits first Korean miners in 1916, bringing 33 of them to Yubari. By 1917 Hokutan had 192Koreans working in Yubari and in 1918, 447. By 1919, there were 2,524 Koreans inHokkaido. An analysis of Korean workers in Japan in 1923 showed that of the 3,286 thenin Hokkaido, ninety percent were working as laborers. For every Korean woman inHokkaido, 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 workedfor Hokutan. Koreans usually held the most dangerous and difficult jobs in the mines,but Hokutan management held that because Koreans were less knowledgeable than otherminers about safety and health, more accidents and illness could be expected amongKoreans than among other workers.2

Even women worked underground in Yubari. The number of female miners roseduring World War I, and in 1916, when their labor was first officially recorded, 2382women were working in the Hokkaido mines. By 1920, that had increased to more than5000. Salaries did not match men’s pay, however.

When the labor market in Hokkaido was tight, workers felt enabled to strike forbetter pay and conditions; miners formed a union in Yubari in 1919. Companies responded to worker shortages in different ways, offering pay incentives and strongersafety rules.

As the trade union movement developed in Japan, the companies continued to recruitKorean workers, leading to the first Korean labor organization in Japan, set up in 1920as a section of the Yubari Federation of the National Union of Miners. Mine activism inthat year was partly a response to a shocking mine disaster at Yubari in June, which killedmore 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 despitethe 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 inYubari’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 encouragedincreased 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 alsodeclined. Meanwhile, fishing boats powered by engines, not wind or oars, became moreavailable. Steam trawlers made in Germany were first brought to Hokkaido in 1909 andfishermen began going to fishing grounds farther from Japan. Soon the mother-ship sys-tem began, first for crab and later for salmon. By the 1920s and 1930s, as large capitalistsplayed a stronger and stronger role in the fisheries, factory ships were dominating thesalmon and crab industries. Many of the workers whose families were formerly employedin the herring fisheries now worked on the factory ships and the boats they sent out. Lifewas hard; the men stayed at sea for months at a time. Kobayashi Takiji wrote a harrow-ing tale about laborers’ appalling life on a frightful factory ship, where they faced every-thing from vermin to death.4 This story, its title translated as “The Factory Ship” or “TheCrab Ship,” became newly popular in 2008, as workers in Japan who are poorly paidstruggled to get along during an economic downturn.

Though the large operators dominated the ocean fishery, small-scale coastal fishingcontinued. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, fishermen’s associations weregiven rights to manage this fishery. Merchants controlled the marketing, however, andfishermen’s families were consistently in debt, some owing as much as eighty percent ofthe value of the catch. In the 1930s, civil servant Ando Takatoshi led an effort to estab-lish fishing cooperatives to market sea products; this could release fishermen from themerchants’ stranglehold. He helped convince fishing families to create such cooperativesand later worked to bring them together into a Hokkaido-wide federation. Repaymentof the fishermen’s debts was slow but the process of reforming the coastal fishery was wellunderway when World War II disrupted the industry.

During this era, forestry continued to serve dual needs—to prepare land for farm-ing and to provide wood for construction and fuel. Forestry in these years often followedthe 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 tobe done mostly during the winter, when farmers could not work in their fields, and alsobecause of the relative ease of hauling logs in the snow to a nearby river bank. Crafts-men built sleighs for the job. When spring came, logs were floated down rivers. As theHokkaido rail network expanded, trains carried more and more lumber. In the early yearsof the twentieth century, a lot of the timber went to China. For domestic use, forest prod-ucts included charcoal and pulp as well as boards. As the years went on, even Hokkaido’stimber resources could not supply the needs of the nation, and Karafuto’s forests plusimported lumber became more and more important.

Significant agricultural advances on Hokkaido came in the early twentieth century.


Tokyo established the Hokkaido Agricultural Experiment Station in 1901. Researchexpanded, 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 exper-iments and planted many kinds of crops. Because of the importance of rice in the Japa-nese diet, the study of rice cultivation continued to be prominent.

As early as 1896, farmers had begun forming local associations to develop irrigationschemes for rice paddies. By the 1930s, some 250 irrigation associations had been organ-ized in Hokkaido; government subsidies had made construction of irrigation works prac-tical. Higashide Seiichi observed a large-scale irrigation project near Fukagawa in 1916or 1917 and noted that Korean laborers brought to do the construction work lived almostas 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 moreclothes in order to ensure that they worked as hard as possible. Higashide speculated thatthey were probably misled into coming to Hokkaido.5

The first half of the century saw new land opened for agriculture, though from 1920to 1930 the amount under cultivation actually decreased. (After World war I ended, agri-cultural production in Europe revived and Japanese exports lost markets there.) Effortscontinued to expand the Hokkaido land used for cultivation because of Japan’s need tofeed its growing population, and critics urged the government to stop large landownersin Hokkaido from letting much of their acreage lie fallow; were the land used more effi-ciently, it could support many more people.

Great efforts have gone into developing pest-resistant varieties of rice that could begrown successfully in a northern climate. Early research centered on finding early matur-ing varieties, but later study stressed the importance of strains that could tolerate coolsummer weather. In 1905 the introduction of Akage rice spurred island development, forthis 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 bedsprotected from the cold. The young plants would be transplanted into the fields aftercold 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. Mapsof the development of areas for rice production in Hokkaido show the rice frontier mov-ing northward and eastward. Surprisingly, it almost reached the northern tip of the islandby 1930. In the 1930s, agricultural lands grew by more than 350,000 acres. But rice culti-vation was an iffy enterprise in these farthest reaches of the island. Years when the weatherwas colder than usual could mean a small or nonexistent crop.

A bad crop year could mean hunger and destitution for farm families. Cold in 1902virtually destroyed the rice planted in Hokkaido and briefly meant no expansion of therice-growing area. Because of extra-cold weather and a destructive late–August typhoonin the 1913 growing season, by early 1914 Hokkaido and northern sections of Honshu facedfamine. An official estimate suggested that ninety-five percent of Hokkaido’s harvestfailed. “Men are subsisting on straw, the bark of trees, unmatured daikon, acorns pow-dered and made into gruel, buckwheat chaff powdered and made into gruel by pouringon hot water,” wrote an observer.6 Again, in the 1920s and 30s, colder weather in someyears led to very low crop yields.

Research on crops other than rice led to improvements in agricultural efficiency. In1920, peas, beans and potatoes occupied more land than rice. New varieties of wheat,

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potatoes and vegetables were introduced successfully. Systematic asparagus cultivationon 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 wasalso in the 1920s that dairy farming began to be important in Hokkaido. Consistent useof crop rotation schemes also began. Research continued; one problem on Hokkaidoonly somewhat successfully tackled was peat bog reclamation; peat was extensive on theisland, especially in the lower Ishikari Valley and the Kushiro-Nemuro area, but withtreatment, the peatland could become productive farmland.

Unlike the traditional Japanese pattern of land use, much of Hokkaido’s agriculturalacreage has been planted in crops used for animal feed. For many years Japan’s militaryestablishment 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 powerneeded on Hokkaido farms, which, unlike heartland farms, were too large to workefficiently by hand. Thus the typical Hokkaido farm depended upon horse power; inalmost every farmyard would sit the large two-wheeled cart pulled by horses in summerand the sleigh used in winter.

Agricultural cooperatives have been influential in Hokkaido just as in the rest ofJapan, and in 1919 Hokkaido farmers formed the Federation of Agricultural CooperativeSocieties of Hokkaido, or Hokuren—an organization to coordinate the sales of their farmproducts. Since then Hokuren has carried out many diverse activities, from canning farmproducts to producing insecticides to arranging exports.


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

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

Farm buildings, including houses, mostly stood on individual holdings, in the Amer-ican pattern, rather than in villages as in the Japanese heartland. Houses showed someAmerican influence on the outside, but just as in earlier years, interiors were built andfurnished in the Japanese style and few dwellings were truly suitable for Hokkaido win-ters.

Many aspects of Hokkaido life did not change much. The weather continued to offerchallenges but people were learning ways to cope. In the countryside, some farm fami-lies built windbreaks using straw from their rice paddies to protect their houses from thecold winter winds. Clothing more suitable to the Hokkaido winters became available,and during cold weather, some railroad cars contained stoves to provide heat. But evenin the twentieth century one could see immigrant huts built with walls of “matting andbrushwood.” Such simple dwellings were as primitive as those built half a century ear-lier, typically featuring only one room. The fire in the center of the room would warmthe small dwelling more or less adequately in winter. At least plenty of firewood was usu-ally available nearby.7

In 1900, Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko, or Hokkaido Development Bank (sometimestranslated as Hokkaido Colonial Bank) was incorporated to support island development.Infrastructure projects financed publicly and privately in the following decades includedthe island’s first hydroelectric plant, which opened in 1906 at Iwanai on the coast south-west of Otaru. The government undertook harbor improvements at many places, includ-ing 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 ship-ping, an important part of Hokkaido commerce. Additional funds were expended onroad and bridge construction, irrigation and drainage and the bank lent funds for proj-ects and helped with relief when times were especially bad.

Development did not magically happen, however, and when the Diet did implementprograms, official corruption too often influenced sales or leases and it was impossibleto determine the impact of these specific development measures on Hokkaido’s economyand 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 hecriticized Hokkaido’s people for not doing more, attributing this to the “lack of a fight-ing spirit” of too many migrants, who went to Hokkaido only to depart soon for theirold homes.8

Among the industries that grew during this era was sake manufacture. The two essen-tials for a good product could be found in Hokkaido: pure, tasty water and a suitablevariety of rice. Sake has traditionally been made in the winter, when cold weather dis-courages the growth of bacteria which can spoil the liquor. Thus Hokkaido is a naturalspot for its manufacture and Hokkaido sake has won prizes. These days, about fifteenfirms produce sake on the island.

Sake is not the only product for which Hokkaido climate and terrain proved suit-able. In 1910, Sekon Nikoshiro opened a factory in Sapporo to produce condensed milkfrom raw milk. A dairy industry expanded and by 1926, four condenseries and aboutninety dairies operated in Hokkaido. Meanwhile, peppermint, which was first grown inthe Kitami region in 1901, was finding a wide market and paper manufacture using pulpfrom island trees was growing rapidly.


During the first thirty years of the twentieth century, transportation links, and thusfarms and towns, spread all across the island. Advancing outposts led to the disappear-ance of forest; stumps dotted the farm fields in areas fairly recently brought into culti-vation. The railroad and the pioneers had reached Asahikawa before 1900, while in theKitami area most agricultural development got its start in the second decade of the twen-tieth century when the railroad came, though a few settler families, including some ton-denhei, 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 thesestations.

Hokkaido’s transportation system was developed primarily to expedite the exportof raw materials, specifically coal and lumber and, later, farm products. That the firstrailroad line built on the island served the Horonai coal mine illustrates this. Lines werebuilt from producing centers to Hokkaido’s main ports: Otaru, Hakodate, Muroran andKushiro, but not until 1904 could one travel directly from Hakodate to Otaru and Sap-poro by rail. From Asahikawa one could take trains both northward and, by 1907, east-ward all the way to Kushiro. This route traversed the Tokachi plain, stimulatingagricultural development in that wide area. In 1926 the Chitose Line, from Tomakomainorth to Sapporo, opened, making it possible to travel directly from Sapporo to Muro-ran by rail. Travelers proceeding from Muroran toward Hakodate would still have to take

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

a boat across Uchiura Bay. About 1930, a rail line opened from Muroran to connect withthe Hakodate Line on the west coast of Uchiura Bay. Today, the section along the northshore of the bay is part of the main line connecting Hakodate and Sapporo; the routenorth from Hakodate winds around Uchiura Bay via the north end of Muroran City toTomakomai and then north, through Chitose to Sapporo. By 1918, the twenty-one milesof railroad that had existed in Hokkaido fifty years earlier had grown to almost one thou-sand miles. Just a few years later, in 1922, a railroad line to the far north opened, its ter-minus at Wakkanai.

Travel by sea offered an important alternative for Hokkaido families. Boats contin-ued to travel along the Hokkaido coast from port to port. At that time, many small steam-ers serving coastal ports on Hokkaido called at Hakodate and passenger ships served thecity twice each day from both Muroran and Aomori. A ship service from Yokohamaoperated two or three times weekly and occasional ships from Hakodate sailed to Sakhalinor Honshu’s west coast. In 1923, ferries began plying La Perouse Strait from Wakkanaito Sakhalin.

About 2400 miles of road existed on Hokkaido by the end of World War I, but allexcept the main roads remained poor, making life difficult for the farmer trying to gethis 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 weredeep corrugations; in the middle was a high causeway abounding in dangerous ruts and


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

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 automo-biles, especially in agricultural areas, and local firms built carts and sleighs for summerand winter travel. Even in the 1930s, roadway development came relatively slowly andalmost all roads remained unpaved.

Otaru, Hakodate and Sapporo were by far Hokkaido’s largest cities in the first halfof the twentieth century. As Sapporo’s port, Otaru was increasing in importance. Con-struction of a breakwater began in 1897, though it took a decade to complete. The struc-ture 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 liningthe canal. The many products shipped from the city included many kinds of goods, frompeas to railroad ties. During the early twentieth century, Otaru was Hokkaido’s commer-cial center, partly because the annexation of Karafuto brought new opportunities fortrade. Fishing rights Japan obtained off the Russian coast after the Russo-Japanese Waralso benefited the city.

Twenty some banks opened in Otaru along with the shipping interests and the busi-nesses that appeared around them. The zaibatsu, too, established Hokkaido branch officesin Otaru. As the city flourished, periodic fires swept through the built-up area, and stonebecame more frequently used as a building material. For a time, Otaru was Hokkaido’s

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

largest city, with 91,962 people in 1910, closely followed by Hakodate (88,888) while Sap-poro (88,841) came third.10 Otaru’s most prosperous days are brought to mind by thehistoric 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 ofJapan.

The Handbook for Travelers to Japan described Hakodate in 1907: “Not withstand-ing 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, thehandbook reported, were missionaries. Seven years later, though, (and according to a dif-ferent guidebook) Hakodate was “a new, flourishing frontierlike city with 21,000 housesand 91,000 inhabitants.” Fishermen congregated there, and in those days perhaps fivehundred vessels would embark from Hakodate during a summer season for other north-ern ports, many in Russia. But officials forbade photography or sketching within aboutfour miles of Hakodate’s port, for it was a “strategic zone.” By 1920, Hakodate was wellahead of Sapporo and Otaru in population, with 132,622 people compared with 102,462in Otaru and 94,568 in Sapporo; at the time, Hakodate was the tenth largest city in allJapan.11

An unusual edifice and a symbol of Hakodate’s history and prosperity is the ChineseMemorial Hall. This Chinese-style building of red brick was planned as a gathering placefor the city’s prosperous Chinese business community. Finished in 1910, the hall appearsvery simple from the outside, but inside are altars, paintings and brilliant red pillars. Chi-nese merchants in Hakodate brought artisans from China, including specialists such aslacquer painters, to create the building. The Memorial Hall’s richness emphasizes theimportance of trade with China to the city. Constructed without any nails, this is the onlybuilding 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 describedthe 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 Hokkaidomines, grew after the 1907 establishment of an iron and steel works, which took advan-tage of the iron mines not too far away at Kutchan, on the western edge of the moun-tains north of the city, as well as coal from Yubari. Ore imported from Korea and Chinasupplemented the local supply. A 1914 guidebook described Muroran as a “picturesquetown” (of 21,000 people) in a “pretty site.” The town grew steadily, and in the 1930spassed the hundred thousand population mark, probably because of the need for ironand steel as Japan went to war with China.12 Asahikawa, too, was gaining population, morethan 20,000 from 1920 to 1930, when it counted more than 80,000 residents. By thisdecade, 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 theearly twentieth century, though the Hara brothers had settled there with fifty samuraifrom Tokyo in 1800 and a small settlement grew after the Kaitakushi built the road fromMuroran to Sapporo. (It was at Tomakomai that the Sapporo route met the road head-ing eastward along Hokkaido’s south shore.) This tiny outpost remained merely a col-lection of small inns and shops catering to travelers; several Meiji era attempts to establishcommunities there failed, but in 1910, Oji Paper opened a mill in Tomakomai. The firmchose the site because of its water supply, abundant nearby forests and extensive landsuitable for industrial development. Muroran served as the port for the mill, and these


two cities came to form Hokkaido’s industrial center. Oji’s health dominated Tomako-mai. By 1920, more than one thousand people in the city worked for the firm. Oji remainsone of the ten top forest products companies in the world. Nowadays, the company’sTomakomai mill produces thirty percent of Japan’s newsprint.

By 1910, Hokkaido’s population was about 1,450,000, with just over forty-five per-cent listed as being in farming and just under twelve percent in fishing. The productionof “silk, bricks, beer, watches, sugar, canned goods, hemp, cement, paper, manure, irongoods, 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, sul-furous, horrifyingly beautiful volcanic landscape. In those days tourists were not pro-tected as they are now, and among the places where visitors could walk in Noboribetsuwere spots where they had to pick up their feet quickly or risk burning their shoes. Ofcourse the hot springs then featured “promiscuous bathing,” which simply meant thatunclothed visitors of both sexes could enter the same pool. English language guidebookssuch as the 1907 Handbook contrasted travel in Hokkaido to that in the Japanese heart-land, warning tourists that on the northern island “there are comparatively few goodroads, the inns are often far apart, and jinrikishas are met with only in a few places andbasha [carriages] on the main roads. Most journeys are performed in the saddle.” Thehandbook 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 wassometimes possible to buy “grizzly bear skins (prices flexible) and Siberian furs” but thatTokyo was a better place to buy traditional Japanese items.14

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

In 1914, World War I erupted in Europe and its repercussions both hindered andstimulated Hokkaido development. The war gave an impetus to Hokkaido manufactur-ing, for warfare interrupted worldwide commerce; Japan, like other nations, found theneed to become more self-sufficient. In Hokkaido, chemical industries, especially papermanufacture, grew, and at Kamiiso, near Hakodate, cement production became impor-tant. The war affected agriculture too, encouraging growth of crops other than ricebecause their export meant strong profits. During the war, wages did not keep pace withprices, leading to strikes and protests throughout Japan. Four thousand workers struckat a Muroran steel mill in 1917. In 1918, rioting broke out in Japan over a doubling of theprice of rice. Authorities broke up strikes in Hokkaido that year and, to discourage fur-ther unrest, made more rice available and reduced prices. With the end of the war, thegovernment promoted and sometimes subsidized the shift back to rice cultivation. Mean-while, Hokkaido felt the effects of inflation and recession. Some firms faced bankruptcyand government and private efforts to improve the island’s economy included extendingfishing grounds farther into the ocean as well as introducing more modern mining tech-niques. As World War I ended, revolution stirred in Russia, and nearby Hokkaido feltthe impact. Several nations, including Japan, sent troops to oppose the communists inthe Russian Far East. With instability in Russia, Japan remained tense, keeping sensitiveplaces off limits to foreigners and fortifying Hokkaido ports.

The 1920s brought prosperity to Hokkaido, as exemplified by the theaters and restau-


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

rants on the island. Japan’s first firm to prepare frozen food for sale began operations inHokkaido 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 innovationssuch as these, people in the Japanese heartland as well as many foreigners still perceivedthe island as backward. Fewer than two thousand cars were registered in Hokkaido in1932; statistics like this tended to bolster the perception that Hokkaido was behind thetimes. 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 hiswife and child behind, because “traveling in Yezo is not very comfortable.” He devoteda chapter to the Ainu, but after seeing traditional Ainu dwellings pronounced that “theirmiserable straw huts without floors are not suitable dwellings for the long, cold Hokkaidowinters,” apparently having no idea what adaptations Ainu made for wintertime.15

During the 1920s, the most dramatic events in Hokkaido occurred in Otaru. At theend of December 1924, an accidental explosion occurred near Temiya Station while work-ers were unloading a ship’s cargo of explosives. The blast left a rubble-filled hole onehundred feet wide, and petroleum stored at the station started an intense fire, destroy-ing 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 thirty-foot length of steel rail three miles across the water. The carnage reminded people of thedreadful 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 peopleand 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 train-ing for all Japanese schoolboys ages twelve and above had recently become required. Amilitary instructor at Otaru Commercial College planned an exercise centered on a hypo-thetical earthquake in the Otaru neighborhood, after which local Koreans and anarchistssupposedly rose in rebellion. Students were to plot ways to “annihilate the enemy.” Wide-spread protests, even beyond Hokkaido, followed the announced exercise, and Tokyo’sMinistry of Education “had to admit that the ‘hypothesis’ was ill chosen.”17

Rising prices and increased unemployment helped foment an upsurge of leftist activ-ity during the twenties. In 1927 a June-July general strike lasting almost a month severelydisrupted Otaru. Many workers’ wages had been cut because owners had been hurt by adownturn in financial markets. The strike, which started among waterfront workers,encompassed tenant farmer protests, which had begun several months earlier. Agricul-tural cooperatives agreed to make food available for strikers and their families in Otaruwhile the port was at a standstill. Minor scuffles with police occurred and life remainedtense, 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 heav-ily involved in the 1927 labor actions in Otaru. Hokkaido had a fair number of commu-nist activists, both because of the island’s nearness to the Soviet Union and because ofcontinued 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 electionsince the vote was extended to all men—a communist representing the Worker-PeasantParty ran for the Otaru seat. He was unsuccessful and soon officials carried out a wide-spread roundup of communist and other leftist leaders throughout Japan, detaining forquestioning 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, asdid government repression. Not until after World War II did the Japanese CommunistParty become a legal organization.

Settlers

As the century began, a guidebook for visitors to Japan described Hokkaido’s peo-ple as “less polished and more independent” than other Japanese.19 Meanwhile, immi-grants 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 sig-nificant, more than one hundred groups moving to Hokkaido in those years. While new-comers often had to struggle with poverty, many of the earlier migrants and their familieshad become prosperous. After early years of toil and privation, some tondenhei memberswent into business when their terms of service ended. Migrants opened every type ofshop needed in Hokkaido’s growing communities. Some of these now stand in the His-torical Village of Hokkaido: among them a noodle shop, a dye shop, a sake brewery, evena photography studio. On the farms, substantial houses came to replace the primitivehuts in which so many families had started their life in Hokkaido. These houses tendedto resemble those in the migrants’ home districts, even when such structures did not suitthe northern climate.

Some migrants later returned to their home islands or moved from the countrysideto Hokkaido cities, giving up their effort to be pioneer farmers. Poor people had no fundsto blast out stumps or to treat the soil with lime to combat acidity. The migrants alsooften lacked basic farming skills as well as ability to cope with Hokkaido conditions, sodifferent from those in their home areas.

Many Japanese hoping to migrate continued to prefer Hawaii, the American main-land or Taiwan—not Hokkaido, charged a member of the National Diet in 1907, explain-ing that this was because Hokkaido was so poorly administered. Anxiety about the coldclimate and the possible unavailability of rice surely must have been important, too.Hokkaido did receive positive assessments, however. In 1914, Sato Shosuke, head of thecollege in Sapporo, claimed that Hokkaido “is at present receiving many emigrants” andopined that though its population was just a little more than one million, the island couldsupport as many as six million people.20 By 1916, Hokkaido had some 360,000 dwellingsto house its residents.

But even those who tried to migrate did not always arrive. When two ships collidedin 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 toexpand but that Hokkaido was unsuitable for settlement because people did not want togo there. The war stimulated migration to Hokkaido, though, and over ninety thousandpeople came in 1919, helping cement Hokkaido’s position as a necessary source of agri-cultural products in Japan. Migration dropped off in succeeding years.

The first national census counted 2,359,183 people in Hokkaido in 1920. Since thefounding of the Kaitakushi, migration to the island had accounted for an increase ofabout two million people. Government programs to encourage settlement continued


sporadically. Despite official encouragement, fewer people than the government hopedactually went to Hokkaido. Moreover, promising alternatives lured some Hokkaido set-tlers away. In the 1920s, when Matsue Shunji got control of much of the land of TinianIsland in the Pacific Ocean to raise sugar cane, many people moved from Hokkaido tothe tropical isle to work on the plantations.

In 1926, the government reported a plan to spend some five million dollars over thefollowing two decades to establish 1,800,000 new farmers in Hokkaido. The main impe-tus for encouraging this migration, as well as earlier ones, was not development, as it hadbeen when Russian expansion was feared, but was rather an attempt to relieve overpop-ulation on Japan’s other islands. The number of Hokkaido residents remained lower thanhoped, even though in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Hokkaido’s popu-lation nearly tripled, growing from 985,000 to 2,812,000.

Several early twentieth century migrants to Hokkaido later became famous fromteachings 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 Hokkaidoto look at areas where he might establish a settlement. Two years later, still in his twen-ties, he led eighty-four people to Hokkaido all the way from Wakayama Prefecture, southof Osaka. In Hokkaido they established the village of Shirataki in the uplands west ofAbashiri. They had left home in March, but their route to their new home took them over

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

Hokkaido’s central mountains—a difficult journey—and they did not reach Shiratakiuntil May 20. They spent the summer building shelters and only the next year began togrow crops. For several years the group managed to survive on their mountain plateaumostly on potatoes, wild vegetables, and fish caught in the nearby river. By 1915 the smallsettlement was becoming fairly prosperous, the people making money from lumberingin addition to farming. That year Ueshiba met jujutsu master Takeda Sokaku in a nearbysettlement and began intense study of his martial art. In 1917 the town of Shirataki burneddown, but the villagers worked hard to rebuild it. Two years later, though, Ueshiba leftand 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 neverreturned to Hokkaido, but it was there that he had received his inspiration to become amaster of martial arts. It was the physical strength and endurance he developed in Hok-kaido that made his success possible.

For Namikoshi Takujiro, life in Hokkaido also led to accomplishment. He migratedto Hokkaido with his family from Shikoku in 1905, when he was seven years old. Unfor-tunately, 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 rub-bing. Later he developed his methods into shiatsu, a system of treatment that used thepressure of fingers upon specific points of the body to ease suffering. Namikoshi openeda clinic in Sapporo, and, eight years later, another in Tokyo. Eventually he began a schoolto train practitioners, and shiatsu has by now spread around the world.


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

Makiguchi Tsunesaburo, who formed the Buddhist social-political organization,Soka Gakkai, also found inspiration during his years in Hokkaido. He was born in 1871and 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, wherehis hard work and study led to a chance to attend Sapporo Normal School (which laterbecame Hokkaido University of Education). After his 1893 graduation he worked as ateacher, later an elementary school principal and a college instructor. In 1901 Makiguchileft Sapporo for Tokyo, where he wrote and worked for educational reform, but withoutmuch success. In 1930, with friends who were also mostly teachers, he founded SokaKyoiku Gakkai, or Value Creation Education Society, which combined principles of edu-cation and Buddhism. His association became an influential Buddhist organization andin 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 inprison the next year but his organization, renamed Soka Gakkai, remains vibrant today.It sponsored an influential political party, Komeito, and though the two organizationshave 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. IshikawaTakuboku, usually affectionately referred to simply as Takuboku, has been called Japan’spoet laureate, especially for his evocative thirty-one syllable poems called tanka. In hisearly 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 thejournal office and his school later that year, Takuboku moved briefly to Sapporo andthen on to Otaru, where he worked for a newspaper. The third of a year he spent therewas a happy time, but he had to leave after an office fight, and a friend obtained an edi-torial post for him in Kushiro. After only two and one-half months in the eastern Hok-kaido city he left for Tokyo, hoping to make his mark in the literary world. He died oftuberculosis when only twenty-five years old but his poetry is revered in Japan now. InHakodate is his family grave and in Kushiro, Otaru and Sapporo are monuments to hismemory. His time in Hokkaido inspired some of his poetry. Here is a poem he wroteabout Kushiro:

While ice is glisteningAnd plovers are crying,The winter moon shinesOver Kushiro Bay.21

Left-wing writer Kobayashi Takiji—usually called simply Takiji—was born in 1903and grew up on a poverty-stricken farm. His parents, lured by advertisements promis-ing a glowing future in Hokkaido, emigrated to the island only to find no respite frompoverty. An uncle made it possible for him to attend Otaru Commercial College; Koba-yashi then went to work at a bank in Otaru. By 1927 he had become interested in the prob-lems of working class people, and during the strike that year, he aided the protestingdockworkers. Takiji began writing about poor people’s struggles, the bitter life that facedmany of Hokkaido’s poor early in the twentieth century both on land and sea. Even thosefarmers who managed to make a small success as they developed their land would oftenlose 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 productivefound they ended as they had begun. They had fled the tenant farmer life in Honshu only

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to find themselves in the same situation in Hokkaido. Kobayashi’s picture of tenant lifein Hokkaido was all too accurate, for tenant farmers worked many acres of rural land; awealthy landlord could have a hundred tenants or more. A group of tenants went on strikein 1926. Takiji’s story, “The Absentee Landlord,” describes the farmers’ struggles anddecision to strike against their landlord’s cruel extortions. This was based on an actualevent; in the story and in reality, the peasants won out. After this story appeared, bankofficials 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 prisontorture. He was thirty-one years old.22

A play revolving about agricultural issues in Hokkaido’s Tokachi District in the 1930shas had a strong influence on Japanese dramatists since a magazine published it in 1937-38. Land of Volcanic Ash, by Kubo Sakae, is rarely staged because of its unwieldy lengthbut is often excerpted in anthologies. Born in Sapporo but raised mostly in Tokyo, Kuboset his great drama during the hard years of crop failure and depression in the 1930s. Theplay’s many characters include poor peasants, the mill manager, an agricultural researcherand an absentee landlord’s mistress. The plot examines significant economic issues includ-


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

ing soil depletion as well as describing the relationships between the characters. Land ofVolcanic Ash makes the area around Obihiro and its problems during the 1930s come alivefor the reader or viewer.23

Well-known sports figures, too, especially sumo champions, have come from Hok-kaido, 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 familyfled Soviet rule.24 Starting in 1936, he was a star pitcher for the team that later becamethe Yomiuri Giants and he had an impressive record, but as a foreigner, was kept underhouse arrest during World War II. Starfin died in a traffic accident in 1957 when onlyforty 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 muchof 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. Scien-tists have identified nine eruptions of this mountain from the seventeenth century to thepresent. These have included explosions, mud flows, falling ash and flowing rock frag-ments. 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 inDate and Abuta, to flee.

In 1926, Mt. Tokachi erupted. This 6,854 foot peak is in Daisetsuzan National Parkin Hokkaido’s central cluster of mountains. After several days of rumblings, on May 24came an earthquake and then a series of explosions draining the lake in the crater at thevolcano’s summit. Melted snow from the almost four foot snow pack poured down themountainside, carrying mud, plants and trees with it and wiping out several neighbor-hoods in the town of Kamifurano. “This means the destruction of the wealth created bythirty years of hard labor,” wrote the Japan Times.25 Exhibits in Kamifurano’s pioneermuseum 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 heelof the Oshima Peninsula about twenty miles north of Hakodate. It is visible from Hako-date Bay. During the 1929 eruption, ash fell on Hakodate for many hours and severedtrain service to Sapporo. Since Hakodate’s electricity came from power stations near themountain, the city went dark. Ash or lava covered villages and fields in the foothills; somevillagers 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 twoand one-half months after the convulsive June 17 explosion, minor volcanic activity con-tinued. The mountain then became quiescent until minor eruptions in the mid–1930s andanother in 1942, when an eruption altered Komagatake’s features and caused ash fall butno significant damage.

Given Hokkaido’s extensive wooded area, forest fire was a seasonal danger. Bad yearsincluded 1904 and 1906, when fires burned for several months and destroyed many acresof 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, firesinvaded Sapporo’s outskirts and for a time were burning on both sides of the railroadtracks connecting Sapporo and Otaru. Flames imperiled Sapporo Shrine but troops calledout to fight the fire protected the sacred precincts. In addition to regular firemen andmilitary troops, prisoners were enrolled to fight the Hokkaido fires; the entire islandseemed threatened. Yubari mine pits had to be sealed because flaming trees set afire pilesof coal stacked outside the mines. Fire destroyed most of the town of Wakkanai at Hok-kaido’s northern tip and flames even ravaged the lighthouse at Cape Soya. Little was leftof 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 sweptthrough and almost destroyed a small coastal town in the far north. Other fires that yearburned many acres of trees near Kitami. Unfortunately, these fires came at a time whenHokkaido lumber operators found a sudden demand for their products as war in Europeseriously cut into the availability of products from Scandinavia.

The worst disaster in Hokkaido during the prewar decades of the twentieth centurywas the great Hakodate fire of 1934. The city had seen earlier conflagrations. After a lateNovember 1878 fire that destroyed almost one thousand homes, officials decided tostraighten and widen the streets, but in December 1879, fire destroyed two thousandhouses in the heart of the city, about forty percent of it. A student in Sapporo noted, “Wemay say that all former Hakkodate [sic] has disappeared, but I hope new Hakkodate willsoon appear.”26 And it did. Since the area replanned and rebuilt after the 1878 fire hadescaped destruction in 1879, officials extended the new plan. The historic district’s per-pendicular streets date from this time. These “slopes,” straight streets that head directlyuphill, 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 dur-ing a high wind. The fire burned for nearly twelve hours, destroying thirteen thousandhouses and, all in all, about seventy per cent of the city. About three hundred peopledied. All the consulates except the American one were lost, along with several banks, thepost office and the telephone exchange; the center of the city was practically gone by thetime the fire burned itself out. Telegraphic messages afterward had to be sent by ship toAomori to be dispatched. It would be ten years before the city could recover, reportersestimated, and insurance companies faced the greatest claims ever made in Japan.

Fire due to a thoughtlessly discarded cigarette destroyed seventeen hundred dwellingsin May 1913. On August 3, 1916, fire broke out in the city again, once more cutting thetelegraph 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 tohelp fight the blaze but could not prevent all the damage.

An April 14, 1921, fire originated in a Hakodate movie theater, the Horaikan. Onemore time fire destroyed the city’s commercial center and, in all, about one-third ofHakodate. Yet again a strong wind helped spread the fire. The post office, newspaperoffice, railway passenger office, several schools and the British Consulate all saw destruc-tion in the blaze.

The story is repetitive because in times of high wind there seemed to be no way toprevent a fire in Hakodate from spreading rapidly, and the city, near Tsugaru Strait, oftenexperiences high winds. The greatest fire of all came in 1934, starting on the evening ofMarch 21 when a chimney collapsed. High winds fanning flames meant destruction againof a great part of the city. Many people could not flee the wild flames quickly enough;


others dashed for what they thought would be the safest place, the harbor, but 917 of themdrowned. In addition, more than two hundred succumbed to the cold; it was still win-ter 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 reminiscentof the Hiroshima landscape after the atomic bomb was dropped. Ships took some refugeesfrom the Hakodate fire to Aomori; tents, schools and barracks housed others temporar-ily. Planners hoped to rebuild the city with broader streets and more parkland and theyused experience gained in reconstructing Tokyo after its devastating 1924 fire.

The 1934 conflagration destroyed some 23,000 houses in Hakodate and more thantwo thousand people died, reported the New York Times, “Hakodate was an attractiveand remarkably clean city.”27 After the fire, perhaps eighty percent of it was gone, whilethe survivors suffered, many reporting visions of ghosts. The city quickly provided stop-gap work for needy men. Soon schools opened in temporary buildings. New buildingrestrictions came into force, requiring all new construction to be fire-resistant, and therehas not been a major conflagration since. To spur people on in reviving their city, theHakodate 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 scarsfrom the great fire, but it was in the years shortly after the fire that Sapporo overtookHakodate in population.

A very different sort of disaster spread throughout the entire world following the1929 stock market crash: the Great Depression. It affected Hokkaido as well as the restof Japan. Wages fell substantially for many, and by August 1931, more than six thousand

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

casual laborers in Hokkaido were out of work. Kobayashi Takeshi, who later becamehead of Nikkyoso, the Japanese teachers’ union, taught during the depression in a small-town Hokkaido elementary school which had no electricity and little heat. He noted thatwhen a window broke, it had to be covered with cloth. During winter cold, there was nochoice but to close the school. One observer writing in January 1932 estimated that some250,000 peasants in Hokkaido were barely able to survive. (The other northern prefec-tures also had large numbers on the edge of starvation.)28 Some farm families held outby obtaining loans or mortgages, which meant hard work and minimal living expensesfor years.

Whether the crop was good or bad during the depression years seemed to make lit-tle difference in whether the Dosanko prospered. In 1930, prices for Hokkaido rice werelow because the rice harvest was good all over Japan. These low prices exacerbated thesuffering caused by depression unemployment. When the rice crop was poor for the nextfew years, adversity continued and farmers abandoned much land that had proved mar-ginal for successful rice cultivation.

A Hokkaido farm girl wrote in her diary for July 1, 1934, that villagers had been sur-viving 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


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

only enough for a few days. Families worked long hours in their fields, but with no guar-antee that they would get a crop, especially because they had little fertilizer. What littlehelp the government furnished was not enough, and in July, a farmers’ deputation trav-eled 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 collectingand transporting pebbles to be used on a newly built road surface. Elementary school chil-dren received rice balls, he recalled, but not every day.29

After Japan gained control of Manchuria on the Asian mainland in 1931, Japanesesettlers who moved there to develop the land included many who had become disillu-sioned in Hokkaido. Some farm products, such as soybeans, became cheaper to producein Manchuria than in Hokkaido. Ironically, what had been learned in developing Hok-kaido was now adapted to use in opening up new regions in Manchuria, which divertedgovernment 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 ofJapan 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 thedecade, cold weather was not such a problem and the crops looked better, but laborshortages reduced Hokkaido farm output; more and more men were serving with Japa-nese military forces in China.

Hard times continued. The worldwide depression had wrecked the economy, cropshad failed for several years, and in 1938 the herring did not appear, causing destitutionamong fishermen and their families. Despite the depression, though, some new enter-prises began in Hokkaido. Japan’s first cheese factory opened in 1933 in the town ofHayakita; the firm later became famous for Snow Brand products and cheese became apart, although a very small one, of the Japanese diet. That same year, the largest pepper-mint processing factory yet built in the entire world took shape in Kitami. In 1934, Taket-suru Masataka, son of a sake brewer, founded a whisky distillery in Hokkaido, locatingit in Yoichi, a town on the Japan Sea about a dozen miles west of Otaru. Taketsuru feltthe climate there resembled that in Scotland, where he had studied applied chemistry andbecome interested in whisky distillation. His company grew into the internationally rec-ognized Nikka Whisky Distilling Company and continues to produce its Nikka brand inYoichi.

Hokkaido’s role in aviation

A pioneering tradition is central to the story of Hokkaido’s development, and thisland of pioneers played a role in the achievements of another group of pioneers: earlytwentieth century aviators. The island was an obvious stopping point on the shortest routeacross the Pacific Ocean. Attempts to cross the Pacific as one leg of a round-the-worldflight 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 reportswere not available for out-of-the-way places. Adequate landing sites were few and fuelcould be hard to find.

An obvious trans-ocean route crossed the Pacific via the Kamchatka Peninsula ofSiberia, 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 teamtrying 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 landand capable of carrying a 2600 pound load, which would include fuel, equipment andpassengers. One of the planes crashed in Alaska and the others had to wait in the Kurilsfor several days because of fog. They flew on one hop from a Kuril Island airstrip overHokkaido—where fog bothered them —to land in north Honshu. Landing strips hadbeen prepared in Hokkaido in case of emergency. The flight was successful; two planesaccomplished the entire trip around the world in 175 days.

In the same year, a British group attempted a round-the-world flight going in theopposite direction. The British fliers’ amphibious biplane, a Vickers Vulture, left South-ampton, England on March 25 and traveled via the Mediterranean Sea to India, Chinaand Japan, on July 14 landing briefly at Kushiro, Hokkaido. They headed on to the KurilIslands where they were grounded by fog for several days. Via Kamchatka, they headedon August 4 for the Aleutian Islands but ran into solid fog and attempted a landing onthe sea for fear of destruction on the cliffs of Bering Island, then totally obscured. Roughseas damaged the plane, making it unable to continue, but the crew managed to steer itto 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, theminesweeper Thiepval, made port in Hakodate after many trials in stormy seas. Thesailors spent an enjoyable two months there and when leaving for their home port atEsquimalt, 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 treatit particularly well, turning it into an alcoholic.

The most famous dirigible in history, the Graf Zeppelin, flew over Hokkaido on itsrecord-making 1929 journey. This was the only round-the-world dirigible flight evermade. The trip took three weeks and on Monday, August 19, people watched it pass overHokkaido as it flew on a lap from Friedrichshafen, Germany to Tokyo. When the airshipleft 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 stormyweather, a longer and more southerly route was chosen.

The depression years were enlivened for people the world over by the exploits ofpioneering aviators. More fliers, Japanese and foreign, tried to cross the Pacific, fly-ing between Tokyo and North America via Hokkaido, the Kurils and the Aleutians. Thefirst 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 andbeyond, when his plane was damaged in the Kurils. Meanwhile, on a projected round-the-world flight, well-known American flyers Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon werefined about $1000 each by Japanese authorities for flying over fortified zones in Hokkaidowithout permission. They completed their flight in early October 1931, becoming the firstmen to fly nonstop across the Pacific. Their route, too, took them over Hokkaido andthe Kurils.

Excitement and worldwide publicity came to Hokkaido when Col. Charles A. Lind-bergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh landed their single-engine pontoon planein Nemuro in August 1931. Mrs. Lindbergh later described the journey from New Yorkvia 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


the Lindberghs’ trip. Though this would not be a record-setting journey, it generatedreams of publicity because of the Lindberghs’ prominence.

The Lindberghs flew west from the United States to the U.S.S.R. in stages, and tookoff from Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, intending to land at Nemuro aftera nine hundred mile flight. Because of the fear of bad weather, however, Lindbergh askedthe United States Embassy in Tokyo to obtain permission from Japanese authorities toland in the Kuril Islands should it be necessary. As it happened, the journey to Nemuroproved to be far from easy for the famous couple. While they were flying southeast alongthe Kuril chain, radio reports came in that the fog which often envelops Nemuro duringsummer days was too dense to permit landing. Thus the Lindberghs came down by asmall island, Ketoy, almost midpoint in the Kuril chain, where the cloud cover was nottoo thick. Before trying to leave Ketoy, Lindbergh discovered an engine problem. A Japa-nese ship standing by towed the pontoon-equipped plane to a kidney-shaped bay of aboutfive square miles on nearby Simushir Island, where a calm bay would make the repairjob easier. Here the couple worked on repairs and slept on tatami mats in “a little shackbuilt for fox farmers.”31 Meanwhile, Japanese aeronautical engineers waited in Nemuroin case the colonel needed their help, but Lindbergh managed to repair the engine him-self.

From Muroton Bay on Simushir to Nemuro was an estimated 420 miles, but afterflying more than halfway to Nemuro, the Lindberghs learned that once again fog pre-vented 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 smalllake a few miles from Shana Village. Here officials wined and dined the aviators at aninn and gave them a sleeping room with tatami and futons; two quilts were stitched

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

together for the lanky colonel. It was not far to Nemuro, but the next day the Lindberghsonce again found they had to land en route, this time on Kunashir Island, just forty milesshort of their fogged-in goal. They stayed in a hut and, finally, successfully made the half-hour flight to Nemuro the next day, August 24, 1931. The town had made elaborate plansto welcome the Lindberghs and newsmen had converged there, filling all available hotelrooms for the five days they had to wait until the famous aviators arrived. Some ten thou-sand people lined the Nemuro beach road, watching for the Lindbergh plane. The colo-nel and his wife received a formal welcome, rested, ate, gave an interview and preparedfor the final leg of their trip to Tokyo.

In the midst of their travails on the way to Nemuro, Anne Morrow Lindbergh con-sulted some notes she had with her regarding weather patterns for the Kamchatka Penin-sula and the Kuril Islands (which she called by their Japanese name, Chishima): “Averagedays of fog in August—28.” Although she may not have realized it, Nemuro usually hasa similar amount of fog during that month. The Lindberghs probably did not know thatFrench ship’s captain L.A.A. Simonet de Maisonneuve, sailing in the area in August andSeptember 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 dayshe was in the islands were foggy. The island chain’s name—Kuril—comes from an Ainuword meaning “smoky.”32

Despite the excitement among Japanese people that Charles Lindbergh had made ahistoric flight to their land, his journey caused apprehension, too, for it demonstratedthe possibility of air invasion from the north. Moreover, the flight indicated to Trippethat weather problems would preclude the use of the northern route for scheduledtrans–Pacific flights.

The Lindberghs were not the only foreign travelers to come to Hokkaido during thedepression years, though their appearance may have been the most spectacular. In 1936a total eclipse of the sun lured foreign travelers to northeastern Hokkaido which was (andis) 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 pos-sibility, Japanese eclipse-seekers had scattered to different sites on Hokkaido. Many whocame to view the unusual astronomical event did see it, but a group which had traveledfrom Cambridge, England viewed nothing but cloud.

By the late 1930s, general travelers could fly to Hokkaido through an air link fromTokyo. Prominent world figures who stopped in Hokkaido during that decade includedHelen Keller. Babe Ruth came with an American all-star team which played against theNippon All Stars in 1934. (The game in Hakodate was delayed due to rain, but eight thou-sand people came the next day and saw Ruth hit a single.)

Refugees came to Hokkaido, too—from the Soviet Union. Some White Russiansfleeing the country after the Bolshevik revolution ended up on the island. Forty-sevenof them were living in Hakodate in 1932 when twenty-one Soviet fishermen in severalboats escaping the desperate conditions they faced in the U.S.S.R. asked for asylum inHokkaido. Hokkaido authorities temporarily interned the fishermen in Hakodate. TheDocho decided to send them back, and though local Russians tried everything they couldto prevent this, the refugees were returned and their fate remains unknown. Soon, ten-sion and war enveloped Japan, and some of the Russians living in Hokkaido were sus-pected of spying for the Soviet Union.


The end of an era

Hokkaido development had proceeded slowly in the first few decades of the twen-tieth 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 orpowerful on the island, people who had grown up on Hokkaido perhaps hearing theirparents’ stories of the sacrifice and drudgery of the early days. Having the example oftheir 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 Hokkaidochanged as it did in all Japan.

As early as 1931, the Hokkaido National Defense Assembly, a gathering of two thou-sand island people—some prominent, some unknown and some military, some civilian—gathered to support Japanese martial activities in Manchuria. On the other end of thespectrum, communist spies remained active on the island.

In a way, the prewar era in Hokkaido ended with the visit of Emperor Hirohito in1936. He spent two and one-half weeks on the island, but the centerpiece of his visit wasattendance at army maneuvers on the Ishikari plain. (During the maneuvers, a typhoonswept across the island; several soldiers taking part in the war games died when a land-slide engulfed them.) The Emperor spent days touring the island, as far as Nemuro, Hok-kaido’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 tothe island during these weeks, and the Japan Times hoped that the opportunity to see theisland firsthand would encourage official efforts at development, editorializing that “thegovernment should and must stand ready to lend a helping hand to those with enoughambition and courage to develop this northern island, this land which is primarily to thepeople 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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11 War and Occupation

Starting in the early 1930s, Japan drifted into conflict against China; In 1937 thishostility became full-fledged war. In December 1941, following Japanese surprise attacksin Asia and Hawaii, war became worldwide, not to end until 1945. Hokkaido suffered lit-tle damage in World War II compared to the rest of Japan, but the civilian populationhad to endure food and fuel shortages and Hokkaido development was no longer a pri-ority except as it contributed to the war effort. Even after the war ended, dislocation con-tinued, as Americans occupied Japan for almost seven years. During these years, returningsoldiers, refugees, food shortages and labor unrest all complicated recovery in Hokkaido.

War

Hokkaido survived the war years nearly unscathed in contrast to the Japanese heart-land but throughout the war troops were stationed on the island to protect Japan’s north-ern flank. Naval forces in the area patrolled against any invasion coming from the northand submarines based at Hakodate guarded Tsugaru Strait. Sapporo was the headquartersfor the Northern District Army as well as the main supply depot for island forces, andChitose was the island’s military aviation center. At Hakodate and near Cape Soya atHokkaido’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 thou-sand additional troops.

In the early 1930s, a brigade from Asahikawa participated in Japan’s conquest ofManchuria; Hokkaido men were felt to be well-suited to fight in the climate and terrainthere. Facing Soviet troops in the Battle of Nomonhan in 1939 on the border betweenMongolia and Manchuria, the Seventh Division’s Twenty-sixth Regiment lost about sev-enty percent of its men. Later, in the Pacific War, twenty-five hundred Seventh Divisionmen served in the Solomon Islands to secure Guadalcanal from American assault. Fewerthan eight percent of them survived to return to Japan. The men of Asahikawa’s SeventhDivision thus hold an honored position in Japanese military history.

As the Pacific War began, the Kuril Islands played a significant part in Japanese andAmerican 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 Hokkaidoand the Japanese heartland.1 Starting in 1940, the Japanese constructed fortifications onthe Kurils in expectation of a possible Russian move against them. After the Nazis invadedthe 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 betweenJapan and her northern neighbor came to seem almost inevitable. In addition to North-ern District Army troops stationed on the Kurils, the Japanese Navy set up its Fifth Fleetheadquarters on Paramushir Island, far north in the island chain. In search of oil, Japanconsidered invading north Sakhalin and the Siberian mainland. Had this northern strat-egy been chosen, Hokkaido as well as Karafuto and the Kurils would have been in themidst of the action, but Japanese strategists decided to turn towards Southeast Asiainstead. Thus in December 1941 Japanese forces attacked Hawaii, Hong Kong, the Philip-pines and the Malay Peninsula.

Japan made some significant moves in the north. The carriers for the Pearl Harborattack were gathered at a hidden bay on Iturup Island in the Kurils, an ideal place to main-tain 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 Aleut-ian 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 north-ernmost base of operations from Paramushir to Chitose.

After December 7, 1941, Japan feared possible American assault upon essential instal-lations 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 northern-most islands. In February 1944, American ships began shelling Kurils bases at night. ByMarch, American planes were bombing islands in the chain only five hundred miles fromHokkaido. Speculation was that the United States could use the Aleutians as a spring-board to bomb Hokkaido. U.S. surface ships and submarines attacked ships travelingbetween Hokkaido and the islands, despite fog that hampered the American effort. Theraids kept Japanese forces busy defending and strengthening their installations againstpossible invasion. More troops were dispatched to the islands, but through the middleof 1944, approximately ten percent of them died en route.2 Later, Japanese troops wereneeded more desperately elsewhere, and from October some were taken from the north-ern islands. Allied forces might have stormed the Japanese base at Paramushir in con-junction with a Soviet declaration of war against Japan, but the U.S.S.R. proclamationdid not come until just days before Japan’s surrender in 1945. Meanwhile, American shipsthat were damaged while attacking the Kurils headed for the nearby Kamchatka penin-sula, where Soviets quietly allowed emergency docking.

Mines and submarines threatened shipping in and near northern Japan during thewar 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 orderto ship goods to the U.S.S.R. in support of the struggle against Hitler. Before Americajoined the war in December 1941, the U.S. government began to make supplies availablethrough 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 regu-lations, ending almost all trade with Japan while at the same time attempting to send goodsthrough Japanese waters to the U.S.S.R.) The Kurils controlled passage to Vladivostokand 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 neu-tral at the time, the Japanese allowed most of the ships through without attack, but onlyunder 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 northand south of Hokkaido; Japanese forces sank nine of the ships and U.S. submarines tor-pedoed Japanese vessels. On October 11, 1943, Japanese defenders on Hokkaido, nearWakkanai, bombed and sank a U.S. submarine, the Wahoo, in La Perouse Strait. The suband its crew had gained the reputation as the most successful American submarine in theservice. It had sunk four or more Japanese ships in the strait, so its presence in the areawas known. Now a memorial to the men who were lost stands at Cape Soya. Americanand 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 theWahoo 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 armedservices had conscripted. After working in Hokkaido, the Koreans were being taken tothe northern Kurils to build military installations, but 655 of the men died when the shipsank.

For the Japanese, transportation links between Hokkaido and Honshu grew moreand more vital during the war as U.S. forces moved ever closer, cutting off Japan’s abil-ity to import needed goods from areas such as Southeast Asia. Hokkaido’s naturalresources, especially coal, and her industrial and agricultural production became morecrucial than ever to the war effort. Knowing this, the American military strove to disruptshipping from Hokkaido. This was a challenge, because Japan had laid minefields inimportant channels. At the beginning of the war, much of the cargo sent from Hokkaidoto Honshu went by sea directly to ports in the Tokyo region. But allied attacks at seaincreased off Honshu’s east coast while Hokkaido’s resources became ever more neces-sary. The rail ferry fleet from Hakodate to Aomori grew from seven to twelve boats andshipments 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 tobe used on the Tsugaru Strait crossing just as the ship was steaming up the coast to beginservice. And despite Japanese mines, in June 1945 eight U.S. submarines successfully nav-igated La Perouse Strait; Admiral Chester Nimitz, chief naval officer in the Pacific The-ater, considered the trip through this strait one of the most perilous routes submarineshad to travel during the war.3 Once American ships navigated the strait, no longer couldthe Japanese assume that the Sea of Japan was a safe refuge. U.S. Submarine Comman-der 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 break-water and intercepting two hoping to enter the harbor. One of the ships was a merchant-man, 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 ofOkhotsk for the first time. An American presence near the Kuril chain and in the Sea ofOkhotsk endangered Japanese fishermen; with food short in the Japanese islands, disrup-tion 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 chargeon a railroad track, hoping to blow up the first train to come by. It worked despite thedefenses on Karafuto poised against a possible American invasion.

In mid–July 1945 came the first and only extensive American attack on Hokkaido,


though a few reconnaissance missions had earlier flown over the island. Americans knewof Honshu dependence on Hokkaido coal and of the crucial role played by the ferriesbetween the two islands. Eighty percent of the freight carried across the strait wasHokkaido coal, absolutely necessary for Honshu industry.4 Aerial reconnaissance pho-tographs showed ports such as Hakodate overflowing with ships ready to transport thefreight.

On July 14, planes from Admiral William F. Halsey’s carrier fleet bombed northernHonshu and selected Hokkaido targets, especially airfields. This was the first attack fromAmerican ships on any of Japan’s home islands. Given the strong possibility of cloudcover or fog, the raid’s success was impressive. (The action had been postponed for a daydue 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 shellsat coastal installations. Several lighter ships also pounded Muroran, impairing the city’sindustrial capacity. During the two-day attack, fighters from aircraft carriers heavilydamaged rail and port facilities at Akkeshi, Hakodate and Kushiro. The planes droppedbombs on Tsugaru Strait, too, sinking eight of the twelve rail ferries and putting the oth-ers out of commission.

Hokkaido’s southern coastal cities bore the brunt of the action. The New York Timesreported Kushiro “almost completely destroyed”—an overstatement, though the attackkilled 192 people and injured more than 500. Japanese officials announced that Hako-date, Muroran, Obihiro and Kushiro had been bombed but that damage was “believedto 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 seventypercent of the city, a survivor estimated years later. The main targets in Muroran werethe Japan Steel Company and the Wanishi Iron Works, but with rain and fog obscuringthe 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 threeof 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 work-ing in the Muroran ironworks. Many Muroran residents fled to nearby mountainsidetunnels 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 previ-ously carried across Tsugaru Strait. Historian Richard B. Frank characterized the July14–15 raid as “the most devastating single strategic-bombing success of all the campaignsagainst Japan” because of the damage inflicted on shipping routes between Hokkaidoand Honshu. Americans found “little or no defense” by the Japanese, only some antiair-craft 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 work-ers are back at work.”7

On July 28, American planes dropped leaflets on eleven Japanese cities, warning ofimminent bombing raids. Hakodate was the only Hokkaido city to be warned, but it wasnot 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. Theseand 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 inva-sion plan ensued: a strike from the Aleutians through the Kurils and Hokkaido to theJapanese heartland. U.S. planners showed interest in attacking Japan’s main islands fromthe Kurils since the distance from the American military base on Attu in the Aleutiansto the North Kurils was less than seven hundred miles. Military strategists seriously con-sidered such a plan but rejected it for various reasons, one of the important ones beingweather. When it was not winter in the Kurils and eastern Hokkaido, fog often obscuredthe land. Moreover, amphibious landings on the Kurils would be problematic because ofthe great clusters of seaweed in the waters around the islands. The B-29s promised to beready in 1944 would have such a long range that they could bomb even the main Japaneseislands from the Aleutians, skipping over the Kurils. Finally, whether the Soviets wouldallow an operation via the Kurils to use support facilities in Kamchatka was question-able.

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 immi-nent attack on Hokkaido. These plans included fake radio messages during Allied broad-casts in addition to leaflets directed to Hokkaido citizens advising them how to avoid thecoming warfare. The goal was to keep Japanese troops in the north, away from invasionsites. After atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, neithera 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 possiblecities 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 plannedto send large four-engine bombers on suicide one-way flights from Chitose to Americancities. Even east coast cities could have been bombed, reported the New York Times shortlyafter 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, for-ests, mines and factories, but also disrupted life and as time went on caused great hard-ship.

In the early 1930s, the army encouraged the formation of civilian organizations tosupport Japan’s military efforts. Soon after Japanese troops invaded Manchuria in Sep-tember 1931, several thousand people, including prominent Hokkaido leaders, partici-pated in founding the Hokkaido National Defense Assembly to encourage Japanese effortsin Manchuria. Meanwhile, for strategic reasons, tourists could not visit the Kuril Islands.(A special exception was made for the Lindberghs.) In preparation for possible futuremilitary action it was in Hokkaido in 1936 that the Japanese Army held its last full-scalemaneuvers before expanding beyond China.

Richard Storry, later a renowned historian of Japan, arrived in the country inmid–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 theirrelatives cheered. In the three years he lived in Hokkaido, 1937–1940, each time Storry


traveled to the island he was grilled by officials—detectives, he wrote—both on the ferryfrom Honshu and on the train.9

Air raid drills began in the 1930s, and in Hokkaido, fear of the Soviet Union grewas international tensions rose. Authorities detained a Soviet vessel in Hakodate in 1938for a month and a half, claiming that it was disguised as a passenger liner when it wasreally a research vessel trespassing in a fortified area. By the mid–1930s, tourists were pro-hibited from photography in areas labeled as strategic zones, including Tsugaru Straitsand Hakodate. After 1940, newspapers were not allowed to print any photographs ofHakodate and by then, some parts of Hokkaido in addition to the Kurils were off limitsto foreign travelers. Neill James, an American writer who traveled in Japan in 1940, sug-gested that “if war comes, the partially fortified island may be lost to Russia.” James stayedin Hokkaido’s best hotels while traveling that year and found that even the rice servedto a foreign visitor was mixed with potatoes or millet.10 Also inadequate were supplies ofcharcoal, which was heavily used as a stove fuel in Hokkaido.

Hokkaido was not as heavily protected as Japan’s heartland, but some seventy-fivethousand 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 atTsugaru Strait. Other mined areas included the Nemuro and La Perouse Straits. The navyhad patrol bases at Hakodate, Urakawa, Akkeshi and Wakkanai, with fuel depots at fiveor more ports around the island.11 Japanese communities also maintained local beachdefenses against possible invasion.

Island residents’ lives inevitably changed due to war, especially after the United Statesentered the conflict. As war shipments between Hokkaido and Honshu came to domi-nate transportation links between the islands, Hokkaido residents had to rely more andmore on local products, especially foods. City dwellers raised garden vegetables and neigh-borhood families often cooperated in growing and sharing produce. This was part of theHokkaido frontier spirit, they felt. Food crops replaced the grass and flowers of Sapporo’sOdori Park. Food was rationed throughout Japan, even such staples as miso and soysauce, 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 mil-let when rice grew scarce. As the war continued, officials urged potato cultivation on theother islands in order to combat food shortages but had difficulty bringing seed potatoesfrom Hokkaido, where they were plentiful. As the military forces drafted more and moreyoung men, the elderly, women and the young were left to raise the food crops. Work onthe farm became more difficult, as many Hokkaido horses were drafted for war service,most being sent to North China. School authorities sometimes dismissed Hokkaido stu-dents from schools to assist with farm work and young women in youth groups on otherislands were dispatched to Hokkaido to help harvest the crops. Women took over otherwork, too, even mining. Though underground work in mines by women had been bannedin 1933, women were called back to the Yubari mines a decade later and worked under-ground for three years.

By 1942, Hokkaido householders had to donate their metal pots and pans to the wareffort. Even temple bells and bronze statues were lost to the national need. Hakodate’sOrthodox church sacrificed its chandeliers and most of its candelabra as well as its famousbells (but in 1983 an expert bell caster on Honshu donated new ones to the church). Thecannons from Benten Cape Fort in Hakodate that Admiral Enomoto moved to a ship in1868 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 in1948.)

Even though Hokkaido was a prime source of newsprint, it became scarce on theisland and eleven Hokkaido newspapers merged to create the Hokkaido Shimbun, whichhas been Hokkaido’s dominant newspaper ever since. Contributing to the newsprintshortage, authorities took over a newsprint factory in Ebetsu in 1943 in order to manu-facture airplanes from plywood, but by the end of the war only two planes had beenassembled.

Coal dominated Japan’s energy supply and keeping the coal mines productive becamecrucial during wartime. Using as much Hokkaido coal as possible in Hokkaido industrybecame more and more important. The steel mills in Muroran had been using NorthChina 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 coalmines at Kushiro closed or mostly shut down because of the growing difficulty of ship-ping the coal as Japanese transport vessels were damaged or sunk.

Because so many Japanese were serving in the armed forces, many Koreans and someChinese under contract as well as Chinese and western prisoners of war toiled in Hok-kaido mines and construction projects. Though an International Labor Organizationconvention prohibited the use of forced laborers in underground mines, in mid–1945more than eighty percent of the Koreans and more than sixty percent of the Chineseworkers in Hokkaido were doing such work. By war’s end, more than three-fourths ofthe 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 broughtin 1944 to work as miners, more than a third of them died. In all, about sixteen thousandChinese 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 fortythousand. At least 41 of the 640 Koreans working in 1943 at one Hokkaido mine diedthere. Some Koreans who escaped were tortured, like Kang Myongbong, who worked forHokutan at Yubari. Each time he tried to escape, his punishment was worse. After histhird recapture, he was beaten and his ankles tied with ropes wetted to tighten them. Hepassed out from pain and after the ropes were released he could not walk at first. He didescape successfully when he tried it a fourth time. Given the labor shortage in wartimeJapan, successful escapees generally had no trouble finding alternative employment, espe-cially in construction. Showing emphatically how they felt, many Koreans and Chineseforced to work in the mines walked out the day the Emperor broadcast Japan’s surren-der.12

To increase the electricity supply, the Hokkaido Electric Power Company built twodams in the island’s north, on the Uryu River west of Nayoro. Conscripted Koreansworked along with Japanese laborers at the site from 1937 to 1943. The men also built arailway line, now abandoned, and the Uryu power station. But the privations suffered bythe workers—overwork, illness and malnutrition—detract from the lake’s creation. Awaterside memorial temple commemorates the two hundred or more Japanese and Koreanworkers who died during the construction.

Hokkaido witnessed an unusual event in the midst of wartime troubles: the birthof a volcano. Mimatsu Masao, a postmaster in the town of Sobetsu on the shore of LakeToya 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


beginning in June 1944. Lava first broke the crust in December and by September 1945the mountain reached its maximum height, 1344 feet. It acquired the name Showa Shin-zan, or Showa Era New Mountain. (The Showa Era is the period during which Hirohitoserved as emperor, 1926–1989.) Because the mountain appeared during the war, scien-tists could not study the eruption. Mimatsu did keep careful records of Showa Shinzan’sgrowth, however. It destroyed some fifty houses as well as many acres of farmland.

Showa Shinzan created problems for Japan’s military government. To protect againstAmerican air raids, officials were enforcing blackout regulations—while Showa Shinzanspouted 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 thatthen traversed the area. Since the line carried iron ore for Muroran’s steel mills, the mil-itary kept townsfolk busy repairing the line, but it finally had to be relocated. When Japanonce again became prosperous, the new mountain became a tourist attraction. A nearbymuseum dedicated to Mimatsu Masao tells Showa Shinzan’s story.

The Dosanko, as all Japanese, found wartime life disrupted more and more. Whilemost 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, evenschoolgirls received training in using bamboo spears to resist the American soldiers whowere expected to invade. Civilians found travel restrictions tightened, with rail passen-ger cars converted to freight cars, first class suspended and tickets rationed. On the otherhand, while in the early days Hokkaido figured prominently in military policy, action shifted

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

southward as the war ground on, and programs such as rationing were not so carefullyenforced in Hokkaido.

Late in the war, the Japanese government decided that some two hundred thousandpeople whose homes in Tokyo had been destroyed by bombs should be resettled on Hok-kaido, where they would grow more food for the war effort. The first groups arrived inJuly 1945. The press described the warm welcome they could expect and did receive; localpeople had done all they could to prepare land and housing and they donated tools andhousehold utensils to the newcomers. The migrants were “farmer soldiers,” just like thelate nineteenth century tondenhei, for in 1945 the need to grow food for the nation wasas crucial as was readiness to protect Hokkaido. Some of the Hokkaido villagers prepar-ing for the new residents were themselves descendants of the tondenhei and a few of theearly pioneers were still on hand. Bombers attacked the third group of 1945 migrants enroute to Hokkaido, however. Far fewer than the total number envisioned actually madethe trek north, and within a few months, many returned to Honshu, having found thatthe reality in Hokkaido was very different from what they had been told. The bush-cov-ered land they received was not ready for cultivation, as promised, food supplies wereinadequate and housing not suitable for the cold winter.

Prisoners and escapees

During the war, living in Hokkaido in addition to the Dosanko were people fleeingthe heartland, conscripted Chinese and Koreans and Allied prisoners of war. Several POWcamps were located in Hokkaido mining communities: Akabira, Utashinai and Ashibetsuon 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 Hok-kaido also held prisoners. Some men worked in the cement plant at Kamiiso. Someunloaded boatloads of fish and coal in Hakodate and a few were kept at Northern Armyheadquarters in Sapporo. Some British, Australian and American prisoners spent severalyears in Hokkaido, as did a number of Dutch prisoners taken in fighting on Java (nowpart of Indonesia but then in the Dutch East Indies). One British prisoner captured inJava, Frank Blanton, remembered the time he spent as a prisoner working on the Hako-date docks throughout a Hokkaido winter as “the most difficult time of my life.” Morethan 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 impris-oned in several places, finally landing in Hokkaido in 1944 and 1945. Most AmericanPOWs brought to Hokkaido did not arrive until about six weeks before the Japanese sur-render, though the prisoners obviously had no idea that war would end so soon. At war’send, 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 afew greens and some thin soup of little nutritional value. Occasionally the men receivedpartly spoiled dried fish. The prisoners toiling in mines worried about dangerous con-ditions; many men had to work in mines that had long been closed and thus containedunsafe, often rotted supporting timbers.

One American prisoner, Chester M. Biggs, Jr., was serving with the Marine detach-ment at the American embassy in Beijing, China when war between Japan and the United


States began in December 1941. With tension growing, the American government hadplanned to evacuate these Marines on December 9, but Japanese forces appeared Decem-ber 8 and took everyone prisoner. The men were held in China, but after American planesbegan bombing eastern China in 1945, the prisoners were moved to Japan, sent north ontrains, and on the fourth of July a group including Biggs boarded a ferry in Aomori togo to Hokkaido. From Hakodate the men went by train to Akabira and finally walkedseveral miles to their new prison camp. This was in Utashinai, a town between moun-tain 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 workin a section of the mine that had been opened up at one time but not worked for manyyears. The men worked a ten hour shift or longer with time out for one meal, but theirsupervisors were Koreans also working under duress who did not press the Americanstoo hard. Several of the POWs went at the face of the rock with jackhammers, and oth-ers shoveled away the chunks cut out of the wall. Yet others brought in timbers to sup-port the roof of the area being mined out. Cave-ins in the old mine made prisonersuneasy, and to add to the prisoners’ troubles, the men at Utashinai heard about the harshwinter weather there and wondered how they would survive it with their ragged clothesand inadequate diet.

Prisoners held elsewhere in Hokkaido also have recounted difficult experiences. Foodsupply was such a problem in Japan by then that some prisoners in Hokkaido even receivedgrasshoppers to eat. Some of the Japanese prison employees and guards treated POWsbrutally. By the summer of 1945, Japanese manpower was so short that even teen-agedboys became prison guards in Hokkaido. One older guard, obviously not fit for serviceat the front, whacked the prisoners with his artificial arm.

The war ended before the prisoners who arrived in 1945 had to face a Hokkaidowinter. Repatriation came only after those in the heartland had been rescued but fooddrops to the camps helped the Hokkaido prisoners in the meantime and within a monthafter war’s end, they were on their way back home.

During the occupation that followed the war, American officials charged some Hok-kaido prison camp officials and guards with war crimes because of inhumane treatmentof 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 prisoncommander Hirate Kaichi, was executed. Charges against him included starving prison-ers, 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 OswaldWynd. Born in Tokyo with dual citizenship, in wartime he served in Britain’s NinthIndian Division. Captured by Japanese troops in Malaya in 1941, he was taken to Hok-kaido. His dual citizenship could have meant execution because he was a Japanese citi-zen fighting against Japan, but he was incarcerated instead and his knowledge of Japaneselanguage and customs benefited his fellow prisoners. Wynd is best known for his novelThe 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 sta-tion but was arrested by the kenpeitai, the Japanese military police, who accused him ofspying for the U.S.S.R. Sent to a camp at Otaru, he suffered from cold weather, dirt, poorfood and illness. He tried to escape, hoping to find a fishing boat that he could sail toRussian 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 con-finement and interrogated for many hours each day. After a trial, he was sentenced tothree years in prison, which he began serving in Sapporo, where again he suffered fromthe cold. Not quite two-and-one-half years after his arrest came his release, on Septem-ber 4, 1945. He stayed briefly at Sapporo hotels, where local Franciscan monks befriendedand fed him. Near the end of September, Americans, now in occupation, arrested Hol-land (it was thought he might try to escape to Manchuria) and took him to prison inYokohama, pending possible charges of aiding the enemy. A few months later, the Amer-icans 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 outtreasonous or near-treasonous activities during the war.

Perhaps the most prominent war prisoner in Hokkaido was David Marshall, describedby the New York Times as “one of the founding fathers of Singapore.” Among the lead-ers of Singapore’s drive for independence from Britain, Marshall became the first electedchief minister of the Singapore government when the island gained increased politicalautonomy as a prelude to independence. Later, for fifteen years he served as Singapore’sambassador to France. Wartime military service came before Marshall achieved theseoffices, though. After capture by the Japanese in 1942 while he was serving in Britishcolonial 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 inHokkaido, 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 inJapan led by Richard Sorge during World War II. While the Japanese executed Sorge forhis 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. Wartimeshortages of food and fuel would have made that infamous prison even more hellish thanusual.

A group of people brought to Hokkaido from American territory for internment dur-ing 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 militaryinformation with any American troops who might appear, in September the Japanese sentthe Aleuts to Japan, where they were taken to Otaru. Here they lived in a railroad employ-ees’ dormitory and many worked in a nearby soap factory. Some labored at digging andpulverizing 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 Aleutsreported 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 timeswould have been very different than food they usually ate. Lunch would be just one ballof 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 win-ter 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. Othersdied from beriberi or starvation. Of the forty-five Aleuts in Otaru—including five bornthere—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,


the Aleuts described their treatment by the Japanese: “We told of the beatings they hadgiven us, of the months of cold and sickness and starvation. We told of our people whodied of neglect.” While they were still in Otaru before repatriation, they happened upona “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 Aleu-tians (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 whichthey danced.18

A few small groups of prisoners among the men kept on Hokkaido managed toescape 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 Kam-chatka but were captured after just a few days of walking. Two American sailors whoescaped made their way to the coast where they found a rowboat with a sail. Knowinglittle 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 forlong, it turned out; the war had just ended.

One American airman whose plane was lost in the mid–July 1945 raids on Hokkaidospent an adventurous several months on the island. Rear gunner Oliver Rasmussen’s mis-sion was to destroy the kamikaze training base that had been established at Chitose, buthis Helldiver ran into 3435 foot Mt. Tarumae near Tomakomai when the pilot becamedisoriented. 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 ChippewaIndian, he had grown up in the northern Wisconsin woods where he learned the skillshe would need to survive in Hokkaido. He was able to extract some emergency rationsfrom the wrecked plane and make his way with difficulty to a secluded spot in the for-est near a water source. Here he rested up, using his parachute as a blanket or sleepingbag while his injuries began to heal. After about two weeks, his rations ran out, and hesubsisted on milk, vegetables and rice he stole from farms. Finally, about two monthsafter his crash, the sight of American planes overhead not attempting evasion and notfacing 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’sgreat adventure ended. He resumed his military career, but nothing in his life thereafterequaled the challenge of his fight for survival in the Hokkaido woods. He considered him-self 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 discov-ered on Hokkaido more than twelve years after the war ended.19 A peasant who was kid-napped in 1944 and brought from China to work in Hokkaido mines, he escaped not longbefore war’s end and hid out in a cave in Hokkaido’s wilderness until his discovery in1958. Years later he sued for damages and the Tokyo District Court ordered the Japanesegovernment to pay his heirs twenty million yen. (Liu died in 2000.) A higher court over-turned the decision, however. A number of other Chinese brought to Hokkaido to workmainly 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 lastedmany years. More than a decade after the war, Soviet mines were still being found inTsugaru 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 occupationregime under the direction of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for theAllied Powers. (Thus the occupation bureaucracy became known as SCAP.) Americanforces dismantled Japanese military organizations and established both civil and mili-tary authority. Until the occupation ended in 1952, SCAP set policies and took action inmany fields, working to establish security, make adequate food supplies available andrebuild both a civilian government and the nation’s economy. Americans wrote a newconstitution 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 militaryfacilities, such as the base at Chitose, and made their Hokkaido headquarters at CampCrawford, which they built on the land of the Kaitakushi farm at Makomanai. CampCrawford 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 thou-sand people, largely to defend Japan against possible Soviet incursion. While occupyingtroops 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 OkushiriIsland, punching in a primitive road some six or eight miles long for access. Japanese work-ers, apparently including convicts, prepared the site. The Americans established an airstation at Wakkanai in Hokkaido’s far north to keep an eye on the U.S.S.R. and SCAPalso ran nonmilitary affairs in Hokkaido, though not giving the island any special con-sideration. When occupation authorities paid any attention to the northern island, it wasto deter Soviet action.

Arriving in Sapporo in October 1945, American officials imposed a curfew for theJapanese but after just two days, rescinded the order; the city was not dangerous. Whenthe Americans first came, they saw no women or children, for all were hidden away orsent out of the city. They soon returned. Possibly the occupiers were dangerous, how-ever — when American paratroopers first entered Sapporo, some of them apparentlyerupted in sex, violence and looting.21 The American base at Chitose attracted vice anddrunkenness and this led to bad feelings between Japanese and Americans. Brothelsenticed a number of GIs, who also regularly used the black market that sprang up. Occu-pation troops and local residents sometimes fought each other, occasionally even shoot-ing Japanese or Americans to death. Drinking often exacerbated the violence. Soldiersinvolved faced court-martial and even the death penalty. Most Americans, of course, gotalong well with the local citizenry.

The immediate problem facing the Dosanko was not danger from the Soviets (or theAmerican occupying forces) but the continuing shortages, especially of food. Though theisland had seen very little war damage, its people suffered from hunger, as was the casein 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 Japanesehad controlled before the war. With shortages of goods came inflation. Hungry peoplesometimes resorted to selling elegant kimonos or other family treasures in order to payhigh black market prices for scarce food. Also available illegally were American suppliesfrom military bases.

Hokkaido as well as the rest of Japan faced possible famine in the 1945-46 winter,


officials feared. The crop year had been bad—the 1945 rice harvest in Hokkaido was lessthan half of normal—and the dislocations caused by war and subsequent occupation didnot 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 tothe number of people to feed. Many had fled Karafuto when Soviet troops appeared afew 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. InSeptember 1946, seventy thousand refugees were reported in Hokkaido, about sixty per-cent of them without homes. Not only was finding food for these people a problem, sowas housing. Officials opened large public buildings and former barracks to house theneedy, some of the structures holding more than a thousand people.

Also among desperate people were the new settlers who had been urged by the Japa-nese government to leave threatened and bombed-out areas in Tokyo to open up newland in Hokkaido for agriculture, only to find that all the good land was already beingfarmed; if the land was worthwhile, settlers found they could not clear it because therewere neither horses nor fuel for bulldozers to do the work. These twentieth century pio-neers had practically no resources to see themselves through a hard Hokkaido winter.

Occupation authorities established prices, rationed supplies and sent specifiedamounts to communities throughout Japan, sometimes earmarking imports for fooddeficit areas. For some time, however, authorities did not set prices that would allowfarmers to meet expenses. Many farmers then refused to sell their crops. In addition, infra-structure deterioration made food distribution difficult. Fish rotted on docks for lack ofcold storage facilities and railroad cars. In mid–November 1945, when desperate villagersin four small Hokkaido mining communities stole eighteen thousand pounds of grainand flour by seizing the contents of farmers’ carts and forcing entry to a flour mill, theNew York Times reported Japan’s “first major food riot.”22

By the end of the year, occupation representatives and Docho authorities beganworking with city officials, labor union leaders and farmers for both short and long termsolutions. Officials also started bypassing the rationing system and buying rice directlyfrom farmers so that it would be available to residents, especially those of Sapporo andMuroran who were reportedly “on the brink of starvation” in early January 1946. Supplyproblems continued, however, and at the end of April, Sapporo officials reported thatthey had only enough rice available to feed the city’s people for one day. All Japan requiredfood rationing but Hokkaido’s food shortage was the worst in the nation, a newspaperreported in May 1946.23 At that time, distribution of food allotments on the northernisland was two months behind schedule. In midyear, General MacArthur ordered extrafood supplies be sent to two regions: the Tokyo-Yokohama area and Hokkaido.

Food production in Japan slowly grew, but shortages continued and supplies ofrationed goods continued to lag a month or more behind schedule in Hokkaido. SCAPofficials tried to stem black market sales of rice, and were urged to arrest farmers whodid not supply the specified amount of rice to official markets but instead sent it to theblack 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 claimedthey 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 thelack of food in their communities. To dramatize the problem, Wakkanai people carriedpictures 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, sup-plies sometimes remained behind schedule, but as the nation slowly recovered from thewar, food shortages gradually ebbed.

Food deficiencies during the war and after bore part of the blame for the many casesof tuberculosis discovered during the occupation. The disease hit the northernmost pre-fectures hardest and health officials attributed this to crowded living conditions and peo-ple’s close contact during long winters. Typhus, too, became a problem in Hokkaido bythe autumn of 1945, presumably brought by miners conscripted from Korea. After war’send, many of the Koreans left their jobs and headed south, towards home, incidentallyspreading the disease, which SCAP fought with inoculations and DDT.

War had depleted local resources in addition to food. The demand for forest prod-ucts from Hokkaido had skyrocketed as wartime needs grew and foreign sources becameunavailable. The end of the conflict saw a need for timber for rebuilding Japanese citiesincluding Tokyo, Yokohama, Hiroshima and the others that had seen massive destruc-tion. 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 coalto run the mills were all factors. All this left Hokkaido’s forest resources drained, so thatafter 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 shipssunk during harbor attacks, more than two hundred of them off Hakodate. Some shipswere 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 passen-gers across Tsugaru Strait as temporary replacements for the ferries destroyed during thewar.

Coal was a necessity in reestablishing Japan’s civilian economy, and Hokkaido’smines furnished a significant amount of Japan’s supply. Stabilizing coal production provedfar from easy, though; almost as soon as the war ended, problems arose. The situationof the Chinese and Korean miners in Hokkaido demanded attention. Hearing of the war’send, Chinese laborers at a mine in Bibai immediately took over their barracks but mineguards and police kept them confined to the mine area. A month later the Chinese demon-strated, mainly for food and freedom, and soon forced their way free, went to other minesand gathered more Chinese to join them. On September 24, the group clashed violentlywith authorities in Yubari, took several officials hostage and demanded better condi-tions, also insisting they would not work with Japanese miners. SCAP authorities orderedthe Chinese back to the mines—and gave permission to Japanese police to arrest, evenshoot, Chinese if necessary. Japanese managers were anxious to keep Korean and Chi-nese miners because Japanese workers would not toil for low wages, and tension in themining communities continued. On November 6, some Chinese miners at Bibai physi-cally attacked a mine official, took over his office and forced negotiations. Finally, SCAPofficials 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 thou-sand 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-


ities decided to accede to the Koreans’ demand for repatriation, and most of the Koreanswere 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 theworkers staged a work slowdown and forced public negotiations. The first large-scalecoal miners’ organization formed in Japan was the Hokkaido Federation of Mine Work-ers’ Unions, formed on November 10, 1945. By the end of the year, three-fourths of theJapanese miners in Hokkaido had joined. Unions organized successful protests mainlybecause working conditions, which had not changed after the war, were so bad, with crewbosses 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 behad.

As postwar troubles in the mines kept surfacing, the companies found themselvesforced to improve compensation and working conditions; SCAP directives called forshorter hours and higher wages. In Hokkaido, because so many of the miners were Kore-ans and Chinese who had been repatriated by the end of November, the companies neededa 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 Hokkaidocoal. By December 1945, the national railways cut service in half due to lack of coal. Japanhad a “coal famine,” newspapers reported.25

Miners found various imaginative ways to fight for their demands. In Bibai, Mitsuiminers used production control when the company refused to improve working condi-tions and salaries. With this tactic, the miners became their own supervisors and increasedoutput while decreasing hours. But the dispute continued until the Docho intervenedand, as arbiter, granted most of the union’s demands.

In October 1946 miners struck throughout Hokkaido. Some 66,000 (out of a totalof about 71,000) mine employees from forty-six of Hokkaido’s fifty-three mines walkedoff the job, protesting low wages. Because of the nation’s need for coal, such a strike couldhave wide repercussions. Following mediation by the Hokkaido governor, coal operatorssettled; the miners won a thirty percent wage increase plus other concessions.

Supplies of coal remained inadequate. Oji threatened to suspend paper productionin Tomakomai because of a lack of coal to run the mills. Oji even temporarily sent someof its work force to work in the mines when the labor shortage was at its worst. One Dochoresponse was to take coal allotted for other uses, including heating, and supply it to Ojiand other manufacturers instead.

Authorities found that some workers hired in Tokyo and brought by Japanese laborsuppliers to work in Hokkaido mines and construction projects were kept in slave-likeconditions; at least fifteen thousand people were thus employed in 1946. Reports of manydeaths 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 beingkept in filthy quarters and given none of the benefits available to regular workers.

Miners’ dissatisfaction and disruptions continued. Unhappiness over wages left min-ers discouraged, one could hear, but some people claimed that the miners were well-compensated, merely taking advantage of Japan’s need for coal to wrest even higher wagesfrom the companies.26 Shortages continued, and in an attempt to encourage miners toproduce 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 in1948 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 inJuly 1948, carrying out a twenty-four hour action to back demands for better pay. Elec-trical workers staged power outages to back their demands. More serious was the mili-tancy of railroad workers. Despite General MacArthur’s order outlawing public employeestrikes, wildcat actions disrupted train service in Hokkaido and elsewhere; a 1948 stand-off between workers and officials meant weeks of canceled runs. After a government ulti-matum, some employees returned to work, some fled, some faced arrest, Others werefired. SCAP and Japanese officials deplored the wildcat strikers’ challenge to governmentauthority and blamed the trouble on the desire of the communist-dominated RailwayWorkers Union to embarrass SCAP. Official pressure eventually forced the strikers toback down.

Though strikes seriously disrupted Japan’s economic recovery, SCAP had encour-aged the formation of trade unions. (The Japanese government had proscribed laborunions in 1940; by December 1945, new legislation protected rights to collective bargain-ing.) Unions became relatively strong in Hokkaido, reflecting difficult conditions in themining industry. Communist influence, wartime and postwar deprivations, food andpower shortages as well as wages that did not keep up with prices all played a part. Laborstrife 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 inHokkaido ... in schools, labor unions, out in the mining and fishing villages,” a promi-nent Hokkaido woman told a visiting American in January 1948. The Hokkaido womancould not understand why General MacArthur had released communists from Japanesejails at the beginning of the occupation.27 (These were among the many political prison-ers incarcerated by the Japanese government in the 1930s and 1940s and liberated bySCAP.)

War’s end found thousands of Japanese troops stranded in the Soviet Far East, andthe U.S.S.R. was very slow to repatriate them, both in order to use their labor and toindoctrinate them with communist ideology. As the Soviets eventually returned theinternees to Japan, some of those who came back worked to spread left wing theory inHokkaido. A United Press reporter asserted in 1948 that communists were threateningpoor island farmers, ordering them to support the Communist Party—because otherwise,when Soviet troops arrived to take over Hokkaido, they would slaughter the farmers. In1949, the Hokkaido Communist Party had some six thousand members (plus at least thatmany 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 ofJapan. More than a dozen communist-oriented newspapers were published on the islanduntil they were closed down by SCAP authorities in September 1950; even the HokkaidoShimbun was embroiled in controversy in 1946 when SCAP pressured the newspaper’sowner 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 com-munists eleven suspects who were arrested for gunning down a Sapporo police inspec-


tor in January 1952, and an Ishikari Valley farmer even compared communists in Hok-kaido to the Ku Klux Klan.

A left-wing Hokkaido University protest in 1950 disrupted the address an Americanadviser on education, Dr. Walter C. Eells, was attempting to deliver. Eells’ recommenda-tions on Japanese education drew controversy. He gave a series of lectures throughoutJapan in 1949-50 designed to promote academic freedom and combat communist influ-ence on university campuses. He asserted that communist professors lacked free will andhad minds closed to alternative ideas; thus they should not be allowed on university fac-ulties. Antagonistic signs greeted Eels at the auditorium in Sapporo where he was tospeak; one proclaimed, “No more Hiroshimas—No more Eells.” His address was sched-uled for faculty members only. Militant students barricaded the venue until the univer-sity 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 coulddo 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 andturning it into a student protest rally. Hokkaido University later expelled four of the stu-dents involved, identifying three of them as communists, and gave lesser punishmentsto 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 Hok-kaido, U.S. military forces protected the island against possible external threats. Mean-while, the Americans in Hokkaido also responded to internal emergencies, from threatsof 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 March1952. Tsunamis caused much of the destruction; southern Hokkaido suffered the most,with Kushiro and the Tokachi plain reporting deaths and many collapsed buildings. Theshaking cut rail lines, severing Kushiro’s transportation connections with the rest of theisland. U.S. military planes helped bring emergency supplies to the quake and tsunamivictims.

In its early days, SCAP dealt with immediate difficulties such as insuring an ade-quate food supply. Later, long-term planning was possible, and a very far-reaching SCAPprogram was land reform. The intent was to get rid of absentee landlords and give landownership to the people who did the actual farming. Before the reforms, tenant farmersworked forty-three percent of the land under cultivation in Hokkaido. Under the newregulations, no Hokkaido farm could contain more than twelve cho of land (about thirtyacres) while in the rest of Japan, three cho was the maximum area set. (This reflects thedifferences between farming in Hokkaido and in other prefectures; in Hokkaido, forexample, it is impossible to raise more than one crop a year.) In 1950, with land reformin place, tenants worked only seven percent of Hokkaido agricultural land.

Another impact the occupation had on Hokkaido, though much less significant, wasthe popularization of skiing. Austrian military officer Theodor von Lerch had introducedthe activity to Japan in 1911 after he arrived to train military officers, but the sport didnot become widespread until after World War II, when the first ski lifts were built. Inlater years, the ski industry has introduced Hokkaido to thousands of Japanese fromother islands and has benefited Hokkaido’s economy.

Very shortly after the war ended, Hokkaido was the starting point for a record-breaking 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 hadexcess weight removed and bomb bays filled with gasoline tanks. Headwinds and iceforming on the wings slowed the aircraft, which were heading for Washington, D.C. Sev-eral 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 theCanadian Yukon, and Edmonton, Alberta. After twenty-six hours in the air they landedin Chicago, having completed the longest nonstop flight ever undertaken by the Air Forceand the first from Japan to the United States. Six weeks later, four B-29s successfullymade the flight from Hokkaido nonstop to Washington, taking twenty-seven and one-half hours.

In 1950, war erupted in Korea. At the end of World War II, Soviet troops had occu-pied its north and Americans the south; after several years, two separate Korean govern-ments assumed office. Troops from the north invaded the south on June 25, 1950. Toprevent a communist nation from swallowing up South Korea, United Nations troopsentered the conflict. American forces stationed in Japan played a major role in the fight-ing, and new soldiers were brought to Japan as replacement troops and for training. Evenin winter, some trained for amphibious landings on Hokkaido’s south shore. Troops sentto Korea after participating in winter exercises in Hokkaido expressed their thankful-ness, saying it enabled them to better cope with Korea’s cold.

Meanwhile, American forces in Hokkaido built and maintained defensive installa-tions. The GIs operated radar sites scattered around Hokkaido, from Okushiri Island toAbashiri, from Rumoi to Cape Erimo to Nemuro. The new constitution adopted in Japanunder SCAP pressure excluded Japanese military forces, but because of security concernsin Asia, slowly a new defense organization took shape in Japan. This Japanese NationalSafety Corps was the forerunner of today’s Self-Defense Force. By 1952, Americans gavethese troops some of the responsibility for defending Hokkaido. The Korean War endedwith a truce in July 1953 and in Japan the new Self-Defense Force grew and began replac-ing U.S. soldiers. Little by little the Americans left. In 1955, the United States turned thedefense of Hokkaido over to the reconstructed Japanese military. A few Americansremained; 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 UnitedStates military forces continued to participate in maneuvers in Hokkaido, especially totake advantage of winter conditions and practice survival techniques.

Hokkaido has changed dramatically since the days of war and occupation broughttragedy and trouble to the island. The formal termination of the occupation came withthe adoption of a peace treaty ending World War II, which Japan and the allied countriessigned on September 8, 1951 (though the Soviets refused to accept it). When the treaty cameinto effect on April 28, 1952, the occupation was officially over and Hokkaido entered anew era.


12 Hokkaido and Her Northern Neighbor

A significant aspect of Hokkaido’s postwar history and development has been theisland’s relationship with the Soviet Union—later, Russia. Hokkaido’s location so nearthe Russian Far East has made it inevitable that when tensions have arisen between Japanand Russia, this northern island is on the front line. In the very last days of World WarII, the U.S.S.R. declared war on Japan and quickly sent troops to occupy all of nearbySakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Shocked by the sudden Soviet moves and the quick over-running of Karafuto and the Kurils, Japanese wrath increased when the Soviets kept thou-sands of Japanese prisoners of war in Siberia long after war’s end. Despite the end of thefighting in 1945, the two nations still have not signed a peace treaty, because Japan con-tinues to claim that the southernmost Kuril Islands, now incorporated into Russia, legallyremain part of Japan.

Soviet bitterness against previous Japanese actions no doubt fueled Soviet desires tograb Japanese-controlled territory while it could be done. Not only had Japan begun theRusso-Japanese War with a surprise attack, Japan had defeated the Russians. Later, aim-ing to keep communists from controlling the Russian Far East, Japan had sent troops toSiberia during the Russian Civil War at the end of World War I. Soviets also saw eco-nomic and strategic advantages in occupying Sakhalin and the Kurils; the U.S.S.R. wouldgain lucrative fishing grounds as well as control of the Sea of Okhotsk. Sakhalin has anexpanse of about thirty thousand square miles, but that is much less important than itslocation and offshore oil and sea life. The land area of the small Kuril Islands is hardlysignificant, but their setting and fisheries certainly are.

The Cold War, fishing confrontations, and controversy that grew over sovereigntyof 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. OnceGermany capitulated in May 1945, the Soviet government began moving troops from theEuropean front eastward to Siberia. The U.S.S.R. and Japan had signed a neutrality pactin 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 afterthe atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, however, Soviet forces began an assault that hadbeen planned for some time, challenging Japanese troops in Manchuria and Sakhalin.Soviets claimed later that Japan had made the neutrality pact invalid by supporting Ger-many, the U.S.S.R.’s enemy, during the war as well as by not living up to earlier prom-ises to cede energy concessions in northern Sakhalin.

On August 9 the Soviets began shelling the Japanese border on Sakhalin; the invaderslooked upon Karafuto as Russian land, despite the treaty at the end of the Russo-Japa-nese War awarding the area to Japan. Some thirty-five thousand Soviet troops fought theirway south and, after two weeks of tense fighting, gained control of the entire island. Theport city of Maoka (now Kholmsk) was one place where civilians became victims betweenthe two armies. In Wakkanai stands a memorial to Japanese telephone operators in Maokawho 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 childrenfrom 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 withnothing but the clothing they wore. Some managed to board ships to Japan but an August22 submarine attack, probably Soviet, on a few of the vessels taking refugees from Sakhalinto Hokkaido killed seventeen hundred people. Several hundred of the many Koreanswho had been brought to Karafuto by the Japanese as laborers also managed to escapeSakhalin; once on Hokkaido, they found themselves housed in refugee camps set up espe-cially for Koreans. Though some of the Sakhalin refugees went on to Honshu and otherislands, many stayed on Hokkaido. With resources on that island already strained, car-ing for these refugees was not easy, especially because so many family breadwinners werenot allowed by the Soviets to leave.

When the first Soviet troops landed on the Kurils on August 16—after the Japanesegovernment announced its surrender—defenders thought the troops were Americans,and military headquarters sent a message of protest to General MacArthur. Two days ofbitter fighting followed on Shumshu, the island nearest the Kamchatka Peninsula, butthe Soviets took the other islands easily. Five hundred women and children from can-nery workers’ families on the north Kuril island of Paramushir stole away during a tem-porary 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 Septem-ber the Soviets completed their conquest.

Once Soviet troops had started their advance into Manchuria, Japanese Prime Min-ister Suzuki Kantaro urged a quick surrender for fear the U.S.S.R. could not only takeother 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 Eastwould oversee a troop landing at Rumoi. The Soviets would proceed to occupy the entirenorthern half of Hokkaido, more or less northeast of a line from Rumoi on the Japan Seato 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 Sovi-ets 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 inplace, but unexpected delays due to strong resistance on Sakhalin and the Kurils caused


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 unex-pected difficulties Soviet troops faced in the advance on Sakhalin. A concern about Alliedreactions and the assurance that Japanese officials would definitely sign an official sur-render document on September 2 probably also influenced him. Hasegawa Tsuyoshi hassuggested other possible factors: that the operation was “too risky,” and that Stalin mayhave learned that the U.S. knew of his plans.1

A successful Soviet invasion of Hokkaido might not have been difficult, becauseJapanese defenses there were not strong, consisting of only one brigade and two divisionspoised opposite possible U.S. advances from the south and east rather than against Sovietthreats from the north. By 1945, obstacles were minimal, and American carrier-basedplanes and battleships had operated almost with impunity in destroying shipping andwar-related industry in the mid–July strike on Hokkaido’s south coast.

Had Hokkaido been invaded, tens, even hundreds of thousands, of residents couldhave been imperiled. Richard Frank, using statistics from Manchuria where many Japa-nese civilians died when the Soviets took over, has estimated that nearly four hundredthousand people on Hokkaido could have died in a Soviet invasion. Seizure of even partof Hokkaido would have had important strategic ramifications beyond control of La Per-ouse Strait. As military historian David Glantz has pointed out, Soviet occupation ofpart of Hokkaido could have meant vast changes for the future of east Asia. The occu-pation of all of Japan would then surely have been prolonged, and South Korea’s futurecould have been affected, too. In addition, were Hokkaido in the Soviet bloc, economicdevelopment would no doubt have proceeded quite differently, and certainly much moreslowly.2

Though Stalin abandoned a Hokkaido invasion, he recommended to U.S. PresidentHarry S Truman that the Japanese troops in northern Hokkaido make a formal surren-der to Soviet forces. Stalin argued that because Japanese troops had occupied “the wholeSoviet Far East” just after the Russian Revolution, it was only right that the Soviets beallowed to occupy part of Hokkaido after World War II. This, Stalin indicated, “has aspecial meaning for the Russian public opinion would be seriously offended if the Rus-sian troops would not have an occupation region in some part of the Japanese proper ter-ritory.” 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 whoemigrated to the United States said, “When I was growing up, I felt I owed my freedomto the American military and General MacArthur who kept the Russians from takingHokkaido.” Japanese people in retrospect indicate great relief that the Soviets did nothave a role in the occupation, and fears that the Soviets might invade Hokkaido lingeredin Japan for decades.3

Long after the war, Japan’s Self-Defense Force continued to prepare for a possibleSoviet invasion of Hokkaido, and officials worried about what support they could expectfrom the Dosanko should an invasion occur. There were a number of communists in thenorthern island in the first postwar decade or so. Also, ordinary homeowners might resistSDF attempts to condemn property for military use while countering an invasion. Evenin the mid–1980s, the accepted view was that Soviets could take control of Hokkaido with-out much difficulty, and policy was to strengthen defenses on Hokkaido to deter theU.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. Pres-ident Truman requested that American military and commercial interests have access toan air base in the central Kurils, but Stalin agreed to this only if the Soviets could havereciprocal 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 leavethose islands, but few agreed. Authorities in Japan urged speedy repatriation of the Japa-nese who had not been able to flee Sakhalin, but the Soviets delayed, wanting to use Japa-nese labor until new settlers could be brought in. The occupiers arrested Karafuto’sleading 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, aJapanese Sakhalin resident in his sixties told a visiting Japanese delegation that at the endof the war he had not been allowed to leave Sakhalin because the Soviet Union neededengine drivers. Some men belonging to Sakhalin’s native peoples—Nivkh and Uilta aswell as Ainu — were arrested and sent to Siberia, not to be released for years. Whenmigrants from elsewhere in the Soviet Union began arriving almost a year and a halfafter the end of the war, the U.S.S.R. finally allowed official repatriation of Japanese tobegin. The process was slow, and Soviet officials suspended the program for severalmonths in late 1948 due to “bad weather.”5 The Soviets slowly returned Japanese soldierscaptured in Sakhalin and Manchuria but, unlike civilians, some soldiers apparently didaccept what they were told about the advantages of communism. Some Japanese were repa-triated as late as twenty years after war’s end. Many were ethnic Japanese women whohad 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 residentsof the South Kurils—some 17,000—were expelled to Japan by 1949. The Soviets destroyedevery 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 asthey 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 manypeople repatriated to Hokkaido helped account for this anxiety. Japanese defense officialsproposed a new farmer-soldier corps, but few men saw any advantages in applying forthe scheme. Because of the perceived Soviet threat, though, a large American militaryforce remained on the island during and even for a few years after the occupation. In1951, U.S. anxiety about the U.S.S.R.’s possible plans grew to the point that most of theAmerican troops’ dependents were sent south to Honshu.

The Cold War helped solidify Soviet determination to hold the Kurils and all ofSakhalin. Postwar geopolitical realities saw the United States active in the western Pacificregion because Soviet challenges and a resurgent China made this area strategicallysignificant. Moreover, with American airmen stationed in Hokkaido patrolling the skiesnear newly-held Soviet territory in Sakhalin and the Kurils and perhaps crossing intoSoviet airspace, the Soviets fortified those areas.

As the Cold War developed, bottles containing propaganda leaflets presumably from


the U.S.S.R. appeared every now and then on the Hokkaido shore. More than five yearsafter the war ended, Hanson W. Baldwin suggested in the New York Times that Sovietsmight have a takeover of Hokkaido in mind, and in April 1952 U.S. Secretary of the NavyDan A. Kimball asserted that the Soviet military presence on Sakhalin “poses a very realinvasion threat” to Hokkaido.6

Japanese and Soviets spied upon each other. In 1953, Soviet soldiers caught two Japa-nese 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 athard labor. After a 1956 amnesty, he returned to Japan and took up life in Omu, an iso-lated 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 Americanplanes from Wakkanai patrolled the air space on their respective sides of the “MacArthurLine,” the imaginary line separating Sakhalin and the Kurils from Hokkaido. In 1952,Soviet planes began to fly over Hokkaido fairly frequently, a Japanese spokesman claim-ing at least forty such incidents in the second half of the year. An American Air Force B-29 flying northwest of Nemuro on a training mission disappeared in October; radar hadshown another plane approaching it from the east. The two planes merged on the radarscreen and then disappeared to the southeast. Soviet officials claimed that their fighterplanes had attacked the United States plane after it entered Soviet territory. The Amer-ican Air Force continued to assert, however, that the U.S. plane was over Japanese waterswhen it was last seen by radar. The next month, two American planes patrolling nearNemuro chased a Soviet plane they spotted over Hokkaido until it left Japanese territory.In January 1953 the United States announced, with Japanese concurrence, the determi-nation to take action should Soviet planes continue to invade Hokkaido air space, notingthat newer and faster U.S. planes had been sent to Japan to counter threats. Japan had noair force at the time, and the Japanese officials involved felt that the American promiseshould help calm “the people of Hokkaido who are nervous about the increasing num-ber 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 claimedthat the Soviet planes fired first. Later that year the Japanese impounded a Soviet ship forillegally entering Japanese waters. A U.S. army general called the incursions “an activeinvasion of Japanese territory,” claiming that the U.S.S.R. was carrying out reconnais-sance 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 withdraw-ing 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-recon-naissance 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 Japanand the U.S.S.R.

With the end of the Korean War, tensions between the U.S.S.R. and Japan simmereddown 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 bel-ligerent move, people in northern Hokkaido became anxious. Because of possible threatsfrom the north, by September 1956 more than fifty thousand Japanese troops—one thirdof 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 invad-ing Hokkaido were bestsellers in Japan.

Confrontations near Hokkaido between the United States and the Soviet Union con-tinued sporadically. On July 1, 1968, the Soviets forced a U.S. plane carrying troops toVietnam to land on Iturup Island in the Kurils after the plane apparently strayed offcourse 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 thatthe Soviets had established a military airport on Iturup.

Because of incidents like these, the U.S. maintained a few troops in Hokkaido for manyyears. The U.S. left the Wakkanai base in Hokkaido’s far north, near Sakhalin, in 1972 andwithdrew from Chitose in 1975. After this, the only U.S. installation in Hokkaido was along-range navigation station at Urahoro on the southern coast. The Chitose field, nextto 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 Vik-tor Ivanovich Belenko flew his plane, then the most advanced of the Soviet fleet, intoJapanese territory. Radar stations picked him up, but he descended to an altitude belowradar 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 helanded he was kidnapped, but Belenko indicated that he hoped for asylum in the UnitedStates. Japanese officials consented, and Belenko proceeded to the United States, wherehe went to work as a test pilot and consultant.

The Belenko incident had various repercussions. American and Japanese technicianstook apart his plane to study it in detail; they became convinced the west did not haveto worry about Soviet technology. Japan shipped the plane’s parts back to the SovietUnion in crates. The Japanese had another worry, however: Belenko had easily penetratedsupposedly closely-guarded air space. Meanwhile, the incident soured U.S.S.R.–Japanrelations. Probably partly in response, the Soviet Union created a two hundred mileexclusive economic zone off its coast, which severely restricted Japanese fishermen. TheU.S.S.R. also refused for some years to discuss the question of sovereignty of the SouthKuril Islands which Japan continued to claim.

Though Belenko’s story made world headlines and caused a diplomatic storm, hewas not the first Soviet military pilot to fly to Japan, hoping for asylum in the UnitedStates. Vladimir Barashkov had done the same thing in November 1948, landing on RishiriIsland (the same island on which Ranald MacDonald had set foot just one hundred yearsearlier). Barashkov’s escape was kept secret for more than three months and did not raisea furor.

The most widely known Cold War incident in the Hokkaido region was the shoot-ing down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983. En route from New Yorkvia 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, killingthe 269 people aboard. Remains and pieces of wreckage later washed up on Hokkaidobeaches. An adequate explanation of the plane’s deviation from its assigned route has neveremerged; some suggested that it was carrying out a secret spy mission, but whatever ledthe plane astray, the shocked world reaction to the intemperate Soviet response added toCold War tensions, which were strong during the early 1980s. In Hokkaido’s far northtoday is a memorial to those who died.


During Cold War years, few Japanese and Russians were allowed to travel to eachother’s countries. Diplomats from the U.S.S.R. stationed in Japan could not go to sensi-tive areas, for example, Hokkaido port cities. Throughout those years, too, Japan’s GroundSelf-Defense Force kept much of its strength in Hokkaido. Had hostilities broken outbetween the U.S.S.R. and the U.S., American forces would no doubt have tried to blockSoviet ships from entering or leaving the Vladivostok area or the Sea of Okhotsk (wherethe U.S.S.R. kept a fleet of its most up-to-date submarines) and both La Perouse Straitand Tsugaru Strait would have become centers of tension. As late as 1992, Russiansexpressed concern that Japan and the United States saw Hokkaido as a military centerthat could threaten the Russian Far East.

Another Cold War effect on Hokkaido lingered beyond the end of the century: cen-tral government direction of Hokkaido’s resources, through the Hokkaido DevelopmentBureau. Though postwar democratic reforms in Japan had brought Hokkaido’s govern-ment in line with those in the other prefectures, Tokyo officials felt the need to continuecontrol 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 toSakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Despite this, Japan continues to assert that Soviet con-trol of the southernmost Kurils, consisting of Shikotan, Kunashir, Iturup and the Habo-mai group of small islands, has been illegal. (In Japan, Iturup is known as Etorofu andKunashir 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 Terri-tories.9

The Northern Territories issue has had an overriding influence on Japanese policytoward the U.S.S.R. (and, subsequently, Russia) since World War II. The Soviet-Japanesemilitary conflict in 1945 lasted for no more than a few weeks, but the diplomatic stale-mate 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 hadgained that area through conquest, the Russo-Japanese War. But even now Japan disputesthe Soviet seizure of the South Kurils.

At their conference held at Yalta in the Soviet Union in 1945, allied war leadersincluding Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed that Sakhalin and theKuril Islands should go to the U.S.S.R. after Japan’s defeat. This was in exchange for theSoviet agreement to join the war against Japan after Germany’s surrender. The Yaltaagreement was kept secret until after the end of the war for fear the accord might spur aJapanese attack on Siberia. Roosevelt may have mistakenly thought that Japan had seizedthe Kurils during the Russo-Japanese War and that as territory acquired by force, theislands should be surrendered. In reality, the 1855 Treaty of Shimoda, which delineateda border between Russia and Japan for the first time, placed that boundary in the middleof the Kuril chain, with the islands now known as the Northern Territories belonging toJapan. In a subsequent treaty signed in 1875, Russia gave Japan title to the entire Kurilchain in exchange for ownership of Sakhalin. Both Russia and Japan claim rights to thedisputed 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 Japa-nese from the south.

Perhaps Roosevelt felt that ownership of the Kurils would be due the U.S.S.R. shouldthat nation help defeat Japan. Allied leaders also may have decided that the Kurils shouldnot 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 trusteeshipterritory, in the way the United States administered Okinawa until returning to Japanthat far southern island region in 1972.

As World War II approached an end, the U.S. planned to occupy the southern Kurilsbut the Soviet advance precluded this, and Harry S Truman, now president, did not makeit an issue. Hasegawa Tsuyoshi has suggested that the U.S. simply did not think the Kurilsimportant enough to worry about. In November 1945 the United Nations granted theU.S.S.R. the right to occupy all the islands in the chain. Having little choice, Japan acceptedthis but later argued that the southern islands to which it still lays claim were not includedin the agreement. Japan pointed out that until the end of World War II no nation exceptJapan ever held title to them. In addition, Japan claimed that Shikotan and the Habomaiswere not in the Kuril chain at all. Habomai Village, in fact, included land both onHokkaido’s Cape Nosappu and on the small islands. Moreover, as Prime Minister FukudaTakeo asked a Russian official in 1977, why was the Soviet Union so determined to holdon to such a tiny island area in the Kurils, given the huge size of the Soviet nation?10 Fukuda’squery seems easy to answer, though; It seems clear that Stalin wanted to hold the Kurilchain 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 Territoriesto Japan. Most insistent, of course, were people displaced from the islands. (More of theseventeen thousand Japanese expelled from the Kurils by the Soviets after war’s end hadlived on the disputed islands than on other islands in the Kuril chain.) Nemuro fisher-men and refugees from the Kurils, including fishermen now prohibited from their tra-ditional fishing grounds, formed organizations to lobby for return of the islands. A seriousJapanese request for their reversion came in December 1945 when Nemuro Mayor AndoSekiten took to Tokyo a petition with thirty thousand signatures appealing for the returnof the Northern Territories. The document included a personal appeal to General Mac-Arthur for action. The Hokkaido University president pressed for reversion and the Hok-kaido 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 conferencetook place for fear such a meeting might decide that the disputed islands should revertto Japan. Thus on February 2, 1946, the Soviets formally (and unilaterally) declared theincorporation of the islands into the nation and at the beginning of 1947 announced thecreation of the province of Sakhalin, which would include all of that island and all of theKurils. Soviet names replaced Japanese ones and Soviet citizens—mostly war veterans andtheir families—repopulated the former Japanese areas.

At the San Francisco Peace Conference in 1951, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshida Shi-geru explained the Japanese claim to the South Kurils, but the treaty nonetheless deprivedJapan of the islands—without saying what nation might receive them. As representativesof a defeated nation, Japanese officials felt forced to accept the treaty but the Soviet Uniondid 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 (orlack of them) to Sakhalin or any of the Kurils.


Not until after Josef Stalin died in 1953 did the Soviets seriously consider improvingrelations with capitalist nations, and in 1955, talks began between the U.S.S.R. and Japanabout negotiating a peace treaty. Japan demanded the return of the Northern Territo-ries; while discussions proceeded in London, the Docho sponsored a rally in Tokyo urg-ing reversion of the disputed islands to Japan. Hokkaido Governor Tanaka Toshifumiaddressed 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 sign-ing a formal treaty; Japan was motivated partly by the desire that Japanese fishermen beallowed to operate in now–Soviet waters. The agreement specified that the Soviet Unionwould return Shikotan and the Habomais (which included only seven percent of the dis-puted 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 turnJapanese anger from them toward the Americans, who still held Okinawa. With reversionof the smaller islands in mind, the Hokkaido government drew up proposals in 1956 fordevelopment on Shikotan and the Habomais, while the U.S.S.R. ejected a number ofSoviet residents from them. The Japanese government considered accepting the offer ofthose islands for fear that otherwise the Soviets would rescind fishing agreements andcontinue to refuse repatriation of Second World War Japanese prisoners convicted of warcrimes 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 agree-ment, the Americans might be coerced into returning Okinawa and removing U.S. troopsfrom Japan. Thus in order to pursue Cold War goals, American officials used the Kurilscontroversy to perpetuate enmity between Japan and the Soviet Union. The United Statestherefore bears some responsibility for the continuing problem.11

The Soviets resisted returning the entire South Kuril group partly for fear of the mil-itary potential that Kunashir and Iturup could offer the Japanese and their Americanallies, giving them easy entry to the Sea of Okhotsk. In an October 1949 speech, promi-nent Soviet official and later premier Georgii Malenkov had stressed the vital role playedby the Kuril chain in the nation’s far eastern defenses. In addition, the U.S.S.R. wouldlose abundant mineral resources on Kunashir and Iturup and probably the seabed as wellas lucrative fishing grounds were the nation’s leaders to renounce claim to all the dis-puted islands. In 1960 Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko announced that Shikotanand the Habomais could not be returned to Japan until all American military personnelleft Japan; the Soviets seized on the adoption of a new U.S.-Japan security treaty to renegeon the earlier offer.

By then, Japan was claiming that Iturup and Kunashir were not part of the Kurilchain that had been specified in the Yalta agreement and the 1951 peace treaty. Perusal ofa map shows that the Japanese could make a strong case that the Habomais and Shikotanare not part of the Kurils. Henry Snow, who hunted sea otters in Kurils waters in the latenineteenth 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 rec-

ognize the existence of a controversy over the sovereignty of the disputed islands. Mean-while, 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 livedon. Former Kurils residents felt the Japanese government was not working hard enoughto obtain the islands, especially when compared with official efforts exerted to regain Oki-nawa.

The U.S.S.R. had withdrawn some of its troops from the South Kurils by 1960, butreacting to Japan-China negotiations and a subsequent friendship treaty, in the late 1970sSoviets strengthened military forces on the islands. In response, Japan stationed moretroops in Hokkaido. In August 1978 Japanese officials estimated Soviet troop strength onthe islands at three thousand; during that summer, Soviets held maneuvers there. By1979, nine to ten thousand troops were apparently stationed on the Northern Territoriesand guns newly installed on Kunashir could shell Hokkaido’s northeastern coast; Japa-nese 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 asforeigners.

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 theanniversary of the date in 1855 upon which Russia and Japan delineated their border inthe Kuril Islands. The Soviet newspaper Izvestia charged that the designation of North-ern Territories Day was an “unfriendly act.”13 During the 1980s, the islands’ strategicimportance to the U.S.S.R. grew as Cold War tensions increased. New Soviet missilesable 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 ofthe Cold War, relations between Japan and the Soviet Union improved and the NorthernTerritories dispute gained attention once again. Soviet officials hinted that an agreementmight be possible. For the first time, Soviet citizens learned that a Japanese movementto regain the South Kurils had existed since the 1940s. In 1989, as part of the commem-oration of the first Russian landing on the disputed islands (by Martin Spanberg 250 yearsearlier), the U.S.S.R., for the first time since World War II, allowed foreign newsmen tovisit the islands. A few months later, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Petrovskysuggested joint environmental studies of the Sakhalin and Kurils area. An article appearedin the Soviet press suggesting the disputed islands be handed over to the United Nationsunder a joint Soviet-Japanese trusteeship, but Japanese officials immediately turned downthis idea.14

In January 1990, Boris Yeltsin, not yet Russian leader but described by the JapanTimes as “a leading Soviet reformer,”15 offered a five-step plan to solve the island ques-tion. First, the Soviet Union would officially recognize that the dispute existed. Next, Japanand Russia would establish a free enterprise zone in the islands. Then the islands wouldbe demilitarized and the two nations would adopt a peace treaty without settling the dis-pute. Finally, the question would be left to the next generation—people not emotionallyinvolved.

The stalemate continued, despite Yeltsin’s and others’ settlement proposals. On avisit to Moscow in March 1991, Ozawa Ichiro, a leader of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democ-ratic Party, apparently offered an aid package amounting to more than twenty-six billiondollars were the disputed islands returned. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev refused.When people living on the disputed islands—by this time, second and third generation


residents—responded to a poll that same month on whether the territories should bereturned to Japan, about seventy percent voted no.16 Later that year, the Soviet Unionrecognized the independence of the three Baltic republics, Latvia, Lithuania and Esto-nia. Japanese officials then suggested that the Northern Territories case was similar, forthese territories, too, had been illegally seized and occupied by the Soviets. But no Rus-sian government could agree to give up the disputed islands at a time when the U.S.S.R.’sbreakup was weakening the region in the eyes of the world. However, during Gorbachev’svisit 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 BorisYeltsin had become leader of a new independent Russia. (Yeltsin, by the way, had beenthe first high-ranking Soviet official to visit the disputed islands.) Several prominent Rus-sians suggested that Russia might return Shikotan and the Habomais to Japan and vari-ous hints emanated from Moscow suggesting that economic aid not directly tied to theislands issue could lead to Russian willingness to cooperate. But Japan did not follow thislead, 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 Japanesereluctance to offer aid with West Germany’s generosity; Russia acquiesced in the subse-quent 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 havechanged policy on the Kurils. Sometimes the northern nation has seemed ready to returnShikotan and the Habomais to Japan, sometimes not. Sometimes Japan has appearedready to accept two islands while continuing to disagree and negotiate over the largerones, and sometimes Japan has demanded reversion of all the Northern Territories. Mean-while, the United States would no longer object were Japan to seek only Shikotan and theHabomais. As for the Russian residents in the South Kurils, their lives had become uncer-tain, due to a combination of inflation, late pay and inadequate supplies. Along withstraitened economic circumstances came concern about the islands’ uncertain future.

In 1993 Governor Yevgeny Krasnoyarov of Russia’s Sakhalin Province, which includesthe Kurils, urged that the controversy be set aside until Russian living standards becamecomparable to Japan’s. He was apparently concerned that Kurils residents would supportreversion to Japan in order to improve their lives. Soon, however, a natural catastrophethreatened life in the Kurils. On October 4, 1994, a severe earthquake hit the NorthernTerritories, killing several people and destroying many, many buildings, both commer-cial and residential. Budget problems since the collapse of the Soviet Union had meantlack of attention to this remote area and officials were unprepared for the disaster, whichaccording to a Russian government official left ninety percent of Shikotan’s people home-less. The earthquake devastated public infrastructure, too, with water and sewage sys-tems broken up and electricity lost. Japan was ready to aid in rescue efforts by dispatchingSelf-Defense Force troops as well as to finance rebuilding, but such gestures founderedon the Northern Territories dispute, and, in the end, Japan sent only emergency human-itarian assistance, though the amount was substantial.

The earthquake led to a major exodus of people from the islands, half the popula-tion of Kunashir and Shikotan leaving when the government offered to resettle them incentral Russia. Some returned later, however. Troop cuts helped decrease the populationof 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 SouthKurils 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 Butwith the rise of nationalism in Russia and secession movements in regions of Russia suchas Chechnya, Russian leaders would not consider these proposals.

Japan and Russia agreed in 1997 to sign a peace treaty by 2000 and Boris Yeltsinreaffirmed this in 1999. Since then, no progress has come in the Northern Territories dis-pute despite the promises, and no peace treaty has been adopted. About 16,800 Russiansnow live on the islands, according to a late 2006 estimate. These islanders include peo-ple who had been lured to the Kurils after the war by promised subsidies and economicopportunities. To their descendants, the islands have always been home. But living con-ditions have deteriorated since the demise of the Soviet Union, and Kimura Hiroshi, whovisited Iturup and Shikotan in 1999, agreed with a Russian reporter that the NorthernTerritories were already Japanese because their economy was kept alive by Japan, notRussia.19 Meanwhile, in one respect the area is a Japanese tourist attraction, for CapeNosappu, northeast of Nemuro’s built-up area and the closest place on Hokkaido to theNorthern Territories, sports several facilities for visitors: a memorial arch, an eternalflame, 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 reachedinto education, for the issue was made a required part of the social studies curriculumfor Japanese students both in junior and senior high school. Moreover, since 1969 theJapanese government has ordered that the Northern Territories be included on all mapsof Japan, and current maps reflect this. Many Japanese have been lukewarm about theislands issue, but others continue to feel adamant about the return of the islands. Japanmight have asked the International Court of Justice to rule on whether part—or all—ofthe Northern Territories should be considered part of Japan, but the government has nevertaken that step, presumably for fear the decision would not be satisfactory.

Ainu have weighed in on the dispute. Any time negotiations loomed, Ainu leadershave spoken out claiming Ainu rights to the islands, because Ainu lived there beforeeither Japanese or Russians did. Many vocal Ainu feel that the Japanese desire to reclaimthe South Kurils would be just another land grab, another case of Wajin takeover of Ainuland.

The stalemate has lasted into the twenty-first century. Russian and Japanese leaderscontinue to vow to solve the dispute, but it is hard to see how they can, although, as GilbertRozman has pointed out, mutual interests such as the desire for closer relations in theface of anxiety about China’s growing might and North Korean intentions could possi-bly lead to agreement. During the 1970s and 1980s the strategic value of the islands wasvery important to the Soviet Union, but that issue has receded and more recent analysissuggests that the strategic value was overrated. Since then, weapons development and theend of the Cold War have both been important in decreasing the Kurils’ importance asa 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 givingeconomic aid to Russia and helping create joint development projects without tying themto the South Kurils question. Such generosity, if continued, could possibly make returnof the islands politically realistic for Russia, but Japanese contributions may have cometoo late, at a time when Russian leaders find it impossible for political reasons to relin-quish any territory. Kimura Hiroshi, however, has argued that Russian leaders have cededother territory, for example signing over the Crimea to Ukraine in 1997.20


Russians apparently remain ambivalent about the Northern Territories question.Officials and citizens in Sakhalin Province want to have a say in decisions regarding theislands. On Northern Territories Day in recent years, Russians have demonstrated inopposition outside the Japanese consulate in Sakhalin. Other protests have criticized theJapanese inclusion of the disputed islands on maps of Japan. A November 2004 surveyfound minimal support in Russia for returning the disputed islands to Japan but a pollconducted across the nation in mid–2005 reported that just over half the people whowere questioned supported the return of all the Northern Territories to Japan, with onlya quarter of the respondents opposed. In late 2006, as he was concluding his service asRussian ambassador to Japan, Alexander Losyukov blasted the “rigid public” in bothnations for the stalement. And Japan’s Foreign Minister Aso Taro suggested that Japantry 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 disputedislands and with Russia’s economy becoming stronger, Kurils residents were seeing realimprovements by 2007. An airport is being built on Iturup and after it opens—scheduledfor 2010—life should become even easier.

Russian President Vladimir Putin implied in 2004 that Russia could return Shikotanand 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 Junichiroannounced only that in the future they would work towards a settlement and in 2006 theRussian government announced plans for substantial investment in South Kurils infra-structure, apparently a hint that Russia had no plans for ever ceding any of the islandsto Japan. In 2008, Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo and President Dmitry Medvedevof Russia announced their intent to pursue a settlement, but such resolves have beenannounced before, with no result.

Why cannot Russia and Japan reach an agreement? Russia does not want to give upland, and the Northern Territories may still have some strategic significance. Some min-eral resources on the islands and, much more important, the fisheries, have considerableeconomic value. Also, as long as the controversy remains unsettled, Russia holds a cardthat can be used in bargaining with Japan. Whatever payment Japan might offer for thereturn of the islands could not compensate for their loss.

To Japan, the issue has taken on symbolic value; no government could agree to giveup what is widely regarded as part of the nation’s inherent territory. The Japanese feel theyhave 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 isthat Russia should return the Northern Territories to Japan just as the United Kingdomreturned Hong Kong to China. Billboards supporting the Japanese claim to the North-ern Territories continue to be seen in Hokkaido cities, from Nemuro to Chitose to Hako-date, yet most of the Japanese public seems unconcerned.

Is there a solution? One obvious compromise would be a reversion of the Habomaisand Shikotan to Japan, but unless Japan and Russia both see advantages in resolving theissue, a stalement will continue, and in each nation, domestic politics will always play arole.

The Habomais are uninhabited now except for border guards and in 1984 the Sovietgovernment declared about two-thirds of the Habomais, Shikotan and Kunashir a naturepreserve. 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 fromNemuro, some of which Japan continues to claim as her territory. “Return the Northern Territo-ries” (Japan’s name for the disputed islands) says this sign, seen in Nemuro in 2004.

now endangered in Hokkaido are thriving on these islands, most impressively the world’slargest owl, Blakiston’s fish owl. These days much of the Kuril chain is a nature-lover’sparadise, with seals and sea lions found in great numbers on some tiny islets and largecolonies of small foxes cavorting about various uninhabited islands. Wildflowers of anorthern landscape abound. This is a volcanic landscape and here and there are fumarolesand the smell of sulfur. If one should be lucky enough to travel there on a day that is notfoggy, some of the islands, like Yankicha in the central Kurils (which the Japanese callUshichi or Ushishiru), are among the world’s most beautiful unspoiled places. Russia’seconomic 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 orderto protect the Kurils’ fragile beauty. UNESCO has recommended a joint Japan-Russiaprogram to preserve the Shiretoko Peninsula in Hokkaido along with the disputed islands.Should Japan ever regain sovereignty over the Northern Territories, pressure for boththeir development and their environmental protection would be intense. If reversion ofthe islands were someday to occur, Hokkaido would benefit from whatever policies Japansubsequently adopted for the islands.

The fisheries

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

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

Sometimes fisheries disputes between the two nations seem to be a way of life; even inthe late nineteenth century Japan and Russia argued over rights to sea life. The Treatyof Portsmouth signed in 1907 after the Russo-Japanese War included accords renewed inthe 1920s and 1930s under which each nation’s people could fish in Russian Far Easternwaters, but problems nevertheless arose. In the thirties, both Japan and the Soviet Uniondispatched destroyers to protect their fishermen in the North Pacific; Soviets accusedJapanese at sea and workers at their facilities on the Soviet shore of spying. Richard Storryin Otaru heard rumors of imminent war with the Soviets whenever fishing negotiationsbecame tense, and largely because fishery disputes grew so heated, the Soviets closedtheir Hakodate consulate in December 1938. During World War II, agreements betweenthe two nations allowed a little Japanese fishing in Soviet waters, but this ended with theSoviet invasion of Karafuto and the Kurils.22

At the beginning of the American occupation of Japan, General MacArthur establishedstrict limits within which Japanese fishermen could operate, and waters east of Hokkaidoremained out of bounds. (Japan also lost fishing grounds around Korea and Taiwan asa result of the war.) Most of the Japanese men whom the Soviets had deported from theKurils were fishermen, and many who settled in Nemuro continued to fish in waters nowoff limits, often close to the Kurils. When the Soviet government incorporated the Kurilsinto the U.S.S.R. in February 1946, the declaration included a 12-mile claim of territo-rial waters around the islands. During that spring, Soviet officials captured a Japaneseboat for illegal fishing in Kuril Islands waters, the first of many such seizures. Whencaught, fishermen faced punishment by Soviet authorities, including fines and confisca-tion of boats, even imprisonment. Sometimes Soviets fired on Japanese fishermen andsometimes, fishermen charged, Russian patrol boats appeared in Japanese waters. Othertimes, engine problems or the generally bad weather—the fog—could cause a boat, Rus-sian or Japanese, to veer off course.

Because of food shortages in Japan, SCAP several times increased the area in whichthe 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 reportedSoviets holding and questioning more and more Japanese fishermen. Despite these con-frontations, apparently no official contacts regarding fishing took place between Japan andRussia.

Meanwhile, the Hokkaido Prefectural Assembly argued that access to the Kuril fish-ing grounds could help ease food shortages. Nemuro’s economic problems were partic-ularly acute. This small city probably suffered more than any other place in Japan fromSoviet 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 manyrefugees from the Kurils, thousands of them, but their traditional fishing areas wereunavailable. People in Nemuro were especially active in the Northern Territories rever-sion movement, for the loss of fishing grounds was a major blow.

Despite the refugees, Nemuro’s population dropped by several thousand because ofthe city’s poor economy. Before the war, Nemuro fish processors had employed sometwenty-eight hundred people but in 1947 only about ten percent as many were workingin the canneries. In the 1950s, Nemuro looked “down at heel and squalid,” F. C. Joneswrote, the very picture of a place that had suffered “economic adversity.”23 The city mean-while was gaining a dubious reputation as a center of espionage.

By mid–1951, the Russians had captured 110 Japanese boats in the Nemuro region,


though after collecting fines they returned all but seventeen of the vessels. Often, fisher-men detained and later released swore they had not entered Russian waters; tricky cur-rents could sweep boats where they did not intend to go. Sometimes Soviet agents stolefishing boats in Nemuro and sailed them the few miles to territory now held by theU.S.S.R.24 In February 1952 United States General Matthew Ridgway complained to theSoviets about the seizure of Japanese fishing boats, but the Soviets nevertheless claimedthirty-six Japanese fishing vessels that year. At the end of the year ten of these boats andsixty-seven of their men were still held.

Once the occupation ended in 1952 and Japan was once again sovereign, Japanesecould resume distant fishing, but challenges and disputes over fishing between Japan andher northern neighbor have arisen again and again. The fishermen of Hokkaido have suf-fered 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 north-ern Hokkaido coast and arrested its four crew members, including the captain. Appar-ently, the boat was supposed to pick up a Soviet spy who had, however, been apprehendedin Japan. In late June 1954 it was a Japanese fishing boat that was in trouble. The MikasaMaru went aground in fog on an uninhabited island in the Kurils. Its men may have beenfishing illegally, but repeated radio calls reporting a disabled vessel and very limited foodsupplies went unanswered by the Soviets. Days later, fearing the men faced illness, evendeath, from exposure and starvation, Japan sent a Coast Guard cutter to the rescue. Thiswas the first Japanese official vessel to enter the Soviet zone since the war, a reversal fromprewar days when Soviet officials had to get special permission to enter a closed port inthe Kurils to rescue a stranded Soviet crew. Proceeding to the site of the grounding, thepatrol boat sent out two rafts only to be ordered away by Soviet soldiers with guns. Reluc-tantly, the Coast Guard abandoned the rescue attempt, but unexpectedly, the Sovietsreturned the Mikasa Maru crew to Japan in mid–July. The men said they had been detainedbecause Soviet officials suspected that the boat was purposely beached so that the Japa-nese could “spy for the Americans.”25 A few days later, another Japanese fishing boat col-lided with a Soviet vessel in the northern Kurils and sank. After about a month, the Sovietsreleased the boat’s crew members. In August, Japanese patrol boats stole into Soviet-heldwaters to rescue a crew when another boat went aground on an island only about threemiles from Hokkaido’s Cape Nosappu.

In the spring of 1955, Soviets stepped up harassment of Japanese fishing boats, send-ing more than ten patrol boats to the Habomais. Japan’s Maritime Safety Board respondedand dispatched vessels to help protect the fishermen. A group of crab fishermen releasedthat year after five months of Soviet detention complained of poor treatment. All theywere given to eat, they noted, was “black bread and soup three times a day,”26 not a dietthat would appeal to Japanese. The U.S.S.R. continued to detain Japanese fishermen, andin March 1956 the Soviet government declared that foreign fishermen would need Sovietpermission 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, theSoviets announced new restrictions on foreign fishing vessels. Japan was anxious to pro-tect her fishing industry and wanted productive fishing negotiations even if the twonations could not agree on a treaty, so Japanese officials insisted on separating fishingfrom other issues. Japan and the U.S.S.R. eventually reached a fishing accord. Provisionsincluded 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 twonations 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, andfleets had to wait each year for an accord in order to begin fishing. (Sometimes Japaneseofficials allowed boats to proceed to fishing grounds early so they would be in place whenthe quota for that year was finally set.) In some years, extended negotiations meant postpon-ing the start of the fishing season. Japanese commentary suggested that Soviets purposelydragged out the talks so that Japanese negotiators would have to choose between accept-ing the Soviet proposals or losing an entire fishing season.27 Japanese fishermen sufferedannual anxiety over whether they would be able to continue the work that was their liveli-hood. If fishermen could not fish, or if their fishing was limited, paying fixed costs for boatsand 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 Japanesefishermen with no threat of capture. Seizures continued, however, though slightly fewerthan 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 nearShikotan and the Habomais; instead, they would have to buy fish and kombu from theSoviets. The Japanese suspected that Soviet officials did not want Japanese fishermen nearSoviet military installations. Some two hundred Japanese boats went out anyway, andthe Soviets did detain some of them. More confrontations with fishermen ensued. In thenineteen years after the war ended, the Soviet Union confiscated 810 Japanese fishing boatsand imprisoned more than 6000 crewmen.28

And the stalemate over fishing continued, some Japanese fishermen being held fora year or more by Soviet authorities. At least one fisherman was captured three times. Aman who was returned to Japan in 1970 reported that in the prison where he had beenheld, men were required to work in quarries throughout bitter winter weather, and eventhe sleeping quarters were unhealthily cold, well below freezing, causing illness as wellas discomfort. The possibility of internment in the Soviet Union meant that fishermenbought insurance to sustain their families in case of capture. At the end of 1975, the Japa-nese government agreed to pay compensation to all fishermen who had been detained bythe U.S.S.R. since 1946, the payments based on length of detention, damage to vesselsand loss of income. Families would also receive funds if a fisherman had died. Govern-ment relief measures have at times also been available for fishermen unable to ply theirtrade 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 frequentfog could hide fishing boats from Russian patrol boats. Also, fishermen continued toprotest Soviet interference in international waters. Meanwhile, the Soviets tried to recruitcaptured fishermen as spies in exchange for permission to fish without harassment or inprohibited areas. Some Japanese have collaborated and in the late 1960s apparently smug-gled out several U.S. deserters through Nemuro via the Kuril Islands. Other Japanesefishermen sometimes supplied information or consumer goods to the Soviets. Informersamong the fishermen remained a concern for several decades, but Japanese fishermen havealso furnished information to their own government, and some were actually doubleagents, apprising the Japanese military of Soviet installations on the islands.29


Japanese fishermen faced problems both near the Kurils and near Hokkaido. Sovietseizures of Japanese fishing boats continued, tending to increase when the Soviets wantedto make a political point, for example against the visit of a Chinese delegation to Nemuroin 1975. Meanwhile, the Japanese became concerned because an expanded Soviet fishingfleet had taken to fishing in waters off Hokkaido, trawlers and large mother ships, some-times with accompanying refueling tankers. Moreover, the trawlers often tore Japanesefishermen’s gill nets. Despite a 1975 agreement to defuse the issue, in 1976 a Soviet shipeven dragged one Japanese boat for about an hour after catching the rope to its net andignoring 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 thana million dollars in damaged equipment and fish they did not catch. After Victor Belenkoflew to Hokkaido and defected to the United States in September 1976, Japanese fisher-men complained that Soviet damage to the fisheries off the Japanese coast barely outsidethe three mile limit increased substantially, apparently in reprisal for Japanese assistanceto Belenko and the dismantling of his plane. The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forceand the U.S. Navy were also often active in the seas around Hokkaido, and fishermensometimes reported that friendly military vessels tore fishing nets.

In the 1970s, nations around the world began claiming 12-mile limits of territorialwaters, while the Japanese government still recognized the 3-mile limit that had long beenthe international standard. In Japan, a nation in which sea products were central to thediet, freedom of the seas was an important principle. Also, officials feared that imposinga wider limit would lose their ships free passage in foreign areas. A 12-mile limit wouldmean Japanese sovereignty over Tsugaru Strait between Hokkaido and Honshu, and thegovernment was wary of restricting Soviets using this passage to sail to Vladivostok andnearby ports. It was a touchy issue.

In addition to 12-mile territorial waters, nations began to claim 200-nautical-milefishing zones. This was a blow, for more than one-third of Japan’s 1975 catch had beentaken 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 Japa-nese government to implement a similar zone. Soon, harassment of Japanese fishing beganin the areas newly declared under Soviet jurisdiction, where Hokkaido fishermen had tra-ditionally worked. And once the new Soviet zone was established, many South Koreanas well as Japanese fishermen moved to waters off Hokkaido and local fishermen beganto complain that South Koreans were frequently—if accidentally—cutting Japanese nets.The two nations discussed the matter amicably, and the South Korean government agreedto compensate Japanese fishermen.

Deciding that new international practices made wider territorial waters and fishingzones necessary, Japan created its own expanded waters in 1977. (More than forty nationshad already taken such action.) According to speculation, Japan established a new 12-mileterritorial limit specifically to stop Soviet fishing near the coast.30 Creation of the 200-mile zone was a step taken only reluctantly, because it contradicted the principle of free-dom of the seas. Under the new legislation, fishermen from nations which had their own200-mile zones would have to pay a fee and acquire a permit before fishing in Japan’szone.

These changes required new fishing agreements between Japan and the U.S.S.R., butboth nations were determined to maintain rights to the Northern Territories, compli-cating 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 accom-panied Japanese delegates to Moscow in April 1977 because of the huge impact the talkscould have on Hokkaido fishermen. He reported that the Soviet fisheries ministerexpressed sympathy with the Dosanko over their difficulties, though it is hard to say thatthis 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 withfishing boats forced to return to port at the beginning of April when talks between thetwo nations deadlocked and the Soviets shut down the herring fishery.31 The negotiationstook 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 limitaround the Northern Territories and charged that the new limit was a ploy to obtainJapanese recognition of Soviet sovereignty over the disputed islands. The Soviets ignoredthe complaint. Japan claimed that its own 200-mile zone included the area around theNorthern Territories, meaning that Japanese and Soviet claims overlapped—but the Sovi-ets controlled the area. Finally, the two nations agreed on a temporary measure in orderto 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 stillassessed. From the mid–1980s, the Soviets insisted on drastically reduced quotas and theright 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 as1985, they dragged on and on, effectively shortening the season during which the Japa-nese could fish; even in the twenty-first century, Japan complains that Russia continuesthis practice.

Not only the Soviet 200-mile zone upset Japanese fishermen; the United States alsoestablished such a zone. Between them, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. thereby controlledalmost all of the area in the North Pacific Ocean in which Japanese had previously fished.Reflecting the concern of Hokkaido fishermen, Kushiro Mayor Yamaguchi Tetsuoappealed to North Pacific Fisheries Management Council members at their 1977 meet-ing in Alaska for “generous access to fish in U.S. waters.”32 The two nations reached agree-ment quickly, but Japan would have to limit its catch and pay fees to fish in the newAmerican 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, notthe fishermen, should pay the new charges. Officials did make some funds available tocompensate the fishermen that year. Since adoption of the 200-mile zone, the UnitedStates has occasionally temporarily detained Japanese boats and fined fishermen for ille-gal fishing in the American zone and there have sometimes been minor disagreementsover regulations.

Nemuro population decreased substantially after the Soviet and American 200-milelimits came into force. The number of Nemuro fishing boats dropped by half during theyear after the Soviets announced the new zone, and to revive the city’s fortunes, officialslobbied Tokyo to allow the port open to Soviets. Since 1991, Russian vessels have beencalling at Nemuro, dropping off fish and picking up merchandise such as secondhandJapanese appliances.


Over the years, separate agreements concluded between Japan and her northern neigh-bor have covered kombu, important for people who gather this seaweed in the Nemuroarea. Japanese had long harvested it from the very productive beds around tiny KaigaraIsland, the closest of the Habomai Islands to Nemuro. Once the Soviets controlled theNorthern Territories, however, kombu, like fish, caused recurring disputes, confronta-tion and negotiation. People in the U.S.S.R. did not use the sea product, but Japanesewho tried to harvest it often found their boats confiscated. In the early 1960s, as a stale-ment persisted, Japanese kombu gatherers decided not to try any harvesting near KaigaraIsland. Eventually, negotiations between Japanese and Russians allowed the gathering toproceed; in exchange for payments to the U.S.S.R., the Japanese kombu fleet would notbe subject to harassment or confiscation. However, the Soviets stopped kombu gather-ing when establishing a 200 mile fishing zone, and not until 1981 could the two nationsreach a new kombu accord. With an agreement in place, more than three hundred Japa-nese boats could head to Kaigara each September day to harvest a product the Sovietsdid not use. Since then, the kombu agreement has stayed mostly intact despite occasionalproblems, and the Japanese continue to pay a required fee to gather the sea plant. Dur-ing the negotiations in various years, by the way, it was not the Japanese government thatreached agreement with the Soviets on the kombu issue. Instead, a fisheries industryorganization carried out the bargaining. The government thus would not be put in aposition that might be construed as a recognition of Soviet sovereignty over KaigaraIsland. Kombu collection in this area continued with little dispute until 2006, when theRussians 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. Thesehad included funds for equipment and repair as well as for fishermen’s salaries. Russianfishermen began smuggling increased numbers of fish to Japan, meaning less tax collectedby the Russian government. Illegal Japanese fishing in waters claimed by Russia alsoincreased, and in the mid–1990s Russian officials took measures to curb poaching byJapanese fishermen, beginning to fire at foreign boats and to capture more Japanese fisher-men. 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 equip-ment enabled many fishermen to operate in prohibited zones without interception.

In response to the changed conditions, Russia and Japan opened wide-ranging nego-tiations over fishing. After several years of meetings, the two countries signed an agree-ment in 1998 to allow limited Japanese “safe” fishing within twelve miles of the NorthernTerritories in exchange for Japanese aid to the Russian Far East. Not since 1945 had anyJapanese fishermen operated legally in those waters.

With the opening up of the Russian economy, private interests bought some gov-ernment-run businesses. Joint fishing ventures and other cooperative operations betweenJapanese and Russian companies began; Hokkaido fishing organizations have played amajor role in reaching agreements. Also, Russian fishermen began the legal sale of theircatches in Japan, where high demand meant high prices. Japanese ports thus saw Russianfishing boats making more and more visits. After delivering their catches, the Russiancrews have loaded their boats with Japanese consumer goods. Nemuro is well-positionedin this trade except that its historic port, on the Okhotsk Sea, is icebound for about athird 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 morethan one-third of the catch has been illegal, Russian fishermen sneaking into Japanesewaters with a contraband catch to sell at Nemuro or Kushiro while Japanese fish with-out permission near the Kurils. Too often, Japanese officials have not punished Japanesefishermen, 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 signsshowed that perhaps the governments of the two nations would take serious action tocurb 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 onthe dispute, asking to obtain only Shikotan and the Habomais and waiting until later toclaim Kunashir and Iturup. Many Nemuro fishermen may be interested only in fish, notin return of all of the disputed islands. They would be happy if they could work legallyin 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; internationalregulations also limit fisheries on the high seas. Conservation has become more impor-tant around the world and though fish remain a crucial part of the Japanese diet, Hokkaidofishermen have an ever harder time and Japanese firms have had to buy more and morefisheries 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 fishingvessels and detained 14,862 fishermen.35 Some were kept for as many as four years. InNovember 2005, the Russians seized a Japanese boat for the first time since 1997. Threeweeks later the boat and its crew were returned to Japan, but the incident shows thatfishing remains a potential flash point, as demonstrated in August 2006 when Russianborder patrolmen shot and killed a Nemuro fisherman in a fishing boat apparently poach-ing in Russian waters. Less seriously, in 2007 Japanese authorities arrested a Russiansailor 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 offisheries issues, from preventing illegal activities to issuing fishing permits promptly.

Just as with the Northern Territories dispute, Hokkaido would see nothing but gainshould fishing relations improve. As long as fish remain central to Japanese cuisine andan important part of the Hokkaido economy, periodic altercations with Russia and polit-ical pressure from Hokkaido fishermen and politicians over rights to the resource can beexpected to continue.

Better relations

Despite disputes between Japan and Russia over the Northern Territories and fishingrestrictions, relations between the two nations have improved. Even during the Cold Waryears, Soviets and Dosanko made some friendly gestures to each other. The Japanese For-eign Office opposed Soviet participation in the World Speed Skating Championships inSapporo in 1954, but finally allowed seven U.S.S.R. skaters to enter Japan. The Japanese


crowd cheered the Soviet skaters, who won the top three places in the meet, and the medianoted the visiting skaters’ popularity in Sapporo. In the 1960s, a Hokkaido trade coop-erative and a Soviet counterpart agreed on a barter plan under which lumber from theU.S.S.R. would be exchanged for various items, including vegetables, cloth, tires andrope, and after a coal mine accident in Yubari in 1965, the Soviet Miners’ Union invitedinjured miners to Sakhalin for treatment of carbon monoxide poisoning. The minersshowed improvement there.

Later examples of good relations between Hokkaido and her northern neighborabound. In 1977 the Soviet Union chose Sapporo as the site for the first Soviet culturalexchange center to be opened outside the communist world, and before the end of the1980s, Soviets and Japanese met in the Soviet Union Far East Region-Hokkaido Good-will Games. In 1989, the Soviet government allowed Japanese journalists to visit theNorthern Territories; reporters from the Hokkaido Shimbun took the initial trip, and forthe first time in about forty years, people in Japan were able to learn about life in theKurils.

In the later years of the twentieth century, Hokkaido began striving for economicdevelopment through closer ties with Russia. Initiatives included trade expansion, studymissions both to and from Russia and support for Sapporo’s Slavic Research Center. TheHokkaido 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 Hok-kaido and Sakhalin signed an agreement to develop economic and cultural ties. Inciden-tally, Hokkaido Governor Hori Tatsuya had been born on Sakhalin, but his trip toYuzhno-Sakhalinsk, where the agreement was signed, was the first time he had been onthat island since 1945. Sapporo has developed a sister city relationship with the Siberiancity Novosibirsk and recent Hokkaido governors have made a number of official visitsto the U.S.S.R., mainly to promote trade. Dosanko interested in ties with Russia notethat while the Northern Territories dispute strains relations at the national level, localrelations can proceed. “Moscow and Tokyo are far away, while Sakhalin and Hokkaidoare very close,” noted a Sakhalin administrator in 2006.36

For decades after the war, people wanting to travel between Hokkaido and Sakhalinhad to fly via Honshu and then the Soviet mainland, but scheduled plane service betweenYuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Hokkaido now operates, and half a century after shipping serv-ice ended between Wakkanai and Otomari (the southern Sakhalin—or Karafuto—portnow called Korsakov), ferries and cargo vessels once again began to operate between thetwo cities. In October 2002, service began between Otaru and Vanino, a port on the Rus-sian mainland several hundred miles north of Vladivostok. From Vanino, goods can besent 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 andheavy machinery, while the main export from the island to Japan is timber. Russian shipvisits to Hokkaido ports have increased dramatically, with twelve times as many shipscoming at the end of the decade of the 1990s as at the beginning. The crewmen purchaseall 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 restof Japan, but some Sakhalin residents fear that if the Northern Territories are returnedto 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. Japaneseboats 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 morerecently 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 tosmuggle 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 tobe Russian, while in the rest of Japan, he will be taken for an American. Russians onshore leave in Hokkaido port cities have at times become drunk and violent, and as thenews media plays up such incidents, some Japanese are wary of Russian visitors. Becausesome Russian ships’ crew members have behaved badly, several Otaru bathhouse opera-tors 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 cityin Russian are common. Even a small Nemuro information center for Russian seamen hasopened. Russian fishermen are now a vital part of Nemuro’s economy, both for the seaproducts they bring and for their purchases; approximately twenty thousand Russianfishermen come to Hanasaki port in Nemuro each year. But in 2006, almost half of thesurviving Japanese repatriated from the Kurils after World War II were living in Nemuroand 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 childrenfrom Sakhalin arrived, the first time since the war that any Soviets had been admitted tothe city. By 2000, the number of Russians granted permits to visit Wakkanai outnum-bered 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 Unionacross the strait. Just as Kuril Islands Russians come to Nemuro to shop these days, Wak-kanai officials want easy entry procedures to encourage Sakhalin residents to make shop-ping trips to Hokkaido. But smuggling between Russia and Japan continues, and inWakkanai, officials have also become concerned about the number of automobile acci-dents involving Russians.

The other two cities where Russian visits have had an impact in recent years are Otaruand Hakodate. In Otaru, as early as 1991 the first Japanese duty-free shop geared for theRussian market opened for business. In Hakodate, Russia’s Far Eastern National Univer-sity has a branch campus, and in November 2008, a Russian foundation opened a Rus-sian center at the university. Patriarch Alexey II of the Russian Orthodox Church visitedthe city in 2000, well more than a century after Japan’s first Orthodox church opened inHakodate.

These days, one sees positive signs of Russia-Japan cooperation in many fields. Oiland gas resources off the Sakhalin coast are being developed, and Hokkaido firms havebeen active in supporting industries, including transportation and construction. As theoil 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 envi-ronment. In the twenty-first century, Russian and Japanese coast guards have practicedcooperative countermeasures against smuggling and in 2007, the two nations togetherinstalled and are now using fiber optic cable under the sea to connect Hokkaido and Sak-halin. In addition, Japan has expressed willingness to help finance a railroad bridge betweenHokkaido and Sakhalin.


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A number of Russian fishermen sell their catch in Nemuro these days, and many shops in the citywelcome 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.

In recent years Japan has extended economic and humanitarian aid to the RussianFar East despite the Northern Territories controversy. Some aid, including food and med-icine, 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 havealso responded to individual Russians in need, especially with medical care. When aseverely burned three-year-old Russian boy from Sakhalin was brought to a Sapporo hos-pital in 1990, Japanese officials waived visa requirements for his family. Many HokkaidoJapanese, including school children, contributed funds for his care, and skin used forgrafts came from Japanese donors.

One case that received wide publicity was that of Sakhalin border official GeneralVitaly Gamov and his wife. In May 2002, incendiary bottles struck Gamov’s apartmentin Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, severely injuring him and his wife. Despite being flown to Japanfor treatment, General Gamov died in a Sapporo hospital several days later. The Russianmafia drew blame for the attack, because Gamov had been working to stop the lucrativepoaching.

Cooperation abounds between Russia and Hokkaido, but the Northern Territoriesand 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 bea military center, but if relations remain friendly and positive, trade and visits back andforth will draw Hokkaido ports closer to Russia. Symbolizing the tie between Russia andHokkaido is the Japanese song Pechika, which describes a family telling stories aroundthe stove. The song features a Russian word that has found a place in Japanese, for pechkain Russian means “stove,” and Russian stoves played an important role in Hokkaido dur-ing 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 thegreat distance between the U.S.S.R. and Japan despite their geographic proximity; “Dis-tant neighbors,” scholars call Japan and Russia.37 One hopes that this distance truly islessening.


13 Recovery and Development

After the end of World War II, great efforts took place to reconstruct Japan. ForHokkaido, these were years of development but also disaster: new initiatives in infra-structure—from harbors to hydroelectricity—but also decline in some industries, espe-cially mining, some bad years on the farm, a sudden worldwide rise in the cost of oil anda typhoon in 1954 during which a thousand people perished on a sinking ship. As Hok-kaido approached its hundredth year of development, these setbacks might have discour-aged both the politicians who made funds available for the island and the Dosankothemselves. Was Hokkaido after all too marginal a place for serious and sustained devel-opment? But Japan needed Hokkaido, and while sad and exceptional events garneredheadlines, development and modernization proceeded and life became more comfort-able and more prosperous for most.

Development

The first priority for Japan after World War II was recovery. Because of food short-ages, officials urged further settlement and extension of agriculture on Hokkaido. Evenbefore the war, Japan had needed to import rice; now, with overseas territories includ-ing Manchuria and Korea gone, Hokkaido would be the key to raising more rice and othercrops. Another crucial need if agricultural output were to be effective was the restora-tion 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 heart-land.

At mid-century, the island of Hokkaido had about 4,300,000 people. Urban streetsremained unpaved, most towns and farms did not have piped water, most families hadno telephones. Farmers still depended largely on horses, not tractors, and Hokkaido hadmore than 250,000 horses in 1949. Some rural families had no electricity; even in the early1960s, more than twenty thousand households went without it. More than one hundredrural schools still had no electric power. Only about twenty percent of junior high schoolgraduates went on to high school, at least partly because of school fees. (Elementary andjunior high school, both compulsory, were free.) Isolated areas had inadequate medicalservices and the Docho established mobile clinics to help meet the needs of rural resi-dents. Some families were so poor that they could not afford to eat any of the food theyraised to sell, instead subsisting mostly on potatoes. But visionaries saw potential forHokkaido to become the Japanese equivalent of a national breadbasket as well as a refuge

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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 hadbeen heavily bombed. (In rebuilding, however, facilities on the other islands incorporatedmodern, efficient techniques and created new products, leaving Hokkaido industrybehind.)

The Diet passed the Hokkaido Development Law in 1950, creating the HokkaidoDevelopment Bureau as a special branch of the national government. Tokyo reasonedthat because of possible Soviet threats, control of Hokkaido improvement was a matterof national security. A year later, the first of a series of development plans began, callingfor strengthening the island’s infrastructure, expanding production in agriculture, fisheriesand 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 variousminerals to be mined in Hokkaido as well as how transportation facilities would beupgraded. New areas were to be opened to farming, including peat meadows in theIshikari Valley previously thought unsuitable for agriculture but which with modernreclamation techniques gave promise of becoming productive. New fishing ports wouldbe developed and old ones repaired. Hatcheries, refrigerated warehouses and plants tomanufacture ice would be constructed. Hokkaido Governor Machimura Kingo pointedout that unlike the early twentieth century development plans, whose main thrust wasto relieve population pressure in the Japanese heartland, postwar plans included the goalof raising the standard of living on Hokkaido. Projects would include housing construc-tion, for example.1


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

Plans may be adopted, but accomplishment is what counts. Too often, politics influ-enced appropriations and too much investment went into already established fields likeagriculture instead of into industry. World Bank funds aided in land reclamation, butJapanese financing for the plans was slow in coming. Both Hokkaido officials and cen-tral bureaucrats had to approve payments and Tokyo failed to provide ample support.The Hokkaido Shimbun could be critical of development progress, writing in 1957 thatplans had “not been for the sake of economic growth of Hokkaido, but for the advantageof politicians.” The newspaper estimated that only half of the first five years’ targets hadbeen met, because neither Tokyo nor the Docho made adequate funds available.2

Though the development plans’ goals were not nearly realized, some projects wereset in motion and others were completed. Perhaps most important were the hydroelec-tric projects, including a large dam on the Ishikari River near Sounkyo—the scenic gorgein Daisetsuzan National Park near the river’s headwaters—and its accompanying powerstations.

Many Japanese who had been living in lands lost in the war, especially people fromSakhalin, Manchuria and the Kurils, settled on Hokkaido. Otherwise, population did notgrow as much as officials wished; just as with every other government scheme to movepeople to Hokkaido, few responded. The plan set to begin in 1971 included a populationgoal for the island of six million people. This has not yet been reached. In addition, evenin 1957, twelve years after war’s end, the island had a shortage of one hundred thousandhousing units. Moreover, funds were short, and new settlers did not have the capital neededto begin successful farming operations. Most refugees had arrived with none of their pos-sessions. Land clearing for new farming ventures was much more difficult than it shouldhave been because American postwar occupation regulations regarding oil conservationseverely restricted use of machinery such as bulldozers.

While Tokyo encouraged agricultural production in Hokkaido, the weather did notalways cooperate. When the 1956 growing season was extremely cold, some ninety per-cent of Hokkaido’s food crops failed, and because the Soviet Union was harassing Japa-nese fishermen and limiting their catch, provisions were very short. The families in mostdire need were repatriates from Manchuria settled in areas marginal for agriculture becausethat was where land was available. These refugees came to Hokkaido with little or noth-ing and tried to establish farms, but they faced poor seasons in both 1953 and 1954. Thenearly total crop failure in 1956 when summer high temperatures often did not climbabove 56o F. left them near starvation. Hokkaido police reported that conditions were sobad that some families sold their daughters, who then were often forced into prostitu-tion. The Japanese and Hokkaido governments worked to assist destitute farmers withpublic works jobs, loans, subsidies, donated rice and, for children, school lunches. (Thishelped encourage school attendance.) The United Nations donated food; so did Japaneseand foreign charities. Thailand and Burma made extra rice available and the U.S. Air Forcesent three planes full of rice—42,000 pounds of it—to Hokkaido for the hungry popu-lace. Not only farmers suffered in 1956; fishermen had a poor year too, but bureaucraticred 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 crit-icism 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 afterthe 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 blamedthe government for sending them to such an inhospitable place. (A newsman visiting Omumade a point of reporting that these people even had to use their heating stoves in thesummer!) Farmers in Shibecha, an inland settlement north of Kushiro, told a similarstory. They had first settled the isolated spot in 1945 but the cold weather in the 1950sdefeated their efforts.3

After the disastrous 1956 season, both public and private efforts continued researchon cold weather agriculture. “Always a food-deficit area, Hokkaido must still import muchof its rice and wheat,” John D. Eyre wrote in 1959.4 From the 1960s, government has takenthe leading role in agricultural planning, land clearing and reclamation, so the individualfarmer has not had to bear so much of the heavy cost of opening new lands. Farm organ-izations also have urged measures to promote and help support shifts to crops and typesof 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 theiremployees, not the government. Among the many services the cooperatives offer are leas-ing farm machinery to their members and processing crops. The island’s umbrella farmorganization, Hokuren, searches for market opportunities for Hokkaido products, andHokuren and local cooperative units also carry out many other activities to assist farmcommunities, from producing seeds to making loans.

Agricultural success remained inconsistent as yields varied greatly during the earlypostwar 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. The1964 Hokkaido rice crop was only half as large as usual and the very cold spring in 1965delayed planting. The cold weather put off planting for so long that when the time finallycame, Self-Defense troops helped get the seedlings set out quickly. Suicides and evencases of infanticide among farm families were reported that year after excessively coldweather damaged both rice and wheat plantings. Prospects were so bad that Dochoofficials investigated the possibility of helping Hokkaido farmers emigrate to Brazil. Fromlate October 1965 through February 1966, official and private agencies such as the RedCross amassed funds to aid Hokkaido farmers. In 1966, in addition to cold, early summertyphoon damage, an August deluge of rain and September frost caused problems.

Sometimes harvests fail, sometimes they are too bountiful; by the early 1980s, Japanwas facing a rice glut, and this put pressure on Hokkaido farmers as well as others todecrease plantings. Milk, too, was in oversupply. Other crops showed promise; for exam-ple, the sugar beet, introduced unsuccessfully in the nineteenth century, has beenprofitable in more recent years. A beet factory opened in Obihiro in 1919 and after WorldWar II the government encouraged sugar beet production anew as Japan, shorn of Tai-wan, had no domestic source of cane sugar. Government officials encouraged farmers inthe Abashiri-Kitami region to plant the beets after they proved to be the only major cropin the area that survived the exceptionally cold weather of 1956. Not only do marketneeds and weather affect crop choices, so do war and politics. It was a political policythat led to the intrepid efforts to grow rice successfully in Hokkaido, for an all-impor-tant goal in Japan was self-sufficiency in rice.

Farms grew larger during those years; the more recently developed a region of agri-cultural land, the larger the farms. Some of the biggest spreads are in areas such as thedairying center east of Kushiro, where the average amount of land per farm is about 125


acres. Bigger farms minimize growing costs; rice is less expensive to produce in Hokkaidothan elsewhere in Japan. But as development has diverted more and more forest land toagricultural use, increasing numbers of wild animals have invaded settled areas, nibblingplants and sometimes tearing them out of the ground. In addition, volcanic eruptionshave destroyed wild animal habitat, meaning that farm animals become prey.

Agricultural development in Hokkaido has involved a change in land use as well asopening new land. Many fields in the northern and eastern areas of the island that provedmarginal for rice have been converted to successful mixed farming, with spreads includ-ing fields of beans and potatoes as well as pasturage for dairy farming, which was becom-ing more important in Japan. These changes were not easy to make, for constructingbuildings and buying land and animals required capital. Meanwhile, rice remainedHokkaido’s most extensively grown crop, being produced on twenty percent or more ofthe island’s cultivated land in the mid–1960s. (In the 1960s, however, apples were the mostprofitable crop in Hokkaido, followed by rice and then potatoes.) Continuing agriculturalresearch has led to increased stability in the farming sector. Perhaps it took the hard timeson the farm in the 1950s and 60s to make the substantial investments in hard work, timeand money available to create a productive agriculture that was truly suitable to Hokkaidoclimate and soil.

Several successful specialized agricultural pursuits grew or, in some cases, began dur-ing 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 intothe 1960s, winters saw timber harvesters with sled loads of logs pulled by horses. Machin-ery has taken over, but racehorse breeding and training have become important eco-nomic activities, and the horse pastures enclosed by white-painted board fences are a raresight elsewhere in Japan.

Some postwar refugees were settled on the Tokachi Plain after the war, but bitterwinters and the short growing season discouraged them. As conditions improved through-out Japan, a number moved on to other islands, but many stayed and persevered. TheTokachi Plain proved suitable for grazing, and one specialty crop has been introducedin the region very successfully. Starting in the 1960s, wine production has become a cen-tral part of Ikeda Town’s economy. Marutani Kaneyasu, mayor of this town near Obi-hiro, spearheaded the idea as a way to use agricultural land effectively at a time whenTokyo was urging the reduction of acreage devoted to rice cultivation. Farmers plantedvineyards in 1961 and two years later winemaking began. Soon the product, known asTokachi Wine, won recognition in European contests and the industry was on its way tosuccess. A September 2003 earthquake caused the loss of more than one hundred thou-sand bottles of wine and damaged the factory, but did not stop Ikeda’s annual wine fes-tival, 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’snatural resources—forestry, fishing and mining — seemed to offer almost unlimitedbounty. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, forestry, like fishing, wasstringently limited and mining was phased out. Forest management has changed drasti-cally since the early days. A desire for both sustainability and profitable forest useprompted 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 becauseunlike 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; aconflagration 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 daysthe island’s trees cannot meet Japan’s need, and wood pulp is imported to the island forpaper manufacture.

Products of Hokkaido’s rivers and the sea remained important in the island’s econ-omy, but no longer did anyone see these resources as inexhaustible, and ever since theend of the war the Russians have controlled some traditional Dosanko fishing grounds.Research to protect and increase marine resources has been ongoing and hatcheries forsea creatures such as oysters and sea urchins as well as fish have been established. For thefishermen, life improved. After the war, the fishing cooperatives in Hokkaido organizeda system to make credit available to their members so they would no longer have to bor-row from merchants at high interest rates. Meanwhile, national legislation in 1949 orderedcompulsory establishment of fishermen’s cooperatives. The fishermen’s own organizationthus would allocate resources and issue licenses for coastal fishing. Cooperatives man-age the fishery, establishing, among other things, the number of boats participating andthe amount of gear they use. Cooperatives also market their members’ products; someeven process the catch. Ando Takatoshi oversaw creation of a mutual insurance systemfor Hokkaido fisher families, which is important given the threat to the fishing industryfrom dangerous working conditions and natural disasters.

The mining industry reached its zenith in Hokkaido in the second half of the twen-tieth century, with more than one hundred thousand miners in 1961 working in some250 mines, mostly producing coal. After World War II, planners touted Hokkaido’s min-eral wealth, and the deposits that were extracted played an important role in Japan’s recov-ery.

But miners worked in deplorable conditions—and deadly accidents continued evenafter companies adopted new safety precautions. Thirty-nine miners died in a methanegas explosion in a Kushiro mine in 1954. Sixty people died in an Akabira coal mine inNovember 1955 when sparks from a motor apparently ignited gas in a shaft; the result-ing 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 justbefore 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 rescueefforts, and forty-two died. In Ashibetsu, eight miners died in 1962 after a gas explosionin a Mitsui mine, ironically on the very day that mine inspectors were completing a sur-vey of Hokkaido mines in hopes of making coal a more competitive energy source. Sixty-one deaths occurred in February 1965 after a methane gas explosion and subsequentcave-in at the same Hokutan Yubari mine where forty-two men had died from an explo-sion five years earlier. Sapporo mine security officials had warned Hokutan that methanein 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 Hokutanreopened the site, and government officials issued a new warning—just two hours beforethe tragedy. Afterward, Tokyo ordered a six month closure of the mine. In 1968 thirty-one miners died in a July fire and eight in a September cave-in, both also in Yubari. In1969, nineteen miners were killed when dynamite exploded in an Akabira mine andnewspapers castigated mine officials for putting profits ahead of safety.5 An unexplained


explosion in a Sunagawa mine considered exceptionally safe killed fifteen men in Decem-ber 1974 and in November 1975 gas exploded in the Hokutan mine at Horonai, killingeleven men and trapping thirteen more. The fire became more and more intense andofficials eventually ordered the pit flooded, dooming the trapped miners. Almost twoyears 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 asmuch of its own energy as possible.6 While government funds had supported this Hoku-tan operation in order to update it, some miners charged that safety precautions had beenscaled down in the interest of stimulating production. This mine supposedly had the verybest available safety procedures and equipment, but because of financial troubles, mineoperators cut corners and safety suffered. Many men evacuated the mine and others wererescued, but when no hope remained for the others, officials flooded the mine to put outfires still smoldering in it. Some months later, the company drained the mine and broughtout the dead. That mine was permanently closed, but another gas explosion in a Yubarimine owned by Mitsubishi killed sixty-two people in May 1985. Most of the 336 minersin the shaft at the time of the accident escaped to safety.

The catastrophes summarized here do not include all of the mining accidents inHokkaido; others also resulted in deaths—and natural disasters, too, endanger miners.A March 1952 earthquake in Hokkaido disrupted work at a number of mines, cuttingelectric power and flooding some pits; half of the people killed due to the quake wereminers who died when mines collapsed. Whatever the causes of such mine disasters, theyresulted in lost lives and disabled miners. Costs related to safety measures, rescue attemptsand interruption of mineral extraction as well as negative publicity helped lead to per-manent mine closures at a time when less expensive imported coal was becoming avail-able and when, in addition, coal was losing out to oil.

From the 1960s, world oil prices tumbled and less and less Japanese coal found amarket. Moreover, thanks to low shipping costs, it became cost effective to import cheapcoal 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 asthe hope to maintain a strong domestic energy supply in Japan, government officialsexpressed reluctance to force mine closures. Mine closings occurred throughout Japanin the late twentieth century, however, as imported coal replaced more and more domes-tic coal (partly because the United States was insisting that Japan buy more coal fromAmerica.)7 From the 1960s to 1990 the number of coal mines on Hokkaido shrank aboutninety percent, with some 380,000 people moving away from the mining towns. Forexample, Haboro Mine, near the coast well north of Rumoi, closed in 1970 after onlythirty years in operation.

About two months after the 1969 explosion in Akabira, the Yubetsu Coal MiningCompany announced reorganization of the mining operation there; the work force woulddrop 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 hasdeclined by three-fourths. Nearby and beyond a mountain ridge, Utashinai saw its pop-ulation drop to only about twelve percent of the 46,000 it was at the height of miningshortly after World War II. The tiny city’s high school closed in 2007 and students nowhave 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 discoveryof coal at Horonai more than one hundred years earlier that had stimulated so muchHokkaido development. The last coal mining complex in Japan, Taiheiyo in Kushiro,closed in 2002, partly because government subsidies to coal mining companies endedthat year. What coal was left in Hokkaido could only have been recovered at an exorbi-tant cost. Ironically, at the beginning of the century some pundits had felt that Hokkaido’scoal would be “inexhaustible.”8 The mines have closed, but their legacy remains, for for-mer miners who contracted black lung disease have brought lawsuits both against themining firms and the government, charging inadequate supervision of mining conditions.World economic conditions do not remain static, however, and as oil prices rose signifi-cantly in 2008, so did the price of coal, prompting Japanese firms to look seriously at thepossibility of once again producing domestic coal.

Not all the affected mines produced coal. Sumitomo shut down its Konomai minein northeastern Hokkaido in 1973. It once produced more gold and silver than any othermine in Asia, but most of the precious metal had been extracted and what was left costmore to obtain than it was worth. In 2006, Nippon Mining and Metals closed Japan’s lastzinc mine, Toyoha mine near Jozankei spa in the hills within Sapporo’s city limits. Themine produced zinc, lead and indium but ran out of ore.

During the 1960s and 70s, Japan’s economy made spectacular progress, but with themines closing, Hokkaido was vulnerable to the autumn 1973 worldwide crisis when oil-producing countries suddenly raised prices and drastically limited exports. Hokkaido,where winter cold necessitates high fuel consumption, felt the shortage acutely. Nonessen-tial uses felt severe cutbacks. At Noboribetsu, workers killed 55 of the 167 bears in thezoo because of lack of fuel to heat their facilities, while at the Sapporo Zoo, heating thepolar bears’ pool stopped, turning the water to ice and depriving the animals of their usualchance to swim. More serious, families and firms throughout the island had budget trou-bles. One project put on hold because of the oil crisis was the construction of a bullettrain line in Hokkaido, then in the planning stage. The crisis soon abated all around theworld, but it had created one more challenge for Hokkaido.

It was during this era that environmental consciousness became an important fac-tor in Hokkaido development, adding restoration and protection as island goals. LakeToya and the Ishikari River offer examples of both environmental degradation and recov-ery. Lake Toya, known for the clarity of its blue water, had lost much of its transparentquality by 1970, due both to nearby sulfur mines and a growing number of hotels, whosesewage, often inadequately treated, was pumped into the lake. Cleanup measures weretaken and sewage no longer flows into Lake Toya. Nearby Mt. Usu’s 1977 and 2000 erup-tions temporarily clouded the lake with ash and pumice.

Significant industrial pollution tainted Hokkaido’s main rivers so that spawning inthese waterways produced very few young fish. In 1971, the Ishikari community, at themouth of the Ishikari River, canceled its annual salmon festival celebrating the appear-ance of the fish returning from the sea to head upriver. Overfishing and river pollutionhad cut the salmon catch from almost two million in 1879 to seven thousand in 1957 andjust 184 fish in 1970. Thus the festival was canceled for lack of fish. But thanks to fisheriesmanagement and environmental regulations, more fish now enter the river and the fes-tival once again takes place each September. Fish populations, however, remain muchlower than once seen, and salmon hatcheries have been built in various Hokkaido loca-tions.


While the Docho and local Hokkaido officials faced issues involving the island’sprime economic sectors, many Dosanko thought that Hokkaido was merely a pawn innational politics. People complained at the high prices on the island. Critics charged thatTokyo’s Hokkaido Development Bureau worked halfheartedly; it wasted resources, it leftroads 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’sSocialist 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 postwarreforms in Japan, prefectural governors would now be elected, not appointed. DuringTanaka’s early years in office, American occupation officials made the key decisions, butthe governor used his influence in addressing the shortage of food, and also on behalf ofeducation, labor issues and social welfare programs. Later he was able to turn more atten-tion to stimulating interest in Hokkaido products, both abroad and elsewhere in Japan.

Political disagreements between Tokyo and Sapporo tended to hinder Hokkaidoprogress. The northern islanders voted much less conservatively than most Japanese inthe early postwar years when the Japan Socialist Party was strong, choosing many Social-ists for the national Diet and the Hokkaido legislature as well as Governor Tanaka. TheHokkaido Shimbun had an influence, often opposing national policies on issues impor-tant to Hokkaido when the island’s interests seemed to be receiving inadequate atten-tion. (And because for years after the war, the nation’s daily papers arrived on the northernisland two days late, the Hokkaido Shimbun remained especially influential.) Attitudeschanged, however, and in 1959, Hokkaido voters, like the nation’s voters as a whole, choseconservative Liberal Democratic Party candidates both for the majority of the Hokkaidolegislature and for governor, electing Machimura Kingo of the Hokkaido pioneer Machi-mura family.

During his time in office, Governor Machimura emphasized development, express-ing what government plans had accomplished as well as what had not been done and set-ting out what should be achieved by 1970. A key challenge, he said, would be to persuadeJapanese industrial firms to operate on Hokkaido. The “plain spoken” governor10 extolledthe Dosanko “frontier spirit.” He also strove to make Hokkaido’s history better known,championing both Japanese and foreign accomplishments in making the island what ithad become.

Liberal Democrat Dogakinai Naohiro, often called “Mr. Do,” won election as gov-ernor of Hokkaido in 1971 and held the office for twelve years. One of his initiatives urgedeach 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 sup-port exchanges with the world’s other northern regions through the Northern RegionsStudy Council. This Sapporo-based organization, born in 1971, became the NorthernRegions Center in 1978. In the years since then, its programs have included many activ-ities in Hokkaido geared to promoting international understanding. Citizen exchangesare an important aspect of the Center’s program. Specialists in fields important to north-ern regions have been brought together through the Center. Examples abound. Agricul-tural researchers from Hokkaido and Russia have cooperated in studies of potato culturewhile Hokkaido and Alaska have shared findings related to fisheries. Joint research andbusiness ventures with North American firms have also been developed in agricultureand forestry.

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Private firms, such as the steel mills at Muroran and the Oji Paper Mill in Tomako-mai, have played an important role in the island’s economy. In the 1950s, both the paper-pulp and the steel industry increased production, though a 1954 strike at Japan Steel cutinto that firm’s output. “Muroran must be the world’s most scenic steel town,” wroteAlexander Campbell in 1961.11

Paper produced in Tomakomai was transported via Muroran until new port facili-ties opened in Tomakomai, where excavation began in 1951 to develop an artificial chan-nel along which modern and extensive facilities could be constructed. Since Tomakomaiis 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 aninternational port. Along with port facilities, the publicly and privately financed projectincluded preparation of an adjoining industrial site for manufacturing, oil refining andpower generation, though the oil shock of the 1970s slowed development and the indus-trial park attracted only a small number of the factories for which it was planned. Improve-ments meanwhile continued at the port of Muroran, with new wharves, lighthouses andprotective embankments constructed.

In the late 1950s, about half of Hokkaido’s foreign trade (measured in volume) passedthrough Otaru, but during the 1970s, work on a nearby rival port began: Ishikari Bay NewPort, 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 wellas breakwater and wharf construction. The port is well-positioned to serve Sapporo, ofcourse, as well as Russian far eastern ports, and has become an important distributioncenter.

In eastern Hokkaido, Kushiro’s port saw vast improvement. An additional riverchannel was dug through the city starting in 1969, and now Kushiro boasts both east andwest harbors. This prevents flooding, and the new channel supplements the shallow har-bor at the mouth of the Kushiro River.

Kushiro, surprisingly, was one of the fastest growing urban areas in Japan through-out the 1950s and 60s. In Sapporo, population was rapidly increasing. Otaru and Hakodatehad long been sizable cities and Muroran had reached one hundred thousand residentsby 1940. By 1950, Asahikawa attained that number and Kushiro followed. Though Hok-kaido cities were growing in the decades after World War II, in the heartland many stillperceived Hokkaido as a place of cold and discomfort. As always, some residents left theisland, according to a 1963 report some 75,000 annually, including about one-fifth of theyear’s high school graduates.

If people from the heartland were to come to Hokkaido and learn what it was reallylike, a good transportation system, starting with the connection to Honshu, was crucial.After World War II, ferry and shipping lines serving coastal communities were restoredone by one. The only prewar luxury liner on trans–Pacific service to the United Statesthat survived the war—the Hikawa Maru—began a coastal service in 1947, connectingMuroran with Honshu ports. As car ownership in Japan grew in the postwar years, auto-mobile vacations in Hokkaido grew popular and services carrying cars between Honshuports and Hokkaido cities increased.

On the island itself, roads were extended and improved. This was sorely needed, forin the 1950s their poor condition discouraged travel. A motorist from Honshu in 1955found a gravel surface on the main road to Sapporo except for the final stretch from Chi-tose, which was paved. But steady progress of the highway system inspired increased


automobile use. The first expressways in Hokkaido opened in December 1971 from Otaruto Sapporo and from Chitose to Kita Hiroshima, about halfway from Chitose to Sap-poro.

Air travel slowly became available to a wider public. When the Emperor and Empressof Japan took a month-long tour of Hokkaido in 1954, they experienced their first air-plane flight on the return trip to Tokyo. The trip from Sapporo to Tokyo took only threehours (and since then, the time has been cut in half.) By 1978, the airport at Chitose wasserving seven million passengers a year. Congestion became a problem as air travel grewin popularity, and construction began in 1975 on what became New Chitose Interna-tional Airport in 1988.

Challenges: strikes, protests and disaster

In Hokkaido, the years after war and occupation saw strikes and protests, naturaldisasters and dissent, sometimes accompanied by violence. The complexity of reestab-lishing the economy frustrated people, inspiring workers to strike and students to demon-strate. During these same years, accidents in the mines and on the high seas challengedthe island’s economy as well as evoking horror.

Labor confrontations dwindled as Japan stabilized after the war. Many, though notall, of the strikes that affected Hokkaido were scheduled for a limited period, were set-tled quickly or petered out. Hokkaido workers of course participated in nationwide laboractions, for example a two-month-long coal strike over wages in late 1952. Resulting coal

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

shortages caused cancellation of some of Hokkaido’s rail and ferry services and JapanSteel’s Muroran plant had to cut its production by seventy percent. The Government ofJapan finally ordered the miners back to work for a cooling-off period and the miners soonagreed 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 Tomakomaiin 1958; as this mill produced thirty percent of the newsprint manufactured in Japan, thestrike was serious for the country. This walkout was not the first disruption at Oji. Work-ers had struck for about three weeks in 1953 over wages, forcing newspapers to cut theirnumber of pages. Mediation settled that conflict, but in late 1957 workers walked out oversanitary conditions and safety as well as pay. This union action failed, and later fruitlessnegotiations and short walkouts set the stage for a five month strike. Workers walked outJuly 18, 1958, seeking higher wages and a guaranteed union shop. In September, someworkers returned to the job, but others stayed out and sporadic violence broke out betweenthe two groups. After being closed for two months, the mill resumed some production,with police protecting workers ready to cross picket lines, but violent confrontationscontinued. Strikers tried to block pulp deliveries to the mill as well as shipment of thenewsprint from the mill. On September 15, strikers forced the men who had resumed workto stay in the factory, unable to leave at the end of a shift. They remained in the plant foralmost two months. At the beginning of October the strikers and their wives took con-trol of the city, allowing only strike supporters on the streets. In early November, somestrikers, apparently drunk, sneaked into the factory to destroy machinery. Some days


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

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 commu-nist role in the action.12 Mediation finally began, and by the end of the month the strik-ers agreed to go back to work. The union shop remained intact and the strikers resumedwork in mid–December, but relations between management and labor as well as betweenthe different workers’ factions remained uneasy for some time. The next June, the uniongave 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 ofpress; 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, precipitatedshort strikes as did proposed work reductions and mine closures, the workers objectingto imports of coal at a time when domestic mines were being closed.

March 1974 offers an example of various inflation-related labor protests. Publicemployees walked off the job for twelve hours, demanding both the right for civil serv-ice workers to strike and wage increases to counter inflation. In Hokkaido, railroad work-ers’ action slowed the speed of both government-operated and private trains. Inflationalso motivated Hokkaido farmers to dump their milk, to insist that the government raisethe product’s guaranteed minimum price.

The worldwide civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s inspired demonstra-tions in Japan not directly tied to economic issues. Protest and violence in Hokkaido cen-tered on three issues: militarism, including Japan’s ties with the American militaryestablishment, 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 tourand, in 1951, to the mutual security treaty adopted by the U.S. and Japan. Antagonismextended to the continuing American military presence and other U.S. ties; fear of agi-tation even arose over the possibility of associating Hokkaido University with an Amer-ican university. Such a relationship could bring financial and academic benefits, but someinfluential people including the university president hesitated to implement a tie for fearof antagonizing left-wing students and faculty members. Several American universitiessought a connection, including the University of Washington in Seattle since it, likeHokudai, 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 SapporoAgricultural College and the University of Massachusetts—then Massachusetts Agricul-tural College—during the time of William S. Clark, establishing a tie with this campusappeared less apt to arouse controversy than would a relationship with any other Amer-ican university. And 1956 seemed an auspicious year to create this new link, for it wasthe 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 installa-tion near Kushiro; about 180 people squatted on a highway to prevent delivery of con-struction supplies. In the late 1960s, protesters throughout Japan insisted that the UnitedStates return Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty. Even in Hokkaido, as distant from Oki-nawa as one could be in Japan, the demand fomented activity, for were Okinawa returnedto 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 aplan to build a Self-Defense Force missile base in a forest at Naganuma Town, about tenmiles east of Sapporo. Many nearby residents sought to prevent construction, pointingout that the base would be situated on land that had long been a forest reserve protect-ing the local water supply. The townsfolk feared that clearing the forested land wouldmake nearby farmland prone to flooding. They questioned whether the Agricultural andForestry Minister could arbitrarily nullify the area’s designation as a forest reserve. Moresignificantly for the nation, protesters used the argument that the SDF was an unconsti-tutional organization, for the Japanese constitution adopted after World War II renouncedwar. Violent confrontations between police and left-wing students supporting the towns-people continued for several years. Despite various court battles, work proceeded on themissile base, with almost ninety acres of forest cleared and a dam constructed to preventfloods. The site already housed missiles by the time the Sapporo District Court ruled onSeptember 7, 1973 that the SDF was unconstitutional. Naganuma citizens wanted the for-est reconstituted, but in 1976 an appeals court reversed the lower court decision. Japan’sSupreme Court later affirmed the constitutionality of the SDF, which has remained Japan’smilitary force.

The Naganuma agitation instigated the most serious challenge to Japan’s defenseestablishment. Among other antimilitary protests in Hokkaido, in 1973, when the GSDFplanned to ship some equipment by ferry from Hokkaido, about 150 protesters at theTomakomai pier held up the shipment until removed by police. More antiwar demon-strators appeared the next morning, and the ferry company decided not to accept the finalshipment. Antiwar sentiment also caused an eighteen-year-old protester to place fakebombs in three Sapporo locations in 1977; he said he wanted the Japanese people pun-ished 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 earlyin 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 gaina greater student role in university management. They caused months of turmoil on cam-pus and disrupted the opening ceremony of the new school year in April. In May, a groupof students painted a new slogan on the pedestal supporting the university’s bust ofWilliam 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 rad-ical students captured university president Horiuchi Juro, who had compared some ofthe students’ actions to Nazi methods. The students held Horiuchi for almost twenty-fourhours but released him when a doctor warned of the seriousness of the president’s highblood pressure.

The situation on the Hokudai campus deteriorated so much that no classes met afterlate June. Early in August, in response to troubles across the nation, the Diet adoptedlegislation designed to resolve campus discord. Administrators could suspend classes fornine months; if the dispute could not be resolved within a year, the Ministry of Educa-tion could disband the school. Hokudai students were among those who protested thislegislation, and the standoff continued. On November 8, in response to official requests,two thousand police raided the campus. Students threw Molotov cocktails at the police-men who tried to enter the barricaded buildings. These small missiles caused severalfires, though all were soon extinguished. Other students threw rocks at the police, who


responded with water cannons and tear gas. Finally, after about six hours, the studentscapitulated; thirty students and policemen had been injured in the melee. When broughtto trial several years later, several student leaders were found guilty of various charges andsentenced to incarceration.

In December came more troubles, when some students belonging to a radical Marx-ist group seized a Hokudai building. Early in the new year, however, faculty membersand other university workers backed up by two hundred riot police removed barricadesthat the students had set up and the students withdrew. Slowly, campus life returned tonormal.

The challenges to Hokkaido during these years included disease. Just as epidemicdisease 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 morevictims, especially children, suffered paralysis. Hokkaido doctors blamed Japanese redtape for slow release of imported vaccine; meanwhile, the United States donated iron lungsand chest respirators, which the Air Force flew to Hokkaido. Thereafter, thanks to a strongemphasis on immunization, polio almost completely disappeared.

Despite modern technology, strong currents and violent storms in Hokkaido waterscontinue to bedevil fishing and sea transportation. Fishing boats sink in stormy watersand 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 theSea of Japan, perhaps during World War II, appeared near the ferry route, causing officialsto 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 45rail cars en route to Aomori across the strait. Shortly after departure, the vessel got intotrouble in heavy seas. Unable to return to Hakodate and safety, the ship anchored justoffshore, but in the high winds the anchor chains broke apart and the ship was tossedabout. Three locomotives on board broke their moorings and rolled free, unbalancingthe ship, and it sank. As it went down, 1172 people died, many trapped below decks. Of44 American servicemen aboard, only one survived; just 159 of the 1331 passengers andcrew did not perish. Several other vessels also sank in the storm, including four otherferries. 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 seethe broken vessel lying off the coast. A year after the tragedy, a court of inquiry announcedits finding that ship’s captain Kondo Heiichi, who died in the accident, was negligent “innavigation.” The court held that the accident could have been prevented if everyone incommand on land and at sea had done all that could have been done and had workedcooperatively. The inquiry found the ship’s structure too weak and blamed ship ownerJapan National Railways for “inadequate administration.”13 Meanwhile, JNR pressed intoservice a thirty-year-old passenger ship to replace the Toya Maru. Interestingly, theEmperor and Empress of Japan had traveled from Aomori to Hakodate on the Toya Marujust 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 ofthe crewmen on other ships to destruction of houses and industrial buildings. The highwinds 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 thanhalf 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 activ-ity at Hakodate and Aomori, so that railroad cars and their cargo piled up at both termi-nals. Adding to delay, ship captains became more likely to cancel sailings in questionableweather.

It is tragic events such as the loss of the Toya Maru that unfortunately interrupt dailylife. More mundane stories which are just as significant never get told. For the story ofHokkaido these include everything from growing use of home insulation to the trans-formation of marginal cropland to good pasture. However, fiction, film and drama witha Hokkaido theme not surprisingly tend to play on the island’s dramatic qualities: iso-lation, frigid weather, storm, poverty and catastrophic incidents. A harrowing tale set onHokkaido is Takeda Taijin’s story “Luminous Moss.” Takeda became acquainted withthe island shortly after World War II while teaching Chinese literature at Hokudai. Hisfamous work, a story containing a play, concerns the efforts of men to stay alive throughthe winter—and the terrible choices facing them —on the deserted Shiretoko shorelineafter a shipwreck. The story raises profound questions about life.14 A play, a movie andan opera, “Hikarigoke,” written by leading Japanese composer Dan Ikuma, have beenbased on “Luminous Moss.” Takeda wrote the libretto for the opera, which was first pre-sented in 1972.

Hopes for prosperity

“Hokkaido is still a virile idyllic place—not too easy, not too proud.”15 This 1961observation suggests that Hokkaido was indeed a land of opportunity, as its championshad asserted for a hundred years, but that the rewards of life on the island could be elu-sive. For the nation, Hokkaido’s resources remained vital, as the efforts put into improve-ment of agricultural land show. But the island filled other needs, too. Some postwardevelopments even took advantage of Hokkaido’s northern climate. In 1956 the islandbecame the site for training Japan’s Antarctic scientific group, because the members couldexperience polar-like conditions at their base on Lake Tofutsu near Abashiri.

The nation’s postwar economic boom led to prosperity, more in the heartland thanin Hokkaido, and, consequently, lured Hokkaido young people south. Tokyo continuedto consider Hokkaido distinct from the rest of Japan and drew up development plans forthe island. Goals came to include conservation as well as improvement of infrastructureand living conditions and encouragement of industry. Plans were often too lofty andofficials in Tokyo were apt to be woefully uninformed about the northern island. WhenShibuya Naozo came to Hokkaido after he had been appointed development minister forthe island in 1979, he exclaimed when viewing the new site planned for industrial use inTomakomai, “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 fisheriesin foreign commerce. Trade patterns shifted due to World War II. Before the war, Hok-kaido firms had traded extensively with China and the Soviet Far East but the SecondWorld War and the following Korean War almost brought an end to such commerce. Fig-ures 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


was the nation to which the most goods were sent (and remains Hokkaido’s major trad-ing partner today). Island leaders hoped to expand foreign trade. In 1957, for example, atrade mission of Hokkaido government and business leaders took a six-week trip toSoutheast Asia seeking trade opportunities. The Docho had a trade office in Hong Kongand planned annual trade fairs there. By the 1970s, exports to the rest of the world includeda wide variety of agricultural and marine products. Manufactured goods sent abroadincluded iron and steel, ships, wood products—and even skis and baseball bats. Amongimports were iron ore, wood chips, fertilizer, machinery and—somewhat surprisingly—wheat and fish, but by the 1980s, almost half of Hokkaido imports consisted of petro-leum and its products. Island leaders would continue to seek trade opportunities in theyears to come.

The Hokkaido economy continued to rely heavily on public rather than privateinvestment, and the value of imports to the island from the rest of Japan and abroadremained much higher than the value of exports; nevertheless, the per capita income ofthe Dosanko improved from about 80% of the average income of all Japanese people in1960 to 95.3% in 1978.17 Life was becoming more pleasant and comfortable, with improve-ments in housing construction and increased use of household appliances. Buildingsbecame more suitable to the Hokkaido climate and more and more families obtainedwashing machines, refrigerators and cars. Also in this era television reception came tothe 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 wasbuilt and in 1958 a scenic ropeway from city to summit began operation. Astute adver-tising since then claims the evening view from the summit as one of Japan’s premier sce-nic vistas. Meanwhile, taking advantage of the road, an observatory on top of themountain began operation in 1953.

Hokkaido celebrated its history and development with two major expositions, theGrand Hokkaido Exhibition held in Otaru and Sapporo in 1958 and the more ambitiousGrand Centennial Fair of 1968 that commemorated the hundredth anniversary of theadoption of the name “Hokkaido” and the beginning of the island’s systematic coloniza-tion and development. The Centennial Memorial Tower arose in Sapporo’s eastern out-skirts and special events took place throughout that summer. Statues to Kuroda Kiyotakaand Horace Capron appeared in Odori Park and Governor Machimura invited Capron’sgreat-grandson Albert Capron and his wife to the festivities. The Emperor and Empressof Japan attended an anniversary ceremony on September 2; their tour, the third post-war imperial visit to the island, included even a trip to Wakkanai at Hokkaido’s north-ern tip. They saw a Hokkaido which could not have been imagined in the days when itwas known as Ezo.

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14 Hokkaido in the World Economy

The end of the twentieth century meant new challenges for Hokkaido as the islandcoped with changes in the world economy. Mines, forests and fisheries no longer pro-vided the wealth they once had, and even agriculture has had to take new realities intoaccount. The strong rise of the Japanese yen against the U.S. dollar punished Hokkaidoexports, 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 businessand industry from elsewhere in Japan and abroad and, in addition, tourism has becomean economic mainstay.

Challenges and changes

Yokomichi Takahiro served as Hokkaido governor from 1983 to 1995, after twenty-four years of conservative leadership on the island. Yokomichi ran for the office as anindependent; he had been a Socialist Party member but said he ran for office to representa Hokkaido Citizens’ Party. Partly due to his commitment to visit every community onHokkaido, he remained popular with his constituents while in office despite the island’seconomic troubles. Yokomichi promoted Hokkaido as a site for investment, visiting citiesin the heartland and abroad on behalf of island communities and industries. As he workedto develop Hokkaido’s economy in a changing world, he reported survey results show-ing that the Dosanko—almost eighty percent of them —liked living in Hokkaido, andthat among Japanese in the entire nation, only Kyoto was chosen as a better place to livethan Hokkaido.1 Hokkaido leaders in recent years have tried to emphasize the island’sadvantages while solving its problems.

In the late 1980s, Hokkaido’s population dropped for the first time, probably due todecline in the island’s major economic bases. Fishing remained crucial, but fishermenwere facing more and more restrictions and young people were less apt to follow familytradition and take up fishing as a career. The array of fresh seafood for sale in Hakodate’smorning market and the great signs in Nemuro and Hakodate advertising crabs illustratethe industry’s continuing importance to Hokkaido, however. Sea animals harvested offthe 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 apopulation decline. Some fishermen work far from the mainland, but these days theyhave to buy rights—mostly from Russia or the United States—to carry on their occupa-tion, while those who work near the Hokkaido shore need to find ways to help increasefish stocks. Hokkaido factories meanwhile process imported marine resources along withlocally caught sea life.

Agriculture has remained a Hokkaido mainstay. Holding about one-fourth of Japan’scultivated 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 (despitethe inhospitable climate), 70% of Japan’s wheat, 85% of azuki (red) beans, 93% of kid-ney beans, over 20% of soybeans and more than 70% of potatoes. Over 40% of Japan’sdairy products come from Hokkaido and over 90% of Japan’s race horses are raised onHokkaido.2 These days one can see vast commercial farms on the island and the govern-ment encourages more large-scale agriculture. By the 1990s the average size of a Hokkaidofarm was almost thirty acres, about twelve times the average in Japan. Because of theirsize, Hokkaido farms can be more efficient than those elsewhere in the nation. Agricul-tural 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 coop-eratives is especially important in protecting farmers against natural disasters, which candevastate a year’s crops.

Farmers in northern Hokkaido have adopted innovative practices to assist cold cli-mate cultivation. In Furen, well north of Asahikawa and now part of Nayoro City, spe-cial efforts include scattering dark ashes on farm fields in the spring to help the snowmelt earlier. Meanwhile, water from melting snow is held behind several dams in the areato create water for summer irrigation. Furen boasts of being the northernmost place inJapan where commercial rice is grown. Its specialty is glutinous rice, which traditionallyis pounded into a powder and steamed.

Changing international trade regulations have opened some of Japan’s protectedagricultural markets. Most Hokkaido farmers are not part-timers (unlike farmers else-where in Japan), and such changes can mean the end of profitable farming for many onthe northern island. The government cut subsidies, affecting Hokkaido dairy products,starch, beans and beef; also, cheaper foreign products began coming into Japan. Upsetabout the influence that international trade agreements, especially with the United States,had on their interests, Hokkaido farmers attacked an effigy of American President RonaldReagan in 1987 because of U.S. pressure to open Japan to more imports. After interna-tional meetings that year and the next, Japan agreed to end some agricultural quotas andthe United States consented to drop insistence that quotas for starch and some milk prod-ucts be raised. In 1990, though, the opening of the Japanese market to more meat anddairy products meant failure for some Hokkaido farmers. Tokyo made developmentmoney available to the island to create other jobs for some families, but the younger gen-eration is deserting the farms in the same way that many fishermen’s sons avoid theirfathers’ occupation.

International pressure to open markets has not died. In 2007, Australian and Japa-nese 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 anddairy products would mean the disappearance of 47,000 Hokkaido jobs.3 On the other

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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 seri-ous harm since a cow born on the island was diagnosed with bovine spongiformencephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) in September 2001, the first such case discov-ered in Japan. The market for beef products quickly plummeted, and the governmentbegan testing every cow that died as well as banning the type of feed suspected of caus-ing the illness. About two years later, Tokyo announced that cattle feed imported fromEurope 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 whenimpure powdered milk processed on the island sickened some thirteen thousand peoplein Osaka in 2000. Moreover, less than two years later company officials admitted that SnowBrand had changed the labels on some beef products to convince consumers that the meatdid not come from places implicated in BSE. Soon afterward, word came that the com-pany had used in production more than two thousand tons of Hokkaido butter that hadbeen stored past the date it was to be sold. After these serious missteps, Snow Brand reor-ganized and sought to recoup its once positive reputation. In 2007, for the first time insix years, the firm brought out a new product, a brand of cheeses made from Hokkaidomilk.

Other Hokkaido firms have damaged faith in the “wholesome image of food prod-ucts from Hokkaido.”4 Many Japanese tourists had been buying Ishiya’s popular white-


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

chocolate-filled cookies, Shiroi Koibito (white lover), but in 2007 customers learned thatthe company has been changing expiration dates on some of the packages and that someother products were contaminated. Also in 2007, a Tomakomai firm, Meat Hope, wasfound to have falsely labeled some of its products for years and soon went out of busi-ness. Whether Hokkaido can reclaim its reputation for healthful food products is not clear.

To promote local agricultural products, the Docho works to publicize Hokkaidofoods, even opening a shop in the middle of Tokyo to introduce items from the north-ern island. New Chitose International Airport also contains many inviting shops sellingHokkaido 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, Hokkaidoagriculture is efficient, productive and a key to island prosperity. Food processing firmschange product lines in response to changing tastes. For example, dairies now produceless milk but more cheese to meet Japanese demand. The most recent development plansfor 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 offashioning a high value product from plants grown on the island. In the island’s super-markets today shoppers can buy wine from Otaru, Furano, Hakodate, Ikeda and otherisland communities as well as from Europe, Australia and South and North America.

In addition to encouraging agricultural innovations, strengthening industrial andcommercial sectors has been a continuing theme in Hokkaido—even in recent years asthe international economy faltered. Shipbuilding and the iron and steel industries weredoing poorly. Hakodate Dock Company laid off large numbers of workers in the 1990sand the last of the mines closed during the following decade. Many industrial firms oper-ate on the island, of course; for example, factories in Muroran still produce cement andsteel and refine oil, Also, in recent years, various small specialized industrial firms havelocated there. Machinery produced in Hokkaido has been limited mostly to parts, butisland firms not surprisingly build lots of agricultural machines—especially the largescale 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, addingto expenses borne by homemakers, business and industry alike. The Hokkaido ElectricPower 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. Nuclearpower 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 notstop its operation. Nine hundred thousand people on Hokkaido signed a petition askingthe Docho to allow a public vote on siting a nuclear plant on the island, but the HokkaidoAssembly turned down the request, 54–52. A citizen referendum would not have beenlegally binding, but it could have influenced lawmakers. Even when the new plant’s testrun took place in October 1988, protesters appeared; it did not help that a mock evacu-ation drill involving nearby communities preceded the test operation. Tomari was thefirst Japanese nuclear plant to be opened since the disaster in 1986 at Chernobyl in theSoviet Union, and it is the only nuclear power facility on Hokkaido. In 2000, GovernorHori Tatsuya announced support for adding a third reactor at the complex and construc-tion 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 con-tinuing opposition to the nuclear plant and, of course, led to increased security meas-ures.

Hokkaido has in recent years been looking into alternative energy sources in addi-tion to hydroelectric and nuclear power and imported oil and coal. By 2006, natural gasfrom Tomakomai, sent by pipeline, replaced all of the imported liquefied petroleum gasused to heat Sapporo homes. Geothermal power has been used in the town of Mori, northand across the peninsula from Hakodate, since the early 1980s. Japan’s first commercial-scale wind power facility was built in the late 1990s at Tomamae, a town of 4600 peopleon Hokkaido’s northwest coast, where the array of more than forty windmills providesan arresting view. Modern windmills also dot the landscape at other places, includingWakkanai in the far north. In 2004, the nation’s first offshore wind power facility alsoopened on Hokkaido, nearly half a mile off the coast of Setana, a town on the OshimaPeninsula’s west coast. Yet because wind power is variable, power companies can be reluc-tant to use it. Several communities in Hokkaido use methane, either from abandonedcoal mines or from cattle excrement, to produce energy. The city of Sunagawa, betweenSapporo and Asahikawa, produces electricity by incinerating garbage. More experimen-tation 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 produc-tion of biofuel made from Hokkaido sugar beets, wheat and rice to run automobiles; farmcooperatives and sake producer Oenon would carry out the project. In other enterprisessupported by the ministry, Kirin Brewery and Mitsubishi announced they would open abioethanol factory in the Tokachi District in 2009, while several other firms planned afactory in Tomakomai to produce the fuel from rice. By 2008, use of food crops aroundthe world to produce ethanol was leading to food shortages and high prices, though, andseveral Japanese firms pursued plans to use other materials, such as rice straw, for ethanolproduction.

Alternative energy projects such as these may help provide Hokkaido’s long termpower needs, but by 2007, rising oil prices worldwide were leading to bankruptcies onthe island. Household budgets suffered, too, as late that year kerosene prices rose to thehighest level ever seen on the island and farmers protested the rising cost of cattle feedas well as gasoline for their tractors. More and more cases were reported during the 2007-08 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 Taku-gin, this was Hokkaido’s largest bank and the largest bank in Japan ever to go under. Ithad been one of the top twenty banks in the nation and had offices in a number of Amer-ican and European cities. Since its founding ninety-seven years earlier in order to sup-port Hokkaido development, the bank had acted as a symbol of the island’s promise andachievement. In 1980, Takugin claimed assets topping eighteen billion dollars, but asJapan’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 anumber of steps to try to stave off ruin, including selling off assets—even its head officebuilding. But nothing could avert collapse. Because sixty percent of Hokkaido’s compa-nies borrowed from Takugin, the bank’s failure made it much more difficult for them toobtain loans and thus led to bankruptcies for many. A number of small businesses on


the island closed their doors when they were unable to borrow, and people who hadinvested in those firms lost their savings while people who worked for them lost theirjobs. Small Hokkaido towns saw bank branches close. Takugin’s downfall not only shat-tered Hokkaido’s economy, it had an appalling psychological effect on the island, bothbecause this was the largest bank on Hokkaido and because of its role in island historyand development over the century. Subsequently, Tokyo oversaw restructuring of Hok-kaido banking and continued to fund construction projects on the island, amelioratingsome effects of the bank failure.

Perhaps Hokkaido’s continued economic troubles helped voters decide to returnlocal politician Suzuki Muneo to the Diet, where he had served for twenty years until hewas charged with bribery. He had abused his position in order to win contracts for Hok-kaido firms. For example, he saw to it that military live-firing exercises were moved fromOkinawa to Yausubetsu, an isolated region of eastern Hokkaido west of Nemuro, in orderfor 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 largecontributions to his account. The bribery leading to his arrest involved use of his gov-ernment influence to minimize the punishment a timber company would receive for ille-gal harvesting. Arrested, Suzuki spent more than a year in the Tokyo Detention Centerbefore being released on bail. He was convicted and in November 2004 sentenced to twoyears in prison. Released on bond after he appealed, he created a new political party inorder to make a comeback and won election to the Diet again in 2005. “A politician’s jobin Hokkaido is to bring money and public works from Tokyo, and this was somethingSuzuki did extremely well,” commented a newspaper columnist.5

Corruption too often has been found among officials in Hokkaido, just as elsewherein the world. In Kushiro in 2002 illegal election activities of the city administrators ledto the mayor’s resignation. Twenty-first century inquiry has shown that Hokkaido Pre-fectural 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 theisland; not just fishery products but guns, drugs and even people have been smuggledinto Japan. Crime syndicates operate in Hokkaido as well as elsewhere in Japan, and havebeen active in laundering funds from the illicit commerce.

In the fishing industry, poaching is a worry. This can happen in all waters, not onlythose claimed by Russia, and sometimes criminal organizations are involved. Near Muro-ran, 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 theseaquatic animals, which are valuable in China when dried. In addition, thieves stole seacucumbers from a workshop in Mori in December. Fisheries officials consequently arelooking for legislation to increase penalties for poaching and thievery, but because mostpoaching activity brings sorely-wanted sea products to market, curbing the illegal activ-ity is difficult. And not all fisheries officials are honest; the head of the Hokkaido Hako-date 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, peopleacting out of poverty or, often, simply because of loneliness.

While crime and corruption harm the Hokkaido economy, military forces stationedon the island have long been an economic benefit. Well more than one-third of the landused by Japanese military organizations lies in Hokkaido, and many of the island’s com-munities 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 Asa-hikawa, Obihiro, Chitose and Sapporo. Chitose is also home to a major military airfieldlocated next to the commercial airport, New Chitose. In addition, Japan’s Defense Agencyoperates Sapporo’s Okadama Airport. Also, Yoichi, west of Otaru, and Hakodate houseMaritime Self-Defense Force facilities. Self-Defense Force winter training exercises takeplace 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 artillerypractice at Yausubetsu.

The Dosanko do not support military activities uncritically. About fifteen hundredpeople 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 land-ing practice, more protests ensued. Drills continued at Taiki in subsequent years, but sohave demonstrations—by people as varied as Communist Party members, labor unionmembers and peace activists. One small group of people carried out a unique peacedemonstration in 2003, marching on a Sea of Okhotsk ice floe to protest American prepa-ration for war against Iraq. When SDF troops based in Hokkaido were sent to Iraq in2004 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 Sap-poro’s annual snow festival because of antiwar protests in the city. Antiwar activists evenheld a demonstration in Asahikawa, where next to the government the SDF is the largestemployer and support for Japanese troops is strong.

A majority of the American troops in Japan are stationed on Okinawa in the farsouth, 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 toJapan’s recession, a government-connected research group suggested moving Okinawa’sseventeen thousand American Marines to Tomakomai, but this did not happen. In 2004,Governor Takahashi Harumi spoke out against reassigning any American Marine con-tingents to Hokkaido. In 2005, though, Tokyo announced plans to move some of theAmerican airmen stationed in Okinawa to other Japanese military bases, including Chi-tose. That city’s mayor protested on behalf of his citizens, but regardless of the opposi-tion, some training operations formerly carried out in Okinawa are now scheduled forChitose. Despite these various citizen protests, the Self-Defense Force has found recruit-ing relatively successful in Hokkaido, because the weak economy there has made it fairlydifficult to find nonmilitary jobs.

Disaster relief is part of the SDF mission and has certainly benefited Hokkaido. AfterMt. Usu erupted in August 1977 and March–April 2000, SDF troops helped evacuatenearby residents, provide relief and clear away the damage. Not all SDF relief efforts aredramatic. Excessive snowfall during the winter of 2005-06 caused dangerously largeamounts to pile up on streets in western Hokkaido, so SDF troops worked at clearingaway snow and carting it off by the truckload. Japanese troops have even given emer-gency aid outside the country. Forces stationed in Hokkaido went to Indonesia’s AcehProvince to participate in the relief effort there after the devastating December 2004earthquake and tsunami.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, another Hokkaido community alsofaced 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


for such events, but not for one of this magnitude. On July 12, 1993, landslides, fires andwaves more than thirty feet high destroyed Okushiri Town, the island’s largest settle-ment, killing more than two hundred people. Though rebuilt, the town has lost residentsand now subsists on tourism and sea urchin fishing. Since the disaster, public funds havemade Okushiri a “fortress island;” new seawalls reach as high as thirty-eight feet and floodgates on four rivers prevent tsunami-generated waves from surging upstream. All fam-ilies received radios to warn of tsunami dangers and evacuation routes have been plannedand publicized. Some of the measures, of course, are too expensive for other communi-ties, as only national and prefectural aid made them possible in Okushiri.6

Other recent earthquakes have wrought damage in Hokkaido. In January of the sameyear, an earthquake centered at sea less than twenty miles from Kushiro caused an unusualproblem. Winter cold complicated recovery efforts, for the frozen ground made it difficultto dig to broken gas mains under the streets in order to restore heat, and some peoplesuffered gas poisoning from the cracked conduits. Mending pipes so that people couldcook and be warm was a priority, and affected schools had to stay closed until the gaslines were once more in service. The Kuril Islands earthquake in 1994 also meant destruc-tion 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 manydifferent 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 Ishikariplain, and especially Sapporo, gained residents (Sapporo population grew from 1,542,979in 1985 to 1,888,953 in 2006, almost one-third of Hokkaido’s total population) whileHakodate lost, from 319,194 to 290,927. Muroran’s population in 1970 was more than160,000, but the worldwide oil shock hit the city’s industry severely, especially during the1980s when population dropped by one-fourth, and in 2006, Muroran had only 97,322residents. Most of the island’s distant and isolated cities—Nemuro, Kushiro and Wak-kanai—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 for2006 show just nine Hokkaido cities with a population of more than one hundred thou-sand. Sapporo is truly dominant. Asahikawa, the second largest city, counted 353,540 peo-ple. (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 thefirst half of the twentieth century Hokkaido, unlike the rest of Japan, saw a gain in ruralpopulation, people are now leaving rural areas for the cities. Educating children in iso-lated 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 awayfrom home in order to attend school. Two hundred forty-eight schools in Hokkaidoclosed in the ten years ending in 2003.

Population shifts helped prompt Tokyo to implement a plan throughout Japan toencourage towns and cities to merge in order to save administrative costs. Local peoplehave a say on the mergers and Hokkaido voters have turned down some proposals. Othersare 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 AbiraTown, named for the river that flows through both communities. The new city of Hokutowest of Hakodate joins the towns of Kamiiso and Ono. Some of Hokkaido’s new citiesand 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 maytake 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 andother cities, the Docho decided to encourage communities to create tourist facilities; anew national law helped inspire resort development, starting in 1987. The governmentinvested in highway improvement and offered various inducements such as tax exemp-tions to resort developers. Cities and towns have built ski areas, resorts and museums.

Hokkaido had seen increasing numbers of tourists from the other Japanese islandsever since the nation’s recovery after the war made leisure travel affordable. A 1982 reportindicated that many Japanese chose Hokkaido for their honeymoons; almost one-fourthof the newly-married Japanese who took their trips within the country rather than abroadwent to Hokkaido. Books and films helped make the island’s attractions known to a widerpublic and Hokkaido native Miura Ayako was voted Japan’s most popular novelist in a1986 poll. Her novel, Shiokari Toge (translated as Shiokari Pass), was a bestseller and anequally successful film. Based on a true incident, it is set partly in Hokkaido early in thetwentieth century. The Hokkaido mountain landscape plays an important role in thestory, which reaches a climax when a runaway train hurtles down Shiokari Pass north ofAsahikawa. 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 ToyaMaru tragedy and Asahikawa’s severe winter weather both feature in this tale, which hasbeen adapted both for film and television. A small museum commemorating Miura’s lifeand works sits in her Asahikawa neighborhood.8 Meanwhile, television programs featur-ing Hokkaido have been shown in various Asian countries in order to attract Asiantourists to the island. (On the other hand, televised views of Hokkaido’s extreme winterweather can discourage heartland Japanese from moving there.)

A popular tourist destination even takes advantage of Hokkaido’s reputation as aprison island. In its most famous prison, Abashiri, terrible overcrowding helped lead tooccasional violence. A new maximum security facility replaced the prison in 1984 andthe old facilities were converted into a museum. It is impossible for a visitor to visual-ize all the horrors of prison life there, though, for the neat, clean buildings are set in ver-dant grounds.

Tourism has engendered a more positive view of Hokkaido among Japanese peopleliving on the other islands, helping dispel negative views of cold and remoteness. Vari-ous Hokkaido communities now hold winter festivals, and despite the prominence of Sap-poro’s February extravaganza, it was in Asahikawa that the world’s largest snow sculpturewas 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’simportance in shipping is still significant; the port has been modernized and large piers


extend well out into the harbor; lighters no longer need to unload ships offshore and bringgoods 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 Russianport 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 atIshikari Bay New Port. Otaru therefore put more and more effort into becoming an impor-tant tourist destination. The historic warehouses have been refurbished and turned in totourist shops, restaurants and Otaru’s historical museum, while city publicity stressesromantic scenes along the canal that was built for commerce.

Hakodate, for so long the island’s premier city, is tourist-dependent now, with itslongtime industries, fishing and shipbuilding, in decline. A 1985 study showed that almostone-fourth of Hakodate’s people were connected to the tourist sector. Its seafood and itspanoramic 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 upontourism. Downsizing of its steel industry meant population decline, and these days thecity publicizes its ferry service from Honshu, its scenic views and its whale-watchingexcursions.

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

Yubari, once Hokkaido’s most important mining center, has been especially hard hitby population decline. Nestled between mountain ridges, the community had about tenthousand 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 fiftythousand. The depression years showed a decrease, but an upsurge came with World WarII and continued in the postwar years. Population peaked in the 1955–60 period at morethan 107,000 people. From then came a steady decline, to about 31,700 in 1985, 21,000 in1990 and 13,000 in 2006. As Suzanne Culter has pointed out, the city’s population declinedby seventy-four percent from 1960 to 1985. When jobs in the mines disappeared andalternative work was not available for all of the displaced miners, many families had lit-tle choice but to leave Yubari. And as mining families left, many jobs that had dependedon the miners’ families disappeared too. Retail establishments and schools closed, throw-ing more people out of work. Schools are consolidating and closing. The vocational highschool started by Hokutan in 1920 finally shut its doors because student numbers hadfallen 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, dirtymining 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 mean-while 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 profitablewithout subsidies. It continues to sell as a luxury gift item because of its high quality. Amelon-flavored black tea as well as “Yubari Melon Yogurt” and various other Yubarimelon products can be bought in Hokkaido. Other city efforts include a museum illus-trating the history of coal mining, which includes descent into an underground excava-tion. 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 collapsein 2006, however. City officials announced plans to sell or close tourist attractions andeven to cancel the popular and respected film festival, though a nonprofit organizationhas been created in order to continue that tradition.

Drastic measures taken by the Yubari government include converting Yubari’s onlyhospital into a clinic which will offer fewer services. These services were saved onlybecause a doctor from Hokkaido’s far north agreed to head a privatized operation. Morethan two-fifths of the city’s people are over sixty-five, which makes the decreasing optionsin local medical care especially significant.

If Yubari is to meet its debt obligations in the next twenty years residents will facethe highest taxes in Japan and municipal employees the lowest wages in the nation. Mean-while, various business firms outside the city have expressed interest in buying or oper-ating tourist facilities there and the mayor of a heartland city—Kasai, in an agriculturalarea inland from Kobe—has proposed that Yubari City workers whose jobs have disap-peared apply to work in his city, which is looking for experienced public employees. Thisis one example of the ways Yubari people have received support and encouragement fromall over Japan. This small city gained a lot of national attention, partly because other com-munities may face similar challenges. Meanwhile, some Yubari people feel that Tokyo hasbeen especially hard on their community as a warning to others.

Theme parks sprang up in Hokkaido to attract tourists. Glucks Konigsreich (Gluck’sKingdom) opened near Obihiro as a replica of medieval Germany based on Grimm’s Fairy


Tales and other traditional European stories. The complex also included amusement park rides for its visitors. Another theme park, Canadian World, began operation inAshibetsu. 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, farmhome. After the park opened, Ashibetsu and Charlottetown, the capital of Prince EdwardIsland, became sister cities. Canadian World, however, has not been a success, as visitorsdid not come in expected numbers—perhaps because of Ashibetsu’s isolated location—and the attraction now looks sad and shopworn. Meanwhile, Glucks Konigsreich hasclosed.

Many communities have competed with each other for visitors. Even some ski resortshave closed because of high costs and low patronage. Companies building and operatingnew facilities have too often brought in their own workers instead of hiring unemployedtownspeople. Moreover, when new recreational facilities have opened, local people havefrequently 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 appreci-ation in the value of the yen made foreign travel affordable. This meant, of course, thatpeople who might have vacationed in Hokkaido went elsewhere.

Some Hokkaido attractions, however, remain especially popular. Asahikawa’s Asahi-yama Zoo has recently become more and more successful and is reputed to be the finestzoo in Japan. Asahiyama has followed modern zoological trends in presenting a morenatural environment for the animals. Zookeepers take the penguins on walks throughthe snow twice a day during the winter months to help the animals shed some of the fatthey naturally put on during the cold part of the year—and this delights the zoo’s visi-tors. This zoo is now the best-loved one in the country, attracting more visitors than evenTokyo’s well-known Ueno Zoo.

Niseko, in the mountains west of Sapporo, has become a boom town thanks to win-ter sports; its high-quality powder snow lies on the ski runs for almost half the year. AfterSeptember 2001, travel to the United States lost some of its appeal and more and moreAustralian skiers began coming to Hokkaido. Niseko, in particular, has attracted expa-triates and a number now live there year-round. Some local people are not happy aboutall the foreign visitors and the increased traffic and construction they bring. Niseko how-ever, 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 ofOkhotsk, originated tourist cruises in icebreakers cruising among Sea of Okhotsk icefloes. Several years later, with a larger boat, Abashiri joined the effort. Abashiri’s popu-lar cruises through winter drift ice have attracted as many as half a million tourists dur-ing a season, but climatic conditions change from year to year, making advance planningfor such trips difficult. In 1989, the year that marked the end of Hirohito’s sixty-four yearreign as emperor, there was no ice at all at Abashiri, but in 2003, when the ice stayedlonger than usual, one of the icebreakers usually used for tourists came to the aid ofAbashiri fishermen and coast guard authorities by helping to open the port, which wasstill closed by ice in late March. Nowadays, though, the icebreaker operators worry thatglobal warming will mean the end of the ice. Over the last hundred years, the amount ofdrift ice off Abashiri has decreased by forty percent.

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Earnings from the tourist sector now exceed those from farming, and some agricul-tural operations now cater to visitors. In the uplands near Furano, high on the SorachiRiver, some farmers have planted their fields to lavender and the area has become a greattourist attraction during the summer blooming season, with wide expanses of the violetflowers in the foreground and mountains in the distance. Regardless of the season, sou-venirs with a lavender theme, even “Hello Kitty” lavender items, are sold in gift shopsthroughout Hokkaido. Farmers also plant other flowering crops, including buckwheat,mustard and even potatoes, to create multicolored displays while the lavender is in bloomas well as to extend the season of flowers.

As tourism has become an important sector in Hokkaido’s development plans, giftand gourmet products have been created, advertised and sold as Hokkaido specialties.For historic reasons, Otaru glassware produced for the tourist market is significant, bothfor its beauty and because it represents a local tradition. Creation of elegant glass itemsgrew out of the glassmaking that flourished in Otaru in pioneer times, producing lampchimneys for settlers and, later, fishermen’s floats. Other communities offer unique foodproducts. Jams, jellies, wines and candy are made from the haskap (sometimes anglicizedas “hascup”), a native berry found extensively in the Chitose area. Caramel-based can-dies from Hokkaido feature not only haskap but other island specialties including Yubarimelon, local butter and milk, and even lavender. One can purchase Genghis Khan (mut-ton flavored) caramel, which has sold well as a novelty item despite its odd taste. Hokkaidomelons, asparagus and potatoes have been especially popular with Japanese tourists. Ricegrown in Numata, west of Asahikawa, has found an export market in Taiwan thanks tobeing 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 Mitsubi-shi automobile models sold in the United States. Trader Joe’s, an American specialty food retailer, advertises “Japanese Hokkaido Scallops,” and “Ezo Abalone” raised inHawaii can be bought on the U.S. mainland. “Ezo beer” is a product developed by a Cal-ifornian long resident in Sapporo. The company’s several varieties are brewed in Oregonbut sold in Japan. Sapporo Breweries is now based in Tokyo, not Hokkaido, but the com-pany still features a classic Sapporo Beer which can be purchased only on the northernisland.

Many communities have opened art museums, historical museums and other spe-cialized ones. Asahikawa boasts a sculpture museum which is worth a visit for its build-ing 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 veryinteresting army museum located on the SDF post in Asahikawa, displays mementoes ofthe tondenhei as well as the famous Seventh Division, whose exploits are still honored forexemplifying the tondenhei spirit. Otaru has a transportation museum located at the ter-minus of the first rail line in Hokkaido; some of the original structures, including theroundhouse, remain. In Kushiro are the city’s excellent and architecturally impressivehistorical 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 Taku-boku worked briefly. In addition to its famous prison museum, Abashiri’s attractionsinclude the outstanding Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples, which features artifactsfrom northern peoples all over the world.


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

Additional responses

Tourism has not been the only response to the changing economic climate. Hokkaidoleaders work to make the island more attractive for the Dosanko as well as for educationalinstitutions, business and industry.

While wooing high tech firms, Hokkaido boosters emphasize the island’s skilledworkforce along with an attractive environment. Efforts also include measures to improvethe transportation infrastructure while responding to environmental concerns. Hori Tat-suya, governor from 1995 to 2003, emphasized strengthened relations between Hokkaidoand Sakhalin, which would bolster the economy of both islands. Takahashi Harumibecame Hokkaido’s first female governor when she took office in 2003. She sees an endto Hokkaido’s colonial economy; she has vowed to replace the dominance of Tokyo andits construction budget with local initiative, basing public works projects on real needrather than a mere desire to create construction jobs. She has also promised to fightunemployment and do without subsidies from Tokyo by continuing to build up the econ-omy with tourism, information technology, biotechnology and a greater shift to morehigh-value-added agriculture. Promises have been made before, of course, and other pre-fectures also have such ideas.

The mining town of Kamisunagawa in the foothills just off the route from Sapporoto Asahikawa had an exceptionally deep mine shaft. When its mine closed, investmentfrom Mitsui firms (Mitsui had run the mine) and the government created a micrograv-ity center using the mine shaft to study the effects of near-zero gravity. Thousands ofexperimental drops have taken place there.

Horonobe, an agricultural town in Hokkaido’s far north, once had 7500 people, butits population has dropped by more than half, partly because a number of dairy farmersleft due to economic difficulties that emerged after international trade liberalization. Tocreate new jobs, town officials obtained support from the populace in the 1980s to wel-come construction of a nuclear waste facility. Farmers had mixed feelings; they wantedto preserve the land and they worried about safety, but they would benefit from fundssent by Tokyo were the facility to be built. A later survey throughout Hokkaido foundlack of citizen support. Governor Yokomichi and the Hokkaido Provincial Assemblyrevisited the idea and ultimately prevented construction of a repository; the Assemblyadopted an ordinance prohibiting the transfer of nuclear waste to Hokkaido. A labora-tory has been built, however, and scientists gained permission to carry out research fortwenty years at the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute’s Underground ResearchCenter in Horonobe.

Some new products are being developed especially for Hokkaido use. One is an elec-tric-powered four-wheel-drive wheelchair specially built to maneuver on snowy pave-ments. Sapporo Breweries has developed a special film made of aluminum, wheat branand nylon to cover beer being transported during cold weather and prevent the beer fromfreezing. Shoes designed especially for Hokkaido winters have appeared on the market.Some feature cleats, some have non-slip surfaces; these shoes even come in fashionablestyles.

As more and more factories and tourist facilities appear, concern for the environmentgrows. Not all the Dosanko appreciate having more than 170 18-hole golf courses on theisland. In addition to land use, environmental concerns include pollution and wildlifedestruction. A project to be sited in Hokkaido was the first large Tokyo-planned con-


struction plan stopped by pressure from a public concerned about the environment. LakeUtonai, a wetland in Tomakomai, was imperiled by a plan to change the flow of the Chi-tose River during times when periodic flooding threatens the Ishikari Valley. After adestructive 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 newchannel to the Pacific Ocean would prevent flooding but it would also attract the watersthat 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 theIshikari basin to guard against floods.

In 1987, Ainu and other environmentalists protested a plan by Japan’s Forestry Agencyfor selective logging in about eight percent of Shiretoko National Park. The Environmen-tal Agency asked for a survey of the area to ensure that no endangered species would beharmed, and after a study, the plan was revised; fewer trees would be felled. The ForestryAgency had justified the plan on grounds of maintaining the lumber industry in the faceof increasing timber imports, but throughout Hokkaido, forest maintenance and refor-estation are also priorities.

Development has channeled rivers between concrete banks and has created artificialshorelines. Comparison of old and new maps and photographs shows clearly the manyisland rivers that have been straightened, even moved. A good example of a river thathas lost its meanders is the Kotambetsu, which reaches the Japan Sea north of Rumoi. Itwandered through nearly flat land as it approached the sea, but the landscape is differentnow as the Kotambetsu follows the more direct route carved out for it. One town whichlost a beach is Shiraoi, once an Ainu settlement where the beach played a key role in dailylife. The town and ocean were separated only by a sand dune, and children would frolicon the sand while their elders launched fishing boats which had been pulled up on to thebeach to sit overnight. Above the high tide line were great pots where fish were boiledfor their oil. Now Shiraoi is isolated from the sea by an express highway. Traffic shootsalong, bypassing the town, and against the sea side of this highway a tetrapod breakwaterreplaces the beach. A very small area remains as the Shiraoi harbor, giving access to theocean. Meanwhile, the tetrapods do not protect Shiraoi residents, though they help makethe 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 townof Esashi where families used to sit on the sand or play in the water. Too many commu-nities in Japan have seen this kind of development, but construction has also been abenefit—offering jobs, of course, and improving transportation routes. The many break-waters 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, asin Shiraoi, stretches of shoreline all over the island have become forests of tetrapods, andone must mourn the loss of beach.

Harbor improvements in Hokkaido are impressive as well as intrusive. Thanks toharbor development, Tomakomai handles about forty percent, by volume, of the island’scargo and leads Hokkaido seaports in handling international trade these days. The changesat the city’s shoreline are hard to believe: that a large, modern harbor could be createdpartly out of flat, swampy land. Next to Tomakomai’s artificial harbor is the large indus-trial zone planned in the 1970s. Because this area is only about twelve miles from NewChitose 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 theavailable 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 impor-tant fishing center, Kushiro also serves as the distribution center for all of eastern Hok-kaido. Thus the city does not depend mainly on tourists, though Kushiro does takeadvantage of being the gateway to Kushiro Shitsugen National Park, the extensive wet-land that is home to the Japanese crane. Fast water flowing down the channeled KushiroRiver has been drying up the marsh, though, so about a quarter-century after a construc-tion 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 thinkthis is simply one more project to support the construction industry.

Transportation services both within Hokkaido and to the other islands are crucialfor industry, trade, tourism, agriculture, fishing and daily life. Local, prefectural andnational governments understand that a good transportation system is essential. Mak-ing travel safer has had a high priority in Hokkaido, especially after the loss of the ToyaMaru in 1954, and has led to construction of the Seikan Tunnel joining Hokkaido andHonshu. This replaces the sixty-mile ferry route between Aomori and Hakodate. Atthirty-two miles in length, the Seikan Tunnel is the world’s longest tunnel, though onlyfourteen miles of it are actually under water. Instead of spanning the channel from theAomori 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 officialswho feared the damage that bombers over Tsugaru Strait could do to wartime shipping.Construction meant engineering challenges as well as expense, though. The Toya Marutragedy heightened demands for action, and serious planning began. Ferry traffic grewquickly in the years after the disaster and by 1971 it was clear that ferry dock facilitieswould 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 beganin 1964. Constructing it was expected to take around seven years but required twenty-one, costing thirty-four lives and more than ten times the funds estimated. During con-struction, extensive flooding disrupted the work several times, most seriously in May1976 when flood waters suddenly burst into the tunnel at a rate that reached thirty-twotons of water per minute. Both the main tunnel and a service passageway next to it wereflooded, 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 mid-dle.

Once the tunnel was complete, tracks were laid, and the Seikan Tunnel opened totraffic on March 13, 1988. The tunnel serves mainly to move freight, not people, and car-ries electrically operated trains, not cars, because adequately ventilating a passage of thatlength for automobile use was impractical if not impossible.

With over one hundred airplane flights now arriving in Hokkaido every day, how-ever, fewer people are using the Seikan Tunnel than used the ferries before the tunnelopened. Travel on the Aomori-Hakodate ferry run had begun to decline as early as the1970s, in fact, as air travel became faster and more convenient. Because airplanes fly fromTokyo to Sapporo in just an hour and a half, the train has not been expected to makemoney. It has, however, served to advance the technology of tunnel construction and toencourage projects such as the “Chunnel” connecting England and France. For theDosanko, the Seikan Tunnel has eliminated many rail service disruptions, because ferry


service had always been suspended during the worst weather. (Perhaps almost as impor-tant to many travelers, they no longer need fear seasickness.)

High speed ferry service between Hakodate and Aomori is now also available; a newcatamaran introduced on the route in September 2007 makes the journey in less thantwo hours. The ship, decorated with excessively cute pictures of sea life on both sides ofits hull, carries cars as well as foot passengers. This ferry might well attract passengersaway from the tunnel, but the two services should prove to be complementary. The ferrywould be more convenient for people wanting to travel between the cities of Aomori andHakodate as well as for those bringing their cars. But the tunnel will be indispensablewhen 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 andPacific Ocean coastal ports on Honshu, and naturalists have enthused over the birds andfish — even sharks— visible on the long Tokyo-Kushiro route. One of the ferry boatswhich served the Aomori-Hakodate route before the tunnel opened has been refurbishedand is now open to the public in Hakodate as a tourist attraction.

Air travel to Hokkaido—mainly Sapporo—has boomed, and in 1988 New ChitoseInternational Airport opened. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the numberof people flying this route each year exceeded the total population of Hokkaido. New Chi-tose 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 Chi-tose rather than to the crowded Tokyo airports. In 1994, the Chitose facility becameJapan’s first airport to be open twenty-four hours a day and these days, Tokyo-Chitoseis the busiest air route in the world. Recently, planes have been flying directly to Hok-kaido’s premier airport from Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore, Guam and Rus-sia’s Sakhalin Island as well as, during skiing season, from Australia. However, due toeconomic 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 havebeen cut.

New Chitose also serves as an emergency airfield for long distance flights that runinto difficulty. International flights taking a polar route fly nearby, for example on theirway from North America to Tokyo. Hokkaido can be a way station for these flights, justas it was for pioneer aviators hoping to cross the Pacific Ocean. Among a number ofexamples, a Boeing 747 bound for Tokyo from Chicago in November 1985 refueled atChitose 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 afterthe air pressure in the plane suddenly dropped for unknown reasons.

All the advances in international air travel have encouraged a stronger Hokkaidopresence on the world scene. As transportation across national borders has become fasterand less expensive, Hokkaido’s international ties have strengthened. And though to Japa-nese, Sapporo may seem distant, to foreign travelers its ninety minute flying time fromTokyo is trivial.

The market for domestic air travel to Hokkaido has spurred the creation of new air-lines, the best known of which is Air Do or, officially, Hokkaido International AirlinesCo. Air Do began service in December 1998 with one airplane, a Boeing 767, making threedaily round trips to Tokyo; the fledgling company’s goal was to provide low cost serv-ice. 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 toserve the Hokkaido market and overnight car ferry service between Honshu and Hok-kaido featured reduced prices due to the increased airline competition. Air Do wentbankrupt in 2002, but reorganization and a new link with All Nippon Airways led toexpanded service and prices comparable to those of the major airlines. High fuel pricesthroughout 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 heatedto melt snow and ice on hills and dangerous curves. This can be done fairly easily in placeslike the Jozankei resort area, where water from hot springs is pumped underneath thehighway. And when the first expressways were built on Hokkaido, snow-melting equip-ment was included. Despite this, Hokkaido consistently leads Japan’s prefectures in thenumber of annual traffic fatalities. Its large area, its mountains and its winter conditionsoffer challenges to drivers. Nissan has constructed a track in Rikubetsu, an inland townin a mountain valley between Daisetsuzan and Akan National Parks, to test car and driverbehavior 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 testsin Hokkaido.

While many transportation improvements have come, increased automobile use hasmeant that some rail lines have become uneconomic. When nearby highways with busservice are available, these rail lines have been discontinued. The railroad no longer servesMatsumae Town, the island’s first capital. Even the line to Horonai, once part of the firstrail line built in Hokkaido, ceased operation in 1987, a little more than one hundred yearssince service began. Most lines today except that between Otaru and the airport in Chi-tose have seen a drop in passengers, both because the island’s population is no longergrowing and because automobile use continues to increase. JR Hokkaido, which operatesthe intercity rail system on the island, is now profitable only because of development ofits real estate holdings, particularly at Sapporo Station.

JR Hokkaido continues to search for innovative ways to operate. In April 2007, thecompany started service with a car that can run both on railway tracks and on roads, itsfirst line running through the rural area southeast of Abashiri. This is the first operationof 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 otheraspects of modern life. So does the need for environmental protection. Developmentplans for the island reflect all of these, but Tokyo direction and financing of Hokkaidohas always been presented in terms of what Hokkaido can do for the nation. In recentyears, however, the bureaucracy has been reorganized and should link central planningmore directly with island localities. Partly meeting the needs once addressed by Takuginis the Development Bank of Japan created by Tokyo in 1999. Two years later, the HokkaidoDevelopment Bureau found itself abolished and reconstituted in Tokyo’s Ministry ofLand, Infrastructure and Transport. In 2008, though, after bid-rigging became publicknowledge, Tokyo planned to abolish the bureau.

Tokyo and the Docho have not always coordinated their plans and strategies. Somefunctions of the center are now carried out by a new regional bureau in Hokkaido andthe island will be a test case for the nation through another Tokyo initiative. In 2006, theDiet adopted a plan to designate Hokkaido as a “special zone.” The government proposes


dividing all Japan into about twelve regions, one of which would be Hokkaido. The pur-pose would be to move some responsibilities from the center to the new regions, whilefinancial help from the center would continue. The scheme has already generated criti-cism, 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 impededprosperity on Hokkaido; in fact, the Takugin failure was linked to the island’s weak econ-omy. In the twenty-first century, the challenge is to increase self-sufficiency as funds fromTokyo decrease. (Even in 2006, however, Tokyo was paying four-fifths of the cost of roadconstruction on Hokkaido.) Some Dosanko are glad to see the end of development proj-ects which they blame for despoiling the island and for encouraging dependence ratherthan initiative. But the loss of funds and jobs does hurt. Unemployment in Japan showeda small decrease in 2006, but in Hokkaido it rose slightly. Also, Hokkaido’s per capitaincome is below the national average.

While Tokyo sends less support to Hokkaido, some island firms look abroad, forinstance to Sakhalin, whose developing oil and gas industry offers many projects, espe-cially for construction companies. Also, through trade promotion, citizen exchanges andcooperative research projects, the Northern Regions Center continues to be active. Anumber of universities in Hokkaido, not only Hokudai, have exchange programs withinstitutions abroad.

Sister city relationships are thriving. Sapporo and Portland, Oregon established atie 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 in1983, the indigenous peoples in the two areas also formed a partnership: Hokkaido Ainuwith the Cape Mudge Indian Band. In Abashiri stands a totem pole specially carved forthe city as a gift from its sister city, Port Alberni, British Columbia. Hakodate and Hal-ifax, Nova Scotia are sister cities, an appropriate tie because their fortresses, Hakodate’sGoryokaku 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 Cen-ter Foundation in Japan. One material benefit has been the construction of many Swedish-style houses in the Hokkaido town, where their effective insulation is eminently practicalfor winter weather. The town celebrates an annual summer solstice festival modeled afterSwedish tradition. The sister city relationship between Otaru and Dunedin, New Zealandis almost thirty years old. Kushiro and New Orleans established a sister-port relation-ship in 1984, recognizing the significance of the huge amount of feed grain shipped fromthe American port to Kushiro for Hokkaido’s dairy cattle. When New Orleans sufferedmassive destruction in 2005 from Hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding, Kushirobusinesses and citizens collected relief funds for the ravaged city.

Positive ties with communities elsewhere in Japan as well as abroad can only benefitHokkaido as the future brings new and often unexpected challenges. As the world changes,so must Hokkaido change. The Dosanko have a reputation for individualism, persever-ance and ability to cope with extreme conditions; the spirit that made early pioneers suc-cessful should help the island and its people in years to come.

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Conclusion

Hokkaido—once Ezo—has always been the Ainu homeland, but once Wajin appearedthe island’s story took a new direction. A Wajin enclave appeared on Hokkaido’s longsouthwestern peninsula and as Wajin power grew under the Matsumae family, clasheswith Ainu almost inevitably came. The more powerful Wajin won out, but a new chal-lenge appeared: foreign explorers. Japanese law kept them away, but the Russian Empireexpanded ever farther eastward and Japan’s rulers feared encroachment on Ezo, not tospeak of nearby Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. In the mid–nineteenth century, the shogu-nate reluctantly opened the nation to foreign port visits and, soon, trade. It was time tosettle 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 plentifulresources. A new capital city, Sapporo, appeared, and while it and its university, foundedin pioneer times, are now among Japan’s greatest, the island’s natural resources no longeroffer seemingly unlimited potential.

Hokkaido suffered crop failure, depression, war and storm-related tragedy duringthe twentieth century but life for the Dosanko improved with infrastructure develop-ment 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 majorchanges in the island’s economy, from mine closures to fish population decline as well asnational economic malaise, but the Dosanko must build for the future. Hokkaido pros-perity was long based upon the extractive industries—mining, fishing and forestry—aswell as agriculture. But mining is gone, fishing has diminished and forestry has lostprominence with more lumber coming into the island than leaving it. This leaves as Hok-kaido’s resources agriculture, nature and people.

Hokkaido agriculture makes a crucial contribution to Japan. Research continuesand new practices add to efficiency and increased production. Organic farming is mak-ing headway on the island while experimental planting of genetically-modified rice inisolated fields is also underway. The most vivid data illustrating Hokkaido’s agriculturalimportance to the nation appear in a self-sufficiency rating. In 2000, only forty percent ofthe food eaten in Japan was raised domestically, but Hokkaido was two hundred percentself-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 prod-ucts made from Hokkaido crops and resources. Hokkaido whisky has won the top awardsin international whisky competitions, even beating out Scotland’s best. Another Hokkaidoprizewinner is a Tokachi District cheese, the top entry among soft cheeses in Switzer-land’s 2004 Mountain Cheese Olympics2; cheese is an example of a Hokkaido productfinding a market throughout Japan as Japanese consumers develop a taste for foreignfoods. 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 com-pany to sell emu products. New products introduced in the Japanese market emphasizetheir Hokkaido connection as a selling point, whether lavender ice cream or soybeansused to made a bean candy. An island firm that has developed a way of freezing milk with-out loss of flavor or consistency planned to export the product. Twenty-first centuryGovernor Takahashi Harumi has announced her determination to continue to buildHokkaido’s food industry.

Hokkaido communities continue to encourage tourism; this sector has recently over-taken agriculture in income generation. Visitors come for the weather, the sports, thenorthern scenery, the historic buildings and the hot springs. Foreigners come; a 2004 sur-vey taken in Seoul, Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong ranked Hokkaido as the Japanesedestination 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, soofficial campaigns to attract tourists target people from other Asian countries as well asJapanese.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 thatforeign visits will increase as a result of publicity and promotion regarding the 2008Group of Eight conference held at Lake Toya. In addition, more Japanese might come toHokkaido after completion of a bullet train to the island, a project that began construc-tion in 2005.

Ecotourism in Hokkaido attracts Japanese and foreign tourists. The Kushiro Shit-sugen wetland offers various environmentally-friendly activities for visitors: hiking,canoeing, cycling and, in the winter, cross-country skiing. Tours have also been organ-ized during which visitors help restore natural habitat. With Shiretoko named a WorldHeritage Site in 2005 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Orga-nization (UNESCO), planners strive to prevent the tourist influx from overwhelming thepeninsula. The increase in tourist numbers will, of course, be an economic benefit to Hok-kaido, but environmental damage remains a concern. Infrastructure improvement, too,must be coordinated with protection of the environment. Whether this can overcomeJapan’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 alongthe Sea of Okhotsk coastline. Scientists think that waters from the Amur River on theAsian mainland cause the floes to form, and that damming the river has decreased theamount of river water running to the sea. Global warning is also a culprit. Scientists sug-gest that this may cause the decline of some fish species near Hokkaido, though warmwater sea creatures, like oysters, may increase. In addition, though hotter weather insouthern Japan seems to be damaging the rice crop there, rising temperatures benefit ricecultivation in Hokkaido. Meanwhile, bird flu, discovered in dead swans found along Hok-kaido’s northeast coast in 2008, is a more immediate worry.

328 CONCLUSION

The current regard in Hokkaido for environmental management is a far cry frompeople’s earlier attitudes; before World War II, Kushiro officials worried about the dam-age the now-protected Japanese cranes were causing to the forests.5 Some of Hokkaido’swild animal species, including the crane, are doing well these days, though a 2007 dis-covery that mercury may be poisoning some cranes has raised alarm. Asahikawa’sAsahiyama Zoo has successfully bred a Steller’s Sea Eagle, that magnificent and protectedbut threatened bird which often winters on the Hokkaido coast.

Some large animals, too, are thriving. Though deer were almost wiped out in thelate nineteenth century, populations have long since recovered and are now blamed fortraffic accidents as well as damage to forests and farm crops. Deer can be hunted law-fully, with over forty thousand of them taken in 1996. These days officials are encourag-ing more people to take up hunting. The Docho is promoting venison as a food, oftenmarketing it as momiji (maple tree) meat, thus finding a use for deer killed to protectcrops. Venison now appears in school lunches in some Hokkaido communities. Bears arethriving too, and inspire fear; they killed three people in Hokkaido in early 2001. Thegreatest concentration of bears is in the Shiretoko Peninsula, where officials fear that thedanger they pose may keep visitors away. How to preserve a bear population while pro-tecting people remains perplexing. Illustrating concerns in Hokkaido about wild animals,some Dosanko reacted angrily to a proposal to reintroduce wolves to Nikko, worryingthat these animals could come to Hokkaido via the Seikan Tunnel—and Nikko is threehundred miles from Hokkaido.

This weather-dependent island will always face the need to cope with severe winterconditions. Though insulation in buildings is common now and sophisticated methodsof keeping roads open have been developed, winter means a standstill for the construc-tion industry and blizzards can still bring the island’s commerce to a halt and make lifemore difficult for everyone. The winter climate is hard on roads, meaning high expensesfor highway maintenance. Roads that freeze at night and thaw during daytime also leadto too many accidents. Winter storm conditions cause road closures and flight cancella-tions and there is sometimes enough snow in a Hokkaido town that people have to enterhouses on the second floor, not the first. Even in the twenty-first century, some homelessmen have lived in tents during an Asahikawa winter, scavenging for food; edibles theyhave found were, of course, frozen.6 Because of winter cold, providing energy for Hok-kaido will continue to be a challenge. Rising worldwide oil prices in 2005 and after plusan especially cold and snowy 2005-06 winter season have made alternative energy sourceseven more important. On the other hand, during the mild winter of 2006-07, some Hok-kaido businesses suffered, including firms that repair frozen water pipes. Also, becauseHokkaido homes are heated well in winter, the Dosanko are uncomfortable during vis-its 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 spend-ing and salaries lag, and the Docho has cut both wages and staff numbers. Hokkaido grad-uates were finding fewer jobs in 2007 than was the case nationally. Some costs are highon the northern island. This has not just been a postwar phenomenon; a 1914 guidebooknoted that hiring porters in Hakodate to transport travelers’ luggage cost twice as muchas in “Japan proper.”7 Most of what is imported to the island from abroad first goesthrough another port, perhaps Yokohama, or through distributors in Tokyo. If moreimports and exports could be handled directly by Hokkaido ports and New Chitose Inter-national Airport, prices on the island could drop.

Conclusion 329

For years, Hokkaido leaders have been striving to attract industry. Only two per-cent of Japan’s manufacturing firms are located in Hokkaido, where five percent of thepeople live. Because of Dosanko frustrations, at the end of the twentieth century one couldeven hear half-serious threats of secession from Japan, or more serious suggestions thatHokkaido be more loosely linked with Tokyo through a federal system of government.Recent government restructuring initiatives taken by Tokyo may or may not satisfy theDosanko.

With the worldwide economic collapse that began in late 2008, some industrial firmshave closed facilities or scrapped plans to build new ones in Hokkaido. Even Oji hasended production in several plants. And like newspapers in the United States, theHokkaido Shimbun has faced declining circulation. Since Hokkaido is on the nation’speriphery and has a relatively small population, manufacturers were not tempted to locatethere even before the economic turndown. Firms which do set up shop in Hokkaido faceextra costs due to severe winter weather: heating expenses, suspension of much outdoorwork during winter months and weather-related transportation disruptions. Many com-panies find it necessary to give employees in Hokkaido an extra heating allowance. Med-ical costs for people in Hokkaido are higher than for people living on Japan’s otherislands—but one of the reasons is that old and infirm people are sometimes placed inmedical facilities for the winter months. These days some Hokkaido people seek tempo-rary work elsewhere in Japan during the winter; government offices in Hokkaido haveaided in searches for these jobs.

Some recent technological developments on the island are based on Hokkaido’s win-ter climate. These include invention of a system for storing ice to be used later for sum-mer cooling. In the city of Bibai, a nursing home collects snow in a storeroom. Whenhot weather comes, the door is opened and cool air is emitted into the building’s diningroom. The city’s government office building is also partly cooled with stored winter snowand Bibai has even provided snow to give some relief to polar bears suffering in the zooin Asahikawa during summer heat. An Asahikawa firm brews sake, taking advantage ofcold weather by making some of it in an igloo.

As these examples show, Hokkaido entrepreneurs and scientists have worked to copewith and even exploit the island’s challenging winter climate. Research continues on howto make better use of the insulation provided by the island’s snow cover. Meanwhile, theDosanko do not let winter cold and snow bother them; they continue their activities asusual, whether shopping, eating out or enjoying sports. In winter, of course, the sportsare snow and ice pursuits or indoor activities like basketball.

Too often people ignore Hokkaido’s benefits, such as the island’s freedom from theheartland’s hot, sultry rainy season. The Dosanko highlight Hokkaido’s location; it iscloser to both Europe and North America than are Japan’s other three major islands.Businesses in Hokkaido and foreign countries have established successful joint venturesand 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 PerouseStrait, from Cape Soya to Sakhalin Island. Russia must first bridge the narrow passagebetween Sakhalin and the mainland; then Japanese money will be available to help buildthe bridge to Hokkaido, a Russian official reported in May 2007.8 Another, more feasi-ble, possibility is a gas pipeline connecting the islands of Sakhalin and Hokkaido, givingHokkaido easy access to Sakhalin’s plentiful gas reserves. Meanwhile, Russian and Japa-nese telecommunications companies operate a fiberglass cable between the two islands.

330 CONCLUSION

Relations with Russia remain important to Hokkaido. Hokkaido fishermen work inor near Russian waters and continue to fear that Russia will interfere with their liveli-hood. Hokkaido interests stress cooperation with the northern neighbor, and Hokkaidoand Sakhalin officials support joint development. Thus cargo shipped between Wakkanaiand Sakhalin’s southern port, Korsakov, has grown substantially. Perhaps the NorthernTerritories dispute might even see a solution, for with changing technology the islandsno longer have the strategic importance they once had. Today, though, no breakthroughis in sight. Meanwhile, though Russia does not seem to offer a threat to northern Japanthese 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 Hokkaidoeconomy would be disrupted. Such American action is theoretical, but the 2006 under-ground detonation of a nuclear weapon in North Korea was not. This disturbed theDosanko, for Hokkaido could easily be the target of such a bomb if not the site of a cat-astrophic accident. As a protest against the nuclear test, Japan banned North Koreanships from entering Japanese ports. This hurt Otaru, where each year about ninety NorthKorean 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 earliermilitary 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 includedstrict regulation of foreign vessels and their passengers, which impacts trade and tourismas well as local fishermen, who have been unhappy at being kept from port areas closeddue to new regulations.

While maintaining vigilance against possible international threats, Hokkaido mustwork for economic security. The island has become the home of businesses to whichweather and distance from the heartland do not matter. For employers, the island’s advan-tages include relatively low salaries and low office costs and for employees, lower hous-ing costs and shorter commutes. In the twenty-first century, more and more Japanesefirms have established call centers in Hokkaido. One requirement for this is an educatedwork force, which Hokkaido has. Another advantage of Hokkaido for call center work isthat people there generally speak without a strong dialect or regional accent. Researchthrives at Hokudai and the Docho has been developing joint research programs betweenlocal universities and industries. The island includes a number of research institutes anduniversities, not just in and near Sapporo. From Wakkanai to Hakodate, Otaru to Kushiro,students can pursue higher education or specialized training. Biotechnology companiesare prospering, with seventy-five biotech firms operating on the island in 2004. Infor-mation 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 manu-facturing.

To many Japanese, Hokkaido remains exceptional, a remote place of snow, ice anddangerous bears. Many people still feel as a 1921 visitor wrote, “Hokkaido ... makes theKyoto or Nagasaki resident feel chilly. The idea of moving to Hakodate or Sapporo is asthough a Virginian were asked to live in Labrador or a Frenchman in Iceland.” Filmdirector Kobayashi Masahiro, who shot a 2003 film on the northern island, said, “There’sa loneliness and an ambiguity to Hokkaido that cannot be seen elsewhere in Japan.”9 TheIsland is important in the Japanese imagination as the locale for exotic events, often in

Conclusion 331

anime or in computer games featuring future wars. Hokkaido is perceived as alien—dis-tant and forbidding—despite the brief airplane flight from Tokyo.

Many Dosanko as well as Japanese in the heartland perceive Hokkaido people as dif-ferent. While they refer to the other Japanese islands as naichi, Hokkaido is “outsideJapan.” In 1902 Anna Hartshorne wrote of Hokkaido, “The children growing up therewill love the north, but the older ones must feel themselves exiles, however loyal to itsinterests.”10 And so it has been. Adjustments were hard for the pioneers, whether in thenineteenth or twentieth century, but later generations love their homeland. Observersagree that Hokkaido’s history has produced a people with a much more egalitarian view-point than people elsewhere in Japan. The Dosanko are more open and outspoken, moreadventurous and more individualistic and have an independent streak rarely found inthe rest of the nation. Women have more rights (perhaps because there were few of themin pioneer days, and thus they were highly valued).

If the Dosanko are perceived as different, so are the Ainu. Japan, and especially Hok-kaido, face the challenge of overcoming prejudice and discrimination against Ainu peo-ple, while at the same time encouraging Ainu cultural life.

An inspiration to Dosanko is the dog Taro, famous for surviving in the Antarcticin 1958 despite being abandoned by Japanese explorers forced to abort their trip with noroom 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 hisretirement years in the Sapporo Botanic Garden. He died in 1970.

Hokkaido’s history, climate and landscape are unique in Japan, making the island awonderful but sometimes challenging place. William S. Clark’s words, “Boys, be ambi-tious!” and the “Clarkii spirit” recalled by his students after his departure inspire theDosanko even today. Perhaps Hokkaido never was quite the paradise Clark describedwhile musing about a prospective immigrant, “the best land he ever saw in the valley ofthe Ishkari [sic], where salmon and deer will come to his door and ask to be eaten, andmagnificent bears will bring him their skins for robes.”11 No longer is Hokkaido a pio-neer 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 uncrowdedcities, grand vistas, pleasant countryside, great people, and opportunity.

332 CONCLUSION

Appendix 1.Hokkaido Chronology

10,000 BC–2nd C. BC Jomon Period existed in Japan2nd C. BC Epi-Jomon Period began in EzoAD 7th C. Satsumon Period emerged

Okhotsk people arrived in Ezo659 First known observation post established in Ezo12th C. Okhotsk people disappeared; perhaps were absorbed

Satsumon culture became Ainu cultureFirst Wajin settlements appeared in Ezo

prob. 1216 First written records appeared of Wajin arriving in Ezo1420–30 Ando family driven into Ezo, inaugurated first Japanese government there1456 Koshamain’s war took place1550–51 Wajin made agreement with Ainu, resulting in establishment of Kakizaki author-

ity in Oshima Peninsula1582 Kakizaki recognized by shogunate as independent of Ando clan1600s Basho ukeoi system developed1603 Kakizaki name changed to Matsumae; area became domain of Japan1606 Matsumae Yoshihiro built Matsumae Castle; established his capital thereprob. 1618 First European, Fr. Jeronimo de Angelis, SJ, visited Ezo1630s Omi trading houses from Honshu began setting up branch offices in Matsumae1633 Shogunate inspectors first went to Matsumae1643 Maarten Gerritsz Vries explored along west coast of Ezo1669 Shakushain’s War fought

18th Century

1716 Matsumae gained full daimyo status1739 Martin Spanberg sailed near and observed Ezo1759 Matsumae clan first heard of Russians in Kuril islands1771 Benyovsky warned, falsely, that Russians planned to attack Matsumae1785 Mogami Tokunai participated in expedition from Edo to Ezo1787 La Perouse explored in Ezo waters1789 Menashi-Kunashir Ainu uprising occurred1792 Laxman expedition from Russia wintered at Nemuro; Japanese refused trade priv-

ileges1796 Broughton visited Ezo area1799 Mamiya Rinzo’s first trip to Ezo took place1799 Shogunate assumed direct control of eastern Ezo1800 Ino Tadataka began surveying Ezo

333

19th Century

1805–06 Krusenstern and Rezanov voyaged in Japanese waters1806–07 Russians Khvostov and Davydov raided Sakhalin, Kurils and vessels at sea1807 Shogunate placed all Ezo under direct control1811–1813 Golovnin and seven other Russians held captive in Ezo1821 Shogunate returned entire island of Ezo to Matsumae control1831 Australian ship Lady Rowena put ashore at Akkeshi1844 Matsuura Takeshiro made his first visit to Ezo1846 U.S. whaler Lawrence sank off Kurils; survivors jailed in Matsumae1848 U.S. whaler Lagoda men placed in captivity

Ranald MacDonald came to Ezo1850 Matsuura’s first map of Ezo printed1854 Shogunate resumed administration of Ezo

Treaty of Kanagawa opened Hakodate to U.S. shipsCommodore Perry visited HakodateTreaty opened Hakodate to British ships

1855 Treaty opened Hakodate to Russian ships1856 E. E. Rice became first American trade representative in Hakodate1858 Japan granted trade privileges to U.S., Britain, France and Russia

I. A. Goshkevich became Russian consul in Hakodate1861 Russian Orthodox priest Father Nikolai arrived in Hakodate1862–63 Raphael Pumpelly and William Blake surveyed Ezo mines1864 Niijima Jo came to Hakodate

Goryokaku completed1868 Meiji Restoration took place

Enomoto and followers established anti–Meiji government in Hakodate1869 Enomoto men lost to Meiji forces led by Kuroda Kiyotaka

Name of Ezo changed to HokkaidoKaitakushi establishedShima Yoshitake began laying out new city of Sapporo

1869–76 Basho ukeoi system abolished1871 Kuroda Kiyotaka went to the U.S. to search for foreign advisers for Kaitakushi

Horace Capron and his assistants began work for the KaitakushiSapporo became official capital of Hokkaido

1872 Land Regulation Ordinance adopted; Ainu land could now be confiscated1874 German Consul Ludwig Haber assassinated in Hakodate

Tondenhei established1875 Border between Russia and Japan settled; Sakhalin now Russian, entire Kuril chain

now part of Japan1876 Sapporo Agricultural College founded; William S. Clark arrived to serve as first

presidentKaitakushi brewery began making beer in Sapporo—the origin of Sapporo Beer

1878 Isabella Bird traveled in HokkaidoSurvey for Otaru-Horonai railroad began

1879 Horonai mine opened1880 First graduation ceremony of Sapporo Agricultural College held1881 Railroad between Otaru and Sapporo opened to traffic

Meiji regime ordered that Kaitakushi be abolishedRailroad to Horonai completed

1886 Hokkaido Prefecture established; Iwamura Michitoshi named its first governor1888 Ban Ichitaro discovered rich coal deposits in Yubari1889 Hokkaido Development Bank (Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko) founded1890 Asahikawa founded

Abashiri Prison opened

334 APPENDIX 1

1896 Trappist Monastery founded in Kamiiso, near Hakodate1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Law enacted by National Diet1900 Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko (Hokkaido Development Bank) incorporated

20th Century

1901 Hokkaido granted a prefectural assemblyHokkaido Agricultural Experiment Station established

1902 Suffrage began in Hokkaido1904–05 Russo-Japanese War occurred1905 Cold-resistant akage variety of rice introduced

Japan received southern half of Sakhalin at end of Russo-Japanese War1909 First steam trawler came to Hokkaido to begin fishing operations there1910 First development plan for Hokkaido adopted

Oji Paper Mill started operation in Tomakomai1914 More than 400 people killed in Yubari mine explosion

Bozu rice, suited to efficient sowing in Hokkaido, developed1916 Korean workers first brought into Hokkaido mines

Regulations adopted requiring four years of schooling for Ainu children1919 Hokuren (Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives of Hokkaido) organized1922 Soya Railroad completed, enabling development of Wakkanai

Docho abolished educational requirements specifically for Ainu1927 Otaru general strike took place

Second development plan for Hokkaido enacted1930 Hokkaido Ainu Kyokai established; strove to combat discrimination1931 Lindberghs flew to Tokyo via Kurils and Nemuro1931–35 Famine occurred in Hokkaido1934 Great Hakodate fire broke out1937 Airplane service between Tokyo and Sapporo beganlate 1930s War began affecting Hokkaido life1943 U.S. bombing of Kuril Islands began

Volcano Showa Shinzan began to grow near Lake Toya1945 Many captured Americans taken to prison camps in Hokkaido; most prisoners put

to work in the minesMid-July: Americans bombed southern Hokkaido portsSoviets captured Karafuto and Kuril IslandsSoviets planned invasion of Hokkaido which Stalin canceled at last minuteTruman denied Soviet request to occupy Hokkaido after war’s endU.S. occupation began in Hokkaido as well as the rest of JapanOccupation officials repatriated Korean and Chinese coal miners

1945–47 Hokkaido suffered severe food shortages1946 Occupation adopted land reforms; dispossessed many Ainu landowners1950 Japanese government created Hokkaido Development Bureau

First Sapporo Snow Festival held1952 New comprehensive development plan established for Hokkaido1952–53 Confrontations occurred during U.S. and Russian military flights in Hokkaido area1954 Ferry Toya Maru sank during typhoon1956 U.S.S.R. agreed to hand Shikotan and Habomai Islands back to Japan; Japan refused,

insisting on Kunashir and Iturup tooDiplomatic relations between Japan and U.S.S.R. restoredCold weather led to severe Hokkaido crop failure

1958 Workers struck Oji Paper Company’s Tomakomai mill for five months1968 Hokkaido celebrated centenary of Japanese settlement1969 Student unrest caused long-term suspension of Hokkaido University classes1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics took place

Hokkaido Chronology 335

Wajin blew up Asahikawa statue, thinking it demeaned Ainu1975 Hokkaido prefectural police headquarters bombed1976 Soviet defector landed Soviet MiG fighter in Hokkaido1976–77 U.S.S.R., then Japan, established exclusive 200 mile fishing zones

Japanese territorial waters extended from three to twelve miles1977 Mt. Usu, near Lake Toya, erupted1978 Soviets held military exercises in and around Northern Territories; began building

full-scale bases on Kunashir and Iturup1980s Ishikari Bay New Port opened1986 Prime Minister Nakasone denied Japan a multicultural nation1987 Icebreaker trips for tourists on Sea of Okhotsk began1988 Seikan Rail Tunnel opened between Hokkaido and Honshu1989 First nuclear power station in Hokkaido, located at Tomari, began delivering power1990s Hokkaido population dropped for first time1990 Last coal mine in Yubari closed1993 Earthquake and tsunami devastated Okushiri Island1994 Kayano Shigeru became first Ainu to serve in National Diet

Earthquake killed seven people and damaged structures in Northern Territories; alittle damage in eastern Hokkaido

1997 Diet abrogated Ainu Protection Law; replaced it with Ainu Cultural LawHokkaido Takushoku Ginko failed

1998 Air Do (Hokkaido International Airlines Co.) began operationPlan to store nuclear waste at Horonobe withdrawn

1999 New Development Bank of Japan took over funding of some Hokkaido projects2000 Mt. Usu erupted

Russian patriarch made first-ever visit to Japan, including HakodateLawsuit filed after Otaru hot springs refused entrance to non–JapaneseImpure Snow Brand milk product sickened many people

21st Century

2001 First case of mad cow disease in Japan diagnosed in a Hokkaido cow2002 Last coal mine in Hokkaido closed

Some World Cup soccer matches held in recently completed Sapporo Dome2004 Professional baseball team Nippon Ham Fighters added “Hokkaido” to its name and

adopted Sapporo Dome as new homeConstruction began on third reactor at Tomari

2005 Construction of bullet train line in Hokkaido beganUNESCO named Shiretoko Peninsula a world heritage site

2006 City of Yubari declared bankruptcyRussian border patrolman shot and killed Japanese fishermen on boat accused of

poaching in Kurils watersHokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters became baseball champions in both Japan and

Asia2007 Fast catamaran car ferry service between Hakodate and Aomori began

Passenger car running both on roads and on rails began service near Abashiri2008 Government of Japan recognized Ainu as an indigenous people

G-8 Summit held at Lake ToyaOperation of an undersea cable between Hokkaido and Sakhalin began

336 APPENDIX 1

Ando Takatoshi (1894–1990)Leader of movement to improve standard ofliving in fishing communities; promoted or-ganization of fishing cooperatives.

Aoshima Shunzo (1751–1790)Agent who reported to shogunate on causesof the Menashi-Kunashir revolt.

Ban Ichitaro (1854–?)Samurai member of Benjamin Lyman’steam; later discovered Yubari’s rich coal de-posits.

Batchelor, John (1854–1944)English missionary who spent much of hislife on Ainu causes, helping people, study-ing culture and language and translatingworks into Ainu.

Benyovsky, Mauritius Augustus (1746–1786)Hungarian adventurer who aroused theshogunate in 1771 with spurious claims ofplanned Russian aggression.

Blake, William P. (prob. 1826–1910)American surveyor hired with RaphaelPumpelly to advise the shogunate on min-eral development; put to work in Ezo’s Os-hima Peninsula.

Blakiston, Thomas Wright (1832–1891)Hakodate merchant who explored much ofHokkaido’s coastal area on horseback; stud-ied and collected birds and other animalspecimens and made significant scientificobservations.

Boehmer, Louis (1841–1892)Kaitakushi horticulturist who introducedmany plants and spent more than twentyyears in Japan; suggested the manufacture ofbeer in Hokkaido.

Brooks, William (1851–1938)Professor of agriculture and director of thecollege farm at Sapporo Agricultural College1877–1880; College president until 1888.

Broughton, William (1762–1821)Ship captain who sailed in Japanese waters1794–98; explored Uchiura Bay on Hok-kaido; sailed around the Kurils and nearSakhalin.

Capron, Horace (1804–1885)U.S. Secretary of Agriculture hired by theKaitakushi as main adviser on Hokkaido de-velopment; arranged for various Americanexperts as well as machinery, plants and farmanimals to come to Japan.

Chiri Mashio (1909–1961)Ainu who became linguistic and ethno-graphic scholar; published two volumes ofa massive Ainu dictionary before his un-timely death.

Clark, William S. (1826–1886)American educator who spent almost a yearin Japan as president of the new SapporoAgricultural College; remembered for hisparting words, “Boys, be ambitious!”

Crawford, Joseph (1842–1924)Engineer hired in 1878; worked three yearsfor the Kaitakushi, mainly on surveying and building the Otaru-Horonai railroadline.

Davydov, Gavril Ivanovich (1784–1809)Russian midshipman who commanded oneof the two ships that raided Sakhalin, theKurils and Japanese ships at sea, 1806–07.

Dogakinai Naohiro (1914–2004)Governor of Hokkaido 1971–1983; leading

337

Appendix 2.Key Figures in Hokkaido History

proponent of strengthening relations withnorthern countries and regions.

Dun, Edwin (1848–1931)Agricultural expert who lived in Japan formost of his life after his arrival in 1873, firstas Kaitakushi livestock adviser, later asUnited States minister to Japan.

Eldridge, Stuart (1843–1901)American hired by Horace Capron; becamepioneer of medicine and medical educationin Hokkaido; spent rest of his life as a doc-tor in Yokohama.

Enomoto Takeaki (1836–1908)One of the first Japanese educated in tech-nology in Europe; opposed the Meiji gov-ernment and in 1868 led his supporters toHokkaido where after several months theywere defeated in battle by Meiji forces.

Golovnin, Vasilii Mikhailovich (1776–1831)Russian explorer in Kurils waters in 1811 ona surveying expedition, captured and con-fined in Matsumae area for two years.

Goshkevich, Iosif Antonovich (1814 or 1815–1875)

Russian consul in Hakodate 1858–1871; didmuch to advance Russian interests there.

Haber, Ludwig (1843–1874)German consul to Hakodate who gainedfame after his assassination by an anti-for-eign Japanese.

Habuto Masayasu (1752–1814)Ezo administrator after shogunate took con-trol from Matsumae at end of 18th century;vigorously led efforts to develop Ezo.

Hidaya Kyubei (1765–1827)Contractor who ran trading post on Ku-nashir; treated Ainu so badly they rebelled,setting off the Menashi-Kunashir War.

Honda Toshiaki (1744–1821)Influential intellectual who worked to in-crease knowledge in Japan; urged expandedtrade, exploration and settlement in the north.

Hori Tatsuya (1935– )Governor of Hokkaido 1995–2003; presidedover establishment of economic and culturalcooperation between Hokkaido and Sakhalin.

Ino Tadataka (1745–1818)Sake merchant who gave up business at agefifty to study surveying and astronomy, thenexplored Ezo; made Japan’s first geographi-cal survey.

Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912)Leading Japanese poet who lived in Hok-kaido for a year, in Hakodate, Otaru and Ku-shiro.

Iwamura Michitoshi (1840–1915)Kaitakushi commissioner who finished plan-ning the new city of Sapporo and designedits street grid; first governor after establish-ment of Hokkaido Prefecture in 1886.

Kakizaki Nobuhiro (1431–1494)Originally named Takeda Nobuhiro; dem-onstrated military skill during Koshamain’swar; adopted by Kakizaki clan and renamed;became family leader.

Kayano Shigeru (1926–2006)Prominent Ainu activist; established an Ainumuseum in his home town of Biratori, stud-ied and taught the Ainu language, challengedthe government to uphold Ainu rights; thefirst Ainu ever to sit in the National Diet.

Khvostov, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1776–1809)Russian naval lieutenant who commandedone 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; tran-scribed over a million lines of Ainu epics.

Kobayashi Takiji (1903–1933)Proletarian writer raised in Hokkaido; ar-rested in 1933 and died after torture.

Kodama Sakuzaemon (1895–1970)Hokkaido University anthropologist whostudied Ainu origins; mistrusted by Ainu fordisinterring Ainu skeletons and keepingthem for research.

Kondo Morishige (1771–1829)Samurai and shogunate official; traveled toEzo and Kurils with 1798 expedition; trav-eled extensively in Ezo in 1807 and urgedcolonization of the north; also known asKondo Juzo.

Koshamain (d. 1457)Chieftain who led first major Ainu challengeagainst the Matsumae; his men destroyedtwelve Wajin forts before their defeat.

Krusenstern, A. J. von (1770–1846)Commander of Russian ship that exploredin Ezo waters 1803–05.

Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840–1900)Leader of Meiji forces who defeated Eno-

338 APPENDIX 2

moto’s rebels; became Kaitakushi head anddirected Hokkaido development; traveled toU.S. to obtain advisers; prime minister ofJapan 1888–89.

La Perouse, Jean-Francois de Galaup (1741–1788)

French explorer of the Pacific; in 1787 “dis-covered” the strait now named for him be-tween Hokkaido and Sakhalin.

Laxman, Adam Erikovich (1766–1803)Negotiator sent by Russia to Japan in 1792,allowed to winter in Nemuro but was re-fused permission to open trade between thenations.

Lyman, Benjamin Smith (1835–1920)Mining geologist in Japan 1873–1881; trav-eled and prospected extensively in Hok-kaido; submitted detailed reports of his find-ings.

MacDonald, Ranald (1824–1894)American adventurer who faked accident inorder to visit Japan in 1848; kept confinedduring almost all his time there, on Hok-kaido and in Nagasaki; taught English tosome Japanese who later interpreted whenthe Perry expedition came to Japan.

Machimura Kingo (1900–1992)Born in Sapporo to a pioneer family; Hok-kaido governor 1959–1971; also served aspresident of the upper house of Diet.

Mamiya Rinzo (1775–1844)Explorer of the north who discovered thatSakhalin was an island.

Matsumae Yasuhiro (1625, 1627 or 1628–1680)Matsumae leader who defeated Shakushain’sforces.

Matsumae Yoshihiro (1548–1616)First of the Matsumae family to be recog-nized as the shogun’s vassal and the ruler ofEzo; supervised trade with Ainu.

Matsuura Takeshiro (1818–1888)Famed explorer of Hokkaido, the Kurils andSakhalin who surveyed and produced a de-tailed and surprisingly accurate map ofHokkaido; suggested the name “Hokkaido.”

Miyabe Kingo (1860–1951)Member of second graduating class at Sap-poro Agricultural College; a leading botanistin Japan.

Mogami Tokunai (1754–1836)Leading Japanese explorer in Ezo, Sakhalinand the Kurils; sympathetic to Ainu.

Munro, Neil Gordon (1863–1942)Medical doctor who often visited, then livedin Hokkaido, working with Ainu; prominentin developing archaeology in Japan.

Niijima Jo (1843–1890)Young man who came to Hakodate in orderto slip out of Japan; studied at Amherst Col-lege in the United States; became an educa-tor in Japan and established Doshisha Uni-versity.

Nikolai, Father (1836–1911)Russian Orthodox priest who came to Hako-date in 1861; became bishop in Tokyo in1877; the person who did the most to ad-vance the Orthodox church in Japan.

Nitobe Inazo (1862–1933)Member of Sapporo Agricultural College’ssecond graduating class; became prominentintellectual and internationalist; served asLeague of Nations under-secretary general.

Ohara Sakingo (1761–1810)Tutor for Matsumae in 1783; perhaps spiedfor the shogunate; reported on secret trad-ing in Kurils between Matsumae and Rus-sians.

Otomo Kametaro (1834–1897)One of the founders of Sapporo Village,which eventually grew into the city of Sap-poro; builder of Sosei Canal from Sapporoto the Ishikari River.

Penhallow, David (1854–1910)Botanist and teacher of scientific subjectsand English during Sapporo AgriculturalCollege’s first years; later briefly college pres-ident.

Perry, Matthew Calbraith (1794–1858)American naval commander and envoy wholed expedition in 1853 to “open up” Japan;returned in 1854, achieved treaty with Japanto open ports of Hakodate and Shimoda toAmerican ships.

Peuillier, Gerard (Okada Furie) (1859–1947).Monk in the Trappist Monastery near Hako-date for fifty years; largely responsible forthe institution’s success.

Pumpelly, Raphael (1837–1923)Mining engineer hired by shogunate in 1862to survey mineral resources; carried out ef-forts on Ezo’s Oshima Peninsula; taughtmining technology to Japanese students.

Rezanov, Nikolai Petrovich (1764–1807)Russian envoy to Japan who sailed with

Key Figures in Hokkaido History 339

Krusenstern, tried unsuccessfully to negoti-ate with Japanese; subsequently orderedraids on Sakhalin, the Kurils and on Japa-nese vessels at sea.

Rikord, Petr Ivanovich (1776–1855)Senior officer on Golovnin’s ship; after Gol-ovnin’s capture, a leader in effort to rescuehim; finally obtained agreement for his re-lease.

Sato Shosuke (1856–1939)Member of first graduating class of SapporoAgricultural College; later earned PhD inagricultural economics at Johns Hopkinsuniversity; taught at the Sapporo college andserved as its president for forty years.

Shakushain (d. 1669)Ainu leader who challenged Wajin rule ofEzo; killed in 1669 by Wajin after surrender-ing; honored by Ainu today.

Shima Yoshitake (1822–1874)Kaitakushi commissioner given responsibil-ity to lay out Sapporo; chose location forSapporo Shrine.

Shimizudani Kinnaru (1845–1882)Governor at Hakodate after Meiji forces tookpower from the shogunate; led governmentin Hokkaido most of the time until estab-lishment of Kaitakushi.

Smith, Sarah Clara (1851–1947)Protestant missionary who worked for fiftyyears in Japan; started the first school forgirls in Sapporo, which grew into HokuseiGakuen University.

Spanberg, Martin (d. 1761)One of Vitus Bering’s lieutenants; in 1739sailed Russian ship through Kurils and pastEzo; apparently met Japanese only in north-ern Honshu.

Sunazawa Bikky (1931–1989)Leading Ainu artist; mainly a sculptor; de-signed Ainu flag.

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

Takahashi Harumi (1954– )Minister in charge of Hokkaido economyand industry; chosen in 2003 to be firstwoman governor of Hokkaido.

Takeda Ayasaburo (1827–1880)Student of Dutch, English and French; stud-ied technology in Europe; met Russians whosailed to Japan in 1853; designed GoryokakuFort.

Tanaka Toshifumi (1911–1982)Socialist who became Hokkaido’s first pop-ularly elected governor; food supply and re-lief needs dominated his 1947–1959 term.

Uchimura Kanzo (1861–1930)Graduate of second class of Sapporo Agri-cultural College; became prominent intel-lectual and Christian.

Ueshiba Morihei (1883–1939)Leader of a pioneer immigrant group toHokkaido while in his late twenties; met ju-jutsu expert Takeda Sokaku, studied underhim and originated martial art of aikido.

Vries, Maerten Gerritsz (d. 1647)First European voyager in Ezo region; in1644 approached but did not land on Ezo.

Wheeler, William (1851–1932)Scientist and engineer; spent 1876 to 1879 atSapporo Agricultural College, succeedingClark as college president.

Yokomichi Takahiro (1941– )Hokkaido governor 1983–1995; ran as inde-pendent, traveled extensively in Hokkaidoand abroad; worked for stronger trade be-tween Hokkaido and foreign nations.

Zusho Hirotake (1840–1911)First director of Sapporo Agricultural Col-lege, under whom William S. Clark worked.

340 APPENDIX 2

Ainu. Aboriginal people of Japan, now foundmostly in Hokkaido.

Ainu-e. Japanese paintings of Ainu.Ainu Kyokai. Original name of Ainu Associa-

tion of Hokkaido.ainu moshir. The land of the Ainu (Ainu lan-

guage 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 ofHokkaido.

Edo. The shogunate’s capital; name changed toTokyo in 1868.

Emishi. Name for early people who were prob-ably Ainu.

Ezo. Name used for the island of Hokkaidountil 1871.

Ezochi. Portion of Ezo reserved for Ainu dur-ing Matsumae era.

GSDF. Japan’s army: the Ground Self-DefenseForce.

Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko. Hokkaido De-velopment Bank.

Hokudai. University of Hokkaido.Hokuden. Hokkaido Electric Power Company.Hokuren. Federation of Agricultural Cooper-

ative Societies of Hokkaido.Hokutan. Hokkaido Coal Mine Railway Com-

pany, later Hokkaido Coal Mine SteamshipCompany.

ikupasuy. Flat, carved Ainu sticks used in

prayer and to offer sake to the gods (an Ainulanguage word).

inau. Ainu sacred stick with shaved curls ofwood on its sides (an Ainu language word).

JNR. Japanese National Railways, Japan’s na-tional railway system, broken up in 1987.

Jomon. Ancient people of Japan who precededthe Yayoi.

JR Hokkaido. Hokkaido Railway Company, thepublic railway system serving Hokkaidosince 1987.

Kaitakushi. Hokkaido Development Commis-sion, or colonial department.

kamui. Ainu term for god (an Ainu languageword).

Karafuto. Japanese name for Sakhalin Island,often used to refer only to southern half ofthe island, which was part of Japan 1905–1945.

Kenpeitai. Japan’s military police; existed until1945.

kombu. Edible seaweed or kelp.kotan. Ainu traditional village (an Ainu lan-

guage 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 organiza-tion in Japan after World War II.

SDF. The Self-Defence Force, Japan’s militaryorganization.

shogun. Military leader acting in name of em-peror, to 1867.

shogunate. Government of Japan when headedby the shogun.

Showa. Emperor 1926–1989; also name of thatera.

341

Appendix 3. Glossary

Taisho. Emperor 1912–1926; also name of thatera.

Takugin. Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko, or Hok-kaido 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.

342 APPENDIX 3

Preface1. John M. Maki, William Smith Clark: A Yankee

in Hokkaido (Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaido UniversityPress, 1966), 195–96.

Chapter 1

1. Horace Capron, “Memoirs,” 2 v. (Beltsville,Maryland and Washington, DC: United States Depart-ment of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library), 2:101–2.

2. Donald Keene, Travels in Japan (Tokyo: Gaku-seisha, 1981), 127.

3. Wim Swaan, Japanese Lantern (London: Geof-frey Bles, 1965), 195.

4. Mark Brazil in Japan Times, March 2, 2003;Watanabe Akira, “Hokkaido Guidebook,” Interna-tional Geographical Union, Regional Conference inJapan, Regional Geography of Japan (Tokyo: Society ofJapanese Regional Geography, 1957), 27.

5. William S. Clark in First Annual Report of Sap-poro 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 ofJapan by Belle Lamar Stockbridge,” Stockbridge Col-lection, University of Massachusetts, 14.

8. Stockbridge, 14–15; Henry Finck, Lotos-Time inJapan (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 Geo-graphical Society 42 (1872), 345.

10. Stockbridge, 14; William Wheeler to his Mother,Aug. 10, 1876, English Language Reports and Letters tothe Kaitakushi relating to Wheeler, Monograph 10 (Sap-poro: Hokkaido Prefectural Government, 1992), 77.

11. Wheeler to his Mother, Sept. 10, 1876, Mono-graph 10, 96.

12. Peter Robinson, “Hokkaido: Japan’s New Fron-tier,” Fodor’s Japan and Korea 1980 (New York: DavidMcKay, 1980), 407.

13. Benjamin A. Lyman, “Geological Survey ofHokkaido; Report of a Geological Trip Through andAround Yesso, with Notices of the Topography, Tim-ber, Population, Ainos, and of the Progress of the Ge-ological Survey,” Reports and Official Letters to the

Kaitakushi by Horace Capron, Commissioner and Ad-viser, 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.

Chapter 21. D. B. Penhallow, “Origin of the Ainos and their

Final Settlement and Distribution in Japan,” CanadianRecord of Science 2 (1886), 1, 17–18; Shannon A.Docherty, “Parallels between the Bear and SalmonTales of the Ainu of Japan and the Native Americansof the Northwest Coast: An Analysis from a Cultural-prehistoric Perspective,” M.A. Thesis, University ofOregon, 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: OxfordUniversity Press, 1968), 2: 50; Penhallow, 18–19.

4. Japan Times, Aug. 21, 1997.5. Japan Textile Color Design Center, comp., Tex-

tile Designs of Japan v. IV: Designs of Ryukyu, Ainu andForeign Design (Osaka: Japan Textile Color DesignCenter, 1961), 18, 19.

6. Ainu scholar Chiri Mashiho introduced the the-ory that warfare recounted in some Ainu epics de-scribes Okhotsk-Satsumon conflicts, Donald Philippi,Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans: The Epic Tradition ofthe 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 WhereWe Went and What We Saw (Philadelphia: Lippincott,1857), 308; A. J. von Krusenstern, quoted in Morris-Suzuki, 12; A. H. Savage Landor, Alone with the HairyAinu. or, 3800 Miles on a Pack Saddle in Yezo and aCruise to the Kurile Islands (London: John Murray,1893), for example, 6–7, 13, 296–97.

8. E. A. Hammel, “A Glimpse into the Demogra-phy of the Ainu,” American Anthropologist 90 (March1988), 33–39.

9. William W. Fitzhugh and Chisato O. Dubreuil,eds., Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People (Seattle: Smith-

343

Chapter Notes

sonian Institution with University of WashingtonPress, 1999), 375.

10. Takakura Shinichiro, “The Ainu of NorthernJapan: A Study in Conquest and Acculturation,” trans.John A. Harrison, Transactions of the American Philo-sophical Society, new series, 50 (1960), 18–19.

11. Annie H. Bradshaw, “The Ainus of Japan,”Women’s Board of Missions, Lesson Leaflet, August1905, 2, in Neesima and Uchimura Collection, Am-herst College Archives and Special Collections,Amherst, Massachusetts; John Batchelor, The Ainu ofJapan: The Religion, Superstitions, and General Historyof the Hairy Aborigines of Japan (London: ReligiousTract Society, 1892), 28; and Ainu Life and Lore: Echoesof a Departing Race (Tokyo: Kyobunkwan, 1927,reprint, NY: Johnson Reprint Co., 1971), 14; KayanoShigeru, 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 ResidentMembers of the Ainu in Hokkaido, Japan, in the Mid-nineteenth Century,” The Science Reports of the TohokuUniversity, 7th series (Geography) 45 (Dec. 1995), 76.

13. Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (Lon-don: 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 Cos-mos Reading from Language (London: Kegan Paul,2001), 60.

17. Kuzuno Tatsujiro, “Aino Gods and Beliefs,” inIrimoto Takashi and Yamada Takako, eds., Circumpo-lar Religion and Ecology: An Anthropology of the North(Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1994), 3.

18. Batchelor, “The Ainu Bear Festival,” Transac-tions 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 (Lon-

don: 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. Batch-elor, 1925), 41.

23. Nitobe Inazu, The Japanese Nation: Its Land, ItsPeople and Its Life, with Special Consideration to Its Re-lations with the United States (New York: G. P. Put-nam’s Sons, 1912), 86–87; F. Hadland Davis, Japan,from the Age of the Gods to the Fall of Tsingtau (Lon-don: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1916), 1, 2; Basil Hall Cham-berlain, Japanese Things (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1971, re-vised reprint of Things Japanese: Being Notes on VariousSubjects Connected with Japan for the Use of Travellersand Others, by Basil Hall Chamberlain; 5th revised ed.,London: John Murray, 1905), 22.

24. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, The Ainu of the North-west 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 His-

tory, Culture, and Present Day Situation of the AinuPeople, 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’sWar.

7. David L. Howell, Capitalism from Within: Econ-omy, Society and the State in a Japanese Fishery (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1995), 31.

8. Watanabe Hitoshi, The Ainu Ecosystem: Envi-ronment and Group Structure (Seattle : University ofWashington Press, 1973), 122 note 27.

9. Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainuof Japan (London: Routledge, 1996), 36.

10. Walker, 95.11. Miwa Kimitada, “Colonial Theories and Prac-

tices in Prewar Japan,” John F. Howes, ed., NitobeInazo: Japan’s Bridge Across the Pacific (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1995), 160.

12. David N. Wells, trans. and ed., Russian Views ofJapan, 1792–1913: An Anthology of Travel Writing (Lon-don: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 53.

13. Glenn Thomas Trewartha, Japan: A PhysicalCultural and Regional Geography (Madison: Univer-sity 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 His-tory,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1969,276.

16. Richard Louis Edmonds, Northern Frontiers ofQing China and Tokugawa Japan: A Comparative Studyof Frontier Policy (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1985), 87, 102–3.

17. J. M. Tronson, Personal Narrative of a Voyage toJapan, Kamtschatka, Siberia, Tartary, and Various Partsof 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, En-glish 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 ofYezo,” Annals of the Association of American Geogra-phers 40 (1950), 258.

2. Cornelius Janszoon Coen, Voyage to Cathay,Tartary and the Gold- and Silver-Rich Islands East ofJapan, 1643, trans. and ed., William C. H. Robert (Am-sterdam: Philo Press, 1975), 243, 245 and “Extract froma missive of the Governor General Anthonio VanDiemen and the Council of the East Indies at Bataviato the Managers of the Dutch East India Company atAmsterdam, Jan. 4, 1644,” 259.

3. Stephan, “Ezo under the Tokugawa Bakufu,”251.

4. George A. Lensen, The Russian Push towardJapan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697–1875 (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1959), 118.

5. A. J. Von Krusenstern, Voyage Round the World,

344 NOTES—CHAPTERS 3, 4

in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806, by Order of HisImperial Majesty Alexander the First, on Board the ShipsNadeshda and Neva, 2 vols., trans. Richard BelgraveHoppner (London: John Murray, 1813, reprint NewYork: Da Capo Press, 1968) II: 29.

6. Krusenstern, II: 41, 47; I: map is on an unnum-bered 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 Islandof Yezo at Intervals between 1862 and 1882 (Yokohama:Japan Gazette, 1883), 85n.

9. Vasilii Mikhailovich Golovnin, Japan and theJapanese: Comprising the Narrative of a Captivity inJapan, and an Account of British Commercial Inter-course with that Country, 2 v. (London: Colburn andCo., 1853), I: 38–39.

10. Golovnin, I: 104.11. Golovnin, II: 252.12. Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Eu-

rope, 1720–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1969), 138.

13. W. R. Broughton, A Voyage of Discovery to theNorth 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 ofan American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan,compiled by Francis L. Hawks (Washington: BeverleyTucker, 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 theUnited States Surveying Expedition to the North PacificOcean, 1853–1856 (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 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: TheNarrative of His Early Life on the Columbia under theHudson’s Bay Company’s Regime; of His Experiences inthe Pacific Whale Fishery; and of His Great Adventureto Japan; with a Sketch of His Later Life in the WesternFrontier, 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 ofJapan: A Diary of Discovery in the Far East, 1853–1856,ed. Boleslaw Szczesniak (Norman: University of Ok-lahoma Press, 1962), 186; J. W. Spalding, The Japan Ex-pedition: Japan and Around the World: An Account ofThree Visits to the Japanese Empire (New York: Red-field, 1855), 296–97; Henry F. Graff, ed., “Bluejacketswith Perry in Japan,” Bulletin of the New York Public Li-brary 55 (June 1951), 276.

22. Spalding, 298.23. Kojima Matajiro, Commodore Perry’s Expedition

to Hakodate, trans. Alice Cheney (Hakodate; Hako-date Kyodo Bunkai, 1953), 14.

24. Thomas C. Dudley, “Memoir,” 135, Dudley Col-

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” CommodoreMatthew 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 AncientPlace Names in Japan,” Transactions of the Asiatic So-ciety of Japan, Second Series 6 (1929), 76; Stephan, “Ezounder the Tokugawa Bakufu,” 114.

2. Todd, Corona and Coronet, 254–55; WilliamHeine, With Perry to Japan: A Memoir by WilliamHeine, trans. Frederic Trautman (Honolulu: Univer-sity of Hawaii Press, 1990), 151–52.

3. F. V. Dickins, The Life of Sir Harry Parkes: Some-time 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 Nar-rative of a Three Years’ Residence in Japan, 2 v. (NewYork; Harper and Brothers, 1863), 1: 241; Neill James,Petticoat Vagabond in Ainu Land and Up and DownEastern Asia (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1942), 36.; Lesley Downer in Financial Times, Febru-ary 2, 2008.

5. Heine, 145; Allen diary in Graff, “Bluejacketswith Perry in Japan,” 276, 278; Thomas C. Dudley toFanny 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 Soci-ety of Japan, 1910 part 2, 202; Kojima, CommodorePerry’s Expedition to Hakodate, 24; Dudley to FannyDudley, 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 inSiberia, Northern Asia, and the Great Amoor RiverCountry; Incidental Notices of Manchooria, Mongolia,Kamschatka, and Japan, with Map and Plan of an Over-land Telegraph around the World, via Behring’s Straitand 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, toChina and Japan from July, 1857, to February, 1860(Boston: Damrell and Moore, Printers, 1860), 41;Richard Henry Dana, Jr., The Journal of Richard HenryDana, Jr., 3 v., ed. Robert F. Lucid (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 1968), 3:1026; fighting is re-ported by Henry Arthur Tilley in Japan, the Amoor,

Notes—Chapter 5 345

and the Pacific; with Notices of Other Places, Comprisedin a Voyage of Circumnavigation in the Imperial Rus-sian Corvette “Rynda” in 1858–1860 (London: Smith,Elder, 1861), 120.

14. Francis Hall, Japan through American Eyes: TheJournal of Francis Hall, Kanagawa and Yokohama,1859–1860, ed. F. G. Notehelfer (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity 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 towardJapan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697–1875 (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1959), 368.

17. E. E. Rice, quoted in Eldon Griffin, Clippers andConsuls: American Consular and Commercial Relationswith Eastern Asia, 1845–1860 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ed-wards Brothers, 1938), 181.

18. G. Pemberton Hodgson, A Residence at Na-gasaki and Hakodate in 1859–1860 with an Account ofJapan Generally with a Series of Letters on Japan by HisWife (London: Richard Bentley, 1861), 92.

19. Hodgson, 96, 199; J. E. Hoare, “Britain’s Con-sular Service, 1859–1941,” Ian Nish, ed., Britain andJapan: 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 Sail-ing 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”; RichardHughes in Far Eastern Economic Review 92 (April 23,1976), 23.

32. Pat Barr, The Coming of the Barbarians; TheOpening 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 ofMine Own People (Garden City, NY: Page and Double-day, 1919), 40.

36. Hartshorne, 1: 355, 358, 356; Bronislaw Pilsud-ski, The Collected Works of Bronislaw Pilsudski, AlfredF. Majewicz, trans. and ed., 3 v., (Berlin, NY: Moutonde 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 theEnds of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, andInteractions (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,2003), 46–48, 236.

2. James Edward Ketelaar, “Hokkaido Buddhismand the Early Meiji State,” in Helen Hardacre, ed. withAdam L. Kern, New Directions in the Study of MeijiJapan (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 535; JapanTimes, July 20, 1960.

3. Preble, The Opening of Japan, 188; RaphaelPumpelly, Across America and Asia: Notes of a FiveYears’ Journey Around the World and of Residence inArizona, Japan and China (New York: Leypoldt andHolt, 1870), 144.

4. Miyajima, Land of Elms, 75.5. Reports and Official Letters to the Kaitakushi, re-

verse of title page; Michael Weiner, “The Invention ofIdentity: Race and Nation in Pre-war Japan,” FrankDikötter, ed., The Construction of Racial Identities inChina and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspec-tives (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1977), 112;Imai Toshinobu, “Changing Agricultural Land Useduring the Exploitation Period 1868–1944 inHokkaido,” Science Reports of Tohoku University 25(1975), 293.

6. W. S. Clark to his family, August 14, 1876 andSept. 10, 1876, Clark Collection.

7. David F. Anthony, “The Administration ofHokkaido under Kuroda Kiyotaka 1870–1882: An EarlyExample of Japanese-American Cooperation,” Ph.D.dissertation, Yale University, 1951, 68.

8. Edwin Dun, “Reminiscences of Nearly a HalfCentury in Japan,” Beltsville, MD and Washington,DC: United States Department of Agriculture, Na-tional Agricultural Library), 4.

9. Choya Shimbun, Aug. 8, 1881, quoted in JamesL. Huffman, Creating a Public: People and Press in MeijiJapan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997),116.

10. The 1898 building now stands in the HistoricalVillage of Hokkaido. (See end of chapter.)

11. Blakiston, Japan in Yezo, 37n.12. Oda Toshikatsu, Planned Population Distribu-

tion 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 Kaitakushirelating 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. ConcentrationCamps (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000),chapter 1.

16. Will, Trading under Sail off Japan, 70–71; Mi-chael Lewis, Becoming Apart: National Power and LocalPolitics in Toyama, 1868–1945 (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Asia Center, 2000), 63.

17. Benjamin S. Lyman, “Geological Survey ofHokkaido. Report of a Geological Trip through andaround Yesso, with Notices of the Topography, Tim-ber, Population, Ainos and of the Progress of the Ge-ological Survey,” Reports and Official Letters to theKaitakushi, 432.

346 NOTES—CHAPTER 6

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 Yu-taka, Transfer and Development of Coal-Mine Technol-ogy in Hokkaido (Tokyo: United Nations University,1982), 25.

21. The Urakawa group’s simple church buildingfrom 1894 now stands in the Historical Village ofHokkaido.

22. C. S. Meik, “Around the Hokkaido,” Transac-tions 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 Mur-ray, 1901), 540.

24. J. M. Dixon, “Travelling in Yesso,” Chrysanthe-mum 1 (1881), 421.

25. Capron, “Memoirs,” 2: 126–27.26. Japan Weekly Mail, April 16, 1892.27. Reginald J. Farrer, The Garden of Asia: Impres-

sions from Japan (London: Methuen, 1904), 159; JapanWeekly 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 Writ-

ers of Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of HawaiiPress, 2000), 204–5.

32. Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu ofJapan, 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: TheJapanese at Home and Abroad as Revealed ThroughTheir Diaries (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 406.

36. Dun, 52–53.37. Ohara Keishi, comp. and ed., Trade and Indus-

try in the Meiji-Taisho Era, trans. Okato Tamotsu(Tokyo: Obunsha, 1957), 497; Irene Tauber, The Pop-ulation of Japan (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1958), 174; Japan Times, July 8, 2008.

38. Japan Times, Nov. 28, 1983.39. Dun, 53.

Chapter 7

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 inJapan, 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 (Lon-don: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington,1883), 305–6.

4. Hokkaido Prefectural Government, Foreign Pi-oneers: A Short History of the Contribution of Foreign-ers to the Development of Hokkaido (Sapporo:Hokkaido Prefectural Government, 1968), 19.

5. Dun, “Reminiscences,” 27.

6. Capron, 2: 83.7. Extract from Capron’s Japanese Journal in Mer-

ritt Starr, “General Horace Capron, 1804–1885,” Jour-nal of the Illinois State Historical Society 18 (1925), 317;Capron, 2: 73, 114.

8. Extract in Starr, 326–27; Lyman is quoted inFujita Fumiko, American Pioneers and the JapaneseFrontier: American Experts in Nineteenth-CenturyJapan (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 Employin Meiji Japan (Hokkaido: Miyama Shoto, 1981), 115.

13. This phrase appears on an informational sign inMakomanai, 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 relat-ing to Boehmer, Monograph 3 (Sapporo: HokkaidoPrefectural Government, 1991), 1, 119, 120; JapanWeekly Mail, Oct. 2, 1886; Blakiston, Japan in Yezo, 11.

16. American Influence upon the Agriculture ofHokkaido, Japan (Sapporo: College of Agriculture, To-hoku Imperial University, 1915), 12.

17. Maki, William Smith Clark, 131.18. Maki, 81–82.19. Dallas Finn, Meiji Revisited: The Sites of Victo-

rian 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 Massachu-setts; Brooks, “Farm Report,” Second Annual Report ofSapporo Agricultural College (Tokei: Kaitakushi, 1878),20.

22. William S. Clark to his family (“Old MotherClark ... and Her Little Clarkies Eight”), Oct. 22, 1876,Clark Collection; Stockbridge, “Personal Recollec-tions,” 16–18, 12.

23. Japan Times, June 29, 1983.

Chapter 8

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 theKaitakushi, 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.

Notes—Chapters 7, 8 347

10. David F. Anthony, “The Administration ofHokkaido under Kuroda Kiyotaka 1870–1882: An EarlyExample of Japanese-American Cooperation,” PhDdissertation, Yale University, 1951, 140; Japan WeeklyMail, 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 PrefecturalGovernment, 1993), 45; First Annual Report of SapporoAgricultural College, 1877 (Tokei: Kaitakushi), 11.

18. Uchida Kiyoshi to W. S. Clark, Jan. 10, 1882,Correspondence of W. S. Clark and His Japanese Stu-dents, (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 Im-perial University, 1927), 104–5.

24. Quoted in Hijiya Yukihito, Ishikawa Takuboku(Boston: Twayne, 1979), 25; Basil Hall Chamberlainand W.B. Mason, eds., Handbook for Travellers in Japan(London: John Murray, 1907), 522.

25. Farrer, The Garden of Asia, 160; L. H. DudleyBuxton, The Eastern Road (New York: Dutton, 1924),47.

26. Storry, quoted in Hugh Cortazzi, comp. anded., Japan Experiences: Fifty Years, One Hundred Views:Post-War Japan through British Eyes 1945–2000 (Rich-mond, England: Japan Library, 2001), 188.

27, Joseph Campbell, Sake and Satori: Asia Jour-nals — Japan, ed. David Kudler (Novato: CA: NewWorld 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, wasmuch 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: Jour-

ney Without Borders, trans. Peter Duus (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2004), 380–81.

Chapter 9

1. Takekoshi Yosaburo, Economic Aspects of theHistory of the Civilization of Japan, 3 v., (New York:Macmillan, 1930), 3:165; Siddle, Race, Resistance andthe Ainu of Japan, 40.

2. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands, 182; PeterGeiser 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 Ethnic-ity in Japan (Berkshire, U.K.: Harwood Academic Pub-lisher, 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; MiwaKimitada, “Colonial Theories and Practices in PrewarJapan,” in Howes, ed., Nitobe Inazu, 164.

13. Frederick Starr, The Ainu Group at the SaintLouis 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 Britainand 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; uniden-tified 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 Ainuand 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 GovernmentArchives).

22. Siddle, 76–77.23. Fukusawa Yuriko, Ainu Archaeology as Ethno-

history: Iron Technology among the Saru Ainu of Hok-kaido, 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 Exposi-tion, 1904,” Arctic Anthropology 30 (1993), 78.

25. Starr, The Ainu Group, 75.26. T. Philip Terry, Terry’s Japanese Empire Includ-

ing 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; KayanoShigeru, “Traditional Ainu Life: Living off the Inter-est,” 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 So-ciety 34 (Oct. 31, 1931), 598–99.

31. Kindaichi Kyosuke, “Present-Day Ainus DesireAbsorption with Japanese,” Nippon Times, July 24, 1948.


32. N. Yakovlev, “A Visit to the Ainu in SouthernSakhalin,” Asiatic Review, new series 43 (July 1947),277.

33. Koshiro Yukiko, Trans-Pacific Racisms and theU.S. Occupation of Japan (NY: Columbia UniversityPress, 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 North-ern People, 361.

39. Japan Times, June 7, 2008; George De Vos andWilliam Wetherall, Japan’s Minorities: Burakumin, Ko-reans, Ainu (London: Minority Rights Group, 1974),17.

40. Kayano, Our Land Was a Forest, 118–19.41. Douglas Sanders, “Japan: The Ainu as an In-

digenous People, IWGIA Newsletter 45 (1986), 123.42. Murayama Tomi, “The Ainu: Struggle for Sur-

vival 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 Com-

munity in Japan, 1910–1923 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:Humanities Press, 1989), 60, 66, 89; Weiner, Race andMigration in Imperial Japan (London: Routledge,1994), 133–34.

3. Michael Hoffman in Japan Times, March 2,2003.

4. Kobayashi, “The Factory Ship” and “The Absen-tee Landlord,” trans. Frank Motofuji (Seattle: Univer-sity 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 tothe Japan Weekly Mail, Jan. 31, 1914.

7. J. W. Robertson-Scott, The Foundations ofJapan: Notes Made during Journeys of 6000 Miles in theRural Districts as a Basis for a Sounder Knowledge of theJapanese 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 Devel-opment and Future Prospects (London: Oxford Univer-sity 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 SaintLouis Exposition, 7; Terry, 356.

13. The Times (London), July 19, 1910. Elsewhere inthis edition of the newspaper, Hokkaido’s populationat the end of 1908 is reported as 1,137,410. The firstofficial census in Japan came in 1920.

14. Terry, 346, 355–56; Chamberlain and Mason(1907), 516.

15. Harry A. Franck, The Japanese Empire: A Geo-graphical 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 Stud-ies 1 (1976), 90.

18. “The Fifteenth of March, 1928” appears inKobayashi Takiji, The Cannery Boat by Takiji Koba-yashi and Other Japanese Short Stories (New York: In-ternational Publishers, 1933), 69–93.

19. Chamberlain and Mason, Handbook for Trav-ellers 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, inTakamine, A Sad Toy: A Unique and Popular Poet,Takuboku’s Life and His Poems (Tokyo: Tokyo NewsService, 1962), 47.

22. See Kobayashi, “The Factory Ship” and “The Ab-sentee Landlord” in John W. Morrison, Modern Japa-nese Fiction.

23. Kubo Sakae, Land of Volcanic Ash, trans. DavidG. Goodman (Ithaca, NY: China-Japan Program, Cor-nell University, 1986.

24. His name appears in English as Starfin, Starffinand 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 Stu-dents, 219.

27. New York Times, March 22, 1934.28. Benjamin C. Duke, Japan’s Militant Teachers; A

History of the Left-Wing Teachers’ Movement (Hon-olulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973), 191; Shimo-mura Chiaki, quoted in Hane, Peasants, Rebels andOutcastes, 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 Annexa-

tion 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-Japa-nese Frontier in the Pacific (Oxford, U.K.: ClarendonPress, 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 Im-perial 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 [Chronol-ogy of Hokkaido History Described] (Sapporo: Hok-kaido Shinbunsha, 2001), 101, reports 835 deaths. Al-most two thousand people died as a result of the raids,wrote Misawa Akihiko in the Yomiuri Shimbun, July 9,2005, provisional translation from Consulate Generalof the United States, Sapporo, Japan, http://sapporo.us

Notes—Chapters 10, 11 349

consulate.gov/wwwhcgyomiurijuly4th.html, retrievedDec. 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 Vaga-bond, 38, 76.

11. Joint Army-Navy Intelligence Study of NorthernJapan: Hokkaido (Washington, DC: Joint IntelligenceStudy Publishing Board, 1944), 1–27, 28, 13–14.

12. William Donald Smith III, “Ethnicity, Class andGender in the Mines: Korean Workers in Japan’sChikuho Coal Field, 1917–1945,” Ph.D. dissertation,University of Washington, 1999, 350, 283, 335.

13. HBC (Hokkaido Broadcasting Company), “Upto 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: TheTrue 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 var-

ious 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 SebastianSwaan (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 Coun-cil 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: Har-vard University Press, 2005), 273.

2. Frank, Downfall, 356; David M. Glantz, The So-viet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945: ‘AugustStorm’ (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, March29, 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 theoriginal, Nippon Times, April 29, 1948.

6. New York Times, Feb. 12, 1951; Christian ScienceMonitor, April 10, 1952.

7. New York Times, Jan. 14, 1953.8. Christian Science Monitor April 10, 1952.9. Whether one uses the term “Northern Territo-

ries” or “South Kurils” can have political significance.“Northern Territories” is the clearer term to use whendescribing the islands that Japan claims and this bookis about Japan; I have chosen to use “Northern Terri-tories” most of the time.

10. Hasegawa, 274, 289; Kimura Hiroshi, Japanese-Russian Relations under Gorbachev and Yeltsin (Ar-monk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 202.

11. For analysis of the U.S. role, see Tsuyoshi Hase-gawa, The Northern Territories Dispute and Russo-Japa-nese Relations, v. 1, Between War and Peace, 1697–1985(Berkeley: University of California, 1998, 114–15; andMarc 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 domesticpolitics rather than U.S. pressure prevented a Japan-Soviet peace treaty in 1956. See his “Japan and theNorthern 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 Linkageand the Kurile Islands,” Asian Affairs 27 (Winter 2001),253; Kimura, 253–54, holds that West German eco-nomic aid to the U.S.S.R. had little to do with Germanreunification.

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 GreatPower Relations Prevail?” Pacific Review 15 (2002), 329;Kimura Masao and David A. Walsh, “Specifying ‘In-terests’: Japan’s Claim to the Northern Territories andIts Implications for International Relations Theory,”International Studies Quarterly 42 (1998), 220; KimuraHiroshi, 256.

21. “Majority of Russians Support Return of AllFour Islands to Japan: Poll,” Jiji Press English NewsService, June 23, 2005, retrieved through Proquestdatabase; Japan Times, Nov. 14 and Dec. 25, 2006. (AsoTaro became prime minister of Japan on Sept. 24,2008.)

22. Robert Swearingen, The Soviet Union and Post-war Japan: Escalating Challenge and Response (Stan-ford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), 172; Storry,“Hokkaido in the Late Thirties,” 93.

23. Jones, Hokkaido: Its Present State of Develop-ment 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.


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-Japa-nese Border Trade: Causes and Consequences,” Eu-rope-Asia Studies 55 (2003), 713.

34. Williams, 720.35. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The Northern Territories

Dispute and Russo-Japanese Relations, v. 2, Neither Warnor Peace, 1985–1998 (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1998), 529. Japanese fishermen in moresoutherly waters have been detained and their boatsconfiscated in postwar years by officials of other na-tions, especially South Korea, but the problem withthe Russians has been much more serious.

36. “Russia: Sakhalin Region Media Highlights 30Oct.–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 131. 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,” Ge-

ographical 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 (Hon-olulu: 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 (NewYork: 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 Out-

cast Generation; Luminous Moss, trans. Shibuya Yus-aburo 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

pan/e/page5.html; also p. 22. The figures are from2000.

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.citypopulation.de/Japan-Hok

kaido.html. The figures are from 2006.8. Miura Ayako, Freezing Point, trans. Shimizu Hi-

romu and John Terry (Wilmington, DE: Dawn Press,1986.)

9. Samejima Kazuo, “Comment” to Yoneda Hit-omi, “The Hillside City and Tourism: A Case Study ofHakodate,” Regional Development Dialog 12 (summer1991), 141.

10. Culter, Managing Decline, 62; HBC, “Up to theMinute in Hokkaido,” March 2, 2003, http://www.hbc.co.jp/english/main_e.html

11. Culter, 96–97.12. Japan Times, July 8, 2008.

Conclusion1. Takahashi Harumi, “The Potential of Hok-

kaido,” 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 cheesecame from Kyodogakusha Shintoku Farm, JapanTimes, Nov. 1, 2004.

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360 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abashiri 20, 25, 127, 136, 223,319, 326, 328; ice floes 19, 318;Prison 134, 136, 315, 319, 334

Abira 315Abuta 53, 236agriculture 17–18, 52, 125, 224,

262, 308, 309, 319, 327; Ainu30, 31, 50, 195; cooperatives221, 230, 293, 308; dairying 17,150, 177, 293; development of116, 224, 293, 294; farms 15,116, 120, 129–30, 140, 223, 224,290, 293–94, 309; model farms144, 151, 155, 171, 172, 172;research 147, 220, 221, 294; seealso animals; farm; food sup-ply; horses; rice; tenant farmers

aikido 232–33Ainu 2, 19, 23–40, 27, 88, 142,

149, 150, 204, 332; activism203, 206, 207, 208, 322; andart 211–12; clothing 25, 26, 30;communities 27–28, 29, 195,201–2, 210, 214; discriminationagainst 193, 202, 211; and dis-ease 54, 192, 199; in exhibits201–2, 209; farming 30, 31, 50,195, 200; festivals 205, 212,213; fishing, traditional 29, 31;fishing under Wajin law192–93, 194, 195, 201, 203,210–11; food and diet 30, 31,32, 53, 203, 212; and forcedlabor 51, 136, 192–93, 194; andforeign explorers 26, 56, 67,74; foreign interest in 56, 80,116, 149, 196–99, 209–10; andgovernment 47, 48, 53, 191,200, 203–4, 208, 211, 215, 335,336; housing 27–28, 28, 203;hunting 23, 29, 140, 194; andimperial 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 land195, 200, 203, 205; legends andtales 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 Ainu57, 126, 191, 194, 196, 209; andSakhalin 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; tradi-tional life 23, 26–38, 56, 214;Wajin, relations with 43, 43,51, 117, 130, 193, 211; Wajinviews of 24, 39–40, 192, 193,202–3; women’s role 29–30, 31;see also Ainu; alcohol andalcoholism: education: Ainu;iyomante

Ainu-e 35, 43Ainu Kyokai 204, 205, 335; see

also Utari KyokaiAinu language 23, 24, 38–39, 66,

196–97, 199, 208, 212; as placename source 38–39, 127; andWajin explorers 65, 66, 73, 196

Ainu Protection Act 199–201,202, 203–4, 205, 208, 335;abolition of 211, 336

Ainu Shinpo 211, 212, 336Air Do 324, 336airports; Chitose 181, 184, 185,

300; New Chitose Interna-tional 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, 296Akan, Lake 16, 212Akan National Park 20, 172, 256Akihito, Emperor 212Akkeshi 14, 20, 120, 132, 141, 180,

192–93; and explorers 56, 59,69, 71–72, 334; and Russians52, 59, 62; and World War II248, 250

Alaska 61, 82, 240; see alsoAleutian Islands

Albrecht, Mikhail 91Alcock, Rutherford 85, 95alcohol and alcoholism 134, 188,

240, 328; among Ainu 32, 33,194, 199, 206, 211; traded toAinu 42, 50, 51; see also beer;sake; Sapporo Beer

Aldson, Hans 67–68Aleutian Islands 24, 59, 61, 240,

241, 267; during World War II246, 249–50, 255–56

Aleuts interned in Japan 255–56Alexander I, Emperor of Russia

62Alexey II, Patriarch 287Allen, William B. 79, 86Americans 1, 17, 77, 88, 89, 90,

94, 144, 145–59, 247–49,253–54; see also names of indi-viduals; occupation, American

Amherst College 97, 154, 173Amur River 69, 92, 328Anatolii, Father 92Ando Sekiten 271Ando Takatoshi 219, 295, 337Ando family 42, 43, 333animals 16–17, 29, 46, 51, 136;

farm 147, 150–51, 153; see alsobears; birds; deer; fisheries;horses; wolves

Anne of Green Gables 318Anthony, David F. 164anti-foreign feelings 91, 93, 98,

108; see also foreigners, deten-tion of; Japan closed to for-eigners

Antisell, Thomas 145, 146, 147,148

Aomori 13, 102, 109, 135, 181,225, 247, 336

Aoshima Shunzo 51, 66, 337Arai Ikunosake 103Araki Daikaku 42Arishima Takeo 140, 176, 174–

75, 186area 9

IndexNumbers in bold italics indicate pages with illustrations.

361

armed forces, Japan 132, 181, 182,183, 186, 244, 246–49, 319;Seventh Army Division 21, 121,126, 216–17, 245, 319; see alsoSelf-Defense Force

Asahidake 10, 21Asahikawa 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 206Ashibetsu 218, 253, 295, 318Aso Taro 276Australia 71–72, 308, 318aviation 251, 286, 300, 323,

324–25; domestic 181, 243;Lindbergh trip 241–43; mili-tary 262–63, 268–69; pioneers240–41; see also airports

Bakunin, Mikhail 92Baldwin, Hanson W. 268Ban Ichitaro 133, 334, 337Barashkov, Vladimir 269Barr, Pat 101basho ukeoi 49, 54, 131, 333, 334Batchelor, John 45, 84, 178,

196–97, 197, 200, 209, 337; onAinu 29–30, 32, 33, 35–36, 198

Bates, George M. 89bear ceremony 29, 33–34, 33,

34, 191, 205, 209bears 17, 329; see also bear cere-

monybeer 33, 110, 153, 163–64, 319,

334; Sapporo Beer 161, 164,180, 185, 319, 321, 334

Belenko, Viktor Ivanovich 269,282, 336

Benkei 37Benten Cape Fort 98, 102, 103,

110, 250Benyovsky, Mauritius Augustus

57, 59, 333, 337Bering, Vitus 57Bernstein, Leonard 186Bibai 253, 259, 260, 330Bifuka 13Biggs, Chester M., Jr. 253–54Biratori 210, 228; see also Nibu-

taniBiratori Dam 210Bird, Isabella 30, 32, 143, 160,

198, 334birds 17, 32, 46, 96, 178, 278,

329; see also Japanese craneBlack, John R. 198“black ships” see Perry Expedi-

tionBlake, William P. 143–44, 145,

148, 334, 337Blakiston, Thomas 95–96, 102,

130, 133, 161, 178, 337; andHakodate 90, 95–96, 108–9;and Hakodate war 101, 102;

observations 62, 127, 138,139–40, 153, 198

Blakiston Line 96Blakiston, Marr & Company 96Blanton, Frank 253Boehmer, Louis 152–53, 163,

178, 337border, Japanese-Russian 64, 77,

82, 103, 116, 194, 270, 334, 335bovine spongiform encephalopa-

thy see BSEBoyle, J.J. 67Bradshaw, Annie 29, 35Brazil 240, 293Bridgestone 325Brigham, Arthur 159Brooks, William 151, 156, 158,

177, 337Broughton, W.R. 66–68, 67, 333,

337Brown, Eliphalet, Jr. 86Brunet, Jules 100, 103BSE 309, 336Buddhism 42, 128, 191, 209;

temples 52, 84, 86, 117, 126, 128bugyo see Hakodate bugyoburakumin 134, 139business 122, 311–12, 331, 390;

unethical practices 309, 312

Camp Crawford 183, 257, 263Campbell, Joseph 182Canada 9, 98, 128, 241, 318, 326Canadian World 318canals 160, 161, 166, 322Capron, Albert 306Capron, Horace 145–48, 146,

150, 183, 306, 334, 337; obser-vations 7, 105–6, 137, 138, 143,147, 163, 197–98; recommenda-tions 146–48, 154, 165

Caroline E. Foote 88, 95Carvalho, Diogo 56castaways, foreign 72, 76castaways, Japanese 59, 60, 61,

64, 65Castricom 56Catherine the Great, Empress of

Russia 59Chamberlain, Basil Hall 37Chang Tsun-san 109Chichibu, Prince 182China 80, 86, 90, 141, 209, 267,

273, 275, 282; trade 41, 45, 50,51, 85, 95, 132, 219; and warwith Japan 132, 204, 254, 303;see also santan trade

Chinese 95, 109, 119, 184; con-scrips 251, 253, 256, 259

Chiri Mashio 199, 337Chishima Archipelago see Kuril

IslandsChitose 21, 24, 25, 138, 169, 319;

military base 256, 257, 263,302, 313; see also airports: Chi-tose; airports: New ChitoseInternational

Chitose River 132, 322

Choshu clan 98Christianity 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 AgriculturalCollege 155, 172–73, 174

Churchill, Winston 270Clark, William Smith 1, 154–56,

157, 170, 172, 303, 337; obser-vations 12, 117, 163, 198, 332;and Sapporo Agricultural Col-lege 1, 154–56, 158, 169, 171,172, 251, 302, 354

climate and weather 12, 147, 158,231, 292–93, 306, 328; fog19, 20, 57, 66, 72, 243, 249,279, 280; winter conditions12–13, 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. 56Cold War 20, 264, 267–70, 285,

335, 336; and Northern Terri-tories 272, 275

College of Agriculture of TohokuImperial University 179–80;see also Hokkaido University

colleges and universities 183–84,303, 331; see also individualinstitutions

Collins, Perry 88commerce see tradecommunication 105, 137, 181; see

also postal servicecommunism and communists

230, 244, 261, 264, 266, 304Communist Party (Japan) 208,

231, 261, 313conscripts 251, 253, 254, 256,

259; see also prisonersConstitution, Japan 263, 303consular offices, Hakodate 93,

101, 109; American 89–90, 334;British 89, 90, 92–93; Russian90–91, 92, 95, 334

consular offices, Sapporo 184cooperatives, agricultural 221,

230, 293, 308, 335cooperatives, fisheries 219, 295corruption 312Corwine, William R. 169crane see Japanese craneCrawford, Joseph 152, 153, 167,

337crime 108, 135, 188, 206–7, 286–

87, 312Crimean War 77, 82, 90crops 17–18, 52, 129–30, 151,

154, 160, 172, 220–21, 223,293

Crow, Arthur H. 144Culter, Suzanne 317Cutter, J.C. 159

362 INDEX

Daikoku Island 67–68, 67Daisetsuzan National Park 21,

236, 292dams 210, 292Dan Ikuma 305Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. 89, 94Date 131, 125–26, 136, 236, 315Date Kunishige 125–26Davydov, Gavriel Ivanovich 62,

334, 337Dawes Act 200Day, Murray S. 150daylight savings time 188de Angelis, Jeronimo 56, 333deer 17, 46, 50, 126, 140, 329DeLong, Charles 150Dening, Walter 196development policies: early

twentieth century 217, 223,232, 335; late twentieth cen-tury 291–92, 293–94, 314–15,325, 335; Meiji 116–24, 139,144–45; shogunate 52, 53, 115

DeVos, George 211Diana 62, 63, 87, 98Dietz, Kelly 210disease 259, 304; among Ainu

54, 192, 199Dixon, J.M. 136Docho see government,

HokkaidoDogakinai, Naohiro 283, 298,

337–38Doshisha University 97drift ice 20, 313, 318, 328Dudley, Thomas 80, 86Dun, Edwin 118–19, 140, 142,

150–51, 163, 174, 183, 338Dutch nation and people 42, 93,

253; Dutch East India Com-pany 56

Eamont 71earthquakes 11, 87, 262, 274,

296, 313–14, 336Ebetsu 122, 126, 164, 184, 194,

251, 314Ebisu people 26economy and economic condi-

tions 141, 229–30, 297, 311,326, 329–30; Great Depression231, 235, 238–40

ecotourism 328Edo 42, 77, 90, 96, 117; see also

Tokyoeducation 107, 124, 126, 153, 290,

314; Ainu 200, 202, 204, 205,210, 211, 335; military training155, 230; see also colleges anduniversities

Eells, Walter C. 262, 302Ekaterina 59Eldridge, Stuart 105, 145, 150,

338Eliza F. Mason 87Emishi people 26energy 310, 329; alternative

sources 311, 330; hydroelectric

21, 251, 292; oil and gas 287,296, 297, 311, 329; see also coal;nuclear power

Engaru 315Enomoto Takeaki 100–3, 101,

116, 133, 153, 250, 334, 338environmental concerns 140,

297, 321–22, 323Epi-Jomon Period 25, 333Erimo, Cape 10, 19, 132–33Esashi 49, 101, 102, 103, 132, 322escapees 63, 72, 254–55, 256Etorofu see IturupEtter, Carl 192Eusden, Richard 93exchange rate 94exploration, American 73–76;

European 56, 66–68; Japanese65–66, 68–69, 72–73; Russian57, 59–63

explorers see names of individu-als

expositions 181, 306; Ainu in201, 209

Eyre, John D. 293Ezo (island) 9Ezo (people) 26; see also AinuEzo brocade 45, 50Ezo Republic 100Ezochi 9, 45, 48, 54, 116Ezogashima 26

famine see food supply: shortageFar Eastern National University

(of Russia) 287farmer-soldiers 53, 253, 267; see

also tondenheiFarrer, Reginald 137, 180Federation of Agricultural Coop-

erative Societies of Hokkaido221, 293, 335

ferry service 299, 301; AomonHakodate 13–14, 85, 105, 135,247, 248, 259, 290, 323, 324,336; and Seikan Tunnel323–24; Toya Maru disaster304–5, 323; and World War II247–48; see also water trans-portation

festivals 21, 186, 188, 205, 238,315

Fillmore, Millard 77Finch, John 72Finck, Henry 13Finn, Dallas 156fire 165, 177, 236–38, 238, 239,

248, 295, 304–5, 335First Peoples see Indians, Amer-

icanfisheries 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; Mat-sumae era 22, 42, 46, 49, 50,54; Meiji era 119, 131–32;poaching and smuggling 284,285, 286–87, 312; post–World

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, tra-ditional; Ainu: fishing underWajin law; basho ukeoi;fisheries controversy withU.S.S.R./Russia

fisheries controversy withU.S.S.R./Russia 279–85, 331

flags 164–65, 208flora 15–16, 92, 104–5, 152–53,

154–55food and diet 63, 130, 147, 240,

319, 328; Ainu 30–32, 53; con-tamination of 309–10; see alsofood 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; short-ages, 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; logging130, 140, 219, 233, 322; refor-estation 54, 140; sawmills 96,147, 163, 180

Former Aborigines ProtectionAct see Ainu Protection Act

Former Hokkaido GovernmentOffice Building see Aka Renga

Fort McHenry, Maryland 98France 77, 82, 93, 100, 103, 184,

334Franck, Henry 230Frank, Richard 248, 266Fuji, Mt. 38Fujito Takeki 212Fukagawa 123, 126, 130Fukami Genyu 65Fukuda Takeo 271Fukuda Yasuo 276Fukuoka 185Fukushi Naritoyo 96Fukuyama see MatsumaeFurano 319Furen 127, 308; see also Nayoro

Gaertner, R. 144Gamov, Vitaly 289Genghis Khan 37Geography 8, 9–22, 10, 11,

146–47; misconceptions 56, 57,58, 61, 62, 66, 68, 75; see alsoexplorers; maps

George V, King of England 201Germany 93, 100, 108, 144, 172,

245, 274Germershausen, William 247

Index 363

Glantz, David 266Glucks Konigsreich 317–18gold 42, 46, 56, 57, 65, 127Golovnin, Vasilii Mikhailovich

62–65, 86, 91, 334, 338Gorbachev, Mikhail 273, 274Goryokaku Fort 97–98, 98–99,

100, 103, 105, 109, 326, 334Goshkevich, Iosif Antonovich

90–91, 108, 334, 338government, Hokkaido (Docho)

138, 217, 271–72, 279, 292, 335;and Ainu 203, 208, 211; poli-cies 260, 290, 310, 315; rela-tions with Government ofJapan 298, 325; see alsoKaitakushi

government, Japan 217, 291, 303,311, 325, 326; and Ainu 193,200, 203–4, 208, 211, 215, 336;Meiji 100, 102–3, 115, 123; seealso shogunate

governors, Hokkaido 138; seealso names of individuals

Gower, Erasmus M. 144Graf Zeppelin 241Grant, Ulysses S. 145Gray, Robert 66Great Britain 77, 82, 92–93, 100,

110, 201, 334great circle route 85Gromyko, Andrei 272Group of Eight summit 215, 328GSDF see Self-Defense ForceGuerin, Nicholas-François 88

Haber, Ludwig 108, 108, 133,334, 338

Habomai Islands 270, 271, 280,284; and partial islands rever-sion 272, 274, 276, 285; seealso Kuril Islands; NorthernTerritories

Haboro Mine 296Habuto Masayasu 52, 62, 338Haight, Milton 159Hakodate 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; impe-rial visits 109, 142; population109, 141, 227, 299, 314; portopening 55, 78–82, 81, 87, 95;railroads to 111, 181, 224; roadsto 53, 135–36, 169, 225; andRussians 59, 62, 63, 64, 87, 88,90–92, 95, 216, 243, 269, 278,287, 336; sea transportation to109, 225; and war of 1869 98,100–3, 101, 102, 104, 334; andWorld War II 248, 249, 250,253; see also Aomori; ferryservice; Gorykaku

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. 310Hakodate Marine Observatory

96Halifax, Canada Citadel 98, 326Hall, Francis 90, 97–98Halsey, William F. 248Hammel, E.A. 27Hanasaki 20, 284, 287harbors 14, 223, 322; see also

Hakodate: harbor; Otaru: har-bor

Hardy, Alpheus 97Harris, Flora Best 107Harris, M.C. 107Harris, Townsend 88, 90Hartshorne, Anna 85, 110, 332Harvard University 173hascap 319Hasegawa Tsuyoshi 266, 271Hawaii 93, 231, 246Hawks, Francis L. 79Hayakita 240Hayashi Yoshishige 209Heine, William 84, 86Herndon, Hugh 241herring 18, 49, 54, 132, 158, 214,

219, 283Hidaka District 19, 214Hidaya Kyubei 51, 338Higashi Hongary 128, 136Higashide Seiichi 130, 139, 220Hijikata Toshizo 103, 104Hikawa Maru 299Hirai Seijiro 153Hirate Kaichi 254Hirohito, Emperor 164, 182, 185,

202, 244, 300, 306, 320Hiroshima 126, 238Historical Village of Hokkaido

123, 124, 129, 131, 141–42, 162,226, 231

Hodgson, Pemberton 90, 92–93Hodnett, Patrick 82Hokkai One 181Hokkai Times 179–80Hokkaido Agricultural Experi-

ment Station 138, 220, 335Hokkaido Ainu Kyokai 204, 205,

335; see also Utari KyokaiHokkaido Anthropological Soci-

ety 179Hokkaido Citizens’ Party 307Hokkaido Coal Mine Railway

Company 133, 134, 218, 295,317

Hokkaido Coal Mine Steam ShipCompany 133

Hokkaido Colonization Com-mission see Kaitakushi

Hokkaido Development Bank223, 311–12, 326, 335, 336

Hokkaido Development Bureau270, 291, 298, 325, 335

Hokkaido Electric Power Com-pany 251, 310

Hokkaido Federation of MineWorkers’ Unions 260

Hokkaido Forest ProductsResearch Institute 294

Hokkaido International AirlinesCompany 324, 336

Hokkaido Jingu (Shrine) 162Hokkaido Kaitaku no Mura 123,

124, 129, 131, 141–42, 162, 226,231

Hokkaido National DefenseAssembly 244, 249

Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters185–86

Hokkaido Shimbun 251, 261, 286,292, 298, 300

Hokkaido Takushoku Ginko223, 311–12, 326, 335, 336

Hokkaido University 96, 156,170, 171, 172, 179, 180, 189; andAinu 178, 179, 208, 209; stu-dent protests 262, 302, 303,335; see also Sapporo Agricul-tural College

Hokkaido University of Educa-tion 184

Hokudai see Hokkaido Univer-sity

Hokuden 251, 310Hokuren 221, 293, 335Hokusei Gakuin 183–84Hokutan see Hokkaido Coal

Mine Railway CompanyHokuto 52, 106, 315; see also

KamiisoHolland, John 254–55Holmes, Harry 94Holt, N.W. 153Honda (automotive company)

325Honda Toshiaki 52, 66, 192, 338Hori Tatsuya 184, 286, 310, 321,

338Horiuchi Juro 303Horonai 133, 141, 149; mine 218,

296–97, 334; railroad 135, 153,167, 325, 334

Horonobe 321horses 53, 121, 136, 137, 142, 221;

breeding and raising 19, 121,151, 294

houses and housing 86, 96, 134,156, 223, 231, 292, 306; Ainu27–28, 28, 203; pioneers’ 129,129, 130, 141, 147, 225; tonden-hai 119, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123,125, 126

Howe, George 72Hu Yaobang 141Hughes, Richard 100

ice floes 20, 313, 318, 328Ikeda 126, 294immigration see migrationincome 306, 326Indians, American 1, 23, 116,

364 INDEX

195, 200, 201, 209, 211, 212,326

Indonesia 56, 313industry 19, 121, 223, 228, 248,

310, 330; in Sapporo 163–64,180; see also fisheries; forestsand forestry: sawmills; min-ing; Oji Paper Company

Ino Tadataka 68–69, 71, 73, 333,338

International Court of Justice 275International Labor Organization

251internment of foreign sailors

63–64, 72, 75–76, 77, 78Iraq 313Irwin, James 153Ishikari 165, 297, 326, 336Ishikari Bay New Port 299, 316Ishikari River 9, 31, 49, 137, 160,

292, 297, 322Ishikari Valley 21, 65, 134, 135,

146, 165, 178, 332; agricultureand reclamation 15, 138, 151,221; settlers 118, 120, 127, 160

Ishikawa Takuboku 180, 234,235, 319, 338

Ishiya Company 309Iturup Island 62, 64, 68, 269,

270, 275, 276Iwahashi Eien 186Iwamura Michitoshi 161, 334,

338Iwanai 305Iwase Yashiro 94iyomante 29, 33–34, 33, 34, 191,

205, 209

James, Neill 85, 250Japan, closed to foreigners 41,

62, 77–78, 98; see also anti-foreign feelings; foreigners,detention of

Japan National Railways (JNR)207, 304

Japan Nuclear Cycle Develop-ment Institute 321

Japan Sea 21, 82, 247Japan Steel 248, 301Japanese crane 17, 20, 323, 329Japanese, ethnic see WajinJapanese language 38–39Jernegan, Nathaniel M. 87JNR 207, 304Johns Hopkins University 173Jomon people and era 25, 333Jones, F.C. 279Jones, George 87Jozankei 325JR Hokkaido 325

Kaifu Maru 65Kaigara Island 14, 284Kaitakushi 116–24, 131–32, 153,

334; Ainu policy 117, 193,194–95; and Americans 143,145–58; development pro-grams 118–22, 133–34, 138; and

Sapporo 160–64, 177; and Sap-poro Agricultural College 154–56, 178; termination 123–24,334; and transportation 137,165, 169

Kaiyo Maru 101, 102, 103Kakizaki Nobuhiro 43, 338Kakizaki family 43, 45, 333; see

also Matsumae familyKamchatka Peninsula 23, 24, 46,

59, 65, 240–42; and explorers57, 61, 64, 66; and World WarII 245, 246, 249

Kamifurano 236Kamiiso 52, 229, 253, 315, 335;

see also HokutoKamikawa Basin 21, 120, 126, 138Kamisunagawa 321Kamokutain 47Kannari Hatsu 199Kannari Taro 200Karafuto 14, 61, 183, 217, 219,

226, 246, 247; Soviet acquisi-tion of 258, 265, 267, 270; seealso Sakhalin

Karan, Pradyumna 328Kasai 317Kawabata Gyokusho 35Kawai Michi 183Kawamura Kenichi 210Kayano Shigeru 30, 192, 203,

208–9, 210, 211, 240, 336, 338Kayanuma Mine 88, 144Keene, Donald 7, 66Keller, Helen 243kelp see kombukenpeitai 254Ketelaar, James E. 115Khabomai Islands see Habomai

IslandsKhvostov, Nikolai Alexandrovich

62, 334, 338Khvostov-Davydov raids 62, 63,

64, 68, 334Kimball, Dan A. 268Kimobetsu 221Kimura Hako 43Kimura Hiroshi 275Kindaichi Kyosuke 199, 204, 338Kipling, Rudyard 21, 110Kita Hiroshima 126, 136, 138,

156Kitami 20, 127, 193, 223, 314Kitami Pass 136Kiyoura Keigo 223Kizu Kokichi 91Kobayashi Chogoro 65Kobayashi Masahiro 331Kobayashi Takeshi 239Kobayashi Takiji 219, 231, 234–

35, 338Kobe 109Kodama Sakuzaemon 208, 338Kodayu Daikokuya 59, 60Koizumi Junichiro 276Kojima (Island) 21Kojima Matajiro 86Komagatake 9, 236

kombu 18, 46, 51, 85, 95, 132–33,281, 284

Komeito 184, 233Kondo Heiichi 304Kondo Morishige 68, 70Konomai Mine 297Korea 88, 217, 279, 290; North

Korea 185, 275, 331; SouthKorea 266, 282

Korean Air Lines Flight 007 269Korean War 256, 263, 268Koreans 265, 282; in mines 251,

254, 259–60, 335; as WorldWar II forced laborers 247,248, 251, 259

Korsakov, Russia 286, 331Koshamain 42–43, 338Koshamain’s War 42–43, 333Kotambetsu River 322Kotetsu 101, 102Krasnoyarov, Yevgeny 274Krusenstern, A.J. von 26, 61, 334,

338Kubo Sakai 235Kunashir Island 51, 57, 62, 242,

270, 272, 276; see also KurilIslands; Northern Territories

Kunashiri Island see KunashirIsland

Kuril Islands 8, 14, 46, 72, 73,77, 109, 173, 334; as Ainuhomeland 23, 24, 26, 29; andaviation 241, 242–43; and Rus-sians 52, 53, 57, 60, 68, 82, 120,333; under Soviet/Russianadministration 267, 271–78,287, 335; and World War II245–46, 247, 249, 265; see alsoHabomai Islands; IturupIsland; Kaigara Island;Kunashir Island; NorthernTerritories; Shikotan Island

Kurils waters 18, 133, 279, 336Kuroda Kiyotaka 82, 102, 103,

117, 183, 306; and Ainu 193,194; and foreign experts 143,144, 145, 147, 148, 159; andKaitakushi 117–118, 122, 123,134, 137, 160, 163; and SapporoAgricultural 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; mining295, 297; population 141, 299,314

Kushiro-Shitsugen National Park19–20, 323, 328

Kussharo Lake 256Kutchan 227Kuya 126Kyoto 45, 160

labor unions 218, 239, 260, 261,300–2

Lady Rowena 71, 334Lagoda 72, 75, 334

Index 365

land grant colleges 154, 155land reclamation 15, 54, 221,

222, 291, 293land reform 205, 262land use policies 118, 119, 139,

220, 291, 294; and Ainu 116,195, 200, 205, 334

Landor, A.H. Savage 55, 198La 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 II247, 250

Lawrence 72, 74, 334Laxman, Adam Erikovich 52,

59, 60, 60, 61, 333, 339League of Nations 172LeMay, Curtis 262–63lend-lease program 246–47Lewis, Michael 130Liberal Democratic Party 298The Light of Asia 204Lindbergh, Charles 241–43, 242,

249, 335Liu Lianren 256logging 130, 140, 219, 233, 322London, Jack 110London, England 201Losyukov, Alexander 276Lyman, Benjamin 132, 133, 147,

148–49, 178, 339

MacArthur, Douglas 205, 257,258, 261, 265, 266, 271, 279

MacArthur line 268, 279MacDonald, Ranald 73–76, 76,

77, 94, 334, 339Machimura Kingo 206, 291, 298,

306, 339mad cow disease 309, 336Makhov, Vasilii 91Makiguchi Tsunesaburo 184,

234Makomanai 151, 183, 186, 188,

257; see also SapporoMaksimov, Sergei 88Malenkov, Georgii 272Mamiya Rinzo 62, 63, 69, 73,

196, 333, 339mammoth 16Manchuria 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; inaccura-cies 56, 57, 61, 75

marimo 16, 212Marine Day 142Maritime Safety Board, Japan 280Marshall, David 255Marutani Kaneyasu 294Mashike 192Massachusetts 165Massachusetts Agricultural Col-

lege 154, 155, 156, 157, 302

Matsuda Denjiro 69Matsue Shunji 232Matsumae (town) 45, 46, 50, 55,

68, 84, 144, 325, 333; Castle44, 45, 55, 97, 102, 333; andexplorers 59, 69, 78; andinterned sailors 63, 72, 75,334; as Wajin headquarters 41,45, 53; and war of 1868–69100, 101, 102, 103

Matsumae Kageyu 80Matsumae Yoshihiro 45, 333, 339Matsumae family 45–52, 54,

61–62, 65, 93, 192, 333, 334;and Perry 79–80; see also Kak-izaki family

Matsumoto Soichiro 150Matsuura Takeshiro 54–55, 74,

115, 160–61, 193, 196, 339;explorations 72–73, 334; map55, 73, 149, 334

Maximowicz, Carl Johann 92Meat Hope 310medicine 91, 105, 150, 290Medvedev, Dmitry 276Meiji Emperor 98, 151, 162; in

Hokkaido 109, 110, 136, 142,177, 199

Meiji Restoration 100, 125, 193,334

Meik, C.S. 136Menashi-Kunashir uprising 51,

52, 66, 333mergers (city and town) 315Mermet de Cachon, Jean 93, 108migration 50, 54, 141, 148, 155;

to Ezo 46, 116, 117; by group53, 118, 125–27, 232, 232–33;from Hokkaido 232, 240, 253;to Hokkaido 138, 139, 253;resistance to 119, 231; see alsorefugees; tondenhei

Mikasa Maru 280militarism 230, 244, 249military see armed forces, Japan;

United States: military forcesMimotsu Masao 251–52miners 133–34, 295–96; Chinese

and Korean 218, 251, 254,259–60, 335; prisoners of war251, 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 alsoAinu; burakumin

Missouri 248Mitsubishi 141, 218, 260, 296Mitsui 141, 218, 321Miura Ayako 315Miyabe Kingo 173, 174, 178, 183,

339Miyagi Prefecture 125, 126

Miyajima Toshimitsu 193, 194,196

Mock, John 160Mogami Tokunai 66, 68, 69, 69,

196, 333, 339Monbetsu 318Mori 169, 199, 311, 312Mori Arinori 145, 154Morison, Samuel Eliot 80Moriyama Einosuke 76Morris-Suzuki, Tessa 194Morrison, John W. 140Morrow, Anne 241–43, 242, 249,

335Morrow, James 80Morse, Edward S. 196Moscow, Russia 16, 283, 286Mossman, Samuel 96Munro, Neil Gordon 199, 339Munroe, Henry Smith 149Muroran 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 61Naganuma 303Nagasaki 50, 82, 91, 93, 94, 95,

109, 134; interned sailors in 72,76, 77; open to Chinese andDutch 41–42, 51, 59, 60, 85;and Russians 59, 60, 61, 77, 82

Nahodka, Russia 316Naito Saitaro 155Nakagawa Goroji 64Nakagawa Seikei 164Nakasone Yasuhiro 210, 211, 336Nakatonbetsu 127Nakayama Kyuzo 138Nambu clan and district 53, 121name of island 9, 74, 105, 115, 193Namikoshi, Takujiro 233Nanae 52, 96, 101, 147, 153, 169,

304; farm 144, 151national parks 16; see also Akan

National Park; DaisetsuzanNatiional Park; Kushiro- Shit-sugen National Park; Shikotsu-Toya National Park; ShiretokoNational Park

Native Americans see Indians,American

Naumann’s elephant 16Nayoro 13, 127, 135, 308Neesima, Joseph Hardy (Niijima

Jo) 97, 154, 334, 339Nemuro 20, 53, 109, 118, 120,

127, 133, 138, 223, 242–43, 242,244, 279, 281; fishing 20, 279,

366 INDEX

285, 307; and Northern Terri-tories 271, 277, 279, 285; pop-ulation 141, 279, 283, 314; andRussians 52, 59–60, 60, 283,285, 287, 288, 333

Nemuro peninsula 20, 69Neolithic period 25neutrality pact, Japan-Russia

264–65Nevelskoi, Genadii Ivanovich 77New Chitose International Air-

port 14, 19, 21, 182, 300, 310,322, 324, 329

New Orleans, Louisiana 326Newnham, Randall E. 274newspapers 106, 123, 179–80; see

also Hokkaido ShimbunNibutani 192–93, 208, 210, 214,

240; see also BiratoriNibutani Dam 210Nicholas II, Czar of Russia 158Niijima Jo 97, 154, 334, 339Niikappu 121, 151Nikolaevsk, Russia 92, 96Nikolai, Father (Ioann

Dmitrievich Kasatkin) 91–92,97, 339

Nimitz, Chester 247Nippon Mining and Metals 297Niseko 318Nissan 325Nitobe Inazo 39, 172, 173, 174,

175, 183, 339Nivkh 267Noboribetsu 19, 39, 228, 297Noguchi, Isamu 186, 187Nomonhan, Battle of 245Nomura Giichi 209Nopporo 21, 141, 164North Korea 185, 275, 331North Pacific Fisheries Manage-

ment Council 283Northern Regions Center 298,

326Northern Territories 270–78,

277, 278, 282, 83, 285, 286,302, 331, 335, 336; see alsoHabomai Islands; IturupIsland; Kaigara Island;Kunashir Island; Kuril Islands;Shikotan Island

Northern Territories Day 273,276

Nosappu, Cape 20, 51, 275Novosibirsk, Russia 286nuclear power 144, 310–11, 321,

336Numata 319

Obihiro 18, 19, 248, 293, 313, 314Obuchi Keizo 210occupation, American 181, 182,

183, 205, 257–63, 292, 335Ogino Genko 131Ohara Sakingo 68, 339Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko 40oil and gas 287, 296, 297, 311,

326, 329, 330

Oji Paper Company 227–28,260, 279, 299, 301–2, 330, 335

Okada Furie 106Okada Haruo 208Okadama Airport 181, 182, 313Okhotsk (town) 64, 65Okhotsk people 25, 333Okhotsk, 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 212Okikurumi 35, 36, 37Okinawa 271, 272–73, 302, 312,

313Okushiri Island 11, 21, 257,

313–14, 336Olympic Games 21, 182, 184–85,

335Omi traders 45, 49, 333Omu 292–93Onibishi 47Orthodox church 57, 90–92, 106,

128, 191, 194, 256, 287, 336Osaka 45, 109, 182, 201Oshamambe 181Oshima (Island) 21Oshima Peninsula 9, 18, 41, 42,

49, 54, 144, 149Oshima Takato 144Otaru 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; popu-lation 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; andWorld War II 247, 249, 254,255–56

Otaru Commercial College 230,234

Otomari 286; see also Korsakor,Russia

Otomo Kametaro 160, 161, 339otter and otter hunting 109–133Oyabe Jenichiro 196Ozawa Ichiro 273

Pacific Ocean 18, 20, 21Pacific rim of fire 11Paleolithic settlements 24Pan American Airways 241Pangborn, Clyde 241Paramushir Island 246, 265Parkes, Harry 85, 90, 199Peabody, C.H. 159peace treaty, Japan-Russia 264,

272, 275, 280peat bogs 15, 161, 221, 222, 291Penhallow, David 23, 24, 156,

157–58, 171, 212, 339Perry, Matthew Calbraith 67,

77–82, 78, 192, 339Perry expedition 67, 77–82, 81,

85–87, 334

Petropavlovsk (Kamchatka) 64,66

Petrovsky, Vladimir 273Peuillier, Gerard 106, 339Philippi, Donald 25photography 86, 91physical features 9–11pioneering 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 73politics 98, 100, 123, 217, 297–98,

307, 312, 321pollution 295, 297population 9, 124, 138, 141, 228,

231, 232, 290, 292, 299, 314–15;decline 296, 307, 314, 317, 336;Ezo era 52, 53, 54; see alsoAinu: population; individualcities: population

Port Alberni, Canada 326Porter, Alexander 105Portland, Oregon 183, 293, 326ports see harbors; individual

cities: harborspostal service 54, 136–37, 163;

226Powhatan 78Preble, George H. 79, 86, 116prehistory 16, 24–25prisoners 134, 136, 138, 235;

prisoners of war 253–56, 335;see also conscripts

prisons 134, 138, 255, 315, 319protest actions 206–7, 302–4,

313, 335Providence 67–68, 67Pumpelly, Raphael 95, 116,

143–44, 197, 334, 339Putiatin, Evfimii Vasilevich 77,

78, 82, 87, 90, 98Putiatin expedition 77, 78, 82,

87, 90Putin, Vladimir 276

railroads 111, 133, 207, 219, 252,261, 325, 328, 334, 336; con-struction 152, 153, 167–68;expansion 135, 140, 169, 181,224–25; see also Seikan Tunnel

Railway Workers’ Union 261Rakuno Gakuen University 184Rasmussen, Oliver 256Red Cross 293refugees 134, 261, 292, 294; from

Kuril Islands and Sakhalin258, 265, 267, 271, 279; Rus-sian 92, 134, 243

religion see Ainu: religions for-eign to Ainu; Ainu: religions,traditional; Buddhism; Chris-tianity; Shinto

Remick, George 87Rezanov, Nikolai Petrovich 61,

62, 339–40

Index 367

rice 45, 116, 147, 220, 229, 308,319; and Ainu 31, 47; crop fail-ures 239, 258, 293; hardystrains 120, 138–39, 220, 335

Rice, Elisha E. 89, 92, 93, 94,100, 101, 334; on Russians 90,91

Ridgway, Matthew 280Rikord, Petr Ivanovich 63, 64,

77, 340Rikubetsu 127, 325Rishiri, Mt. 66, 309Rishiri Island 21, 62, 66, 74–75,

193, 269, 309roads 135–36, 225–26, 299, 325,

329; construction 53–54, 136,168, 169, 299

Rodgers, John 68, 88Roosevelt, Franklin D. 270, 271Rozman, Gilbert 275Rumoi 21, 132, 192, 265Russia 1, 2, 122, 137, 229; and

Ainu 50, 60, 193, 204; explor-ers from 57, 59–65, 77, 333–34,338; and the fishery 18, 133,278–85; Japanese policytoward 48, 52, 59–64, 119, 145,333, 334; post–Soviet era 274–76, 284–89, 330, 336; relationswith Japan 14, 65, 77, 145,285–89, 331; suspicion of 53,57–58, 85, 90, 98, 115–16, 119,120, 192, 193, 250; trade with60, 61, 62, 92, 122, 284, 286–87, 331; treaty negotiationswith 82, 89, 272, 280, 334,335; see also KamchatkaPeninsula; Kuril Islands;Northern Territories; RussianFar East; Russo-Japanese War;Sakhalin; U.S.S.R.

Russian Far East 14, 23, 89, 229,264, 287, 330; see also Kam-chatka Peninsula; KurilIslands; Northern Territories;Russia; Sakhalin; U.S.S.R.

Russian language 2–3, 63, 91, 289Russian 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, 198St. Petersburg 59, 64Sakai, John 92Sakakura Genjiro 65sake 42, 50, 51, 74, 223, 330Sakhalin 14, 53, 90, 118, 122, 134,

259; and Ainu 23, 26, 193–94,203, 204; border determina-tion 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

Soviet/Russian province 18, 20,26, 269, 274, 276, 285; see alsoKarafuto

salmon 18, 20, 31, 49, 132, 297samurai, former 100, 116, 118,

119, 125, 140Sanders, Douglas 212San Francisco Peace Conference

271Sangar, Straits of see Tsugaru

StraitSantan trade 45, 50Sapporo 21, 38, 85, 141, 142, 183,

237, 257, 258, 272, 285–86,289, 293, 297; airports andaviation 181–82, 184, 185, 313,324, 335; Botanic Garden 147,173, 178, 178, 179, 179, 332; ascapital 105, 138, 161–62, 334;crime and protest 188, 206,303; festivals 21, 183, 186, 188,208, 212, 335; historical build-ings 55, 164, 165, 166, 167, 175–76, 177, 177, 188; imperial vis-its 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 II182, 249, 250, 253, 255; see alsoMakomanai; Shiroishi;Susukino; Toyohira

Sapporo Agricultural College117, 146, 154–59, 157, 164–79,170, 171, 172, 183, 334; BotanicGarden 147, 173, 178, 178, 179,332; Clock Tower 175–76, 177,177, 188; graduates 172–75,173, 174, 175; see alsoHokkaido University

Sapporo Beer 161, 164, 180, 185,319, 321, 334

Sapporo Gakuen University 184Sapporo Medical University 184Sapporo University 184Saris, John 56Saru River 192, 198, 210Sato Shosuke 173, 175, 175, 231,

340Satsuma clan 98, 117Satsumon people and era 25, 333Satsuporo 160–61; see also Sap-

poroSawabe, Paul 92SCAP (Supreme Commander for

the Allied Powers) 257–63,271, 279, 335; see also occupa-tion: U.S.

Schaefer, Marrie 184Scott, James 144SDF see Self-Defense Forcesea otters 109, 133sea products 50, 85, 95, 140; see

also fisheriesseals and seal hunting 109–10Seikan Tunnel 14, 323–24, 329,

336

Seki Kansai 127Sekon Nikoshiro 223Self-Defense Force 263, 268,

269, 270, 312–13, 319, 331; indisaster relief 274, 293; see alsoarmed forces, Japan

Sendai region 45, 57, 118, 181Setana 131, 311settlement see pioneeringSeventh Army Division 21, 121,

126, 216–17, 245, 319Shakushain 47–48, 51, 204, 206,

207, 340Shakushain’s War 47–48, 50, 65,

333Shanghai 93, 96Shelting, Aleksei 57shiatsu 233Shibecha 293Shibuya Naozo 305Shiga Shigetaka 173–74Shihei Hayashi 50Shikoku 233Shikotan Island 57, 270, 271,

272, 274, 276–77, 285; see alsoKuril Islands; Northern Terri-tories

Shikotan Maru 217Shikotsu-Toya National Park 10,

19Shima Yoshitake 161, 162, 334, 340Shimamatsu 136, 156Shimizu Shikin 139Shimizudani Kinnaru 100, 340Shimoda 78, 80, 82, 87, 93Shimura Tetsuichi 160Shinotsu 164Shinsengumi 103Shinto 117, 162, 191, 209; Sap-

poro (Hokkaido) Shrine 162,183, 237

Shintoku 183Shintotsukawa 127shipwrecks 72, 77, 95, 101, 137,

231; Toya Maru 14, 304–5, 315,323, 335

Shiranuka 53, 88Shiraoi 39, 206, 322; and Ainu

47, 199, 201–2, 205, 206, 212,214

Shirataki 232–33, 315Shiretoko National Park 20, 322Shiretoko Peninsula 10, 133, 278,

328, 329, 332, 336Shiriuchi 42Shiroi Koibito 309–10Shiroishi 164, 182; see also Sap-

poroShizunai 48, 126, 204–5, 206shogunate 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 explorers60, 65, 68; and war of 1869 97,98–103

Showa Emperor (Hirohito) 164,182, 185, 202, 244, 300, 306,320

368 INDEX

Showa Shinzan 19, 251–52, 252,335

Shumaranai, Lake 21Siddle, Richard 193, 202Sieroszewski, Waclaw 110Signal’nyy Island see Kaigara

Islandsilkworms 139silver 56, 65Simonet de Maissonneuve,

L.A.A. 243Singapore 255Sino-Japanese War 217sister cities 20, 72, 183, 286, 293,

316, 318, 326Sjoberg, Katarina 193skiing 262, 318Slavic Research Center, Sapporo

286Smith, Charles H. 93Smith, Sarah Clara 183, 340Smithsonian Institution 80, 210snow see climate: winter condi-

tionsSnow, Henry 133, 243, 272Snow Brand Products 240, 309,

336So Shokei 69Sobetsu 251Socialist Party, Japan 208, 298Soka Gakkai 184, 234Sorachi Valley 218, 253Sorge, Richard 255Sosei Elementary School 176South Korea 266, 282South Kurils see Northern Ter-

ritoriesSouthampton 79, 80Soviet Miners’ Union 280Soviet Union see U.S.S.R.Soya, Cape 20, 62, 66, 75, 118,

136, 237Soya Strait see La Pérouse StraitSpalding, J.W. 79, 85, 86Spanberg, Martin 57, 273, 333,

340sports 158, 185–86, 230, 285–86,

321, 336; baseball 185–86, 236,243, 336; see also OlympicGames

spying 254, 255, 268, 281Stalin, Josef 265, 266, 267, 271,

272Starfin, Victor 236Starr, Frederick 196, 201, 227Stephan, John J. 54, 59, 84, 245,

289Stockbridge, Belle 13, 15, 158–59,

161, 168Stockbridge, Horace 159Stonewall Jackson 101storm damage 127, 165, 179, 293,

304Storry, Richard 182, 249, 279strikes 134, 218, 229, 230, 251,

259–61, 300–2, 335student protests 302–4, 335suffrage 217, 230, 335

sulfur 133Sumitomo 218, 297Summers, James 159Sunagawa 296, 311Sunazawa Bikky 202–3, 206,

208, 212, 340Sunazawa Kazuo 202–3Susukino 181, 185, 188Suzuki Kantaro 265Suzuki Muneo 312Sweden 326Swift 68

Tachibana Kosai 90Tachimachi, Cape 105Tacoma 217Taihei Maru 247Taiheiyo Mines 297Taiki 313Taiwan 217, 231, 319Takadaya Kahei 64, 340Takahashi Harumi 215, 313, 321,

340Takakuro Shinichiro 46Takeda Ayasaburo 98, 122–23,

340Takeda Nobuhiro 43, 45Takeda Sokaku 233Takeda Taijin 305Takeoka Seikichi 126Taketsuru Masataka 240Takikawa 120Takuboku 180, 234, 235, 319, 338Takugin 223, 311–12, 326, 335,

336Tanaka Toshifumi 259, 272, 298,

340Tangaro 75Tani Buntan 69Tanouchi Suteroku 172Taro and Jiro 332Tarumae, Mt. 256taxation 51, 54, 132Tayoro 127tenant farmers 139, 140, 234–35,

262territorial waters 279, 282–83,

336Teshio 203Teshio River 9, 68Teuri Island 21theme parks 317–18Tinian Island 232Tobetsu 326Todd, Mabel Loomis 84, 164,

198–99Tofutsu, Lake 305Togo Heihachiro 103Tohoku Imperial University

179–80Tokachi, Mt. 236Tokachi region 19, 224, 235–36,

262, 294, 311Tokachi River 9Tokachi Wine 294Tokoro River 120, 127Tokugawa government see

shogunate

Tokugawa Ieyasu 45Tokugawa Mitsukuni 65Tokyo 105, 135, 145, 173, 181,

182, 185, 201; see also EdoTomakomai 169, 227–28, 248,

256, 310, 311, 314; harbor 299,303, 316, 322; industrial site210, 305, 313, 321–22; industry227–28, 260, 299, 301–2, 310,335; railroad to 19, 224–25

Tomamae 311Tomari 144, 31–11, 336tondenhei 119–21, 126, 231, 319,

334; housing 119, 119, 120, 121,122, 123, 125, 126; settlements120–21, 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 297Toyohara 286; see also Yuzhno-

Sakhalinsk, RussiaToyohira 164, 182; see also Sap-

poroToyohira River 153, 160, 161, 163Toyota 325trade: through Ainu 45–46, 60,

61, 62; foreign desire for 59–61,64, 77; through Hakodate 89,94, 95, 96, 105, 109–10; post-war 299, 305–6, 308, 319; seealso 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 137transportation 135, 319, 323; see

also aviation; ferry service;railroads; roads; Seikan Tun-nel; water transportation

Trappists and Trappistines 106–7treaties 82, 89, 94, 263, 270, 279,

302, 334; and Northern Terri-tories 270, 271–72, 275; Treatyof Kanagawa 78, 79, 82

trees 15–16; see also forests andforestry

Trippe, Juan 241–42, 243Tronson, J.M. 55, 88Truman, Harry S. 266, 267, 271Tsugaru Clan 52Tsugaru Fort 104Tsugaru Strait 13–14, 16, 26, 55,

61, 68, 71; and Hakodate 18–19,84, 85, 95; post–World War II256, 259, 270, 282, 290; andRusso-Japanese War 216–17;shipwrecks 72, 137, 231; andWorld War II 245, 247, 248,250, 256, 323

Tsuishikari 194tsunamis 11, 87, 262, 313–14, 336

Index 369

Twining, Nathan 249typhoons 11, 165, 179, 244, 293,

304

Uchida Kiyoshi 172Uchimura Kanzo 172–73, 174,

340Uchiura Bay 19, 67, 68, 80, 100,

125, 147, 225Ueda Fumio 185Uehara Kumajiro 196Ueshiba Morihei 232–33Uilta 204, 267unemployment 326, 330UNESCO (United Nations Edu-

cational, Scientific and Cul-tural Organization) 278, 328,336

United Kingdom see GreatBritain

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; inCold War 257, 266–69, 270,272, 335; in Hakodate 78–81,85–90, 101; Japanese in 97, 172,173, 175, 231; military forces181, 183, 186, 282, 292, 302,313; and Northern Territories272, 274; troop withdrawal263, 268, 269; and World WarII 245, 246–49, 335; see alsoAmericans; occupation, Amer-icans; Perry expedition

University of Massachusetts 154,302

Urakawa 53, 134, 248, 250, 294Urano, Jacob 92Urausu 139Urup Island 60, 64, 68; see also

Kuril IslandsUryu, Lake 21Uryu River 251U.S.S.R.: break-up of 274, 284;

defections from 243, 269;Hokkaido invasion plans265–66; Japanese apprehensionof 250, 266, 267, 268, 291;postwar 265–74, 279–84,285–86, 412; relations withU.S. 266–67, 268–69, 270; andWorld War II 245–47, 249,254, 255, 264–65; see alsoKamchatka Peninsula; KurilIslands; Northern Territories;Russia; Russian Far East;Sakhalin

Usu, Mt. (Usuzan) 19, 236, 297,313, 336

Utari Kyokai 205, 208, 210; seealso Ainu Kyokai

Utashinai 218, 253, 254, 260, 296Utonai, Lake 322

Vanino, Russia 286Vauban, Sebastian 98Vladivostok, Russia 14, 21, 122,

137, 217, 246, 270Volcano Bay see Uchiura Bayvolcanoes and volcanic eruptions

10, 11; see also Asahidake;Komagatake; Showa Shinzan;Tokachidake; Usu, Mt.

Von Lerch, Theodore 262Voukelitch, Branko 255Vries, Maerten Gerritsz 56–57,

66, 333, 340Vukovich, Nicolai 65Vyse, Howard 199

Wahoo 247Wajin (ethnic Japanese) 1, 2, 42,

49, 52, 333; see also Ainu:Wajin, relations with; Hako-date: port opening; Matsumaefamily

Wakayama Prefecture 232–33Wakkanai 14, 20–21, 38, 223,

237, 250, 306, 311, 314, 332;fisheries 283, 312; food short-age 258–59; railroad to 225,335; and Sakhalin 134, 257,265, 269, 286, 287, 331

Walker, Brett 48, 192Wanishi Iron Works 248war of 1869 55, 98–103, 98–99,

101, 102, 104, 334warfare 29, 39, 42–43, 47, 217;

see also Korean War; Russo-Japanese War; World War I;World War II

Warfield, A.J. 145–46, 149–50,162–63, 165, 169

Washington, University of 302Wasson, James R. 150Watanabe Chiaki 137water transportation 29, 137,

225, 299, 324; see also ferryservice

weather see climate and weatherWeiner, Michael 117Wetherall, William 211whaling and whalers 69, 71–72,

77, 89, 95, 109, 209–10, 334wheat 17, 147Wheeler, William 165, 166–67,

340; descriptions of Hokkaido15, 16, 55, 128, 163; at SapporoAgricultural College 156–57,158, 176

Will, John 94, 95, 101, 130Williams, Samuel Wells 80, 86wine and winemaking 126,

152–53, 294, 310Winter Olympics see Olympic

GamesWolfe, James 87wolves 17, 140, 151, 329Worker-Peasant Party 230World Bank 292World Council of Whalers

209–10World War I 218, 229World War II 14, 204, 245–56,

263, 270–71, 335Wu Xueqian 141Wynd, Oswald 254

Yagishiri Island 21, 74yakuza 286–87Yalta Agreement 270, 272Yamaguchi Tetsuo 283Yamakoshinai 54Yamanashi Prefecture 232Yanagawa Kumakichi 103Yausubetsu 312, 313Yayoi people 25Yeltsin, Boris 273, 274, 275Yezo see EzoYoichi 47, 240, 313Yokohama 90, 94–95, 109, 225Yokomichi Takahiro 159, 211,

307, 321, 340Yoshida Kiyonari 154Yoshida Shigeru 271Yoshihara Seiji 241Yoshitsune 37, 42Yotei, Mt. 19Yubari 133, 219, 227, 237, 317,

334, 336; mine accidents218–19, 286, 295, 296, 335;mine labor 218, 219, 259–60

Yubetsu Coal Mining Company296

Yubetsu River 120Yufutsu 53Yuki Shoji 206, 209Yuni 126Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia 286,

289

zaibatsu 141, 218, 226Zenibako 167zoos 297, 318, 329Zusho Hirotake 154, 169, 340

370 INDEX

hokkaido

Documents

hokkaido history

hokkaido japandiscovery

hokkaido chronology

hokkaido japanhistory

hokkaido japanethnic

hokkaidos history

history ofhokkaido

ainu numbers