Hokkaido

Hokkaido (北海道 Hokkaidoo) is the second-largest and most northerly of the four main islands of Japan. The island comprises a single administrative division, with 5,601,000 people recorded living there in 2006. This is approximately 4% of the total population of Japan, making its population the second-smallest of the four largest islands, above that of Shikoku. About a third of the population live in or around the capital, Sapporo (札幌市 Sapporo-shi), which is famous for the annual Snow Festival (さっぽろ雪まつり Sapporo Yuki Matsuri).

(CC) Image: Christian Günther
Location of Hokkaido.

Hokkaido is linked to various other parts of Japan by the Seikan Tunnel (青函トンネル Seikan Tonneru) and domestic flights. Shikoku has an extensive road network alongside more limited rail services, which allow access to the major cities of Sapporo, Hakodate (函館 Hakodate-shi) and Asahikawa (旭川市 Asahikawa-shi).

Hokkaido is also the land of one of Japan's few groups of indigenous people, the Ainu (アイヌ; the word is borrowed from the Ainu language). This group are also native to Sakhalin, the Russian island north of Hokkaido, and the disputed Kuril Islands.

History

From 1600 to 1799, the Matsumae domain in northern Japan administered all contact with the island of Ezo (Hokkaido) and its Ainu population. The Matsumae family benefited from trade with the Ainu and the employment of Ainu in Matsumae-owned fisheries. Japanese interpreters trained in the Ainu language facilitated all communication because Ainu were not allowed to learn Japanese. In 1799, the Tokugawa shogunate revoked Matsumae control over the area and decreed that all Ainu should learn Japanese and follow Japanese laws and customs. The purpose of this edict was to legitimize Japanese claims to Hokkaido in response to an increase in the number of Russian ships in the area. Thereby, the shogunate had shown an understanding of the role of identity politics in the legitimization of national geopolitical borders. After 1872 the new Meiji regime called for rapid modernization of the island, with conscription in to the army and universal education, and opened the first railway.

The American chemist William Smith Clark (1826-1886)was the founder in 1876-1877 of the Sapporo Agricultural College, which became the University of Hokkaido. He was a charismatic figure who emphasized character transformation. Clark's American colleagues David P. Penhallow and William Wheeler became founding professors and later principals of Sapporo. They built a modern university along the lines of the University of Massachusetts.

Hokkaido is often treated as a colonial appendage of Japan. But Mason (2005) goes further and argues that Hokkaido was a testing ground for new Meiji policies and thus played a role in the creation of modern Japanese national institutions and ideology. The Meiji elite attempted to justify and naturalize their new form of government through proclamations that laid claim to and encouraged the settlement of Hokkaido. Japanese military power was extended to the island by resettling bodies of state-sanctioned farming-soldiers, tondenhei. Tondenhei recruitment campaigns used the appropriation of the samurai as a modern masculine icon to define imperial ideology, promote colonial expansion and discipline Japan's unseasoned and unreliable modern military.

Kunikida Doppo's short story, "The Shores of Sorachi River" (Sorachigawa no kishibe , 1902) reveals the ways literary works reinforced the colonization of Hokkaido through depictions of "developing" a "blank slate" and portrayals of the manly "battles" of colonists subjugating Hokkaido's savage wilderness. The oppression of Ainu communities under Meiji colonial law was ignored.

Hara Hôitsuan's The Secret Politician (Anchû seijika , 1890), highlights the practices used in the Meiji state's attempts to discipline and unify the Japanese population. The Secret Politician tells the sad plight of ordinary farmers imprisoned in the harsh shûjikan prison system in Hokkaido for their involvement in a peasant protest,

The strategies for colonization of Hokkaido were adapted and expanded after 1910 to apply to Japanese colonization of Korea.

Bibliography

• Maki, John. William Smith Clark: A Yankee in Hokkaido (1996) online review
• Mason, Michele Marie. "Manly Narratives: Writing Hokkaido into the Political and Cultural Landscape of Imperial Japan." PhD dissrtation U. of California, Irvine 2005. 195 pp.  : DAI 2005 66(6): 2223-A. DA3181261 Fulltext: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

See also

• Kuril Islands
• Honshu
• Shikoku
• Kyushu
• Japan