The Boundaries of 'the Japanese': Volume 2: Korea, Taiwan and the Ainu 1868-1945

By Trans Pacific Press

In this the parallel volume to The Boundaries of 'the Japanese': Volume 1: Okinawa 1818-1972 (2014), renowned historical sociologist Eiji Oguma further explores the fluctuating political, geographical, ethnic, and sociocultural borders of 'Japan' and 'the Japanese' from the latter years of the Tokugawa shogunate to the mid-20th century. Focus is placed first upon the northern island of Hokkaido with its indigenous Ainu inhabitants, and then upon the mainstays of Japan's colonial empire-Taiwan and Korea. In continuing to elaborate his theme of inclusion and exclusion, the author comprehensively recounts and analyzes the events, actions, campaigns and attitudes of both the rulers and the ruled as Japan endeavoured both to be seen as a strong, civilized nation by the wider world, and to 'civilize' its disparate subjects on its own terms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trans Pacific Press
• Release date: Jan 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781925608267

Book preview

The Boundaries of

‘the Japanese’

Volume 2

Korea, Taiwan and

the Ainu 1868–1945

JAPANESE SOCIETY SERIES

General Editor: Yoshio Sugimoto

Lives of Young Koreans in Japan

Yasunori Fukuoka

Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan

J.S. Eades, Tom Gill and Harumi Befu

Coming Out in Japan: The Story of Satoru and Ryuta

Satoru Ito and Ryuta Yanase

Japan and Its Others:

Globalization, Difference and the Critique of Modernity

John Clammer

Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron

Harumi Befu

Foreign Migrants in Contemporary Japan

Hiroshi Komai

A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan, Volume 1

Shigeru Nakayama

Farewell to Nippon: Japanese Lifestyle Migrants in Australia

Machiko Sato

The Peripheral Centre:

Essays on Japanese History and Civilization

Johann P. Arnason

A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-images

Eiji Oguma

Class Structure in Contemporary Japan

Kenji Hashimoto

An Ecological View of History

Tadao Umesao

Nationalism and Gender

Chizuko Ueno

Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony

Takami Kuwayama

Youth Deviance in Japan: Class Reproduction of Non-Conformity

Robert Stuart Yoder

Japanese Companies: Theories and Realities

Masami Nomura and Yoshihiko Kamii

From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Religious Movements in Modern Japan

Susumu Shimazono

The ‘Big Bang’ in Japanese Higher Education:

The 2004 Reforms and the Dynamics of Change

J.S. Eades, Roger Goodman and Yumiko Hada

Japanese Politics: An Introduction

Takashi Inoguchi

A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan, Volume 2

Shigeru Nakayama

Gender and Japanese Management

Kimiko Kimoto

Philosophy of Agricultural Science: A Japanese Perspective

Osamu Soda

A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan, Volume 3

Shigeru Nakayama and Kunio Goto

Japan’s Underclass: Day Laborers and the Homeless

Hideo Aoki

A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan, Volume 4

Shigeru Nakayama and Hitoshi Yoshioka

Scams and Sweeteners: A Sociology of Fraud

Masahiro Ogino

Toyota’s Assembly Line: A View from the Factory Floor

Ryoji Ihara

Village Life in Modern Japan: An Environmental Perspective

Akira Furukawa

Social Welfare in Japan: Principles and Applications

Kojun Furukawa

Escape from Work: Freelancing Youth and the Challenge to Corporate Japan

Reiko Kosugi

Japan’s Whaling: The Politics of Culture in Historical Perspective

Hiroyuki Watanabe

Gender Gymnastics: Performing and Consuming Japan’s Takarazuka Revue

Leonie R. Stickland

Poverty and Social Welfare in Japan

Masami Iwata and Akihiko Nishizawa

The Modern Japanese Family: Its Rise and Fall

Chizuko Ueno

Widows of Japan: An Anthropological Perspective

Deborah McDowell Aoki

In Pursuit of the Seikatsusha:

A Genealogy of the Autonomous Citizen in Japan

Masako Amano

Demographic Change and Inequality in Japan

Sawako Shirahase

The Origins of Japanese Credentialism

Ikuo Amano

Pop Culture and the Everyday in Japan: Sociological Perspectives

Katsuya Minamida and Izumi Tsuji

Japanese Perceptions of Foreigners

Shunsuke Tanabe

Migrant Workers in Contemporary Japan: An Institutional Perspective on Transnational Employment

Kiyoto Tanno

The Boundaries of ‘the Japanese’, Volume 1:

Okinawa 1868–1972 – Inclusion and Exclusion

Eiji Oguma

International Migrants in Japan: Contributions in an Era of Population Decline

Yoshitaka Ishikawa

Globalizing Japan: Striving to Engage the World

Ross Mouer

Beyond Fukushima: Toward a Post-Nuclear Society

Koichi Hasegawa

Japan’s Ultra-Right

Naoto Higuchi

The Boundaries of ‘the Japanese’, Volume 2:

Korea, Taiwan and the Ainu 1868–1945

Eiji Oguma

Stratification and Inequality Series

Inequality amid Affluence: Social Stratification in Japan

Junsuke Hara and Kazuo Seiyama

Intentional Social Change: A Rational Choice Theory

Yoshimichi Sato

Constructing Civil Society in Japan: Voices of Environmental Movements

Koichi Hasegawa

Deciphering Stratification and Inequality: Japan and beyond

Yoshimichi Sato

Social Justice in Japan: Concepts, Theories and Paradigms

Ken-ichi Ohbuchi

Gender and Career in Japan

Atsuko Suzuki

Status and Stratification: Cultural Forms in East and Southeast Asia

Mutsuhiko Shima

Globalization, Minorities and Civil Society: Perspectives from Asian and Western Cities

Koichi Hasegawa and Naoki Yoshihara

Fluidity of Place: Globalization and the Transformation of Urban Space

Naoki Yoshihara

Japan’s New Inequality:

Intersection of Employment Reforms and Welfare Arrangements

Yoshimichi Sato and Jun Imai

Minorities and Diversity

Kunihiro Kimura

Inequality, Discrimination and Conflict in Japan:

Ways to Social Justice and Cooperation

Ken-ichi Ohbuchi and Junko Asai

Social Exclusion: Perspectives from France and Japan

Marc Humbert and Yoshimichi Sato

Global Migration and Ethnic Communities:

Studies of Asia and South America

Naoki Yoshihara

Stratification in Cultural Contexts: Cases from East and Southeast Asia

Toshiaki Kimura

Advanced Social Research Series

A Sociology of Happiness

Kenji Kosaka

Frontiers of Social Research: Japan and beyond

Akira Furukawa

A Quest for Alternative Sociology

Kenji Kosaka and Masahiro Ogino

MODERNITY AND IDENTITY IN ASIA SERIES

Globalization, Culture and Inequality in Asia

Timothy S. Scrase, Todd Miles, Joseph Holden and Scott Baum

Looking for Money:

Capitalism and Modernity in an Orang Asli Village

Alberto Gomes

Governance and Democracy in Asia

Takashi Inoguchi and Matthew Carlson

Liberalism: Its Achievements and Failures

Kazuo Seiyama

Health Inequalities in Japan: An Empirical Study of Older People

Katsunori Kondo

The Boundaries of

‘the Japanese’

Volume 2

Korea, Taiwan and

the Ainu 1868–1945

By

Eiji Oguma

Translated by

Leonie R. Stickland

Trans Pacific Press

Melbourne

First published in Japanese in 1998 by Shin’yōsha as ‘Nihonjin’ no kyōkai.

This English edition first published in 2017 by:

Trans Pacific Press, PO Box 164, Balwyn North, Victoria 3104, Australia

Telephone: [phone] Fax: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Web: http://www.transpacificpress.com

Copyright © Eiji Oguma 2017

Designed and set by Sarah Tuke, Melbourne, Australia.

Printed by Focus Print Group, Burwood, Victoria, Australia

Distributors

All rights reserved. No reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Trans Pacific Press.

ISSN      1443–9670 (Japanese Society Series)

ISBN      978–1–925608–95–3 (Hardcover)

               978–1–925608–94–6 (Softcover)

               978–1–925608–26–7 (eBook)

Cover photo: A postcard from 1920 portraying the Japanese empire as a geographically far-flung, diverse assemblage of peoples and places. [Commemorating the First National Census October 1, 1920].

Image courtesy Special Collections and College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College,and the East Asia Image Collection (http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections/eastasia/).

Contents

Figures

Preface to the English Edition: Coloured Imperialism and Beyond

Introduction

  1 The People of the ‘Empire’s Northern Gateway’

  2 The Possession of Taiwan

  3 The Birth of a Government-General’s Kingdom

  4 Japanese-who-were-Koreans

  5 Separate but Equal

  6 ‘People’s Rights’ and ‘Impartial Benevolence’

  7 Green is the Willow, Scarlet the Blossom

  8 Mainland Extensionism

  9 The Failure of Governance Reform

10 The Dream of ‘Different Flesh, Same Mind’

11 ‘Korean-born Japanese’

12 Japanisation and ‘the Japanese’

13 The Final Reforms

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Name Index

Subject Index

Figures

1  Formation of Japanese national identity

2  Japanese policy discourses for peripheral areas

3  Japanese colonialism and Asia

4  Four-fold model of ethnic relations

5  Family systems in East Asia

Appendix The Governance Structure of Taiwan

Preface to the English edition: Coloured Imperialism and Beyond

To the many readers with whom I will become acquainted through this volume:

The original Japanese version of this book was published in 1998. My earlier work, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen: ‘Nihonjin’ no jigazō no keifu (The origins of the myth of a homogeneous nation), was published three years prior to that, and translated into English by David Askew as A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-images in 2002 (Trans Pacific Press).

These two books have pursued a series of closely-interconnected themes. These themes have been to re-examine the national identity that comprises ‘the Japanese,’ and to elucidate the characteristics of Japan’s colonial rule.

Japan is sometimes said to be a unique country. On occasions, both non-Japanese and Japanese themselves hold such a view. The reasons often cited are that ‘the Japanese’ are homogeneous, or that they are exclusionist towards minorities and immigrants.

Many researchers on modern Japan think that these two are related to historical perceptions vis-à-vis wars and colonial domination. In other words, they claim that the positioning of the wars and colonial governance that Japan conducted from the late nineteenth until the early twentieth centuries is intimately connected with the shape of the national identity that comprises ‘the Japanese.’ My abovementioned two books also shared such a problem-consciousness.

However, critical considerations of modern Japan carried out from that manner of problem-consciousness have tended to split in two directions.

One of these emphasises Japan’s uniqueness and explains everything in terms of such uniqueness. This is exemplified by the discourse which says that Japan’s closed stance towards immigration is due to ‘the Japanese’ being homogeneous. Yet this is a kind of tautology, and consequently explains nothing.

The other direction is one that attempts to explain the characteristics of Japan from theories produced in the United States and Western Europe. Since the 1990s, various theories have been introduced to Japan, as well, and research based on these which analysed Japan’s national identity and colonial rule has been conducted. At times, however, such studies appeared to me to be somewhat forcibly applying theories generated in America and Western Europe to the Japanese case. They seemed to me to be relying upon a different uniqueness again – that of America and Western Europe – in order to criticise the discourse that claimed that Japan was unique.

I hardly need mention that America and the countries of Western Europe are not free from their own particular social and historical contexts, either. Nor are the theories produced amid those contexts universal, as they stand. In order to approach a universal viewpoint, researchers from countries with differing social and historical contexts must undertake studies based on their respective countries’ cases, and engage in dialogue based on the findings thus obtained.

The method I have adopted in this book, above all, has been to examine materials on Japanese discourses and the political decision-making process. I have referred to theories in post-colonial studies and political science, but I did not deductively analyse my own survey results from those theories. In this book, too, I decided to spell out the approach I took in the Introduction, and to organise the findings I obtained in the Conclusion, but I did not venture to articulate a theoretical framework. In other words, I prioritised taking a humble posture towards historical materials.

This was the same approach in my previous work, A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-images. There may be some readers who feel uncomfortable with my style, where there is hardly any mention of theory but many quotes from materials, but I beg their understanding of my position as described above.

This does not mean, though, that I refused to situate the unique case that is Japan in a universal context: quite the opposite. What I wanted to show in A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-images was that Japan, too, had a history that strove to form a national identity as a multi-ethnic country.

Japan is regarded as a contrast to countries such as the United States and Australia which have adopted a multi-ethnic national identity. As I have shown in this book, however, in the early twentieth century, Japan had the potential to tread a different path. Moreover, that period was the same as that when the United States and Australia were on the way to shaping their own multi-ethnic identity.

What I wished to show, in other words, was that Japan, too, had followed a similar course to other countries, and its later trajectory differed merely because of historical accident. To the last, the methodology I employed to prove this was to gather Japanese materials, quote them, and have the materials speak for themselves. In short, I endeavoured to arrive at something universal by amassing things that were particular.

The subject matter with which I dealt in this book, too, is not specific to Japan, but is universal, that subject being the question of how a certain state set boundaries between its nationals and those who were not its nationals: Naturally, this is something related to all of the states on this earth.

Of course, things which are universal manifest themselves in keeping with their particular areas and times. Japan’s colonial rule did indeed differ from that of Britain and France. In this book, however, I have shown that such a disparity can mostly be explained by such factors as that Japan’s being inferior to the Western powers prompted it to adopt a policy of expanding its national borders with the aim of national defence, and that it ended up dominating its neighbouring areas as a result of such a policy. Such characteristics more closely resemble those of Russian and Chinese domination of their peripheral areas than those of British or French colonial rule, but are not unique to Japan.

Such colonial rule by Japan was inferior to that of the Western powers, and it was the first example of people regarded as a ‘coloured race’ being on the side that dominated other people. It was what should be called Coloured Imperialism, both in the sense of its being imperialism by a ‘coloured race,’ and in the sense that it could only be a second-rate imperialism. The vicious cycle in which people in an inferior position to a particular powerful group dominated others in an even more inferior position than themselves is the very essence of Coloured Imperialism.

My targets of review in this book were not limited to the organs of government and politicians that stood at the pinnacle of the Japanese hierarchy. All discourses involved in the action of boundary-setting are included in my target of investigation: intellectuals, settlers, minorities, as well as women who were among the minorities. Within their discourses, readers are sure to discover the vicious cycle in which dominance breeds dominance.

Furthermore, in this book I have also examined how such discourses shaped the legal code and education system. This book also comprises a sociology of knowledge dealing with discourse history, a political history which reviews the political process, and an area study relating to the history of one area which is divided into separate countries in the present day.

The question of the discipline to which this book belongs is not a major one, however. What I hope the readers of this book will take from it is the following: in what forms do things that are universal to humankind each manifest themselves in their specific historical and geographical contexts? In other words, how do people in a particular era, in a particular location, and placed in particular circumstances suffer, or hold what manner of hopes? Through what sort of political process does such suffering or hope crystallise into what kind of institutions, and how does it change people’s destinies? These are the things I would like readers to apprehend from this book. In other words, I attempted to arrive at universality by thoroughly investigating the specific case that is Japan.

In writing this book, I scrutinised many materials, and was overwhelmed by the human agency revealed from them. Those materials contained every manner of thing that sways human destiny: desire, power, conscience, meanness, hope, despair, strategy, coincidence, victory, defeat, anxiety, resolve, trust, alliance, betrayal, and the like. I have cited numerous materials because I tried as much as possible to respect their raw voices.

I am not confident of having been able sufficiently to depict everything contained in those materials in this book, but with all the effort of which I was capable, I attempted to be a medium for conveying discourses and actions which had vanished among the waves of history. I beg that readers, too, will sense from the descriptions in this book some entities lying beyond those descriptions, and not represented in words. Moreover, it is precisely such entities that may suggest measures to us for transcending the vicious cycle of dominance.

The translation and publication of this book was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Publication of Scientific Research Results (Grant Number 15HP6006), provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, to which we express our sincere appreciation.

I offer my heartfelt thanks to Leonie R. Stickland, the translator who rendered a book which was difficult to translate in both quantitative and qualitative terms into English.

Eiji OGUMA, December 2016.

Introduction

How wide a range has the expression ‘the Japanese’ encompassed? This is the first question addressed in this series of volumes.

And what kinds of factors have been involved in the setting of the boundaries of ‘the Japanese?’ This is the second question explored in this series.

The theme of this series, which began with Volume One on Okinawa (Oguma 2014), is to examine political discourses relating to the border areas and peripheral peoples of modern Japan–Okinawa, the Ainu of Hokkaido, Taiwan, Korea, and so on – and to reappraise the concepts of ‘the Japanese’ and ‘Japan’ from the perspective of the above questions.

The changing boundaries of ‘the Japanese’

How far did the parameters of the words ‘Japan’ and ‘the Japanese’ extend? This question appears at first glance to be a strange one. In the current conventional view, Okinawa and Hokkaido in the abovementioned list are taken to have consistently been ‘Japan,’ while Korea and Taiwan are understood to be areas that are not ‘Japan,’ but which were under temporary possession as ‘colonies.’ This division, however, is not actually so self-evident.

For example, the trend in recent years has been to advocate for the ranking of Hokkaido and Okinawa, too, as having been Japanese ‘colonies.’ In these cases, it is insisted that both of these areas were ‘countries’ that were separate from ‘Japan’ prior to the Meiji era, and that they were made into ‘Japan’ through aggression and assimilation policies. Moreover, they are understood to be similar to Korea and Taiwan for the very reason that aggression and assimilation policies were implemented.

It is possible to take the reverse perspective from this, as well, meaning that in the period before the Second World War, Koreans, Taiwanese, Okinawans and Ainu people all shared Japanese nationality, and were legally ‘Japanese.’ This point differentiated them from inhabitants of other areas occupied by Japan, in that the residents of the Liaotung (Liaodong) Peninsula Leased Territory (the so-called Kantō-shū) and Northern China (Kahoku) Occupied Zone were ‘Chinese’ in terms of nationality, for example, and the vast majority of residents of the Japanese puppet state of ‘Manchuria’ (Manshū-koku) – apart from ‘Japanese Mainlanders’ (Naichijin) or ‘Koreans’ living there – did not have Japanese nationality, either. In national textbooks of the 1930s, the residents of Okinawa and Hokkaido, of course, and those of Korea, Taiwan, Karafuto (Southern Sakhalin) and so forth were all taken to be ‘nationals’ (kokumin) of Japan. On the other hand, residents of ‘Manchuria,’ the Northern China Occupied Zone, the Southern (Nanpō) Occupied Areas (comprising Japanese-occupied parts of South-East Asia), and the ‘South Sea Islands’ (a Trust Territory mandated by the League of Nations) were described separately from the abovementioned ‘nationals’ in the national textbooks (see Nihon kyōkasho taikei, 1979, pp. 489, 579). Here lie boundaries of ‘the Japanese’ which differ somewhat from today’s general knowledge.

At the same time, however, this does not mean that Koreans and Taiwanese who held Japanese nationality were treated equally as ‘Japanese.’ Even simply in a legal respect, a great proportion of them (apart from those living in naichi – that is, Mainland Japan) did not have franchise vis-à-vis the Imperial Diet, and primary education was not free of charge for them, either. In the case of the Ainu (the indigenous inhabitants of northern Japan, Sakhalin, and so on, as will be explained in Chapter One), also, a different educational system instituted by a law called the Hokkaido Former Natives’ Protection Act was applied, and it was only in 1919 that suffrage was first granted to Okinawa. It goes without saying that discrimination in general, apart from that of the legal system, was intense. Despite having Japanese nationality, they were a presence that was discriminated against both legally and generally, being ‘Japanese’ and not ‘Japanese’ at the same time. These were the people who constituted the boundaries of the ‘Japanese.’

This has set the main theme of this series of volumes: to investigate the discourses on policies in modern Japan around Okinawa, the Ainu, Taiwan and Korea, and explore how the boundaries of ‘the Japanese’ have been established.

It goes without saying that the ‘Japan’ and ‘the Japanese’ referred to here are not fixed entities, but nothing more than discursive concepts which vary according to times and circumstances. Certain groups of people – the native inhabitants of Okinawa and Korea, for example – have been regarded at different times and in different situations as being ‘Japanese,’ or not. Therefore, a question such as: ‘Are those people truly Japanese?’ is meaningless. Strictly speaking, a concept such as ‘true Japanese’ cannot come into existence in the first place. The abovementioned people were all ‘Japanese’ in terms of nationality, but at the same time, they were excluded from ‘the Japanese’ in some form. In other cases, theories from such disciplines as anthropology, linguistics and history are often brought out as evidence that a certain group of people – the residents of Okinawa, for example – are ‘true Japanese,’ but again, this does not make sense. This is because these theories were ones that were conceived after Okinawa was incorporated into Japan, as I explained in Volume One of this series (Oguma 2014); and, as I will elaborate in this volume, in the age of the Empire of Japan, it was ‘proven’ by anthropology, linguistics, history and so forth that Koreans were part of ‘the Japanese.’

By contrast, this book poses the question: ‘Why, and in what manner, were those people classified as Japanese?’ To be more precise, the question is: ‘Due to what factors, and in what form, did political discourse in the nation-state called Japan include particular groups of people in the Japanese, or exclude them from the Japanese?’ Moreover, my reason for dealing here with the policy discourses around modern Japan’s domination of its peripheral areas is not merely in order to reflect upon Japan’s history, but nothing less than to present a case study for verification of the dynamics involved when a nation-state sets the boundaries of its ‘nationals.’

‘Japan’ and ‘colonies,’ and ‘the West’

These days, it is usual for Korea and Taiwan to be dealt with as issues of ‘Japan’s’ ‘colonial’ domination, while Okinawa and the Ainu are often treated as matters of regional history or discrimination issues within ‘Japan.’ The recognition that Korea and Taiwan are not ‘Japan’ and that Okinawa and the Ainu are part of ‘Japan’ is taken to be a tacit assumption.

It is the idea of drawing boundaries between ‘Japan’ and its ‘colonies’ that enables this assumption to take shape. As previously mentioned, admittedly there has been a position taken in recent years that regards Okinawa and the Ainu as being part of ‘Japan’s’ ‘colonial’ domination, but if this were conducted based on the idea of taking Okinawa and Hokkaido, which were classified as part of ‘Japan,’ and reclassifying them as belonging on the ‘colonies’ side, then it would not be something that shook the dichotomy consisting of ‘Japan’ versus its ‘colonies.’ In this series of volumes, by contrast, I have aimed to re-examine what has established the schema of ‘Japan’ versus its ‘colonies,’ in other words, the very thinking that comprises drawing boundaries between ‘Japan’ and ‘non-Japan.’

This schema of ‘Japan’ versus its ‘colonies’ requires re-appraisal in two senses. Firstly, such a schema often starts from the premise that the boundaries which divided ‘Japan’ from its ‘colonies’ already existed in a fixed manner. At the same time, it is thus also assumed that the ethnicity-based boundaries that divide ‘Japan’ from ‘Korea’ and so forth are also immutable, as in: ‘No matter what, the Japanese are the Japanese, and the Koreans are the Koreans.’ In such a framework, in the case of ‘Japan’ and ‘Korea,’ it tends to be thought that even if one of these comes to have a relationship involving being dominated as a ‘colony,’ it will still maintain a never-changing identity in terms of an ethnic group or a state. However, as has been advocated by various studies in recent years, ethnic groups and states are by no means immobile entities.

Secondly, this schema tends to be tied to a historical view of national history which makes an ethnic group or state with unchangeable boundaries its subject, and for that reason, the internal complexity within ‘Japan’ or ‘colonies’ and elements that do not fit into this dichotomy tend to be filtered out. For example, when history is written using the expression: ‘colonial domination of Korea by Japan,’ ‘Japan’ and ‘Korea’ are respectively depicted as if they were singularities, with ‘Japan’ as the subject of that domination, and ‘Korea’ as the subject of resistance. In addition, even if the existence of such people as ‘Japanese who were friendly towards Korea’ or ‘Koreans who attached themselves to the Japanese side’ were assumed, it cannot be said there is no danger of neglect of conflict between parties inside ‘Japan’ and ‘Korea,’ such as the mutual confrontation between different government agencies within ‘Japan,’ and regional, class- or gender-based disparities within ‘Korea.’ There is also the possibility that entities that represent neither ‘Japan’ nor ‘Korea,’ such as people with ‘mixed blood,’ or the influence of ‘the West’ that lies outside the ‘Japan’-versus-‘colonies’ binary will have difficulty entering the field of vision.

Conversely, in this series of volumes, the very notions of ‘Japan’ and its ‘colonies’ constitute the targets of investigation. Here, I take the perspective that when the boundaries of ‘the Japanese’ were drawn, anything and anyone taken to be on the ‘inside’ of the boundaries were deemed to be ‘Japanese,’ and those ‘outside’ to be ‘colonies.’ Those boundaries are ones that frequently shift according to different advocates and circumstances, ‘Korea’ and ‘Okinawa’ at times being deemed to be part of ‘Japan,’ and at other times to be ‘colonies’ distinct from ‘Japan.’ The question of whether a place will be classified as either ‘Japan’ or a ‘colony’ is something that will be decided according to how the boundaries are set, which means that ‘Japan’ and ‘Korea’ have not existed in a fixed manner.¹

This is why the way boundaries are set is problematised, but this series of volumes places emphasis on the following two points in its analysis.

One is to be aware of the internal diversity in ‘Japan’ and its ‘colonies.’ As I discuss in Chapters Three, Eight and Nine in this volume, one of the major factors in determining the way the boundaries of ‘the Japanese’ were set was internal sectionalism in ‘Japan.’ The Governments-General of Taiwan and Korea, for example, were oriented towards trying to sever their jurisdictions of Taiwan and Korea from ‘Japan’ in order to avoid intervention in their vested interests as authorities. In Chapter Twelve, in turn, I deal with the influence that diversity within ‘Korea’ exerted upon intellectuals from the side being ruled. I examined similar cases in Okinawa in Chapter Three of Volume One (Oguma 2014).

My other point is to pursue an examination not as a two-body problem of ‘Japan’ versus its ‘colonies,’ but as a three-body problem composed of these with the addition of a third item, namely, ‘the West.’ In substantive terms, this means verifying how the presence of ‘the West’ impacted policy discourse over the areas on ‘Japan’s’ periphery. From here on, let me explain in a little more detail about this second point of view.

Although it is often forgotten nowadays, Japanese intellectuals and policymakers in the early years of the Meiji era (1868–1912) held strong fears that Japan would be colonised by Western powers. This could not help also affecting its policy discourse vis-à-vis its surrounding areas. Mark R. Peattie, for example, points out that Japan’s acquisition of colonies was not carried out principally from an economic motivation, but mainly from one of national defence: that is, in an attempt to secure a zone of advance defence in order to protect its homeland from any threat from Western nations (Peattie 1996). There may be criticism as to whether this assertion is appropriate, and Japan’s having ‘felt’ threatened is a separate question from whether any actual threat existed in the first place, but even taking just this one matter, the necessity should be seen to include the presence of ‘the West’ in examining issues of the domination of Japan’s peripheral areas.

In recent years, ‘Japanese-style Orientalism’ has been known as a framework for conducting discourse analysis relating to the areas surrounding Japan while taking the presence of ‘the West’ into account. This is an application to Japan of Edward Said’s work on Orientalism (1978), which argues that a ‘barbaric’ ‘Orient’ was produced as an object to invade, observe and exclude in order to identify ‘the West’ as ‘civilisation’ = the ruler. Following this framework of Orientalism, ‘Japan’ is regarded as have been identified as ‘civilisation’ = the ruler, the same as ‘the West.’ This debate could be said to hinge on an extension of the point that a so-called ‘Leave Asia, enter Europe’ (datsu-A nyū-Ō) consciousness existed as a backdrop to Japan’s colonial domination.

However, there are some points which cannot be fully explained by this ‘Japanese-style Orientalism’ alone. One of these is the existence of so-called Asianism which extols resisting ‘the West’ through an Asian confederation centred on Japan. This type of Asianism is known for having touted ‘pan-Asianism’ (Kō-A) in contrast to the ‘de-Asianism’ (datsu-A) discourse which endeavoured to divide ‘Japan’ from ‘Asia.’ Yet this thinking, in turn, played a role in justifying rule, so it is hard to say that ‘Leave Asia, enter Europe’ alone was a discourse of domination.

Above all, the weak point in ‘Japanese-style Orientalism’ is its inability to explain the existence of arguments for assimilation. In the logic of Orientalism, disparity with ‘the Orient’ which constitutes the object of rule ought to be emphasised, but assimilation discourse, which advocates the reduction of difference, appears to be running counter to that. There could also be the position that it was established logic that assimilation meant ‘civilising,’ that is, drawing near to civilisation = Japan, but it would probably be impossible to explain forced worship at Shinto shrines and the so-called name-change policy (see Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen in this volume) in the context of ‘civilisation.’

I would like to think that such problems derive from the drawbacks contained in Said’s very discourse on Orientalism. The targets of investigation in Said’s series of works are mainly discourses from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Britain and France, and twentieth-century America. Moreover, he mostly only takes up works by bourgeois or higher-status White males.³ This means that the targets he sets up are discourses by rulers for whom no threat greater than ‘themselves’ exists.

In modern Japan, however, in circumstances where there was a threat from ‘the West,’ which was in a higher position than ‘Japan,’ a discourse arguing for rule of those in a lower rank than ‘Japan’ was formed. While being classified as a yellow race in the Far East, but also being a colonial empire that had adopted modern civilisation, ‘Japan’ came to occupy an extremely delicate and ambiguous position at that juncture when the worldview that ‘the West’ = civilisation = Whites = the rulers, and ‘Asia’ = barbaric = Coloureds = the ruled was predominant.

In that situation, while advocates on the Japanese side were criticising discrimination from ‘the West’ on the one hand, as symbolised by the problem of migrants of Japanese descent (Nikkei) in the United States, as I will discuss in Chapter Seven, for example, they also took on the task of justifying Japanese rule of peripheral areas. In analysing discourses about ‘Japan,’ which was tinged with an ambiguity consisting of simultaneously being both ‘the East’ and ‘the West,’ it is natural for there to be a certain measure of difficulty in directly applying the discourse of Orientalism, which assumes the existence of an oppositional schema comprising ‘the West’ and ‘the East.’

Incidentally, such an ambiguous position is not something peculiar to Japan. In Orientalism, how would latecomer imperialist countries such as Germany, Italy and Russia be situated, for example? Even within nineteenth-century Britain, might Scotland and Wales, which were placed at a lower rank than England, and working-class women and so forth, have been unconnected with colonial rule? The discourse of Orientalism criticises the binaries of ‘civilised/ barbaric,’ ‘the West/the East,’ or ‘men/women,’ but that criticism in itself is thought to have fully functioned only in the aspect that the binaries are clear-cut.

In order to question anew the past schema of ‘Japan’ versus ‘the West,’ one must be aware of the diversity within ‘Japan’ and its ‘colonies,’ and add a third item, namely, ‘the West,’ at the same time. Put differently, this could also turn into a case study that would investigate what kind of discourse of domination would be formed in an ambiguous example where there was another ‘ruler’ above the ‘ruler’ (for example, ‘the West’ in relation to ‘Japan’). This is not something that can be said only of international relations: for example, questioning the response to Korea and Taiwan from people hailing from the Tohoku region of north-eastern Japan, which was a subordinate area inside ‘Japan’ (corresponding, as it were, to Scotland in nineteenth-century Britain), and from members of the People’s Rights faction and so on, who were estranged from the forces of clannish nepotism in Meiji-era Japan, will constitute an analysis of ambiguous examples in which a ‘ruler’ superior to another ‘ruler’ exists, at the same time as becoming aware of the internal diversity within ‘Japan.’

‘Inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’

I will now discuss what kind of subject of research and investigative methodology I will adopt from the abovementioned problem-consciousness.

The subject of research in this series of volumes is discourses on policy around the establishment of the boundaries of ‘the Japanese’ amid the territorial fluctuations of ‘Japan’ – aggression and ‘reversion,’ for instance. Specifically, this second volume deals with discourses ranging from those on early Ainu policy in the Meiji era, when Hokkaido was incorporated into modern Japan, to those relating to the rule of Korea and Taiwan during the years of the Japanese Empire. Volume One (Oguma 2014) discussed the discourses on Okinawa from Meiji times up to the debates around the reversion of Okinawa to Japan from U.S. military control after the Second World War.

It goes without saying that the setting of this subject is a little too broad, but examining only a specific period or specific subject (such as the Ryukyu Disposition included in Volume One) would not enable the exploration of general regularities in the setting of the boundaries of ‘the Japanese.’ Here, on the other hand, I have omitted such issues as establishment of the boundaries of ‘the Japanese’ which were not accompanied by ‘Japan’s’ territorial variation, namely, naturalisation and the acquisition of nationality, foreign workers, and post-Second World War policy on Japan-residing Koreans.

The fields to which these volumes give most weight in examining such policy discourse are education and the legal system.⁴ Education was a policy of cultural unification that sought progressively to remodel locals into ‘Japanese’ by such means as ‘national language’ (kokugo) education, and its importance goes without saying. The legal system, in turn, not only involved stipulation of status as ‘Japanese,’ including nationality and registration, but also was something that determined whether people have ‘rights as Japanese,’ typified by suffrage.

Moreover, the debate around the setting of the boundaries of ‘the Japanese’ in policy discourse materialises concretely in the form of whether to implement an assimilation policy in newly-possessed areas. As I discussed in Chapter One of Volume One (Oguma 2014), for example, when Japan incorporated Okinawa in the 1870s, in the early Meiji era, a debate already existed as to whether to ‘Japan’-ise this area, or else to leave it as a protectorate under its sphere of influence and not to carry out ‘Japan’-isation. Such debates were repeated in relation to the later rule of Taiwan and Korea, as well.

Naturally, ‘Japan’-isation in educational policy means what is termed nowadays as assimilation policy, involving such elements as ‘national language’ education and the injection of Japanese culture, and the cultivation of a spirit of loyalty towards the state and the emperor. In other words, the debate over whether to adopt such an assimilation policy can be seen to have been one that discussed the choice of whether or not to include those areas in ‘Japan,’ rather than one that discussed methods of ‘colonial’ governance.

The reshaping of historical views can be cited as a further vital part of assimilation policy in education, because ‘members of the nation’ in the modern nation-state are constructed as a group that has not only a common ‘national language,’ a shared culture and a common object of loyalty, but a shared history, as well. For that reason, not only ‘national language’ education, the injection of Japanese culture and the cultivation of a spirit of loyalty towards the emperor, but also the teaching of an officially-recognised historical view that ought to be shared as ‘Japanese,’ are essential in policies for assimilation to ‘the Japanese.’

If we take ‘Japan’-isation in education to be such a thing as ‘national language’ education and the remodelling of the historical view, then legal ‘Japan’-isation materialises in the form of application of the Mainland Japanese legal system to the locality in question. The revision of the Korean Civil Affairs Ordinance (Minji rei), known as the ‘name-change’ (sōshi kaimei) policy, for example, was not simply something that imposed Japanese-style names on Koreans: it was one that amended regulations pertaining to the family that had hitherto been premised on the Korean family system in order to bring them closer to the family system stipulated in the naichi (Mainland Japan) Civil Code. In addition, the conflict between indirect-rule line, which implemented rule by preserving local customs and enlisting the cooperation of the pre-existing ruling class, and the assimilation line, which applied Japan’s legal code in place of local customs, was already present from the time of the Ryukyu Disposition in 1879 (see Volume One in Oguma 2014).

Moreover, as for assimilation in the legal system, it is expressed in regard to suffrage in terms of electing representatives from the area in question to the Imperial Diet in Tokyo, in the same way as other prefectures inside ‘Japan.’ By contrast, the nature of suffrage in a form that excluded the area in question from ‘Japan’ manifested itself as advocacy for allowing it to carry out self-governance as a ‘colony’ that was separate from ‘Japan.’

In analysing the discourses that discussed peripheral areas incorporated into ‘Japan,’ if I label the placing of that area inside the boundaries of ‘the Japanese’ as ‘inclusion,’ and its placing outside the boundaries as ‘exclusion,’ and venture to conduct a contrastive schematisation, its political expression will be as follows:

‘Inclusion’…National education, application of domestic laws, national suffrage

‘Exclusion’…Segregated education, preservation of ‘old customs,’ colonial ‘self-governance’

‘Inclusion’ as an ideal type meant, in other words, the positioning of integrated peripheral areas not as ‘colonies,’ but as part of ‘Japan,’ and making their inhabitants the object of ‘national’ unification as ‘Japanese.’ Conversely, ‘exclusion’ as an ideal type meant positioning peripheral areas – both culturally and as political units – as ‘colonies’ (‘non-Japan’). When advocates from the Japanese Empire constructed the identity of an imaginary ‘us’ that constituted ‘Japan,’ such ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ could be said to have represented policy discourses as a result of their choosing whether to include peripheral areas on the ‘us’ side, or to exclude these as being ‘them.’

When organised in this way, it is easy to understand the emergence of advocacy for ‘exclusion’ which established ‘the Japanese’ by way of drawing boundaries between them and ‘colonies’ (‘non-Japan’) in political discourse on the peripheral areas of modern Japan, but how, then, should we interpret the presence of an assimilation discourse that argued for ‘including’ peripheral areas? Such an explanation as that the Japanese government of the day and advocates were trying to integrate the native inhabitants of peripheral areas equally into ‘the Japanese’ cannot possibly hold true in light of the reality of discrimination and domination. On the other hand, though, it is too unreasonable to regard the assimilation policy’s assertions as having been merely the official stance.

This series of volumes, by contrast, wishes to present the view that what became a primary factor in the assimilation discourse was an additional Other located even further outside the schema of ‘Japan’ versus its ‘colonies,’ namely, the presence of ‘the West.’ As I discuss in these volumes, apart from the line which comprised excluding a ‘them,’ meaning ‘colonies,’ and constructing an ‘us’ that was ‘Japan,’ there also existed a line comprising expansion of an ‘us’ that was ‘Japan’ in order to resist a ‘them’ consisting of ‘the West.’

If we assume that, when applied by ‘Japan’ to its peripheral areas, ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ were expressed politically in the shape of the need for an assimilation policy in education and the legal system, then the political expressions when applied to ‘the West’ were diplomacy and national defence. As previously mentioned, the ‘Japanese’ of the Meiji era harboured a strong sense of crisis towards being colonised by ‘the West,’ and that sense of crisis materialised as an emphasis on positioning national defence as a matter of the highest priority. This tendency ended up persisting intermittently until the 1945 collapse of the Empire of Japan, but for that reason, attention will be paid to the ways in which such a bias towards ‘national defence’ came to be reflected in the political discourse relating to peripheral areas.

To reiterate, political discourse vis-à-vis peripheral areas was a debate around whether to set the boundaries of ‘the Japanese’ in a form that would include the native inhabitants of those areas, that is, a debate over how to identify ‘the Japanese.’ In that milieu, the identity-consciousness of ‘the Japanese’ was expressed politically in the form of debates around the necessity for an assimilation policy (‘national language’ education and the remodelling of the historical view, the pros and cons of maintaining ‘old customs,’ the shape of suffrage, and so on), and of advocacy for national defence against ‘the West.’ Taking the above kind of perspective, these volumes examine policy discourse vis-à-vis the periphery, in other words, ‘the boundaries of the Japanese expressed by means of the language of politics, and their fluctuation.’

‘The language of politics’ and ‘irrepresentable entities’

Discourse analysis around colonial domination has been prolific in recent years. Although these volumes do deal with the arguments of intellectuals, they also target such material as politicians’ utterances, internal documents from government agencies, opinions from teachers on the ground, and records of Diet proceedings. These kinds of government documents, Diet proceedings, acts of parliament and the like represent ‘the language that the state speaks,’ as it were, and, to be precise, are not ‘reality’ per se, but are important as a point of contact where such discourse exerts an influence upon ‘reality.’⁵

Along with posing the question: ‘In what form was that political language constructed,’ what I wish to bear in mind in these volumes when examining such political discourse, namely, ‘the boundaries of the Japanese expressed by means of the language of politics, and their fluctuation,’ is: ‘What were the things that could not be represented by means of that language?’

In logical terms, whether to place a group of people inside the boundaries of ‘the Japanese, or to place them outside it is a choice from two alternatives. As expressions in the language of politics, these are discussed as a policy discourse of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion,’ as stated above. In these volumes, however, at the same time as verifying the way in which the words ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ were constructed, I also wish to give consideration to the parts that are missing from expressions couched in the language of such alternatives.

My reason for attaching importance to such parts is that the actual people involved harboured an ambivalence that cannot be encapsulated in either/or terminology. For example, even if they desired equality as ‘Japanese,’ when the ruled who wanted to reject being assimilated as ‘Japanese’ tried to express their own standpoint, this tended to take on elements that could not be fully represented in such existing terminology in cases where ‘the language of politics’ existed only within the framework of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion.’

The question of what kinds of meanings and interpretations ‘the language of politics’ gives according to its users’ position and the contexts in which it is employed is what these volumes wish to emphasise, as a phenomenon that arises in circumstances where there is no choice but to express a standpoint by means of the limited ‘language of politics,’ yet while embracing ‘the inexpressible’ in this manner. As I will elaborate in this volume, even if they used the same term, ‘the Japanese,’ for example, the rulers and the ruled respectively invested it with different meanings, and many cases can be seen of dispute over the interpretation of ‘the Japanese.’

In the first place, the ruled bore many difficulties in expressing their own desires. Lacking any ‘modern’ ‘language of politics’ in their conventional vocabulary, if they were trying to express their wishes in a form that could be recognised as ‘modern,’ they consequently had no choice but to borrow ‘the language of politics’ which their rulers used.

In the case of the East Asian sphere that was subjected to domination by ‘Japan,’ the thinking behind resistance movements was at first couched in ‘traditional’ Confucian terminology, and from the 1920s on, it was often discussed in the terminology of national self-determination or socialism which had been introduced from ‘the West.’ As such, it was slightly less inevitable that they would be driven into a position of having to use the language of politics which the Japanese side employed than in various cases of colonial rule by ‘the West.’ That said, as shown in Part III of this volume and several chapters in Volume One, there is also no shortage of examples in which the ruled altered the interpretation of the language of politics used by the Japanese side – the ‘isshi dōjin’ (impartial benevolence) discourse, and colonial policy studies, for instance – and made it into a manner of expression invested with different meanings to that of the ruling side.

Moreover, in fact, the rulers also harboured this kind of ambivalence. As I will describe in this volume, the ruling side’s discourse on governance policy, too, was basically discussed within the framework of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion,’ but the governance policy which actually became entrenched took a form that could be rated neither as either ‘inclusion’ nor ‘exclusion.’ The major cause of this, above all, was that it was not possible for the diverse and often mutually contradictory desires held by the ruling side to be amply satisfied in a governance policy based on the either-or classification framework of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion.’ Through the descriptions in these volumes, readers should see the state of affairs in which both the rulers and the ruled disputed over the interpretation of terms while using a shared language of politics, but with each embracing parts that could not be expressed in words at the same time.

The above constitutes the main theme of this series of volumes, namely, The Boundaries of ‘the Japanese.’ The composition of this volume is as follows.

Firstly, in Part I (Chapters One to Four), I review the arguments on policy in the initial period of Japanese possession of Hokkaido, Taiwan and Korea, and examine the ways in which the dominant order of discourse and the oppositional structure of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ were formed. In Part II (Chapters Five to Nine), I investigate the critiques of the order of discourse thus formed and attempts at reform, as well as their limitations. In Part III (Chapters Ten to Thirteen), I evaluate attempts at resistance by those being ruled, within that order of discourse. Although Chapter Thirteen should fit into Part II in terms of content, from the perspective of its chronological context it constitutes the final chapter of Part III. This composition is the same as the original Japanese version of this series of books.

The chapters on Okinawa in the Japanese version are contained in Volume One of this series, published by Trans Pacific Press (Oguma 2014). Of the chapters in Volume One, Chapters One and Two comprised Part I of that volume, while Chapters Three and Four were included in its Part III: Chapters Five to Ten in Volume One – descriptions of the post-war history of Okinawa – comprised Part IV in the original Japanese version. If the two volumes are read in tandem, then the overall structure of the series will be more readily understood.

The original Japanese version of this series was published in 1998. Since then, research on some of the individual topics which it addresses have been published, such as Asano Toyomi (2008), Teikoku Nihon no shokuminchi hōsei: hōiki tōgō to teikoku chitsujo (The legal system of imperial Japan: jurisdictional unification and imperial order), Nagoya daigaku shuppankai. However, there are still no works that have employed a similar approach to this series of volumes to conduct a survey of like density. For that reason, the decision was made not to pursue mention of such previous studies afresh in the English version.

It goes without saying that as this volume is not a general information manual on so-called ‘colonial rule,’ much of it does not touch even upon issues that are deemed historically important. In this volume, for example, I have excluded independence movements based upon the idea of national self-determination from among tendencies on the side of the ruled as my objects of analysis. Because such movements defined ‘themselves’ as being non-‘Japanese,’ they did not turn into something that shook the boundaries of ‘the Japanese’ as a result. What I discuss here in these volumes are movements whose participants – while acknowledging that they themselves were ‘Japanese’ in some form or another – pressed for change in the framework of ‘the Japanese.’ Examples of these include those called ‘campaigns for gaining self-governance’ or ‘pluralistic visions.’ Even so, there are limits to what can be covered in these volumes, but I beg readers to understand that I have chosen representative examples.⁶

Please also note that in accordance with historical nomenclature, these volumes use certain Japanese terms as is, such as ‘naichi,’ ‘hondo’ (Mainland Japan), ‘Nik–kan heigō’ (annexation of Korea by Japan), ‘Nis–sen dōso ron’ (theory of common ancestry between Japan and Korea), and that quoted passages sometimes employ expressions that are deemed unacceptable nowadays, but have been left unchanged, as historical material.

1The People of the ‘Empire’s Northern Gateway’

When the ‘Japanisation’ of residents of Okinawa was being carried out in Japan’s south, as discussed in Volume One of this series (Oguma 2014), a similar situation was progressing in its north, as well. This consisted of the education of Ainu people in Hokkaido.

It is well known that, just as Okinawa was dubbed the ‘southern gateway to the empire,’ Hokkaido, also, was nicknamed the ‘northern gateway to the empire.’ Since the Edo Period, Hokkaido had attracted attention as a military stronghold against Russia, and policies vis-à-vis the Ainu, in turn, were progressively decided amid such a diplomatic relationship. Yet, somewhat unlike in the Okinawan case, where education in the Japanese language and for instilling a spirit of loyalty to the Japanese government was thoroughly implemented, educational policy targeting the Ainu, who were differentiated from ‘the Japanese’ as a separate race, came to be shaped in a way which not only included them in ‘the Japanese,’ but went on to incorporate an element of exclusion from ‘the Japanese,’ as well. Moreover, this developed into something that underpinned later educational policies in Taiwan, Korea, and so on.

From border disputes to ‘Japanese’

As I discussed in Chapter One of my previous volume (Oguma 2014), until the first half of the nineteenth century the international order in East Asia consisted of tributes from local residents and submissive relationships, and national boundaries were not clear-cut. Such a worldview regards land as being within a particular state’s sphere of control because it is a place where a submissive people reside, not as territory because it is located inside a national border. For that reason, the term ‘Ezo-chi,’ too, is not a word that necessarily indicates present-day Hokkaido, but meant lands inhabited by the Ezo, who were a people submitting to the Edo Bakufu.The Bakufu side vaguely regarded the area encompassing the Kuril Islands (Chishima) and Karafuto (Sakhalin), and even as far as the Kamchatka Peninsula, as ‘Ezo-chi.’

Naturally, this differed from the modern nation-state’s way of thinking vis-à-vis national boundaries. However, when the Bakufu government was obliged to conduct negotiations in accordance with the principles of modern international society, oddly enough, in one principle this view on territory coincided with the view on the national borders of a modern nation-state, namely that ‘land where [its] kokumin (members of the nation) reside constitutes [that nation-state’s] territory.’

About twenty years before the Ryukyu Islands became a zone of border conflict, Perry’s American fleet arrived at Uraga at the end of 1853, and negotiations were held between the Edo Bakufu government and the Russian government over ‘Ezo-chi,’ which was the northern border belt. Kawaji Toshiakira (also known as Saemon-no-jō) from the Bakufu government side, who engaged in negotiations with Russia in Nagasaki, had the following dialogue with the Russian envoy, asserting that Etorofu Island, in the Kuril Islands, was Japanese territory (Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku 1911, pp. 406, 390).¹

The logic that Ainu were ‘Japanese,’ and, for that reason, any land where Ainu lived was ‘Japan,’ is one that Kawaji repeatedly employed on the occasion of the negotiations. By the same logic, he asserted that the Kamchatka Peninsula also ‘belong[ed] to our country.’² It is unclear whether this logic was one that Kawaji extolled through extension of the logic of the old order, or through that of the modern nation-state. Just as it was claimed that inhabitants of the islands in question were ‘Japanese’ in order to acquire Okinawa, as discussed in Volume One of this series (Oguma 2014), in the north, also, the Ainu were first deemed to be ‘Japanese’ in the context of negotiations with other countries.

This was not the first time that the Japanese central government had focused attention upon the Ainu because of its adversarial relationship with Russia. In 1799, when the Bakufu government switched Eastern Ezo-chi – whose rule hitherto had been left in the hands of the Matsumae clan – to a territory under direct Bakufu control, a change also arose in policy vis-à-vis the Ainu; but at that time, too, the direct motivation was the threat of Russia.²

Until then, Matsumae governing policy regarding the Ainu had basically been one of non-interference. As of 1777, the Matsumae clan was a small clan comprising a mere 170 retainers’ households, even with the inclusion of common foot-soldiers (ashigaru), and it did not have the ability to manage the Ainu in the whole of Ezo-chi. The object of Matsumae rule consisted mostly of Wajin (migrants of mainland Japanese descent) merchants and contractors in permitted fishing grounds; and it is said that there were no edicts targeting Ainu. Of course, in cases where Ainu mounted a rebellion, the Matsumae clan moved to suppress that, and Wajin merchants and contractors made profits through such practices as unfair trading with Ainu; but a kind of indirect rule was implemented in which Ainu conducted their livelihoods under the chieftains (shuchō) of each locality. It would not be right to make simplistic comparisons, but this corresponds, for example, to how the indigenous people of North America in early pioneering days were tormented by oppression from European colonists on the one hand, but were not the object of laws and regulations which the colonists created, either.

Moreover, what is often indicated as characteristic of the times of Matsumae clan rule is that it was generally forbidden for Ainu to learn the Japanese language or Japanese customs, in contrast to the assimilation-oriented policy of later years. This can be said also of the case in which Satsuma forbade the assimilation of Ryukyuan residents, but as in the Edo Period the learning of culture across status boundaries was behaviour that would disrupt order, it would not have been particularly strange for Ainu copying of Wajin language or manners to have been proscribed, although this, too, was originally something enforced at a local level rather than as a Matsumae clan ordinance.

Nonetheless, what made it impossible to keep such a situation unaltered was Russia’s policy of southward advance. Far from filling out its troop strength against Russia, the small clan that constituted Matsumae was in a state of suffering under its own liabilities, and its dependence on contractors which arose from its fiscal difficulties was furthering the exploitation of Ainu. If that situation were not rectified, Ainu unable to bear the discrimination from Wajin could have started taking action, pinning their hopes on Russia.

In the late eighteenth century, at the central level, an increasing number of individuals, including Hayashi Shihei, submitted written proposals on the Ezo-chi issue which hitherto had been disregarded. Most of these argued that unless steps were not taken to protect the Ainu, have them assimilate to Japanese ways and make them have a consciousness of belonging to Japan, there would be severe danger of their being won over by the Russian side. In response to this, in 1799 the Bakufu government made Eastern Ezo-chi into territory under its direct control, but the orders issued at that time discussed the encouragement of assimilation towards Japanese language and customs. The Bakufu advocated such measures, saying: ‘The extension of moral influence [over the Ainu], [and their] being educated, will gradually result in Japanese manners, and [they will] be deeply obedient; and even if perchance they should become emotionally attached to a foreign country, it will prevent them being moved in their heart of hearts.’ In such a way, while on the one hand security forces were sent in after Ezo-chi had become territory under direct Bakufu government control, brief edicts vis-à-vis the Ainu were applied, and such moves as reform of the trading situation were attempted. At the same time, the banning of such Ainu customs as bear festivals and tattooing were advocated, and, further, Buddhist temples were set up as a countermeasure against the penetration of Christianity.

Nonetheless, the administration which was actually carried out could hardly be said to have been a positive assimilation policy. The major reason was that the Bakufu government lacked a sufficient financial base to implement complete assimilation. The ban on the learning of Japanese manners and the Japanese language was lifted, but it merely permitted the learning, no educational facilities being established. Ainu resistance to modification of their customs was also strong, and it was also difficult to send out enough official inspectors to enforce assimilation; and actual administration remained half-hearted.

Moreover, such direct Bakufu control was abandoned in 1821. The primary reason was that the Russian threat was regarded as having receded, but what was larger than this was the economic burden. There was little