Frontier to Empire: Labor and Agriculture in Ezo/Hokkaido, 1788-1945

Abstract

The dominating narratives of Japan’s annexation of the island of Ezo/Hokkaido in 1869 place Russian encroachment as its principal cause, the island existing as a semi-colonial agricultural periphery under farmer-militia until the 1900s, at which point it had been reconstituted fully as part of the Japanese state. I argue that not only did the island’s colonial era extend decades both prior to and following this narrowly circumscribed period, but that elite anxieties regarding “modernity” and “state sovereignty” informed colonization far more than notions of security. The dissenting narratives of the “frontier” found in non-agricultural production, forced labor, and border formation, along with the subaltern perspectives of the workers, women, Korean miners, and native Ainu subsumed within this project, were ultimately made invisible through the ideological propagation of certain labor and agricultural activities as conceptual markers for identity formation, these ultimately driving the construction of “empire” and the “modern” Japanese state.