Trading Wolves for Cattle: Mapping Hokkaido in the Age of Developmentalism

Olivia Fox, University of Minnesota

Beginning in the late Tokugawa period, Japanese elites began to adopt and refashion the concept of the nation-state from their engagement with Western powers, imagining a singular “Japan” with clearly demarcated borders. For Ezo, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago, this shift entailed a series of cartographic expeditions intended to recast the “wild” frontier as a definite colonial possession. This ideological transformation was made possible by the economic dependence of the indigenous Ainu, locked into their role facilitating trade between regional powers, that in tandem with conquest and disease, had fractured any potential opposition to Japanese rule. By the time the Meiji government formally conquered the island in 1869 and renamed it Hokkaido, sovereignty, and the presence of Japanese “subjects” in Ezo increasingly entailed Ainu displacement. As the industrial base of the island expanded in the wake of annexation to encompass a growing network of dairies, lumber mills, coal mines, roads, and train lines, the state assumed an active role in managing the population of Hokkaido specifically as potential workers and consumers. In this context, cartography took on a different character. Beyond demarcating physical space as part of a nation-state, the maps commissioned under the management of the Hokkaidocho were intended to demonstrate the growth and interconnection of industry, with ordinary people serving as both raw material for and the grateful beneficiaries of this economic expansion. This paper attempts to document this discursive shift, through charting changes in who commissioned maps, how maps represented sites of production, and the intended audience for these spatial representations. In these new visual depictions of Hokkaido, the Ainu disappear entirely, and it was the continued participation of ordinary Japanese people in the developmentalist narrative of Hokkaido’s growth that allowed for the island’s indigenous past to be quickly forgotten.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 73. Novel Sources and Distant Pasts Across Global Geographies