I left Akita at 4:30am, hauled my
luggage on and off trains for seventeen hours, and staggered into
Hokkaido's prefectural capital long after dusk.
As with most things in Hokkaido,
the first word belongs with the Ainu, the indigenous people, whom we
shall return to properly in due course. Sapporo's name comes from sat
poro pet ("dry, large river") in the Ainu language.
Sapporo is one of Japan's
youngest settlements, with dedicated
settlement only beginning in the 1860s. A century and a half later,
it is Japan's fourth most populated city, prosperous and popular, and
renowned for its beer, chocolate biscuits, miso ramen, snow festival,
and hosting of the 1972 Winter Olympics.
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| Now is that or is that not a planned city? |
But to understand it – and to
understand Hokkaido – we have to go back further than the birth of
Sapporo. Much further. 40,000 years further, in fact, to the
Pleistocene epoch: far enough to make out its geo-ecological
umbilical cord, which was totally separate from that of Japan's.
Notice anything major that isn't
there now?
Hokkaido was once connected to
the Asian continent by a land bridge. As the display suggests, the
spread of life to Hokkaido came mainly from the north, while in the
rest of Japan it came from the south. Conversely, the Tsugaru Strait
between Hokkaido and Honshu – which I crossed by train through the
Seikan Tunnel – was prohibitively deep, limiting the movement of
animals and influences across it.
A gap in origins, a barrier at
sea, whose defining influence sets Hokkaido apart from Japan to this
day. About 20,000 years ago Hokkaido was settled by humans, who
again, it is believed, cross from the north. Factor in the radically
different climates – the sweltering summers we in Tokyo know well
at the time of this writing, and Hokkaido's
merciless winters at the mercy of the northern winds – and we are
left with effectively two different lands: one of the Pacific, the
other of the Arctic.
Let's move forward a bit to the
neolithic era, around 3000-15,000 years ago, and Japan's
Jomon culture with their marvellous pottery and enigmatic dogu. These early Japanese would eventually
settle down to cultivate rice, advancing into the Yayoi period; but
not in Hokkaido. Hokkaido's people did not commit to agriculture,
instead continuing and further developing their established
hunter-gathering and fishing practices in what is called the
Epi-Jomon era, a chapter unique to Hokkaido.
Further migrations of people and
practices were to follow, but it is these northern cultures, it is
claimed, that ultimately gave rise to the Ainu. Like those
precursors, the Ainu were not a farming people: rather they defined
themselves by that ancient, time-forged
heritage of living in tune with the wilds
and the seas.
Migrations from and trade with
people from Honshu steadily grew, as did exchanges with Chinese and
Koreans from the mainland. But it was only well into the most
recent millennium that Japan truly entered Hokkaido's story.
For many of those Japanese migrants were
exiles: and they settled along the southern coast of "Ezo",
as it was known to them, built forts, consolidated their positions,
and came into contact and conflict with the Ainu already living
there.
Then came the era of Japan's
warring states, and its eventual unification under the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 17th
century. With this came the rise of the Matsumae clan:
the family which was to dominate southern Hokkaido on the shogunate's
behalf.
For the
Matsumae, it must have felt at times like all their dreams had come
true. They were exempt from rice tributes to the shogunate and
sankin kotai, and gained exclusive
rights and flexibility to deal with the Ainu – at best meaning
trade, at worst meaning destroying them in wars and eating
away at their traditional lands. The Matsumae came to live
with the arrogance and decadence of trade princes, and in
the midst of their holdings, perched on Hokkaido's southern peninsula
amidst the numerous little sprouting merchant empires, grew what
would become Japan's gateway into the island: the port city,
Hakodate.
This was the era when Japan
sealed itself away from the outside world. In this closed-country
(sakoku, 鎖国)
context, the government valued the Matsumae's "service"
of "defending" the frontiers from "barbarians":
whether that meant grinding away at the Ainu, or
fobbing off the Russians, who were also starting to nose their way
down in hopes of trade. And trade wasn't allowed: foreign dealings
were only permitted at Nagasaki, under painfully restrictive
circumstances.
For some two or three centuries
this arrangement persisted, much to the Matsumae Clan's satisfaction.
But it was not to last. “Ezo” was bursting with natural
resources, and its location made it a tempting lure for those, like
the Russians, who wished to expand into the north Pacific. Those
Russians kept coming, and soon other Europeans like the British began
to turning up in alarmingly powerful vessels. Late in its day, the
shogunate became convinced that it had to secure Ezo as a Japanese
territory to hold back these ominous foreign agendas; and so it began
to relax the travel and trade restrictions up there, and opened
Hokkaido up to permanent Japanese settlement.
Then came the Black Ships, and
everything changed.
In 1853, Commodore Matthew
Perry's American fleet came thundering into Edo (Tokyo) Harbour,
demanding on threat of force that Japan open up. What followed is
well-established: the crushing of the shogunate's legitimacy, amidst
anti-foreign sentiment and resentment of the government by the
domains and lords it had marginalized; social and economic unrest;
and the “end of the curtain”, by which the emperor was restored
to the centre of power, the shogunate was overthrown, and Japan's
isolation came to an end. Hokkaido was the stage for key moments and
processes in these revolutionary times as well, as we shall see when
we get to Hakodate.
Hakodate: now for the first time
brought under central control. The new Meiji government took direct
responsibility for Hokkaido through a colonial Magistrate's Office
(below), threw Hakodate wide open to foreign trade and influence, and
prepared it as a launchpad for the full-scale colonization of
Hokkaido.
Japan now hurtled to modernize
its society, its economy its military, to learn from and catch up
with the Europeans and United States before they reduced it to
similar misery as they were visiting on the rest of Asia; and for
this, the consolidation of Hokkaido's vast resources and strategic
position was held as essential. The first order of business was to
put together a capital, for which the Ishikari Plain was seen as
ideal. Down went the criss-crossing grids of roads, the green belt
that is now Ōdōri
Park, and an ever-burgeoning inflow of Japanese migrants: and up
sprung Sapporo, the nerve centre of Japan's new power in Ezo.
The Euro-American feel to Sapporo
is no coincidence. Many Western technical experts were brought in to
advise on and guide Japan's development, in everything from
architecture to industry, urban planning to science and education.
The blend of foreign and Japanese influences, adapted to meet
Hokkaido's natural challenges, persists to this day; and perhaps
because those foreigners were part of Japan's Hokkaido adventure from
the start, the mix feels less uneasy and disjointed, more organic,
than it does to the south in Tokyo.
Japanese immigration to Hokkaido,
formerly permitted, was now actively encouraged. With the abolition
of the domain system, people from all echelons of feudal life were
left without work or a place in society, and many went north to try
their luck, including plenty of former samurai. So too went
pioneering farmers, religious groups, prisoners forced into labour,
and people fed up with urban poverty, all subsidized and incentivized
by the government to till Hokkaido's land, and in the case of former
warriors, to defend it from foreign invasion. In all about two
million people made the trip in the late Meiji to mid-Taisho period.
Some of these people flourished;
we shall find a tremendous example in Furano, in a couple of entries'
time. But many others came to grief, arriving with little more than
the rags on their backs and not prepared for Hokkaido's alien
conditions and unforgiving climate. Imagine struggling through winter
months at fifteen degrees below zero in something like this:
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| Look closer at the door and the window. Insulation, this is not. |
Those who braved it out could
find themselves achieving a steadily better quality of life down the
decades, as settlements grew, facilities developed, and the trappings
of their traditional homes and identities – new and improved with
foreign techniques and equipment – took new roots around them.
Inevitably, not everyone had
reason to be happy about this. Who are we forgetting?
The Ainu were to pay the gravest
cost for Hokkaido's transformation. Hostility towards them now became
systematic and politically ordained, regarding them less as an ethnic
minority and more as a backward and inferior race. They were
forbidden from hunting and fishing on their own ancestral lands;
their clothing and customs were banned; the government seized their
property; and many were forcibly relocated to make way for Japanese
immigrants. As time went on, the destruction of their heritage and
forced assimilation into Japanese culture took hold as absolute
imperatives: and the results, which deserve a post to themselves,
were dire indeed. And as their ways of life disintegrated, others
were eager to press on with reshaping Hokkaido in their own image,
and – in an ominous echo of the world's later disgraces – to call
it 'development'.
But though the crimes against the
Ainu cannot be excused, it is vital to understand why it happened. As
with so many of humanity's calamities, so much came down to fear. A
fear, in this case, of foreign aggression driven by greed and racist
disdain – and this fear had basis. Dreading its own vulnerability,
Japan's quest to create a zone of advantage to repel those predators
led it to wars with China in 1985 and Russia in 1905, and from there,
the story is well-known. Japan's descent into madness was underway;
it panicked before the foreign imperialist monsters, and thus became
one itself. Its military expansion into Korea and Manchuria
accompanied disastrous recession at home, which brought Hokkaido
waves of impoverishment, labour disputes and violent unrest.
If there was ever any illusion
that the “development” of Hokkaido was happening for its own
sake, this was when it dispersed. Mining, cultivation, lumber, roads
and railways, the postal service: how convenient, that these were
found so well-placed to supply those wars with China and Russia? And
now, Japan's militarization spread through its north, and more
turmoil and poverty was at hand as once-settlers fled to settle a
second time, this time in occupied Manchuria. What was left of the
fruits of Hokkaido's colonization was poured into the stomachs and
fuel tanks of Japan's military machine, and Hokkaido was dragged by
the country that had made it its own into the horrors of World War
II.
Hokkaido acquired something of an
aura of shelter during the war, as a place to evacuate to: and though
the Allied air raids took their toll on its cities, it fared somewhat
better than the annihilation unleashed on most of Japan's heartland.
A lot of soldiers from Hokkaido fought and died in key battles,
especially in the carnage of Okinawa; and like the rest of Japan,
Hokkaido emerged from the nightmare adrift in chaos, inflation and
crippling food shortages. Nonetheless, its story in many ways
parallels Japan's from there: reconstruction, revival, social and
economic transformation, and after all of it, the economically
near-independent and refreshingly identity-conscious land we find
there today.
This self-consciousness, I felt,
has meant Hokkaido has not quite been simply absorbed into the
Japanese whole. Japan's struggle to come to terms with the bloodier
aspects of its history are notorious, but in Sapporo's leading
history museum I found a blunt and detailed honesty about what was
inflicted upon the Ainu; and in that city's structures, its practices
and its people, a more harmonious blend of Hokkaido's many
influences, and a more comfortable, confident and reflective sense of
their journey than the confusion, and depression, one finds in the
centres of Honshu.
On a more personal note, having
missed Akita's Kanto-Matsuri, my luck turned around in Sapporo, where
I found myself arriving in the midst of the Bon Matsuri: a
nationwide festival with Buddhist origins as a paying of respects
to ancestors (compare China's “hungry ghosts” tradition), but
held later in the year in Hokkaido than the rest of Japan with
markedly unique forms of song, dance and celebration.
I will confess to have found it
exhilarating beyond description. I felt compelled to join in the
dance: a dance which anyone may participate in, no matter their age,
sex, clothes, work or actual skill at dancing, and by which it feels
that all are rendered equal upon the rhythm of the drums and flow of
the festive notes.
So runs the marathon tale of
Hokkaido. Joys and sorrows; accomplishments and struggles; and though
in its heart the colonization of Hokkaido was founded, as too often
elsewhere, on the ruining of its original inhabitants, it also made
possible so many of the great experiences, and good people, I was to
find on my journey therein. The latter does not excuse the former;
the former does not diminish the latter. What results is a very
difficult story to evaluate, but one that offers us much to learn,
and is clearly far more complex than it first appears.
As I travelled on, I found the
important chance to examine this story through the perspectives of
different characters. Lavender farmers; the final holdouts of the
Tokugawa loyalists; the residents of today; and even chipmunks –
all differently placed in what they contributed or were dealt in
their relationship with this island. In the next post, we look at
perhaps the most fundamental characters of all: the Ainu, who lived
there first and were devoured to the last, but whose blood and
heritage, I feel, and vehemently hope, is not as finished as it
looks.
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