NOTES

  1   The vast majority of the salmon in Hokkaido—and thus in this book—are Oncorhynchus keta, commonly referred to as shirozake in Japanese, kamuycep in Ainu, and chum salmon in English. There are smaller numbers of commercially harvested pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) in Hokkaido, but these are referred to as trout (karafuto masu) in Japanese. Hokkaido is home to still smaller numbers of cherry salmon (Oncorhynchus masou), also considered trout in Japanese (sakura masu), but these are not a commercially significant fish.

  2   This approximation is based on 2008–18 data from the Japan Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries 2020.

  3   This book uses Japanese honorifics, primarily -san (roughly the equivalent of Ms. or Mr.), for Japanese-language speakers, as these were the name conventions within used ethnographic contexts. Except where otherwise noted, names are pseudonyms. At her request, this is Miyoshi-san’s real name.

  4   I use the terms multispecies and more-than-human more or less interchangeably. While there are concerns that multispecies positions scientific ways of knowing as an unexamined norm, I use it alongside more-than-human in the context of this book, as nearly everyone I interviewed during its research uses the concept of species (even as they also draw on ways of knowing that do not track through the scientific). The term worlds is a widespread albeit imprecise concept in anthropology that does not fully align with its use in philosophy. As used here, worlds are material and relational; they are not static but rather continually brought into being within practices.

  5   See Kolbert (2014) on the Sixth Extinction; see also Lewis and Maslin (2018), Lorimer (2017), and Swanson, Bubandt, and Tsing (2015) for different overviews of the Anthropocene and its social lives.

  6   This shift toward the study of entities and beings beyond the human has become a wide-ranging movement across the humanities. While this book can be read as part of this general movement in the humanities, sometimes called “the material turn,” it focuses less on material agency and more on material historicity.

  7   The lack of ecology in political ecology has been a long-standing topic of conversation (P. Walker 2005).

  8   This paragraph is indebted to the thinking of Anna Tsing and the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene project.

  9   This book is also substantially influenced by other modes of environmental and animal history, such as Ritvo (1987) and Anderson (2004).

10   See Gluck (2011) for a powerful explanation of modernity as a historical process, not mere trope, and for discussion of the forms of “improvisational modernity” that arose in Japan.

11   For an overview of Hokkaido’s settler-colonial history and the need to challenge its common narratives, see Grunow et al. (2019).

12   In a classification of nations published by a Japanese government body in 1869, “Russia was not put into the highest category of ‘civilized countries’ (bunmei no kuni) together with England, France, the Netherlands, and the United States (later joined by Austria, Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden). Russia, along with Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the countries of Latin America, was placed in the second category, ‘enlightened countries’ (kaika no kuni). From there on, the list descended as follows: China, India, Turkey, Persia, and the African nations north of the Sahara were classified as ‘semi-enlightened countries’ (hankai no kuni), while the nomadic tribes in Siberia, Central Asia, Arabia, and Africa were classified as ‘countries of uncivilized manners and customs’ (izoku no kuni). Last came the ‘barbarians’ (yaban): the American Indians and the natives of Africa and Australia” (Togawa 1995). As a consequence of this categorization, the Japanese government sent few officials and students to Russia, and only one person with Russian travel experience was selected to serve in an important government position (215).

13   The primary fieldwork for this book was conducted from August 2009 to December 2010, with short follow-up trips in 2011 and 2015. Preliminary research also occurred in 2006–8.

14   This paragraph draws on the work of Liu (1995), Stanlaw (1992, 2004), and Hogan (2003), who specifically studied how people in Hokkaido incorporate English words. These scholars reject descriptions of katakana as “borrowing” or “loanwords” in any simplistic sense, stressing instead the creative and inventive making of katakana terms.

15   The genus Oncorhynchus developed in the early Miocene (15–20 Ma), compared to approximately 300,000 BP (before present) for Homo sapiens. Even if one wants to define the emergence of salmon through species rather than genus, they are still far older than people. According to fossil evidence, present Pacific salmon species all evolved prior to 6 million years ago (Waples, Pess, and Beechie 2008).

16   This section is indebted to conversations with Frida Hastrup and Nathalia Brichet.

  1   By 2020, however, the number of Honshu salmon had declined more sharply than Hokkaido fish, so there are now closer to ten times as many salmon in Hokkaido as in Honshu. Statistics from Hokkaido National Fisheries Research Institute (2020).

  2   This point builds on that of other scholars reconsidering comparison in light of Viveiros de Castro’s work, including Jensen et al. (2011), Gad and Jensen (2016), Jensen and Morita (2017), and Mohácsi and Morita (2013).

  3   Ilocano refers to a Filipino ethnolinguistic group with ties to the Ilocos region, the northwestern part of the island of Luzon, which was subject to Spanish colonization efforts from the sixteenth century onward.

  4   The depictions of these countries by the Japanese participants did not fully grapple with their actual practices, which include oil extraction and ongoing battles over Sami rights.

  1   Translation roughly based on Petersen (2007), but slightly modified by the author.

  2   Translation from Petersen (2007).

  3   What places counted as Ezo also varied according to the historical moment; while Ezo generally included most of the island known today as Hokkaido, as well as those known as Sakhalin and the Kurils, it was indeterminate, often expanding and contracting depending on who drew the map (Edmonds 1985; Morris-Suzuki 1998b).

  4   The transformation of Ezo into Hokkaido did not happen overnight. For several decades, both names were used, often with confusion. For example, a 1902 missionary report indicates that Ezo was used to refer to the main island, while Hokkaido referred more generally to all of Japan’s newly claimed northern lands (Batchelor 1902).

  5   While Hokkaido eventually came to denote a fixed district that encompasses the main northern island, Japan’s northern boundaries did not become static (Morris-Suzuki 1998b). Disputes with Russia over the ownership of the southern Kurils continue, and although the Japanese government is not actively pursuing claims to its former colonial lands in Southern Sakhalin, it continues to assert that the question of sovereignty in this area has not been officially settled.

  6   As Lu (2019, especially chapter 1) describes, Japanese officials—drawing on Malthusian logics—also compared Hokkaido immigration to the founding of the United States, invoking the story of the Mayflower and the Puritans.

  7   For more on Nitobe and his time at Sapporo Agricultural Collage, see Dudden 2019.

  8   During the Meiji era, people took note of such differences as they tried to make sense of Hokkaido. Thomas Blakiston, a Briton who lived in Hakodate from 1861 to 1884, concluded, based on his natural history observations, that “Yezo and more northern islands are not Japan, but, zoologically speaking, portions of northeastern Asia, from which Japan proper is cut off by a decided line of demarcation in the Strait of Tsugaru” (Blakiston 1883, in Cortazzi 2000, 154).

  9   In 1870, the Japanese government recommended the following countries as models for exchange students interested in specific fields, providing a sense of the diverse comparisons that Japanese government officials made: Britain (machinery, geology and mining, steelmaking, architecture, shipbuilding, cattle farming, commerce, poor-relief); France (zoology and botany, astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, architecture, law, international relations, promotion of public welfare); Germany (physics, astronomy, geology and mineralogy, chemistry, zoology and botany, medicine, pharmacology, educational system, political science, economics); Holland (irrigation, architecture, shipbuilding, political science, economics, poor-relief); and the United States (industrial law, agriculture, cattle farming, mining, communications, commercial law) (Nakayama 1989, 34).

10   The Meiji government (and the Tokugawa Shogunate in its final years) sent government officials and students abroad, with the number of people dispatched varying by year, ranging from tens to a few hundred annually (Hara 1977; Inoue 2008).

11   Nitobe, who studied for three years at Johns Hopkins University, frequently wrote about Japan for American and other English-speaking audiences and also authored texts in German.

12   What Capron refers to as native Japanese horses are those primarily descended from continental Asian populations and specifically bred for millennia in Japan (International Museum of the Horse n.d.) Cattle have been similarly reared in Japan since around 200 CE, with distinct island breeds emerging from continental Asian populations (Mannen et al. 1998).

13   Fruit trees and seeds were also distributed to other parts of the Japanese isles (Walker 2004, 256). Transfers of plants and animals were part of a widespread nineteenth-century interest in “acclimatization,” or the introduction of species to new locales. See Dunlap (1997) and Lever (1992) for general information on acclimatization.

14   While the differences in meanings attached to mammal meat, particularly beef, in Europe and Japan before the late nineteenth century are clear, the rates of actual meat consumption are not. It appears that people in Japan may have eaten a fairly substantial volume of hunted meat at various time periods (Krämer 2008).

15   The director of the Tokyo Naval Hospital and the Head of the Bureau of Medical Affairs of the Navy, who beginning in the mid-1880s encouraged military beef eating, had studied in London for five years (Cwiertka 2002, 9–10).

16   While the Appropriations Act of 1851 authorized the creation of the Indian reservations, later nineteenth-century policies often emphasized land privatization via allotment over removal to reservations. The Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 is one example of this shift. In the twentieth century, policies again vacillated between termination and recognition of tribal rights. For a description of Clark and other American advisors’ views on Ainu, race, and settler-colonial practice, see Hennessey 2020.

17   Capron’s memoirs indicate that while Ainu people reminded him of American Indians, he saw them as more amenable to civilization. Capron praised what he saw as signs of Ainu adaptation to agricultural settlement: “Vegetables and fruits now supplement the meager diet of fish and sea weed of the native Aino, and his simple expression that ‘potatoes go so good with fish’ speaks volumes of encouragement to the Japanese promoters of this Commission” (Capron 1884, 305). What Capron likely did not realize was that Ainu have an agricultural history stretching back to at least the ninth century, including grains, vegetables, and indeed, potatoes (Crawford and Yoshizaki 1987). Potatoes were part of Ainu agriculture prior to the Meiji period, perhaps from their introduction to Hokkaido in 1706 and certainly from the early nineteenth century (Hosaka 1993).

18   This sentence focuses on government-run Ainu elementary schools as described in Tanabe 2019. The Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) also ran Ainu day schools from 1888 to 1906, along with the Hakodate Ainu Training School (1893–1905), a boarding facility. In contrast to the government-run schools, these institutions included Ainu language coursework (Tanabe 2019). By 1910, more than 90 percent of Ainu children were attending school, with roughly one-third of school-age Ainu children at government Ainu schools and the remaining two-thirds at other institutions, including CMS Ainu schools (Ogawa 1997, in Tanabe 2019).

19   Hokkaido remained under direct control of the central government until after World War II, when it became a regularized prefecture.

20   Military drill was a required part of the curriculum, with the goal of cultivating bodies in addition to minds. The Hokkaido colonial government, fearful of Russian incursions, was also interested in ensuring that its population was ready for military mobilization. Military training had been included in the original Morrill Act, as it was passed by Congress shortly after the start of the US Civil War (Abrams 1989).

21   For more on the relations between “pioneer spirit” and Christianity in Hokkaido, see Shirai 2010.

22   See exhibits about food items at the Sapporo Clock Tower Museum.

23   The first formal institutes of higher education were not established until the mid-nineteenth century. The oldest institutions are Keio University (1858) and Tokyo University (1867). Thus, when SAC was established, higher education in Japan was still in its infancy.

24   The article from which this statistic is taken raises important questions about the role of Chinese merchants in Hokkaido, alongside American influences.

25   The phrase ethnic Japanese is used to identify Japanese people from Japan’s southern islands, vis-à-vis Ainu peoples, who were made Japanese citizens and often self-identify as Japanese as well as Ainu.

26   Although the Columbia River sparked the salmon boom, its production was quickly eclipsed by that of Alaska. By 1901, Alaskan canneries were producing nearly ten times as many cases of fish, albeit at a lower quality and price (Martin and Tetlow 2011, 19).

27   In 1877, in addition to salmon, the facility also produced canned venison (9,358 cans), canned oysters (3,226 cans), and canned beef (Treat 1878).

28   Canned food products were slow to catch on in Japan and never reached the popularity that they did in European countries (Cwiertka 2006, 61).

29   The differences in taste and texture that Euro-Americans noticed between Japanese and American canned salmon products can be explained in a variety of ways. The regions used different species of salmon with markedly different flesh consistencies and oil content. In addition, the use of different kinds of salt and different canning technologies also likely produced substantially different tastes. The “made in Japan” labels attached to such products may have also influenced Euro-American taste testers and may have led Euro-Americans to interpret differences between American and Japanese salmon products as inferiorities on the part of the Japanese goods.

30   Clark 1877b, page 11 in the digital archive numbering, sheet 6 as hand-numbered by author.

31   This book refers to this island by its internationally recognized name of Sakhalin. However, the Japanese speakers with whom I interacted often used Karafuto, its name under Japanese rule. Similar tensions exist for the names of the Kuril Islands, as Japan continues to dispute Russian claims to the four southernmost islands, referring to them as the Northern Territories. These regions also have Ainu and other Indigenous language names.

32   This information about the official’s encounters with hatchery technologies in Vienna comes from a summary of an exhibit at the Saitama Prefectural River Museum (Saitama Kenritsu Hakubutsukan 1998), as well as from Wada (1994). Although hailed as a model at the Vienna exhibition, the Australian attempts to introduce salmon ultimately failed to produce self-sustaining runs of these fish (Lien 2005).

33   Information about Ito comes from displays and conversations with staff at the Chitose Sake no Furusatokan (Chitose salmon aquarium) in Chitose, Hokkaido, as well as from Ichiryūkai (1987).

34   The number of places Ito visited and the diversity of fisheries he observed was immense. See his itinerary, reprinted in Ichiryūkai (1987). See also Ito’s original report (1890).

35   For more on the Columbia River fish wheels that Ito saw during his trip, see Seufert (1980).

  1   Other well-known SAC graduates in colonial governance include Kawakami Takiya, who became a botanist with the Taiwanese colonial administration, and Tōgō Minoru, a high-ranking bureaucrat in colonial Taiwan and noted proponent of Japanese racial supremacy. The allure and promotion of Hokkaido models also attracted interest from non-Japanese. In a 1905 document, Chinese officials explicitly advocated the opening of Chinese experimental farms based on those in and around Sapporo (Lawson 2015, 52).

  2   Japanese fisheries managers built the first hatcheries in what is now Russia in the 1920s (Nash 2011, 88).

  3   JICA is roughly the equivalent of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) or Germany’s Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ; the German corporation for international cooperation).

  4   I base my description of the JICA-Chile project primarily on interviews with Nagasawa-san, other Hokkaido fisheries scientists who traveled to Chile, Chilean participants in the JICA project, and JICA officials. My understanding has also been enhanced by Hosono (2010).

  5   Japanese involvement in Chile has focused more on resource acquisition than on colonial settlement. In contrast to Peru and Brazil, the Japanese government did not send emigrants to Chile, nor did the Chilean government solicit Japanese workers.

  6   The success of these early efforts is debated. Some sources say that they did not create lasting runs of fish, while others hail this moment as the beginning of Chilean trout populations. Academic sources (e.g., Urrutia 2007) tend to be skeptical of nineteenth-century successes.

  7   The Japanese members of the JICA-Chile salmon project all cited this historical event as one of the reasons that Japan and Chile have good relations.

  8   An exact accounting of how the industry came to be eludes even those who try to study it directly. The author of one article, which set out to identify the main actors and factors that brought about the Chilean salmon industry, ultimately concluded that due to the large number of intertwined people—government groups, private businesses, and individuals—the precise origins of the sector could not be determined (Urrutia 2007, 463). The best the author could do, he said, was to allude to the “grand diversity” and “heterogeneity” out of which the industry was born (463).

  9   Quotes are the author’s translations from interviews and conversations that took place primarily in Japanese but with some use of English and occasional Spanish.

10   This trip was sponsored by the Japan Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency, which was the precursor to what is now the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

11   In their ocean life phase, salmon eat krill, along with squid and smaller fish, such as herring, anchovy, and sand lance.

12   The date when these efforts began is unclear, but in 1982, they succeeded in harvesting the first eggs and milt (semen and seminal fluid) from salmon reared to reproductive adulthood in Chile (Hosono 2010, 46).

13   The reasons that efforts to naturalize chum salmon in Chile were not successful remains unclear from a biological perspective. However, salmonid species that transplant easily are the exception rather than the norm. Within the Oncorhynchus genus, only Chinook salmon and rainbow trout, out of the twelve currently recognized species, have successfully established self-reproducing populations in new places on a substantial scale. See Rossi et al. 2012.

  1   During the fieldwork in Chile on which this chapter is based, interviews with Japanese traders were conducted by the author in Japanese, while interviewers with Chileans in the salmon industry were conducted either in Spanish (with an interpreter) or in English.

  2   After the mid-1980s and the end of the JICA project, Norwegian companies began to have an increasing influence on the Chilean salmon industry (Katz 2006). In 1987, via Norwegian interactions, Chileans began to rear Atlantic salmon in addition to Pacific salmon (Phyne and Mansilla 2003, 112).

  3   Hochare is the Japanese word for a fish who has already spawned and who is either approaching death or has recently died. In Aros’s words, the flesh of a hochare “has no color and no taste and it disintegrates.” However, the low oil content of hochare makes them valuable to Ainu people, as they are easier to preserve via drying.

  4   Although tinkering with salmon color has a longer history, the SalmoFan is a trademarked product that became widely popular in 2003, when Hoffmann-LaRoche, a company that manufactured salmon-feed supplements, included the fans for free with all orders. The SalmoFan is now owned and produced by DSM Nutritionals (Cha 2004; DSM Animal Nutrition and Health n.d.).

  5   The species most commonly used in fish meal in Chile are anchovy and horse mackerel, while in Norway, they are capelin, herring, and blue whiting (Miles and Chapman 2006).

  6   Estimated using historical exchange rates from FRED (2021).

  7   Furikake are fish flakes often sprinkled atop rice.

  8   In 2011, approximately 39 percent of Chile’s salmon exports went to Japan, 24 percent to the United States, 10 percent to Brazil, and 4 percent to Europe (Esposito 2011). By 2018, the United States constituted 27 percent and Japan 23 percent of Chilean salmon exports, but Japan remains significant; in the same year, Chilean salmon farms increased their production of coho salmon (185,000 metric tons that year) (Salmon Chile n.d.). Because Japan is the almost exclusive market for farmed coho, this shows a continuing interest in catering to Japanese consumers.

  9   Japanese companies continue to dabble in Chilean salmon farm ownership. In 2011, after the Fukushima nuclear disaster and disruptions to Japanese fisheries, the Mitsubishi conglomerate purchased a Chilean salmon farm (Nihon Keizai Shinbun 2011) and subsequently expanded holdings in the region (White 2016).

10   Yamada-san sometimes criticized farmed salmon in general but often made specific reference to Chilean-produced fish.

11   Producers contest descriptions of farmed salmon as dyed or artificially colored, as their flesh color is controlled through levels of astaxanthin in their feed. While the astaxanthin used in aquaculture is primarily synthetically derived, it is the same compound that produces the pink hue in wild fish when they ingest it via the bodies of krill and shrimp.

12   As a 2019 article in an industry e-magazine discusses, Chilean salmon farms’ use of antibiotics is decreasing but remains high (Evans 2019). See also Arroyo 2017.

13   For more on salmon farming labor issues and health impacts, see Aguayo (2008) and Latta and Aguayo (2012). These articles correspond to what I heard during my own much shorter visit to this region.

  1   In Alaska, for example, between 1984 and 2002, “real (inflation-adjusted) ex-vessel prices for most … species had fallen to about one-third of average prices during the 1980s” (Knapp 2007, 240–41). The salmon market glut affected all species but was particularly difficult for chum salmon, which consistently garner lower prices than species such as sockeye and Chinook. For the effects of imported farmed salmon on Japanese markets, see Shimizu (2005).

  2   The notion that ties of transnational trade can remake more-than-human worlds is far from novel in the social sciences. Scholars have developed a wide range of concepts to highlight the ecological consequences of carving the planet into zones of production and consumption. For example, Immanuel Wallerstein’s “core-periphery” relations (2004) have helped us understand how the extraction of raw materials from colonial regions has fueled the concentration of wealth in the metropolises of the Global North, while such concepts as the “ecological footprints” have highlighted the outsized marks that urban areas leave on their surrounding rural landscapes (Rees 1992). Yet attention to the effects of the Chile-Japan salmon trade on Hokkaido’s ecologies pushes us to consider different geographies than those featured in most of such research.

  3   For examples, see Freidberg (2004) on European vegetable imports from Africa, Mintz (1985) on sugar, and Pomeranz and Topik’s (2014) short essays on a variety of commodity-chain histories.

  4   Ishikawa and Ishikawa (2013) have made a similar move, showing how the transnational wood products trade has altered Japanese forest ecologies by reducing domestic timber harvests.

  5   Hokkaido salmon populations continue to fluctuate. When the majority of my field research took place between 2008 and 2011, Hokkaido salmon returns ranged from about thirty-nine to forty-eight million fish. Those numbers had fallen substantially by 2018–20, when they ranged from eighteen to twenty-three million, a level to which they had not fallen since the early 1980s (Japan Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries 2020). These declines are discussed in chapters 5 and 6.

  6   See, for example, Tsing (2005), as well as the citations in note 3 of this interlude.

  1   In this chapter, I use the term fisherman when discussing ideas and practices that are seen as being male-specific by people in the salmon fishing cooperatives where I worked. For example, women are generally not allowed on salmon fishing boats in this region, so the emptying of nets is gendered male. However, women do own shares of salmon fisheries and participate in fish sorting and other dock work. Thus, when I refer to more general aspects of fish cooperative work, I use gender-neutral terms such as fisherpeople and fishers.

  2   While the degree of self-management in salmon fisheries in Japan is very high in comparison to those in the United States and Canada, it is not in itself a unique arrangement. For an overview of self-governance and comanagement, see Townsend et al. 2008.

  3   This term carries connotations of being “behind the times.”

  4   In the postwar era, American occupation officials encouraged such interpretations. In their reports, they described Japan’s fisheries as something “handed down from the feudal era” and thus in need of modernization (Hutchinson 1951, 174). The United States played a significant role in postwar fisheries policies and cooperative organizational structures, even directing radio announcers to produce a series of broadcasts on how to enact properly democratic fishing cooperatives (GHQ/SCAP 1950).

  5   The reading skills required for the two publications are also very different. For example, my eleven-year-old Japanese friend could already read the Nikkan but could not yet make much sense of the Nikkei.

  6   For a description of this 1948–50 Japanese fisheries reform from a biased but historically interesting American perspective, see Seidensticker (1951). For more scholarly analyses, see Yamamoto (1995) and Makino and Matsuda (2005). Under this American occupation policy, previous fisheries ownership structures were replaced by “democratic” fisheries cooperatives with owner-fishers. This process paralleled a similar agricultural land reform, which distributed land rights to previously tenant farmers (Kawagoe 1999). In December 2018, Japan enacted a new fisheries law reform, the first in seventy years, with implications that are not yet fully clear.

  7   Salmon fishing rights are hereditary in most contexts, but each cooperative independently decides what kinds of inheritance patterns are acceptable. Until the last decade or so, rights were typically passed from father to firstborn son, but inheritance rules have since become more flexible. In Kitahama, for example, widows, sons-in-law, grandsons, nephews, and daughters also have inherited rights. There have also been several cases of fishers who gained their rights through “adult adoption,” a practice in which an adult becomes the legal child of an older person, taking that person’s last name, caring for that person, and then inheriting his or her fishing rights.

  8   While pink salmon are a minor part of commercial catches dominated by chum, other trout species do not play a substantial role in Hokkaido’s commercial fisheries.

  9   Although such set-nets were common in US West Coast salmon fisheries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were banned for commercial use in Oregon and Washington in the 1930s and in Alaska in 1959. Yet in 2021, Washington State re-legalized salmon traps under some conditions as they are increasingly viewed as a sustainable fishing method (Wild Fish Conservancy Northwest 2021). See Swanson (2019).

10   Yet in an immediate postwar moment characterized by food shortages and general instability, salmon set-net rights nonetheless seemed appealing enough to Kitahama residents that hundreds of people wanted them.

11   On top of shares, the board members have also created a bonus system that gives small extra rewards to the members who serve as dockworkers and boat crew for the boat with the year’s largest catch because they end up with the most work of unloading and sorting fish.

12   Every year, the group’s board members go on a comparative study tour (kenshū) to enhance their understanding of global fisheries. When their harvests are good, they travel internationally, and when I was there, they were debating if they should travel to Australia or Vietnam.

13   Kitahama sells its fish to a variety of wholesale traders and companies through daily auctions. Fish auctions are common in Japan, most famously the tuna actions of Tsukiji Fish Market, described in Bestor (2004).

  1   See Hébert 2010 and 2015 on changes in the Alaska salmon industry.

  2   For a history of fisheries science ideas with a focus on salmon, see Bottom 1997.

  3   Segawa 2007 and personal communication.

  4   The facility was eventually forced to clean up its act by installing a settling pond and a water treatment process.

  5   See chapter 1 in McCormack ([1996] 2016) for a broader discussion of Japan’s “construction state,” as well as Kerr 2001 for a description of the role of concrete in Japanese modernization efforts.

  6   About twenty people participated in this event, but the society has about 150 active members.

  7   North American salmonid species, such as rainbow trout, and European fish, such as brown trout, were introduced to Hokkaido in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hasegawa 2020).

  8   The scientific names are Oncorhynchus nerka (sockeye), Oncorhynchus kisutch (coho), and Oncorhynchus tshawytscha (Chinook).

  9   Kitada (2014) estimates that the majority of hatchery chum salmon (87 percent) are produced by private hatcheries, with the remainder (13 percent) by national hatcheries.

10   These practices were not unique to Hokkaido. See Taylor (1999) for a description of cross-river egg transfers in the United States. In the Columbia River, hatchery workers, worried that they might not fill their quotas of eggs if they waited until late in the season, also used the earliest returning fish as brood stock. As a result, the genes of early returning fish are also overrepresented there, and over the course of several decades, the timing of hatchery salmon runs has crept earlier (Quinn et al. 2002).

11   Alaska, with large-scale chum and pink salmon runs, has a somewhat different history. In the 1970s, the state of Alaska took notice of Japan’s hatchery success. Until that decade, Alaska, one of the world’s largest salmon producing regions, relied on stream-based salmon reproduction, constructing only a handful of hatcheries in the state’s southern panhandle. But in the 1970s and 1980s, as Alaskan fish numbers dipped, fishermen and government leaders sought more active stock enhancement techniques. In 1976 and 1983–84, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game sent officials to Hokkaido to explore Japanese practices of chum cultivation and hatchery organization (Kron 1985; Moberly and Lium 1977). Illustrating that development does not always flow from the “West to the rest,” Alaskans embarked on large-scale hatchery cultivation partially inspired by Japanese models (McNeil 1980, 18).

12   Land-use practices such as clear-cut logging (which produces sediments that smother gravel beds and warm stream temperatures) and mainstem dams (which impede fish passage) are well-known problems for stream-spawning salmon in the Columbia River. However, for hatchery fish, most of which are produced in lower river facilities, the loss of estuary feeding areas is a major issue for which hatcheries do not compensate.

13   In this recounting of differential successes, variations in ocean conditions across the Pacific should also be considered. Differences in ocean conditions may also have contributed to the dramatically divergent return rates of hatchery fish in these regions.

14   In 1991, a National Marine Fisheries document declared that hatchery salmon should not count as salmon under the Endangered Species Act. According to the policy, “The key is the link between a ‘species’ and its native habitat, and this link is broken when fish are moved from one ecosystem to another” (Waples 1991, 18–19). For the document’s authors, hatchery salmon, whose link to a specific spawning stream was no longer intact, did not represent “an important component in the evolutionary legacy of the species” (12). This statement had major legal and management implications.

15   In the US Pacific Northwest, most hatcheries mark their fish by removing a small fatty fin, called the adipose fin, thus making it visually apparent if a fish is of hatchery origin. Every year, about fifty million juvenile salmon on the US Pacific Coast are also given internal coded wire tags that contain data about their hatchery rearing history (US Fish and Wildlife Service n.d.).

16   For more on these select area fisheries systems, see Columbia River Fish Working Group (2008). Furthermore, while this section has focused on the protection of wild fish relations, US Northwest salmon policies also include ecologically focused activities such as carcass planting, where the bodies of hatchery salmon are placed in streams to improve their nutrition, something that is not a routine part of Japanese salmon management.

17   Overall, Japan’s statutes for the conservation of endangered species are much more limited than those of the United States, with no legal mechanisms for citizens to force action. Fish codes are even more limited in that they focus on sustainable catches, not conservation, and delegate most management to fisheries cooperatives (Takahashi 2009).

18   For comparison, around 25 percent of salmon harvested in Alaska in 2019 were of hatchery origin (Welch 2020).

19   See Nagata et al. (2012) for descriptions of changes in Hokkaido salmon management in this period.

20   See Morita (2019), who also discusses the effects of fishing pressure on the diversity of salmon populations along with other risks in relation to climate change. Tillotson et al. (2019) discuss how hatcheries seem to reduce the ability of salmon to cope with warming temperatures from a Northern American context. See also Kitada and Kishino (2019), with the caveat that this study has not been peer reviewed and should thus be seen primarily as an indication of concern and research interests.

21   See graph in Morita (2014, 7).

22   For a Japanese research group’s take on these issues, see Kaeriyama et al. (2012).

23   Although this chapter focuses on the United States, it is worth noting that Canada established a formal Wild Salmon Policy in 2005.

  1   See also the mention of Ainu children playing cowboys and Indians in Dubreuil (2007).

  2   Indigenous scholars have widely analyzed such dynamics. For one well-known example, see Deloria (1969).

  3   See Howell (2004) for effects of assimilation policies.

  4   This chapter does not intend to make claims about Ainu identity, as it emerges out of research specifically on relations to salmon rather than long-term collaborations with Ainu communities. Furthermore, the subsequent overview of Ainu-salmon relations draws on lines of archeological and historical research that are themselves contested and entangled with webs of problematic comparisons (Kondo and Swanson 2020). It offers one possible reading of a selection of sources but does not intend to be definitive, as various Ainu people may want to narrate these histories in other ways.

  5   Ainu peoples are diverse and have deep ties to multiple places, including those currently termed Sakhalin and the Kurils. While this chapter’s overview of Ainu-salmon relations focuses on Hokkaido, where Ainu communities were also very different across the island’s regions, the Ainu communities with ties to these other islands have their own specific histories, as well as interactions with settler colonialisms (in some cases Russian, as well as Japanese).

  6   A distinct set of culture and practices with continuities into the present—referred to as Ainu culture—emerged around this time, so I use the terms Ainu and Ainu Mosir—the Ainu name for the island—from here onward.

  7   This paragraph is based on Segawa (2007) and personal communication with Segawa.

  8   See also lewallen (2016) on the history of Ainu repression and resistance in eastern Hokkaido.

  9   For more on this subcontracting system, see Hokkaido/Tohoku Rekishi Kenkyūkai (1998).

10   The information in this paragraph and the subsequent two is largely from interviews with museum staff and scholars in Hokkaido, but see also Kayano (2004, 16).

11   This detail about salmon and salt comes from Segawa, personal communication, April 2010.

12   Although salmon from Ainu Mosir were predominately consumed by poorer people, partially fermented salmon produced in northern Honshu’s Niigata region were a delicacy eaten primarily by the upper classes. Tokohu residents sent their own salmon to the tables of Edo elites, while they themselves ate the tougher, imported Hokkaido salmon (Segawa personal communication).

13   Matstumae officials may have attempted to limit Ainu agriculture during this period to force Ainu into increased trade dependency (Walker 2001, 85–87).

14   Morris-Suzuki (1994, 1996) and Howell (1994, 2004) have written extensively about Japanese state projects toward Ainu people.

15   The herring industry was equally important at this time (Howell 1995).

16   In his 1912 English language book The Japanese Nation, Nitobe wrote, “As they are now found, they have not yet emerged from the Stone Age, possessing no art beyond a primitive form of horticulture, being ignorant even of the rudest pottery. Their fate resembles the fate of your American Indians, though they are much more docile in character” (quoted in Harrison 2009, 98).

17   In addition to the ban on salmon fishing, female lip tattoos and poison-tipped hunting arrows, both critical parts of Ainu-ness, were also prohibited.

18   Such efforts were explicitly comparative. For example, in 1874, Benjamin Smith Lyman, an American advisor to the Hokkaido colonization commission, recommended that they eliminate predators, such as wolves, by “offering bounties, as is done in other countries” (Hirano 2015, 206). This recommendation became policy.

19   According to Hirano (2015, 204), in 1871 there were 66,618 Ainu people living in Hokkaido and in 1901, fewer than eighteen thousand. These numbers differ somewhat from those of Walker (2001, 182), regarding the mid-nineteenth century, but both point toward profound losses.

20   For more on Ainu relations with other Indigenous and minority people in this period, including in Greenland, Alaska, and China, see Dietz (1999) and Harrison (2014).

21   One women I interviewed explained it as feeling tokidoki Ainu, “sometimes Ainu.” The work of scholars who identify as Ainu, including Mai Ishihara’s autoethnography (Ishihara 2020) and Kanako Uzawa’s descriptions of Ainu youth (Uzawa 2020; Uzawa and Watson 2020), describe related experiences. See also the extended quotes from Ishihara about her experiences of coming to know herself as Ainu in the postscript of Kosaka (2019, 188–91, 274–75).

22   This resonates with lewallen’s (2016) description of a person who identifies as Ainu but also runs a commercial fishery. The man refused to give consent for a ceremonial salmon harvest, due to the economic sensitivity of the issue for commercial fisheries, stating, “We can’t allow Ainu traditional fishing in our river” (13).

23   For one history of Ainu first salmon ceremonies, see Iwasaki-Goodman and Nomoto (2001).

24   The 1997 law finally replaced the 1899 Ainu protection law that designated the Ainu as “former natives.” Although the 1997 law eliminated the worst discriminatory language and provided funding for projects related to Ainu language, arts, and culture, it did little to address economic or rights issues.

25   For an overview of Ainu fishing rights, see Ichikawa (2001).

26   Ekashi is an Ainu honorific for male elders. At Hatakeyama-ekashi’s request, it is used here instead of the Japanese honorific -san.

27   See Uzawa and Watson (2020) for an ethnographic description of Ainu-wajin collaborations and their importance within projects for Ainu resurgence. They describe a university group where students with and without Ainu heritage learn about and enact Ainu practices, such as dances, together.

28   This mixed outcome resembles that of the first court ruling that recognized Ainu rights in 1997, in response to the construction of Nibutani Dam, which expropriated Ainu landowners. While the ruling recognized Ainu rights, by that point, the dam had long since been built. See Maruyama (2012).

29   Two key legal rulings were the Belloni decision in 1969 and the Boldt decision in 1974. For one history of fish-in activism, see Shreve (2009).

30   Translation by author from the Japanese provided in Kosaka (2019).

31   The group was formerly called the Urahoro Ainu Association but changed its name to Rahoro Ainu Nation (Rahoro Ainu Neishon), using the English world nation transliterated in katakana, likely pointing to another comparison (Kayaba 2020).

32   They also resonate with other Ainu calls for salmon rights, such as Ukaji (2018).

  1   Pacific salmon each have three pairs of otoliths. The largest, the sagittae (about 5 mm in diameter) are usually used for analysis and are those described here.

  2   Phrase borrowed from Anderson (2004).

  3   Other animals and plants in Japan are bound up with comparisons. See Tsing (2015) on Japanese forests, Skabelund (2011) on dogs, Miller (2013) on the Ueno Zoo, and B. Walker (2005) on Hokkaido’s landscapes.

  4   Tyrrell (1991) illustrates how American exceptionalism has shaped scholarly approaches to American history in addition to popular narratives.

  5   See Tyrrell (1999) and Stoler (2006) for analyses of how the United States has been made through transnational projects characterized by comparative endeavors. Hathaway (2013) also documents how the US feminist movement was deeply inspired by stories of Chinese revolutions, but these influences are almost never mentioned in any histories of US feminism.