CHAPTER TWO Landscapes, by Comparison
Hokkaido and the American West
A FEW months after he relocated to Hokkaido in 1907, the poet Ishikawa Takuboku was stirred to pen a short essay about his encounters with this new Japanese land. In the midst of domestic turbulence in Honshu, Ishikawa had traveled first to Hakodate to serve as a substitute elementary school teacher, but he soon moved on to Sapporo after the school burned down in a fire. By that autumn, he had made his way to the western port city of Otaru, where he took a job writing for one of the town’s newspapers (Pulvers 2015). Despite his own misfortune and financial insecurity, he saw Hokkaido as place with a bright future. In his text, First Sight of Otaru (Hajimete mitaru Otaru), Ishikawa dwelled on Hokkaido’s possibility and vigor:
The spirit of the settler and the taste of the frontier endow people with unexpected might. Think about it—since Europe emerged from the deep slumber of the dark ages, a myriad of brave adventurers have set their sights on manly adventure in America, Africa, Australia and much of our Asian region. Think too how to this day, what was once called Yezo Island, now the island of Hokkaido, has pulled in countless adventurers from the mainland. Our Hokkaido is the land of freedom, thrown open for us Japanese. The children of freedom across the country, acting with spirit and bravery, have doubtless been stirred by that untamed land stretching out as it does like a continent. (Ishikawa 1967)1
For Ishikawa and others, Hokkaido was a vast tabula rasa, despite its Ainu Indigenous community, deep histories of trade relations with Honshu, and fast-growing commercial centers, such as Otaru. Entangled in easily recognizable tropes, it quickly became a space of virgin territory awaiting virile adventurers, a place whose bounty extended from its rocky mountain spires to its expansive seas:
By the mountains of white clouds and setting sun, where not a single human step has been planted since the dawn of the world. By the hinterland of the great verdant forests. By the great plains, expanses of desert reticent of rural Russia. And by the limitless oceans, frothing white and swarming with fish. (Ishikawa 1967)2
Ishikawa’s romantic prose is merely one example of the ways that Japanese officials, writers, and Hokkaido-bound migrants repeatedly framed the island as a frontier (shinkaichi or furontia) and a colonial project (shokuminchi) (Mason 2012a). Through the invocation of such terms, Hokkaido was nearly always thought of and experienced in relation to other places awash in similar expansionary imaginaries, practices of Indigenous disenfranchisement, and resource extraction. Yet Hokkaido was a specifically Japanese frontier rather than a wholly generic one. What role did comparison-making play in the development of Hokkaido as place with a complex pattern of similarities and difference, as an unambiguous “frontier” with a distinctly Japanese sensibility? In Hokkaido, the frontier was not a mere abstraction. Instead, the island’s frontier framing quickly led to many concrete comparisons between it and other highly specific spots, and the specificity of those comparisons came to have significant impacts on the fish swarming in Ishikawa’s endless and frothing white seas.
Hokkaido, as a place name, has always marked a comparative project. While this large island north of Honshu has physically existed for thousands of years—since the submersion of the land bridge that connected it with Russia—Hokkaido itself has a shorter history. Prior to nineteenth-century Meiji modernization, the island was known as a part of Ezo, a name that carries a meaning of “barbarian lands.”3 Ezo and its Ainu residents were firmly entangled with Japanese trade networks, but Ezo was not considered a part of Japan proper. In the frenzy of post-Restoration nation-making and increasing fears of Russian incursion, Meiji modernizers changed the name of these northern lands to Hokkaido, a word that means “north sea route” or “north sea district,” and initiated efforts to incorporate the area into the territory of Japan through colonization and development. The change in name marked an important conceptual shift. While Ezo was generally seen as outside Japan-as-such, Hokkaido was to be “Japan’s frontier,” a critical site for practices of nation-making. The new Meiji state was explicit that its designs for the region marked a shift. “Today’s Hokkaido is not yesterday’s Ezo,” declared one government document (Mason 2005, 2).4
Hokkaido marked a project clearly distinct from that of Ezo, one rooted in new kinds of comparative practices.5 When Japanese officials compared their new nation to those of Europe and North America, they felt that they needed their own colonies in order to claim their place as a first-rate global power. In the nineteenth century, being internationally recognized as “civilized” was closely tied to a regime’s ability to claim its “ability to transform an uncivilized people” (Dudden 2005, 3). For the Meiji state, Hokkaido, with its Indigenous Ainu people, was an ideal site to enact the kind of civilizing drama that would demonstrate Japan’s potential to become the “Great Britain of the East” (Kublin 1959, 76).6 Officials hoped to do so by enacting Hokkaido as Japan’s American West, a place to demonstrate national vigor by domesticating “wild” people and “wild” landscapes. European colonial imaginaries merged with classic Western frontier fantasies, producing powerful visions of a place where the oxymoronic platitude of “peaceful conquest” could reign supreme (Mason 2012b, 39–42). Like their American counterparts, Meiji officials simultaneously described the colonization of Hokkaido as “peaceful pursuits” and as “industrial warfare and conquest” (Nitobe, quoted in Mason 2012b, 39–40).
Getting such frontier narratives “right” profoundly mattered to nineteenth-century Japanese elites. They were not content simply to settle Hokkaido and extract its resources; they wanted to do so in internationally legible ways. Making Hokkaido into a frontier was essential to making its colonization comparable to that of Euro-American nations. The desire to create a comparable colonialism is especially evident in the work of Nitobe Inazō, a Japanese diplomat and politician who attended college in Hokkaido.7 In 1893, Nitobe wrote a pamphlet in English in which he explicitly framed the colonization of Hokkaido using language that echoed that of nineteenth-century Western colonialism:
The northern islands of Japan, vaguely called Yezo, were for centuries a terra incognita among the people: all that was told about, and unfortunately most readily accepted by them was that the region was the abode of a barbarian folk known as the Ainu, and that it was a dreary waste of snow and ice, altogether unfit for inhabitation by a race of higher culture. To Yezo, then, at once the northern frontier of the Empire and a land endowed with magnificent natural resources as yet untouched by human hand, the new Imperial Government wisely began to extend its fostering care. (Nitobe 1893, 1–2)
But as important as language is, enactments of “the frontier” are never done by narrative alone. They are also always material practices of landscape-making. Just as Japanese officials sought to make internationally legible narratives of frontier colonialism, they also aimed to create physical landscapes that would appear undeniably colonized in the eyes of Western observers. For Meiji era officials, comparison was a material world-making practice, one entangled with the transformation of the island’s conjoined human and more-than-human relations. These processes, and the arrangements they produce, are what I call “landscapes, by comparison” (Swanson 2018). The phrase is inspired by Anthropology, by Comparison, an edited collection by Richard Fox and Andre Gingrich (2002), who posit that practices of comparison have been foundational in the making of anthropology as a discipline. Yet here, landscapes, instead of a scholarly field, open up comparison as an ethnographic object in addition to an analytical act.
When anthropologists consider landscapes, cross-cultural comparison is not typically the first topic that comes to mind. Although environmental historians and cultural geographers have examined landscapes as global assemblages, for many, landscapes still conjure a sense of the “local”—of either Indigenous knowledge or traditional rural lifeways—of wisdom that sits in places (Basso 1996). Furthermore, there remains a tendency in popular usage to think of landscapes as more or less self-contained places with ties to particular cosmologies. Speaking of “Japanese” landscapes, for example, often conjures temple gardens and so-called Eastern aesthetics of nature. Paying attention to Hokkaido, however, shows us the utter impossibility of seeing landscapes in such ways. There, we see Japanese landscapes that are made not through some holistic and internal Japanese logic but by comparisons that link the island to geographically far-flung places. We meet Hokkaido landscapes whose species configurations and histories of management cannot be understood separately from specific comparisons with the American West and with particular locales within it.
Somewhat counterintuitively, in the case of salmon, it makes sense to study fish in relation to landscapes, as well as water. Although salmon spend much of their adult lives feeding in the open ocean, they spend the beginnings and ends of their lives in small rivers that are intimately connected to the lands that surround them. During their freshwater phases, salmon are highly sensitive to the variations in water and stream morphology that land use changes generate. Dams can divert water for irrigation and block salmon migration, agricultural runoff can pollute rivers, and logging-related erosion can cause rivers to fill with silt, smothering eggs and degrading habitat. Indeed, nearly any changes to landscapes or rivers can reshape salmon behaviors, modify patterns of fish survival, and rework the genetics of salmon populations. Because landscape processes are literally written into the bodies of the fish, one cannot understand salmon without attention to them. As Hokkaido’s agricultural and industrial development seriously damaged salmon spawning habitat, the island’s colonization officials also began directly targeting the region’s salmon for modernization, remaking both its fishing industry and its fish populations to resemble those of the Columbia River basin, along the US West Coast.
SEARCHING FOR COMPARISONS
When Japanese government officials initially sought to colonize Hokkaido, they were perplexed about what to do with what they perceived as an alien landscape, a place incomparable to Honshu, home to the centers of Japanese political power and cultural identity. The chasm they felt between Honshu and Hokkaido was more than ideological. Biologically and climatologically, Hokkaido is indeed different from the rest of the archipelago. The Tsugaru Straits, which separate Hokkaido’s Oshima peninsula from northern Honshu, are so extraordinarily deep (at least 132 meters) that they have largely blocked the exchange of non-avian animals and non-avian-borne plants between the islands (Kondo 1993, 76). During glacial eras, Hokkaido was regularly connected by a land bridge to Siberia via Sakhalin Island, while Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku were intermittently linked to the Korean Peninsula. When sea levels were low, mammoths migrated southward from Siberia to Hokkaido, while monkeys moved northward from continental Asia to the other islands. But the Arctic species assemblages that came from Siberia and those from more southerly parts of Asia did not meet and mingle on the Japanese islands. Despite being separated by a mere twenty kilometers, the watery abyss of the Tsugaru Straits kept the non-volant species of Hokkaido and the other islands apart, fostering distinct ecologies to the channel’s north and south.8
Hokkaido’s climate, too, differs from the rest of Japan. Although Hokkaido’s major cities sit at approximately the same latitudes as Portland, Oregon, Toronto, Canada, and Rome, Italy, their winter weather is much more extreme than their coordinates suggest. In contrast to central Honshu, where most weather comes from the maritime tropics, Hokkaido’s weather sweeps down from the frigid mountains of Siberia and Manchuria. In the winter, these Arctic winds pick up moisture as they cross the Japan Sea, dumping an average of about six meters of snow on Sapporo. When I lived in Hokkaido, I put on my long underwear in late November and did not take it off until mid-April. Along the northern Hokkaido coasts, where salmon fishing flourishes, sea ice drifts across the Sea of Okhotsk and packs against the shore, the ocean groaning as the white ice cracks and shifts. Summer, too, is different in Hokkaido. The 20°C (68°F) summer isotherm, a temperature line that typically marks a boundary between cool temperate regions and warm temperate regions, runs through the Tsugaru Straits (Yabe 1993, 38).
As Meiji era officials formulated development plans for Hokkaido, they looked for models abroad that would offer guidance for such a different place.9 The Iwakura Mission, a group of Japanese ambassadors and students who took an extended around-the-world study tour in 1871–73, strongly recommended using England as a general model for Japanese development. To the members of the mission, the geography, climate, and culture of the British Isles seemed vaguely similar to Japan, making it an ideal nation to emulate (Willcock 2000, 979). In Honshu, government officials adopted the commission’s recommendations, inviting a number of British experts to provide advice on the construction of railroads, telegraph systems, and lighthouses, as well as to establish Komaba Agricultural College, a training school that later became a part of Tokyo University (Russell 2007, 111; Willcock 2000). But in Hokkaido, Kuroda Kiyotaka sought to make a different kind of comparison.
Kuroda, a former samurai from Kyushu, was appointed to the Kaitakushi (also known as the Hokkaido Colonization Commission) in 1870. During the Meiji Restoration, he had distinguished himself by leading imperial military forces against a group of Tokugawa loyalists who had fled to southern Hokkaido in 1869 and briefly established an independent state. By subduing these remaining shogun supporters, Kuroda secured Hokkaido for the Meiji government. Once his military career ended, Kuroda turned to diplomatic and political pursuits, including the settlement of Hokkaido. In 1871, at the Japanese government’s request, he traveled to the United States and Europe a few months ahead of the Iwakura Commission.10 While England might provide a model for mainland Japan, Kuroda saw American agricultural landscapes as a much better template for Hokkaido development (Harrison 1951, 136; Russell 2007, 6). In contrast to the British, the Americans were more experienced in opening new territory, dealing with more severe climates, and cultivating cold-resistant crops. Writing in 1893, Nitobe described Kuroda’s decision to compare Hokkaido to the United States:
He saw that the fertile virgin soil could be made to yield its richest treasures only under wise management. But where should he seek wisdom? Japan had long since forgotten the art of breaking up new land; her agricultural system was too intensive to be applied to a newly-opened country; her mining operations were too primitive to be followed on an extensive scale. In General Kuroda’s mind there was one source whence he could expect wisdom and knowledge pertaining to new settlements; and that was America. Thither, therefore, he himself proceeded in the fall of 1870. He studied the rapid and wonderful progress of colonization in that country, and thought that the modus operandi at work there might well produce similar results in Japan. (Nitobe 1893, 2–3)
Though Nitobe wrote this description in English—likely with rhetorical embellishments targeted toward American audiences—this depiction of Kuroda’s fascination with the United States seems more or less accurate.11 During his visit to the United States, Kuroda was intrigued enough by American settlement practices that he recruited General Horace Capron, the sitting federal commissioner of agriculture, to resign his post and travel to northernmost Japan to serve as an advisor to the Kaitakushi beginning in 1871.
Capron was an established and internationally minded advocate for “modern” and “scientific” agriculture. After the end of the US Civil War, he gained renown for promoting crop diversification in the American South, especially for encouraging farmers to plant citrus trees in addition to cotton (Russell 2007, 81). Even before he headed to Japan, Capron was thinking and acting beyond the boundaries of the United States. He had become a corresponding member of the Society for the Promotion of National Industry of Brazil to become more familiar with South American crops. Learning of the success of seedless oranges through the society’s materials, he arranged to have two of the trees shipped to California, an act that sparked the West Coast navel orange industry. Additionally, in 1869, he started an international seed exchange program, inaugurating it by shipping 130 seed packages to the new Meiji state (Russell 2007, 81).
When he arrived in Japan in 1871, Capron stayed in Tokyo for many months, crafting his recommendations and plans for Hokkaido before he ever set foot there. Capron also established experimental government farms in Tokyo to provide a way station for plants and animals in transit from the United States to Hokkaido (Fujita 1994, 36). The Honshu farms served not only as sites for research and acclimatization but also as places to publicly display the Kaitakushi’s progress to Tokyo-based leaders. In 1873, the emperor himself came to inspect the farm’s crops and animals (Walker 2004, 257). In mid-1872, Capron moved northward to Hokkaido itself, and upon arrival, Capron was impressed with its potential:
This island is just wonderful. Its true value has not been recognized nor regarded as important. Its mineral resources are abundant. Its fishery resources are inexhaustible. Its woods are superior in quality and abundance and its agricultural productive power is great. (Quoted in Fujita 1994, 38)
But at the same time, Capron was disappointed with the island’s existing experimental farm, started by a German farmer, which was yielding little produce (Russell 2007, 140). He also found the quality of the island’s farm animals to be so dismal that he suggested that the Kaitakushi order “all native stallions, bulls, and boars be either altered, i.e., deprived of the power of generation, or removed to some remote part of the island, and by the introduction of foreign animals in their stead for breeding purposes” (Capron, cited in Russell 2007, 141).12
Over the next two years, Capron would spark a revolution in Hokkaido agriculture and land use by introducing American crops and livestock. The lists of species that made their way across the Pacific by steamship is truly impressive. Some came in the form of cuttings—cherries, nectarines, plums, peaches, apricots, raspberries, currants, black gooseberries, strawberries, rhubarb, quinces, and grapes. Others arrived as seeds—onions, turnips, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, beets, celery, spinach, corn, peas, beans, and potatoes. Still others arrived on the hoof—Devon and Durham cattle, Berkshire and Suffolk pigs, Cotswold, Merino, and Southdown sheep, and Arabian horses. Their numbers were not small; by the end of 1873, 32,775 young fruit trees had been shipped to Hokkaido.13 In total, 224 varieties of fruits and vegetables made their way to Japan under Capron’s tutelage (Russell 2007, 129, 132, 134).
Capron also recruited additional Americans to assist his efforts to help the Kaitakushi transform Hokkaido’s landscapes. The cadre of American men that the Japanese government hired at his recommendation surveyed the island, mapped its geology and rivers, laid out the grid system for its capital city, built mechanized sawmills, fostered the development of mining industries, and helped with road, bridge, and railroad construction (Duke 2009; Fujita 1994). One of these foreign pioneers was Edwin Dun, an Ohio rancher, whom Capron selected to introduce modern livestock production to northernmost Japan. Beef eating, in particular, was framed as an act redolent of modernity. The Japanese government began to heavily promote meat consumption, arguing that Europeans had strong, muscular bodies because they regularly dined on mammal flesh.14 In 1872, the royal household announced that the emperor regularly ate beef and mutton (24). According to Japanese food studies scholar Katarzyna Cwiertka, in the nineteenth-century West, meat eating was perceived as a source of national strength and linked to social Darwinism: “A leading British scientific publicist … stated in one of his lectures of 1860 that ‘those races who have partaken of animal food are the most vigorous, most moral, and most intellectual races of mankind.’ Similarly, an American cookery writer … argued that the British dominance of India proved the fact that meat-eaters dominated world politics.” In a moment when such sentiments circulated alongside new Western notions of nourishment and sanitation, the Japanese government quickly added canned beef to their military menus (Cwiertka 2006, 33, 63–64).15
Hokkaido’s Kaitakushi was interested in the economic value of such animals. For the island’s colder and more marginal climates, livestock rearing seemed more promising than rice farming. Dun, with years of practical experience in the US Midwest, became their guide. He brought more than one hundred cattle and one hundred sheep to Japan, including some from his own farm (Hokkaido Prefectural Government 1968, 44–45). But once he arrived in Hokkaido, he faced a serious challenge: the island was no pastoral paradise. Its grasses were poor, its farms lacked fences, and wolves prowled its mountains. Dun and the Kaitakushi set out to make the landscape safe and hospitable for the animals that symbolized modernity. They introduced Kentucky bluegrass, red top, timothy, and clover; they built miles of split-rail fences; and they exterminated wolves and wild dogs with strychnine, a chemical poison widely used for predator control in the western United States (Fujita 1994, 60; Walker 2004). The practices worked; they helped to build beef, dairy, and horse industries in Hokkaido, while decimating the island’s canid populations. They successfully turned miles of hills and plains into parcels of pasture.
As in the case of the American West, the Kaitakushi and their American advisors sought to exterminate not only the animals but also the Ainu culture that impeded their agricultural plans. Capron, who had served as a federal Indian agent earlier in his career, was an advocate of so-called native assimilation policies, which sought to eliminate Indian lifeways through forced agriculture (in contrast to other officials who favored policies that created small reservations and restricted American Indians to them). Although he expressed some remorse about the brutal treatment of Indians, Capron participated in the Indian resettlement and likely promoted Indian farming (Medak-Saltzman 2008, 100–102). Although Capron’s role in Ainu policy is unclear, the Kaitakushi (and later the Hokkaido prefecture government) adopted strategies that share some similarities to the assimilation-focused US Indian policies that were in vogue after the US Civil War, such as boarding schools, forced agriculture, and dubious land allotment schemes.16 For example, in 1872, the Kaitakushi pressured thirty-seven members of the Ainu elite to attend a temporary school in Tokyo, where they were taught agriculture and livestock farming with the hope that they would take such skills back to their villages and inspire other Ainu to adopt farming lifeways (Frey 2007, 69–96).17 From 1901 to 1937, the government operated a segregated system of Ainu schools, where children, who were forbidden to speak their native languages, took coursework in Japanese, arithmetic, farming (for boys), and sewing (for girls).18
Japanese Ainu policies also seem to have been influenced by the legal maneuverings that the US government used to disenfranchise American Indians. Declaring Hokkaido empty land and instituting a new property-rights regime, they stripped Ainu people of their lands. In 1899, as part of the Former Aborigines Protection Act (Kyūdojin Hogohō), they created land allotment practices that echo parts of the 1887 Dawes Act, which turned Indian lands into privately owned farmsteads (Medak-Saltzman 2008, 103–5). The Kaitakushi further forced Ainu people into exclusively agricultural ways of life by strictly enforcing hunting and fishing bans that deprived the Ainu of access to critical food supplies. In 1876, the Japanese government outlawed the bows and poison-tipped arrows that Ainu people used to hunt deer. Three years later, the government prohibited the freshwater capture of salmon and trout (Aoyama 2012, 119). The aim of such laws—as for many contemporary US policies—was the functional elimination of Indigenous lifeways. As Ainu leader Kayano Shigeru (1926–2006) described it, the “law banning salmon fishing was as good as telling the Ainu, who had always lived on salmon, to die. For our people, this was an evil law akin to striking to death a parent bird carrying food to its unfledged babies” (Kayano 1994, 58–59).
Although the Kaitakushi did not bow to American advice and friction with the foreigners was not uncommon, the advisors undoubtedly spurred shifts in the Kaitakushi’s approaches to Hokkaido’s social and natural landscapes. However, they did not stay long, as the Kaitakushi hired most of them on one- to three-year contracts. Furthermore, in 1882, when the central Japanese government reorganized Hokkaido’s administration—replacing the Kaitakushi with another form of central governmental control—most of the directly employed foreigners were sent home (Hokkaido Prefectural Government 1968, 26).19 But another institution, the Sapporo Agricultural College, continued to work outward from American-inflected logics of modern scientific agriculture and natural resource management, expanding them to transform Hokkaido’s lands and waters for decades to come. Immediately after joining the Kaitakushi, Capron began advocating for the development of an agricultural school in Japan. Kuroda and others were easily persuaded. As Nitobe would later write, “The simple adoption of American methods without trained hands to rightly direct them, would merely amount to an apish trick” (1893, 3). Japan needed people who could both inhabit modernity’s subjectivities and perfect its technical practices. Education was thus a key facet of the Kaitakushi’s efforts.
In 1875, Kuroda asked the Japanese ambassador in Washington, DC, to secure the services of an American educator capable of establishing a first-rate agricultural college in Hokkaido. Several years earlier, the Kaitakushi had attempted to build a temporary school in Tokyo for the education of modern farmers, but the institution had been disorganized, and it was deemed a failure (Duke 2009, 201). Kuroda wanted American advisors who could turn their floundering school into a full-fledged institute of higher education. The Japanese government managed to recruit a consultant of the highest caliber—William Smith Clark, then president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College (MAC). MAC was one of the first land-grant colleges founded under the Morrill Act of 1862, which provided funding for schools where “the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts” (US Congress 1862). Clark, one of MAC’s founding members, embraced this challenge and sought to create the United States’ first generation of well-trained specialists in scientific agriculture. When he was invited to create a similar college in Japan, Clark jumped at the opportunity, taking a year’s leave from MAC to travel to Hokkaido. In a letter to his wife, Clark remarked on this exciting opportunity to “rebuild M.A.C. with variation and possibly some improvements on the other side of the earth” (cited in Willcock 2000, 987).
In summer 1876, Clark arrived in Hokkaido along with two other MAC professors, William Wheeler (civil engineering and mathematics) and David Penhallow (chemistry, botany, agriculture) (Fujita 1994). Immediately, they began creating Sapporo Agricultural College (SAC). One of Clark’s first requests was that the Kaitakushi build a model farm, then turn its ownership over to SAC for use in agricultural education (Kataoka 2009, 6-1). Per the Americans’ suggestions, the new facility included both crop production areas and a dairy barn, which also included spaces for horses and pigs (6-3). Originally, the new farm building had a descriptive name: the Delivery Room and the Stable; Clark, however, renamed it the Model Barn to symbolize its intended role as a template for modern agriculture in Japan (6-3). The curriculum that Clark created for SAC embodied the spirit of the Morrill Act, emphasizing practical education and military training, but not at the expense of more scholarly pursuits.20 In the school’s early years, the courses included geometry, English, German, elocution, and political economy, along with drainage and irrigation, manures and crop rotation, vegetable pathology, stock farming, and veterinary science. Notably, students also took classes titled “History of Colonization” and “Political History of Europe” (see Nitobe 1893, 35–42, for a complete list of courses). Natural history, and its mode of scientific nature observation, was also a critical part of the curriculum. Faculty took students on scientific expeditions around Hokkaido to collect specimens and to teach the young Japanese to see the world through the lens of natural resources management. During its second year of operation, the school added a natural history museum so that its students could more easily make comparisons by viewing “the natural history of Japan and its productive resources, together with such specimens as may be obtained from abroad by purchase or exchange” (Sapporo Agricultural College 1878, 2; Yaguchi 2002, 104).
At SAC, Clark collaborated with Japanese students to create a school with much more ambitious goals than simple instruction in the cultivation of crops, the proper siting of mines, and the preservation of botanical specimens. Through the study of agricultural practices and natural resource management, he sought to cultivate modern male subjectivities. The goal of the school was to create an improved breed of men, alongside better breeds of wheat and horses; the school wanted to make men who could become leaders of a societal shape-shifting, an agricultural and industrial revolution in the service of modern nation-building. According to the school’s second annual report, in an introductory letter penned by then college president William Wheeler to Kuroda Kiyotaka, the head of the Kaitakushi, Japan would need its own legions of “agricultural and industrial exhorters” to “induce” common farmers to accept the “privileges” of modern agriculture, to make them “understand, or to have faith, that their present condition and that of the country could be made better through such radical innovations” (Sapporo Agricultural College 1878, 19). As Wheeler continued, “To furnish men for missions of this nature should be considered one of the first objectives of the Agricultural College” (20).
Sapporo Agricultural College Model Dairy Barn, located on the campus of what is now Hokkaido University. Completed in 1877, the barn was inspired by a similar structure at Massachusetts Agricultural College. Photo by author.
Clark and later staff made self-cultivation and moral education core educational goals. To spread the gospel of modernity, SAC students were to first inhabit its subjectivities themselves. They were to develop what the school called “frontier spirit.” Although SAC’s moral education was not reducible to religion, it certainly included sizable doses of it. When Clark ran the school, every morning before lecture he led the students in a hymn, a scripture reading, and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. With Clark’s encouragement, the entire first-year class signed his “Covent of the Believers in Jesus,” converting to Christianity, and other SAC students reportedly practiced worship forms in their limited spare time: “The boys in [a second-year student’s] group took turns as a ‘pastor’ and rotated the meetings among their college dorm rooms. Whoever was the minister for the week brought in an empty flour barrel to serve as a pulpit, which was draped in a blanket. Blankets were laid on the floor for the ‘congregation’ while the appointed minister sat in the sole stool” (Czerwien 2011, 29, 36).
SAC Christianity was eclectic and predominately lay-led. One student wrote that “it was interesting [to us] because it was a practical religion, unlike that taught by ordinary missionaries. It was religion without the odor of religion” (Maki [1996] 2002, 178). Yet at the same time, SAC Christianity was deeply Protestant in its ability to link self-cultivation to national development and capitalist-oriented progress. Protestant Christianity provided important frameworks for comparison-making in part due to its focus on “improvement.” For the Americans in Sapporo, modernizing one’s soul was inseparable from—and critical to—improving one’s country.21 Understanding what “improvement” might be and whether or not one had accomplished it was seen as an inherently comparative task, with American Protestant Christian teaching offering up frameworks of heathen/Christian and backward/modern alongside ideal models, ranging from Jesus to mechanized farmsteads. The SAC instructors, New Englanders steeped in liberal education, believed that the students needed to be inculcated with desire, with yearnings for continual improvement at the scale of both the self and nation. When Clark was departing Sapporo at the end of his tenure at SAC, he reportedly shouted his most important advice to his students as he trotted away on horse: “Boys, be ambitious!” More than a century later, the phrase continues to be well known throughout Japan and was prominently featured in a mobile-phone advertisement that played incessantly on television in the late 2000s, when I was studying and researching in Japan. SAC instructors, including Clark, felt that such subject formation required far more than “book learning.” Students were required to take a course called “Manual Labor,” to perform gymnastics, and to regularly engage in hands-on activities. SAC also used school meals to craft students who would be at home with one foot in the East and one in the West. In addition to Japanese-style rice-based meals, the students were introduced to Western-style staples, such as chicken, venison, coffee, bread, butter, and ice cream, served on flat plates.22
In total, such practices appear to have had their intended effects. By 1898, when a labor activist wrote the following words, SAC and its graduates had already begun to draw attention in Japan:
It is the only college in Japan that has the so-called ‘college spirit’ which has been moulding the character of students ever since the distinctive impression made upon the college by the first Pres. W.S. Clark. The college is noted for making men though she has not neglected making scholars. Sons of the college are conspicuous figures everywhere throughout the Empire. (Sen, quoted in Willcock 2000, 991)
Although the school was located on the margin of Japan, it was one of the fledgling nation’s most important nineteenth-century institutions of higher education, and its early graduates joined Japan’s first generation of cosmopolitan gentlemen.23 As a result of their Western educations, the early cohorts of SAC students became unusually skilled in various comparative practices and were strongly represented within an emerging group of Japanese cosmopolitans. They became Japan’s translators, negotiating across languages and concepts. They went on to earn advanced degrees from top institutions in the United States and Europe, including Harvard, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins. They became diplomats and statesmen. One rose to the position of prime minster, another to that of under secretary-general of the League of Nations. While citing knowledge they gained in Sapporo, they guided Japan’s colonization of Taiwan and Korea, suggesting plans for their agricultural development. One became the chancellor of Tokyo University, while many others also took up teaching, fulfilling SAC’s dream that they would spread new knowledge and a new spirit across Japan (for all these examples, see Willcock 2000, 1016). About 40 percent of the students who graduated between 1880 and 1895 became teachers “for a substantial part of their working lives” (1016). Some become prominent Christians, starting a church in Sapporo and a small religious movement in mainland Japan. They introduced Nathaniel Hawthorne to Japan, developed a Shakespearean theater, authored bilingual dictionaries, established a fine arts school, founded English language newspapers, and published a Japanese magazine called English Youth (1015).
Yet as they became citizens of the world, the school’s graduates did not neglect Hokkaido, enacting their new transnational philosophies on the island’s landscapes. During the school’s early days, students were required to sign a pledge committing themselves to serve the Kaitakushi in its efforts to develop the island: “After graduation I will become a citizen of Hokkaido and will serve in the Colonial Department for five years upon the same terms as other officers of similar rank” (Dudden 2005, 10–11; Sapporo Agricultural College 1878, 94). Although the public-service requirement was soon dropped, more than a third of the school’s pre-1900 alumni remained in Hokkaido permanently, becoming the leaders of its businesses and institutions. “The Society of the Advancement of Agriculture, the Fishery Association, the Natural Science Society, a body called the Friends of Learning, the Pomological Society, the Economic Club, the Young Men’s Christian Association, the Temperance Society, the Silk Culture Association, and many other minor organizations all count among their most active members and promoters the graduates of the College” (Nitobe 1893, 30). Although the American advisors are often given much of the credit for the island’s colonization, the SAC graduates were the ones who more substantially transformed Hokkaido. The logics and practices they preached and performed set off a cascade of landscape changes. They drained the marshlands, converting them to agricultural land. They cut forests and processed wood products. They built coal and gold mines. With their influence, from 1869 to 1912, Hokkaido’s population increased from about fifty-eight thousand to 1.7 million (Ivings and Qiu 2019, 291).24 Throughout the twentieth century, the island’s development continued on a relatively consistent path of agricultural intensification, natural resource exploitation, and industrialization, despite the vast changes and turbulence of war and, later, of postwar growth—with Hokkaido’s landscapes straining under the changes.
COMPARING SALMON
While agriculture was an important focal point, the colonization of Hokkaido was more than a terrestrial process. It marked the transformation of rivers, oceans, and fish as much as it did the transformation of lands. Although many of the Kaitakushi’s projects focused on establishing scientific agriculture in Hokkaido, colonial administrators did not overlook the direct modernization of its seas. From the beginning, fisheries were considered to be one of Hokkaido’s most valuable assets. Hokkaido’s fecund fishing grounds were what initially drew ethnic Japanese interest in the island, and in 1891, after more than two decades of state agrarian encouragement, more than 70 percent of the island’s population still worked in fishing-related employment (Irish 2009, 132).25 While the American advisors who arrived in Hokkaido tended to initiate a more land-oriented colonization, Japanese officials, who were not about to neglect the fisheries that had long been the region’s economic mainstay, put substantial effort into their development.
For hundreds of years prior to the Meiji Restoration, ethnic Japanese people consumed sizable quantities of Hokkaido’s salmon and herring, first by trading with the region’s Indigenous Ainu people and later by forcing Ainu to labor for Japanese fishing firms. During the Meiji period, however, colonial administrators began to see Hokkaido’s seafood as a potentially lucrative export in addition to a domestic foodstuff. By the mid-1870s, Hokkaido bureaucrats expressed a strong interest in establishing a canned salmon industry. Only a decade earlier, in 1864, two fishermen from Maine, the Hume brothers, became the first people to try to can Pacific salmon. The men had moved to California as 49ers, but when they did not strike gold, they turned to silvery fish. They established an experimental cannery along the banks of the Sacramento River and began packing salmon into handmade metal tins. Their first products were such a success that they decided to relocate to a location with larger salmon runs and better possibilities for expansion: the lower Columbia River, along the border of Oregon and Washington State. In 1866, the Hume brothers built a small cannery at Eagle Cliff, Washington, near the mouth of the Columbia. In their first year, they sold only four thousand cases, but in their second year, their sales more than quadrupled, to eighteen thousand cases. This success was a marked change from pre-canning attempts at commercialization. From the 1830s to the 1850s, the river’s immense salmon runs captured the attention of white explorers and businessmen, who tried packing the fish in salt and brine. Such methods, however, failed to turn a profit, because too much of the salmon spoiled en route to major markets along the US East Coast. Canning technology, however, created new trade routes by suspending time (Naylor 2000). With salmon safely preserved in metal vessels, Columbia River fish could be shipped to markets anywhere in the world. Customs records from 1873 show that Columbia River salmon were already being directly exported to England, China, and Australia, and by 1875, Astoria, a port city at the river’s mouth, had become the center of a global canned seafood industry with twenty-four foreign and domestic ships taking on cargoes of canned salmon. In this newly transnational form, the industry rapidly grew; in 1873, there were eight canneries dotting the banks of the lower Columbia, yet only ten years later, the number had increased to thirty-nine (Penner 2005, 10; Tetlow and Barbey 1990, 5, 6, 8).
The Columbia River salmon industry created a buzz among entrepreneurs on multiple continents.26 When Hokkaido administrators heard about it, they thought that they might be able to establish something similar in northern Japan. Snippets of correspondence from 1876 and 1877 indicate that the Kaitakushi were beginning to think about the potential export value of their salmon. Japanese government officials yearned for a favorable balance of trade in order to rapidly acquire foreign currency. In addition to developing an export-oriented silk industry, Japanese government officials began to consider the possibilities embodied in fish. In late 1876, the Kaitakushi began sending samples of salmon—both smoked and experimentally canned—to foreign merchants and diplomats for evaluation. One Yokohama-based merchant named J. D. Carroll was optimistic enough about the test products he received that he sent a reply to the Kaitakushi in January 1877, reporting that he found their tinned salmon to be “fine” and their smoked salmon to be “excellent” (Carroll 1877). He thought the products might do well if exported to China and offered to do business with the Kaitakushi in the future. The Kaitakushi, however, had more high-prestige markets in mind. They sent several samples of smoked salmon to US consular staff along with a letter asking the Americans to report back on “how it suits your American taste” (Yasuda 1876). In addition, they wrote a memo to William Clark asking what part of the United States he thought might provide the most promising market for Hokkaido salmon (Kuroda 1877a). But many Americans and Europeans were less than enthusiastic about how Hokkaido salmon would fare in their stores. The Tokyo-based representative of a London-based trading firm reported mixed reviews of the first batch of Hokkaido salmon. The British thought that the smoked salmon was decent, but “continental” tasters found it “mouldy and greasy” (Ahrens 1877b). No one liked the canned fish: “As to the sample of tinned salmon sent, the reports both from London and the Continent are unsatisfactory. The salmon on arrival were found broken into small pieces and the color had turned bad and it could not be brought into competition with the preserved salmon from America” (Ahrens 1877b, 2).
Undaunted, the Kaitakushi moved forward with their plans to commercially produce and export canned salmon. In June 1877, Kuroda asked Capron to “employ one practical man well acquainted with the precepts of making canned salmon etc for term of six months” (Kuroda 1877b). Capron secured the services of Ulysses S. Treat, a cannery man from Maine, who arrived in Hokkaido later that same year along with an assistant named T. S. Sweat (Cwiertka 2006, 62). When he saw Hokkaido’s fall run of fish, Treat was enthusiastic about their commercial potential, boasting that “the salmon fishery in the Ishikari River is one of the largest yet known. It is stated that, in some seasons the catch amount is about 1,800,000 fish” (Treat 1878). At the Kaitakushi’s request, Treat oversaw the construction of a cannery near the mouth of the Ishikari River and provided instruction in canning techniques. Under his direction, the cannery produced 12,092 two-pound cans of salmon in its first year, in addition to a few cans of salmon eggs, some barrels of pickled salmon, and a bit of smoked fish (Treat 1878).27
Aiming to impress Europeans and Americans, the Ishikari factory wrapped these first cans in bright red bilingual labels, similar to those in use on the Columbia River, with directions for use in both English and Japanese (see photos below). The kanji characters on the label may have added an alluring Oriental mystique for overseas audiences, but they served little practical function.
Although Japanese people ate sizable amounts of fresh and dried fish, Hokkaido canned salmon were never intended for domestic markets. They were too expensive for Japanese consumers and rather unappealing to Japanese palates.28 Instead, the Kaitakushi consistently courted European tastes, seeking feedback on their evolving product from white foreigners. A Kaitakushi official sent some of the 1877 salmon to the Japanese Consulate office in Marseille, France, with a request “to distribute the salmon to some Europeans, who are doing the business with, and give me their opinions as well as your own of its quality and also furnish me the information of its sale in Europe, for we have the intention to promote this enterprise to a great extent” (Yasuda 1878). Yet this new batch of Hokkaido salmon still failed to match the flavors and textures for which European taste buds yearned. One French trader could find nothing he liked about Hokkaido fish. The salmon “was not a first class fresh” fish, the “boiling was too long,” and the season in which the fish was prepared was likely “not proper” (Freres 1878). In his opinion, even the size and shape of the tins was wrong. The Dutch ambassador to Japan also discouraged the Kaitakushi from trying to sell their fish in Europe, advising that the fish would be likely to find “a better and more profitable market in British India and Java” (Bauduin 1879). A British merchant was impressed by Japanese canning technique but was disappointed by the flavor, texture, and color of the Kaitakushi’s product:
The fish prepared with Japanese salt has a peculiar flavor, which is probably due to that kind of salt. We doubt if this flavor would be liked in Europe.… The fish in all the cans, although perfectly preserved was of a very light colour, and in our judgment too dry and tough in texture to be ranked as equal to the Oregon Salmon.… We think that the people of Europe, who have become accustomed to the appearance and taste of the Oregon Salmon, would not consider the Hokkaido fish as equal to it either in quality or value. The Hokkaido Salmon is no doubt very good food, but the Oregon fish would probably be much preferred, and it might be difficult, at least in the beginning, to introduce, or to obtain a fair price for, the Japanese product.… We would suggest that you should yourself make a comparison between the Oregon and the Hokkaido fish, remembering that the toughness or firmness (hardness) of fibre which in Japan is considered a merit in fish, is not so considered in foreign countries, though of course the tenderness of fibre which is preferred there must not degenerate into softness or rottenness.… We regret not being able to give you a more encouraging report on your samples, the packing of which seems quite faultless.29 (Walsh 1877)
Columbia River salmon canning label, 1881. Courtesy of the Oregon State Archives.
Like this British merchant, most of the foreigners who sampled Hokkaido salmon compared it immediately with the Columbia River fish that were already gaining international popularity. They urged the Kaitakushi to learn to make the same comparison. A representative from a London trading firm described how salmon were canned in Oregon and recommended that the Japanese obtain “practical experience” in how salmon canning was performed there (Ahrens 1877a).
William Clark also felt that the Hokkaido salmon industry needed to learn from the Columbia River. He wrote letters to the Kaitakushi about the successes of Oregon canneries: “The total amount taken at Astoria and vicinity is estimated at 40,000,000 pounds annually. 25,000,000 cans weighing one pound and a quarter each were sold for about $3,000,000 in 1876. 7,920,000 cans were sent to England. The demand for the salmon is so active that it is all sold before the fish are caught” (Clark 1877a). Clark convinced the Hokkaido officials to pay him 250 gold yen to travel to Oregon and prepare a report for the Kaitakushi on its salmon industry. In summer 1877, when he returned to the United States, Clark made a beeline to Astoria, Oregon, where he drafted a thirteen-page report on the Columbia River salmon harvest and the region’s canneries. He provided a comprehensive overview of an array of topics: gillnet fishing methods, tin can production, practices for killing and bleeding fish, temperatures and diameter of boilers, how to check for defective cans, and how to pack salmon in wood crates. He also wrote about the organization of labor, including the productivity of cannery shift workers and the system through which canneries leased boats and nets to fishermen who lacked the capital to buy them (Clark 1877b). Clark thought that Hokkaido canneries, like those of the Columbia River, would have to seek out British markets: “England takes nearly one third of the [Columbia River] canned salmon and Australia a considerable quantity. Japanese salmon would probably have to seek a market in England or some of her colonies. Only English laborers will buy such expensive food. There can be little doubt however that a good article can be sold at a remunerative price in some part of the wide world.”30
Soon, Hokkaido’s canned salmon did indeed successfully compete with salmon from the US West Coast. By 1910, Japan’s salmon industry had taken off, fueled by fish from both Hokkaido and the new northern territories acquired during the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War. Canning companies quickly expanded into Sakhalin, the Kurils, and even mainland Kamchatka, where at the time, Japan had treaty rights to establish salmon fishing colonies.31 By 1932, there were ten canneries on Hokkaido and thirty-three more in the Kurils, Sakhalin, and Kamchatka (CFAJ 1934, 25–27). Approximately 80 percent of Japanese-produced canned salmon was exported, and of this exported fish, about 80 percent was bound for England, with the remainder headed to France, Holland, Belgium, and South Africa (31–32). Throughout the early twentieth century, the Canned Foods Association of Japan actively marketed canned salmon products, sending its managing director on an extensive promotional tour of Africa, Europe, and the Balkans in 1930 (102). In 1934, the organization was pleased to report steady increases in exports, “indicative of the fact that Japanese canned salmon has maintained its good reputation in foreign lands” (33). The fish had undoubtedly become “the backbone of the canning industry in Japan” (4).
Hokkaido salmon canning label, 1877. Courtesy of the Archives of Hokkaido.
HATCHERY HISTORY
Modernizing fish, however, meant more than putting them into cans. It also entailed efforts to rationalize nature and increase its productivity. While at the helm of the Sapporo Agricultural College, William Clark suggested that Hokkaido improve its salmon species in the same manner as its horses and cattle: by replacing the weak Japanese stocks with bigger Western versions. He called for
the introduction into the Ishikari River of the Salmo Salar or large salmon of Europe and America. This species not only grows to a much larger size that the salmon now frequenting Hokkaido, but its flesh is much firmer and better adapted to canning. There would seem to be no special difficulty in bringing the impregnated eggs from the Sacramento River in California and hatching them in the waters of the Ishikari, from which this most valuable fish could then be distributed to all parts of the Empire where the conditions are suitable for its growth. (Clark 1877a, 2)
Although they did not follow such advice to its letter, the Kaitakushi indeed took suggestions about fish culture seriously. In 1877, the same year that Hokkaido officials instructed Ulysses Treat to establish Japan’s first salmon cannery, they also authorized him to conduct the island’s first salmon hatching experiments. Treat had boasted that fish hatcheries were an integral part of the cannery complex; if hatcheries were properly established, he said, there would “be no doubt of success” for the entire industry. Hatcheries were both the modern way and the American way:
Millions of salmon eggs are thus hatched in America, every year, and the benefits derived from the operation are already making themselves manifest, not only in the increasing numbers of fish to be found in places where salmon were formerly abundant and from which they have been driven by excessive fishing, but in their appearance in places where they have previously been wholly unknown. (Treat 1878)
By the late 1870s, Treat was likely preaching to the converted. Japan had a long history of fish culture efforts, and in the Meiji moment, the country hardly needed to be convinced of its potential benefits. Since the 1750s, samurai had been building spawning channels and altering Honshu rivers to boost salmon reproduction (Kobayashi 1980, 96), and by the Meiji era, members of the Japanese government were already enthusiastic about more active and interventionist approaches to fish cultivation. In 1873, several exhibitions at the Vienna World Exposition had caught the eye of a Japanese official in attendance. One was the Australian delegation’s hatchery exhibit. It explained how beginning in 1864, salmon and trout eggs had been successfully shipped from England to Tasmania, where they had been hatched and released into Australian rivers that had never before borne salmon. This report of successful of salmon propagation captivated the Japanese official, but from the information provided in the exhibit, he could not quite understand the exact techniques.32
While fish culture was not itself novel to Japan, large-scale salmon production practices emerged from a variety of new assemblages. The Sapporo Agricultural College played a primary role in the building of the island’s modern fisheries, just as it did for its land-based agriculture. From 1878 to 1887, John Cutter, a Massachusetts doctor, taught a variety of courses at SAC, including zoology, veterinary medicine, and fisheries sciences (Minamoto 1993, 27). Although there was no fisheries department during SAC’s first decade, the school still inspired some of its earliest students to think about the scientific management of the seas. Uchimura Kanzō, a member of the second graduating class, essentially majored in fisheries and gave a graduation speech titled “Fisheries Is One of the Sciences” (Matsuda 2002, 407). The fisheries curriculum grew quickly; courses in ichthyology and fishing gear and methods were added in 1884, a class in aquaculture in 1887, and another in fisheries science in 1889 (407). In 1906, the school formalized its commitment to training managers of the sea by creating a separate Department of Fisheries. Ultimately, the college dominated fisheries education in Japan for more than a century. Until 1987, Hokkaido University (SAC’s successor) offered the only fisheries science doctoral program in Japan (408).
As was the case with agricultural development, SAC graduates pioneered fish cultivation practices in Hokkaido. Ito Kazutaka, a member of SAC’s first graduating class, revolutionized Hokkaido’s fisheries by instituting the salmon hatchery system that remains the backbone of today’s salmon industry.33 Throughout his life, Ito hewed to a path typical of SAC graduates: he converted to Christianity, helped found a church, and became vice president of the Japan Temperance Union. But in contrast to many of the other graduates, he sought to ranch Hokkaido’s seas rather than till its soils. After his graduation from SAC, Ito accepted a post with the Kaitakushi to fulfill the school’s government-service requirement, and Ito, like many of his classmates, turned this mandatory service into a permanent career as a public official. When the Kaitakushi was converted into a prefectural government, Ito became the head of Hokkaido’s first prefectural fisheries department (suisan kachō). In 1886, at the request of the Japanese government, he traveled to North America to study US and Canadian fisheries practices, with the aim of improving those of Japan’s north. During a twelve-month whirlwind tour, Ito traversed the continent, visiting more than fifteen states and provinces. He met with US officials in Washington, DC, toured New York City’s Fulton Fish Market, visited fish processing plants in Rhode Island, and made careful observations of New England’s cod fishery.34
Ito’s most important activities were centered on salmon. He traveled to Bucksport, Maine, to document the practices of a brand-new institution: the salmon hatchery. Fish culture there, like everywhere in the United States, was still in its infancy. Maine’s inaugural salmon hatchery was not constructed until 1871, with the Bucksport facility following a year later. This was one of the few places where Ito could observe such novel practices of producing fish. When Ito was touring the continent in 1886, it would have been impossible for him to visit a Columbia River hatchery, for a simple reason: salmon hatcheries had yet to take root in the Pacific salmon heartland. Although the US Fish Commission had established one small hatchery on Oregon’s Clackamas River in 1877, the facility had closed in 1881 from lack of funding and was not reopened until 1888 (Northwest Power and Conservation Council n.d.).
Yet while the East Coast was advanced in terms of hatcheries, the West Coast was the world leader in canneries. So after his visit to Maine, Ito traveled by train first to British Columbia’s Fraser River, then to the mouth of the Columbia. He timed his trip perfectly, arriving on the West Coast in mid-September, when the region’s rivers swarmed with salmon. As a guest of an Oregon fishery official, Ito spent a week observing various parts of the mainstem Columbia River. In the river’s middle reaches, he watched American Indians harvest salmon, while near its mouth, he surveyed commercial fishing techniques and toured a cannery. By the time Ito returned to Hokkaido, his notebooks were filled with meticulous and detailed line drawings of hatchery incubators, his mind racing with new ideas. Modern fisheries science was still so embryonic in North American that it stood in sharp contrast to agricultural pursuits, where Hokkaido tended to appear “behind” the West. Ito’s job was not to help Hokkaido “catch up”; it was to help the island join in—and perhaps even lead—the mounting wave of late nineteenth-century fish culture. In 1888, the same year that the first Columbia River hatchery reopened, Ito established Hokkaido’s Chitose Central Salmon Hatchery, modeled after Maine’s Bucksport facility (Kaeriyama 1989, 627). As Ito continued to experiment with fish cultivation and expand Hokkaido’s hatchery system, he was, if anything, ahead of the curve. With his inspiration, Hokkaido’s fish cultivation program grew to a network of fifty hatcheries in twenty years, a pace faster than that found along the US West Coast (Kobayashi 1980, 97).
Ito was clearly not an imitator but an innovator. For example, he combined the design of a fish wheel that he saw on the Columbia River with Japanese weir technology to create a new method for harvesting fish hatchery brood stock.35 Ito seems to have strongly felt that such modernization and innovation required comparative thinking. He founded the Hokusui Kyōkai, a fisheries society that shared information about evolving technologies. On his return, the group published Ito’s report from his North American fisheries study tour, making it widely available to those in the industry. As a result of his technical innovations and dissemination efforts, Ito was—and still is—hailed as the father of modern fisheries in Hokkaido.
Yet the development of modern fisheries science and managerial control in Hokkaido, as in other sites around the world, was far from a story of unambiguous success. Hatcheries were quite intrusive; workers would typically build weirs that spanned rivers bank to bank, funneling all migrating salmon into holding pens for hatchery use. The method, which blocked most salmon from swimming upstream and spawning on their own, essentially converted a given river’s salmon from natural spawning to an allegedly superior mode of reproduction. Salmon hatcheries allowed Hokkaido’s fisheries managers to feel modern, but they did little to boost salmon populations. Although hatcheries released large numbers of juvenile fish, most of the hatchery smolts are thought to have died soon after they reached the ocean, as salmon harvest numbers showed no increases as a result of early hatchery efforts. Ito’s Chitose hatchery and other Hokkaido facilities diligently researched salmon biology, but they still had much to learn. Not knowing how to nourish growing salmon, they elected not to feed them; such starving and weakened hatchery youngsters likely served as easy prey for other aquatic organisms. Yet while Hokkaido’s hatcheries did not increase adult fish numbers, they were still heralded as a great technological achievement. Every spring, visitors flocked to the grounds of Chitose Central Hatchery to picnic under the cherry trees that had been planted around the salmon ponds while celebrating the triumph of modern applied science. Multiple times, members of the Japanese royal family inspected the island’s hatcheries, recognizing the facilities’ work as an important national contribution.
However, hatcheries served Japanese state interests far better than salmon populations. From 1879 to 1893, the average catch of Hokkaido salmon was about seven million fish, with a peak of eleven million fish in 1889. Hatcheries seemed to be the perfect tool to supplement salmon populations subject to such intense fishing pressures, but they could not sustain such catches. Hokkaido’s salmon stocks crashed. Despite increasing hatchery efforts, harvests hovered around three million fish per year from 1900 to 1970, less than a third of their late nineteenth-century levels (92). The problem was not that the Hokkaido fisheries managers were inept or improperly educated. Their results were no worse than those of US or Canadian fisheries professionals. Across the North Pacific, the hatchery technologies worked well to produce a modern material aesthetic but poorly to produce fish. Simultaneously, the suite of other frontier-making practices made it difficult to maintain salmon habitat in Hokkaido, as well as elsewhere around the Pacific Rim. The types of landscape modification needed to promote modern agricultural production completely altered the ecosystems with which salmon are intertwined. Within a few decades, dams, water diversions, industrial effluent, and sewage from urban areas rendered most of Hokkaido’s major rivers unsuitable for natural salmon spawning. Industrial farm development denuded the forested stream banks that once provided shade to keep waters at the cool temperatures that young salmon require. Hokkaido developers’ efforts to dike and drain riverine wetlands to prevent flooding and expand the land available for agriculture production virtually eliminated juvenile fish feeding areas, turning once meandering rivers into concrete ditches. Riverbed gravel dredging and pollution from paper mills and starch plants only added insult to other injuries. In short, by the early 1900s, Hokkaido’s salmon rivers and their fish populations barely resembled those of a century earlier (Kobayashi 1980, 92–97).
ACCRETED COMPARISONS
Hokkaido colonial officials had immediately grasped that comparisons were technologies of landscape-making that could be harnessed for national and imperial development. For them, the materiality of comparative practices was self-evident; their enactments required the physical movement of bodies and technologies. Throughout the Meiji period and into the Taisho, Japanese exchange students, American and Danish advisors, cattle and plant breeds, and hatchery blueprints traveled in uneven flows in the process of bringing comparisons into being.
In Hokkaido, these comparisons were never reducible to “copying.” Though Japanese officials used the American frontier as an example, they did not mindlessly reproduce its practices. Instead, they wanted to use comparisons with it to generate new configurations of humans and nonhumans in Japan—to use the power of comparison to create forms that would be at once legibly modern and distinctly Japanese. Although comparisons with the American West mattered greatly in Hokkaido’s Meiji era development, the island was made through processes of creative and generative cosmopolitan thinking rather than through a single dyadic comparison. Because they wanted to make the island a symbol of modernization (kindaika) within projects of Japanese nation-making, officials were simultaneously making material comparisons between Hokkaido and Honshu, as well as between Hokkaido and Euro-America. The comparative aesthetic that has developed in Hokkaido—the mode of making similarity and difference—has not evolved from a lone binary comparison but through the negotiation of multiple comparisons at once.
The material legacies of these multiple comparisons sometimes unsettle visitors and residents. For many visitors and residents, Hokkaido feels uncannily “Japanese” and “un-Japanese” at the same time. Sometimes the uncanniness lies in small details like the decorative Japanese-Victorian moldings that linger under the eaves of Hakodate’s buildings (Finn 1995). Sometimes it flashes up on a computer screen, as when one views the website of Hokkaido University, the direct descendent of Sapporo Agricultural College, which continues to cite “frontier spirit” as the first of its four basic educational philosophies. Still other times, it appears when one encounters the size and design of Hokkaido’s farms, which are on average ten times that of mainland Japan and whose outbuildings more often resemble US midwestern-style barns and silos than Edo era stone storehouses (Iwama 2009, 2–9). One travel writer tried to explain this common sensation through comparisons with foreign lands: “In many ways, Hokkaido is the least ‘Japanese’ of all the main islands. It’s Texas and Alaska rolled into one. It’s Siberia. Switzerland. The last frontier and the end of Japan” (Ferguson 1998, 365). Many mainland Japanese and Hokkaido residents feel that the people who live in the north also march to the beat of a different drum; they are at once Japanese and different. In a newspaper article about Hokkaido, a Honshu man described northerners as people who live by different social codes: “When it comes to personal relationships [Hokkaido residents] are too easygoing. They’re not interested in all the intricacies of status and hierarchy and just exactly how A relates to B. Without knowing these things, you just can’t do business in Japan, and that’s why Hokkaidoans lose out to mainlanders all the time” (Oka 1981). Such sentiments are widespread and often directly attributed to the island’s frontier history, often in ways that erase Ainu people and celebrate settler colonialism. According to an article published in a peer-reviewed research journal, Hokkaido’s “frontier spirit” has made the island’s contemporary inhabitants more “psychologically” similar to Americans than to mainland Japanese (Kitayama et al. 2006).
As many people in Hokkaido will tell you, the island’s frontier history has been embedded into it in ways that continue to shape the island’s inhabitants, both human and nonhuman. Indeed, in a very literal way, places like the American West and the Columbia River are not external to Hokkaido but already materially within it. This is because practices of comparison have pulled pieces of these other landscapes into those of Hokkaido. It is productive to understand this island’s landscapes—as well as, perhaps, many others—as sedimented layers of cross-cultural comparisons. When we take seriously such an idea, it requires that we study landscapes differently. It demands that we do not take landscapes as either isolated patches or “local” places. Rather, we must explore how landscapes are formed in relation to one another, often across large geographical spaces. We must ask how landscapes are tied together not only by commodity chains and resource extraction but also through heterogeneous practices of comparison. We must then trace the specificities of those comparative practices, querying how they may have made their way into the tissues of the world, into such materials as metal, plant fiber, and flesh. To examine how comparisons are embedded in Hokkaido’s landscapes is to see an ostensibly “Japanese” landscape as itself cosmopolitan, as a place that is made by a set of comparative encounters in which comparisons continually bring other landscapes and cultures inside Hokkaido. This is a different sense of place, one that assumes that more-than-human landscapes emerge from routes as much as roots (Clifford 1997).