Coda
Embodied Comparisons beyond Japan
ON a late autumn day, I watch as two fisheries biologists in heavy-duty vinyl-coated rain gear collect decomposing salmon bodies along a small Columbia River tributary lined with alders. They haul the fish carcasses to a wooden worktable set up beneath the corrugated metal roof of a two-sided shed. With a sharp bread knife, one of the biologists saws vertically into the head of one of the salmon, about an inch behind its eyes. The fish’s body is spotted with fungus, and it smells unmistakably of rotting flesh. The salmon is one of many who have returned to the creek to spawn, dying shortly after laying their eggs or releasing their sperm. One of the biologists cracks the head of the salmon over the edge of the table, peering into the brain cavity exposed by his cut. Swapping the knife for a pair of tweezers, he gently reaches into the lower part of the brain cavity and removes two soft sacs. Inside each is a small white stone: an otolith, or fish ear bone.1 After wiping them on a paper towel, the biologist places them into small, carefully labeled vials that will be shipped to a university lab. He repeats the process again with another fish, and this time I ask if I can hold one of the bones, which reminds me of a sliver of broken seashell.
The tiny otolith that I cradle in my palm illustrates how comparisons literally matter. It shows how practices of comparative landscape-making find their way into the material bodies of fish. Composed of calcium carbonate and trace minerals deposited into a protein matrix, this otolith helped its fish to “hear.” Although fish do not have eardrums, their otoliths work similarly to those in humans, turning sounds and spatial orientations into neural impulses as these small bones bump up against the hair cells inside cochlea. Unlike human otoliths, however, salmon ear bones continue to enlarge throughout the life of the fish. Otoliths are a fish’s diary, accumulating like tree rings but at a faster rate. As a salmon grows, it lays down approximately one otolith band per day, and when examined in a laboratory, the width and chemical composition of these bands can provide a sense about different aspects of a fish’s life. The bands change depending on its diet, migration routes, and levels of stress.
Salmon otolith. Photograph by George Whitman and Kimberly Evans. Used with the permission of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis.
Forms of environmental management—including hatcheries, river alterations, and ocean fishing regimes—affect otolith deposition through the ways they alter the conditions of salmon, including what they eat, where they can hide, and the temperature of the waters in which they swim. Resulting changes in otolith patterns—like otoliths themselves—initially appear small. For example, a large number of salmon otoliths now display a “stress check,” a dark heavy band deposited on the day they are released from a hatchery, testifying to the metabolic shock of moving from a tank to a river; stream-born fish, in contrast, have no such mark. Furthermore, some hatcheries intentionally create unique patterns of marks on the otoliths of their fish by varying the water temperature during their egg stage, essentially creating an internal barcode for the fish that makes them identifiable when otoliths are used in research projects. The otolith patterns of salmon—both hatchery and non-hatchery—have also shifted in other ways. In some regions, they have fewer freshwater and brackish-water bands in comparison to those of their ancestors, as the salmon spend less time in river and estuary habitats that have become increasingly developed and barren, with less food and fewer hiding spots for young fish. These altered patterns and the fish histories they index become visible through forms of otolith analysis that are themselves comparative; at the same time, they lead us back to the comparisons of river industrialization and hatchery production.
Practices of comparison are among the fragmentary stories that otoliths inscribe. Via the thoroughly comparative practices of landscape-making, the forces that social scientists often term political economy—such as industrial fishing, nationalistic claims to ocean resources, and land-based capitalist developments that degrade fish spawning grounds—shape the metabolic lives of fish and are thus calcified into these bones inside their heads. At the same time, comparisons also seep into salmon in other ways. While scientists have found otoliths especially useful for studying certain changes in salmon lives, there are additional effects of comparative landscape-making projects that are more clearly visible in fish body shapes and sizes, the timing of salmon returns, the location of spawning, the population numbers of different salmon groups, and genes and gene expression.
Without attention to comparisons, we simply cannot understand the bodies and lives of Hokkaido salmon or the watersheds in which they spawn. Many times over, comparisons have shaped Japanese salmon and their watersheds by creating new relations. Each chapter in this book has shown us how comparisons produce practices that remake salmon bodies, populations, and metapopulation structures within and beyond Hokkaido. Attuned to comparisons, we noticed how those between Hokkaido and the American West compelled the introduction of specific kinds of hatchery techniques and the development of a form of scientific fisheries management that led to particular production practices in Japan. We saw how Japanese desires to create a postwar economy comparable to that of the United States, as well as Japanese comparative assessments of Latin America, aided the formation of the Chilean farmed salmon industry, an industry that in turn has completely reconfigured Chile’s ecologies. Back in Hokkaido, we observed how salmon populations were remade by the changes in global fish markets that comparisons between Japanese salmon and Chilean farmed fish engendered, and we traced how the island’s fish have been shaped by the management practices of Japanese fishing industry professionals committed to being “modern” rather than either “traditional” or “out of date.” Finally, we noted how comparisons that track through “wildness” and “indigeneity” have generated new conservation initiatives and fostered practices of river restoration. Because these kinds of comparative practices have caused such major changes in salmon morphology, genes, and population structures, noticing practices of comparison are an essential part of noticing Hokkaido salmon. By altering salmon worlds, comparisons shift the bodies and evolutionary trajectories of these fish. In the case of Hokkaido’s salmon, these comparisons have had such strong effects that it seems appropriate to think of these fish as creatures of comparison.2
COMPARISON IN AND FROM HOKKAIDO
This book has attempted to highlight the role that comparative practices play in landscape transformation, in an attempt to cultivate a genre of multispecies political economy that follows the effects of industrial processes and landscape changes into the tissues of other-than-human species. To do so, it has looked at situated practices of comparing in and with Japan. Comparison, as a phenomenon, is in no way unique to Japan; on the contrary, it is a nearly ubiquitous act. Yet practices of comparisons take on very different geometries and textures within particular webs of relations. This book’s aim has been to spark broad reflections about the role of comparisons in landscape-making by tracking the specific comparisons that have emerged with projects of making and contesting “modern Japan.” For hundreds of years before the Japanese settlement of Hokkaido, Ainu management practices were coeval with the region’s salmon. After 1869, however, its salmon were made Japanese, as they were pulled into new, explicit projects of state-making. Within this history, the evolutionary pressures on salmon become inseparable from nationalist modernization policies that were continually reaching out to places beyond Japan through acts of material comparison. The bodies of Japanese salmon, in the flesh, bring us into histories of comparative nation-making and landscape-making in an uneven world, serving as a reminder that geopolitics matter, literally, to the bones and tissues of other-than-human beings. Although it is rarely phrased in such ways, Hokkaido salmon genes are fundamentally shaped by nineteenth-century Japanese fears of Euro-American colonization and the colonization of Hokkaido that they enacted in response, as well as by the twentieth-century politico-economic dynamics of post–World War II high-seas salmon fisheries, Japanese development aid and supply chain management, and twenty-first-century transnational conversations around environmental conservation and Indigenous rights.
The terms through which geopolitical dynamics are expressed can often be problematic and ahistorical, with erroneous elisions between ethnicity, culture, and nation-state practices. In everyday encounters in Japan, comparisons between Japan and the West are frequent and frequently stereotypical. But this seemingly binary civilizational comparison is not as singular, generic, or categorically rigid as it might initially seem. While it is often invoked in sweeping terms, it is also iteratively brought into being together with comparisons among specific places. When we look at comparisons between Japan and the West in the flux of everyday life, we see that they at once emerge out of and are constantly interrupted by complex and multidirectional webs of comparative practices that draw in Hokkaido, the Columbia River’s salmon canneries, the tastes of English and French foreign service members, a river in southern Chile, and the many more sites that have appeared in this book. A Hokkaido salmon, then, is Japanese in the sense that it has been shaped by projects that intentionally sought to build a modern Japan, but that Japanese-ness is neither innate nor wholly located in Japan; instead, it is emergent out of transnational comparisons that have historical patterns but that are also contingent, creative, and heterodox.
BEYOND SALMON AND BEYOND JAPAN
Such phenomena are relevant beyond salmon and beyond Japan in many ways.3 Related comparative landscape-making dynamics are at play for many non-Western countries caught in the complex comparisons of modernity-making, as “specters of comparison” (to use Benedict Anderson’s [1998] phrase) are common to projects undertaken in the name of progress. Because the vast majority of development projects routinely swap models and envision futures through the presents of other places, similar strategies for considering comparison are likely relevant for exploring more-than-human relations in other parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But what about areas within Euro-America, within that which one might call the West? Are they, too, remade by comparisons, even if those comparisons are sometimes hidden or harder to see? If so, how?
I was at first startled by all of the overt comparisons I encountered in Hokkaido salmon management because they were so rare in the salmon worlds that I knew from living and working in the US Pacific Northwest. My own comparison between the Columbia River and Hokkaido compelled my attention to comparison in Japan. Yet it also made me curious about the seemly non-comparative nature of Columbia River salmon worlds. Were they really as un-comparative as I initially thought? Or was I just failing to notice the comparisons within them? The otoliths mentioned in the first pages of this coda were extracted from Columbia River fish. What comparisons, if any, had shaped their formation, along with the bodies and lives of the fish from which they had been extracted?
When nineteenth-century Japanese colonial officials compared Hokkaido and its salmon to those of the Columbia River, the comparisons were indeed largely one-way. In searching several of the important repositories for Columbia River fishing-related archives, I have found no evidence that American officials expressed any interest in learning about Hokkaido’s fisheries at that time. Neither have I found any US notes about the visits that Japanese officials and their emissaries made to Oregon and Washington as they developed Hokkaido’s salmon industry. Their curiosities were not the same. While Oriental art and lacquerware captured the imaginations of urban Euro-American elites who were tickled by oddities of those they framed as exotic, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century development projects of Japanese officials do not seem to have piqued the interests of the Americans seeking to develop the Columbia River region. Why was a visit from a Japanese official not seen as a noteworthy opportunity to learn about Japanese fisheries? And why, after all, were there no American missions to learn about fisheries in Hokkaido until the 1980s, when the state of Alaska wanted to know how Hokkaido’s fish hatcheries had come to so dramatically outperform theirs?
Perhaps the answer lies in the ways that the development of the American West has been fundamentally entangled in assertions of national non-comparability. National exceptionalism has a storied place in American thought; the United States was founded on claims of divine guidance and radical experimentation as the young country tried to position itself as a break with Europe, as different from its established ways.4 As (white) Americans have imagined their nation as one of incomparable greatness, US popular narratives have tended to suppress rather than celebrate the transnational comparisons that have been integral to the formation and development of the United States. But while they are typically absent from historical accounts, concrete comparative projects have indeed played key roles in shaping western American landscapes. For example, at the same time that the Hokkaido Colonization Commission was importing new species of plants and animals from the United States, the US Department of Agriculture was sending its own plant collecting expeditions to Asia (Chacko 2018). But in contrast to Hokkaido, where the histories of crop-plant introductions are widely known (albeit problematically framed within celebratory colonial narratives), the origins of crop plants naturalized to the United States have largely been erased.
Traces of comparisons, however, clearly remain, not only in landscapes but also in some archives. Despite the paucity of records in the Columbia River–Japan case, some nineteenth-century Americans did indeed record comparative modes of envisioning the American West. For example, George Perkins Marsh, an American diplomat who had spent time in the Ottoman Empire, saw the drylands of the American West in comparison with Arabian deserts. For Marsh, that comparison led him to strongly support US military efforts to deploy camels in an effort to remake American desert worlds. In an 1854 address to the Smithsonian, Marsh elaborated his comparative thoughts:
The habits of the Indians much resemble those of the nomadic Arabs and the introduction of the camel among them would modify their modes of life as much as the use of the horse has done. For a time, indeed, possession of this animal would only increase their powers of mischief; but it might in the long run provide the means of raising them to that state of semi-civilized life of which alone their native wastes seem susceptible. Products of the camel, with wool, skin and flesh, would prove of inestimable value to these tribes, which otherwise are likely to perish with the buffalo and other large game animals; and the profit of transportation across our inland desert might have the same effect in reclaiming these barbarians which it has had upon the Arabs of the Siniatic peninsula. (Marsh 1855, 120)
Marsh’s settler-colonial comparative practices at once resonate with those of late nineteenth-century Hokkaido officials and differ from them. Marsh, like Hokkaido officials, was comparing in the name of colonial practice—of violently destroying Indigenous lifeways and fostering economic development. But he was able to compare with a sense of surety that Hokkaido officials did not have. Marsh did not worry if the overall development and modernity of the American West would measure up to that of the Arab world. His comparisons were marked by the confidence of comparing from a transnationally recognized position of power. Beyond Euro-America, comparisons are more anxious as they are judged not only within the frame of one’s own nation-making but also by other more powerful nations. Such comparative unease does not in any way excuse or mitigate the violences of Hokkaido colonialism. Instead, attention to it is a tool for analyzing the specific ways its violences unfold.
Perhaps counterintuitively, attention to comparisons may be as important for understanding Columbia River salmon and their management as it is for Hokkaido salmon and theirs. For Japan, the challenge of capitalist modernity has been one of becoming comparable. In contrast, within US narratives, it has been framed as one of becoming incomparably great. Yet such assertions of incomparability are nonetheless simultaneously built out of, justified through, and challenged by everyday comparisons that reach across space and time. The Columbia River salmon canning industry was, of course, shaped by the rural men in coastal Scandinavia and Finland who heard about the comparatively more lucrative fisheries in the Columbia River and decided to emigrate. But it was also constructed from settler-colonial comparisons that justified usurpation of Indian fisheries, as well as from other racialized comparisons that justified the recruitment and second-class treatment of its Chinese contract laborers. Furthermore, as in Hokkaido, there were also counter-comparisons that challenged salmon industry practices, not only its racialized and gendered economies but also its environmental effects. In the case of US Pacific Northwest salmon, a 1921 article in a popular regional magazine, unconvinced by the alleged promise of hatcheries, was already comparing US fish to “the bison, the passenger pigeon, and the great auk” as other parts of the United States and North Atlantic worlds were seen as harbingers of the problems that industrial salmon fisheries were likely to create (Sunset Magazine 1921).
How is one to see the traces of comparisons that are often overlooked in nations that are still reluctant to be haunted? Other anthropologists and historians have begun to probe this question by tracing the practices of comparison within which US-based projects are iteratively made, alongside their elisions.5 Following their lead, if I were to do research in the Columbia River now, after my encounters with Japanese salmon, I would approach the question of how salmon are done there with a different sensibility. I would pay far more attention to the erasure of transnational connections, and I would not take the largely self-referential quality of doing Columbia River salmon at face value. Instead, I would try to notice the practices of exclusion through which the unmarked categories and ostensibly un-comparative worlds in the Columbia River are made, while querying how the US Pacific Northwest has been able to become such a seemingly insular salmon world. Part of this practice would also be to listen more closely for specters of comparison, asking how the salmon worlds of other places haunt those of the Columbia River basin. Although they are not made overt in everyday practices of doing salmon, within American hatcheries, restoration projects, and laboratories there are hints of hauntings that more attuned eyes and ears might catch and query: American scientists who dismiss Japanese work as irrelevant, Pacific Northwest tables filled with salmon from Chile, and hatchery salmon feed that contains protein from Peruvian anchovies.
Regardless of whether a context resembles Hokkaido or the Columbia River, attention to comparisons serves as an important hinge in the ways that it better enables social scientists to integrate research on nation-making and transnational encounters with that of multispecies and more-than-human scholarship. Comparisons, along with assertions of incomparability, warrant more attention as powerful but often overlooked landscape-making forces, ones that fundamentally transform the lives and bodies of other species. It is not enough to examine comparisons within human social registers. We must also follow them into more-than-human worlds.