Colonisation of Hokkaido
The colonisation of Hokkaido was the process from around the fifteenth century by which the Yamato Japanese took control of Hokkaido and subjugated and assimilated the indigenous Ainu people, which had developed from around the thirteenth century. The process of colonisation began with the trading of fish, furs, and silk between Japan and the Ainu. Despite rebellions against increasing Japanese influence in 1669 and in 1789, their control of the island steadily increased: by 1806, the Tokugawa shogunate directly controlled southern Hokkaido.
In 1869, just after the start of the Meiji era, a development commission was set up to encourage Yamato Japanese settlement on Hokkaido. Colonisation was seen as a solution to multiple problems: it would solve mass unemployment among the former samurai class, provide natural resources needed for industrialisation, ensure a defence against an expansionist Russian Empire, and increase Japan's prestige in the eyes of the West. American advisors were heavily involved in guiding and organising the process. The traditional Ainu subsistence lifestyle was replaced by large-scale farming and coal mining, with the native Ainu, along with political prisoners and indentured Koreans, women and children, forced to provide labour.
Colonisation dispossessed the native Ainu people of their lands and property. Widespread discrimination enforced against them, including their forced relocation into mountain areas and the prohibition of the use of the Ainu language, had the eventual aim of the extinction of Ainu culture and its replacement by Yamato Japanese culture. The process of colonisation and the resultant discrimination has been systematically denied or ignored by Japanese society.
Background
Kamakura period
From around the 13th century an identifiable Ainu culture developed from and replaced the previous Satsumon and Okhotsk cultures in Hokkaido. It was also during this period that economic contact between the Yamato of Honshū and Ainu of Hokkaido began. The Yamato viewed the Ainu as "barbarians", with the contemporaneous Japanese name for the island of Hokkaido, Ezochi, meaning either "land of the barbarians" or "the land for people who did not obey the government". The Ainu called the territory they inhabited Ainu Moshiri meaning "land of humans/land of the Ainu".Before the colonisation of Hokkaido, the Yamato and early Japanese polities took control of the region of northern Honshū inhabited by the Emishi people.
By the fifteenth century Yamato fortified trading settlements known as date had been established around the Oshima Peninsula in southern Hokkaido. In 1456, the first recorded instance of fighting between the Ainu and Yamato occurred, building into Koshamain's War in 1457, leading to the destruction of many of the trading settlements. Through the sixteenth century the Yamato engaged in a campaign of inviting Ainu leaders and elders to peace talks, at which the Ainu were ambushed and killed. During this time the Kakizaki family took a leading role in the Yamato settlers on southern Hokkaido, establishing a monopoly of trade with the Ainu.
Edo period
In 1599 the Kakizaki family took the name Matsumae. The Tokugawa shogunate officially granted the Matsumae clan exclusive rights to trade with the Ainu in the northern part of the island. Later, the Matsumae began to lease out trading rights to Yamato Japanese merchants, and contact between Yamato Japanese and Ainu became more extensive. Throughout this period, Ainu groups competed with each other to import goods from the Yamato Japanese, and epidemic diseases such as smallpox reduced the population.In 1635, Matsumae Kinhiro, the second daimyō of the Matsumae Domain in Hokkaido, sent Murakami Kamonzaemon, Sato Kamoemon, and Kakizaki Hiroshige on an expedition to Sakhalin. One of the Matsumae explorers, Kodō Shōzaemon, stayed on the island during the winter of 1636 and sailed along the east coast to Taraika in the spring of 1637. From 1669 to 1672, Ainu chieftain led a rebellion against the Matsumae clan. The rebellion began as a fight for resources between Shakushain's people and another Ainu clan led by Hae in the Shibuchari River basin. After Shakushain killed Hae's son, Hae sent emissaries to the Matsumae to request arms and potential remediation. While travelling back members of the emissaries died of smallpox, with reports reaching Hae and Shakushain that they had been poisoned by the Matsumae. As a result, Shakushain called on all the Ainu of Hokkaido to work together to fight the Matsumae. The Ainu coalition demanded complete political independence from the Matsumae and Yamato, and a return to the direct trading rights with Honshū, instead of the Matsumae mediated trade currently in place. The rebellion was eventually quashed, with Shogun Tokugawa Ienobu rewarding the Matsumae for this result. Historian Brett Walker highlights the rebellion as a watershed moment in the history of the Yamato Japanese conquest of Hokkaido, as it solidified the future involvement of Japanese state powers in colonising Hokkaido instead of it being left to the local Matsumae clan.
Through the Edo period the Matsumae developed the fishing industry in Hokkaido, where Yamato Japanese merchants oversaw Ainu fishers whose catch was processed and sold to the Yamato Japanese of Honshu. The Ainu working in this industry were forced into it, and subjected to rampant exploitation. The development of this industry also had wider ecological impacts, where the increased scale of fishing disrupted the subsistence fishing that many Ainu relied upon.
From 1669, the Matsumae had ships conduct trade with southern Sakhalin, while also exploring the island for exploitable resources. In an early colonisation attempt, a Yamato Japanese settlement called Ōtomari was established by the Matsumae on Sakhalin's southern end in 1679, to control trade with the Ainu and Nivkh who lived on Sakhalin, though trade on the island was still dominated by the Qing dynasty until the 1790s.
In the 1780s, the influence of the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate on the Ainu of southern Sakhalin increased significantly, and by the beginning of the 19th century, the Japanese economic zone extended midway up the east coast, to Taraika. With the exception of the Nayoro Ainu located on the west coast in close proximity to China, most Ainu stopped paying tribute to the Qing. The Matsumae clan was nominally in charge of Sakhalin, but they neither protected nor governed the Ainu there. Instead they extorted the Ainu for Chinese silk, which they sold in Honshū as a special product of the Matsumae domain. To obtain Chinese silk, the Ainu fell into debt, owing much fur to the Santan, a group composed mostly of the Ulchi, Nanai, and Oroch peoples of the Amur River, who lived near the Qing office. The Ainu also sold the silk uniforms given to them by the Qing, which made up the majority of what the Yamato Japanese knew as nishiki and jittoku. As dynastic uniforms, the silk was of considerably higher quality than that traded from the Chinese at Nagasaki, and enhanced Matsumae prestige as exotic items. Eventually the Tokugawa government, realising that they could not depend on the Matsumae, took control of Sakhalin in 1807.
In 1789 a further Ainu rebellion occurred on the Shiretoko Peninsula in northeastern Hokkaido due to labour exploitation of the Ainu working in fisheries. Writing in the same year, Honda Toshiaki, a Yamato political economist, recorded how in the Edo period the Ainu were prohibited from speaking the Japanese language, and called for the full colonisation of Hokkaido.
From 1799 to 1806, the shogunate engaged in a process of consolidation where they took direct control of southern Hokkaido. The shogunate chose to move the seat of the government in Ezochi from Matsumae to Hakodate in 1802. Japan proclaimed sovereignty over Sakhalin in 1807, and in 1809 Mamiya Rinzō claimed that it was in fact an island and not attached to the Asian mainland. From 1801, the shogunate began taking registries of the Ainu in Hokkaido, eventually compiling extensive records of families, employment histories and relations, and their level of conformity to Yamato social standards. As part of this consolidation, the shogunate also eased restrictions on Yamato Japanese moving to Hokkaido, and during this period, Ainu women were often separated from their husbands and either subjected to rape or forcibly married to Yamato Japanese men. Meanwhile, Ainu men were deported to merchant subcontractors for five- and ten-year terms of service. Policies of family separation and assimilation, combined with the impact of introduced diseases such as smallpox and venereal diseases, caused the Ainu population to drop significantly in the early 19th century. In the 18th century, there were 80,000 Ainu, but by 1868, there were only about 15,000 Ainu in Hokkaido, 2,000 in Sakhalin, and around 100 in the Kuril Islands. Also during this later phase of the Edo period, Ainu remains were taken without consent to be studied and racialised by both Yamato and English researchers.
Despite their growing influence in the area in the early 19th century as a result of these policies, the Tokugawa shogunate was unable to gain a monopoly on Ainu trade with those on the Asian mainland, even by the year 1853. Santan traders, commonly interacted with the Ainu people independent of the Japanese government, especially in the northern part of Hokkaido. In addition to their trading ventures, Santan traders sometimes kidnapped or purchased Ainu women from Rishiri Island to become their wives. This further escalated Japan's presence in the area, as the Tokugawa shogunate believed a monopoly on the Santan trade would better protect the Ainu people from Santan traders.