#PANFU ADVENT 2018 SERIES#

#PANFU ADVENT 2018 SERIES#

These 'Indian'-like Ainu were subjected to a series of discourses and policies which conversely aimed to 'de-Indigenize' them, conceptually rendering them non-native in their own unceded territories, facilitating the dispossession of their land, their resources, and ultimately, of their own bodies. Meanwhile, colonial planners began to re-cast the Ainu as akin to the 'Indians' of the American frontier. Settlers-many of them penniless former samurai-took on the role of white American frontiersmen, 'breaking' a land re-imagined as empty, primordial, and virginal.

Thereafter, with the support of a contingent of foreign advisors, educators, and developmentalists, the modernizing Meiji state began to transform the island into an export-driven resource colony resembling not the Japanese mainland but New England. While the former Tokugawa bakufu exercised varying degrees of suzerainty over the Indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido for centuries, increased challenges to Japanese sovereignty by the aggressively expanding British, Russian, and American colonial empires pushed the new Meiji regime (1868-1912) to formally annex the northern island in 1869, claiming it as terra nullius. Accordingly, the present study builds upon a growing wave of revisionist literature which challenges conventional historiographies which assert that the Japanese colonial period began with Japan's acquisition of Taiwan in 1895 and ended with Japan's defeat in the Asia Pacific War in 1945 and instead understands Hokkaido as an ongoing settler colonial project. And, far from an obscure outer periphery, settler colonial Hokkaido was central to the development of the modern Japanese nation-state and wider colonial empire. A transnational settler colonial project, Hokkaido was not simply a 'Westernized' region internal to Japan, but an outer territory which became 'Japanese' precisely through its Westernization. This facilitated the dispossession of their land, their resources, and ultimately, of their own bodies. These 'Indian'-like Ainu were subjected to a series of discourses and policies which aimed to 'de-Indigenize' them, conceptually rendering them non-native in their own colonized homeland. Meanwhile, colonialists began to re-cast the Ainu as akin to the 'Indians' of the American frontier. Settlersmany of them penniless former samuraitook on the role of white American frontiersmen, 'breaking' a land re-imagined as uninhabited, primordial, and virginal. Thereafter, with the support of a contingent of foreign advisors, educators, and diplomats, the modernizing Meiji state began to transform Hokkaido into an export-driven resource colony resembling not the Japanese mainland but New England. However, increasingly direct challenges to Japanese territorial sovereignty by the rapidly expanding American, British, and Russian colonial empires pushed the new Meiji regime to formally annex Ainu territories across the northern island in 1869, claiming them as terra nullius (empty, ownerless land). The former Tokugawa bakufu exercised varying degrees of suzerainty over the Indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido for centuries.

Panfu advent 2018