| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Brett L. Walker. The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–1800. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 332. $40.00.

At the start of the seventeenth century, most Ainu were politically autonomous and economically self-reliant. They occupied areas beyond the pale of Japanese military or political control: most of the island of Hokkaid as well as lands farther north. Two centuries later, most Ainu lands had fallen to de facto Japanese conquest, which sometimes took the form of overt military action. More commonly, however, coercive force remained in the background, enabling the shrewd manipulation of trade conditions. Brett L. Walker closely examines this two-century period of Japanese expansion into Ainu lands, explaining its mechanisms and logic. In the process, he also casts new and useful light on the nature of Japan's early modern state. 1

A secondary aim of Walker's book is to confer upon the Ainu some measure of agency. Walker takes the common nineteenth-century image of Ainu as a passive, primitive, backward people in need of Japanese assistance and points out that it was exploitative Japanese policies backed by military force that reduced this once thriving people to poverty and dependence. He argues that Ainu resisted Japanese conquest, sometimes even at the cost of their lives, and thus places great emphasis on Shakushain's War of 1669. On the whole, however, I was struck more by the comparative lack of overt Ainu resistance during the period of Walker's study. I am not suggesting that Ainu willingly acquiesced to Japanese encroachment but rather that Japanese methods of subjugation proved so effective that overt military action was minimal. . . .

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