Brett L. Walker

Meiji Modernization, Scientific: Agriculture, and the Destruction of Japan's Hokkaido Wolf

THE MEIJI RESTORATION of 1868 ranks among the most important events in Japanese history. Basically, after over two and a half centuries of samurai rule, the Tokugawa shogunate (bakufu; literally, a military-style "tent government" run by the shogun) fell to what historians call the Satchô alliance—essentially, a political and military alliance between Satsuma, Chôshû, and a handful of other disgruntled feudal domains—and, in the course of the next several decades, the alliance replaced Japan's decentralized early modern polity with a more centralized modern one. Within months of the 1868 transfer of power, the Meiji emperor, in whose name the Satchô alliance had fought, issued the Charter Oath (gokajô no seimon), a short document that outlined the priorities of the new government. Most importantly, the Meiji government pledged to end centuries of carefully constructed isolation from most Western countries.¹ Instead, the Charter Oath proclaimed that, "knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to invigorate the foundations of imperial rule." For a time, the government did just that: Japan wrote a Prussian-style constitution, built an English-style navy, and established an American-style agricultural college on Hokkaido, among many other noteworthy achievements. Of course, Japan did not simply mimic other countries and their institutions, but rather refashioned the knowledge and expertise garnered from foreign advisers and returning Japanese officials to fit its emerging vision of modernity.² One such foreign adviser who assisted with Japan's modernization in the Meiji period, a man who offered expertise in the arena of scientific agriculture, was an Ohio rancher named Edwin Dun (1848–1931).

Map 1. Hokkaido, Japan.
Courtesy of Dale Martin.

Dun came to Japan as a foreign adviser in 1873 after Albert Capron, a cattle broker, approached him in a Chicago hotel. Earlier, officials with the Meiji government had asked Capron to find a qualified rancher in the United States who could oversee the establishment of a modern livestock industry in Japan. Officials planned to focus the new industry on the recently acquired island of Hokkaido, where Capron's father, Horace Capron, a former commissioner of the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, served as chief adviser to the Kaitakushi, or Hokkaido Development Agency.³ As part of the colonization of Hokkaido, the Meiji government promoted ranching, largely in the form of state-run experimental farms. In the eyes of Meiji officials and their Western counterparts, ranching was progressive and scientific, and it produced the primary cuisine of modern nations—beef. Most officials on Hokkaido, moreover, believed that ranching represented the agricultural future of northernmost Japan. Meiji officials and public intellectuals, many of whom had visited North America during the 1871 Iwakura Mission, also knew that the United States had settled the American West through the expansion of ranching and other forms of agriculture.⁴ Indeed, scientific agriculture suited Kaitakushi needs perfectly on the under-developed Hokkaido.

Correspondences between the Kaitakushi's branch office in Hakodate, in southern Hokkaido, and superiors in Sapporo, site of the Kaitakushi's home offices, illustrate the place that ranching was to hold in the economic future of northernmost Japan. While debating whether to raise bounties on predators to quell increasing losses at the experimental farms, one Kaitakushi official emphasized the importance of the new commitment to ranching. Harkening back to the official agronomy of the Tokugawa era (the early modern period; 1600–1868), wherein the wealth of feudal domains was measured in bushels of rice (the so-called kokudaka system; in which one koku equaled 5.2 bushels), he remarked that until now grain farming had served as the cornerstone of Japanese agriculture. He submitted, however, that Hokkaido's cold springs and early fall frosts made grain farming risky. What made sense for Hokkaido was raising livestock such as cattle, horses, and sheep. The same official pointed out, nonetheless, that despite the best efforts of Japanese settlers and the Kaitakushi, livestock numbers, particularly horses, had not increased. The reason was that year after year, bears, wolves, and wild dogs killed and ate free-ranging horses on the farms, devoured all the foals in the pastures, and once attacked a ranch hand. This official suggested that predators even caused hardships among the Ainu, the native people of Hokkaido, who hunted deer for the Kaitakushi after their forced deculturation and assimilation in the early nineteenth century.⁵ According to this writer, wolves and wild dogs, not the native Ainu or even the menacing Russians in the North Pacific, most immediately stood in the way of the Japanese settlement of Hokkaido. The Kaitakushi must act, officials argued, and act decisively, or hungry carnivores would devour Hokkaido's future.⁶

Dun oversaw the task of eliminating wolves (Canis lupus hattai Kishida,1931) and wild dogs from southeastern Hokkaido. To the Meiji government, Dun and the many other late-nineteenth-century foreign advisers hired to assist with Japan's transformation into a modern nation were "live machines." Through their work, Meiji officials adopted foreign attitudes about wolves that combined with, or in some instances superimposed over, existing ones formed in the early modern period.⁷

In early modern Japan, Neo-Confucianism had served as the official ideology of the Tokugawa shogunate, and it generally viewed grain farming as the most noble and productive of all enterprises (with the possible exception of governance). "The treasure of the people is grain," wrote the scholar Kumazawa Banzan. "Gold, silver, copper and so forth are the servants of grain."⁸ By the late eighteenth century, such Neo-Confucian ideologies had combined with more native Japanese ones to form prejudices that associated raising and eating livestock with foreign "barbarians" and elevated farming and eating Japanese rice to a borderline religious experience.⁹ Hence, many Japanese intellectuals came to see grain farming as a noble endeavor, whereas they viewed animal husbandry and meat eating with disdain.¹⁰ Not surprisingly, Japanese farmers principally used oxen and other farm animals for draft work and not as sources of protein. As the Christian Socialist Katayama Sen wrote nostalgically of the pre-Meiji years, "I was born in a farm house, and I worked as a farmer. The family ox was absolutely necessary for plowing, and we loved him as one of ourselves. I followed behind him working, and I made money on his labor. I had so many memories of the animal that I would have never have wanted to eat meat."¹¹ Given such attitudes, those wild animals that threatened Japanese grain farmers, such as deer and wild boar, came to be seen as truly noxious in the context of Japan's early modern agronomy, while wolves, which chased these ungulates from grain fields, became friends of the noble Confucian farmer.

As the geographer Furukawa Koshôken noted at the close of the eighteenth century, wolves in Morioka domain, in northeastern Honshu, graciously chased deer and wild boar from the grain fields of farmers. For this reason, when peasants there encountered wolves in the wild, it was customary to say, "Oh lord wolf, what do you say? How about chasing the wild boar from our fields?"¹² By the 1870s and 1880s, however, after Japan's appropriation and refashioning of newly imported Western assumptions about predators through the agency of Dun and others, a new greeting for wolves was created: shoot them, sever their ears or legs, bring these to a municipal office, and collect a lucrative bounty. Whereas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries peasants revered wolves at Shinto shrines as guardians of Tokugawa agriculture—even crafting magical wooden votive amulets and stylized talismans with images of wolves (see Figure 1)—the new Meiji regime ruled out both of these primitive traditions in favor of modern Western ones, and categorized wolves as "noxious animals" (yûgai dôbutsu). The Meiji government, much like governments in Australia, South Africa, and the United States, then mobilized its resources to exterminate them. As a rancher from the American Midwest, Dun was comfortable in the task of killing wolves at the experimental farms of Hokkaido. A product of mid-nineteenth-century American beliefs in the power of scientific agriculture and hostilities toward the wolf, Dun came to Japan quite prepared to expand ranching and eliminate a predator that needed to be wiped out to facilitate the march of civilization.¹³

Figure 1. Amulet with Wolves.
Called an ubudate ema, this wooden votive amulet from Mitsumine Shrine pictures two adult wolves with pups. Today, the symbolism of thisema promises fertility and safety to couples hoping to have children as well as fecundity to the farmers of the Chichibu region of Saitama Prefecture.

From the author's collection.

There is a historical lesson in the story of Dun and wolf extermination on Hokkaido, one that transcends even the troubling question of why our species is capable of so hastily destroying another. Changing perceptions of wolves in Japan after the introduction of scientific agriculture highlight the significance of new attitudes toward the natural world in early Meiji definitions of modernity. With striking ease, Meiji officials brushed aside centuries of reverence for wolves—and, to a lesser degree, the entire East Asian order that supported such reverence—replacing it, brick by brick, with the edifice of modernity. Meiji officials did not know stories such as "Little Red Riding Hood" or worship at Christian churches, traditions often targeted as sources of wolf hatred.¹⁴ Yet, when they prioritized industrial ranching, they saw the wolf as a noxious animal, as the bottom line of ranching demanded that they do so. In the new order, Hokkaido's wolves were to be sacrificed, their dead faces grimaced and their bodies strewn around poisoned horse carcasses. Though separated by only decades, the ranchers of Hokkaido lived in a world apart from their early modern grain farming countrymen: They lived in the modern world. Reminding us of this fact in a recent review of modern Japanese history textbooks, historian David Howell implores scholars of Japan, "Let us treat Japan as a regular country, a distinctive but not incomparable example of global modernity."¹⁵ Exploring wolf killing on Hokkaido does just that: It traces the spread of notions of modernity as they transformed one East Asian country, drastically altering its definitions of nature and attitudes toward animals, and homogenizing it according to global rhythms of industrial life.

Wolf Killing in Edwin Dun's Day

ALMOST ALL late-nineteenth-century American ranchers lived in what can only be described as a culture of wolf killing. Indeed, they sometimes took wolf killing to near pathological heights.¹⁶ Take Ben Corbin, the self-proclaimed "Boss Wolf Killer." In his writings, Corbin's metaphors and narratives mixed nineteenth-century biblical language and modern ranching imagery, and they contrast starkly to early modern Japan's agrarian culture as represented by Kumazawa Banzan. Corbin's Virginia-born father had "hunted redskins with Daniel Boone," and in Corbin's mind, killing wolves similarly meant clearing the way for civilization by destroying another tribe on the American frontier. In 1883, just a decade after Dun first went to Japan, Corbin relocated to northern Dakota Territory, where high bounties for wolf "scalps" provided the incentive for him to perfect his wolf-killing skills. Corbin killed wolves for bounties, but more importantly, he killed them for cultural reasons, to clear the way for the settlement of the American West by the ranchers whom he likened to the kindly shepherds of the New Testament.

In his book, Corbin's Advice or the Wolfer's Guide (1900), Corbin yoked biblical figures to nineteenth-century notions of progress. Abraham, he argued, was "rich in cattle, silver and in gold—something like the ranchmen and stockmen of North Dakota." The pastoral life of the herdsman "preceded every other profession." Corbin, moreover, saw guarding livestock as part of divine providence. "Largely my life has been spent in protecting these flocks against the incursions of ravenous beasts of prey," he explained. "I know it is but a first step and the first step, which counts in the march of civilization." Corbin also drew on social Darwinism to justify ranching culture: "I can not believe that Providence intended that these rich lands ... should be forever monopolized by wild beasts and savage men. I believe something in the survival of the fittest, and hence I have 'fit' for it all my life." He concluded that, "Civilization is a fine thing, and it may spread itself like a green bay tree in the cities, and lordly mansions of the millionaires, with all their silks and broadcloths, but it has to have plenty of beef and pork and mutton—yes, yes, and wool too, and plenty of it."

For Corbin, therefore, clearing the land of wolves became a raison d'etre. In an arrogant self-revelation (not to mention a piece of savage reportage), he wrote, "The wolf is the enemy of civilization, and I want to exterminate him." In a deeply disturbing episode, he told of shooting a female wolf as she fled her den, and then performing a "Caesarian operation" to remove the unborn pups from her cooling body. He says that there were "four of them alive and kicking," and two more discovered in the den. The female, it turns out, had been in the process of giving birth to her young. In a twisted scene, Corbin "laid them besides their dead mother for their first meals and this is according to Scripture, 'although you may be dead you yet shall live'." He then killed them and took the carcasses to Bismarck, North Dakota, to try and retrieve bounties (which had been terminated).¹⁷ With the Bible as his compass, notions of progress as his rudder, and the winds of civilization powering his sails, Corbin helped transform the wolf into a powerful nineteenth-century symbol of evil.

Edwin Dun

THIS WAS Dun's world. A prominent nineteenth-century Ohio rancher, he oversaw land that his ancestors had farmed and, as his activities in Japan reveal, he saw wolves as a symbol much as Corbin did. Wolves were animals, as Corbin noted, that only stood in the way of the "march of civilization." And, hindering the march of civilization was something that the modernizing Meiji government would not tolerate. Wolf killing in Japan, at least after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, needs to be seen in this light. At the Niikappu ranch (in southeastern Hokkaido) Dun oversaw for the Kaitakushi a deadly program designed to eliminate wolves and wild dogs with the use of strychnine, which had become a favorite tactic of wolfers in the American West and other regions where industrial ranching had become a prominent fixture of the modern agronomy. It is worth exploring Dun's experiences in Japan in some detail, because he is often celebrated as the man who, as one official history trumpets, "saved the farm" at Niikappu from the ravages of wolves, elevating him to the status of the "father of Hokkaido agriculture."¹⁸ Indeed, as an agricultural pioneer and wolf killer, Dun was featured in Funayama Kaoru's Zoku Otôsei (Otôsei continued; 1975), the second installment to his popular 1969 novel, Otôsei. He became an even more heroic figure, wielding a samurai sword on horseback, in the comic Ôkami no hi: Ezo ôami no zetsumetsuki (Memorial to the wolf: A record of the extinction of the Hokkaido wolf; 1994), with a narrative by Togawa Yukio and illustrations by Honjô Kei (see Figure 2).¹⁹

Figure 2. Wolf Killing in the Comics.
A dramatic scene from Togawa Yukio and Honjô Kei's 1994 Ôkami no hi: Ezo ôkami no zetsumetsuki (Memorial to the wolf: A record of the extinction of the Hokkaido wolf). After wolves killed and ate horses at the Niikappu pastures, Edwin Dun, an employee of the Kaitakushi (Hokkaido Development Agency), says, "I'll use strychnine!"

From the author's collection.

Dun was born in 1848, on a ranch near Springfield, Ohio, the grandson of Scottish immigrants to the United States (see Figure 3).²⁰ The family ranch employed as many as twenty hired hands. The impression one gets looking through his unpublished memoirs, Reminiscences of Nearly A Half Century in Japan, is that Dun fancied himself as a hereditary rancher, the son of a landowner in central Ohio, an area he called "Dun Plains," and a keeper of a family charge to husband animals. His father and three uncles together owned about 15,000 acres of the "finest 'blue grass land' to be found outside Kentucky" where they raised shorthorned cattle and racehorses.²¹ Yet, despite the quaint homegrown strokes with which Dun painted his early life in Reminiscences, he actually came of age in the aftermath of America's first agricultural revolution, which lasted between roughly 1812 and 1830. As many historians have argued, the United States, bolstered by scientific advancements, the invention and perfection of a flood of new farming techniques and technologies, and the creation of new crops and livestock breeds, set a course for agricultural industrialization that culminated in the 1920s.²² Not surprisingly, it was precisely this model of industrial agriculture that interested Meiji policy makers.

After high school, Dun enrolled in Miami College in Ohio, originally to study law, but abandoned his education after his eldest brother left the family ranch to seek a career as a civil engineer. Dun spent the next six years learning the ropes of ranch life. In 1871, after gaining considerable expertise in livestock, he and a cousin opened their own dairy farm, which, by his own accounts, prospered until the center of cattle breeding in the United States shifted westward, signaling tough times for Dun and other Ohio livestock owners.

All this changed in 1873, when the twenty-five-year old Dun met Albert Capron, whom the Kaitakushi had entrusted to buy cattle and ship them to Japan. After their initial meeting, Capron later visited the Dun ranch, where he was shown the herds of shorthorns and other stock that Dun reckoned were best suited for the Kaitakushi enterprise. The two decided on about eighty head in all, including calves and heifers, which Dun promised to deliver to the Chicago stockyards. In Chicago the two men dined together at the Stock Yard Hotel, where Capron informed Dun that he had another commission to fill for the Kaitakushi. As Dun recalled, "It was to secure the services of some one well up to live stock breeding and handling as well as a practical farming experienced in up to date methods in the United States. ..." Eventually, Dun asked if he might be suitable for the commission, which, despite the low salary, seemed like a good opportunity "owing to the business depression in the United States." (Here Dun is probably referring to the panic of 1873.) Capron agreed that the young Dun should advise the Kaitakushi on "up to date methods" at its ranches.²³

Figure 3. Edwin Dun.

Courtesy of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan.

Dun left for Japan in June 1873 aboard the steamer Great Republic and was met in Tokyo by Kaitakushi officials. He talked with Kuroda Kiyotaka, governor of Hokkaido, and other high-ranking officials who confirmed his provisional contract and reported on the status of the livestock held at the Tokyo experimental farms.²⁴ Dun spent two years in Tokyo at the Kaitakushi headquarters before leaving for Sapporo. In Tokyo, under the advice of Horace Capron, three experimental farms—the laboratories for scientific agriculture—had been set up, consisting of farmland, barns, corrals, and classrooms to train the future ranchers of Japan. In a country dominated for centuries by wetland rice cultivation, these experimental farms were an important part of Japan's embrace of modern agriculture, serving, quite literally, as a breeding ground for both livestock and Japanese ranchers. These experimental farms taught not only animal husbandry, but often other kinds of agricultural science as well: New fruit trees and vegetables were planted to be grown, reproduced, and distributed throughout the country. Thus, from the third experimental farm in Tokyo, Dun wrote in his memoirs, two million fruit trees had been distributed on the main islands (of Kyushu, Shikoku, and Honshu) alone.²⁵ It was these types of experimental farms that so dramatically altered the eating habits of nineteenth-century Japanese. Indeed, the year before Dun arrived in Tokyo, the Meiji emperor, both a repository of tradition and a symbol of modernity, ate beef reportedly for the first time.²⁶

In a progress report, Japan in the Beginning of the 20th Century, the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce boasted of its successes as of 1904. Although cattle had been in Japan from ancient times, it noted, and previous emperors even had established official pastures, these animals, as Katayama Sen remembered, were seen largely as beasts of burden and not widely consumed by people. Starting in 1866, however, fifteen foreign cows had been purchased from the English at Yokohama, and this set in motion a program wherein the Meiji government would "spare neither money nor pains" to encourage the development of the livestock industry. In the case of horses, some regions, such as Morioka, had long bred them, and new foreign breeds, such as Arabians, had been introduced as gifts from foreign governments. In 1871, explained the ministry report, an American official was employed to oversee the horse-breeding program, while two Japanese officials traveled to the United States to learn the craft there. Swine and sheep also were imported in the early Meiji years. The ministry report explained that although "eating the flesh of animals [was] forbidden in former times [for] religious motives" (a notion, incidentally, that fails to hold up under close historical scrutiny), the Meiji Restoration had brought what ministry officials hailed as a "revolution in the Butcher business."²⁷ In 1900, butchers built 1,396 slaughterhouses throughout the country. At these slaughterhouses, between 1893 and 1902, employees dispatched over 1.7 million cattle to fuel the workers and soldiers of modern Japan.²⁸ That revelation came through the efforts of Dun and others like him.²⁹

Experimental farms also employed the technologies of scientific agriculture. Dun was impressed by the threshers that could yield one thousand bushels of grain per day, and the self-binding reapers, gang plows, corn planters, and "innumerable smaller machines and implements" that were all of the latest technology. In Tokyo, Dun quickly went to work organizing the ranching section of the experimental farms. The stables and barns, designed by Horace Capron, were "located in about the most unhealthy spot that could have been found," and so one of Dun's first accomplishments in Japan was to relocate the barns to more open areas where disease would be less likely to plague livestock. This was easy, recalled Dun, because the "detail of farm work and care of domestic animals had been drilled into me from childhood." In Reminiscences, Dun fancied himself not as a "college-bred, book-learned" expert, like some of his colleagues, but as a practical farm boy who could "swing a scythe or ax with the best." With no "graduated veterinary surgeon" in Japan at the time (although Japanese medical culture boasted a long tradition of Chinese-influenced veterinary training), Dun also found himself employing his homegrown skills and knowledge of animal anatomy as well to deal with the various health-related problems of the livestock.³⁰

Along with steam trains and modern buildings, these experimental farms became evidence of Japan's modern transformation.³¹ Not only did the Meiji emperor eat beef in 1872, but, in September 1873, the emperor arrived at the Tokyo experimental farm in his "imported court carriage," part of his new image as a more visible European-style sovereign. He was attended by Meiji luminaries such as Prime Minister Sanjô Sanetomi, Saigô Takamori, Ôkubo Toshimichi, Kuroda Kiyotaka, and Ôkuma Shigenobu. The emperor inspected the livestock and machinery, and was treated to a display of how the thresher worked. "His Majesty was well pleased with the exhibition," Dun remembered. That night he visited the emperor with Saigô, where he "made bows as instructed and backed out." One suspects that Dun's ease within such elite circles contributed to his later diplomatic career in Japan. In 1884, the Chester A. Arthur administration appointed Dun to the newly established post of second secretary in the American legation, and then in 1893, during the administration of Grover Cleveland, he was made chargé d'affaires. (Dun also married a Japanese woman in 1875, during his first visit to Hokkaido.)³²

The Niikappu Ranch

FROM 1875 TO 1883 Dun lived and worked in Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido. There he shaped directly the agricultural development and landscape modification of the northern island. Through his version of equine zootechny—the science of horse breeding—that was practiced at the experimental farms of Hokkaido, Dun promoted the language, methods, and ideals of American animal science.³³ Refashioning Hokkaido in the image of the American West (or in Dun's case Midwest) meant altering horse-breeding practices in Japan. It also meant killing the wolves that threatened the survival of the enterprise.

Dun opposed raising sheep on the island, because he concluded (erroneously) that the "arable lands of Hokkaido as well as Japan proper were more urgently needed for the production of food for people than for the growing of grass for sheep." Moreover, Dun believed that the grasses of Hokkaido were poorly suited for ranching. Later, after an experimental batch of sugar beets failed, he also advised against growing that crop, arguing that Hokkaido "is too cold for the development of a high percentage of sugar."³⁴ Dun's most important task, however, was overseeing large experimental farms at Makomanai, Izari, Niikappu, and Shizunai. At Makomanai, south of Sapporo, "about 200 acres of wild land was cleared out and cultivated in corn, hay and various kinds of roots for food for the cattle." In Izari, south of Sapporo near Chitose, Dun and others "enclosed a fine bit of native pasture land about 2,000 acres in extent for the use of some of our horses." Niikappu, however, emerged as the centerpiece of the Hokkaido ranches run by the Kaitakushi. There Dun and others established a "great stud farm and ranch for the improvement of Hokkaido horses," a process achieved through the crossbreeding of Nanbu stallions, a famous Japanese breed from Morioka, with imported animals. Finally, just east of Niikappu, along the Shizunai River, an adjoining 300 acres were set aside to supply winter forage.³⁵

The Niikappu ranch covered about 35,000 acres in all and eventually was separated into smaller pastures by post-and-rail fencing (see Figure 4). The ranch was situated between the Niikappu River, which served as the western border, and the Shizunai River on the east. It was about ten miles inland from the coast, and its total length was about fifteen miles, and the width somewhere between five and six miles. The southern section of the ranch was covered with grasslands about fifty or sixty feet above the banks of the rivers, while the northern section graded from hills into mountains, with ground cover consisting of scrub bamboo. Dun's first report on the Niikappu ranch, dated October 1875, highlights some of his early concerns about the location and breeding practices there. The first problem was that Niikappu spread onto the slopes of the Hidaka Mountains, and so the site was isolated and had a "great amount of useless land." Moreover, ranch hands allowed horses to roam within "the large extent of mountainous territory," where it became "impossible to find them." The horses, noticed Dun, ventured into the mountains in search of bamboo, and yet by the end of winter, they still were "so poor that almost every bone can be seen." Dun laid out seven recommendations that he hoped would improve the location for horse breeding.³⁶ However, two years later, in another inspection undertaken in July 1877, Dun again voiced concern: The size of the Niikappu ranch was "much greater than is necessary for the purpose for which it was, and is now intended, and the difficulty of managing and controlling a large number of horses roaming over so large an area of land is very great." He also commented once more on the poor winter cover and food provided at the site.³⁷ Even as late as 1881 he complained of Hokkaido stallions "running wild in the pasture, and mountains adjoining it," a problem that needed to be dealt with.³⁸

Figure 4. Niikappu Ranch.
The Niikappu ranch site, with its barns and post-and-rail fencing, looks as though it might be located somewhere in southwestern Montana. The United States provided the model for Japan's colonization of the northern island of Hokkaido.

Courtesy of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan.

Although Dun said nothing of wolves and wild dogs in these letters and reports, this type of situation—open pastures bordered by mountainous terrain, inhabited by weakened horses in the winter—was ripe for problems involving predators. In 1881, while inspecting the Shiriuchi Valley on the Oshima Peninsula as a possible site for raising sheep, Dun explained that open pastures bordered by mountains could invite predation from wolves and wild dogs.³⁹ Dun wrote that the Shiriuchi Valley, once drained, might make fine sheep country, but he cautioned that an elaborate fence would have to be erected because the valley had mountains on three sides. "It is not necessary that the sheep should have any protection during the spring, summer and fall." He explained in his report to the Kaitakushi, "If it were not for the wolves and dogs, it would only be necessary to turn them in their pasture, and leave them there, as soon as there was sufficient grass to keep them, but as there are dogs and wolves at Shiriuchi, it will be necessary to guard them at night: for this purpose pens with high fences can be made in which the sheep can be kept at night."⁴⁰

In time, after Dun recommended that horses from Izari be moved to Niikappu, the Hidaka site developed into the center of Dun's horse-breeding activities.⁴¹ By March 1878, he was boasting of making the Niikappu ranch the "principal horse breeding establishment of Hokkaido."⁴² He explained in Reminiscences that ranch hands brought one thousand Hokkaido mares to Niikappu, along with about fifty of the best Nanbu stallions they could find. Moreover, he integrated four imported thoroughbred stallions into the breeding program. Dun discovered that about ninety percent of the Hokkaido mares bred to Nanbu stallions became pregnant, whereas only about forty percent of those bred to imported stallions were with foal. Dun explained this as "owing to the difference of temperament of the native and thoroughbred" horses. In his reports to the Kaitakushi, he continued to push a regimen to weed out weak horses. This Western equine zootechny represented the "first principle in breeding any of our domestic animals," he explained.⁴³

So Dun went to Japan in 1873 confident in the powers of scientific agriculture—the productive capabilities of modern farm technology, the benefits of certain crops and livestock, the transformative abilities of equine zootechny, and the fruits of scientific breeding. His counterparts, the Kaitakushi officialdom, eager to modernize their country, paid close attention to Dun's many lessons and adopted many of his suggestions—often with little question.

Soon after Dun arrived in Japan, the Meiji emperor even had visited one of the Tokyo experimental farms, witnessing the industrial magic of a mechanical thresher. Later, as an ambassador representing industrial agriculture, Dun attended an audience with the emperor and other government officials. This confidence in modern agriculture had deadly consequences for Japan's wolves. If Neo-Confucianism, Buddhism, and more native traditions shaped earlier Japanese attitudes toward wolves, then industrial agriculture born in the West shaped post-Meiji ones.⁴⁴ Wolves hampered Dun's efforts at equine zootechny—a stone jammed in the wheels of industrial progress. They stood in the way of Japanese modernity. As wolf predation increased at Hokkaido's horse pastures, so too did the need to exterminate them, and Japanese cast wolves in the image of "noxious animals" that needed to be killed.

Wolf Kills

DESPITE THE SUCCESS of the Niikappu ranch, wolves preyed heavily on the foals the first year.⁴⁵ Dun later wrote in Reminiscences, "But to our horror we discovered that wolves with which that part of Hokkaido was at that time infested seemed competent to devour horse flesh rather faster than we could produce it. One lot of 90 mares with foals had been placed in an enclosure to themselves, [and] within a week to ten days they were rounded up but not a colt was with them. Every one of the 90 had been killed, their bones were scattered all over the place."⁴⁶

In May 1878, the problems involving wolves, and feral Ainu dogs still remained endemic at the Niikappu ranch. Scattered bones and decaying carcasses were the only evidence that the foals had existed at all. A report filed that month by Iwane Seiichi, an official on the scene at Niikappu, stressed that predation from wolves and dogs at Niikappu was causing economic losses and threatening the basic viability of the ranch. Iwane wrote that the total number of horses at the ranch was two thousand, over thirteen hundred of which were Nanbu mares. Of these mares, reported Iwane, about nine hundred were actively producing foals every year. However, since the creation of the Niikappu ranch in 1872, only about three hundred of these foals had survived to adulthood. Iwane explained, in no uncertain terms, that he believed wolves, bears, and Ainu dogs were killing and eating them. At the time of his report, every mare over three years old was pregnant, and of these about four hundred already had dropped foals. "The wolves and dogs know this," wrote Iwane, and they enter the pasture looking for easy prey, and because the ranch is so vast, it is nearly impossible to stop the killing. "In the summer, the colts simply become wolf food," he wrote. In response, he made a series of recommendations designed to reduce the size of the ranch, and fence it into plots for better management of breeding. Iwane admitted that it would be expensive, but he believed that in the end the returns from foal survival would pay for the fencing. He then went on to discuss his policy, already underway, designed to stem the losses from wolves.⁴⁷

Iwane's policy was as follows: First, all horses were to be rounded up at night and moved into smaller, fenced pastures (see Figure 5). This would make it easier to guard them, he suggested, and so a guard should be placed at these pastures to ensure that no wolves or dogs broke in. Second, and most interestingly, Iwane proposed prohibiting the keeping of Ainu hunting dogs in the villages near the Niikappu ranch. Not only could dogs not be kept, but all wild dogs were to be hunted down and shot. However, in nearby Ainu villages where Iwane's policy was underway, many people refused to surrender their dogs and hid them when local officials came to their homes. This was also true of Ainu living in Shizunai. Considering the traditional place of dogs and wolves in Ainu culture—Ainu believed themselves to be born from a union of a goddess and a dog of some kind—some Ainu had even resorted to taking their dogs into the mountains and raising them there, away from the villages and the watchful eyes of Kaitakushi officials.⁴⁸ Frustrated, Iwane explained that even if Kaitakushi officials offered to buy dog pelts, in effect tempting Ainu to kill their own dogs, Ainu staunchly refused. The only solution, he argued, was to tell Ainu who want to keep their dogs to move, and to hire special "dog killers" (satsukensha) to hunt down remaining canines. Already incidents involving the killing of foals had been "in the many tens," he explained, and surely would continue unless something was done.⁴⁹

Figure 5. Horse Corral.
In 1878, Iwane Seiichi and other Nikkappu officials removed horses from pastures and placed them in corrals to avoid wolf predation.

Courtesy of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan.

The Kaitakushi was evidently slow to act, however, for this policy report was followed by an even more urgent request from Hosokawa Midori, another official at Shizunai. He too emphasized that the damage caused by bears, wolves, and dogs was "not a little." Hosokawa himself had seen a horse half eaten near a barn at the Niikappu ranch, and he said that it was indeed a disturbing sight. The deeper pastures at Niikappu, he wrote, were teeming with wild animals, and so protecting the horses at the ranch proved extremely difficult. The ranch hands and horse caretakers tried to ward off the night attacks by wolves and wild dogs. In a scene that must have resembled a war zone more than a ranch, workers lit bonfires near the stables, while the deafening sound of rifle fire split the Hokkaido night. But wolves and dogs still managed to get into the stables and pastures and injure or kill horses. Hosokawa urged officials in Sapporo to get moving on Iwane's proposal to partition that land with fences, and suggested that professional "wildlife hunters" (yajûbôgyosha)—armed with Western rifles and paid ¥5 per month—be brought in by no later than November or the ranch would be overrun by wolves. Even more than Iwane, Hosokawa painted a warlike picture of the conflict occurring at the Niikappu ranch, where local managers were at a loss about how to handle the striking onslaught of wolves and wild dogs.⁵⁰

The war at Niikappu, at least as described by Iwane Seiichi and Hosokawa Midori, was completely out of control, a situation much worse than that seen in normal descriptions of wolf predation from the American West.⁵¹ There probably was an unusually high concentration of wolves and wild dogs in the Hidaka region at this time. Inukai Tetsuo, an ecologist who studied Hokkaido's wildlife, postulated that many wolves and wild dogs had moved into the Hidaka region around 1878 as a result of a variety of environmental factors, some a product of Hokkaido's development, others related to climatologic conditions.

Inukai suggested that the fate of the wolf and wild dog was tied to that of the deer. These canines came to the southeastern section of the island, to places such as Hidaka, where the Niikappu ranch was located, because deer habitually went there in the winter to escape the deep snowfall of the western section of Hokkaido. When they arrived, however, hunters had killed most the deer, forcing wolves to turn to livestock. In the wake of the Kaitakushi's massive harvest of deer, in other words, habitual wolf subsistence systems broke down. Naturally, they turned toward the best alternative, the Niikappu ranch.⁵³ In 1878, just when Iwane was voicing his concerns about wolf predation, the Kaitakushi stepped up its harvest of deer as part of a broader policy of exploiting resources on Hokkaido.⁵² They established venison canneries such as the one in Bibi, near Chitose in central Hokkaido, where deer meat was canned and saltpeter extracted from the blood, and where skins and antlers were exported as part of burgeoning European and Asian trades in pelts and pharmaceuticals (see Figure 6).⁵⁴ Many Ainu, their previous hunting and fishing lifestyles lost in the wave of forced assimilation that swept Hokkaido after 1800, had little choice but to become professional hunters under the Kaitakushi.

Figure 6. Venison Cannery.
Venison cannery at Bibi, near the present-day city of Chitose. When hunters killed deer to fuel the venison industry, supply skins to Europe, and ship horns to East Asia for use in pharmaceuticals, deer numbers dropped precipitously, and wolves were forced to turn to horses and other livestock to feed themselves.

Courtesy of the Resource Collection for Northern Studies, Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan.

As for the climate, the winters of 1878 and 1879 were extremely severe. Indeed, the winter of 1879 was so harsh that in 1880 deer harvests dropped to half of what they had been, no doubt leveling even more pressure on Hokkaido's predators and human hunters. Dun explained that despite the heavy snowfall, deer might have pulled through were it not for the "great demand for hides and horns." During the winter, he wrote, "deer had collected in thousands in the most sheltered valleys and ravines where, owing to the deep snow, the Ainu on snow shoes overtook them easily and slaughtered many tens of thousands with clubs and dogs. In the Mikawa district alone—15 miles by 5—75,000 skeletons were counted in the spring [of 1879] by men sent by the government to ascertain the loss." The slaughter occurred the following winter as well, explained Dun, and the "result was practical extermination."⁵⁵ After the exceptionally harsh winter of 1879, the Kaitakushi shut down the venison canneries for two years, but deer numbers were probably at historical lows by 1880–1881.⁵⁶

To a certain extent, deer killing in Hokkaido mirrored the North American experience of bison killing, although on a lesser scale. When the bison slaughter rose to its height, wolves and other scavengers thrived on the availability of carrion, and wolf numbers probably spiked briefly. However, beginning in 1868–1869, the year of the completion of the Omaha-Ogden stretch of the Union Pacific Railroad, cattle gradually supplanted bison, and abnormally high populations of wolves turned to this new (and easier to catch) ungulate, causing high rates of depredation. Modeled after the development of the American West, the Meiji development of Hokkaido, under the Kaitakushi, resonated with similar environmental upheaval. Stanley Young, the wolf-killing czar of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, made this point, as have environmental historians. Young wrote that "the American's taste for beef had to be satisfied," and so the bison and other wild game were eliminated in favor of cattle, which "brought the wolf into direct competition with the producer of prairie cattle, and it became a war to the bitter end."⁵⁷ Dun, just such a prairie cattleman, brought this war to Japan, and the Niikappu ranch became his primary battlefield.⁵⁸

For Dun, threshers, clean stables, fencing, winter forage, and controlled equine zootechny were part of the recipe for modern agriculture in Japan, but so too was wolf killing. In the nineteenth-century American West, wolf killing became a standard feature of modern agriculture: wolfers used rifles, traps, poisons, biological agents such as mange, and the technique of "denning" to rid the rangeland of Canis lupus. As a foreign expert, Dun brought these skills to Japan, and he employed them with ruthless efficiency.

Destroying The Hokkaido Wolf

EVEN BEFORE Dun had arrived in Sapporo, other foreign experts, such as Benjamin Lyman, a geologist for the Kaitakushi, speculated that predators would need to be eradicated before successful ranching could be achieved on Hokkaido. While touring Hokkaido in 1874, a year before Dun arrived, Lyman wrote that the "presence of bears and wolves in the mountains (though far less numerous than the deer) will perhaps be of some hindrance to the introduction of sheep and even larger cattle; and perhaps it will be thought necessary to encourage still further their extermination by offering bounties, as is done in other countries."⁵⁹ Lyman submitted his comments to Horace Capron, who then forwarded the recommendations to high-ranking officials of the Kaitakushi. The Kaitakushi took Lyman's advice, and a complex bounty system (which is beyond the scope of this article) ultimately was organized for the extermination of bears, wolves, feral dogs, and crows.⁶⁰

Dun was concerned mainly with horses, not sheep or cattle, but nonetheless he came to the same conclusion as Lyman. In Reminiscences, he lucidly described the Hokkaido wolf as an animal built to kill and so deadly to the ranching enterprise:

The Hokkaido wolf is a formidable beast but not dangerous to man as long as other prey is to be had for the killing. During the winter months, at the time of which I am writing, they lived mostly upon deer which were very plentiful. During the summer their diet was principally horse meat. A full grown wolf weighs from 70 to 80 pounds, he has an enormous head and mouth armed with tremendous fangs and teeth. He is generally very lean but exceedingly muscular. Of a grey color in summer and greyish white in winter, when his fur is thick and long. His feet are remarkable for their size, three or four times larger than the feet of the largest dog which they resemble in shape, only the claws are much longer. Their large feet enable them to travel rapidly over deep snow that soon tires a fleeing deer that could easily run away from his enemy when the ground is bare. They usually hunt singly or in couple but frequently the trail of a pack of four or five or even more is seen in the snow. They are widely scattered throughout the island as a rule but few in any one neighborhood.⁶¹

Under normal conditions the Hokkaido wolf remained "scattered throughout the island," a distribution shaped by wolf ecology. However, as Hokkaido's deer population plummeted in 1878–1879, wolves redefined the boundaries of their subsistence activity. There is also a good chance that many of the canines that killed horses at Niikappu were in fact feral Ainu dogs (which are fairly wolfish in appearance).⁶² In Kaitakushi documents, officials used the Chinese characters for wild dog and wolf virtually interchangeably, sometimes together in a compound (rendered as rôsai or rôyaken), suggesting that not only wolves but also dogs threatened the Niikappu ranch. Whether wolves or wild dogs, however, in the face of food shortages in 1878–1879, Dun wrote that, "the large number of horses we had confined in a limited area attracted them from near and far." As Dun remembered, "After killing the colts in the outlying pastures it was not long before they began on the mothers. In fact the situation became so serious that it was up to us to exterminate the wolves or go out of the breeding business at Niicapu."⁶³ Because hunting wolves was next to impossible, Dun continued, "we sent to Tokio [Tokyo] and Yokohama for all the strychnine to be had and fearing there was not enough for our purpose in those places, sent a supplementary order to San Francisco for more." In the end, Dun concluded, "We succeeded in getting enough to poison every living thing on the island."⁶⁴

The use of strychnine did not originate in the United States. It had long been used in Europe to kill predators and "noxious" birds such as crows and magpies. As wolfer Stanley Young wrote, however, as a "ready weapon in the hands of profit-seeking pelt hunters and enraged stockmen," strychnine did contribute to the near annihilation of wolves in the United States. Once in the American West, it became the "law of the prairie" that no carcass should be left without lacing it with the deadly poison, and as Young himself observed, that led to one of the "strangest and most lurid chapters in the history of killing mammals such as wolves."⁶⁵

Although the use of strychnine did not originate in the American West, wolfers there certainly perfected it. And Kaitakushi officials, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, were about to turn the page to this "lurid chapter" in Japanese history as well. Killing wolves with strychnine remained one of the favorite tactics of industrial ranchers and their wolfers around the globe. In the industrial mindset, poison—at least when compared to building elaborate fences, paying herders, and placing traps—proved extremely cost effective. In the United States, the frontier journals and memoirs that celebrated the deeds of wolfers were littered with vivid descriptions of the use of strychnine. To some, like William Edward Webb, it evidenced the "wonderful command that God gave [humans] over the other animals." In the 1870s, at about the same time Dun was in Japan, Webb recalled that in the American West, Mexican wolfers readily used the poison to kill wolves. They cut from a slain old bull "lumps of flesh about the size of one's fist, into which gashes were made, doses of the powder inserted, and the flesh then pressed together again." Once prepared, the lumps of meat "were scattered close around the carcass, and a few laid upon it." The next morning Webb discovered to his delight the effectiveness of the poison: "Twenty-three dead wolves were found," he wrote, "and the even two dozen was made up by a large specimen of the gray variety ... who was exceedingly sick, and went rolling about in vain efforts to get out of the way." They later tied up this wolf and tortured it—behavior, one should add, common in the American West.⁶⁶ In the 1860s, Granville Stuart also documented strychnine use. He wrote that along with horses, flour, beans, sugar, coffee, salt, blankets, a rifle, plenty of ammunition, and a hunting knife, "a supply of strychnine" was all a wolfer needed for success in the West. Stuart, too, described slicing pieces of bison meat, inserting the poison, and then waiting for the next morning when a "poisoned carcass would often kill a hundred or more wolves."⁶⁷

Joseph Batty, in How to Hunt and Trap, wrote in the early 1880s that after bison had been slain to be used for bait, their "skins are partially removed, bodies laid open and contents of the thorax taken out. The viscera and blood which settles is poisoned, the upper quarters are gashed with a knife, and strychnine is put in the incisions. The crystals soon dissolve and penetrate the flesh." The carcasses often freeze at night, so the wolves first feed on the "frozen blood from the thorax, and die in twenty minutes to an hour afterwards." With such techniques, boasted Batty, "Seventy-eight wolves have been taken in Montana in a single night with one buffalo."⁶⁸ Later, in 1897, with a flippant tone that betrays the nonchalance with which wolves were poisoned in the West, L. S. Kelly wrote that after shooting a bison cow, he noticed that wolves were watching him: "They were lined up in a row, as if they had been bidden to a feast and were not particular as to the manner in which it was served. I proceeded to satisfy them." He cut open the bison, and "loaded the carcass" in the "usual way" with strychnine, while the wolves "took an unusual interest in the work of preparing this bait." The wolves, Kelly speculated, probably never had seen a poisoned carcass, and were accustomed to following Native Americans during their bison hunts. "Though uninvited guests," he wrote blithely, "I felt that their appreciation should not pass unrewarded." When he returned a couple days later he discovered that "their beautiful carcasses covered the prairie."⁶⁹ This was the savage wolf killing culture of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, of which the "law of the prairie" was a part.

On 20 June 1878, Hosokawa Midori again wrote to Kaitakushi officials in Sapporo that predation of foals was continuous. Ranch hands and others tried to keep the wolves and dogs out of the pastures, but the "wild animals come in packs of hundreds," and were relentless. Officials hired two hunters, and they killed some wolves; the overall results were minimal, however. Hosokawa then noted that at Niikappu a new strategy would be adopted for the summer, from 1 July to 30 September. He explained that ranch hands had decided to use strychnine to poison the wolves and dogs, and a request was dispatched to the Sapporo Hospital to obtain some.⁷⁰ Four days later, Hosokawa again wrote regarding the plan to use strychnine, though his attitude toward the poison was cautious. He warned that the meat and skins from wolves and dogs poisoned should not be eaten or touched, and so local villagers should be told in advance to report any dead animals to officials at the Niikappu ranch. He requested 1.3 ounces of strychnine, but the Sapporo Hospital only had 1.06 ounces on hand, and so that would have to do.⁷¹

"We went to work systematically," wrote Dun in Reminiscences. Dun first organized a patrol of about twenty men on horses, and each individual was given a daily route. Each rider was given "chunks of poisoned meat to be dropped at likely places," and, adhering to the nineteenth-century law of the prairie, a "small bottle of strychnine to be used in case ... the carcass of a murdered horse or colt was found." Dun wrote, in that strangely nonchalant tone so familiar to the journals of wolfers in the American West, that in such a case the carcass "would be deeply slashed and a liberal allowance of our seasoning sprinkled within it. The success of our systematic work was immediate and within a few months complete." Dun continued:

The first day's bag was five or six dead wolves found, probably others slunk away to die in places where they could not be found. Their bodies would usually be found near the poisoned carcass or bait, where if undisturbed they would remain gorging themselves until the deadly stuff began to work and it works very quickly. Often they would be found near water where they had gone to quench the terrible thirst the poison creates. Our first day's bag was our best. A few were bagged every day for a week or ten days, then only one or so occasionally. Then for weeks our bag would be nil until finally the beasts were wiped out. So within one summer and autumn we were freed from a pest that in the spring seemed very threatening to our enterprise. Hundreds of dead foxes, crows and an occasional Ainu stray dog were found near our plants which was of course unavoidable.⁷²

The sharp drop in deer numbers in 1878–1879 had focused wolves in the Hidaka region, where poisoned carcasses and bits of meat awaited the "murderers."⁷³ Thus Kaitakushi officials could boast to Tokyo in March 1880 that the strychnine campaign had been a success and should be continued. "Everybody knows the damage done by wolves on Hokkaido," wrote officials in Sapporo; yet wolves, being fast and clever, were extremely difficult to kill. Hunters could rarely anticipate from which direction they would come next. So officials explained they had spread strychnine in chunks of meat around the Niikappu ranch. Of four wolves that fed on the poisoned bait, two died almost instantly, while the remaining two, having had a smaller dose, wandered away, but they too were soon reported dead (see Figure 7). Considering the success of the program (and because the next horse-breeding season was quickly approaching), officials wanted more strychnine from Tokyo. They asked that it be shipped as quickly as possible.⁷⁴

Figure 7. The Hokkaido Wolf.
The image includes the only partially decipherable caption, "This picture, like the other, is of the Hokkaido mountain dog. In 1875, the former Kaitakushi government had captured the wolf alive and cared for it." Later, we are told, the wolf died.

Courtesy of the Hokkaido University Museum of Natural History, Sapporo, Japan.

Conclusion

DESPITE THE SUCCESS of Dun's late 1870s chemical campaign against wolves and wild dogs, he alone was not responsible for the extinction of the Hokkaido wolf. The Kaitakushi's elaborate bounty system and environmental upheaval caused by Hokkaido's development also played important roles. However, more interesting than the specific policies that led to wolf extinction, or the reasons why Dun and other Westerners felt so compelled to "exterminate" (and not just cull) wolves, is a deeper question. Why did some Japanese, having lived in a culture that once revered the wolf as the "large-mouthed pure god" only decades before, approve of the ruthless industrial methods used to eradicate them? To explain this about-face in Japanese attitudes toward wolves, we need to return one last time to the issue of Japan's vision of modernity in the early Meiji years. When foreign advisers such as Dun came to Japan, they brought much more than their expertise: They brought deeply rooted opinions about the promise of modernization that, when integrated into the Japanese education system, work place, political values, and attitudes about the natural world, laid the foundation on which the modern Japanese nation would be built.

It is understandable that scientific agriculture proved such an important part of Meiji economic reforms and the colonization of Hokkaido. What is less understandable, however, is how the Hokkaido wolf, much like so many other human and nonhuman beings, could be so easily sacrificed on the bloody altar of modernity. Historians have written at length about the social impact of Japan's early industrial age, when celebrated Japanese capitalists came to dominate world textile markets by forcing young women, called "factory girls," to labor under horrific conditions in damp, tubercular mills; when Ainu, or what remained of them in the late nineteenth century, labored at salmon and herring fisheries located along the coastal areas of Hokkaido, and there were cheated, raped, and beaten daily by greedy overseers; or when brave young men boarded "factory ships" to catch and process crab in North Pacific waters, working in unbelievably dangerous conditions, all for the benefit of the modern nation or to make somebody else rich.⁷⁵ In the name of modernity and industry, we—and I say we because this is our world too—consistently prove willing to sacrifice members of our own species. Seen in this light, sacrificing another species, such as wolves, seems unremarkable.

What is remarkable, however, is that Japan had almost come to resemble other modern industrialized nations—in this case the community of Western wolf exterminating nations—more than it resembled its own pre-modern self. It is the historical discontinuity, not continuity, which stands out in the story of wolf extinction in Japan. This rather jarring lesson regarding the power of global modernity is one that historians need to consider when teaching their students about the roots of modern Japan.

Notes

This article is a modified chapter from the forthcoming Creating and Killing the Wolves of Japan: Reflections on the History of Science, Culture and the Environment (Seattle: Weyerhaeuser Series, University of Washington Press). I sincerely appreciate the kind help I received from Akizuki Toshiyuki, Amano Tetsuya, Bill Cronon, Jeff Hanes, Susan Jones, Inoue Katsuo, Dale Martin (who also drew the marvelous map), Eve Munson, Mary Murphy, Adam Rome (and anonymous readers for Environmental History), Tanabe Yasuichi (who selflessly shared years worth of his own research with me), Ron Toby, Conrad Totman, Tsuchiya Tatsuhide, Kären Wigen, Marcia Yonemoto and, of course, Yuka Hara. I am grateful to the staff at the Hokkaido Prefectural Archives (Hokkai Dôritsu Monjokan) in Sapporo, Japan; the Resource Collection for Northern Studies (Hoppô Shiryô Shitsu) at the Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Japan; and the Montana State University Special Collections in Bozeman, Montana. Funding for this project came from a Japan Foundation Research Grant and a Vice President for Research, Creativity, and Technology Transfer Research Grant at Montana State University.

^1. The classic study of early modern Japanese diplomacy is Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (1984; reprint, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991). For a historiographical assessment of English-language scholarship on early modern Japan's foreign relations, see Brett L. Walker, "Foreign Affairs and Frontiers in Early Modern Japan: A Historiographical Essay of the Field," Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10 (Fall 2002): 44–62.

^2. For English-language studies of early Meiji politics, see Joseph Pittau, S. J., Political Thought in Early Meiji Japan, 1868–1889 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); W. G. Beasley, The Meiji Restoration (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972); Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, ed., Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). For a pioneering discussion of "nature" in Japanese political discourse, including during the early Meiji years, see Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For thoughts on the Satchô alliance and the character of early Meiji governance, see L. M. Cullen, A History of Japan, 1582–1941: Internal and External Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 218–24. For American experts and the colonization of Hokkaido, see Fumiko Fujita, American Pioneers and the Japanese Frontier: American Experts in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994). On early Japanese embassies that brought back information regarding Europe and the United States, see Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (New York: Kodansha International, 1979); Peter Duus, The Japanese Discovery of America: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997); and Ian Nish, The Iwakura Mission to America and Europe: A New Assessment (Kent: Japan Library, 1998).

^3. The Meiji government established the Kaitakushi in July 1869, an agency designed to oversee the economic development and military defense of the island of Hokkaido. Likewise, in 1871–76 the Kaitakushi oversaw the development and defense of Sakhalin Island, as well as the Kuril Islands after 1876. Primarily, the Kaitakushi tried to entice Japanese to settle Hokkaido and to develop the island's many natural resources. However, one year after the Hokkaido colonization "assets scandal" of 1881, the Meiji government dismantled the Kaitakushi and Hokkaido officially lost its colonial status. On the Kaitakushi, see John A. Harrison, Japan's Northern Frontier: A Preliminary Study in Colonization and Expansion with Special Reference to the Relations of Japan and Russia (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1953), 59–139.

^4. On the 1871 Iwakura mission, see Beasley, The Meiji Restoration, 366–74; and Nish, The Iwakura Mission to America and Europe. On the use of the Morrill Act as a model for the establishment of the Sapporo Agricultural College (present-day Hokkaido University), see John M. Maki, William Smith Clark: A Yankee in Hokkaido (Sapporo: Hokkaido University Press, 1996), 77–145. In 1872, while viewing military drills at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, a land-grant institution, Mori Arinori, chargé d'affaires at the Japanese legation (1870–1872) and later Minister of Education (1885), explained, "That is the kind of an institution Japan must have, that is what we need, an institution that shall teach young men to feed themselves and to defend themselves" (ibid., 124).

^5. For a history of early modern trade and other forms of cultural and ecological exchange between Japanese and Ainu, see Brett L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For a more general history of Ainu-Japanese relations, see Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan (London: Routledge, 1996).

^6. "Môjû ryôsatsusha e teatekin kyûyo no ken" (Matter of bounty allowance paid to wild animal hunters) [1878.2.15], in Shûsairoku (Collected jurisdictional records) (A4-54-49). Hokkaido Prefectural Archives (hereafter HPA), Sapporo, Hokkaido. For a history of Russian encroachment in the North Pacific, see George Alexander Lensen, The Russian Push toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697–1875 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).

^7. On the "live machines" of Meiji Japan, see Hazel J. Jones, Live Machines: Hired Foreigners in Meiji Japan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980).

^8. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought (London: Routledge, 1989), 17.

^9. Nativist (kokugaku) scholars such as Hirata Atsutane valorized agriculture in Japan's early modern period as the "ancient Way" (kodôron). According to H. D. Harootunian, Hirata believed that "Japanese rice was superior to the rice of all countries, and those who consumed it took in a divine food that guaranteed their uniqueness and superiority over all others." See H. D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23, 212. For more on rice in early modern Japan, see Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 86–88.

^10. Of course, there are many exceptions to this early modern Japanese disdain for meat eating. The widespread consumption of wild game is perhaps the most important. Japanese boast an ancient tradition of hunting wild game and the inhabitants of upland communities ate the flesh of many wild animals. In some instances, Japanese attributed medicinal qualities to certain wild game, which seems to have alleviated some of the Buddhist implications of its consumption. See Brett L. Walker, "Commercial Growth and Environmental Change in Early Modern Japan: Hachinohe's Wild Boar Famine of 1749," The Journal of Asian Studies 60 (May 2001): 329–51. In the sixteenth century, some European missionaries described butcher shops in Edo (present-day Tokyo) where urban consumers could buy the meat from a variety of wild game. See Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco's remarks in Michael Cooper, comp., They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 284–85.

^11. Shibusawa Keizô, comp., Japanese Life and Culture in the Meiji Era, trans. Charles S. Terry (Tokyo: Ôbunsha, 1958), 65–66.

^12. Chiba Tokuji, Shuryô denshô (Hunting folklore) (Tokyo: Hôsei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1975), 157; Hiraiwa Yonekichi, Ôkami: Sono seitai to rekishi (The wolf: Its ecology and history) (Tokyo: Tsukiji Shokan, 1992), 89.

^13. On the impact of Western notions of "civilization and enlightenment" on Meiji Japan, see Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period, 51–75.

^14. Describing the role of European fables, myths, and biblical interpretations in creating the Western hatred for wolves, a highly astute (but sadly anonymous) European writer observed from British colonial India in 1927: "As a good European, I inherit a whole huddle of dark neolithic fears which the poets and magicians and schoolmasters of my tribe have sedulously kept alive through the safe, comfortable centuries. I am not to blame. From my cradle have I been bidden, enjoined, commanded to fear the wolf. He tears you to pieces alive and digs you up when you are dead, and before the maid has time to run to your frantic ringing he pulls you down on your own threshold; between the pillarbox and the front-door he pulls you down, in the dark, after tea. No, I am not to blame." C. G. C. T. as cited in Denise Casey and Tim W. Clark, comp., Tales of the Wolf: Fifty-one Stories of Wolf Encounters in the Wild (Moose, Wyo.: Homestead Publishing, 1996), 134.

^15. David L. Howell, "Required Reading," Journal of Japanese Studies 29 (Summer 2003): 355.

^16. See, for example, Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 258–90; Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978); and Bruce Hampton, The Great American Wolf (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997).

^17. Ben Corbin cited in Rick McIntyre, ed., War Against the Wolf: America's Campaign to Exterminate the Wolf (Stillwater, Minn.: Voyageur Press, Inc., 1995), 123–29.

^18. Hokkaido Prefectural Government, ed., Foreign Pioneers: A Short History of the Contribution of Foreigners to the Development of Hokkaido (Sapporo: Hokkaido Prefectural Government, 1968), 23, 24.

^19. Funayama Kaoru, Zoku Otôsei (Otôsei continued), in Funayama Kaoru shôsetsu zenshû (The complete collection of novels by Funayama Kaoru), Vol. 9 (Tokyo: Kawade Shobô Shinsha, 1975). The section of Funayama's novel dealing with wolves (134–50) includes quotations from Dun's unpublished memories describing the Hokkaido wolf (146). In Togawa Yukio and Honjô Kei's work, by contrast, the comic (manga) style affords these authors greater flexibility. Although portraying Dun heroically, the authors portray the Hokkaido wolves sympathetically as well. The authors even give the wolves voices in the narrative. Wolves excitedly exclaim, "Meat!" when they first discover the strychnine-laced baits, and then cry out "Oh, the Pain!" and "Water!" as the strychnine begins to kill them (160–205). The wolves also are protected by a young lad called "Boy" who, on one occasion, embraces a wolf as it dies from strychnine poisoning. In many ways, this comic is the first environmental history of the disappearance of either subspecies of Japanese wolf. See Togawa Yukio and Honjô Kei, Ôkami no hi: Ezo ôkami no zetsumetsuki (Memorial to the wolf: A record of the extinction of the Hokkaido wolf) (Tokyo: Shônen Champion Comics, 1994).

^20. For more information on Edwin Dun, see Foreign Pioneers, 15–27. See also Fujita, American Pioneers and the Japanese Frontier, 69–87. Dun's daughter, Dun Michiko, also wrote on her father, but offers little information, at least related to Niikappu and wolves, that is not contained in his unpublished memoirs; see Dan Michiko, Meiji no bokusaku (Fenced pastures of Meiji) (Tokyo: Sumire Gakuennai, 1968), 43–53.

^21. Edwin Dun, Reminiscences of Nearly A Half Century in Japan [n.d.]. Resource Collection for Northern Studies (hereafter RCNS), Hokkaido University Library, Sapporo, Hokkaido.

^22. On the industrialization and modernization of American agriculture, see Peter D. McClelland, Sowing Modernity: America's First Agricultural Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Deborah Kay Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). On the roots of the industrial ideal in American agriculture and literary traditions, see William Conlogue, Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

^23. Dun, Reminiscences, 6.

^24. For more in English on Kuroda Kiyotaka and the Kaitakushi, see David Forsyth Anthony, "The Administration of Hokkaido under Kuroda Kiyotaka—1870–1882: An Early Example of Japanese-American Cooperation," (Ph.D., diss, Yale University, 1968).

^25. Dun, Reminiscences, 12–13.

^26. On the revolution in Japanese meat-eating habits during the Meiji period, see Shibusawa, comp., Japanese Life and Culture in the Meiji Era, 65–69. For more on Japanese food culture in general, see Michael Ashkenazi and Jeanne Jacob, The Essence of Japanese Cuisine: An Essay on Food and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

^27. On Japanese and wild boar, for example, see Walker, "Commercial Growth and Environmental Change in Early Modern Japan."

^28. At the same time in the United States, as Richard White explains, after an expansion of the cattle industry in the American West, "Americans came to think that they were living in the 'Golden Age of American Beef', " (Richard White, "Animals and Enterprise," in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 256). For more on the development of the North American cattle industry, see Terry G. Jordon, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000).

^29. The Department of Agriculture and Commerce, ed., Japan in the Beginning of the 20th Century (Tokyo: Shoin, 1904), 184–200.

^30. Dun, Reminiscences, 13–14.

^31. On the ideology of the Meiji period, see Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Tak Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1996).

^32. Dun, Reminiscences, 15–16, 74–75, and 30.

^33. On the importance of zootechny in the context of the colonization of the Philippines, see Greg Bankoff, "A Question of Breeding: Zootechny and Colonial Attitudes towards the Tropical Environment in Late Nineteenth-Century Philippines," The Journal of Asian Studies 60 (Spring 2001): 413–37.

^34. Dun, Reminiscences, 32–34.

^35. Ibid., 35.

^36. Edwin Dun, "His Excellency, Matsumoto" [Nanai, 4 October 1875]. RCNS.

^37. Edwin Dun, "Mr Dzushio Hirotake, Acting Daishioke Kwan of Kaitakushi" [Sapporo, 9 July 1877]. RCNS.

^38. Edwin Dun, "His Excellency, Dzushio Hirotaki, Kaitaku Daishioki Kwan" [Sapporo, 28 May 1881]. RCNS.

^39. Even without Dun's advice, Kaitakushi officials, increasingly knowledgeable about the American experience, probably became well aware of the potential problems that predators posed to raising sheep on Hokkaido. For example, see "Beikoku kuma ôkami no men'yô o gai suru keikyô" (The situation of sheep depredation by bears and wolves in the United States) Hokkai tsûshi (Northern sea interpreter) 14 (October 1880): 8–11.

^40. Edwin Dun, "Shiriuchi" [Sapporo, 1 July 1881]. RCNS.

^41. Edwin Dun, "His Excellency, Governor Hori, Kaitaku, Daishioki Kwan" [Sapporo, 18 October 1877]. RCNS.

^42. Edwin Dun, "Mr Satow, Gon shio shioki Kwan of Kaitakushi" [Sapporo, 25 March 1878]. RCNS.

^43. Dun, "His Excellency, Matsumoto." RCNS.

^44. For a treatment of Japan's pre-industrial wolf history, see Hiraiwa, Ôkami. On Shinto and Buddhist wolf iconography and symbolism, see John Knight, "On the Extinction of the Japanese Wolf," Asian Folklore Studies 56 (1997): 130–59; and Waiting for Wolves in Japan: An Anthropological Study of People-Wildlife Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

^45. For some slightly later reportage on the predator situation at the Niikappu ranch, see "Niikappu bokujo no keikyô" (The situation at the Nikkappu ranch) Hokkai tsûshi (Northern sea interpreter) 7 (July 1880): 4–9.

^46. Dun, Reminiscences, 35–36.

^47. "Yachû bokuba o oiireru saku chikuzô hoka yonkado no ken" (Matter of four reasons to construct a fence to herd horses into at night) [1878.5.11], in Shûsairoku (Collected jurisdictional records) (A4-54). HPA.

^48. For regional variations on this Ainu creation myth, see Sarashina Genzô and Sarashina Kô, Kotan seibutsuki: Yajû-kaiû-gyozoku hen (A biological chronicle of Ainu villages: Volume on terrestrial animals, marine mammals, and fishes) (Tokyo: Hôsei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1976), 2: 291–92. An English version of this story can be found in Carl Etter, Ainu Folklore: Traditions and Culture of the Vanishing Aborigines of Japan (Chicago: Wilcox & Follett Co., 1949), 20–21. Interestingly, John Batchelor rejected this origin myth, saying that it was not a traditional Ainu tale. Some critics of the Japanese settlement of Hokkaido claimed that, because the female wife of the wolf god was often depicted or described as a Japanese court lady, that Japanese trumped up the story to place Ainu in a subordinate position to themselves, as children of the Japanese. However, this appears not to have been the case, as many early sources, some with illustrations, tell this same story, even before the advent of assimilation policies initiated by Japanese.

^49. "Yachû bokuba o oiireru saku chikuzô hoka yonkado no ken" [1878.5.11], in Shûsairoku (A4-54). HPA.

^50. "Niikappu bokujo sanjiba kuma ôkami nado no higai bôjo no tame yôjû dan sôchi no ken" (Matter of sending Western firearms and ammunition to prevent bear and wolf damage to newborn horses at the Niikappu ranch) [1878.5.23], in Honka todokeroku (Records of home division reports) (A4-51-72). HPA.

^51. For some comparative statistics of roughly the same time period regarding wolf and coyote predation in the American West, see Theodore S. Palmer, "Extermination of Noxious Animals By Bounties," in Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1896), 55–56.

^52. For more on the history of Hokkaido's deer population, see Inukai Tetsuo, "Hokkaidô no shika to sono kôbô" (The Hokkaido deer and its rise and fall) Hoppô bunka kenkyû hôkoku (Research reports on northern culture) 7 (March 1952): 1–22.

^53. Inukai Tetsuo, "Hokkaidô-san ôkami to sono metsubô keiro" (The Hokkaido wolf and its road to extinction) Shokubutsu oyobi dôbutsu (Botany and zoology) 1 (August 1933): 17.

^54. Inukai Tetsuo, Hoppô dôbutsushi (Northern animal journal) (Sapporo: Hokuensha, 1975), 23.

^55. Dun, Reminiscences, 52–53.

^56. Inukai Tetsuo, Waga dôbutsuki (My animal chronicle) (Tokyo: Kurashi no Techôsha, 1970), 117–18.

^57. Stanley Paul Young, The Wolf in North American History (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1946), 100, 104–5. See also Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

^58. For more on this bitter war between wolves and humans, and a discussion of the changing attitudes toward wolves in the United States, see Thomas R. Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife: Ecology and the American Mind, 1850–1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

^59. Benjamin S. Lyman, "Journal of a Trip from Nemoro by Soya and Hakodate to Yedo" [1874]. RCNS.

^60. For sources on Hokkaido's bounty system, see Kaitakushi, ed. Hokkaidôshi (Hokkaido records) [1892] (Tokyo: Rekishi Toshosha, 1973), 397–99. See also "Môjû ryôsatsusha e teatekin kyûyo no ken" [1878.2.15–6.29], in Shûsairoku (A4-54-49); "Kuma ôkami nado môjû ryôsatsu no ken" (Matter of hunting and killing bears, wolves, and other animals) (1878.1.21 and 1878.5.31), in Shûsairoku (Collected jurisdictional records) (A4-54-48); and "Kuma ôkami narabi ni karasu hokaku todoke tori matome hôkoku sashidasase kata no ken" (Matter of final settling of notification regarding the capture of bears, wolves, and crows)[1880.1.21], in Shûsairoku (Collected jurisdictional records) (04061). All these sources can be found at the HPA.

^61. Dun, Reminiscences, 36–37.

^62. For more on the origins and nature of Hokkaido dogs, see Hatakeyama Saburôta, "Hokkaidô no inu ni tsuite no oboegaki: Senshi jidai kaizuka-ken to Ainu-ken no hikaku" (A memorandum on the Hokkaido dog: A comparison of the prehistoric shellmound dog to the Ainu dog) Hokkaidôshi no kenkyû (Research on Hokkaido history) 1 (December 1973): 41.

^63. Dun, Reminiscences, 37.

^64. Ibid.

^65. Stanley P. Young, The Last of the Loners (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 40–44.

^66. William Edward Webb, Buffalo Land: An Authentic Account of the Discoveries, Adventures, and Mishaps of a Scientific and Sporting Party in the Wild West with Graphic Descriptions of the Country; the Red Man, Savage and Civilized; Hunting the Buffalo, Antelope, Elk and Wild Turkey; ETC; ETC (Chicago, Ill., and Cincinnati, Ohio: E. Hannaford & Company, 1872), 290–93. See also McIntyre, ed., War Against the Wolf, 54–55.

^67. Granville Stuart, Forty Years on the Frontier (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1925). See also McIntyre, ed., War Against the Wolf, 59.

^68. Joseph H. Batty, How to Hunt and Trap (New York: Orange Judd Company, 1884). See also McIntyre, ed., War Against the Wolf, 60.

^69. L. S. Kelly, "Wolves and Coyotes," Forest and Stream 48 (20 February 1897), 144–45. See also Casey and Clark, comp., Tales of the Wolf, 162–64. The sporting magazine Forest and Stream often ran articles on how to poison wolves with strychnine, some going into grotesque detail on what techniques offered the wolfer the greatest killing power with their poison. For example, see Orin Belknap, "Poisoning Wolves," Forest and Stream 48 (27 February 1897), 168.

^70. The use of strychnine on Hokkaido was not the first time that Japanese had used poisoned baits to kill wolves. For the use of poisons in northeastern Japan during the early modern period, see Hiraiwa, Ôkami, 130–31.

^71. "Niikappu bokujo nai ni oite yajû dokusatsu no gi ukagai no ken" (Matter of inquiry into poisoning wild animals at the Niikappu ranch)[1878.6.20], in Shûsairoku (Collected jurisdictional records) (A4-54). HPA.

^72. Dun, Reminiscence, 37–38.

^73. In the nineteenth-century modern order, westerners and Japanese not only came to view wolves as ruthless "murderers," but as trespassers and violators of property rights as well. This fact helps to explain the brutality of wolf extermination, as well as the extermination of other less murderous creatures such as prairie dogs: See Susan Jones, "Becoming a Pest: Prairie Dog Ecology and the Human Economy in the Euroamerican West," Environmental History 4 (October 1999): 531–52.

^74. "Hondô rôgai zankoku ni tsuki satsukaku no tame sutorikiniine kôkyû no ue sôchi kata no ken" (Matter of the brutal damage caused by wolves throughout Hokkaido and the purchasing and sending of strychnine to kill them) [1880.3.16], in Tôkyô bun iroku (Transferred records of Tokyo written documents) (03774). HPA.

^75. For an overview of the underside of Japan's modernization, see Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, & Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). On factory girls, see E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). On tuberculosis in Meiji Japan's silk industry, see William Johnston, The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69–90. For a personal account of Ainu being forced to work in forestry and at fisheries, see the memoirs of Kayano Shigeru, Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980). For a fictional account of life on a crab factory ship, see Kobayashi Takiji, The Factory Ship and The Absentee Landlord, trans. Frank Motofuji (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973).

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