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Book Review
| The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–1800. By BRETT L. WALKER. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xii +332 pp. $40.00 (cloth).
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In the late nineteenth century, North American advisors and visitors to Japan's new northern colony of Hokkaido saw close parallels between the fate of the American Indian and the Ainu, the native people of Hokkaido. Within the racist framework of social evolutionism, both groups were perceived as "dying races" destined to succumb to superior civilizations. For the Japanese, parallels with the status of the North American Indian were so clear that the 1887 Dawes Act in the United States provided a model for the 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act. |
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These similarities between the colonial history of the Ainu and Native Americans are matched, however, by important differences. The Ainu and other native groups in northeast Asia had experienced a much longer history of contact with surrounding state societies; the process of colonial encounter was thus more complex and incremental than in the Americas. Perhaps because of these apparent continuities, the deconstruction of the colonial history of Hokkaido has been slow, and only during the past two decades have Japanese scholars begun to criticize the traditional view that stressed the "apartness" of Ainu history. This new book by historian Brett Walker provides the best critical analysis of the premodern colonial encounter between the Ainu and the Japanese so far published in English. Walker continues to use North America as a point of comparative departure, but his book utilizes an approach derived from the New Western history to center the frontier as a place rather than merely a point of contact. The author focuses not so much on the expansion of the Japanese state into Hokkaido as on the interrelationships between Ainu resistance and Japanese expansion. |
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