The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800 (review)

Walker has written a sympathetic history of a long-neglected region—the Ainu homeland in the northern Japanese archipelago, known to the early modern Japanese as Ezo. Taking a cue from the new historians of the American West, Walker eschews the term "frontier" in favor of an Ezo-centered account. Deploying methods from environmental and cultural history, he documents the ethnic, ecological, and geopolitical violence that drew the region's rich resources steadily into the orbit of Japan.

The book opens with a contrasting pair of Japanese maps, drawn in 1700 and 1830, respectively. In the former, Ezo is represented as a foreign land. Its outlines are mere impressions, and the cartographic standards imposed by the shogun to domestic regions are not applied. The later map, by contrast, attests to a more aggressive relationship toward the region. By 1830, the shogun's cartographers could map Hokkaido, the Kuriles, and southern Sakhalin in precise detail, thanks to extensive surveying and exploiting of these islands for fish, game, timber, minerals, and medicines. The once hazy realm to the north had come sharply into view as a resource-rich periphery, making it a hotly contested borderland between the Russian, Chinese, and Japanese states.

In excavating the context of these two maps, Walker covers considerable ground. Chapter one explores state making on the northern border in the late 1500s, at the close of Japan's long era of civil wars, and traces the process through which one warrior family, the Matsumae, came to be invested with proprietary rights to the gold, hawks, eagle feathers, bearskins, deerskins, sea otter pelts, and other valuable commodities of the Ainu trade. Much light is shed on the flexibility of feudalism at the regime's margin, as well as on the international order in which the Tokugawa shogunate took shape.

The second chapter explicates a key moment in the military struggle over the region's resources. Analyzing Shakushain's War as a Japanese counterpart to King Philip's War, Walker identifies economic competition as the core of this "ethnic" conflict. In subsequent chapters, he traces the decline of Ainu autonomy (as the iron pots, lacquerware, sake, and tobacco gained through trade became integral elements of Ainu ritual and material life); the cultural symbolism of trade relations (which were increasingly scripted to display Ainu subjugation); its mounting environmental costs (from mining runoff to overhunting, overfishing, and unsustainable logging); the hardening of international boundaries in this one-time buffer zone; and the role of epidemic diseases (notably smallpox and syphilis) in the conquest of the Ainu. The book ends with a meditation on the ceremonial dimension of the conquest, arguing that both Ainu and Japanese incorporated each other's ceremonial practices to form a cultural "middle ground."

Informed throughout by the historiography of colonial encounter in North America, The Conquest of Ainu Lands effectively places the Japanese-Ainu encounter on the wider map of world history (dispelling, in the process, the misconception that modern Japanese imperialism had no premodern precedent). As a result, Walker's work should be of considerable interest to anyone pursuing comparative research on the economic, ethnic, and ecological relations between expanding states and stateless peoples in the early modern period. The questions are wide-ranging; the research is splendid; and the text has been meticulously edited, thoroughly indexed, and generously illustrated with period prints and maps.