The Japanese Journal of American Sturdies, No. 11 (2000)

Remembering a More Layered Past
in Hokkaido: Americans, Japanese,and the Ainu
Yujin YAGUCHII THE ADVENTURE OF CHARLES LONGFELLOW
It was a “cool” and “bracing” morning in the southern part of
Hokkaido (Figure 1). The day was September 16, 1871, and fall had
already come to the northern island of Japan. But Charles Longfellow
did not mind the chill. Rather, he and his travel companion, Charles De
Long, the American Minister to Japan, felt that the morning was quite“pleasant.” As they walked along the coast, they enjoyed the calm sea
on one side and the “richly wooded undulating hills or mountains” on
the other. Following them were a group of Japanese ofﬁcials acting as
an escort to the guests from abroad. A group of Japanese coolies also
followed, carrying heavy luggage and leading pack horses.1
Longfellow was more than six thousand miles away from his home in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father, the poet Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, and his family led a life of cultivated comfort, surroundedby friends and visitors of considerable intellectual and material sophistication.2 Despite the lack of such material comfort in Hokkaido—walking on narrow paths, riding untrained horses, and spending the nights inmakeshift shelters—Charles’ spirits remained high. He and De Long, a“rough and ready Colorado man who would shine more in the ﬁeld thanthe cabinet,” were excited because they knew they were ﬁnally going to
Copyright © 2000 Yujin Yaguchi. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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Figure 1 Map of Hokkaido, Japan

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have a chance to satisfy their longstanding wish: they were scheduled tosee the Ainu, the indigenous people of the island.3 The men had comeall the way to Hokkaido just to see the natives, described by the Japanesein Tokyo as “the queer people.” The Americans had heard that the Ainu
men were “hairy” and “wild,” while the women were said to “succle [sic]bear cubs, fatten and eat them.”4 The adventurous men desired to observe
these “queer people” with their own eyes. When De Long managed toobtain permission from the Japanese government to travel to the island,Charles Longfellow decided to accompany him, explaining to his family that there would be “hundreds of fellows who would give all their oldloots to do this.”5
Soon the Americans and their Japanese retinue arrived in a small Ainu
village called Urap, which consisted of about thirty houses. Longfellow
quickly left the column on a horse and excitedly galloped into the village to have a closer look at the “queer people.” But his sudden arrival
caused great “dismay” among the Ainu residents, particularly among thewomen who “either ran away or crouched down covering their mouths
and uttering a peculiar low wailing sound.”6
Although Longfellow’s ﬁrst encounter with the Ainu ended in a ﬁasco, he had other opportunities to satisfy his desire to visit Ainu communities during the following days of traveling. On September 21, for example, he arrived in a larger Ainu village where he “cornered two bright–
eyed girls of about eighteen” as “captives” and struck up “quite a talkwith them.” He showed them his tattoo which they admired “verymuch[,] it being so much better than their own rude work.” He completed
the conversation with these “captives” by giving them some money andreceiving a carved wooden spoon in return.7
Three months later, the New York Times ran a report on Longfellow
and De Long’s journey. It included a description of the “hairy aborigines of Japan” and detailed activities not fully recorded in Longfellow’s
diary. According to this unknown journalist, during the journey theAmericans had the opportunities to enter several Ainu houses, to see atleast one performance of traditional Ainu dance, and to go hunting with
the Ainu men. They apparently also got a close look at the natives whentraveling in “a junk, rowed for a long time by Ainos.” “It was a curious
scene,” the article reported, “to behold those wild, long bearded fellows(an exact picture of ﬁrst–class theatrical pirates,) singing to their oars,
and chanting a wild and not unmusical song.”8
*

*

*

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YUJIN YAGUCHI

Although Charles Longfellow’s account of his travel to Hokkaido
remains virtually unknown today, his experience is signiﬁcant because
it points to a dimension of the past that has not been sufﬁciently recognized by historians interested in the intercultural history of the UnitedStates and Japan. Despite the presence of numerous works that have analyzed the variegated dimensions of the history of the two nations, few,
if any, scholars have paid close attention to the encounters between
Americans and the Ainu. This is a rather curious oversight, because manyof the works that focus on the history of the U.S.–Japan relationship havedwelled upon the history of the northern island of Hokkaido, where formany centuries the majority of the population had been Ainu.9
Scholars who have investigated the history of Hokkaido have disclosed a great deal about the extent of the American “contribution” to
the Japanese “development” of the island during the latter half of thenineteenth century. Americans such as Horace Capron and William
Smith Clark played a critical role in the Japanese Colonization
Commission, a government agency established in 1868 to colonize anddevelop the northern island, which had been relatively unoccupied by
the Japanese until that time.10 They provided the Japanese with technical expertise in a wide range of areas including modern methods of surveying, mining, logging, agriculture, and education. As a result, these“American pioneers” did much to transform the “Japanese frontier.” As
Fumiko Fujita has noted in her research of American involvement in theisland, the works of American advisors “left a distinctively American
imprint on the history of Hokkaido.”11
Although it is important to recognize the signiﬁcance of American
activities in Japan’s mission of colonization, it is also necessary to recognize that the relationship of Americans with the Japanese was only
one part of the “American imprint on the history of Hokkaido.” Anotherequally, if not more, important dimension was many encounters between
Americans and the Ainu, who had been living in the area for centuries
before the arrival of the Japanese and Americans. Although only a few
concrete cases of such encounters are available for historical scrutiny
today, I believe it is important to retrieve them and move them to theforeground of our historical memory, so as to construct a more complex
and multilayered vision of the past in Hokkaido.
In this paper, I would like to suggest a new way of conceptualizing
the past relationship between the United States and Japan by calling
attention to the presence of the Ainu and thereby complicating the nature

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of that relationship. Speciﬁcally, by dwelling upon the records of two
encounters—the account of Charles Longfellow’s travels to Ainu villages and a photograph of William Smith Clark and Sakhalin Ainu
women—I will call attention to the possibility of expanding the scope ofunderstanding the intercultural history of Japan and the United States.
The Ainu were often “victimized” in such encounters because the balance of power and privilege between the Ainu and Americans was far
from equal. However, I will also point to the important and somewhat
paradoxical role the indigenous people played in facilitating the presence of Americans and their work in the island, and thereby potentiallysubverting the seemingly ﬁrm hierarchical power relations of the twogroups. By doing so, I hope to initiate a re–evaluation of the entire terrain of the understanding of the intercultural history of the United States
and Japan in the nineteenth century.12
II

THE IMPERIAL EYES

Despite his strong wish to see the “queer” natives of the northern
island, Charles Longfellow’s description of the Ainu suggests he was notreally seriously interested in understanding these people and their culture. His choice and sequence of words in describing the Ainu indicatethat he regarded the natives not as fellow human beings but more as creatures who shared less with a man like himself than they did with thenative birds and animals of the island. For example, when he saw a groupof Ainu men making oil from sardines on the beach, he noted in his memothat it was an “interesting scene[;] Inos [Ainu] drawing net and boilingsardines for oil, [while] dogs, women and crows assist [them].”13 His
impression of the Ainu dance was favorable, but he also considered it
more bestial than human. He noted that “their songs were pretty andsad[,] the dances were hopping about[,] beating hands and making noises like young bears.”14
In short, Longfellow’s interest in the Ainu was that of a detachedobserver who wished to satisfy his curiosity by seeing the strange andthe different. He saw his life as being far different to that of the natives
and he simply wished to relish a quick taste of the “queer” customs andtraditions of the Ainu before returning to civilization.
The structure of power embedded in Longfellow’s encounter with the
Ainu was clear. As a part of the group that included the ofﬁcial delegate
from the U.S. government, Longfellow was a privileged tourist. He and114

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his fellow travelers had such strong political and ﬁnancial power thatmost Japanese they met found it necessary to take the utmost care in hosting them. Longfellow described how he was pleasantly “struck by theattention we received.” On one occasion, for example, they were met by
Japanese men “in their best clothes, and katowing before speaking, while
the whole tea house was given up to us.” As he and his fellow westerners traveled, the Japanese on the street would lead their animals “out of
the road” and would “take off their hats or handkerchiefs[,] often dismounting[,] many even going down on their knees, out of respect.”15 The
power Longfellow enjoyed over the Ainu was even stronger and moreprivileged. He could easily “corner” the Ainu women, enter into theirhouses and observe a ritual dance, transforming the Ainu into mere
objects, remnants of wild savagery to stare at before returning to civilization. Encounters like these between Americans and the Ainu would
continue long after Longfellow’s departure. Whether the Americans
were tourists, advisors to the Colonization Commission, or anthropologists, their position in Hokkaido was so politically powerful that theirrelationship with the Ainu remained ﬁrmly hierarchical. Americans andthe Ainu seemed to stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of dominanceand deference, as the former commanded respect and power from theJapanese while the latter were rapidly losing control of their autonomy
in their own land.
***

The pattern of hierarchy which organized American–Ainu interaction
is visibly demonstrated in a photograph taken in Sapporo about ﬁve years
after Longfellow’s visit to that town (Figure 2). It was taken some time
between the fall of 1876 and spring of 1877 in the town of Sapporo, thecapital of the northern island.16 The scene, captured by a Japanese photographer named Seiichi Takebayashi, shows a total of eight ﬁgures, but
only two are identiﬁable today.17
The American man standing to the right is William Clark, who was
employed by the Colonization Commission as the ﬁrst president of
Sapporo Agricultural College (SAC). SAC was modeled after the
Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where
Clark had also served as president. Its mission was to teach Japanese students a scientiﬁc approach to agriculture. According to Clark, the goalof the school was “the proper training of the students . . . in practical

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Figure 2 William S. Clark and a group of Sakhalin Ainu,
1876–77. Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.
agriculture, and especially in the correct mode of farm management, with
due regard to economy of labor, the production of proﬁtable crops andstock, and the maintenance of fertility in the soil.”18
The Japanese man standing at the far left of the group is Seitaro Hori,a graduate of Massachusetts Agricultural College. He was an employeeof the Colonization Commission and served as Clark’s personal secretary and interpreter.19 Although considerably shorter than Clark, Hori
looks much like him in the photograph. The beard, the moustache, andthe hairstyle, as well as his set of western clothing—including a jacket,
a vest, and a white shirt—all emulate the style of his American boss. The
only accessories missing are a bowtie and a watch chained to his vest.
Clark and Hori stand behind a group of unnamed young Ainu womenand an infant, all of whom wear traditional Ainu garb. While the small
girl to the right and the mother in the center nursing the infant wear dresses made of animal hides (perhaps deer or seal), the other ﬁgures, looking slightly downwards, wear outer garments made from woven tree barkﬁbers. They all wear shoes made of animal skin. Hardly anything is
known about these women today except that they were “Karahuto

116

YUJIN YAGUCHI[Sakhalin] Ainu,” who had been relocated from their home on Sakhalin
Island to Hokkaido by the Japanese government as a result of an international treaty made between Russia and Japan in 1875.
The 1875 treaty settled a long–standing border dispute between thetwo nations by granting Russian sovereignty over Sakhalin in exchange
for recognition of the Japanese claim over the Kurile islands. Although
the Ainu had claimed that “Karahuto [Sakhalin] belonged to the Ainu,”
the Japanese government was not inclined to listen to the voice of thisminority group in an age of unrelenting imperial territorial ambitions.20
The government argued that the Ainu in Sakhalin were Japanese citizens
and encouraged them to leave the soon–to–be Russian territory. A totalof 841 Ainu men and women, who were more accustomed to living with
the Japanese than with the Russians, consented to leave for an area called
Soya in Hokkaido, directly across the strait from Sakhalin. But fearingthat the “stubborn and stupid” Ainu would eventually “escape back” to
Sakhalin and trigger a border dispute, the Japanese government decided
to move them to a more distant area called Tsuishikari, near Sapporo.
The Sakhalin Ainu strongly opposed the idea of being relocated to anarea so far from home and petitioned to have the plan canceled, expressing their fear of smallpox in the unaccustomed climate and their concern
over the lack of desirable ﬁshing areas. But the government forced therelocation by rounding up the Ainu like “sheep and pigs,” as one outraged Japanese advocate of the Ainu complained at the time. Because
the Ainu continued to oppose the idea of the relocation to Tsuishikari,
they were ﬁrst taken to the port of Otaru with a new promise that theywould instead be relocated to an area called Atsuta, which was closer tothe ocean. But the Japanese ofﬁcials deceived them again by suddenly
redirecting the ship to Tsuishikari. The Ainu strongly protested, but they
were forced to give up as the Japanese police were sent to the port to prevent possible resistance. The bitter involuntary relocation to Tsuishikari
was completed in June 1876, only two months before Clark’s arrival in
Sapporo.21
The scene in the photograph thus brought together two different andunequal cultures that were increasingly at odds with each other. Clark
represented the arrival of a new social system in the colonized island.
His goal was to establish many large–scale farms in Hokkaido that would
be administered rationally by professionals (like himself) and that would
produce crops of great exchange value in distant markets. He argued thatthe “most rational and approved system of farm economy should be

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117

adopted” for the island and “only such crops and stock should be raised
as are likely to be worth their cost.” He also recommended that “handimplements and human labor should be replaced by agricultural
machines and the working of horses and cattle.”22 Accordingly, hedevised an academic curriculum for his Japanese students at SAC thatencouraged the gaining of both a scientiﬁc and a practical knowledge of
agriculture and “farm economy.” He ordered textbooks, equipment,
seeds, and domestic animals from the United States. He also emphasized
the importance of developing in Japanese youth a sense of self–will,
self–help, and self–discipline, as well as the Christian faith, so that they
could fully direct their attention and energy to the goal of becoming the“most useful and most noble Christian men” in modernized Japan.23
The way Hori stands in the photograph suggests that he had paid attention to and mastered Clark’s instructions. He presents himself as modern and non–traditional in his outﬁt, particularly at a time when many
Japanese ofﬁcials were still wearing the more traditional Haori and
Hakama. In growing a beard, he had deﬁed the stereotypical image of aJapanese man. At the time, many Westerners were often struck by the“hairless” and “feminine” features of Japanese men, but there is little inthe visual image of Hori that evoked a sense of femininity.24 Rather, hestands as a mini–Clark or as a visual double of Clark, somewhat lesscompletely westernized than his master but sharing the same outlook on
the future of the island. As a graduate of Massachusetts Agricultural
College, he was a believer in Clark’s ideology and would have fully
agreed with one of the Japanese students at SAC who wrote that he wanted to become like an American “scientiﬁc farmer” or a man of “independent, self–reliant spirit, [with] steady, vigorous character and healthy,sound constitution.”25
In strong contrast, the cosmology of the Ainu men and women differed profoundly from Clark’s vision. The Sakhalin Ainu in the photograph had traditionally lived by hunting sea animals and gathering plants
for their livelihood. To accommodate their hunting and collecting expeditions, they moved from one point to another depending on the season.
The food and other materials they collected were more important for
using and consuming within their local community than for the potential beneﬁts they could bring from market exchanges. Members of the
Ainu communities discouraged personal ambition and gain and emphasized the harmony of their community and its relationship with theirgods. True, any description of the culture of these people as “simple,”

118

YUJIN YAGUCHI“stable,” “pure,” or “completely self–sufﬁcient” is grossly inaccurate, as
the Ainu had their own complex needs and expectations, as well as a system of exchange with neighboring cultures. But it is reasonable to argue
that they were not much concerned with the “system of farm economy”
and the “scientiﬁc” farming Clark vigorously advocated. The Ainu related to their land differently from the American and Japanese colonizers.26
The photographer Takebayashi captured these two different culturesin a series of contrasts: men with names versus women without names;
individuals versus a group; western outﬁts versus indigenous outﬁts;
clothing materials processed in factories versus raw materials worked byhand; adult versus children; standing high versus sitting low; looking
straight versus looking down; fully clothed versus partly naked. And it
was clear which side enjoyed the power. Clark and Hori represented theantithesis of the Ainu, who, according to Clark’s judgement, had “madelittle or no progress in the art of civilization during the last thirty centuries.”27 Whereas the Ainu in the photograph had recently been relocated from their native land against their wishes, the newcomer Clark
boasted that he had “plenty of business, plenty of inﬂuence, plenty ofmoney and plenty of happiness” in the island.28 While the men represented the glorious future of the island, the women were considered a
relic of the past, fast disappearing from the face of earth. The scene in
the photograph signiﬁed the arrival of the new forces that had overtaken and overcome the local social system and conﬁrmed the triumphantvictory of modernity sustained by the expansive political ideology ofwestern imperialism.29
III

THE EROTIC SUBMISSION

Analysis of the formal qualities of the photograph further illuminates
the relationship between the two groups. The composition of this photograph is well balanced and seems to have been carefully crafted. Eachman stands behind two Ainu women. The triumvirate placement of theﬁgures requires attention because they are strategically located toemphasize one central point in the scene: the naked breast. Both triangular clusters of ﬁgures look slightly inward, thereby directing the gazeof the viewer to the center. The pose of the ﬁgures further directs thegaze to the lower half of the photograph as Hori and the women on bothsides (except for the little girl) project their eyes downward. Thus the
direction of the bodies and eyes as well as the placement of the ﬁgures

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119

directs the gaze toward the woman with an exposed breast. This womansits in a way that maximizes the exposure of her breast to the viewer. If
the gaze had been intended to focus on the woman herself, she would
have sat looking straight into the camera lens—in fact, such a posturewould have made the entire scene well–proportioned because her body
would then be the central line of axis for the two contrasting triangularclusters. But she is posed looking slightly to the right, ensuring that her
breast remained visible. (Looking left was apparently unacceptable as
the infant’s head would have obstructed the view.) Moreover, unlike theother women in the photograph, she is dressed not in a skin–colored dress
made of woven tree bark ﬁbers but in a dark–colored coat made of animal hides which produces a sharp and emphatic contrast with her whiteskin and further attracts the viewer’s gaze to the breast. Thus the partial
nudity in this scene is carefully calculated in its effect: the placement of
the ﬁgures and their postures in this scene draws the viewer’s attention
to the woman’s breast as if the whole scene were subsumed under theimage of her nudity.
It is difﬁcult to imagine that the Ainu woman in the photographexposed her breast simply to feed her child. Ethnographic accounts fromthe past indicate that the Ainu often objected to being photographed.
According to John Batchelor, the well–known missionary and ethnographer who lived among the Ainu for nearly a half century, this was
because it was believed that, by “being sketched or photographed,” “theirnatural life was . . . shortened in some mysterious way or other.”Batchelor tells of an account of a western traveler who visited Sakhalin
without knowing of the Ainu’s aversion to photographs. The man “tookan almost endless amount of trouble to develop” a few photographs he
had taken in the community, thinking that they would please and surprise the local Ainu. But when he presented the photographs, the chiefand his associates became so distressed and enraged with this act of transgression that they burnt all of his photographs and even his “poor kodak”
into ashes.30
Furthermore, evidence suggests that the Ainu women in particular had
strong reservations about exposing their skin in public. For example,
Benjamin Lyman, an American engineer who conducted a series of mineralogical surveys of the island in the late nineteenth century, noticed
that while Ainu men readily stripped “to their waist cloth” when crossing rivers, the women “only replaced an outer garment.” “It is plain,” heobserved, “that among Aino women there exists the desire to conceal the120

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greater part of the body.” Other reports corroborate Lyman’s observation. Jan Havlasa, who traveled to Hokkaido in 1912, noted that the Ainu
women would not take their clothes off in a public bath, in sharp contrast to Japanese men and women who seemed to have little reservation
about showing their bodies. The Ainu women were said to hide theirbreast even when breast–feeding by tucking their child inside the shirt.31
Such reports suggest that the nudity in the photograph was not an outcome of a mere coincidence. Rather, the male choreographers of thistableau vivant coerced the Ainu woman to act against her cultural normand forced her to strip in a photographic studio.
This attention to the breast was consistent with Charles Longfellow’s
interest in the story of Ainu women who were said to suckle the cubs
kept in the community. At the same time, the scene undoubtedly satisﬁed the sexually interested gaze of the contemporary viewers who were,
given the overwhelming predominance of men in the Colonization
Commission (and the town of Sapporo), almost certainly male.
No recorded contemporary response to this photograph exists today,
but I believe the juxtaposition of the exposed Ainu woman and Clark inthe same scene offered a kind of visual pleasure to the Japanese viewersthat was not so different from the pleasure Laura Mulvey detected in
Hollywood “narrative cinema.” Using psychoanalytic theory, Mulvey
identiﬁed three elements that constituted the basis of the pleasure maleaudiences ﬁnd in popular Hollywood ﬁlms. First is a “scopophilic
instinct” or a desire to subject the female body as an erotic object. The
men project their “phantasy on to the female ﬁgure” for the sake of theirsexual enjoyment. Second is a form of narcissism that makes the maleviewer “fascinated with the image of his like [i.e. the handsome maleprotagonist] in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman.” Third is related to the classic Freudian
psychoanalytic concept of the problem of the female ﬁgure who, becauseof “her lack of a penis,” implies “a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” to the male audience. According to Mulvey, there are two avenuesof escape from this “castration anxiety.” One is to fetishize the woman
so that she becomes “reassuring rather than dangerous.” The overvalued“cult of the female star” is a good example of such fetishization. The
other strategy is to subject the woman to “voyeurism”—to investigate
and demystify her and subsequently devalue, punish or save her. The latter processes, which are typiﬁed by the conventions of the ﬁlm noir, havesadistic associations because the pleasure of the male viewer lies in

REMEMBERING A MORE LAYERED PAST IN HOKKAIDO

121“ascertaining the guilt [of the woman] . . . asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness.”32
Although this feminist analysis of the male gaze has been critiqued bya number of scholars, I believe Mulvey’s analysis is helpful for exploring the kind of feeling evoked in the mind of the male viewers of thephotograph in nineteenth–century Sapporo.33 The viewers’ “scopophilic
instinct” forced the Ainu woman to expose herself in front of the camera despite her cultural norm and turned her into an object of sexual fantasy. The men eroticized the woman by subjecting her to their gaze, dominating her and giving them a feeling of arousal and mastery over her.34
Meanwhile, their “narcissistic instinct” was projected onto the two men,particularly to Clark, who had assumed at the time an almost deiﬁed
image among the Japanese as a great teacher of modernization.35 As
Clark was highly respected not only by Japanese but also by his young
American assistants, he acted as a “more perfect, more complete, more
powerful ideal ego” or the “controlling ﬁgure with whom the spectator[could] identify.”36 He signiﬁed a greater and gloriﬁed future for theisland. Through a narcissistic identiﬁcation with Clark (or with Hori,
who served as Clark’s alter ego), viewers could conﬁrm their masteryover the future and through him gain a sense of control over the Ainu,
who symbolized the past that needed to be suppressed and abandoned.
According to Mulvey’s psychoanalytic framework, it is also necessary to consider the signiﬁcance of the “lack” represented by the Ainu
women and the attendant “castration fear” they created in the male audience. The avenue the men took to repress this fear was not through“fetishization.” Fetishizing the people who represented the past was not
appropriate for the Japanese, as they were interested in change and thefuture. Rather, they opted for the “voyeuristic mechanism.” To justify
and assert their control over the Ainu, the men searched for the “guilt”
of the natives. The voyeurism of the Japanese and American travelers,engineers, and anthropologists would therefore ﬁnd the Ainu guilty of,among other things, not making any “progress” in the “last thirty centuries” and of the “savage” custom of nourishing the cub at a woman’sbreast. It would also reveal the “stupidity” of their not understanding theborder dispute between Russia and Japan. Upon ﬁnding these spheres of“guilt” the colonizers “punished” the Ainu by depriving them of theirland, but also “helped” them with measures such as relocating them to
Tsuishikari.

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THE EROTIC SUBVERSION

The psychoanalytic interpretation of this photograph locates the intertwined feeling of fear and domination unfolding under the erotic malegaze. Yet, I sense another way of reading the photograph because thepresence of an infant here differentiates the scene quite sharply frommost Hollywood narrative ﬁlms. (After all, Garbo and Dietrich did notnourish babies in their ﬁlms.) It is perhaps true that the “scopophilic
instinct” of the men forced the Ainu woman to uncover herself so as toeroticize her. At the same time, however, the presence of the naked breast
and the infant makes it possible to argue that the Japanese male viewers
were also dependent upon her. This is because the utmost eroticism of
the men’s sexual fantasy could only be derived through imaginary identiﬁcation with the infant, who, like the famous cub, was allowed to “suckle” the woman’s breast in public. While narcissistically identifying
themselves with the standing, soaring Clark, the scopophilic male viewers could only fantasize the tactile experience of touching the woman’sbreast through identiﬁcation with the infant. This pleasure, however,required the men to become infantile, cuddled and nourished by anddependent on the mother who would offer their regressive imaginary
selves the bare breast.
This image of the male viewer as an infant serves as a counterpoint to
the male viewer who ﬁnds the “guilt” of the woman and asserts control
over her. Clark and other men had the power to strip the woman andpoint to her “lack,” but once the breast was exposed, they could exercise
their erotic imagination only by transforming themselves into a dependent baby in her arms. As Homi Bhaba suggests in his discussion of the“other” question, the colonial “body is always (if conﬂictually) inscribedin both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power.”37 While the body of the Ainu served as
an object of material and sexual exploitation, the sexual attachment
between the dominant and the dominated mediated by the naked breastin this photograph simultaneously leads to a potential for transgressingthat hierarchy.
Indeed, in real life, power and dependency were intertwined within
the seemingly rigid hierarchical relationship of the colonizers and thecolonized, because the very identity of the colonizers was dependent
upon the colonized. This is because it was the Ainu who, by occupying
the island for centuries, had rendered the land sufﬁciently “alien” andREMEMBERING A MORE LAYERED PAST IN HOKKAIDO

123“foreign” as to require “colonization.” The very raison d’etre of theColonization Commission was based upon the presence of the Ainu men
and women living on the island.
The presence of the “alien” Ainu in Hokkaido was particularly relevant to the employment of Americans. Immediately after the establishment of the Colonization Commission, the Japanese began searching forforeign advisors who would help transform this unfamiliar and unexplored land. Who would be the best qualiﬁed for colonizing such an“alien” environment and transforming it into a useful land? The Japanese
had no experience in confronting an “alien” “frontier.” Kiyotaka Kuroda,
who was the Deputy Chief Minister of the Commission at the time, decided that he had to ﬁnd “an advisor experienced in the opening of a newland . . . from a country whose meteorological and topographical conditions are similar” to Hokkaido.38
After some deliberation, Kuroda decided to recruit men from theUnited States, rather than from European nations. This decision was
based on his regard for the United States as “a prosperous country withthe experience of ‘opening up a new land [while] pushing back the frontier.’”39 The logic of inviting Americans to Hokkaido was based upon
his understanding that the practical experience of “opening” the westernland proved the American capacity for confronting and transforming theclosed and unfamiliar land in Hokkaido. In other words, the Japaneseinvited the Americans because the land was an alien frontier land inhabited by equally alien Ainu men and women. In this respect, Americans
owed their employment to the Ainu, who made the land sufﬁciently“alien” to the Japanese.
Indeed, had the land been a familiar, non–frontier land, the Japanese
would not have employed Americans. In the nineteenth century,
Americans were under–represented as advisors and teachers in all otherareas of Japan. Americans made up only 13% of all the foreigners
employed by the Japanese government between 1868 and 1889. But the
number jumped to 58% in the “frontier” of Hokkaido.40 More signiﬁcantly, virtually all the men hired for the most prominent positions in
Hokkaido, such as the chief advisor to the Colonization Commission(Horace Capron) or the presidents of SAC (William Clark and William
Wheeler), were Americans. The Japanese government consciously
altered its pattern of foreign employment in Hokkaido because it
believed that only Americans could effectively colonize and people a“frontier” environment. The rationale for inviting American men to124

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come to Hokkaido rested upon the presence of the Ainu men and women
who, according to Clark’s allegation, had “made little or no progress” in“the last thirty centuries.”
V A MORE LAYERED VISIONCharles Longfellow’s description of the Ainu and the photograph ofWilliam Clark standing with Seitaro Hori and the Ainu women suggest
a new way of conceptualizing the signiﬁcance of the American involvement in the modern history of Hokkaido. The analysis of these visualand documentary records points to the importance of recognizing adimension of the past that has yet to be given a full recognition. It is amodest step toward constructing a more balanced historical narrative that
foregrounds a wider variety of historical agents involved in the past
scene.
In order to gain a more complex, nuanced, and multilayered vision of
the human interactions that took place in the island in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to reclaim the presence of the Ainu as a signiﬁcant
third party and insert them into the existing narrative of a dual encounter
between the Japanese and Americans. However, this act of insertion
should not be regarded as an attempt to enrich the existing Japanese history and the history of Japanese relationship with the United States bysimply making their past more multicultural. Rather, it complicates andproblematizes the very framework of the existing understanding of the
U.S.–Japan relationship in the northern island by arguing that the Ainu
occupied a position that was profoundly integral to the whole terrain of
cultural interactions in nineteenth–century Hokkaido. Although the Ainu
suffered greatly in the face of the inauspicious collaboration of theJapanese and their American assistants, they were not simply the helpless victims of colonization. Rather, despite their serious loss of political and economic resources under colonization, they remained a criticalforce in the making of the colonial history of the island. Recapturing thatforce from the layered sediment of the past renders a simpliﬁed narrative of binary exchanges and encounters between the Japanese andAmericans no longer tenable. A full recognition of the Ainu and theirsubversive force, made without any underestimation of the degree of
their victimization, will enable a reappraisal of the whole signiﬁcance of
the intercultural history of the northern island.

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125

NOTES
1
Charles Longfellow to Alice Longfellow, 16–19 September 1871. The letters are
written in the form of a diary addressed to Charles’ sisters, Alice and Edie, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. They are available in the archives of Longfellow National Historic Site
in Cambridge today. Longfellow’s letters and journals written in Japan were recently
published by the Longfellow National Historic Site. Christine Wallace Laidlaw, ed.,Charles Appleton Longfellow: Twenty Months in Japan, 1871–1873 (Cambridge, MA:
Friends of the Longfellow House, 1998). The quotations in this paper are taken from theoriginal manuscript.
2
For a useful summary of the life at Longfellow house, see U.S. Department of theInterior, National Park Service, Final Master Plan: Longfellow National Historic Site
(Cambridge, MA: Longfellow National Historic Site, 1978).
3
Charles to Alice, 3 August 1871. Charles Longfellow’s information about De Long
was a mistake. De Long was born in New York and had been a politician in Nevada.
Laidlaw, Charles Appleton Longfellow, 38.
4Charles to Edie, 13 September 1871. Longfellow was traveling with several othermen including a Dr. Ugo Pisa, the “Italian Secretary” in Japan, and Elisha Rice, who
was the American consul in Hakodate.
5Charles to Alice, 3 August 1871.
6Charles to Alice, 16–19 September 1871.
7Charles to Alice, 21 September 1871.
8
Although the writer of this article is unknown, its tone suggests that the reporter wasa part of the traveling group. “Travels in Japan: Additional Notes of Minister De Long’s
Journey in the Interior,” New York Times, 3 February 1872, 12.
9See, for example, Foster Rhea Dulles, Yankees and Samurai (New York: Harper &Row, 1965) 174. Merle Curti and Kendall Birr, Prelude to Point Four: American
Technical Missions Overseas, 1838–1938 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1954), 39–65. John A. Harrison, Japan’s Northern Frontier: A Preliminary Study inColonization and Expansion with Special Reference to the Relations of Japan and Russia(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1953).
10
Merle Curti and Kendall Birr, Prelude to Point Four. John A. Harrison, Japan’s
Northern Frontier. Issa Tanimura, Kepuron Shogun [General Capron] (Tokyo: Kenkyu
Sha, 1937). Shingo Osaka, Kuroda Kiyotaka to Horesu Kepuron [Kiyotaka Kuroda andHorace Capron] (Sapporo: Hokkai Taimusu Sha, 1962). Shingo Osaka, Kuraku Sensei
Shoden [A detailed history of Professor Clark] (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1956; repr. 1965).
Masatake Oshima, Kuraku Sensei to Sono Deshi Tachi [Professor Clark and his students]ed., Tomo–o Oshima (Tokyo: Kyobunkan, 1993). Kazunori Harada, “Kaitakushi no
Oyatoi Gaikoku Jin to Amerika” [Foreign Employees in the Colonization Commission
and the United States] in Hokkaido to Amerika [Hokkaido and the United States](Sapporo: Sapporo Gakuin Daigaku, 1993), 139–173. Of all the writings on Americans
in Hokkaido, the most reliable and carefully researched is Fumiko Fujita, American
Pioneers and the Japanese Frontier: American Experts in Nineteenth–Century Japan(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). Fujita has also published an abridged versionof the book in Japanese. Fujita, Hokkaido wo Kaitaku Shita Amerika Jin [Americans
who developed Hokkaido](Tokyo: Shincho Sensho, 1993).
11
Fujita, American Pioneers and the Japanese Frontier, x. The popular use of the word
“frontier” to characterize the island of Hokkaido has remained. See, for example,
Douglas Lee, “Japan’s Last Frontier: Hokkaido,” National Geographic 157 (January1980): 62–92.

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YUJIN YAGUCHI

12
Although in this paper I discuss the Ainu within the context of the history ofJapanese–American relationship, it is not my intention to recreate a vision of the pastin which the Ainu are incorporated into a national history of Japan or the Japanese. As
I will argue later in the conclusion, it is not my wish to have the Ainu subsumed under
the Japanese national history. Rather, my goal is to question the very framework of conceptualizing the past in terms of simpliﬁed national identities by indicating how theseemingly binary national relationship between Japan and the U.S. not only involved aparticipation of an ethnically non–Japanese population but, more importantly, wasenabled by them. David L. Howell discusses the danger of “regionalizing” and “domesticating” Ainu culture without signiﬁcantly challenging the nationalistic framework.
David L. Howell, “Ethnicity and Culture in Contemporary Japan,” Journal ofContemporary History 31 (January 1996): 171–190. On the “racial” signiﬁcance of Ainu
for the Japanese, see Richard Siddle, Race, Resistence and the Ainu of Japan (London:
Routledge, 1996).
13
Journal of Charles Longfellow, 23 September 1871. Longfellow National HistoricSite, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Besides writing letters to his sisters, Longfellow kept
this journal as he traveled the island.
14
Journal of Charles Longfellow, 29 September 1871.
15
Charles to Alice, 17 and 18 September 1871.
16
Today, the original photograph is at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem,
Massachusetts. The photograph was given to the museum by Mrs. Russell Robb in 1918.
The reason why the photograph turned up in Salem is unclear. However, the town had
strong connections with Japan and its northern island because of Edward Morse, who
served as the director of the museum between 1880 and 1916 after teaching at the
University of Tokyo between 1877 and 1879. He traveled extensively while he lived inJapan, including a visit to Sapporo and other areas of Hokkaido in 1878. The exact dateof the photograph is not known but it was either 1876 or 1877 (the latter will make itsix, rather than ﬁve years, after Longfellow’s visit to Sapporo) because William Clark,
the American pictured in the scene, arrived in the fall of 1876 and left in April of 1877.
As I will indicate later in the paper, these women were Sakhalin Ainu. It is important toremember that the Ainu were a diverse group of people and their lifestyles and customs
differed signiﬁcantly depending on where they lived. As Emiko Ohnuki–Tierney
showed, the Sakhalin Ainu, in particular, differed from the Ainu in Hokkaido. However,virtually every Ainu group was inﬂuenced by the Japanese colonization through thedestruction and deprivation of their tradition, land and means of livelihood. Thus, in thispaper I treat the Ainu as a single group whose members generally experienced the same
historical transformation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. On Sakhalin Ainu,
see Emiko Ohnuki– Tierney, The Ainu of Northwest Coast of Southern Sakhalin (NewYork: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1974); Ohnuki–Tierney, “Regional Variations in
Ainu Culture,” American Ethnologist 3 (May 1976): 297–329.
17
Takebayashi came to Sapporo in 1872 and became the only photographer in town.
From 1872 to 1873, he was brieﬂy employed by the Colonization Commission to keep
a visual record of the colonization. In 1876 (when Clark arrived in the city) he built a
new studio that turned out to be a successful business venture. This photograph was likely to have been taken in the new studio. Soichi Koshizaki, Hokkaido Shashin Bunka Shi[History of Photography in Hokkaido] (Otaru: Shinsei Sha, 1946).
18
William Clark to Kiyotaka Kuroda, 8 September 1876, in First Annual Report of
Sapporo Agricultural College, 1877 (Sapporo: Kaitakushi, 1877).
19
Clark speciﬁcally requested of the Colonization Commission that Hori be his assistant and interpreter. See the correspondence between William Clark and Kiyotaka

REMEMBERING A MORE LAYERED PAST IN HOKKAIDO

127

Kuroda on 14 September 1876 and 15 September 1876, Hokkaido Prefectural Government Archives.
20
The statement is quoted in Genzo Sarashina, Ainu to Nihonjin [Ainu and Japanese](Tokyo: Nihon Hoso Kyokai, 1970), 128. For a detailed historical account of the relocation, see Karahuto Ainu Shi Kenkyukai, Tsuishikari no Ishibumi [The stone monument of Tsuishikari] (Sapporo: Hokkaido Shuppan Kikaku Senta, 1992).
21
Youko Kaiho, Kindai Hopposhi: Ainu Minzoku to Josei to [Modern Northern
History: About the Ainu and Women] (Tokyo: San–ichi Shobo, 1992) 102. The opposition was noted in a letter from Juro Matsumoto to Kiyotaka Kuroda, 25 May 1876, in
Matsumoto Juro, Ishikari Tokachi Ryo Kiko [Travel Notes from Ishikari and Tokachi
Districts], quoted in Kaiho, 102. The historian Shinichiro Takakura suggests that the
government intended to use these Ainu as coal–miners for the Horonai mine, discoveredby Benjamin Lyman, who was one of the American advisors to the Colonization
Commission. Takakura, Takakura Shinichiro Chosaku Shu [Writings of Shinichiro
Takakura] 1 (Sapporo: Hokkaido Shuppan Kikaku Senta, 1995), 364.
22
Clark to Kuroda, 8 September 1876, in First Annual Report of Sapporo Agricultural
College, 1877.
23
Letter from Clark to Kiyoshi Uchida, 1 July 1877, Hokkaido Kaitaku Kinenkan[Hokkaido Historical Museum]. Uchida was one of Clark’s students.
24
Yujin Yaguchi, “The Politics for the ‘Copper–Colored Strangers’: Japan and the
Impending Crisis in 1860,” ALETHIA 10 (1994): 49–69.
25
Shosuke Sato, “Agriculture and its Development,” Amherst Record, 14 August
1878. Reprinted in Naoki Onishi, ed., Clark no Tegami [The correspondence of W.S.
Clark and his Japanese students] (Sapporo: Hokkaido Shuppan Kikaku Senta, 1986),
240, 245.
26
Scholars argue today that the Ainu’s system of exchange with other cultures wascomplex and far–reaching. Evidence suggests that the Ainu traded with the Chinese as
well as with Russians and Japanese. But the mode of exchange can be distinguished fromthe system of international market exchange mediated by money, through which
Hokkaido was incorporated into Japanese political economy in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Ohnuki–Tierney, The Ainu of the Northwest Coast of Southern Sakhalin.
Isao Kikuchi, Ainu Minzoku to Nihonjin [The Ainu and Japanese] (Tokyo: Asahi Sensho,
1994).
27
William S. Clark, The Agriculture Of Japan (Boston: Rand, Abery, & Co., 1879),
6.
28
William Clark to William B. Churchill, 19 November 1876, Hokkaido University
Library.
29
Such a way of thinking was sustained by the logic of the “survival of the ﬁttest,” anidea from Spencerian social Darwinism, which was ﬁrst introduced to Japan by two
American scholars, Edward Morse and Ernest Fenollosa. Many leading Japanese intellectuals enthusiastically received the idea because it not only justiﬁed the need forJapan’s drastic modernization program but also the nation’s invasions into other nations
and territories in Asia. Naohide Isono, “Shinkaron no Nihon he no Donyu,” [Introduction
to the Theory of Evolution to Japan] in Takeshi Moriya, ed, Kyodo Kenkyu Mosu to
Nihon [Collaborative Research on Edward Morse and Japan] (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1988),
295–327.
30
John Batchelor, “Items of Ainu Folklore,” Journal of American Folklore 7 (January–
March, 1894), 43–44. Similar accounts by foreign visitors are found frequently. See, forexample, Herbert G. Ponting, In Lotus–Land Japan (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911),
312–313; L.H. Dudley Buxton, The Eastern Road (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner & Co., 1924), 54.

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31
Lyman’s report is found in Horace Capron, Commissioner and Adviser, and His
Foreign Assistants, Reports and Ofﬁcial Letters to the Kaitakushi (Tokyo: Kaitakushi,
1875), 481. Jan Havlasa, Japonsky podzim. Zlomky zivota, trans. Susumu Nagayo(Tokyo: Miraisha, 1988), 143–144. On how the Ainu women nourished their babies inpublic, see Genzo Sarashina, Ainu no Minzoku [Ainu Ethnography] (Sapporo: Miyama
Shobo, 1982), 191. Ainu Bunka Hozon Taisaku Kyogi Kai, ed., Ainu Minzoku Shi[Ethnography of the Ainu] (Tokyo: Dai–ichi Hoki Shuppan, 1969), 468.
32
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (Autumn 1975):
6–18.
33
See, for example, Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcok andFeminist Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 1–15; Edward Snow, “Theorizing
the Male Gaze: Some Problems,” Representations 25 (Winter 1989): 30–41.
34
In his discussion of Thomas Eakins’ painting of “The Agnew Clinic,” David Lubin
discusses how the male gaze appropriates, dominates and objectiﬁes a woman’s bodyto derive a sense of “mastery” over and “arousal” from her. Lubin, Act of Portrayal:
Eakins, Sargent, James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 77–78. Susan Sontag
puts it more bluntly: “to photograph someone is a sublimated murder.” Sontag, On
Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 14.
35See, for example, Shingo Osaka, Kuraku Sensei Shoden [A detailed history ofProfessor Clark] and Masatake Oshima, Kuraku Sensei to Sono Deshi Tachi [Professor
Clark and his students].
36
Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 12.
37
Homi Bhaba, “The Other Question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse ofcolonialism,” in Bhaba, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 67.
38
Quoted in Fujita, American Pioneers and the Japanese Frontier, 7.
39
Ibid., 6, 7. Fujita also suggests the inﬂuence of Kuroda’s friends, Yukichi Fukuzawa
and Arinori Mori, who had favorable opinions of the United States as “the rising powerof the future.” In addition, John A. Harrison writes that the Japanese turned to “the UnitedStates for help for three main reasons. Meteorological conditions on the frontier and in
the northeastern States were the same; America led the world in the use of farm machinery; the United States was isolated from any international controversy, especially from
Russia.” John A. Harrison, “The Capron Mission and the Colonization of Hokkaido,
1865–1875.” Agricultural History 25 (July 1951): 136.
40
Sapporo Shi Kyoiku Iinkai ed., Oyatoi Gaikokujin [Foreign Employees] (Sapporo:
Sapporo Shi Kyoiku Iinkai, 1976), 12. From 1867 to 1889, a total of 1,364 foreigners
were employed by the Japanese government. The British were the largest group with
626 employees, followed by French (236) and Americans as a distant third in rank (178).
In the Colonization Commission, however, 36 out of 62 foreign employees were
Americans.