Paper short abstract:

In our opinion, Japan's policy towards Ainu and relations with Russia reflect the changes in Japan's economic and social life, worldview, intellectual history etc., and intertwining of these processes in the late 18th century marked the turning point in early modern Japan's history as a whole.

Paper long abstract:

The history of any state or society is a complex of various processes such as domestic and foreign politics, economy, culture, social thought and others. If we are facing a task to cut off any historical period, we can trace the bifurcation points by considering all these processes as dynamic systems and then clear up where they coincide with each other.

Edo (or Tokugawa) period of Japanese history was a time of systematic inclusion of Ainu into the area of Japanese intellectuals and central government attention. Starting from proclaiming the freedom of travel for Hokkaido Ainu in Tokugawa Ieyasu's black-seal certificate to Matsumae domain, relations with Ainu developed into the trading post enfeoffment system with trading posts established along the shores of Ainu lands and Matsumae domain vassals who, for their service, were granted with the right to send ships there for trading with Ainu. By the beginning of 18th century, this trading post enfeoffment system developed further into the trading post contract system after Matsumae domain vassals began to assign their rights to trade with Ainu to merchants for the fixed royalty. Finally, with Russia's advance to the Kuril Islands Ainu lands were brought under the Japanese political control in late 18th and early 19th centuries.

At the same time, though 18th century was marked by limited flow of information about Russia to Japan, Russia's first attempts to establish trade relations with Japan in the end of the century brought relations with Russia and Ainu together in central government's political agenda. From the beginning of 19th century, the performance of Russia-Japan relations was tied together with Japan's policy towards Ainu lands.

By collating the history of Japan relations with Ainu and Russia, we can manage to see their correlation as well as their influence on other activities of Japanese state and society.

Paper short abstract:

The pre-war poetry of Sarashina Genzō links proletarian politics, Ainu ethnography and transnational literary consciousness. As a historical source it offers insights into the ideological currents of the time. Poetic ethnography also raises key questions about interdisciplinarity and translation.

Paper long abstract:

Historians of Japan have long relied on poetry as source, although more often in reference to the pre-modern period. In the modern era, poetry is often cited to qualify traumatic events, such as Yosano Akiko's pacifist poem to her brother during the Russo-Japanese War. Translating and analysing 1920s and 30s' Hokkaido poetry offers new insights into the socio-political tensions of the time. It also raises intriguing methodological questions.

The poetry of Sarashina Genzō (1903-1984) is particularly valuable as it is located at the crossroads of proletarian politics, Ainu ethnography and transnational literary consciousness. Sarashina's work sheds light on the conflicted feelings of impoverished migrant-settlers toward the Ainu; they identified with the plight of the natives but also wished to distance themselves from their fate. His ambiguous take on Darwinism challenged the official ideology of development in Hokkaido and echoed the tenets of transnational anarchist thought. Inter-textual analysis reveals the poet's belief in a 'humanistic ethnography' which nuances the conventional interpretation of ethnography of the period as an ideological tool used to justify Japanese colonial expansion.

Methodological questions arise because of the interdisciplinary nature of the historical investigation. Sarashina's work, with its varied and intermingling voices from different cultures, is both creative writing and ethnography. While the time-consuming and often arduous translation process allows a heightened understanding of what specific historical events mean in their ideological context, this same process creates an emotional bond with the text, which enhances subjectivity. The historian as translator must therefore establish a distance from the text while analysing the poetry as poetry, which is to say a complex and multi-layered artistic production. This back-and forth movement between the fictional and the non-fictional, the subjective and the objective, validates Japanese pre-war anarchist poetry as historical source.

Paper short abstract:

Space and time are connected. Changing spatial perspective changes the temporal landscape too. My paper uses the framework of the Okhotsk region (spanning Sakhalin, Hokkaido and the Kurile Islands) to rethink the periodisation of Japanese history and the boundary between tradition and modernity.

Paper long abstract:

The history of Japan has a familiar shape that is relatively rarely challenged. Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Muromachi, Azuchi-Momoyama, Edo, and then the modern era with its multiple oscillations and vicissitudes. Of course, boundaries are sometimes blurred and questioned. But it is easy to forget that there are parts of Japan whose history has entirely different temporal shape. Space and time, in other words, are connected. Changing our spatial perspective changes the temporal boundaries of history too. My paper will use the framework of the Okhotsk region (spanning the areas that we now call Sakhalin, Hokkaido and the Kurile Islands) to rethink temporal boundaries. It traces the rhythms of Okhotsk history, and in so doing particularly questions assumptions about developmental trajectories and about the distinction between the indigenous/traditional and the modern. The paper shows that core assumptions about social development (for example, the assumption that hunting and gathering precedes and is less "advanced" than crop growing) are inapplicable in an area like the northern frontier region of Japan, and explores the way that the non-state societies of the region wove together elements of the so-called "indigenous" and the so-called "modern" as they charted their own paths to survival in a region divided and re-divided between Japan and Russia/the Soviet Union.