Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to bring the "far north" back in to the debate on empire and Japanese migration, and suggests that doing so alters much of our temporal and conceptual understanding of the Japanese empire.

Paper long abstract:

Despite a burgeoning literature on the Japanese colonial empire, and the flows of people within it, the northern reaches of the Japanese empire continues to be a conspicuous absence in many of the key debates. Hokkaido, Chishima (the Kurile Islands), and Karafuto (Sakhalin) have rarely been treated in this wider literature, tending to receive no more than an honourable mention in the footnotes of important works, or to be relegated entirely to the level of local history. In the frame of local history the realities of relatively recent incorporation and mass settlement (often dislodging Ainu communities), as well as the shared histories and separated present of these territories (except for Hokkaido they are de facto part of Russia) have proved highly problematic when local historians of Hokkaido's recent past attempt to weave their accounts into the constrained fabric of national history. This is not just due to the discrepancy of conditions between Hokkaido and the rest of Japan, but is also the result of a need to include the north beyond Hokkaido on the one hand, and the convenience of leaving it out on the other.

This paper aims to bring the "far north" back in to the debate on empire, and suggests by doing so much of our temporal and conceptual understanding of the Japanese empire is changed. Including the colonial far north pushes our chronology of Japanese empire firmly into the nineteenth century, and also suggests that scholars of Japanese migration have misinterpreted the role of Tohoku in imperial expansion. This paper combines locally produced print media (newspapers, magazines, guidebooks, etc.) and written testimonies related to, or produced by, Karafuto's colonial settlers and migratory labourers in order to trace migration circuits to the colony. Ultimately, it stresses that the colonization of Karafuto was an "extension" of the project to colonize/settle Hokkaido, and thus northward bound colonial settlement transcends the late Edo, Meiji, Taisho, and Showa eras. Following Japan's defeat, many of the almost 400,000 Japanese residents of Karafuto eventually resettled in Hokkaido further demonstrating these enduring entanglements.