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.