Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how American oyatoi-gaikokujin William Smith Clark and David Pearce Penhallow spread colonial knowledge to future colonial administrators at Sapporo Agricultural College in the 1870s and analyzes their conceptions of empire.

Paper long abstract:

Long featured in history textbooks, the story of William Smith Clark is familiar to most Japanese. Clark, the founding president of Massachusetts Agricultural College, was hired in 1876 by the Kaitakushi to establish a comparable institution in Hokkaidō. At Sapporo Agricultural College (SAC), Clark's charisma, educational zeal, and his conversion of many students to Christianity became legendary. Many early SAC students, including Uchimura Kanzō, Satō Shōsuke and Nitobe Inazō, went on to become influential leaders. Clark's legacy is most famously encapsulated in his supposed parting words, "Boys, be ambitious!" dramatically delivered from horseback before he rode off into the sunset.

Far less well-known is the significant role that SAC played in the formation of Japanese imperialism. Despite Clark's high profile and the plethora of biographical works about him, his tenure at SAC has never been analyzed from a postcolonial perspective. This is no doubt in part because Hokkaidō is seldom discussed in colonial terms despite the systematic dispossession of the Ainu using colonial technologies that its settlement involved. Hokkaidō became a model for Japan's later colonial ventures, with many of SAC's early students serving as leading colonial administrators. Most notably, Nitobe Inazō worked for the government general of Taiwan before becoming Tokyo Imperial University's first professor of colonial studies, a new academic discipline that had debuted at SAC.

This paper will investigate how Clark and one of his successors as president of SAC, David Pearce Penhallow, served as conduits for the transmission of colonial knowledge between Japan and the United States. Letters, newspaper articles and their published work reveals that both had a strong anthropological interest in the Ainu that was profoundly influenced by the colonial thought of the age. Both men not only spread such ideas and worldviews to their Japanese students but also defended Japanese expansionism after their return to the United States. The paper will conclude with a discussion of what terms Clark, Penhallow and Meiji leaders used to describe Hokkaidō - a "frontier", "colony" or other kind of territory - and what this can tell us about their mindset and intentions.