Historical Development of Hokkaido's Cartography
- 1200s: Ainu settlement of Ezo
- 1599: Matsumae clan granted rights over Ezo by the shogunate
- 1604: Tokugawa Ieyasu allegedly places Matsumae in charge of gold
mining on Ezo (Boyle 8)
- 1600s: “Gyouki style maps” (as in, made by the bodhisattva Gyouki)
predominate in commercial records, focus on highways and connections
between prefectures, Ezo and Ryukus classed as foreign lands and often
not pictured (Toby 39)
- 1635: Matsumae clan surveys potential fishery sites along southern
Karafuto (Sakhalin), survey lead by Murakami Kamonzaemon (Walker
295)
- 1669: Shakushain Revolt, lead by disgruntled Ainu in part
attributable to mining interests interfering with fishing access (Boyle
8)
- 1700: Ezo remapped as part of kuni-ezu, map in the “mythical vein”,
focus on Japanese ports (Toby 32)
- 1799: Russian traders meet with Matsumae representatives, kicking
off 25 years of surveys of Ezo and surrounding islands (Boyle 4)
- 1800: Inou Tadataka’s survey of Ezochi, included in his “Dai Nippon
enkai zochi zenzu” (complete map of Japan’s coastlines) published 1818
(Walker 291)
- 1808: Mamiya Rinzou’s survey of Karafuto, placing the island on
latitudinal and longitudinal lines (Walker 283)
- 1813: Russian mission to Ezo, boundaries established with Japan,
Karafuto left vaguely under “joint control” (Toby 70)
- 1853: Ezo Kōkyō Yochi Zenzu published (private) concerned with
shipping routes and locations of fisheries (Boyle 5)
- 1854: treaty with US opening Hakodate to American ships and
consulate (Perry) (Blaxell 2)
- 1862: Ralph Pumpelly arrives to conduct (abortive) geological survey
of Ezo at behest of Japanese government, founds School of Mines and
Applied Science in Hakodate (Boyle 13)
- 1869: Ezo renamed Hokkaido, integrated into Japan by Meiji
government
- 1872: Hokkaido rendered “terra nullius” 無主の地 by 1872 Land
Regulation Act (Hirano 328)
- 1873: Benjamin Lyman Smith arrives in Japan to conduct a
stratigraphic survey of Ezo (Boyle 17)
- 1874: Meiji government creates farming-militia system, initially to
shore up agricultural production in Hokkaido with downwardly mobile
ex-samurai families (Hirano 329)
- 1870s: construction of Sapporo city center (including university)
building exteriors along western lines (Blaxell 8)
- 1896: Japanese government begins to directly subsidize the
production of oceangoing vessels, drawing Japanese fisheries into direct
competition with the international whaling and fur trading powers (Boyle
8)
- 1899: Japanese government provides to relief aid to only Ainu
“engaged in farming” (Hirano 332)
- 1901: 10 Year Development Plan to build new railway stations,
bridges and roads (Hirano 331)
- 1909: Japanese government subsidizes and encourages rice production
in Hokkaido to the detriment of other crops (Blaxell 14) Japanese
population of Hokkaido reaches 1.5 million (Hirano 331)
- In 1872, Benjamin Smith Lyman, an American geologist, arrived in
Hokkaidō at the behest of the Kaitakushi, the administrative authority
charged by the new Meiji government with the colonization and
development of Japan’s northernmost island.
- The resulting 1876 map, though unprecedented for its depiction of
Ezo’s mineralogical profile, was not entirely the work of Lyman and his
Japanese assistants. Pressed for time, the surveyors incorporated the
work of earlier cartographers like Inou Tadataka, who had surveyed the
island’s coastline 76 years prior.
- What changed in the practice of Japanese cartography, and in Ezo in
particular, over the course of that intervening century? The successive
military regimes that governed what we know today as “Japan” (or
sometimes only the island of Honshu) had been commissioning territorial
maps from their subordinates since at least the 700s. In the Tokugawa
period, the shogunate periodically required the daimyo (lords of the
various substrates or “domains” that comprised the Imperial government)
to submit detailed maps of their possessions (kuni-ezu 国絵図) that were
then compiled into one map of the entire realm (the nihon-ezu 日本絵図).
These maps were held privately by the bakufu, and coexisted alongside a
vibrant culture of commercial cartography, as guidebooks for navigators,
travelers, and city-dwellers proliferated in the mid-Edo. Interest in
European mapmaking techniques, spread via the artificial island of
Dejima that served as a trading post for the Dutch, combined with a
relatively low barrier to entry in fields like surveying that attracted
many cartographers of commoner stock meant that, from our perspective,
maps of Japan grew in both quantity in quality from the mid-17th to the
end of the 19th century. It is possible to tell the story of “Japanese
cartography” as a story of slow and then (after the infamous Perry
expedition) rapid technical progress towards a style of mapmaking that
was, by the Taisho era, wholly modern in its approach.
- But what this narrative would obscure is that shifts in cartographic
practice were brought about not primarily by a change in ability but in
institutional priority. In short, the nature of the Tokugawa (and
successor Meiji) state and what its representatives wanted to do with
maps, and with territorial claims in general, completely transformed. In
the case of Ezo, the bakufu went from relying on a nested series of
intermediaries, the Matsumae clan and the indigenous Ainu, as points of
access to a larger world of Pacific trade, to directly managing the
territory of Hokkaido as a part of the Japanese nation populated by
Japanese subjects.
- During the Tokugawa period, the shogunate undertook a series of
efforts to map the extent of their territorial claims. These maps
(called kuni-ezu or province maps) were constructed in a highly
political idiom, and emphasized long outdated provincial boundaries
(rather than the contemporary divisions between daimyo holdings).
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, Ezo featured in only some of
these maps, and when it was depicted, it was (along with its sister, the
Ryukyus) represented as foreign territory. In the 1700 official survey
of Ezo, only the Matsumae-controlled southern tip of the island is
rendered “realistically”, while territory to the north of their holdings
is sketched loosely and with an eye to the mythological.
- Not only were details about the area that would become Hokkaido
scant in the kuni-ezu, access to these maps was heavily restricted to
the bakufu. It would fall to commercial surveyors, and the Matsumae
themselves to survey Ezochi, the Kurils, and Karafuto (now Sakhalin). In
1635, The Matsumae surveyed the top half of Karafuto, mainly documenting
sites of extant and potential fisheries. In the 1670s, the clan made
rough maps of the Kuril islands, mostly with an eye towards the
locations of mineral deposits, particularly gold. All of the maps the
Matsumae produced lacked the cartographic “realism” of the kuni-ezu. The
purpose of these diagrams was not to provide reliable land survey data
in pictorial form, but to elucidate economic ties between the Matsumae,
the Ainu, and other indigenous peoples of the northern islands, and to
provide a shorthand for navigational routes between fisheries, mines,
and other extractive zones.
- The sketchy and functional nature of these maps reflects the 17th
century economic relationship between the Ainu and the Matsumae. The
Ainu had been conducting long-distance maritime trade since at least the
10th century, and the Matsumae relied on these pre-existing trade and
foraging networks to supply goods (like sea urchin and eagle feathers)
to the bakufu. Thus the knowledge embodied in survey-style maps was, in
this period, the domain of Ainu tradespeople and navigators. Maps, it
must be remembered, do not “correspond” or “fail to correspond” to a
geographic reality, but rather they exist as visual interfaces through
which landscapes and seascapes become parseable to different actors. For
the Matsumae, the purpose of maps in the 17th century was to provide a
visual shorthand for the points of contact between their own vassals and
the larger world of northeast Asian commodity trade. We can place the
maps they commissioned within an idiom of similar commercial maps
created during the Tokugawa, maps that emphasized sites of economic
importance, the direction of trade routes, and the expected temporal
duration of one’s journey over a precise rendering of coastlines and
topography.
- This state of affairs persisted (despite increasing Matsumae
presence further north after the defeat of Shakushain’s rebellion in
1669) for decades. But, as the 18th century drew to a close, the
imperatives of mapmaking, both for the Matsumae and their Tokugawa
superiors, rapidly shifted.
- In 1799, Russian traders met with representatives of the Matsumae
clan for the first time. The shogunate reacted to this meeting with
great alarm, and in the next 25 years Ezo and the surrounding islands
were officially and exhaustively surveyed by bakufu agents for the first
time. The first complete survey of Ezo’s coastlines was undertaken by
the famed cartographer Inou Tadataka in 1799, but his work published in
a comprehensive map of all Japan commissioned by the bakufu, was not
published until after his death in 1818. In 1808, Mamiya Rinzou, under
guidance from shogunal officials, surveyed the full extent of Karafuto
(Sakhlalin) confirming its island status and placing it, for the first
time, on latitudinal and longitudinal lines. Comparing both Rinzou and
Tadataka’s work to their 17th and 18th century counterparts, we can see
a strong de-emphasis on the mythical and the ethnographic in favor of a
standardized language of geographic representation that appears, to
modern observers, as recognizably influenced by European cartography.
Notable too is both surveyors' attention to land itself. Contrasting
Inou’s map with earlier all-Japan maps in the gyouki-style which
preferred a highly stylized depiction of the shape of the archipelago
with emphasis on sea and land routes for travellers and merchants, we
can see that exactitude has taken on a functional necessity of its own.
Similarly, Mamiya’s survey of Karafuto looks nothing like earlier
Matsumae depictions, with their practical attention to sites of economic
interest. Rather, for both Mamiya and Inou (and of course their bakufu
superiors) the practical purpose of these maps is to aid in the
geostrategic defense of Japanese territory.
- The latter half of the 19th century saw these military concerns
overtake the previous economic interests that had characterized the
Matsumae’s managerial attitude towards a largely independent body of
Ainu traders and laborers. In 1854, Hakodate was opened up to American
merchants. While Ezo had long been conceived of (primarily on the
mainland) as a potential space for gold mining operations, the day to
day reality of Matsumae trade with the Ainu was organized primarily
around fishing, prestige goods like eagle feathers, and foraged goods
like sea urchin. But American presence on the island, coupled with
rising anxiety within the shogunate about mineral resource extraction,
spurred the bakufu to seek the assistance of outside experts.
- In 1862, Ralph Pumpelly, an American geologist, was invited by the
Japanese government to conduct a geographical survey of Ezo. While his
efforts were prematurely aborted, his students at the Hakodate School of
Mines and Applied Science, would go on, under the new Meiji government,
to assist in Lyman Smith’s far more successful survey of Ezo’s (now
renamed Hokkaido) mineral deposits.
- Comparing Lyman Smith’s map (and the subsequent cartography of his
Japanese students) to the maps of Ezo in centuries prior, we note again
the significance of the landform at the expense of the maritime and
nodal understanding of the Matsumae. Part of Lyman Smith’s maps, in
fact, relied on Tadataka’s survey to completely represent the coastline
of Hokkaido. The shift in significance of what maps meant to the state
is also apparent. Whereas the kuni-ezu served the ideological function
of shoring up internal conceptions of the domain and extent of bakufu
sovereignty, the late Tokugawa and Meiji government’s concern with the
subsurface demonstrates a political outlook grounded in what would
become known as the ideology of developmentalism, that the strength of a
state was demonstrated by it’s capacity to govern and economically
exploit territory, not only (or perhaps even at all) to manage or
oversee a system of status and prestige.
- For the Ainu, this shift meant an erosion of the economic
independence that had characterized their relation to the Matsumae. For
even while, as Brett Walker notes, Ainu from the late 17th century on
were functionally dependent on finished goods originating from Japan,
the conditions of their employment were nonetheless recognizeable to us
as only loosely contractual in a way that preserved their capacity for
mobility and local political organization. But from 1872 onward, when
the Japanese government declared the whole of Hokkaido terra nullius
(無主の地, mushu no chi), the Ainu found themselves for the first time
as subjects of an empire intent on transforming their surroundings into
a completely new polity based in the widespread adoption of agriculture
and extractive industry.
- David Howell notes that Ainu during the colonial period faced a
double bind. On the one hand, in order to interface with the Japanese
state they had to operate from the position of being a Japanese
subject/citizen, a form of negotiation ostensibly blind to what we have
come to call “ethnic difference”. At the same time, the fact that the
Ainu were not Japanese, living in separate communities and unused to the
agricultural and heavy industrial labor that the post-Restoration state
imagined as Hokkaido’s future, made it impossible for them to articulate
and advocate for their specific needs to the government which claimed
(in some fashion) to represent them. By 1899, the Japanese government
was only offering relief aid to Ainu engaged in farming, and in the 1901
10-Year-Development plan drawn up by the Hokkaido Agency, the Ainu are
barely considered. In the flurry of mapmaking from the 1870s to the
1900s, colonial officials produced oceanic surveys, rail maps, and urban
planning diagrams, none of which contained any reference to the
foreignness and separateness of the island that had characterized
Japanese mapmaking up until the 19th century.
- Coda: 1909, Japanese population on Hokkaido reaches 1.5 million,
rice production (after several failed attempts), Ainu as a “dead
people”, modern cartography and the modern subject as both attendant to
industry and the recipient of a “services state” through which
industrial wealth is meant to be channeled.