The Ainu people are Indigenous to Hokkaido (Japan’s northernmost island in the early 21st century), the Russian-administered island of Sakhalin, and the adjacent Kuril archipelago. The Ainu traditionally refer to these lands as Ainu Mosir (meaning “the land of the people”). In the early 21st century, an increasing number of Ainu refer to Hokkaido itself as Yaun Mosir (roughly “the land of land”). Long neighbors with the Japanese, they historically resided as far south as Honshu and as far north as Kamchatka. As of 2023, most Ainu are concentrated in southern Hokkaido and the Tokyo metropolitan area. During the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), the Matsumae Domain maintained a deeply exploitative, if not outright colonialistic, relationship with Ainu groups across Hokkaido (then known in Japanese as Ezo). Nevertheless, Tokugawa leaders explicitly recognized Ainu territorial sovereignty and political formations. Following the Japanese annexation of Hokkaido in 1869, however, the Westernizing Meiji state (1868–1912) adopted settler colonial practices in Hokkaido that closely resembled those of the United States, the British Empire, and the Russian Empire. Declaring Ainu territories across Hokkaido terra nullius (empty or ownerless land), the Kaitakushi (the Japanese Colonial Office) and successive Hokkaido-based prefectural governments disregarded Ainu sovereignty entirely and engaged in a zero-sum colonization program, dispossessing the Ainu of their unceded land, waters, and resources.
While this led to deadly waves of famine and epidemic disease in Ainu communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many resisted. This ranged from physical confrontations with colonial agents to large-scale peaceful protests. Amid widespread social Darwinist-inflected narratives of the Ainu as a self-destructively inferior race, in 1899, the Meiji government passed the so-called Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act (Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo-hō), rendering the Ainu wards of the state. In the 21st century, the legacies of the Protection Act and surrounding racist and colonialist discourse continue to impact the Ainu. This most often takes the form of Japanese disavowals of Ainu existence and the state’s rejection of Ainu calls for self-determination. Nevertheless, many Ainu maintain distinct cultural identities, spiritual traditions, and epistemologies and assert sovereignty on their own unceded territories.
Article
The Ainu and Japanese Settler Colonialism
Michael Roellinghoff
Article
Buddhist Culture in Early Modern Japan
Nam-lin Hur
Buddhist culture was most active and prosperous in early modern Japan (1600–1868). Buddhist temples were ubiquitous throughout the country, and no one was untouched by Buddhism. Buddhist priests wielded considerable power over the populace, and Shinto was largely subject to Buddhist control. Buddhist culture attained this considerable influence in early modern Japan through the performance of death-related rituals and prayer.
Death-related rituals (also known as funerary Buddhism) were rooted in the nationwide anti-Christian policy of the Tokugawa bakufu that utilized the administrative machinery of Buddhist temples. Using the opportunity provided by the anti-Christian policy, Buddhist temples were able to bind all households to death-related rituals and this, in turn, gave rise to the danka system in which dying a Buddhist soon became the norm in early modern Japan.
Given the rigid social status, mutual surveillance, and highly regulated nature of everyday life in Tokugawa Japan, people through prayer often turned to Buddhist deities to seek divine help for their wishes or ad hoc solutions to worldly problems. Beyond being sites of prayer services, Buddhist temples also served as spaces of learning, relief, and/or leisure, thus catering to people from all walks of life. Both prayer and play were also integral to Buddhist culture in early modern Japanese society.
Article
The Culture of Travel in Edo-Period Japan
Robert Goree
The expansion of travel transformed Japanese culture during the Edo period (1603–1867). After well over a century of political turmoil, unprecedented stability under Tokugawa rule established the conditions for men and women from all levels of the hierarchical society to travel safely for purposes as varied as the cultural consequences of a country increasingly on the move. Starting in the first half of the 17th century, institutionalized forms of compulsory travel for the highest-ranking samurai and a limited number of elite foreigners made for conspicuous political spectacle and prompted the Tokugawa shogunate to develop and maintain an extensive system of roads, post-towns, checkpoints, and sea routes. Prompted by the economic prosperity of the Genroku era (1688–1704) in the late 17th century, an ever-growing portion of the population, including commoners from cities and villages, took advantage of newfound leisure to embark on journeys for pilgrimage, medical treatment, and sightseeing. This change was accompanied by the expansion of tourism, which grew into a sophisticated commercial enterprise in the 18th century. Poets, writers, painters, performers, and scholars took to the road throughout the Edo period for artistic and intellectual pursuits, often as teachers or students, generating and spreading culture where they went. With an astonishing output of travel literature, guidebooks, maps, and woodblock prints featuring landscapes, a thriving commercial publishing industry, which first blossomed in the Genroku era, used woodblock printing technology to popularize travel in increasingly diverse ways. Together with such influential forms of print, the things that people wore, packed, bought, enjoyed, and rode while traveling formed a rich body of material culture that reveals the lived experience of travel for the duration of Tokugawa rule.
Article
Domestic Commerce during the Tokugawa Period
Martha Chaiklin
Under Pax Tokugawa, a wide variety of social, political, and economic factors coalesced to allow commerce in Japan to flourish to a theretofore unprecedented degree. The preceding century of civil war had had relatively little impact on the economy, but the removal of barriers to expansion such as toll roads that had been erected by warring daimyo (feudal lords) allowed the mechanisms of commerce that already existed in domanial economies to expand exponentially. Increased agricultural productivity and prosperity engendered a population boom in the 17th century.
In 1635, the formal institution of sankin kōtai—a hostage system designed to ensure peace and prevent excessive accumulation of wealth in the provinces, usually translated as “alternate attendance”—created a movement of people and goods across the country that stimulated urbanization. The number of cities increased as did their sizes, with the largest of them, Edo, reaching an estimated million inhabitants by 1700. Robust distribution networks proliferated to support this urbanization, leading to greater monetization and consumerism.
To support improving living standards and the need for revenue, the daimyo promoted the development of regional specialties, many of which flourished, buttressed by increased travel among all segments of society. Competition led to the development of branding and marketing. Merchants, who, according to Confucian ideals, were at the bottom of the social structure, became a larger and more important part of society in this period, resulting in the creation of unique ethical codes, religious sects, and philosophies geared to their specific needs and anxieties. Merchant houses, monopolies, and trade organizations formed. Some of the more successful—such as Mitsui and Sumitomo—would, in the late 19th century, form zaibatsu, and they still continue to exert influence on Japanese commerce.
Article
Foreign Trade in Tokugawa Japan
Robert Hellyer
Despite common portrayals, Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) was not a completely isolated or closed state that turned away from foreign trade. Instead, it maintained consistent but limited trading links with other Asian states and groups, as well as with the Dutch East India Company. The structure of foreign trade was defined by early modern Japan’s political system, in which the Tokugawa shogunate ruled as the central authority, dominating roughly 260 lords who exercised broad autonomy within their individual feudal domains. The Tokugawa shogunate directly administered trade with Chinese and Dutch merchants at the port of Nagasaki. However, in the north, the Matsumae domain controlled trade with Indigenous Ainu tribes, while to the west, the Tsushima domain maintained commercial ties with Chosŏn Korea. To the south, the Satsuma domain manipulated to its benefit the foreign trade of the Ryukyu Kingdom, over which it exercised suzerainty. In response to internal and external trends, the shogunate periodically revised the parameters of foreign trade. During the first century of the Tokugawa era, Japan’s foreign trade centered on exporting silver to China, in exchange for silk. In the mid-18th century, Japan definitively ended silver exports, focusing instead on exporting copper and marine products, which were used to obtain medicinal goods, primarily from China. Under Western military and diplomatic pressure, in the late 1850s, the Tokugawa shogunate signed a series of treaties with Western states that reshaped the structure of foreign trade. Beginning in 1859, Western and other foreign merchants began to reside in three treaty ports that became the main venues of foreign commerce. Japan’s foreign trade thus transitioned from a focus on exchanges with China and other Asian states. Instead, foreign trade, especially exports of silk and tea, centered on Western nations, a trend that accelerated in the closing years of the Tokugawa period.
Article
The History of Japan’s Silk Exports, 1859–1899
Yasuhiro Makimura
The export of silk products created a regional trade surplus for eastern Japan, centered on Tokyo. In producing raw silk, the people of eastern Japan created factories to lead rural industrialization. This regional trade surplus was used to fuel growth in the consumer economy of Japan, as it pushed western Japan, centered on Osaka, to develop its cotton industry. These two industries and the Yawata Steel Works in northern Kyushu transformed Japan from an agricultural country to an industrial country in the late 19th century.
In this story, the role of government is both central and peripheral. Without the decision by the Tokugawa shogun’s government to open Japan to external trade, this development would never have happened. However, once Japan was opened to trade, the Tokugawa government did not do much to help the trade, while the Meiji government, though desirous of fostering trade, did not always succeed in its efforts. Ultimately, it was the producers and merchants, the people, who transformed the rural economy and the country itself.
Article
Japan and the Ainu in the Early Modern Period
Noémi Godefroy
The Ainu are an indigenous people of northeast Asia, and their lands encompassed what are now known as the north of Honshu, Hokkaido, the Kuril archipelago, southern Sakhalin, the southernmost tip of Kamchatka, and the Amur River estuary region. As such, Ainu space was a maritime one, linking the Pacific, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the Sea of Japan, and the Ainu settlements were dynamic actors in various maritime trade networks. Hence, they actively traded with other peoples, including the Japanese, from an early stage.
Spreading over thousands of years, relations between Japan and the Ainu evolved in an ever-tightening way. These relations can be read in diplomatic or political terms, but also, and maybe even more so, in economic, spatial, and environmental terms, as Japan’s relationship with the Ainu people is deeply rooted in its relationship to Ainu goods, lands, and resources. Furthermore, Ainu songs reveal the importance of the charismatic trade with Japan in the shaping of Ainu society and worldview. From the 17th century, the initial, relative reciprocity of Ainu-Japanese relations became increasingly unbalanced, as the Tokugawa shoguns’ domestic productivity and foreign trade came to hinge upon Ainu labor, central to the transformation of northern marine products. During the 18th century, overlapping authorities and conflicting interests on both sides of the ethnic divide led to the advent of an inextricable web of mutual interdependencies, which all but snapped as the northeastern region of the Ainu lands became the convergence point of Japanese, Russian, and European interests. The need to establish clear regional sovereignty, to directly reap regional economic benefits and prevent Ainu unrest, led the shogunate to progressively establish direct control on the Ainu lands from the dawn of the 19th century.
Although shogunate control did not lead to a full-fledged colonial enterprise per se, from the advent of the Meiji era, Ainu lands were annexed and their inhabitants subjected to colonial measures of assimilation, cultural suppression, and forced agricultural redeployment on the one hand, and dichotomization and exhibition on the other hand, before they all but disappeared from public discourse from the end of the 1930s. From the 1990s, within a global context of emerging indigenous and minority voices, Ainu individuals, groups, and movements have strived to achieve discursive reappropriation and political representation, and the past years have seen them be recognized as a minority group in Japan. Given past and ongoing tensions between Russia and Japan over sovereignty in the southern Kuril, and the future opening of the Arctic route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Ainu could play an international role in both diplomatic and environmental terms.
Article
Mapping of the Maritime Boundaries at Japan’s Northern Edge in the 19th Century
Edward Boyle
Japan defined its northern edge against Russia over the course of the 19th century. In earlier periods, an area and people known as Ezo marked the northern edge of Japanese state and society, but expansion of both the Russian and Japanese polities brought them into direct contact with one another around the Sea of Okhotsk. Perceptions of foreign threat accelerated Japan’s efforts to map and know Ezo, and shifted understandings of Japan’s northern edge outwards. Maritime routes defined this new northern edge of Japan, and their traces on the map tied distant locales to the national body.
Maritime space was therefore crucial to this expansion in conceptions of the nation, through which the maritime boundary of Japan came to incorporate much of the Ezo region. The mid-century opening of Japan transformed this maritime boundary, which was shaped in the latter half of the 19th century by Japan’s particular situation, even as global and universal concepts were drawn upon to justify its operation. Japan’s participation within international and inter-imperial society conferred upon it the ability to appeal to such concepts for legitimacy, a participation made possible by the state’s efforts to satisfactorily map and administer the boundaries of Japan’s northern edge.
Article
Maps of the World in Early Modern Japan
Radu Leca
Since the world in its entirety cannot be grasped through direct experience, world maps are mental constructs that serve as a radiography of a given culture’s attitudes towards its environment. Early modern Japan offers an intriguing study case for the assimilation of a variety of world map typologies in terms of pre-existing traditions of thought. Rather than topography, these maps stress topological connections between “myriad countries” and therefore embody the various mental maps of cultural agents in Japan. The maps’ materiality and embeddedness in social networks reveal connections to other areas of visual and intellectual culture of the period.
Article
Political Cartography in the Tokugawa Period
Fumiko Sugimoto
When the coalition government composed of the Tokugawa shoguns and daimyō set about to give visual expression to the entire territory under its rule, it chose to produce enormous hand-drawn maps of each of Japan’s provinces, which corresponded to administrative spatial divisions that had been established by the government in the ancient period on the model of China. These maps followed the example of political maps being produced in China at the time, and systematically deployed icons representing a centralized order based on administrative and military organizations were embedded in the landscape and topography of the provinces.
While basing itself on the style of Chinese political maps, the shogunate devised its own distinctive methods of spatial representation. Countless villages, corresponding to the primary financial base for the shoguns and daimyō, were inserted in the form of geometrical icons into the hierarchical order of provinces and their subdivisions in the form of districts. Recorded on each of these village icons were the village’s official name and its official rice yield as agreed on by the shogun and daimyō. In addition, the shogunate did its utmost to gain a fresh grasp of the borders of each province. The shoguns and daimyō were able to produce such maps because the leaders of local village communities possessed the knowledge and surveying techniques that made it possible for them to submit maps able to meet the demands of the shogun and daimyō. In the eighteenth century, the eighth shogun created a hand-drawn map of Japan by combining these provincial maps.
But around the same time, from the eighteenth century onwards, the world of the Pacific Ocean surrounding Japan was undergoing considerable change. There arose a need for reliable coastal maps that could be shown to Western nations. For Japan, making this kind of map available to international society meant asserting the extent of its national territory. Amidst attempts to find ways to build a modern form of national territory and moves to represent it visually to international society, maps of Japan’s national territory, different from provincial maps and past maps of Japan, were beginning to take shape. The driving force behind the creation of these new maps was a private intellectual’s desire for knowledge, while those who accurately understood the meaning of making public maps of national territory in the context of the international situation in the nineteenth century and made the shogunate face the implications of this were not the shogun’s senior statesmen but intellectuals and technical experts employed at the shogunate’s institute for Western studies.
The shogunate exhibited a new woodblock-printed map of Japan at the 1867 International Exposition in Paris and presented copies to leading figures in Europe. The shogunate wished to proclaim to Europe that he himself was Japan’s ruler. But after Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the fifteenth and last shogun, surrendered his position as shogun and was defeated in battle, the political order centered on the Tokugawa family finally collapsed.
Article
Sex Work during the Tokugawa Era
Elizabeth D. Lublin
In the early 1600s, the Tokugawa shogunate licensed prostitution as one of many policies that it implemented to establish order and to consolidate its control over a once war-torn Japan. The system that emerged confined legal sex work by women and girls to designated quarters, enclosed by walls and with their gates tightly regulated. The prostitutes within overwhelmingly came from impoverished commoner families who sold their daughters into indentured servitude to secure cash advances critical to their own survival. These transactions escaped condemnation due to the belief that girls so sold were fulfilling their filial duty. The absence of any stigma associated with officially authorized sex work conversely drew scores of men to the licensed quarters, and rapid expansion of the commercial sector of the economy, the increasing use of cash, and urbanization produced a commoner class able to vie with samurai, their political and supposed social superiors, for the affections of licensed prostitutes. By the 18th century, the licensed quarters had become destinations for the masses, integral components of the urban economy, and both site of and subject matter for a flourishing early modern culture. The very existence of the quarters helped to legitimize prostitution and, together with growing economic stratification, stimulated demand for cheaper sex. Sex work proliferated legally in the licensed quarters with female prostitutes and both semiofficially and illicitly in cities, market towns, ports, and post stations around Japan, with women and men and girls and boys selling and being sold for sex. While the shogunate tried to regulate clandestine female sex work where it could and periodically imposed harsh penalties where systematic oversight proved elusive, it largely turned a blind eye to male sex work. The vast majority of clients of male prostitutes were men themselves, and sexual relations between men not only had been a common practice within samurai society for centuries but also did not threaten the sanctity of the family or challenge gender norms. While the shogunate largely overlooked sex work with foreigners as well during the early Tokugawa period, beginning in the 1640s and coincident with restrictions on foreign trade, it sanctioned sexual labor but only by licensed brothel prostitutes. The easing of those restrictions through treaties in the 1850s and the influx of foreigners prompted the opening of legal brothels and quarters just for non-Japanese. Much more so than prostitutes with only Japanese clients, those servicing the foreign population were stigmatized by Japanese and foreigners, with the latter linking them to the threat of syphilis.
Article
The Treaty Port System in Japan, 1858–1899
Catherine Phipps
The treaty port system largely defined the legal and spatial parameters of Japan’s international trade and relationships during the second half of the 19th century. The treaty ports were designated port cities along Japan’s coast where foreign vessels anchored and foreigners came ashore to reside and conduct trade within circumscribed geographical limits. The system was based on a series of treaties that the Japanese negotiated with Western powers, especially the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, under the threat of force at a time when the Japanese shogunate did not wish to alter the country’s highly restricted level of foreign engagement. The treaties followed similar ones that had already been signed in China and they served as the instruments of informal imperialism’s advance into the region. The resulting infrastructure joined new patterns of transportation and trade with longer-standing domestic and East Asian regional networks, linking Japan’s treaty ports to those in China and to broader networks of global exchange that used common currencies, regulatory principles, institutions, and shipping lines.
The five port cities, to varying degrees, became cosmopolitan sites where Japanese, European, American, and Chinese merchants traded, tourists visited, sailors took shore leave, traffickers operated, and consular officials, diplomats, and judges endeavored to manage interactions in their own national interests. The treaty ports were the centers of a maritime infrastructure that also served Japan’s rapid modernization, the return of its full sovereignty, and its emergence as an imperial power in Asia, including through naming Special Trading Ports at home and establishing treaty ports in Korea and Taiwan. Overall, the treaty port system structured and informed Japan’s international relations within a competitive global environment dominated by imperialist expansion, capitalist accumulation, industrial and technological revolutions, resource extraction, and new patterns of global migration and labor, as well as shifting practices of access and exclusion throughout the Pacific world.
