American Assistance in the Colonization of the Ainu

        Today in Sapporo, the capital city of the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido, an old wooden clock tower stands amidst towering office buildings and a bustling four-lane road. The clock tower’s corinthian-like columns, verge-board roof, clapboard siding, sash windows, and chimney distinguish the clock tower as a western-style building. Inside of the clock tower, a statue of an American man named William S. Clark sits on a bench at the front of a large lecture hall. The reason as to why an old, western-style clock tower honoring an American man stands in the middle of a heavily urbanized Japanese city lies in the esoteric history of the American contribution to the colonization, forced assimilation, and ethnic and cultural genocide of the indigenous Ainu people. In the latter half of the 19th century, the new Meiji government hired many American advisors to help with their new endeavor of exercising direct control over the northern island of Hokkaido. Japanese leaders sought assistance from particularly American advisors because the Japanese leaders believed that the United States’ ongoing settler conquest of Native American lands was a logical model for Japanese settler colonialism of Ainu lands in Hokkaido. These American advisors worked for the Kaitakushi, or the Colonization Commission, and were hired as technical advisors, engineers, surveyors, and teachers. The Americans played a crucial role in the modernization of the northern island by advising and working with the Japanese colonizers and transforming its landscape from the land of the Ainu to the land of the Japanese. By assisting the Japanese in their encroachment upon the island's interior, the Americans in Hokkaido contributed to the process of marginalizing the Ainu in the newly established Japanese colony. Americans and their activities in the northern island were instrumental, and even necessary to the Japanese colonization of Ainu lands, as the advice, technical assistance, and general guidance they gave to the Japanese influenced the direction and the speed of the colonization and thus precipitated the plight of the Ainu. Recognizing the Americans as a significant party in the history of the ethnic and cultural genocide of the Ainu questions the conventional historical framework that has portrayed the American presence in Hokkaido as that of pioneering and heroic modernizers.