Imperial Practice and the Making of Modern Japan's Territory: Towards a Reconsideration of Empire’s Boundaries

Abstract

A renewed focus on the notion of empire has prompted an interest in questions of modern Japanese imperialism after the Meiji Restoration, both in Japan and abroad. It has also focused attention on the issue of comparing empires across Eurasia during the early modern period, under the rubric of 'global history'. Japan has not really been incorporated into this latter discussion. This article begins by examining the reasons for this lack of incorporation, before moving on to discuss the value of considering early modern Japan as an imperial formation. The lens it adopts is one of cartography, that quintessentially imperial practice that has featured heavily in discussions of a Eurasian early modernity. The article examines the cartographic incorporation of Japan's northern region of the Yezo into Japan itself, culminating in the area being newly designated as Hokkaido in the early Meiji period, the newest circuit within Imperial Japan's administrative map. This political outcome was the result of varied practices that found reflection across the Tokugawa-Meiji divide. Yet this intense variety of practices, constantly shifting in response to contingency, served to form the state-effect, through which the land of Yezo was granted its unity and represented on the map. The territory on the map provided the visual, graphic representation of the demarcation of authority of the state that authorized the practice of its own mapping. In this manner, the state mapped itself into Hokkaido and from this perspective, the division between the early modern and modern eras is far less significant than is frequently assumed.

Introduction: Heritage Sites and Borders of Memory

“…Shinto's role as an arm of the Meiji state is particularly clear in Hokkaido, where it replaced the Tokugawa's utilization of Buddhist temples as a representative of assimilatory policy in the lands formerly associated with the Ezo, or Ainu. The establishment of protector shrines and their enshrinement of pioneer kami was bound up with Meiji state's claims to the territory of Ezo (present day Hokkaido), which in addition to being surveyed, measured and incorporated on the map (Boyle 2016) was being sacralised at Sapporo Jinja, in particular. This means of asserting control was subsequently adapted to Taiwan after 1895, exporting the colonial triumph of Hokkaido to new lands.…”

States of exclusion: A critical systems theory reading of international law

“…The process also started during the Tokugawa era, comparable to the age of empire in Europe, rather than the much later 'classical' era of the Japanese Empire straddling the 19th-and 20th centuries. 750 Before its official incorporation into Japan in 1869, the territory, formerly known as Yezo, had habitually been depicted as a barbarous space (together with the Ryukyus and Korea) in direct contrast with the civilised mainland. 751 Trade and tributes were expected, placing the region in the same liminal space between inclusion and exclusion that so many colonies find themselves in.…”