In this talk, I discuss daily life under regimes of martial law in villages settled by Tondenhei farmer-soldiers and their families in late 19th century Hokkaido. A hybridized system combining structures of ancient Japanese tonden garrisons and Russian Cossack hosts, the strict, militaristic environment in which Tondenhei soldiers lived and trained transformed them into not only discipline soldiers but also highly effective agrarian colonists. They did so precisely by blurring indistinctions between inside and outside, public and private, work and home, peacetime and wartime, indigenous and exogenous, and even “civilized” and “barbarous. Indicative of this, while Tondenhei villages occupied the territories of the indigenous Ainu people, I show, too, that together with efforts to reform the Tondenhei to more closely resemble the Cossacks, some saw the Cossackized Tondenhei as an ideal model for Ainu assimilation.
Speaker
Prof. Michael Roellinghoff
Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong
Michael Roellinghoff is a historian of modern Japan with a focus on the 19th century colonization of Hokkaido, its transpacific entanglements, the impact of colonization on the Indigenous Ainu people, as well as their resistance thereto. His book manuscript focuses on the relationship between the legal doctrine of terra nullius and “de-indigenization”; that is, colonial discourses and policies which claim that the Ainu are non-native to Hokkaido.
No registration required.
Enquiry: Misaki Nagaoka
