A colonial trans-Pacific partnership: William Smith Clark, David Pearce Penhallow and Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido

Abstract

Immediately following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the new, Western-oriented Japanese government decided to make the colonization of the adjacent northern island of Hokkaido a showcase of and economic engine for Japanese modernity. In so doing, Japanese leaders consciously modeled Japanese settler colonialism there on American models, particularly in the treatment of the indigenous Ainu. As part of this project, a large number of American advisors were hired, including three American professors from Massachusetts Agricultural College who were to found a similar institution in Sapporo. Although the story of these professors is well-known in Japan, their connections to Japanese settler colonialism have never been properly investigated. I argue that these professors, most importantly William Smith Clark and David Pearce Penhallow, served as important conduits of colonial knowledge, spreading both American technologies of settler colonialism to Japan and a positive image of Japanese imperialism in the United States after their return. Most significantly, they spread new, ‘scientific’ understandings of the Ainu that conformed to classic Western colonial tropes and contributed to their systematic dispossession. In these ways, these American ‘brokers of imperialism’ worked in tandem with their Japanese employers to both physically and discursively reform Hokkaido into an American-style ‘frontier’.