It was past noon by the time the shogunal steamboat Kanrin-maru finally dropped anchor at the whaling colony of Port Lloyd on January 18, 1862. The head of the expedition, Magistrate of Foreign Affairs Mizuno Tadanori, and his translator Nakahama Manjirō proceeded immediately to the shore, where they were greeted by a startled group of Bonin Islanders. Mizuno was a plain-spoken man with little sense for beating around the bush, so he proceeded readily to declaring that this island was to be considered a part of Japanese soil (Nihon-chi no uchi), but that the settlers need not fear being dispossessed, for they were now “just like the people of Japan.”Footnote ¹ Over the next several days, the magistrate interviewed each head of household and asked them to sign a statement that they would “respect the law proclaimed by the Japanese envoys and are willing to live on good terms with the Japanese who will immigrate. They will pay tribute to the Tycoon of Japan in exchange for the guarantee to keep their fields.”Footnote ² What followed over the next seventeen months was a display of scientific modernity and administrative power that made for a unique instance of Tokugawa colonialism in the Pacific.

Though small in scale and ultimately short-lived, the shogunate’s colonial venture to the Bonin Islands became a formative moment in Japan’s frenetic reorganizations on the eve of the Meiji Reform. The project of incorporating a remote group of islands with a few dozen foreign settlers raised questions of race and climatic compatibility, while the discovery of introduced plants and animals inspired new narratives of biological kinship and historical claim. This chapter discusses how administrators and scholars in the shogunal service brought about tools and concepts in the service of control in a formerly unexplored and ecologically shifting environment. The botanist Abe Rekisai took a special interest in the plants the foreigners had introduced from around the Pacific, and he observed that their mere presence revealed a history of migration and kinship.Footnote ³ Observations of environmental change also inspired new narratives of Japanese settlement, colonization, and claim: Local magistrate Obana Sakunosuke redomesticated feral chickens which, he believed, were the remnants of an earlier Japanese colony, while he theorized that boars must have grown tusks after the retreat of civilization.Footnote ⁴ The changing environment of introduced and invasive species merged Japanese honzō botany with novel notions of biological change.

Unlike the adjacent frontier of Ezo, where commercial development and, by the mid nineteenth century, state-led initiatives incorporated local populations into the economic polity of Japan, the Bonins had never been inhabited and remained utterly inaccessible to Japanese explorers for the previous two centuries. With the breakneck expedition to this “forgotten colony” – a term with which Ishihara Shun alludes to the episode’s unfitting implications for the grand narratives of modern Japan – the shogunate in fact joined a colonial scramble for the Pacific.Footnote ⁵ The systematic incorporation of “foreign” islanders into the administration, the relocation of ethnically Japanese subjects, as well as the exploration and indexing of resources on shore and at sea reflect an ongoing redefinition of territorial and cultural boundaries of “Japan.” Ethnicity and the status order were no longer the cardinal criteria that spatially demarcated the reach of the bakuhan state, but malleable definitions of subjecthood legitimized their expansion to an overseas territory.Footnote ⁶ This expansion hinged on the empirically argued idea of transitional climates: since the Bonin Islands were to constitute an extension of the islands off Izu province, it was presumed that settlers from Hachijō, the nearest location within Japan, would be best suited to farm and inhabit their southern climes.

A strong emphasis was put on the scientific and techno-centric symbolism celebrated by Western empires. Legitimate subjection of territory was seen as revolving around a cultural transformation of land by specific forms of agriculture, an idea that came out of the kokudaka system’s agrocentric understanding of economic prosperity and was affirmed by Western tenets of frontier settlement. Yet the cultural hierarchies constructed in the process were highly exploratory. Shogunal botanists and scholars of “Dutch learning” dispatched to the site were keen to source settlers and stoppers-by for intelligence on the most suitable methods of farming and whaling while Japanese make-do projects faltered. Unlike earlier projects of land reclamation within, as they had been tackled with varying intensity throughout the period of Tokugawa rule, the incorporation of a contested overseas colony was burdened with the symbolic significance of colonial expansion. The new boundaries of Japan were affirmed in an internationally comprehensible language of sovereignty, one that was voiced in resource administration, harbor controls, and the minute mapping of land and sea. Encounters between Japanese officials, scholars, and farmers with foreign migrants and travelers in practice turned the islands into a shogunal entrepôt of species, knowledge, and technology, an open harbor without a treaty. The brief colonial experiment ultimately faltered in the crisis-ridden summer of 1863, when the shogunate had to reshuffle its shrinking resources. The experience, however, provided a laboratory for political, economic, and biological globalization at a crucial moment in the shogunate’s imperial reorientation amidst a colonized Pacific.

Kaitaku as a Model for Japanese Colonialism

The question of whether the expedition to the Bonin Islands was an act of colonial expansion or merely the reclamation of a Japanese periphery hinges on a terminology developed in the context of Western imperialism. The term kaitaku or “opening,” which was used to describe the colonization of formerly incorporated territory emerges from domestic land clearing projects in early modern contexts. Both kai and taku signify “opening,” but in the classical language, kai could also mean “putting something to use” or, as it were, to open up its potential.Footnote ⁷ This embodies the urgency of land reclamations in the eighteenth century, when expanding caloric output helped alleviate Malthusian crises. Over the early modern period, an ever growing population created pressure on an internal frontier of forests, marshlands, and valleys. Under the Japanese kokudaka system, population growth was moreover seen as a marker of good government, and it rewarded domain lords whose status was determined relative to the theoretical productivity of their domains.Footnote ⁸ Though the incorporation of the Bonin Islands in some way rested on this logic, the stakes were of a completely different nature.

Only with the colonization of Taiwan in 1895 was the modern Japanese term for colony, shokuminchi, commonly used in the context of Japanese expansion.Footnote ⁹ The early modern term for “colonization,” kaitaku, also remained in use until the mid-Meiji period with regards to the colonial development of Okinawa and Hokkaido. The word shokuminchi was introduced to the Japanese language through Shizuki Tadao’s 1801 translation of Englebert Kaempfer’s History of Japan to describe Western expansionism. The characters shoku “to proliferate,” min “population,” and chi “place”, which Shizuki chose for his new creation emphasize the relocation and expansion of a settler population rather than the subjection of Natives and extraction of resources. Yet as the term’s use in hypothetical scenarios for Japanese overseas expansion by Hayashi Shihei, Satō Nobuhiro, Tōjō Kindai, and other early nineteenth-century authors discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate, by 1861, the choice of vocabulary was a conscious one. A semantic distinction of kaitaku and shokumin for analytical purposes would therefore be misleading.

The expedition to the Bonin Islands was announced to foreign representations in Japan as a “preparatory inspection of the islands in Izu Province and opening (kaitaku) of the island Ogasawara,”Footnote ¹⁰ suggesting that the expedition would be a mere detour on a domestic routine inspection. The modern term ryōyū for “sovereign possession” does not appear in primary sources from this context, even though some Japanese historians keep framing the expedition as an assertion of ryōyū over “national territory” or ryōdo.Footnote ¹¹ In practice, any notion of national belonging remained structured in the fragmented geography of Japanese identities. As an ostensible extension of the shogunal lands of Izu province, the Bonin Islands were put under the authority of the shogunal intendant Egawa Tarōzaemon. Regardless, both the vocabulary of agrarian development used in Japanese sources and the islands’ annexation to the shogunal lands of Izu province contradict the symbolic meaning and the transformative character the Pacific expedition unfolded in Japan’s self-representation among the colonial powers of the modern Pacific.

As Takahiro Yamamoto has argued, the formation of Japan’s modern borders was a decades-long process that embraced the incorporation of Ezo, Ryukyu, and the Bonin Islands between the tumbling of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the early Meiji period.Footnote ¹² Catherine Phipps moreover writes that “Japan holds a unique position in world history in that it added to its territorial holdings while its sovereignty was compromised through asymmetrical treaties.”Footnote ¹³ Without needing to affirm narratives of Japanese uniqueness, the colonial experiment in the Bonin Islands underlines the dynamic and open-ended nature of the reforms tackled under the shogunate over the 1850s and 1860s, and it casts doubt on the necessity of collapse and modern reemergence under the terms of the Meiji Reform.

Early on, the Japanese hired islanders familiar with the territory for different administrative tasks. Obana’s report, submitted after the Japanese retreat in 1863, documents that the local magistrate entrusted the British settler Thomas Webb with piloting foreign ships to the harbor and gave him a Japanese “national flag (kokki).”Footnote ¹⁴ Like the hinomaru flag of the rising sun that hails from the mast of the steamboat Kanrin-maru in Figure 5.5, or the flag the expedition hoisted on “Mount Asahi” above the bay immediately upon arrival, Webb’s flag represented Japan as a national actor vis-à-vis foreign vessels and governments. This symbol had just emerged around that time. Suzuki Jun points out that it was the newly founded Shogunal Navy that had introduced this flag, flying it on vessels, but Mount Asahi is likely the first instance where it was used to demarcate shogunal control on shore – or be it, the “national” territory of Japan.Footnote ¹⁵ Manjirō’s schooner Kimizawa Number One, which was not a naval vessel when it sailed to the islands on a whaling voyage, was signaled with the combination of conventional attributes: Flying the crest of its owner Egawa Tarōzaemon, the vessel also raised a lampion with the words “shogunal service (go-yō)” that marked the supreme nature of its mission.Footnote ¹⁶ The display of the hinomaru specifically in interaction with foreign vessels calling at the Bonin Islands underlines how the naval symbolism that painted over the fragmented structure of the Tokugawa state gained its national meaning through international encounters in the maritime frontier.

The delineation of Japan’s sovereign space coincided with the empire’s gradual expansion into an intentionally vague frontier space. In fact, it is questionable whether Japan could at any point be considered a nation state as it transformed from a regional bakuhan patchwork into an expansive, multi-ethnic empire.Footnote ¹⁷ The island of Ezo had been gradually incorporated into Japan’s commercial sphere since the seventeenth century, though less by formal expansion of the kokudaka system than commercially and by contact on the ground, as Brett Walker has shown.Footnote ¹⁸ Despite the successful mapping of the northern frontier as far as the Amur Delta, it was not until 1869 that Japan formally annexed Ezo, and only in 1875 was a binding border across the Sea of Okhotsk negotiated with the Russian empire.Footnote ¹⁹ Likewise, the Ryukyu Islands’ ambiguous status as a de facto colony of Satsuma domain lasted until 1872, when Japan unilaterally declared the kingdom a domain (han) and later, a prefecture.Footnote ²⁰ The Bonin islands, while part of early modern Japan’s virtual geography, differ from these territories in that they had no history of gradual integration into Japan’s commercial and political realm and had moreover been claimed – though not controlled – by the British and the United States.Footnote ²¹

In the first place, asserting claims over a place that had been officially named “No-Man-Land” meant to demonstrate effective rule and providing care for the new subjects. A few days after his arrival, Mizuno asked the American settler Nathaniel Savory, whom he had recognized as the most influential person in the settlement, whether the island was home to any cows or deer. Savory replied that “there are no cows or deer, but goats. However, those goats have not been here forever, I have brought them over from my country and I released them.”Footnote ²² Mizuno replied that “even if you have released those goats, they are feeding on grass and trees from Japanese soil (Nihon no tochi), and can therefore not be considered freely available (jiyū).”Footnote ²³ The unwavering magistrate clarified that the use of goats and other natural resources had henceforth to be approved by the Japanese local authorities, but immediately, he assured that the fields the settlers were currently farming would remain tax exempt.

What legitimized such sudden claims remained a central question throughout the venture, and Mizuno put an emphasis on the benevolent rule the shogunate meant to bring to the stateless frontier community. When a thief stole and ate a few of Savory’s ducks a few days later, Mizuno readily compensated Savory in the name of his government. Savory was at first unwilling to accept the money, but Mizuno responded: “Since you are permanently living on this island, you are just like the people of Japan. The people are like a child and the government is like a parent … You should accept this as a gift from parent to child, without hesitation.”Footnote ²⁴ These acts affirmed the pretension of benevolent rule in the manner of a filial relationship between government and subjects.

Benevolence or jin (Chin. rén 仁) is perhaps the most central principle of Confucian Learning, as it is foundational for all social relationships. The concept has been translated as humanity, kindness, benevolence, or human-heartedness, but as a theory of government, it constitutes the foundation of legitimate rule.Footnote ²⁵ During the shogunal administration of Ezo in the first half of the nineteenth century, this framework of benevolent rule had been recast as a frontier policy toward the native Ainu population, as Brett Walker has shown. In response to a sharp population decline that jeopardized Japanese influence in the region vis-à-vis Russian advances, the shogunate in 1857 ran a pervasive smallpox vaccination campaign. As the vaccinator Kuwata Ryūsai wrote upon his return, the extension of “benevolence” to the “barbarians” of Ezo should have introduced them to a more civilized and healthier lifestyle.Footnote ²⁶ Following a similar line of thought, Mizuno stationed several physicians in the Bonin Islands.

The offer of medical care and physical protection may not have been unwelcomed among the settlers, given the islanders’ experiences with pirate raids. In 1849, the islands were raided by the crews of two ships that stole “all they could get hold of,” and cajoled the crew of a third vessel at anchor to abandon their ship. The pirates stole a sum of $2,000 in cash and a value of $2,000 in livestock from Savory alone, moreover abducting his underage wife, as one visitor recorded two years after the fact. Savory’s wife, “a young girl born on the island,” seemed to have little reason to feel attached to her husband, “for by all accounts she gave information as to where his money and valuables were hid, and departed nothing loth.”Footnote ²⁷ When the American commodore Matthew C. Perry came to the islands in 1853, he stipulated a legal “constitution” for the colony, installing the settlers Nathaniel Savory, James Motley, and Thomas H. Webb as Chief Magistrate and Councilmen, the islands’ formal authority at the order of the US Navy (see Chapter 5). This council was supported by a navy captain who was stationed there “for advice and instructions.”Footnote ²⁸ In his travel report, Perry later claimed that the constitution he had written up for the colony was “an interesting specimen of this original effort at constitution-making by wanderers from many lands, civilized and savage … prepared, concurred in, and adopted by [them] in assembly.”Footnote ²⁹ It is more likely that Perry or his middlemen presented the islanders with a ready-made text.Footnote ³⁰ For Savory, who until the islands’ takeover by Japanese in 1862 continued to hoist the stars and stripes over his bamboo hut, the position at the order of the US Navy affirmed his status and authority in the community.Footnote ³¹ Unlike the ship-jumpers who fled the harsh conditions aboard a whaler by absconding into the hills until their ship had departed, Savory had all reasons to welcome protection and cooption by the powerful commodore. On these local power structures the Japanese expedition sought to rest its administration.

Ruling a Shipboard Society

The settlement of Port Lloyd was a fluctuating community of migrants and travelers from all around the Pacific, Africa, and Western countries. Daniel Long counts seventy arrivals on eighteen vessels by 1837, though many temporary settlers chose to leave within a few years.Footnote ³² Many settlers were former whalers dropped off by their ships when they had fallen ill, and many may have illicitly abandoned their crews to evade the harsh conditions of life aboard a whaler. It is documented that some suffered abduction and enslavement, but a few may have migrated intentionally. A man called Charlie “Kanak” who owned some land in Port Lloyd was born on an unspecified Pacific island in 1822, and had been working on British and American whaling vessels for several years before he settled down to farm.Footnote ³³ Others, again, came to break land, or to marry into a settler household. A family of ten living in Hahajima at the time had apparently set over from a Pacific island on an American vessel in 1860, three years after a woman from their community had married a German settler on the island.Footnote ³⁴ The circumstances under which Pacific Islanders migrated to the Bonins are not documented in detail, but given indications of “blackbirding” and especially trafficking of women in various instances, it must be assumed that not all did so out of their free will, as we will see again in Chapter 7.

The frontier community fluctuated significantly with the coming and going of whale ships and traders. Among the thirty to forty individuals that resided in the islands at any time over the previous three decades, patriarchal hierarchies persisted with ethnic mixing in marriage and eclectic households. As an effect, the community was quickly turning into a pan-Pacific melting pot. Biographical records suggest that by 1862, at least 23 percent of the population were of mixed race and born in the islands, whereas only eight out of forty-eight can unambiguously be identified as Euro–Americans.Footnote ³⁵ As Chapter 7 will show, the trend toward ethnic mixing persisted thereafter, as visitors and administrative records in the late nineteenth century suggest. Perhaps concerned about legal conflicts that could arise from the foreign citizenship of some islanders under the extraterritoriality principle stipulated in the unequal treaties, Japanese administrators recorded extensive interviews with those white men who dominated the settlement and possessed citizenship of Western states. As was customary in Japanese population records, only heads of household were interviewed, with wives, children, and other dependents, as well as unrelated co-inhabitants only listed in passing – usually omitting even the names of female individuals. The male-biased records created by this implementation of a Japanese family model buttress the perceived prominence of “Euro–American” settlers among the community.

Within a mere three decades, the cultural baggage of each settler had merged into a creole culture reflected in various economic and cultural practices. The islander Thomas Webb, to whom Obana had handed a Japanese flag and ordered to act as the harbor’s pilot, navigated around the island in an outrigger canoe and caught fish with a spear in shallow places.Footnote ³⁶ Like most settlers, he dwelled in a grass-thatched hut similar to traditional Hawai‘ian dwellings, neatly suited for the warm and humid climate in the islands – which the Japanese liked to compare to the earthfast dwellings found “in our Imperial Country in the ancient age of the gods.”Footnote ³⁷ The Hawai‘ian Language, which had served as the quotidian language in the settlement’s first decade, was slowly giving way to new creole versions of English that absorbed influences of Portuguese and other languages spoken in the mixed migrant households.Footnote ³⁸ The settlement of Pacific travelers was socially and culturally in flux as it merged the heterogeneous cultures of the shipboard into an original local identity.

The emphasis of Japanese administrative records on the councilmen Thomas Webb, Nathaniel Savory, and Thomas Motley, as well as a few other men, illustrates how new Japanese administration incorporated preexisting structures of local power. Policing the islands had previously been an interest of the United States, primarily to suppress ship-jumping. As a lawless space, the Bonin Islands offered an opportunity for sailors to flee rough and often abusive relations aboard and wait out the next opportunity to sign on. James Scott, who studied the mountainous uplands of Southeast Asia, described such stateless frontiers as “a rough and ready homeostatic device; the more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had … Mobility allowed farmers to escape the impositions of states and their wars.”Footnote ³⁹ Much alike, the ship-jumpers who passed through or gathered in the colony were subverting the onboard hierarchies on which the capital-intensive whaling industry relied. When Perry steered to the Bonins in 1853, he was determined to shut down this escape route.

Mizuno set up a temporary administrative headquarter right above the home of “councilman” Savory, where he also had his men erect a memorial stela for the ill-fated Japanese sailors who had died on these remote islands in the past.Footnote ⁴⁰ As more land was cleared, local magistrate Obana relocated the offices across the bay to Ōgiura, the junction between the earlier settlements around the bay and the plains to be cleared in the island’s southern valleys. Ōgiura’s location oversees both the bay’s entrance and the two “foreign” villages, and was thus well situated as a center of control (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2). This created two distinct spaces of settlement. Most Japanese settlers resided near the administrative offices in Ōgiura and farmed newly opened fields in the south of the main island, avoiding conflicts over agrarian space with the inhabitants of “Ōmura” and “Okumura” villages, as the Japanese began to call Port Lloyd.

Figure 6.1 Map of the Bonin Islands with English and Japanese toponyms. (Author’s design.)

Figure 6.2 Landscape painting of Ōgiura village by Miyamoto Gendō, 1862. The grass-thatched dwellings in the lower right contrast the Japanese houses and administrative buildings on the left. Ogasawara-tō zue furoku ikkan, p. 8, in: OVBE, Acc. No.: great safe 6–6–13.

The assertion of harbor control under the hinomaru with the help of Thomas Webb communicated the Japanese takeover to the international community. Even though the number of whaling vessels cruising the Japan Ground had been declining since the 1850s, the harbor of Port Lloyd was still visited frequently by foreign vessels for trade, refueling, or to disembark the sick (see Chapter 3). The islanders actively solicited their services, as the logbook of the New Bedford whaler Navy, illustrates: “a boat came off, they said they had botatoes, hogs, ducks, chicken &c … [we] started for the shore on Peel Island. The Jappanese has taken possession of the Island, one Jappanese Man of war in port.”Footnote ⁴¹ The report Obana later submitted to the shogunate stressed the potential of expanding trade with foreign sailors:

During the seventeen months of his tenure, Obana counts visits of nine American and two Hawai‘ian whaling vessels, as well as one large Russian steamboat that anchored at Port Lloyd for about two weeks.

Mizuno himself had forged plans to develop the islands into a Japanese whaling base, and he picked up Perry’s proposal for a coaling station.Footnote ⁴³ The Bonin Islands at this point functioned as an open harbor, but one without a treaty and at a safe distance from Japan proper – during the negotiation of the Ansei treaties in 1858, Mizuno had urged to keep interaction with foreigners limited to “outlying ports like Nagasaki and Hakodate,” adding that “even if they go elsewhere, it is my hope that the shogunate will designate places some distance removed from Edo.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Having inspected the Bonin Islands personally, Mizuno returned to Japan and arranged for medical personal to be sent to the Bonins and provide legitimizing services to its new subjects.Footnote ⁴⁵ This would not only substantiate Japan’s claim over the Bonins, but support the infrastructure for international traffic, seasonal whaling, and agrarian development.Footnote ⁴⁶

Transitional Geography of Climate and Body Politic

Mizuno was well aware that climatic circumstances could jeopardize the colonial project. In Japanese natural philosophy, climate was seen as an important factor in shaping the character and physical properties of local populations, as also the numerous fudoki or “treatises on climate and culture” of different regions within Japan underline. The concept of fūdo is most easily translated as “climate,” but in practice, it encompasses a much wider set of assumptions on the relationship between culture and environment. In the context of eighteenth century kokugaku thought, for example, the precept that health needed to be cultivated in the context of climate, diet, and other aspects of the local constitution inspired the search for domestic medical products administered according to a Japanese “ancient medicine (kohō),” allegedly better suited for Japanese bodies and environments.Footnote ⁴⁷ The connection between human health and native climatic conditions was empirically confirmed through the observation that travelers risked contracting a “climate disease” or fūdo-byō in zones colder or warmer than their native place. Fūdo-byō, too, was a bucket term for all sorts of place-specific diseases to which local populations seemed to be more resistant than outsiders. As one map of the notoriously malaria-infested Yaeyama region in Ryukyu warned: “If the islanders drink the water from places other than Ishigaki, they will unavoidably fall ill, so they are extraordinarily cautious.”Footnote ⁴⁸ What Europeans may have called “tropical disease” in Japan also applied to sicknesses contracted in cold places. Daigo Shimpei, the founder of the whaling settlement on Iturup, for example, succumbed to “climatic disease” in the winter of 1802.Footnote ⁴⁹ Though complicated by germ theory in the late nineteenth century, this geo-deterministic line of thought culminated in the twentieth century with Watsuji Tetsurō’s Climate and Culture of 1935, a seminal treatise about the “climatic character” of the Japanese. Obana Sakunosuke’s Essentials on the Climate of the Island Ogasawara – the official chronicle of all explorations undertaken during the colonization – underlines that understanding the climatic conditions was seen as the key to colonizing an overseas territory.

To reduce climate-related risks, Mizuno chose to transplant people from the nearest location within Japan to the Bonin Islands, a closer place in the transitional geography of climates. Half a century before the colonial experiment was put into practice, shogunal adviser Satō Nobuhiro had suggested to use subjects from Tosa province in Shikoku as the most physically apt for the islands “straight south from Japan,” but once commodore Perry’s mission report had been brought to Japan in 1860, it was clear that Hachijō was geographically much closer (see Figure 1.3).Footnote ⁵⁰ Relocating farmers from this arid isle to the Bonin Islands seemed to be a good idea based on climatic and structural considerations.

Mizuno was especially conscious that the soil of the Bonin Islands would not yield much at first and therefore proposed that paupers be first sent to settle in the islands. At a preparatory meeting for the expedition, the magistrate stated:

As discussed in Chapter 2, Edoites thought of Hachijō as an isolated and exoticized world at the limit of the human realm. Surrounded by rough and dangerous seas, Hachijō is a volcanic island with limited water resources and little arable soil at its center and along its southern shores. Since sufficient quantities of rice could hardly be grown there, the island was subject to a special form of silk-based taxation.Footnote ⁵² Since the eighteenth century, the shogunate initiated programs to relocate Hachijō islanders to Honshu for construction and land reclamation projects. Under the supervision of senior councilor Tanuma Okitsugu in the 1780s, a major number of such dekasegi hyakushō or “migrant working commoners” worked to drain a vast area of wetlands in the northeastern Kantō Plain for new agricultural land.Footnote ⁵³ With Hachijō, the shogunate was confident to fall back on a repository of laborers willing to emigrate.

In the spring after Mizuno’s expedition, the shogunal steamboat Chōyō-maru set course for the Bonin Islands, delivering agrarian tools and a stock of rice and grain seeds for the settlers.Footnote ⁵⁴ In fall, eleven married couples and eight minors whose marriages had been arranged in advance were relocated from Hachijō. They were joined by eight craftsmen to assist with land improvement activities.Footnote ⁵⁵ The thirty-eight Japanese immigrants outnumbered the thirty earlier inhabitants of the archipelago slightly. As we shall see, this fūdo-determinism is distinct from Western race theories derived from biblical or natural history, but it emerged from a more timeless understanding of static relationships between peoples and places, as seen in the countless early modern fudoki gazetteers.Footnote ⁵⁶

Cartographic Occupation

The promise of agrarian settler colonialism to expand taxable land was prominent in the colonial agenda. In an early phase, the Japanese settlement was focused on “opening” as much arable land as possible. Within only a year and a half, the thirty-eight settlers had expanded the agrarian space on Peel Island by 37.5 percent, to approximately 9.6 hectares.Footnote ⁵⁷ In some instances, land was bought from previous owners, but for the main part, the Japanese cut down shrubs and forests on narrow plains along the creeks in the southern half of the island (see Figure 6.3).

Figure 6.3 Plots of land in Kita Fukurozawa Valley, Peel Island (Chichijima). Based on: Ogasawara-tō zue furoku ikkan, p. 39, in: OVBE, Acc. No.: great safe 6–6–13.

Of more immediate relevance were mapping, naming, and indexing the new territory. The name Ogasawara replaced the formerly used toponym Munin jima, or “No-Man-Land,” which had been the islands’ official name since the seventeenth century – a tacit rebuttal of the widely circulating narrative of Ogasawara Sadayori.Footnote ⁵⁸ As explained in Chapter 3, the new name for the islands was derived from the Ogasawara family’s notorious claim to have owned the island since the sixteenth century. The shogunate had examined and rejected the claims of Ogasawara Sadatō who, in the 1720s, claimed that his ancestor Sadayori had obtained permission from no lesser than Toyotomi Hideyoshi himself to colonize the islands between 1593 and 1626.Footnote ⁵⁹ Even though the shogunate had declared these claims unfounded in the eighteenth century, this widely known narrative was the best material available to substantiate a territorial claim. When Savory asked whether Mizuno knew of the British claim over the island, the magistrate stated resolutely that “three hundred years ago, we built houses here … This continued for two hundred years, but then we interrupted it in the year of the rooster [1753].”Footnote ⁶⁰ But dusting off and pepping up these stories, or the assiduous documentation of land, plants, and people could hardly disguise the utter lack of familiarity with the colony.

While some of the new toponyms were descriptive of geographical characteristics – such as Iimori san for a mountain shaped like an overfilled rice bowl – others referenced more specific tropes of Japanese culture and geography. A pair of twin rocks in the middle of the harbor reminded the explorers of the famous Meoto rocks near Futami Okitama shrine in Ise, thereby inspiring the new name for “Futami Bay” (see Figures 6.4 and 6.5).Footnote ⁶¹ It is not quite clear where the names of each island were first used, but resonating with the Neo-Confucian family allusion for relationship between ruler and ruled, individual islands were named after family roles. The names Chichijima or “Father Island,” Anijima or “Big Brother Island,” as well as Otōtojima, the “Little Brother” of the northern group appeared in Mori Kōan’s largely fictional map of 1752, as did Hahajima, the “Mother Island,” Anejima “Big Sister,” and Imōtojima “Little Sister,” in the southern group.Footnote ⁶² The maps produced by navigator Ono Tomogorō and his staff of cartographers and artists completed the family by adding a “Niece Island” Meijima and a “Marriage Arranger Island” Nakōdo shima further north. Historical references were woven into maps and views as well. Miyamoto Gendō’s landscape paintings, for example, showed the Kanrin-maru flying the hinomaru near the beach Perry was said to have purchased for his coaling station, and Miyaura or “Shrine Bay” was named after the – ahistorical – shrine Ogasawara Sadayori was said to have built there in the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶³ Above all of this, on the peak of mount Asahi, hailed the flag of the rising sun (Figure 6.4).

Figure 6.4 The Kanrin-maru anchoring between the Futami Rocks and a place said to be the patch of land Commodore Perry had purchased in 1853. Note the hinomaru flag atop the mountain peak on the left. Ogasawara-tō sōzu, vol. 1, p. 32, in: NAJ.

Figure 6.5 Ono Tomogorō’s map of Chichijima and surroundings, 1862. Note the English annotations to the Japanese toponyms, which indicate that the map was used to communicate with Anglophone settlers. Ono Tomogoro’s Map of Chichijima, in: OVBE.

The maps drawn by the shogunal explorers showcased mapmaking skills according to exact, triangulated geometry, yet they were distinctively Japanese in style.Footnote ⁶⁴ Captain Ono Tomogorō and his assistant Tsukamoto Akitake mapped the archipelago from the sea. Tomogorō, who had navigated the Kanrin-maru across the Pacific on its mission to America in 1860, was known for his skillful use of the “lunar distance” method to determine longitude, an extremely demanding mathematical task that could take hours to execute.Footnote ⁶⁵ Sailing around the islands, they recorded the coastlines with high precision. At the same time, silhouettes of coastal mountains and the map’s emphasis on coastlines call to mind Inō Tadataka’s famous map of Japan, compiled half a century prior (see Chapter 3).Footnote ⁶⁶ Wherever their ship went, they fathomed the depth, leaving traces on the map like footprints in the snow. A fine line marks the border of navigability by delineating waters of less than four hiro or 7.2 meters in depth. Water depths had been measured in Japan since the 1840s. The Japanese perfected their hydrographic maps around major harbors and with the assistance of foreign experts once the port openings announced heavier traffic in 1860, but Futami Bay may have been the first underwater landscape mapped with such precision by an exclusively Japanese team.Footnote ⁶⁷ By ensuring safe navigation in the bays, the new authorities prepared to expand traffic also at this Pacific entrepôt.

Agrarian Transformation

Upon his return to Japan, Mizuno hired several physicians to be stationed in the Bonin Islands. Besides providing care to foreign and Japanese settlers, the physicians’ tasks included exploring and indexing useful plants, and facilitating their introduction to Japan. The honzō botanists Kurita Manjirō and Iguchi Eishun, however, who had accepted the mission reluctantly, petitioned for repatriation after merely three months on site. Along with a collection of 180 leaves – not seeds – they sent the remark that:

Since the early eighteenth century, mercantilist ideas had inspired the introduction of foreign species to Japan, and chiefly medical plants such as ginseng from Korea, to substitute costly imports.Footnote ⁶⁹ The utility of potent plants in Japanese honzōgaku or “materia medica” was often evaluated based on specific features of previously known flora, a research method that blinded the two botanists to the medical and agricultural practices of the Bonin Islanders. Kurita and Eguchi dutifully submitted a list of medical plants that could potentially be introduced to that desolate place – by the next unfortunate scholar appointed to this position.

In late summer 1862, the botanist Abe Rekisai came to the islands, one of the intellectuals in the entourage of Egawa Tarōzaemon prosecuted a quarter-century earlier because of their plans to clandestinely explore the Bonins for “useful” (go-eki) plants (see Chapter 4.)Footnote ⁷⁰ Rekisai brought along thirty-two seedlings of medical plants, which he tried to grow in the Bonins.Footnote ⁷¹ The preliminary plan Mizuno had forged before his trip envisaged a settlement based on the cultivation of rice and various types of grain and beans (gokoku).Footnote ⁷² Oranges, peaches, and plums were added to this plan after Mizuno’s visit. Cedar, pine, bamboo, and cypress were to be grown for construction materials.Footnote ⁷³ It is not clear how many of these plants were actually brought to the islands during the brief duration of this first attempt at colonization.

Roughly a month after his arrival, Rekisai’s field notes turned toward unknown plants the botanist discovered in the islanders’ gardens, such as pineapples or the Ogasawara Tako, an endemic tree whose leaves were used to weave hats and baskets (see Figure 6.6).Footnote ⁷⁴ Rekisai started paying regular visits to the “foreign” settlers’ homes to cure various maladies, and the settlers, who welcomed his help, usually rewarded his services, treating the doctor to coffee and roasted potato, experiences he recorded meticulously in his diaries. His excitement was utterly elitist. Contrasting the foreigners, Rekisai described the Japanese settlers as “idiots (oroka) who don’t even understand what a grape or an apple is, they cannot recognize the great and lasting benefit of exotic fruits and trees, they are fools without an exception.”Footnote ⁷⁵ With preference, the scholar spent his days in the company of foreign islanders and mingling with international crews who equally appreciated his medical services.Footnote ⁷⁶

Figure 6.6 Painting of an Ogasawara Tako by Miamoto Gendō (1863). Ogasawara-tō sōzu, vol. 2, p. 29, in: NAJ, Acc. No. 271-0519.

Meanwhile, island magistrate Obana reported the discovery of oranges, bananas, yams, taro, pineapples, and many other plants the foreigners had brought to the Bonins. The observation that the islands had become enriched with useful species from distant countries brought a new plan on the Japanese agenda: What could be grown in the Bonin Islands could perhaps be cultivated in Japan, as well. The islanders introduced Obana to one particularly tasty fruit:

Rekisai had a similar idea when he came across a wild-growing pineapple on an excursion inland, as he later reported: “When I returned to Japan, I collected the sprouts and gave them to Hanado Chōtarō who nourishes them in his greenhouse. Judging from the fact that they grow sprouts from the ripe fruit, they must be hōri pineapples, and, given their taste, we may call them yellow pear.”Footnote ⁷⁸

In order to relate and categorize his discoveries, Rekisai ordered the botanical works of Linnaeus, D. L. Oskamp, and J. A. van de Water from Edo.Footnote ⁷⁹ The attempt of understanding these introduced plants in an international context of slightly familiar plants soon became a process of negotiating empirical observations against diverging, speculative theses. Just the naming of new discoveries imposed discussions of kinship and thereby, historical entanglement.

About the endemic Ogasawara Tako, Rekisai wrote:

Ono moved on to categorizing the tako tree as a family of three apparently related plants he called screw rowara (according to its Hawai‘ian name lau hala),Footnote ⁸¹ wild bashō, and vine rowara (pineapple). The screw rowara, he related to its Ryukyuan relative, the adan tree, and thereby filled in a missing piece to connect the adan, the pineapple, and the banana altogether to the basho tree found in Japan. Japan’s vassal state of Ryukyu had served botanists as a subtropical archive since Arai Hakuseki’s Survey of Southern Islands, a role the Bonins assumed for Rekisai. Rekisai constructed this surprising kinship between the Taiwanese pineapple, the Japanese bashō – a Japanese type of banana tree – and the tako tree of the Bonin Islands based on a similarity of leaves and the hexagon patterns on the fruit.

Fieldwork in the Bonin Islands brought together a variety of sources and theories that had to be reconciled, but ultimately, empirical observations made the difference. By the time of his return, Rekisai had identified eighty-nine species which he categorized as “same as in Japan,” “somewhat different than in Japan,” and “nonexistent in Japan.”Footnote ⁸² Most of the thirty-two species he had brought from Japan for experimental plantation, however, died off. The experiment led to frustrating results as much of his garden was eaten away by mice and other introduced pests – raising questions about the origin of mammals on the islands and the clues they offered about histories of human presence.Footnote ⁸³

Temporalities of Natural History

Briefly after the advent of humans, rats were proliferating wildly in the Bonin Islands, competing with endemic animals over local herbs, shrubs, and trees, or preying on indigenous birds, snails, and other small animals.Footnote ⁸⁴ Governor Obana Sakunosuke also noticed a problem of deforestation – a typical effect of goats roaming wild – but in the good manner of a colonial administrator, he readily attributed it to the islanders’ unchecked consumption of construction wood.Footnote ⁸⁵ While such landscape change was hardly understood in its ecological dimension at the time, the foreign descent of introduced species soon provided the base for arguments about ownership and historical claims.

Fascinated with the idea that animals released on the island turned hills and shrubs into a pantry, Obana joined the islanders on a hunt. In his report to the shogunate, he described his observation of feral pigs on the southern Hahajima Island as follows:

The description of these dark-skinned feral pigs with tusks suggests that they were likely the offspring of “Polynesian” pigs brought from Hawaiʻi.Footnote ⁸⁷ In a different place, Obana continues:

Rather than assimilating the environmental constitution to Japan – where people only rarely ate the meat of mammals – Obana started redesigning the natural environment of the islands according to a business plan oriented at the trade in foodstuffs with the emaciated crews of international whaling vessels.Footnote ⁸⁹

Obana’s descriptions of local flora and fauna also express the expectation that earlier Japanese presence has left traces in the composition of the natural environment. About a strange type of wild chicken, he wrote: “Chickens. They are numerous in villages, mountains, and fields, but most of them are wild. Their feathers are black and their flight imitates that of a pheasant. Certainly, they are the thriving [offspring] of those that Shimaya Ichizaemon had released.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Ichizaemon had obtained the mission to explore the islands in 1675 after a group of castaways had managed to return from there (see Chapter 3). His expedition examined the islands for useful resources, mainly with a focus on plants and mineral ores, but no mention was made of an introduction of plants or animals to the uninhabited islands.Footnote ⁹¹ The ahistorical introduction of chickens Obana describes, anyway, reflects an increasingly dynamic understanding of human and natural history that emerged from the eclectic environment of this Pacific entrepôt, in material and discursive terms.

An Entrepôt of Knowledge and Technology

In early January 1863, the entry of a group of whales into the bay of Port Lloyd announced the start of the whaling season. The islanders became busy at once and soon the whaling vessels started pulling in.Footnote ⁹² Nakahaman Manjirō, who had earlier served as Mizuno’s interpreter, had been expected back with the schooner Kimizawa Number One, but bureaucratic issues had delayed his departure from Edo. Mizuno had been particularly impressed about the scene of five whales that entered the harbor, playing around in the shallow waters.Footnote ⁹³ In Japan, such scenes had long become a rare sight, and even though foreign whalers had long been struggling with declining catch in the region, too, the whaling grounds of the Bonin Islands seemed abundant to the Japanese.

As discussed in Chapter 4, Japanese and Western whaling techniques differed in important ways. Japanese whaling businesses processed whales into a variety of products sought-after on Japanese markets, including whale bone and string tools, and fertilizers.Footnote ⁹⁴ For technical reasons, this whale hunt, carried out with small rowing boats, was tied to a shore-borne infrastructure and could only occur within a distance of fifteen to twenty kilometers from the coast. This necessitated the coordination of several hundred people distributed over thirty to forty boats, usually orchestrated with flags, fire, and smoke signals from an elevated lookout on the coast.Footnote ⁹⁵ Western whaling vessels, by contrast, harpooned whales far offshore solely to extract whale oil on expeditions that lasted several months or years. This industry was exclusively interested in the valuable whale oil that could be tried out at sea – the animal’s flesh and bones were thrown overboard. Harvesting the perishable products in demand on Japanese markets remained technically impossible in pelagic zones until the invention of onboard cooling facilities in the twentieth century.

Even before the first settlers had arrived from Hachijō, preparations were made for a Japanese whaling campaign.Footnote ⁹⁶ In the summer of 1862, the merchant Hirano Renzō from Niigata had chartered Egawa’s schooner Kimizawa Number One.Footnote ⁹⁷ Hirano offered the vessel and the necessary funds to Manjirō for his whaling enterprise, yet Manjirō sailed at the order of Egawa Tarōzaemon, with shogunal credentials.Footnote ⁹⁸ The voyage was experimental in nature, but it contributed to the shogunate’s naval strategy. As shogunal inspector Hattori Kiichi remarked, pelagic whaling should “bring eternal benefit to the nation (kokueki),” or at least help finance naval expansion.Footnote ⁹⁹ The authorities ordered Manjirō to sell the meat of whales caught at any nearby harbor, but to bring oil and bones back to Japan.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Manjirō’s training had long become outdated, and he relied on the islanders to introduce his cadets to the most up-to-date whaling techniques. In the meantime, American whalers had developed more effective methods, killing whales with explosive harpoons, the so-called bomb lance method patented in 1861.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Manjirō bought a harpoon and ammunition, and hired a group of foreign settlers. One whaler even relocated from Hawaiʻi when he heard that the Japanese would hire foreign experts at lavish salaries.Footnote ¹⁰² Within a month, the crew of hired foreigners and Manjirō’s cadets caught two sperm whales and successfully harvested ninety-six barrels of oil near Anejima island.Footnote ¹⁰³ Manjirō’s expedition was somewhat haphazard, as a letter indicates, which he submitted to the shogunal finance department after his vessel’s return. Manjirō inquired what he was supposed to do with the gained oil – whether to sell it at Yokohama, or to store it away until further notice.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The competition over whales continued with radically different methods and in a formerly unfamiliar environment.

Pelagic whaling was a wasteful industry and the bomb lance exacerbated the probability of killing and then losing the prey. Abe Rekisai, the botanist, described his experience on a brief whaling trip with a foreign crew as follows: We sailed near the whale and hit one bomb lance directly into it … we chased it and as we hit it [again] in the stomach, I heard the explosion inside. The fish hit waves in pain and sank in a horrible spectacle. The foreigners also say it certainly died.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The bomb lance technique had been the industry’s last blow before the classical whaling industry collapsed. It was a technique efficient at killing, one that accelerated the decimation of whale populations (see Figure 6.7).

Figure 6.7 Depiction of a bomb lance model from the early 1870s in the collection of botanist Tanaka Yoshio, the later chief of the office for agriculture and founder of Ueno Zoo. Shin hatsumei kujiragoroshi jū, p. 165, in: TUGL, Tanaka Yoshio Fund.

With Japan’s integration into globalizing markets, gearing up for the race for resources meant learning from globally active competitors. Relying on such formal interaction with foreign captains, Obana compiled a list of whale species the foreigners had caught around the Bonin Islands, and enumerated the market price of each species’ oil per barrel in dollars. The oil of killer whales was traded for sixteen dollars per barrel, a right whale’s oil for twenty, and the precious sperm whale oil for up to forty-five dollars per barrel.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Obana could relate only three of the nine species listed in English to a Japanese name, suggesting that some of the species the foreigners caught offshore were not yet familiar to the Japanese. The Japanese were used to catching coastal baleens, but many of the pelagic toothed whale species were rarely found in shallower whale grounds. Had governmental planners spoken indifferently of “whale fish (geigyo)” in correspondence with Nakahama Manjirō, the officials sent to the Bonin islands meticulously recorded names and characteristics of each species as understood from interviews with foreign whalers.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ English dialect differences and non-native accents among whalers may have affected Obana’s categorizations: the previously known humpback whale was inadvertently subdivided into a homubekki (13.2 m), hōbekki (20 m), and himubekki (13.2 m) type in Obana’s records.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The systematic appropriation of marine knowledge and technology had turned the colonial enterprise into an intelligence project on technological, geographical, and biological essentials for Pacific expansion.

Tokugawa Colonialism at the Crossroads

In the summer of 1863, foreign pressure mounted against the shogunate over the murder of an English merchant near Namamugi village. As the shogunate was at first unwilling to pay an indemnity of 440,000 Mexican silver dollars to Britain, roughly one third of its annual revenue, Japan and an alliance of four Western powers found themselves on the brink of a war.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In August, the British attacked Kagoshima from the sea, and Japan’s international political predicament worsened dramatically.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In this context, the shogunate could no longer guarantee the safety of its subjects and risked another naval humiliation in the Bonin Islands. Prudently, they called back all settlers and bundled the disintegrating shogunal capacities in the mainland.Footnote ¹¹¹ The land and supplies the settlers had developed during their short stay were divided among the non-Japanese islanders with the understanding that this retreat was only temporary.Footnote ¹¹²

The colonial experiment in the Bonin Islands – even though small in scale and aborted after only a year and a half – shows how Tokugawa Japan, despite facing humiliation through unequal treaties and even a Russian aggression against the island of Tsushima in 1861, managed to assert a territorial claim against Western competitors on its Pacific side.Footnote ¹¹³ The project was symbolically significant as it displayed the same visual language of colonial power and technological modernity to which the Japanese had been subjected less than a decade prior, with the arrival of the American squadron of black ships at Uraga. Yet this language of power followed a distinctively Japanese grammar. Neo-Confucian ideals of government pervaded rhetoric and legal practice on the ground, while a strong emphasis rested on the agrarian development or “opening” of land. An emphasis was put on the administrative control of resources, supported by an apparatus of administrative and academic personnel who primarily inventoried the colony’s novel climate and produce.

The islands’ exploration offered ways to construct diachronic connections of different kinds. Discoveries of familiar, yet strangely exotic species raised questions about the historical kinship of social and natural environments in the southern colony. Certain animals commonly kept in Japan seemed to have assumed savage traits since their alleged introduction by Ogasawara Sadayori or Shimaya Ichizaemon centuries prior, while others, brought hither by foreign migrants, showed striking similarities with possibly related species in Japan. Efforts to index flora and fauna intersected with the construction of a historical narrative that put territorial claims on a scientific footing. These projections were highly speculative, but they provided a historical and cultural compass.

Expansion beyond the older frontiers of the early modern bakuhan state necessitated a fundamental redefinition of ethnicity, national space, and Japan’s appearance on the international stage. Proficient in foreign languages, the islanders fulfilled an indispensable role in the interaction with international sailors.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Bonin Islanders were declared subjects of the “tycoon” – noticeably appearing with his foreigner-proof cognomen – forming a new type of subjects located beyond the conventional status order of Japanese and frontier populations.Footnote ¹¹⁵ For Japan’s fragmented realm of shogunal and domain lands, this generalized subjecthood helped universalize territorial claims vis-à-vis foreign governments as “national,” an idea that was only forming at that time. Likewise, the hinomaru flag of the shogunal navy, which was first used in the Bonin Islands to mark a national territorial claim, elevated the shogunate into the position of a national government.