China and Japan’s Northern Frontier: Chinese Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Hokkaido

Abstract

This article examines the role of Chinese migrants in the development of Hokkaido in the last years of the Tokugawa period and the early Meiji period. The southern part of Hokkaido was the northern frontier of the Japanese realm until the mid-nineteenth century when one of its principal ports, Hakodate, was opened to international trade, and the island as a whole was opened to unrestricted Japanese colonial settlement. Hokkaido’s population ballooned from an estimated 58,000 in 1869 to 1.7 million by 1912 as settlers flooded in. Yet, despite this remarkable population transfer, Hokkaido’s settler colonial history is little known to scholars outside of Japan. Even less known is the role played by Chinese migrants and the China market in Hokkaido’s transformation. Hokkaido’s main economic activity, trade in marine products, developed rapidly (thus luring settlers) based on expanding demand for Hokkaido produce in southern Japan and the distant Yangtze delta. As such, Hakodate developed a thriving Chinese merchant community at least a decade before the Qing established formal trade relations with Japan in 1871–73. This article argues that Chinese migrant merchants were able to dominate Hokkaido’s foreign trade in this period due to a combination of their mercantile talent, market power, and association with (not subordination to) Western firms, which gave them extraterritorial rights. The demand for Hokkaido marine products in China was an important impetus to the expansion of Japanese capital and economic activity into Hokkaido’s frontier areas and hence the merchants involved in this trade played an indirect role in Japanese colonization. This article also briefly touches upon histories of Chinese sailors, agricultural labourers, translators, and technicians who worked in an around Hokkaido in the Meiji period.