Episode 371 - The First Frontier, Part 1

This week's episode is brought to you by Audible. Audible has over 425,000 titles to choose from, all compatible with iPhone, Android, Kindle, or your MP3 player of choice. For listeners of the show, Audible is offering a free 30-day trial membership complete with credit for a free audiobook of your choice. You can cancel any time and keep the free book or keep going with one of Audible's subscription offers. Go to audibletrial.com/japan to claim your offer. This week, I'm going to recommend China & Japan Facing History by the Late & Great as Revogal. Dr. Vogel died just a few days ago as of the recording of this episode and what better way to honor his memory than reading or, I guess, listening to one of his works. Go to audibletrial.com/japan to claim your copy. [Music] Hello and welcome to the history of Japan Podcast, episode 371, the first frontier, part 1. This week, I want to return to an approach we've tried before, and that I, and apparently quite a few of you, really like. And that approach is to tell the story not of a person or an institution or a phenomenon, but of a place, the history of one of Japan's many regions. In this instance, I spent a lot of time thinking about where I wanted to take us next, but ultimately there was one idea I'd just kept coming back to. So this week, we're starting a history of Japan's first modern frontier, Hokkaido. This is a story I want to tell for two reasons. First, as that whole first frontier title thing might clue you on to, Hokkaido is very important to the history of Japan's overseas empire. We think of the island today as an intrinsic part of Japan, but it was not always so. For the vast majority of Japanese history, the island was only loosely tied, if at all, to Japan proper. The successful colonization of Hokkaido and its complete incorporation into Japan would set the stage in a lot of ways for Japanese colonial efforts down the line, from Taiwan, to Manchuria, and beyond. Second, this is a history that's important to me personally. Outside of Tokyo, where I spent so many wayward hours of my youth trying to find the best curry near the National Archives, the place I've spent the most time in in Japan is Hokkaido, specifically Hakodate, one of the area's major cities. Shout out by the way to the Hokkaido International Foundation, whose two-month Japanese language program was extremely intense, but fantastic for getting my language abilities up to par. I recommended highly and I'd be happy to talk about it with anyone. So this is an area of Japan I really love, and not just for the soup curry, though I did devote an entire episode of the Patreon newsletter to translating a soup curry recipe I found online. Honestly, in retrospect, this was a place that was just really instrumental in building up my love of the Meiji Restoration as a historical period, and thus taking me on my course to graduate school. So it's an area I love, and ones I love to talk about, and taking it on feels natural and appropriate for the show. But enough setup, let's dive in. First, let's talk names. Hokkaido as a name is relatively new. The name literally translates to something like Northern Sea Circuit and was chosen in 1869 by the newly established Meiji government for reasons that, well, we'll get into later. For the vast majority of Japan's history, the inhabitants of the Japanese mainland referred to the island as "Ezolchi" or "The Land of Ezo". The "Ezo" or "Meishi" as those characters are sometimes read, being the name given by Japanese at the time to that island's native inhabitants, an Aboriginal group we call the "I New" today. By the way, I'm going to use that term "Ezo" to refer to the place occasionally, but for the most part, I'm going to be anachronistic and say Hokkaido just for clarity's sake. Now, the names here are a little confusing, but bear with me for a second. The "Emiishi" are a distinct ethnic group whose battles with the early Japanese state 1300 years ago or so led to the rise of the samurai as professional warriors, existing conscript armies modeled on China, being insufficient for defeating the "Emiishi" armies of horseback raiders. Even after the "Emiishi" who lived in what's now the "Canto" region around Tokyo and points further north on the main island of Honshu were defeated and incorporated into Japan, their name continued to be applied to the inhabitants of what's now Hokkaido. The relationship between these two "I New and Emiishi" is complex, with some historians suggesting that the "I New" inhabitants of Hokkaido were descendants and/or remnants of the defeated "Emiishi", others saying the groups were distinct. For our purposes, it's not really important though, man, I really want to do an episode on the early Japan and "Emiishi" wars at some point, but finding sources that are easy to parse is going to be something. What matters for us is that the people we think of as ethnic Japanese did not consider the residents of this remote island to be among their number, as sentiment the "I New Natives" happened to share. And by the "I New" itself, as a term from the "I New Language" just means "person", the "I New" called Hokkaido "I New Mosir" or the land of the people or sometimes "Yauun Mosir" land of our country. "I New History" in and of itself is not particularly well documented, thanks in large part to the fact that until the 1800s there was no system for writing the "I New Language" and thus no written record to work off of. Thus our main sources for "I New History" are oral histories from "I New Records", "Archaeological Work" and the appearances of "I New" in the histories of other cultures. From archaeological and anthropological research, we generally suspect the "I New" are descended from Siberian tribes from what's now the Asian part of Russia. For example, prior to the 1870s, the "I New Practiced Mammification" as a part of their burial rituals, something that's also quite common among a lot of mainland Asian peoples. Archaeological records, meanwhile, suggest the "I New Economy" was dominated by a combination of fishing, hunting and gathering and agriculture, with the last of these being common enough that "I New Homes" were traditionally built in an elevated style to keep pests out of their grain stores. For reasons we'll explore in a bit, the "I New" never developed a predominantly agricultural economy, but there absolutely was an agricultural system in place. There's also evidence of sophisticated toolmaking, including pottery, though the metal tools we found have all been of Japanese make, at least from what we can tell. The first appearance of the "I New In Japanese Records" probably dates from around 1000 CE. I say probably because said records refer to them as the "Watarijima Amishi". "Watarijima" literally means crossing from the island and is probably a reference to the group being from Hokkaido. From the Japanese perspective, the most noteworthy thing about this group was their produce. Amishi rulers, who had been subjugated by the Japanese, usually brought horses, and attribute to their Japanese overlords. However, these new people brought animal furs. Japanese records also describe these people as talented hunters, while the Amishi on Hokkaido at this point were generally more focused on agriculture. Early contacts between the "I New" and Japan were generally limited to trade in these furs, often in exchange for tools or Japanese cookware. Even as more and more of Honshu and eventually all of it fell under the sway of Japanese rulers, Hokkaido itself remained outside the administrative control of Japan. It wasn't really until what we'd call Japan's medieval period, coinciding with the rise of samurai-dominated warrior governments, that Japanese rulers started to take more of a direct interest in this remote northern island. The armies of the first Shogun to rule Japan, Minamoto Noyori Tomo, conquered the remote north of Honshu in 1189. Eventually, Yori Tomo would install a family allied to his cause, the Andoklan, to rule over this northern boundary, and among other things to deal with the Ainu. The origins of the Andok family are a bit murky. In fact, it's sometimes suspected that they were a family of assimilated Amishi descent, giving them both an in with Amishi in the north and with the Ainu, though that's not exactly proven. The Andoklan were given a fairly poor fief in Tsugaru, what's now a Mori-perfecture, more or less directly across the Tsugaru straits from Hokkaido itself. The region was only loosely integrated into Japan. Culturally, it was a mishmash of Japanese and Ainu communities which had come over from Hokkaido, leading to an interesting hybrid culture that continues to this day. Among other things, Tsugaru dialect Japanese is famously impenetrable to outsiders. The lightly populated land, combined with some pretty brutal weather coming over from Siberia, made the domain rather poor in terms of agricultural wealth. Namunili, the Minamoto, handed the Andoklan control of Hokkaido as well, but in practice, there wasn't really a lot the Andoklan could do to actually exert control over that territory. What it could do was ride a lucrative trade with the Ainu, particularly in Furs, through its primary port city and castle town of Tosaminato, substantially enriching the Andok family. And I do mean substantially. Tosaminato today is an archaeological site and apparently the digs have located to quote directly from one report "very large caches of coins" unquote. Put less dryly, the Andoklan made bank off its trade monopoly with the Ainu. They were given by the Shogunate exclusive trade rights with the Ainu and the right to bring the goods they acquired to other Japanese ports, exempt from a lot of the tax duties nominally associated with that kind of trade. But the relationship was not solely beneficial to the Andoklan. To use the words of one of the best scholars on this subject, Brett Walker, trade with the Andoklan also quote "ushered in the full blown emergence of Ainu culture" unquote. Japanese made goods were very valuable among the Ainu, Ainu leaders whose contacts with the Ando made trade possible were able to parlay that role into becoming powerful chiefs. The ability of said chiefs to distribute the Japanese made goods they had exclusive access to in turn created a new social hierarchy centered on the chiefs and radically remade Ainu material culture thanks to the influx of Japanese technology. This new technology, in combination with growing numbers, made it possible for the Ainu to begin pushing north, settling all of Hokkaido as well as the southern half of Sakhalen Island and the neighboring Kural Island chain. Indeed, I'd be remiss not to note here one fascinating little bit of history. I knew expansion into Sakhalen brought the Ainu tribes into conflict with that island's inhabitants, the Nivk people. And the Nivk, who were losing badly to the Ainu, turned for help to a friend on the continent, the Mongol-led Yendinesty of China. The Ainu actually fought a series of conflicts against the Mongols, even rating the Asian mainland a couple of times, before the two sides came to an agreement in the early 1300s that split Sakhalen between the Ainu and the south and the Nivk in the north. The relationship between the Ainu and Japan was, I think it's fair to say, at this point mutually beneficial, with both sides benefiting from the trade relationship. But I also don't want to paint an unnecessarily rosy view of this relationship, because this was not an example of totally friendly coexistence and the two sides did come into conflict on a semi-regular basis. In both the 1260s and the early 1300s, there were emisci rebellions on the Japanese mainland supported by Ainu raids, and in the second case made worse by a concurrent civil war within the Ando family. Probably the biggest conflict between the two sides, though, came in the 1450s with what's called "Kosha Mains War". The genesis of the war lay an attempt by the Ando clan to expand its hold over Ezzo proper. By the 1400s there were some ethnic Japanese who'd settled on the island, primarily to trade with the Ainu, but in 1454 the Ando clan lord, Ando Masaki, got it in his head to try and expand their presence. He began an ambitious plan to expand Ainu territorial holdings on the Ezzo itself, starting with what we call the Oshima Peninsula, the area of Hokkaido, directly across the Tsugaro Strait from Japan proper. The Ando clan had already fortified some settlements on the island, including one, called Shinori Tate, which represents the first Japanese settlement of what's now the city of Hakodate. Under Ando Masaki, however, this network was expanded into 12 fortifications scattered around the Oshima Peninsula, from which the Ando could expand their sphere of influence on the island. As you might imagine, while this was all going on, tensions started to run a bit high, and in 1456 they boiled over. The inciting incident was a fight between a Japanese blacksmith and an Ainu youth over a trade involving a knife, apparently there was a dispute as to its quality and therefore its trade value. Said the dispute was resolved by the blacksmith stabbing the Ainu youth, I suppose to prove a basic point about the functionality of his handiwork. When word of the fight got back to Ainu communities on Oshima, a local chief named Koshameen rallied his forces to punish the Japanese. Now it's worth noting that while I don't doubt Koshameen's resolve to avenge the death of this youth, knife jokes aside stabbing a kid because you don't like him talking smack about your workmanship is a bit much. It probably was not just to avenge the boy that Koshameen decided to go on the offensive. At stake in the war, really was a broader conflict about the land itself. Not only after all did the Ando attempts to claim more land for their fortresses and to control the land around them represent a bit of a sticky issue. The larger number of Japanese settlers now coming to the island represented increased pressure on the surrounding food resources, especially the fish which formed a big part of the Ainu diet. The resulting conflict was a fierce one but a relatively short one. Koshameen's forces were able to overwhelm the initial Ando defenses burning 10 out of those 12 fortresses. However, both the professionalized nature of the Ando clan samurai and their superior weapons and armor eventually turned the tide. In 1458 the two sides clashed at Nanai-hama, the harbor of Hakodate and in the ensuing battle both Koshameen and his son were killed. In the aftermath the leaderless Ainu armies collapsed. The conflict was nominally a victory for the Japanese over the Ainu but the intensity of the fighting made it clear that further attempts to expand into Hokkaido would be costly to the point of being prohibitive for the Ando clan. One other aspect of this conflict that's worth noting, the best source we have for it is something called the Shinra No Kiroku, the family history of a clan called the Matsumai about whom we'll talk much more in a bit. I mentioned this because said family history recounts that one samurai by the name of Kaki-zaki Nobu hero, also sometimes called Taketa Nobu hero, no relation to the Taketa clan of Kai province from which the great Taketishin game came was responsible for killing both Koshameen and his son with his substantial archery skills. Nobu hero's accomplishment catapulted the Kaki-zaki, already one of the more powerful vassals of the Ando clan, into prominence within the region's politics. Eventually the Kaki-zaki clan would become the most powerful political force among the Japanese settled on Ezo-slash Hokkaido proper. And that's going to come to matter a great deal because for exciting political reasons that we don't really need to get into, over the course of the 1500s the Ando clan would eventually end up being displaced from northern Japan. Basically in the chaotic wars of the Senkoku era they ended up picking a fight with and losing to the neighboring Nanbu clan. The same clan whose leaders would eventually take the Dutch crew of the Breskins, Prisoner, a century or so later. Long story short, the Ando clan would survive the Senkoku period, indeed the family still around today, but after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 they'd be placed down in what's now Ibaraki, far closer to Tokyo. That doesn't mean though that the Nanbu clan which displaced the Ando ended up assuming control of the Ainu, instead they got cut up with yet more wars with neighboring clans. No, what happened instead was that the Kaki-zaki clan, former servants of the Ando, and the most powerful Japanese family on Hokkaido itself, ended up assuming control over the small Japanese outpost on the Oshima Peninsula. In the 1590s the Kaki-zaki Lord Yoshihiro was able to convince the Warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi to hand him control of the Ainu trade, mostly from a combination of a sequious flattery and strong political skills though I suppose deep down what's really the difference. The Kaki-zaki became the new agents handling trade between the Ainu and the mainland, operating out of their primary fortress a castle at Matsumaya on Hokkaido itself on the Oshima Peninsula. In the family, apparently with a very keen eye towards smelling out the political winds, was then able to weather the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the clan pledged its loyalty to Tokugawa Yaiasu as early as 1599. And so it was that for the final 250ish years of samurai rule in Japan, the Kaki-zaki, who with permission from Tokugawa Yaiasu, changed their name to the Matsumaya clan, oversaw Japan's relations with the Ainu. Specifically in 1604 the Matsumaya clan was granted a rather unique charter giving it the rights to control both the Ainu trade and the movement of Japanese people into and out of Hokkaido. As it had for the Ando before them, this new status would make the Matsumaya clan very wealthy. Managing a trade network of Ainu that ranged all the way to the Asian mainland, the family was able to become very rich indeed. Indeed, if anything, the arrangement was far better for the Matsumaya than it had been for the Ando. Since the Matsumaya clan was based on Hokkaido itself, it was far easier for the family to build relations with the neighboring Ainu cotons, as Ainu settlements were called, to reinforce their trade network. Just how wealthy this made the Matsumaya clan is clear from their exceptional status within the hierarchy of Tokugawa era samurai lords. Remember that the lords or Daimyo were ranked by the Tokugawa based on their Kokudaka, their estimated income from rice harvests based on land surveys. Higher Kokudaka meant more status for the lord and for the domain. The Oshima peninsula however was not particularly good farmland. Indeed, so far as I can tell, the Japanese inhabitants didn't really bother trying to farm it at all. Nor would it have been possible to ascertain exactly how much agricultural land the Matsumaya clan held, since unlike every other domain in Japan, the Matsumaya holdings had no clear borders to delineate them. Instead they were broadly divided into Matsumaya lands, the area of the clan directly controlled, and Ezo lands, which is to say everything else. Basically, Matsumaya lands were confined to the Oshima peninsula, but the exact dividing line was always a little blurry. Despite the fact that the Matsumaya clan did not possess this basic standard of wealth or even a clear sense of what they owned, the Tokugawa afforded the family all the privileges normally accorded to Dimeo families, based not on their agricultural holdings but solely on the wealth of the Ainu trade. I've looked around a bit to see if I could find where precisely Matsumaya was ranked in the pecking order of the time. The one value assigned to the clan's holdings I could find from 1855, ranked the domain at 30,000 Koku annually in terms of value, which is pretty middle of the pack overall, but respectable enough certainly. And in other ways, the Matsumaya were afforded even more privileges than a regular family of lords were. For example, most other lords in Japan had to go to Edo every other year to attend personally to the Shogun, a practice known as Sankeen Koltai. Matsumaya was one of very few domains, allowed a more relaxed status. The lords of Matsumaya only had to go attend to the Shogun personally every six years. In a system that was essentially built to be stable and easy to surveil, so as to keep an eye on ambitious lords who might try and overthrow it, it's a real testament to the wealth of the Matsumaya and their perceived importance in terms of the Ainu trade that they were allowed so much slack in their proverbial leash. So how did the Matsumaya actually manage their holdings? Well, initially, the clan divided up trade rights in much the same way others divided up land rights, where a normal domain would be subdivided between vassals with each vassals having a designated fee from which they drew wealth, Matsumaya was divided up geographically into trade zones with each of the Matsumaya clan's vassals having the right to set up trade posts within their lands. Probably the most important of these trade posts was Shinori Tate, one of the old 12 Andoklann fortresses on the island, which was rebuilt in the 1500s and at some point received a new name, Hakodate. However, eventually both the Matsumaya and their vassals came upon a realization that would plague many from the samurai class throughout its history. As it turns out, a life of martial arts and reading Confucius does not prepare you terribly well for the business world. And so many of them turned to that age-old tradition, subcontracting. Specifically, they sold their trade rights to wealthy merchant families who would then manage the trade in exchange for a cut of the overall profits. This arrangement was excellent financially for merchant and samurai alike. And to boot, it resulted in both the castle town of Matsumaya and Hakodate turning into, if not cities, than at least more substantial villages. In particular, Nanai-Hama, the harbor of Hakodate is one of the better harbors in this region of Hokkaido, which is pretty important given the tendency for fellow weather to blow in from Siberia. And so Hakodate in particular became the major Japanese port on the island, though Matsumaya Castle about 90 kilometers or 55 miles away, remains the seat of domain government and the largest settlement in terms of population. It's also worth noting that while Hakodate began to prosper as a settlement during this time, the Oshima Peninsula remained the only part of Hokkaido with any Japanese settlement. In the popular consciousness, these northern regions remained a remote and distant place, viewed by turns as barbaric and dangerous or as uncivilized and unspoiled. In less romantic terms, the Oshima Peninsula was considered to be something of a dividing line between Japan and the outside world. A 1713 map by the Japanese cartographer Teraishima Ryoan depicted the Oshima Peninsula itself as a part of Japan proper, but the rest of Hokkaido as a land of foreign barbarians. So this whole arrangement worked out pretty well for the Matsumaya clan and its political allies, but what about the Ainu? How did they feel about it? Well, the answer, naturally enough, was pretty variable but generally not great. One of the policies imposed by the Matsumaya was a trade monopoly, the attempted to force Ainu traders to work only with Matsumaya clan agents in shipping goods overseas. In practice, of course, monopolies like that are hard to enforce and Ainu traders were able to smuggle goods into Japan, as well as maintaining trade links with the Asian mainland and Korea in particular. However, the Matsumaya were still able to maintain a pretty firm hold on trade with the Ainu, both for reasons of geography, frankly the clan's presence on Hokkaido just made them easy to sell to, and because the arrangement did work out well for some in the Ainu population. Much as had been the case under the old Ando clan regime, Ainu chieftains with particularly close relations to the Matsumaya were able to turn a substantial profit from trade. Their influence in bringing goods to the Matsumaya and distributing Japanese goods among the Ainu gave them a lot of power and social prestige, and many of them in turn rather liked this system devised by the Matsumaya clan. Their opinion was not universally held, of course, but Matsumaya power was backed up by both the clan's own samurai and the promise of mainland intervention. Both Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Yai Asu had accompanied their pronouncements that the Matsumaya were the legitimate masters of the Ainu trade, with promises that any Ainu who dared to fight them would face the full might of the Japanese mainland. In essence, the Matsumaya position was enforced by a combination of political acquiescence from some Ainu leaders and the threat of military force. For all the world, it honestly reminds me of nothing so much as the very early European colonies in North America, both in what's now the US and in Canada. These colonies were generally pretty small in terms of their overall size and European population, but were sustained by serving as hubs in a trade network, building relations with native peoples that allowed them to acquire and sell valuable North American goods back in Europe. Noramai I, by the way, had notes such similarities, I've heard this arrangement in Hokkaido described as a form of proto-colonialism, and honestly, I can't say I disagree. There were attempts to resist the system the most famous of which is easily the rebellion of Shokshain. Shokshain was from an Ainu clan called the Shibuchari, with a long-standing rivalry with a neighboring clan, the Haye. In fact, Shokshain himself came to power in 1655 after the Haye assassinated his predecessor. An all-out war between the two clans was prevented only by Matsumaya itself, as the clan mediated a peace treaty. However, in 1668, Shokshain decided to break the treaty, apparently in part because he was convinced the Haye were being given a helping hand by Matsumaya clan officials in preparing for an attack against him. Shokshain's men launched a surprise attack killing most of the Haye clan leadership, at which point the Haye asked for intervention from Matsumaya. Another attempt by Matsumaya to intervene and prevent fighting, after all, how could the clan exploit the Ainu if they were busy killing each other, resulted in Shokshain deciding to attack some Matsumaya clan ships sailing near his territory. Apparently fed up with Japanese attempts to intervene in what he considered a local issue, Shokshain began rallying other Ainu clans to his cause, promising that he would help free them all from Japanese domination. Apparently that message had some resonance. shakshan was able to rally some 30,000 Ainute's cause. However, even with numbers, shakshans or Volt had little chance of success. In 1669 he was able to attack some of the Japanese settlements in Oshima, but before long he was intercepted by Amatsumaya clan army and fought to a standstill. I knew warriors with bows and arrows and mostly stone-tipped ones that were not as it turned out much of a match for samurai with modern armor and even firearms. The Tokugawa even arranged for reinforcements from mainland domains. With those on hand, the Matsumaya were able to crush the revolt. Shakshan was forced to surrender by the end of the year. Shortly thereafter he was killed by a group of drunk Matsumaya samurai out for revenge and his primary fortress was burned to the ground. There were other outbreaks of violence. For example, in 1789 Ainute attacked Japanese traders visiting their lands and killed about 70 of them after rumors started spreading that Japanese were deliberately poisoning Ainu villages. However, another large-scale revolt never took place. The Ainu had neither the numbers nor the technology to make it work. The Matsumaya clan was actually aware of this. After Shakshan's defeat, the clan introduced new regulations such as a ban on sharp-edged metal tools and a ban on Ainu learning the Japanese language. All intended, once again, to turn to the works of Brett Walker, to "establish a tradition of Ainu subservience." Ainu chiefdans were forced to sign treaties banning them from requiring Japanese goods anywhere other than Matsumaya run trading posts on the Oshima Peninsula and demanding that the Ainu inform the Matsumaya of any anti-Japanese agitation and work to suppress it. Ainu chiefs were made totally financially dependent on patronage from the Matsumaya and their retainers and this in turn gave the Japanese even more leverage over them. Ainu leaders were even forced to go before the Matsumaya and their retainers for audiences that resembled nothing so much as the ones the Shogun would force his lords to attend. Much as the Shogun would bring out his lords and have them demonstrate their loyalty and then reward them with gifts, the Matsumaya clan would have Ainu leaders come before them and pledge fealty before rewarding them with gifts in turn. Now as you've all heard me say a few times by now, I'm not a huge fan of historical speculation just because I think it's very hard to ground in fact. But in this case, I think it is fair to say that Hokkaido was already well on the way to being colonized by Japan during this time. In many ways it was already being treated as a colonial periphery. Over the course of the Tokugawa period, the number of Japanese on Hokkaido grew continuously. By the 1710s, the Oshima Peninsula was home to some 15,000 Japanese residents. By comparison, only 152 Ainu were allowed to reside there. Matsumaya control on the island was expanding. Not only did it control trade, the clan began to open up zinc, copper, and sulfur mines on the island as well as fishing preserves staffed by Ainu laborers. In many ways Hokkaido was already a part of the Japanese zone of influence yet in one crucial way it was not. Japanese settlements were still confined to the Oshima Peninsula and while the Matsumaya clan had a lot of influence with Ainu outside of this territory and was able to exert indirect control over them, it did not rule them directly. And this was about to be important because a new challenger was about to appear on the field. As far back as the 1650s, expeditions from far off Imperial Russia had made it to the Pacific Ocean. The Russians had even fought a brief war in the 1600s with China and Korea over control of Central Asia, a war China won by the by. The Russians set up their first Pacific base at Okotsk in 1650, about 1600 kilometers or 995 miles north of the northernmost tip of Hokkaido. From that base, Russian influence continued to radiate steadily outward, particularly as the Russian Empire was able to subjugate more and more of the tribes in its Pacific holdings and build up its power in those regions. Japanese leaders were aware of these developments, thanks to the Dutch information about the outside world continued to enter Japan at a steady clip. However, it wasn't really until the 1790s when it became clear that Russia was an actual problem that would have to be dealt with and that Russian influence in Asia not only was not going anywhere but was going to grow as an issue moving forward. Specifically in 1791, a Swedish Finnish explorer named Adam Laksman arrived in Hokkaido, sailing into Hakodate and asking for a meeting with Japanese officials. His ostensible pretense for his voyage was the desire to return a group of Japanese fishermen who had been shipwrecked on the Russian part of the Asian mainland a few years earlier, but while he was there he was, of course, more than happy to work out a nice trade arrangement between Japan and Russia. The Matsumaya clan was able to fob Laksman off with the help of some envoys sent up hastily from Edo with a thank you kindly, some nice gifts and a promise that future Russian ships could go to Nagasaki and be well received. Said Russian ships were of course in fact pointedly told to buzz off when they did show up. Though nothing immediate came of the incident it was quite alarming and suddenly it made Hokkaido a far more urgent and far more vulnerable place in the imagination of Japan's leaders and where that would take us, well we'll see next time. For now though that's all for this week, thank you very much for listening. Special thanks this week to new patrons Jan Lenart and Stephen Rout for donating to support the show. To join them to find out more about this week's episode or any other episode or just submit your ideas for future episodes check out the podcast webpage at isakmyer.net that's ISAC, MEYER.net or our Facebook page facebook.com/historyofJapanPodcast. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you next time for part two. [Music]