Hokkaido

• 1. Introduction

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  Hokkaido, Japan's second-largest island, carries a name invented by a government committee in 1869. The man who coined it, Matsuura Takeshiro, drew on what the Ainu people called the region: Kai. That single syllable became the foundation of a new official identity for an island that had been home to indigenous people for tens of thousands of years. What drove Japan to rename an entire island? Who were the people already living there? And what happened to them when one of Asia's most ambitious colonization projects came to their shores? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Ainu and Ancient Hokkaido

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  Over 15,000 years ago, during the Jomon period, hunter-gatherers flourished on the island that would become Hokkaido. Unlike Honshu, Hokkaido saw no conflict during this long period of early settlement. The spiritual beliefs of the Jomon people are theorized to have given rise to Ainu spirituality, weaving an unbroken thread of culture across millennia.

  About 2,000 years ago, Yayoi people arrived and the island's population began to shift from hunting and gathering toward agriculture. Trade grew between Hokkaido and the Japanese mainland. The Nihon Shoki, completed in 720, is often cited as the first written mention of Hokkaido in recorded history. According to that text, a military commander named Abe no Hirafu led a large naval force northward from 658 to 660 and encountered peoples called the Mishihase and Emishi. The place he visited, called Watarishima, is widely believed to refer to present-day Hokkaido.

  By the feudal era, the island's indigenous people were known as Ezo, and their homeland was called Ezochi. During the Nara and Heian periods spanning 710 to 1185, they maintained trade relationships with Dewa Province, exchanging furs and goods for rice and iron. The Ainu were not a marginal presence; they were the dominant civilization on the island for centuries before the Japanese state took a serious interest in their territory.

• 3. Feudal Conflict and Ainu Resistance

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  During the Muromachi period, which ran from 1336 to 1573, Japanese settlers established a foothold at the southern end of the Oshima Peninsula. Disputes between these newcomers and the Ainu escalated into open war. In 1457, a warrior named Takeda Nobuhiro killed the Ainu leader Koshamain and suppressed the uprising. Nobuhiro's descendants went on to rule the Matsumae-han, a domain that held exclusive trading rights with the Ainu through the Azuchi-Momoyama and Edo periods stretching from 1568 to 1868.

  The Matsumae family's economy was built on that trade. The Ainu had extensive trading networks of their own, and the relationship was one of mutual dependency even as political power tilted toward the Japanese domain. That dependency did not prevent further violence. The last large-scale Ainu resistance was Shakushain's revolt in 1669-1672. A smaller uprising, the Menashi-Kunashir rebellion, was crushed in 1789. After that, according to the historical record, the terms "Japanese" and "Ainu" had become clearly distinguished categories, and the Matsumae were unambiguously on one side of that line.

  The Tokugawa shogunate became increasingly anxious about the Russian presence in the region during the 18th and 19th centuries. Russia had established settlements on Kamchatka from 1699, on the Sea of Okhotsk coast from the 1640s onward, and in Sakhalin in the 1850s. In 1855, after the Treaty of Shimoda defined the border between the Russian Empire and Tokugawa Japan, the shogunate reinstated assimilation programs aimed at the Ainu, driven by the fear that a culturally distinct indigenous population might align with Russia.

• 4. Meiji Colonization

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  In May 1869, the last resistance to Meiji authority on the island was defeated. A group of Tokugawa loyalists led by Enomoto Takeaki had briefly occupied Hokkaido after the Boshin War, establishing what is sometimes called the Republic of Ezo, though that label is considered a misnomer. Their defeat opened the way for full annexation.

  The Meiji government established the Hokkaido Colonization Board in 1869 and renamed the island Hokkaido, meaning "northern sea route." To develop it, they turned to the United States. Kuroda Kiyotaka traveled to America and recruited Horace Capron, who had served as US President Ulysses S. Grant's commissioner of agriculture. Kuroda hired Capron for US$10,000 per year. The choice was deliberate: Capron had direct experience in the forced removal of Native Americans from Texas to new territories after the Mexican-American War. From 1871 to 1873, Capron worked to introduce Western farming and mining methods, with mixed results. Frustrated, he returned home in 1875.

  In 1876, William S. Clark arrived to establish an agricultural college in Sapporo. He stayed for only a year, but his parting words, "Boys, be ambitious!", can still be found on public buildings in Hokkaido today. During that decade of intensive settlement, the island's population climbed from 58,000 to 240,000.

  To accelerate development, Japan built three prisons and used political prisoners as forced labor in coal mining, sulphur extraction, and road construction. During the opening ceremony of the first prison, the Ainu place name Shibetsuputo was replaced with the Japanese name Tsukigata. Later, prison labor gave way to indentured Korean labor, child labor, and women's labor as the coal sector expanded. Japan's transition to industrial capitalism depended heavily on Hokkaido's coal, and that dependence only grew during World War I.

• 5. What Happened to the Ainu

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  The 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act is the clearest legal expression of what the Meiji state intended for the Ainu. The act forced Ainu people off their traditional lands and relocated them to rugged, mountainous interior regions. It prohibited fishing and hunting, which were their primary means of subsistence. The Ainu were valued, in the words of the historical record, primarily as a source of inexpensive manual labor.

  The Meiji government ran assimilation campaigns designed not merely to integrate the Ainu but to erase their language and culture entirely. Ainu people were compelled to take Japanese names and could not speak their own language in school. Facing pervasive stigma, many concealed their heritage. UNESCO has since recognized the Ainu language as critically endangered.

  In the 21st century, the Ainu are almost totally assimilated into Japanese society. As a result, the majority of people of Ainu descent have no knowledge of their heritage or culture. With the rise of indigenous rights movements, some activists have proposed giving Hokkaido an Ainu-language name. Among the candidates discussed is aynu mosir, meaning "land of the humans"; yaun mosir, meaning "onshore land"; and akor mosir, meaning "our land." Each phrase carries a different range of meaning depending on who speaks it and where they stand.

• 6. The Land Itself

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  Hokkaido covers 83,423.84 square kilometers, making it the 21st largest island in the world by area. The center of the island is mountainous and volcanic. Its plains include the Ishikari Plain at 3,800 square kilometers and the Tokachi Plain at 3,600 square kilometers. The island also contains the largest wetland in Japan at 2,510 square kilometers.

  The island is seismically active. In 1993, an earthquake of magnitude 7.7 generated a tsunami that killed 202 people on Okushiri Island. On the 26th of September 2003, a magnitude 8.3 earthquake struck near the island. On the 6th of September 2018, a magnitude 6.6 earthquake centered near Tomakomai caused a blackout across the entire island.

  Hokkaido's wildlife is notable by any standard. The island hosts more brown bears than anywhere else in Asia outside Russia. The Steller's sea eagle, on average the heaviest eagle species in the world, ranges here. The Hokkaido wolf is now extinct. Sea otters, once declining in Japanese aquaria, are increasingly drawing tourists to the island's shores.

  The climate drives much of Hokkaido's character. Snowfall on the mountains adjacent to the Sea of Japan can reach 11 meters in a single season. The highest temperature ever recorded on the island was 39.5 degrees Celsius on the 26th of May 2019. Hokkaido is unusual among Japan's major islands in being largely unaffected by the June-July rainy season, which makes its cooler, drier summers a significant draw for visitors from the rest of Japan and from other parts of Asia.

• 7. Agriculture, Coal, and Modern Economy

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  Hokkaido holds nearly one quarter of Japan's total arable land. The island ranks first in the nation in the production of wheat, soybeans, potatoes, sugar beets, onions, pumpkins, corn, raw milk, and beef. The average farm in Hokkaido covers 26 hectares, which is almost eleven times larger than Japan's national average of 2.4 hectares per farmer as of 2013.

  Coal was the engine of the island's early industrial growth. Cities like Muroran were built specifically to supply coal to the rest of the Japanese archipelago. The coal railways around Sapporo and Horonai were constructed in the late 19th century on the advice of an American engineer named Joseph Crawford. By 2001, however, the service sector and other tertiary industries were generating more than three-quarters of Hokkaido's gross domestic product.

  In 2023, Rapidus Corporation announced what is described as Hokkaido's largest business investment: a plan worth five trillion yen to build a semiconductor manufacturing factory in the city of Chitose. The site is expected to eventually employ over 1,000 people, signaling a new chapter in the island's economic life that has little to do with the agricultural and extractive industries that defined its first century under Japanese rule.

• 8. Sumo, Snow, and Sapporo

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  The 1972 Winter Olympics were held in Sapporo, and the city remains the largest on the island with close to two million residents, making it the fifth-largest city in Japan. The Sapporo Snow Festival is among the most recognized winter events in the country, a direct product of the island's position as Japan's snowiest and coldest region.

  Hokkaido holds a singular place in professional sumo. The prefecture has produced more yokozuna, the sport's highest rank, than any other in Japan. Eight wrestlers from Hokkaido have achieved that rank: Chiyonoyama, Yoshibayama, Taiho, Kitanofuji, Kitanoumi, Chiyonofuji, Hokutoumi, and Onokuni. The prefecture's rise in sumo was tied to economic conditions of the Meiji era, when high birth rates and limited resources led families to send young boys to sumo stables. The golden age came during the Showa and Heisei periods, when Chiyonofuji, Hokutoumi, and Onokuni all held the rank of yokozuna simultaneously. The last title won by a Hokkaido native was in 1991, and the pace of producing elite wrestlers has slowed considerably since.

  The Hokkaido Shinkansen connects Tokyo to near Hakodate in just over four hours. The only land link to the rest of Japan remains the Seikan Tunnel, which carries railway traffic under the Tsugaru Strait. One airline, Air Do, took its very name from the island it was created to serve.