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9 - Settling the Frontier, Defending the North

“Farmer-Soldiers” in Hokkaido’s Colonial Development and National Reconciliation

from Part 3 - Domestic Resolutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2020

Robert Hellyer
Affiliation:
Wake Forest University, North Carolina
Harald Fuess
Affiliation:
Universität Heidelberg
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Summary

The farmer-soldier (tondenhei) system was the centrepiece of the Meiji period program to develop and populate Hokkaido. It sought to establish communities of farmer-soldiers in order to accomplish a number of pressing objectives, including the fortification of the vulnerable north, the provision of opportunities for destitute members of the former samurai class, and the establishment of settled agricultural villages in Hokkaido. Established in 1874, it facilitated the relocation of over 7,000 households to Hokkaido before its abolition in 1904. In most historical accounts of Hokkaido’s Meiji period development/colonization, the tondenhei system is given pride of place. The farmer-soldiers are commonly cast as heroic pioneers who engaged in a courageous, and ultimately successful, battle to tame the harsh northern wilderness and protect it from the designs of looming foreign encroachment. In this chapter, I evaluate the contribution of the tondenhei to development and defense. Tracing the fortunes of a large number of farmer-soldiers and their communities across I recover some of the silence on the individual experiences of farmer-soldiers and reveal a mixed record in Hokkaido’s development/colonization. If anything the tondenhei system’s main contribution was to provide a mechanism for reconciling some of the former enemies of the Meiji government.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Meiji Restoration
Japan as a Global Nation
, pp. 191 - 211
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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