| This dissertation examines competing portrayals of "manliness" and "manhood" set in or associated with Hokkaido which served to define not only the northern colony but also the Japanese nation as a whole, as various social, political, and cultural actors during the Meiji era responded to the continually changing imperatives in the strategies of nation-building, imperial expansion and power-politics that emerged in relation to a threatening West.; In the introduction I challenge implicit and explicit denials of Hokkaido's colonial status, argue that Hokkaido played a significant role in the production of modern Japanese national institutions and ideology and outline how the Meiji elite attempted to justify and naturalize an almost wholly new form of government through proclamations that laid claim to and encouraged the settlement of Hokkaido. Chapter One considers the process by which Japanese military might was extended to the island through the stalwart bodies of state-sanctioned farming-soldiers, tondenhei and interrogates tondenhei recruitment campaigns, military rescripts and soldiers' handbooks to understand how the appropriation of the samurai as a modern masculine icon was used to define and refine imperial ideology, promote colonial expansion and discipline an unseasoned and unreliable modern military. Kunikida Doppo's short story, "The Shores of Sorachi River" (Sorachigawa no kishibe , 1902), the focus of Chapter Two, reveals the ways literary works reinforced the colonization of Hokkaido through depictions of "developing" a "blank slate" and portrayals of the manly "battles" of colonists subjugating Hokkaido's savage wilderness. Ultimately, such official and popular renderings belie both the oppression of Ainu communities under Meiji colonial law and the contestatory nature of the making of modern Japan.; Hara Hoitsuan's The Secret Politician ( Anchu seijika, 1890), treated in Chapter Three, however, highlights the material and corporeal practices involved in the Meiji state's attempts to discipline and unify the Japanese population. In narrating the plight of ordinary farmers imprisoned in the harsh shujikan prison system in Hokkaido for their involvement in a peasant protest, this work suppresses traditionally accepted male-male sexuality at the same time that it strategically celebrates male-male love bonds in order to challenge an indifferent, morally bankrupt government. |
