Hello, and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 556, The Gods March Overseas, Part 2.

So last week we spent our time talking about the role of religion in Meiji Japan and how

conversations around religion within the country were shaped by both the domestic politics of the

Meiji government and pressures from the Western world, with its own interpretation of what

religion was supposed to be, shaped by Europe's distinct religious history. This week and

next are about seeing how those debates around religion played out in an arena where religious

ideas played a surprisingly large role in Japan's colonization of other parts of Asia.

And when we talk about colonization during the Meiji era, I think there's one place we

really have to start with, Hokkaido, the massive northern island, where the process of colonization

was so successful that what once was treated as wild country is now considered indisputably

a part of Japan's integral territory, a fourth home island in its own right.

Now, it's been a while since we talked about the colonization of Hokkaido, so as a quick

refresh about how it all started, Hokkaido was during the years of the Tokugawa Shoguns,

at best loosely attached to, so to speak, Japan proper.

Its indigenous population known as the Ainu have their own language, history, and culture,

more closely related to the

indigenous tribes of Siberia and the Russian Far East than to the Wajun or ethnic Japanese.

Based out of Koton or settlements scattered around Hokkaido, the Ainu subsisted by a combination

of foraging, hunting, and some agriculture, the last of which was made possible by a growing

trade in iron tools, ceramics, and the like with the Japanese.

That trade in turn was monopolized by Japan's northernmost feudal domain, Matsumai, whose

rulers controlled only a small sliver of Hokkaido itself, the Oshima Peninsula,

...