Japan formally colonized Hokkaido beginning in 1869, when the new Meiji government established the Kaitakushi (Development Commission) and renamed the island from “Ezochi” to “Hokkaido” on August 15 of that year. But Japanese presence on the island stretches back centuries earlier, and the full story involves a long, gradual process of encroachment on the homeland of the Ainu, the island’s indigenous people.
Early Japanese Presence Before 1869
Starting in the early 1600s, Japanese traders and settlers began moving into the southern tip of the island, then known as Ezochi, meaning roughly “the land of barbarians.” The Matsumae clan controlled a feudal domain restricted to that southernmost portion and managed trade with the Ainu. The Tokugawa government in Edo stayed largely uninvolved in Ainu affairs, and Japan never formally annexed the territory during this period.
The Matsumae clan’s influence over the Ainu grew steadily. By the late 1700s, they dominated the Ainu economically, militarily, and politically. Trade with Japanese merchants transformed the Ainu economy from one based on hunting, fishing, and regional exchange into one dependent on a single trading partner. At Japanese outposts, Ainu increasingly traded prestige goods like eagle feathers and fur pelts for rice, sake, and manufactured items. Resistance was ruthlessly suppressed.
Russian exploration along the northern Pacific eventually forced the Tokugawa government’s hand. Alarmed by Russian contact with the Ainu in the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin, the Tokugawa ordered northern Japanese clans to garrison all of Ezo with thousands of troops. They stripped the Matsumae clan of control over most of the island and put soldiers on permanent alert. This militarization marked a shift from loose commercial influence to something closer to territorial control, though formal colonization wouldn’t come until after the Tokugawa shogunate fell.
The Meiji Government Takes Over
When the Meiji government replaced the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, it moved quickly to secure Hokkaido. The new leaders viewed development of the island as essential to Japan’s prosperity and defense against Russian expansion. In July 1869, the Kaitakushi was established as a colonial administration, and the island was officially renamed “Hokkaido,” meaning “northern sea circuit.” The Ainu, who had called their homeland “Yaunmosir” (the land on the land) or “Aynu Mosir” (the land of humans) for centuries, were not consulted on the renaming.
The government recruited immigrants from across Japan to settle the island. One of the key programs was the tondenhei system, launched in 1874. These were farmer-soldiers contracted to 20 years of combined active and reserve military service. They performed military exercises while clearing land and building roads. Between 1874 and 1904, when the program ended, roughly 40,000 settlers arrived in Hokkaido as tondenhei. Their dual purpose was straightforward: protect the northern border and make the wilderness productive.
American Advisors and Western Farming Methods
The Meiji government hired foreign advisors, many of them American, to survey Hokkaido’s resources and figure out how to make the cold, undeveloped land support a large settler population. Horace Capron, a former U.S. Commissioner of Agriculture, was among the most influential. He arrived with agricultural machines including threshing machines, self-binding reapers, mowing machines, gang plows, and corn planters.
The Americans recommended crops suited to Hokkaido’s harsh climate. In the north, they advocated underground tubers like potatoes and daikon that could survive hard freezes. In the south, they introduced corn, onions, fruit trees, and wheat. The Sapporo Agricultural College, founded in 1876 under the leadership of William Smith Clark (formerly president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College), became the testing ground for these new crops and distributed successful varieties to immigrants. The college eventually introduced buckwheat, oats, barley, cabbages, legumes, tomatoes, carrots, and various American range grasses. Livestock including horses, oxen, cattle, sheep, and swine were also brought in. Capron even recommended Western-style housing with thicker walls, raised floors, and fireplaces to help settlers survive Hokkaido winters.
Sapporo itself was built on an American-style rectangular street grid with wide streets, some as broad as 35 meters. Founded in 1868, it grew from a colonial outpost into a planned city that borrowed heavily from 19th-century American urban design. Today it’s home to nearly 2 million people.
What Colonization Meant for the Ainu
The colonization of Hokkaido was devastating for the Ainu. As settlers flooded in and land was parceled out for farming, the Ainu lost access to the forests, rivers, and coastal areas that had sustained their way of life. The legal framework made this displacement official. On March 2, 1899, the Meiji government passed the Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Act. The law stripped the Ainu of their indigenous identity, labeling them “former aborigines” and forcing every member into Japanese citizenship. Rather than protecting the Ainu, the act served to erase their distinct legal status and accelerate their assimilation into Japanese society.
The effects lasted well over a century. It wasn’t until 2019 that Japan passed the Act on Promoting Measures to Achieve a Society in which the Pride of Ainu People is Respected, which for the first time in national law recognized the Ainu as “indigenous people of the northern part of the Japanese archipelago, in particular Hokkaido.” The law’s stated purpose is to realize a society in which the Ainu can live with pride as a people, though its practical impact continues to be debated.
A Colonization in Stages
Answering “when was Hokkaido colonized” depends on how you define colonization. Japanese traders established a commercial foothold in the early 1600s. Military garrisons arrived in the late 1700s in response to Russian threats. But the systematic, state-directed colonization, complete with a colonial administration, mass immigration programs, foreign advisors, and laws designed to absorb the indigenous population, began in 1869 and accelerated through the end of the 19th century. By the time the tondenhei program ended in 1904, the transformation of Hokkaido from Ainu homeland to Japanese frontier was largely complete.