II. Cultivation and Commodification: Progress as Mastering Nature

Unbeaten Tracks takes the readers from Yokohama, through the “beaten” tracks of Yedo and Nikko, to the lesser-trod peripheries of Japan.Footnote ⁵ Her encounters with Japanese landscape, culture, and peoples are episodically narrated, with Bird providing her readers with detailed descriptions of what she sees and experiences. Bird particularly valued her “interior” chapters, for she thought they “offer a fuller account of the aborigines of Yezo, obtained by actual acquaintance with them, than has hitherto given” (1). As my concern is with her conceptualization of modern man as efficient cultivators of nature and her representation of the Ainu as the very opposite of man proper, I will focus on these interior chapters, as well as the chapters en route, in which Bird introduces and reiterates the above concept by emphasizing the beauty of Japanese fields and gardens.

On her way to Hokkaido, Bird finds herself facing neat rows of rice, cultivated by the deft hands of the Japanese. Her accolades on these Yedo plains demonstrate that she conceives of the proper man as one who can efficiently control, manipulate, and demand full command over nature. According to Bird, Yedo is “all homelike, liveable, and pretty,” and is “the country of an industrious people for not a weed is to be seen” (12). By specifically describing Yedo as “homelike” and “liveable,” Bird represents it as a developed region populated with people who aptly domesticate spaces to the extent that a British subject feels quite at home. Later in Nikko, she again emphasizes Japanese dexterity in landscaping: “The wheat is sown in rows with wide spaces between them, which are utilised for beans and other crops . . . the land under careful tillage and copious manuring bears two, and even three, crops, in the year . . . not a weed is to be seen, and the whole country looks like a well-kept garden” (emphasis added 40). Although she does not make a direct connection between the weedless, garden-like quality of the Japanese fields with modernity per se, she does specifically note that “the best land produces annually about fifty-four bushels of rice, and the worst about thirty” in Nikko (40). The preciseness of this report on harvest demonstrates her interest in productivity and reveals that she considers the numbers to be the proof of the Japanese virtue – their economic use of land. The Japanese, according to Bird, cultivate and organize land systematically for larger profit by planned tilling of different crops, and they procure sufficient resources as a result. In other words, they have mastered the art of conquering land. The fields have secured resources; they function as vast storage from which the industrious farmer can gain promising surplus value. Man is no longer at the mercy of nature's vagaries, as the worst harvest is still enough.

While some tend to farms and maximize profits by laborious weeding, others hope to venture into the hotel business by creating perfect gardens. Kanaya, a man who owns a beautiful garden with “a very respectable waterfall, a rushing stream, a small lake, a rustic bamboo bridge, and several grass banks” and plans to “build a hotel for foreigners,” is represented as an intelligent man with firm control over nature (62–63). He not only crafts artificial waterfalls in his garden, but also “[transplants] several large trees”(62). By rearranging plants, Kanaya transforms his house into a picturesque landscape that will yield him profit – or, to be more precise, foreign currency. It is also in Nikko that Bird comes to appreciate the Japanese aesthetics of flower arranging. While she finds “a single blossoming branch of the cherry” to be too extreme at first, she then changes her mind and argues that the European method of arranging flowers in bouquets, in which “stems, leaves, and even petals are brutally crushed, and the grace and individuality of each flower systematically destroyed” is rather “grotesque and barbarous” (61–62). Rather than a jumbled array of flowers, the Japanese ladies display the full beauty of a single branch of an azalea, for example, showing off its “stalk, leaves, and corolla” by isolating the branch from the rest and placing it in a simple vase (62). Such an arrangement demonstrates Japanese excellence in taming nature and utilizing it most effectively; these ladies do not waste any part of their flora, but enjoy it in its entirety.

Nevertheless, Bird does not praise all Japanese as respectable cultivators. In Japanese households of Hozawa, a lesser-developed rural town, she finds people who fail to domesticate their animals. Instead of animals being kept in coops or stables, “fowls, dogs, horses and people [are] herded together in sheds black with wood smoke”(93). Bird finds this unruly mingling of animals and humans to be abominable traits that mark the villagers’ savagery; she even goes as far as to say, “their standard of foundational morality is very low, and [their] life is neither truthful nor pure” (93). To be fair, this assessment is drawn not only from people's neglect of their horses and dogs, but also from their filthy clothes and lack of sanitation. However, even if we take this into consideration, the fact that Bird describes the villagers as “courteous, kindly, industrious” people and the village “free from gross crimes,” only to condemn them as immoral on the same page indicates that respectability is more than being courteous, kind and industrious for Bird (93). One must also wear the right clothes, live in a well-organized house, and most importantly, demonstrate sufficient control over domestic livestock by stowing them away in separate compartments. As those people in Hozawa lack such capabilities, they are, for Bird, lesser citizens with no moral convictions who need to be pushed into the civilized world.

The Hozawa villagers are not, however, the lesser of the lesser beings. It is the Ainu of Hokkaido, the “missing link,” that Bird perceives to belong on the bottom rung of humanity. According to Bird, the Ainu live in huts that are “fitter for the HIDING place than the DWELLING place of men” (218).Footnote ⁶ The capitalization of the two words “HIDING” and “DWELLING” clearly exposes her intention to emphasize the difference between them. And because the previous pages of Unbeaten Tracks reiterate the orderly state of properly organized spaces owned by respectable Japanese men, readers can immediately draw a comparison and conclude that the Japanese, or, at least the worthy ones like Kanaya, “DWELL” while the Ainu “HIDE.” In fact, even the “undercivilized” Japanese like the villagers of Hozawa are never described as hiding. Although Bird questions the morality of these villagers due to their failure to construct separate spheres for man and animal, their lodgings were still referred to as houses. Then, one can surmise that Bird interprets the Ainu buildings to be hiding places not simply due to the “tawny roof” on their huts, but because she sees the Ainu themselves to lack a quality that belongs to one who can be said to “DWELL.” Bird can claim that the Ainu inhabit “HIDING” places unfit for man despite her earlier observation that their houses are “all trim and in good repair, rise out of the sandy soil,” because she has already established that having a house does not suffice as the proof of humanity (207). For Bird, to be man proper means to “DWELL,” which is to securitize, cultivate, utilize and colonize nature efficiently. It means to arrange nature and transform it into manageable territory that yields profit, to create spaces that are “homelike, liveable, and pretty” (12). To “HIDE,” in contrast, means that one lacks control over nature and leaves it uncultivated, which is precisely what Bird argues that the Ainu are doing. To support her argument, Bird presents the impenetrable forests that surround the Ainu village. In contrast to the neat rice paddies and gardens seen en route to Hokkaido, these forests are chaotic, “matted together by lianas, and with an undergrowth of scrub bamboo impenetrable except to the axe” (190). This “matted” forest is neither homelike nor liveable, nor is it pretty as are Japanese fields and gardens. On the contrary, it is ugly, neglected, and left to decay, which, for Bird, is the blazing evidence that Ainu culture is no culture at all.

Self-contradiction in Bird's observation of the Ainu not only undermines her authority as an anthropologist, but also cuts fissures within her narrative, unveiling the very artificiality of the binary logic she deploys in dividing the savage and the civilized. However, if Bird is aware that “the distinction between civilized and savage is spurious” (76), as Floriane Reviron suggests, she does her best to suture them by resorting to the stock image of the Ainu savage. Bird reports that she has been treated courteously and kindly by the Ainu, and she speaks of well organized huts that are built to last. Nonetheless, rather than examine the gap between the popular myth of the nomadic savage and the reality in which she witnesses the civility of the Ainu as well as their sedentary lifestyle, Bird dismisses the latter and confirms that the Ainu are indeed a “nomadic tribe” with no ability to discipline themselves into beings who “DWELL” (244).Footnote ⁷ Contrary to Bird's claim of Ainu's nomadism, the Ainu had lived for centuries in and were the original settlers of Hokkaido, or more precisely, Ainu Moshir in the Ainu language and Ezochi (蝦夷地) in Japanese, both of which mean the land of the Ainu.Footnote ⁸ The Ainu usually had not one, but two huts built for themselves – one for summer, and another for winter. (Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, “Spatial” 428). Also, contrary to popular belief, they were greatly attached to their habitats, and did not exhaust the rivers and forests of a specific region and move away to another. However, such rootedness seems to matter little for Bird. Equating the lack of industrialized agriculture as the ultimate sign of the Ainu's primitive and nomadic nature, Bird leaves intact the myth disseminated by the Japanese and further popularized by travelers like her. We are left with a story of inherently incompetent pseudo-human nomads succored by civilized Japanese men. The fact that Japanese modernizers/colonizers have been encroaching upon the Ainu's rights to Hokkaido land as its autonomous, native inhabitants is carefully expunged from Bird's narrative.

From Bird's perspective, the Ainu are primitives who fail to dominate nature and content themselves in remaining a vulnerable part of nature. And her emphasis on the Ainu's incompetence as cultivators who leave nearby forests in a “matted” state overshadows the fact that the Ainu are competent hunter-gatherers with botanical knowledge that enables them to use what she describes as a mere mass of scrubs, tangled roots, and unidentifiable weeds as food and medicine. However, even if Bird knew of the Ainu's active utilization of nature, she would not have granted them the status of man proper, for she suggests that one must create order by combing out the “matted” parts of nature and distinguish oneself as the master in order to be seen as one who can “DWELL” as a man. In short, one must not gather and hunt, leaving nature in its chaotic state; one must have plots of land that do not look “as if they had been cultivated ten years ago, and some chance-sown grain vegetables had come up among the weeds” (213). One must learn to cultivate nature, so that it yields regular harvests. Further noting that the Ainu tend to “partially clear another bit of forest, and exhaust that in its turn” when “nothing more will grow,” Bird clearly marks the divide between the Japanese and the Ainu and hints that, if left alone, the Ainu will destroy nature instead of developing it (213). Hence, the Japanese with the knowledge and skills to cultivate nature own not only the rights to Hokkaido lands that are being largely wasted by the Ainu, but also the rights to dominate over those who fail to exert the same power over nature.

The binary opposition between “HIDING” and “DWELLING,” as well as the notion of man as colonizer of nature, both of which are employed by Bird in justifying Japanese colonization of the Ainu, stem from an imperialistic world view that can be traced back to the Roman era. As William V. Spanos points out, “‘culture,’ ‘cultivate,’ ‘acculturation’ . . . are cognates of colonize (from the Latin word colonus)” (96). The literal meaning of agriculture then, is the act of colonizing agros, the field. The farmer, agricola, is a man who knows how to stand as the colonizer of land. Furthermore, the very fact that the Roman word for field, agros stems from the Greek, agrios, which means the “wild, monstrous, savage,” suggests that Western man has perceived nature as the savage that needs to be conquered and disciplined from the Romans onward (Spanos 97). This was a rather aggressive turn, for previously, man's relationship with land was not entirely colonial; in fact, the Roman agricola was the replacement of the Greek word for farmer, “georgia (geo+ourgos: earth-making) and georgos (one who works the earth)” (Spanos 97). While Bird's notion of cultivating land resembles the Romans, the Ainu cultivation (or non-cultivation, as Bird argues) is akin to that of the Greeks. Although the Ainu had no expansive plots organized for systematic agriculture, they did in fact work the land, gathering plants and growing small quantities of traditional crops. The difference between the Ainu and the Japanese relationship with land was that the former did not perceive land as savage wilderness that need to be tamed systematically. However, ignoring the ontological difference between their own approach to nature and that of the Ainu, Japanese colonizers argued that the “Ainu do not understand the way to cultivate grains, and would not even know a rice field if they saw one” (Walker 86). Bird adopts the same argument, consolidating the image of the Ainu as savage; they have no ability to tame the agrios (savage land), and are therefore stigmatized as the agrios (monstrous) themselves.

The Ainu dwell in nature not as conquerors of land but as inhabitants who live amidst nature. However, as a modern subject who can only conceive of dwelling as securitizing nature for human usage, Bird cannot imagine or admit that the Ainu dwell in an entirely different manner. In Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger speaks of a different mode of dwelling, one that does not require the dweller to colonize or master nature. According to Heidegger, the Old English word for building, buan, also means “to dwell,” “to remain, to stay in a place” (Poetry 144). This type of dwelling does not require that man cultivate rows of neatly weeded rice paddies or transform nature into well structured gardens by transplanting trees and flowers. Dwelling, in the old sense of bauen, is “being on the earth,” and “to be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal” (Poetry 145). When Heidegger argues, “the real meaning of the very bauen, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us,” he hints that the modern way of living is no longer dwelling in the old sense (Poetry 144). Heidegger reiterates this by noting that the Gothic word for dwelling, wunian, means to “be brought to peace, to remain in peace” (Poetry 147). The Ainu's mode of living, which Bird derogatively calls “HIDING,” is much like the dwelling Heidegger celebrates, which means to “remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each things in its nature” (Poetry 147). Although terms like preserve and safeguard may sound very similar to Bird's notion of “DWELLING” as colonizing nature, this dwelling is significantly different, for the phrase “each thing in its nature” demonstrates that the Greeks did not associate safeguarding with colonizing, but rather with living as part of the environment. Likewise, the Ainu viewed nature as “a sacred space teeming with kamuy [gods] in the form of animals, plants, fish, and even contagions” (Walker 77), which is why they atoned for slaughter of animals and fish with sacred rituals.Footnote ⁹ The Ainu, like the Greek man, “gather (legein) and save (sōzein), catch up and preserve, what opens itself in its openness” and “remain exposed (alētheuein) to all its sundering confusions” (Heidegger, Technology 131). They dwell amidst nature as its inhabitant, not as the master who demands control over it. Such difference is lost on Bird who perceives history as linear progress. Even if she knew the similarities between the Greeks and the Ainu in terms of their relationship with nature, such knowledge would not have changed her assessment of the Ainu as those incapable of “DWELLING.” In fact, she would probably use it against the Ainu; after all, the ancient Greeks were colonized by the Romans, which would mean, for Bird, that the Ainu would naturally be colonized and ruled by a race that conquers nature more efficiently.

Linking the Ainu's addiction to Japanese alcohol (sake) and the squalid living condition of the Ainu located in Shiraoi, Bird briefly notes, “the Ainu have reaped abundantly of the disadvantages without the advantages of contact with Japanese civilization” (Unbeaten 253). On the same page, she describes the process of Japanese “horse-breaking” which involves goading, violent spurring, and flogging; the scene ends with the bloodied but well-broken horse crawling into a shed. This “brutal exhibition” is, according to Bird, an example of how “triumphs of brute force” always follow from violence (253). Bird's juxtaposition of the Ainu chief of Shiraoi who wistfully tells her that he is “of no more good” and the horse that ends up becoming “spirit-broken” reveals that she is quite aware that Japan's oppressive disciplining policies break and dehumanize the Ainu. However, she never withdraws her notion of the Japanese government as an ultimately well-meaning power engine that aspires to move “forward on the tracks of Western civilization” (79). Introducing a Japanese man and his son who “look after Government interests” as exiles living among the Ainu in a “rambling house, greatly out of repair,” Bird emphasizes that the Japanese overseer and the Ainu live in harmony (259). By so doing, she attempts to attenuate the unease that witnessing the uncanny similarities between the broken horse and the haggard Ainu chief share may breed in her readers.

According to Bird, the Ainu are a harmless but heavy burden put on Japan, the little giant working so diligently to follow the example of her betters. They are a “people without the instinct of progress, descending to that vast tomb of conquered and unknown races which had opened to receive so many before them”(emphasis added 202). The above sentence reveals Bird's world picture, weltbild, which places civilized man in the center of the world with his (modern) equipment to decipher the mysteries of nature, to grab hold of its vast potential, and to securitize the entire system so that man can march forward into what he calls progress.Footnote ¹⁰ While the Japanese know how to move forward, the Ainu descend; these adjectives explicitly reveal how Bird interprets the Japanese-Ainu relationship to be a desirable one in which the veritas (truth/correct) improves the falsum (wrong/false). Bird's hesitance, or more precisely, incapability to perceive the Ainu dwelling as proper “DWELLING” evidently shows us the rigidity of her world-view. The binary opposition of “DWELLING” and “HIDING” is so engrained, much like the opposition of veritas and falsum, that she cannot conceive of the possibility of an alternative relationship between man and nature. It is, for Bird, only natural that the civilized conquer the uncivilized. Man should conquer the uncivilized nature, and if a man fails in becoming the master of nature, he cannot avoid being conquered by the civilized (and therefore superior) man. In fact, she posits such as the uncontestable course of human history. Phrases such as “unknown races” and “so many before them” obscure the identities of the peoples that were subjugated and exterminated by others, and her use of deterministic language such as instinct depoliticizes colonial violence, reducing it to collateral damage that occurs not only in Japan, but also throughout history.

III. The Constitution of the “Missing Link”

Japan's development policies – undertaken by the Kaitakushi department, which Bird believes to be a good-willed apparatus of the Japanese government that “has to work in building up the New Civilisation” – were in no way benevolent (2). On the contrary, the Kaitakushi resembles the anthropological machine Giorgio Agamben discusses in The Open, a machine that runs “by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human: Homo alalus, or the ape-man” (37). The fact that the hirsute physiognomy of the Ainu was greatly emphasized clearly supports this argument. Indeed, the myth of Japanese homogeneity was forged by defining the Ainu, along with other indigenous peoples such as the Okinawans, as alien while simultaneously including them in Japanese jurisdiction. As Agamben writes, “the inside is obtained through the inclusion of an outside” (37). The Ainu legally became Japanese after the colonization of Hokkaido, but the new world order demanded that the indigenous either perish or assimilate, albeit as an adopted alien and a “former native” (kyudojin) rather than as an “average person” (ippanjin) of Japanese society. Despite the attempts of sympathetic Japanese such as Kita Massaki who promoted the assimilation of the Ainu, the gap between the Japanese and the “former native” remained wide during much of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The Ainu were represented as enfant savage, who would, “even if [they] are given the same rights as Wajin [mainland Japanese] and allowed to live among them . . . be overcome in the struggle for survival” and ultimately die out (Siddle 118). As did European imperialists, the Japanese concretized their ideal of a “universal mankind” with narratives and policies that included the Ainu, only to cast them out as savages mired in “the anachronistic space” where time was said to be meaningless (McClintock 19).

The popular myths the Japanese employed to alienate the Ainu are reiterated by Bird. For example, she notes that:

In the above quotation, Bird defines the Ainu as “uncivilisable” and “irreclaimable” savages, obstacles that the modern nation of Japan will have to remove if it wants to complete the process of modernization. To present the Ainu as relics of the past, Bird reports that they lack temporal understanding. According to Bird, “the future, however, does not occupy any place in their thoughts” (238). What she does not tell us is that this was the exact image constructed and disseminated by the Japanese to justify their colonization of the Ainu. The Ainu were represented by the Japanese as primitives “against which the civilisation and progress of Japan could be measured” (Siddle 77). In fact, the Japanese were eager to present the Ainu as their possessions; in world exhibits, the Ainu were exhibited as Japan's former natives along with their art commodities. The stark contrast between the “hairy” Ainu clad in their traditional clothes and the “modern” Japanese organizers of the Japanese booth clearly gave the latter “the distinction of being ‘removed from actual savagery’” (Mizuta 39). By posing as the superior race with powers to enlighten the savage, the Japanese sought to convince others that they had entirely escaped from their feudal past, and that they were indeed, a modern society. The Ainu had a different temporal concept, one that divided the year according to weather and used the lunar calendar – which was also used by the Japanese until 1872 – but such mattered little to the Japanese, for their intent was not to portray Ainu culture objectively, but to affix it in the past (Ohnuki-Tierney, “Time” 490).Footnote ¹¹ Without addressing or even doubting the credibility of Japanese accounts on Ainu inferiority, Bird merely repeats this myth of Ainu anachronism.

Likewise, “Ainu counting” (Ainu kanjo), another fiction contrived by the Japanese, is reiterated by Bird when she affirms that they do not have “numbers above a thousand” (221). This popular myth was that the Ainu could only “count with difficulty, adding extra words for ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ during the counting process” (Siddle 48). Bird adopts the myth and interprets the lack of precise numbers in Ainu culture as evidence of Ainu inferiority. To be savage is to lack what the civilized world has, and to lack is to be savage. The circular reasoning unveils that Bird does not see the fictitiousness of previous discourses on indigenous peoples; she remains oblivious to the fact that the Ainu world is built on and around a coherent episteme. Instead of reading different numerical systems as result of different world-views, she transforms the Ainu's view into the manifestation of the Ainu's “uncivilisability” and a reason to condone Japanese colonization of the Ainu. As the Ainu's numerical system leaves numbers less tightly organized than that of the Westerners and the Japanese, it is nonexistent. By rendering it nonexistent, Bird can consolidate the picture of the Ainu as the natural born savages. The Ainu's numerical system was “based on units of twenty, which indicates that it was not copied from the Japanese” (Siddle 48). Bird seems to be unaware of the Ainu's unique calculating methods, but even if she had known about it, she would have disregarded it as primitive and inferior, for the Ainu grouping of twenty cannot be precise enough for Bird, who prides herself in precise reports on her travel which include not only her itinerary and her findings, but also the exact measurements of lengths and widths of everything she observes. Bird is a modern researcher in the Heideggerian sense: knowing, for the researcher, is to be able to count with exactitude, to objectify and to “set in place [gestellt]” (Heidegger, Technology 126). Research will only acknowledge objects that can be measured by the yardstick of modern science, and that which eludes exactitude is nonexistent. In other words, even in the midst of direct contact with the Ainu and their world-view, Bird cannot acknowledge their knowledge as knowledge, or their numbers as numbers, their time as time, because she only recognizes that which can and has been formulated by a (Western) researcher as valuable (and existent) knowledge. By rendering the Ainu's temporality and their numerical system as nonexistent, Bird consolidates her world picture, setting the Ainu “in place” as the “missing link.”

Bird also relates the Ainu's lack of letters to their “uncivilisable” and “irreclaimable” character – “they have no letters,” and therefore, are “savages” (221). While Ernst Haeckel distinguished the ape-man from man based on the former's lack of language, Bird divides the Ainu from man only because the former lacks written language. Unable to apply Haeckel's theory directly to the Ainu as they have their own language, she redefines man as one who writes. According to Bird, the Ainu is not-quite-human, for they have not become homo scrittura.

Perhaps not coincidently, such a notion echoes the Linnaean hierarchy of man which sanctions only the European, who is “governed by laws,” as man proper (Pratt 32). The “Wild Man” is said to have has none that regulates him, the American “regulated by customs,” the Asians “governed by opinions,” and the African “governed by caprice” (Pratt 32). Both Linnaeus and Bird perceive the European as one who has written legislation, therefore reaching the apogee of civilization, while others drag behind, living in chaos dictated by their volatile nature. Prior to informing her readers of the Ainu's lack of written language, Bird states that “their houses and persons swarm with vermin” and that they are “sunk in the grossest ignorance” (221). The underwritten argument here is that if they had letters, they would have had laws for sanitation, which would have prevented them from living as animals among vermin, and that as they do not have the advanced faculties required of man proper who can write, it is only natural that they be ruled by those who have proven themselves as part of the modern race. From such a perspective, it is only those who write, count, and live in well-sanitized houses who are endowed with the rightful place in history. Others without letters, like the Ainu, “have no place in history” (270) or the right to claim history as their own. The fact that the Ainu were and still continue to be a part of the violent history of internal colonization is downplayed in Unbeaten Tracks, and readers are left with the image of a bungling race that cannot put down their own words on paper, hiding in their huts waiting for their destined extinction.

IV. Filling in the Gaps and Looking at the Shadows of Progress

Bird's study of the Ainu excludes the long history of oppression the Ainu had to endure, and her purportedly scientific, objective portrayal of the Ainu is, for the most part, a caricature of a people unfit to survive in a modern world. To support her claim, Bird emphasizes the lack of “modern” numbers, “precise” temporal concepts, and written language in Ainu culture, as well as the lack of systematically cultivated land in Ainu habitats. However, in reality, the so-called “lack” of agriculture in Ainu villages derived more from Japanese desire for Ainu resources than some intractable preference of the Ainu for hunting and gathering over farming. In other words, this lack was not a constitutive one that reveals the innate inferiority of a race, but a lack that divulges the coercion of a colonial power. By the 18th century, the Japanese had put down strict prohibitions on agriculture, which were implemented for several purposes, among which was to confiscate the fertile parts of the island and to procure a cheap labor force for use in fishing stations by the Japanese settlers. Prohibition on agriculture undermined the Ainu community greatly, for the Ainu were banned from growing indigenous grains as well as Japanese rice. As the Ainu could not produce the necessary food crops, it became easier for Japanese fisheries to “coerce [them] into providing labor in return for rations or goods” (Siddle 37). Interfering with how they use their land, the Japanese not only colonized the land itself, but damaged the entire Ainu economy, which made it easy for them to colonize, arrange, and utilize the Ainu as resources to fuel factories they built on what once used to be the Ainu's habitation. In and through the nineteenth century, Japanese businesses continued to expand under the auspices of governmental policies that helped them to colonize Hokkaido. One policy specifically stipulated that all landowners must occupy the land in order to have legal ownership. As many Ainu fishermen had been relocated to fishery barracks, they could not meet the requirement and lost their land.Footnote ¹² Later, when the government wished to “protect” the Ainu, they were given swamp land in the peripheries of Hokkaido, which is possibly why the Ainu whom Bird visits are all living in isolated areas.

Bird perceives the world through an anthropocentric lens that sees all things (living and non) as either resources to be exploited or waste to be discarded, devaluing land and wildlife and dehumanizing people like the Ainu in order to facilitate their cultivation and civilization. However, if the Ainu were, as Bird persists, a dying race, their decline was the result of a series of sociopolitical, economical, and environmental changes that she fails to discuss in her narrative. In Hokkaido, the immigrant Japanese overfished and forced the Ainu to overfish by giving them certain quotas to fill, to profit from the growing demand for fish and fishmeal fertilizers (Walker 85). In addition to the disruption caused by such overfishing, the Ainu's economic autonomy was sabotaged by the complete enclosure of the rivers. Much of Hokkaido island was zoned out and distributed to Japanese industries and traders, which meant that rivers that had been shared among the Ainu could no longer function as their Commons. Even those rivers that had yet been claimed by the Japanese became places of contestation, for each Ainu chiefdom now competed against each and relied greatly on trade for survival. As a result, many Ainu individuals who could no longer depend on rivers for sustenance inserted themselves into the Japanese economy either as menial laborers in Japanese fisheries or employed fishermen trading with the Japanese in unequal terms.Footnote ¹³

For Bird, overcoming the challenges nature thrusts at man by colonizing it most effectively is far more important than sustaining the equilibrium of riverbeds and forest ecosystems on which native inhabitants such as the Ainu depend. Prior to entering Hokkaido, on the road from Nikko to Niigata, Bird states that “Japanese rivers are much choked with sand and shingle washed down from the mountains” and that “the minds of engineers are much exercised upon the Shinano [river]” working under the auspices of the government that “is most anxious to deepen the channel and give Western Japan what it has not – a harbour” (100). She identifies this project a “necessary operation” that must be executed despite the high costs, for without deep channels and harbors, only “a limited ocean traffic is carried on by junks and by a few small Japanese steamers which call outside” (100). Words such as “necessary,” “limited,” and “small” indicate that she approves of the government's decision to manage their rivers more efficiently. The “minds of engineers” Bird mentions, which will accelerate the speed with which the river transports man and cargo, are the product of modern technology that “puts into nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (Heidegger, Technology 15). The river is challenged to produce speed; it has become a commodity that can be engineered to maximize profit. And this is precisely what Bird perceives as the great achievement being made by the Japanese government; it brings speed and efficiency. That such projects impact the environment and devastate the lives of native inhabitants is never discussed in Unbeaten Tracks.

Indeed, Bird congratulates the Japanese on their relatively humane treatment of the Ainu:

Bird's justification that the Kaitakushi Department is not as violent as the U.S. version betrays the fact that she recognizes violence as a necessary component of the civilizing process, a price that the conquered race must pay. Bird poses no question about the legitimacy of colonization; if one race is weaker than another, it must simply accept its fate. Briskly brushing aside Von Siebold's comments on Japanese cruelties, Bird posits that the Kaitakushi Department “means well,” and ends her commentary without further contemplation.Footnote ¹⁴

Despite Bird's confidence, however, the civilizing mission of the Kaitakushi Department was in no way “more [humane] and [equitable] than its U.S. counterpart. In fact, the Kaitakushi exacerbated the already unequal Japanese-Ainu relationship with policies that strictly forbade the Ainu to engage in agriculture, prohibited them from practicing their traditional customs, and dispossessed them of their land. That the Ainu had a “singular” fear of the Japanese government is nothing but reasonable; their fear was not an imagined one, as Bird presupposes, but rather a valid and perceptive one that foresaw what could happen if the Japanese discovered the Ainu had been evading Japanese surveillance and practicing outlawed traditions. However, Bird merely dismisses their fear. The exclamation mark she includes when informing her readers how the Ainu repeatedly insist that she not divulge any information to the Japanese lest “harm might come to them!” hints that she believes their concerns to be entirely groundless, even hysterical (207). In effect, Bird denies the Ainu's authority over their own experience as well as their cognitive faculties.

Although Bird divests the Ainu of rhetorical power by rendering their words into unreasonable tirades that attest to their suspicious nature, Japanese intrusion and violence was not imagined. From as early as the twelfth century, the Ainu saw their land and chiefdoms abused under the guise of benevolence. In fact, Ainu hunters inform Bird of the most pressing and oppressive prohibitions imposed on the Ainu; according to them, the Japanese have “prohibited the use of poison and arrow-traps” and have driven wild animals “back farther and farther into the mountains by the sound of [Japanese] guns” (Bird 230). Although the Ainu still managed to hunt with their traditional tools in areas where Japanese surveillance failed to reach, the ban on string-bow traps and poisoned arrows – implemented in 1876, two years prior to Bird's visit to Biratory – crippled the Ainu economy and was often the cause of discord between the Japanese and the Ainu. The ban on poisoned arrows was not simply prohibition on a particular apparatus, but another method of colonizing the Ainu. The logic behind this was that the Japanese guns were more productive and safer hunting tools. By defining the traditional customs of the Ainu as dangerous and pre-modern, the Japanese both devalued and divested the Ainu of their means of hunting, allowing the Japanese to assume control over the forest. On this matter, Bird simply posits that “the Government has prohibited arrow-traps, for they made locomotion unsafe” and implies that the grounds “a little farther north, where the hunters are more out of observation” need also be made safer (231–32). Admittedly, the enforcement of the prohibition of poisoned arrows may have securitized Hokkaido roads as Bird argues, but what she refuses to acknowledge is that it devastated the forests as well as Ainu communities. Japanese hunters came armed with rifles, and these “modern” hunters overhunted to the extent that “the deer herds were close to extinction” (Siddle 62). The policy was devised to weaken the Ainu's authority over their forests and to debilitate their hunters. However, in Bird's narrative, the Japanese are represented as the righteous achievers of safe locomotion and the Ainu as savages who rely on not only inefficient but also hazardous devices to hunt.

Reform policies such as the ban on poisoned arrows came from the Kaitaikushi Department, and the word Kaitaikushi derives from the verb kaitaku. Examining the root of this Japanese equivalent to the Western word for development helps us understand that the Japanese government and Bird shares the fundamental idea that a properly modernized man must master nature and securitize resources. The two Chinese letters that compose the word kaitaku, 開 and 發 mean, when read singularly, to “occasion” in the Heideggerian sense – i.e., to “let what is not yet present arrive” (Heidegger, Technology 10). To occasion is to bring forth, and to let “the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself,” just as the silversmith lets the sliver burst open and become a silver chalice (Technology 10). Bringing forth he further explains, is the bringing “hither out of concealment into unconcealment” (11); it is an opening, a moment of revealing that breaks free from the previous condition, which is exactly what the first character 開 means: to open, bloom, and spread. Its radical, 門, is a door, and to open this door is to bring to the fore what had been hidden. And the flower that blooms (opens up) reveals the petals that had been inside the tiny bud. The latter character 發, has similar meanings: blossoming, waking up, and revealing.

While the two characters remain neutral when written alone, these letters (especially 發) take on entirely different connotations when conjoined with other characters. Instead of bringing forth, they challenge forth, and instead of occasioning or unconcealing, they unlock and move to a definite (and finite) end point. For example, with the character 展 (to spread, go forth, make better) following, 發 comes to signify an improvement from a previous state, and to expand extensively. When written in conjunction with the character for “light” (明), 發 comes to mean, to invent, to unlock a certain quality of a certain object or to make something out of nothingness, which is, of course, understood as an ingenious act of science. In short, additional words before or after the character 發 immediately add another layer to time and lead one to recognize the time of arrival as more significant. The same applies to the word of our concern, kaitaku (開發). Literally, it means to open up and open up, and, to bloom and bloom. The repetition signals urgency, which is fitting for a word that means to develop wastelands, to utilize nature, and to educate the ignorant. The Kaitakushi Department moves forward towards a designated end by challenging forests to yield pathways, land to yield more crop, and by bringing improvements to the nation by bringing light to the interior. As the department interprets everything in terms of that future point, the fact that such improvements trample on rights of the indigenous is of no relevance. Such a teleological interpretation of the world allows no room for bringing-forth, or letting be; as it must reach the point of completion, it simply bulldozes over whatever disturbs its smooth running, whether it be nature itself or the lesser beings it labels as the primitive and savage.

Sharing the ideology of progress as advocated and practiced by the Kaitakushi Department, Bird downplays the brutality of colonialism in Japan and justifies violence as a necessary means of enlightening and modernizing the entire nation. Observing the living conditions of the Shiraoi Ainu, Bird draws the reader's attention to the Japanese sake shops near the Ainu village and states that the sake shop “supplies an explanation of the squalor of the Aino [sic] village of fifty-two houses, which is on the shore at a respectful distance” (252). The following sentences describe the lack of cultivation in Shiraoi Ainu village, squalidness of Ainu dens, the unkempt appearances of Ainu children, and the effeteness of the village chief. These are all, according to Bird, the “many evidences . . . that Japanese contiguity is hurtful” (253). However, while she admits that Japanese presence in Shiraoi is hurtful rather than beneficial, she is reluctant to hold the Japanese responsible for the dehumanization of the Ainu. Bird does mention that the sake shops have detrimental effects on the Ainu life. However, by adding that they are “at a respectable distance,” she connotes that the Ainu's intemperance, not the existence of the sake shops, is the problem that needs to be solved. By blaming the Ainu themselves for being unable to stay away from the sake shops and for being unable to reap the “advantages of contact with Japanese civilisation” (253), Bird perpetuates the image of the savage Ainu. Seen from her perspective, the Ainu are as unruly as their matted forests that are impenetrable except to the axe. The Japanese brutality about which Bird hears is understood mostly as a necessary tool with which the Kaitakushi Department strives to civilize stubborn “missing links” out of their own inferior nature.