Medium post #1

Put yourself in the shoes of an Ainu person who lived through the extension of the boundaries of the old Tokugawa regime to include your ancestral homelands. How might your life change on an everyday level? How might you respond, either individually or collectively to this imposition of colonial rule over you?

As an Ainu person who lived through the extension of the boundaries of the Old Tokugawa regime to include my ancestral homelands, it would at first, be a gradual transition depending on where I lived. However, as the Meiji regime took over and expanded further into Hokkaido, it would be more affected. Under the pretense of “protecting” the Ainu people from nature’s ways, the Meiji government will promote agriculture to the Ainu people. Since agriculture seems to be a good, harmless idea at first, I think that I would not be opposed to it. Agriculture will help stabilize food supplies compared to the old ways of depending on natural ways. Therefore, I think that I would not, as an individual, respond negatively at first. However, by assimilating agriculture into the Ainu society, we would end up losing our ways of depending on nature, but we would instead be dependent on the Meiji government. We would need to practice agriculture in order to survive, and in order to do that, we would have to learn and get help from the Meiji government, giving them control over our livelihoods. This would enable the Meiji government to exploit our resources and take advantage of our land and our resources, without leaving the Ainu people a way to fight back. Therefore, after realizing the unfavorable outcome of one-sided dependence of Ainu community to the Meiji government, I would work with other Ainu individuals to fight back collectively, against the Meiji government, so that they cannot take advantage of us. I would look for individuals who were reluctant to follow the ways of the Meiji government and as them to lead us back to the old ways of living so that we can support ourselves. However, the Meiji government’s military power would be overwhelmingly stronger than the Ainu community, so it would be inevitable at this point to avoid Japanese assimilation into our community without harm, and possibly, being annihilated.