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Frontier fantasies: cinema, regional alterity, and Hokkaido at the boundaries of nation

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Frontier fantasies: cinema, regional alterity, and Hokkaido at the boundaries of nation

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FRONTIER FANTASIES:

CINEMA, REGIONAL ALTERITY, AND HOKKAIDO AT THE BOUNDARIES OF
NATION

by

Adam Silverman

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC DORNSIFE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
EAST ASIAN AREA STUDIES

August 2021

Copyright 2021 Adam Paul Silverman
ii
Acknowledgments

None of this work would have possible without the support and guidance of the
community at the University of Southern California. I would like first to thank Professor
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Professor Kerim Yasar, and Professor Youngmin Choe for their
invaluable tutelage and support as advisers and committee members, and their infinite
tolerance of my many unformed and occasionally ill-conceived ideas. They have endured
too many papers and long seminar presentations on my research on cinema and Hokkaido
and have always generously steered me in the right direction.
I would also like to thank Professor Sunyoung Park, whose seminar birthed this
topic, as well as Dr. Li-Ping Chen and Dr. Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer for guidance in
various seminars. Extensive thanks are due to Grace Ryu and the staff at the East Asian
Studies Center at USC for all manners of help and support. I would also like to thank my
peers and friends Tiara Wilson, Donald Collins, Steve Literati, and Sui Wang for their
input and feedback in class and in private.
I must thank Professor Aaron Gerow, who first started me out on my journey with
Japanese cinema during my time at Yale and has continued to answer my many questions
even long after graduation. Leo Kim and Ammar Saeed have proofread more of my work
than any friends should ever have to. Finally, thank you to Laila Robbins for everything.
It wasn’t easy writing this thesis during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it would have been
impossible without you.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................ii

Abstract ..............................................................................................................................iv

Introduction..........................................................................................................................1

Chapter 2. National, Nationless Other: the Postwar Ainu Film Boom................................4
Introduction..............................................................................................................4
Development, the Tourist Gaze, and the Postwar Myth of Homogeneity...............6
The Ainu Film Boom.............................................................................................12
Conclusion.............................................................................................................21
Chapter 3. Borrowed Frontiers: Transposing Hollywood’s West on Japan’s North.........23
Introduction............................................................................................................23
Fantasizing the Frontier: Dislocating Genre and Nation.......................................26
Imagined Boundaries: To Borrow Myth, Legend, and Frontier............................32
Conclusion.............................................................................................................37
Chapter 4. Frontiersman: Takakura Ken and Settler Masculinity in Hokkaido................38
Introduction............................................................................................................23
Takakura Ken in The Yellow Handkerchief and A Distant Cry from Spring.........40
Missing Men at the Vestiges of Frontier................................................................43
Conclusion.............................................................................................................47

Conclusion.........................................................................................................................49

Bibliography......................................................................................................................52

iv
ABSTRACT

Despite the Japanese film industry’s prolific engagement with the region in the post-war
era, research on cinematic representations of Hokkaido in English-language scholarship
remains scarce. By looking at a varied sample of post-war texts, ranging from the Ainu-
boom of the 1950s and 60s to the films of Takakura Ken (star of the popular Abashiri
Prison series), this thesis project proposes to consider how cinematic representations of
the regional alterity of Hokkaido—along with its indigenous people—have borrowed
from visual regime of the Hollywood Western to visually mythologize Hokkaido as a
kind of national frontier space in order to reimagine the boundaries of the national self in
the aftermath of the Pacific War.
1
I.
Introduction

I upon my frontiers here
Keep residence; if all I can will serve
That little which is left so to defend
John Milton, Paradise Lost

In the wake of Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, Hokkaido—the first of Imperial
Japan’s colonial expansions, and one of the few holdings permitted to remain under
Japanese control following the dissolution of its vast overseas empire—underwent a
dramatic period of economic development and settlement. The newly organized post-war
government, just as did the Meiji government nearly a century prior, quickly turned its
gaze northward. The two governments, both facing the enormity of the task of radically
re-envisioning and redefining a nation in the throes of dramatic upheaval and
transformation, each in turn made addressing the issue of the northern frontier a matter of
immediate priority.
Certainly, active steps by local and prefectural governments have been taken to
cultivate the image of Hokkaido’s settler colonial ‘pioneer’ image (a cogent example of
this is the Historical Village Museum of Hokkaido in Sapporo, a painstakingly detailed
open-air reconstruction of a 19
th
century settlement). But it wasn’t merely the nascent
post-war government that turned its gaze to Hokkaido; the Japanese commercial film
industry produced a short-lived but prolific wave of films both set on the northern island
and featuring its indigenous people, the Ainu, as a significant part of these films’
2
narratives. Prior, almost all pre-war depictions of the Ainu on film had been ethnographic
or documentary in nature. After the end of the so-called ‘Ainu boom’ of the 1950s and
early 1960s, film depictions of Hokkaido continued to be produced—but relatively few
even acknowledged the existence of northern Japan’s indigenous people. The central aim
of this work intends to address both the role of cinema in the construction of Hokkaido as
a kind of post-war national frontier space, as well as how transformations in those
depictions over time map alongside attendant transformations in Japanese society.
The history of Hokkaido on film is as old as the history of Japanese cinema itself.
In 1896, just ten years after the newly formed prefectural government announced a new
emphasis on the importation of capital and development at the center of its colonial
project, the cinématographe arrived in Japan from France via Lumière operator François-
Constant Girel and almost immediately found its way to Hokkaido. Some of the first film
ever shot in Japan was of Hokkaido and the Ainu––placing both at the very genesis of
film in Japan and Hokkaido as a Japanese colonial holding.
1
And when the nation was
violently rebirthed with the conclusion of the Pacific War and subsequent occupation by
the United States, Hokkaido again filled a need for a genesis of new post-war definitions
of boundaries for masculinity, for Japaneseness, for the nation. But in order to fully
satisfy that role, Hokkaido first needed to be concurrently cinematically reimagined and
visually mythologized as a kind of national frontier space.
Just as Michele Mason boldly suggests (borrowing James Edward Ketelaar’s
words of caution against the tendency to “equate the ‘declaration’ of the Meiji era with its
production”) that the modern Japanese state was not in fact created in 1868 with the
restoration of power to the Emperor but in 1869 with the expropriation and colonization

1
Centeno Martín (2018), pp. 80.
3
of Hokkaido, so too would I suggest that we might imagine the post-war state beginning
not simply with Japan’s formal surrender at the end of the war, but also with the
reiteration of the colonial development of Hokkaido in the early aftermath of the war.
2
I
propose that Hokkaido, since removed from any actual rugged frontier state, has been
cinematically fantasized, reimagined, remediated as frontier in perpetuity in order to
furnish a sempiternal peripheral space against which the national core might—or,
perhaps, must—be dialectically defined.

2
Mason (2012), pp. 4
4
II.
National, Nationless Other:
The Postwar Ainu Film Boom

Introduction

“From now on, there is neither Ainu nor Shamo.
We are all the same Japanese people.”
Or so says the eponymous Mito Komon towards the end of the film Mito Komon’s
Journey to Ezo (1961), after he successfully foils an attempt by Russians and treacherous
Japanese collaborators to sow seeds of conflict between the Ainu and Matsumae in Ezo
(now known as Hokkaido). Invoking shamo, the Ainu-language term for non-Ainu
Japanese, he makes a nominally progressive plea for mutual understanding and a
collective, Ainu-inclusive national identity. And while as historically incoherent and
nakedly colonial as such a turn of phrase might appear to contemporary audiences, it
suggests the complexity of rewriting and renegotiating history in order to place the Ainu
into newly emergent notions of post-war nationhood.
The history of representations of both Hokkaido and the Ainu in narrative cinema
remains a persistently unplumbed topic in the academic study of Japanese film. And
while some scholars such as Marcos Centeno Martín, Michele Mason, and Aaron Gerow
have written on the subject of Hokkaido or the Ainu on film in the past, there has still yet
to be a fully comprehensive examination of narrative films set in Hokkaido. The present
lacuna in scholarship possibly stems in part because narrative representations of the Ainu
in commercial Japanese film are themselves relatively uncommon; of the texts that do
5
exist, many are non-canonical, lack home-video releases, and are infrequently if ever
publicly screened.
But Hokkaido more generally is also curiously omitted in English language
scholarship on Japanese cinema. Donald Richie’s A Hundred Years of Japanese Cinema,
one of the most comprehensive general accountings of Japanese film history in English,
fails to mention the northern island even once throughout the entirety of the tome.
3

Michele Mason has written about how colonial narratives (some of which are popular
films) of Hokkaido reinforce the modern nation-state, but her film analysis is brief and
the texts are engaged largely on an individual basis––precluding the possibility of
adequately reckoning with a complete understanding of Hokkaido on film more broadly.
4

And while little scholarly work has been done here, numerous canonical film directors
across generations have turned their eyes to the north for material, including Kurosawa
Akira, Narsue Mikio, Kinoshita Keisuke, Yamada Yoji, and Iwai Shunji, to name just a
few. So while films containing the Ainu are relatively rare, films set in Hokkaido are not
equivalently uncommon––raising the question of why both categories are canonically
neglected.
Of the sparse sample of films that constitute the body of narrative Ainu cinema, I
wish to draw attention to a curious, yet critical, detail: a cursory glance at a list of
narrative films featuring the Ainu reveals that a striking majority was made in a relatively
narrow window of time beginning in 1947 and ending in the early 1960s. Likewise,
prewar films set in Hokkaido were fairly uncommon; yet in the decades following it, the
Japanese film industry churned out numerous films set in Japan’s northernmost island.

3
Richie (2001).
4
Mason (2012).
6
This observation forms the basis of this project of inquiry. Why the sudden, concentrated
interest in representations of Hokkaido and the Ainu? Or perhaps, why is meditating on
Hokkaido and the Ainu’s relationship to Japanese national identity specifically relevant at
such a critical juncture in that very identity’s post-war reformation?
Perhaps it was the rapid economic development of Hokkaido, or that new
histories and anthropologies of the Ainu trickled down to cultural producers. Or
perhaps, the need to revisit and rewrite conceptions of ethnicity in order to transition
towards a new model of national subjectivity predicated on the supposed homogeneity of
the post-war Japanese citizenry forced Japan to engage, renegotiate, and reconcile one of
the most glaring examples of alterity still contained within its post-Imperial borders. Or
even, as I intend to argue throughout this thesis, fantasies of the foreign and of the
frontier were cinematically transposed to reflexively deploy the national periphery in
order to redefine the national core. To address these questions, I first intend to turn to the
films of the Ainu boom themselves to see how the alterity of the Ainu was utilized in
cinema to negotiate the destabilization of Japanese national identity that had been
triggered by the conclusion of the Pacific War.

Development, the Tourist Gaze, and the Postwar Myth of Homogeneity
Although representations of minority groups in Japanese cinema could be found
even in the pre-war era
5
, film depictions of the Ainu from prior to and during the war
generally fall under the category of the ethnographic or documentary film.
6
It wasn’t until
the American occupation that a short-lived wave of Ainu-related films would suddenly

5
See, for example, Shimizu Hiroshi’s depictions of mixed-race individuals in Yokohama in Japanese Girls
at the Harbor (1933).
6
Centeno Martín (2017), pp. 69-89.
7
emerge. This period, just over a decade in length, coincided with several other important
contextual developments. The most concrete of these was the Hokkaido Development
Act. The consequent establishment of the Hokkaido Development Agency and Hokkaido
Development Bureau, and the subsequent enactment of the first act of the Hokkaido
Comprehensive Development Plan (spanning 1952 - 1961) signaled that the priority for
the central government with regards towards the northern territory would be to focus on
transportation, power, food, and industrial infrastructure development.
7
The result was a
new wave of settlement (particularly from war returnees and Imperial subjects who had
been living in now-dispossessed colonial holdings) and economic development, but
another consequence was that the development of Hokkaido coincided with the
concurrent development of a domestic tourism industry.
Because the Japanese government restricted tourism to foreign countries from
1945 to 1963, domestic tourists turned to the Otherness of Hokkaido as an alternative to
actual tourism abroad.
8
There is a litany of reasons why Hokkaido can be easily cast as
‘exotic’ in the cultural imagination of the majority Japanese coming from wealthy cities
in Honshu––most obvious is simply its geographically distinct landscape from the rest of
the Japanese archipelago. Where much of the Japanese archipelago is characterized by
densely forested mountains (as much as 80% of Japan’s landmass) and valleys filled with
rice paddies, Hokkaido features vast grassy plains and cattle ranches.
9
It’s no coincidence
Sugawa Eizo’s masterpiece You Can Succeed Too (1964), a musical rumination on
Japan’s radically transforming white-collar economy set against the backdrop of a

7
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism. (n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2019, from
https://www.mlit.go.jp/hkb/develop_e.html.
8
Eguchi (2015), pp. 141-153.
9
Petry (2003).
8
regional tourism company, chooses to make organizing tours around Hokkaido a key
narrative event in the film. Hokkaido’s visual alterity helped to immediately locate it as
the archetypical domestic tourist destination early on in postwar Japan (Okinawa,
rebranded as a kind of “Japanese Hawaii” would supplant this position upon its later
return to Japan by the United States in 1972). A year prior to the film’s release, the
civilian terminal at Chitose Airport was opened which helped to increase the civilian air
travel to Hokkaido that had commenced in more limited capacity in 1951 under the
Allied occupation.
Given the continued control of Okinawa by the United States and the
dispossession of all other colonial holdings, Hokkaido’s unique domestic position as a
peripheral, colonial element of the Japanese state made it a particularly popular
destination for travel within Japan––and in place of foreigners, domestic tourists could
encounter the Ainu as a kind of substitute in highly performative reconstructed tourist
villages. This kind of regional and ethnic tourism remains a staple to this day for how
normative Japanese society encounters and consumes a commodification of the cultural
heritage of the Ainu people. For many majority Japanese, one of the primary points of
contact through which they’ve learned about and encountered Ainu people, culture, and
history is via this presentational form of ethnic tourism.
10
Cultural and racial alterity, in
addition to regional geographic exoticness, has therefore played a key role in positioning
Hokkaido as a site of the touristic gaze.
And as Ainu kotan, or villages, in places such as Shiraoi and Kushiro became
major tourist destinations (the Japanese government spent a lofty ¥20-billion sum on
opening the new National Ainu Museum and Park in Shiraoi in 2020), some members of

10
Hiwasaki (2000), pp. 393-412.
9
the Ainu community remain skeptical of the promise that tourism will lead to egalitarian
relations between the Ainu and majority Japanese––given that the increased economic
investment has not been met with commensurate movements towards rectifying past
injustices, for instance returning ancestral fishing and hunting rights.
11
Such tensions as
these are demonstrative of the complicated way in which the tourist gaze is situated
within the uneven mechanisms of the relations between the Japanese state as it organizes
the parameters of the gaze and the Ainu as they are rendered objects of the gaze. As
Urray and Larsen remind us:
The notion of the tourist gaze is not meant to account for why specific individuals
are motivated to travel. Rather we emphasise the systematic and regularised
nature of various gazes, each of which depends upon social discourses and
practices, as well as aspects of building, design and restoration that foster the
necessary ‘look’ of a place or an environment. Such gazes implicate both the
gazer and the gazee in an ongoing and systematic set of social and physical
relations.
12

This framework challenges us to think of the broader social and institutional ecosystem
that has surrounded Ainu tourism in order to better understand the particular dimensions
of the tourist gaze in the specific context of Hokkaido. Alongside economic and industrial
developments, other shifts in cultural production beyond the boom in Hokkaido-set films
further contributed to this network of relations between majority Japanese tourists and
Ainu tourism.
One example of this can be found within the academy. The increasing
consumption of the Ainu as a kind of tourist commodity was also met with growing
scholarly attention as the Ainu become an object of an academic gaze. The most

11
Grau (2020).
12
Urray & Larsen (2011), pp. 17.
10
important work of the time came from historian of applied colonial science Takakura
Shin’ichiro, a prominent figure at Hokkaido University in Sapporo. Among his most
significant works was A History of Ainu Policy (Ainu seisakushi, 1942), a history of
Japanese colonial policy starting in the early Tokugawa era and stretching to the turn of
the century.
13
Takakura’s work, while marred by unfortunate prejudices of his time, was
significant because it represented several influential developments: first, a serious
scholarly attitude towards the study of Ainu history, who were previously viewed as
having no history and therefore being unworthy of scholarly attention. Second, Takakura
held deep sympathy for the Ainu and their historical exploitation rather than reductively
viewing them exclusively as savages. Finally, he contributed the narrative that the Ainu
were a race unfortunately doomed to extinction and that assimilation provided the most
humane path forward—which laid the foundation for the popular postwar narrative that
the Ainu were an “extinct” people.
The rise and subsequent fall of the Japanese empire throughout the first half of the
20th century brought with it a changing of hands between two dominant and
diametrically opposed discourses on ethnic and racial mythologies of the Japanese state:
first, that the history of the Japanese archipelago contained ethnically diverse subjects
who had unified together into one group (and were therefore justified in a colonial
incursion into Asia); and, following the war, second, that the Japanese people were
racially pure, homogeneous, and descended from an imperial line from time
immemorial.
14
The transition between these racial conceptions constructs a problematic
of alterity in the logic of the Japanese postwar nation-state, where it at once both contains

13
Howell (2014), pp. 101-116.
14
Oguma (2002), pp 321-325.
11
the imperial remnants of the definitional widening of the Japanese ethno-subject as its
territorial expansion enfolded increasingly Other groups into itself, and yet also denies
the continued existence of those minority groups through the propagation of the myth of
national homogeneity.
And certainly, Japan throughout the second half of the 20
th
century made the
erasure of the Ainu as a living people the, often explicit, state position. Famously, in
1986, Prime Minister Nakasone enraged Ainu protestors (as well as other groups) with
his now infamous declaration that Japan was a nation without ethnic minorities.
15
The
narrative that the Ainu are an extinct people persists even today, with a (now former)
Sapporo City Assemblyman in 2014 declaring on Twitter that “Ainu people no longer
exist.”
16
Yet as we’ve previously established, Ainu tourism is a popular activity for the
majority Japanese, especially during the so-called “Ainu boom” of the 1950s and 60s that
characterizes our time period of interest. How is it that academics and politicians can
simultaneously declare the Ainu a dead people while contact flourished between majority
Japanese and Ainu in the form of the tourist gaze?
The popularity and promotion of Ainu tourism fits into a narrative of what Tessa
Morris-Suzuki refers to as “cosmetic multiculturalism.”
17
Cosmetic multiculturalism
describes a multicultural system in Japan in which minorities are superficially
acknowledged and celebrated but whose political, economic, and social concerns remain
unaddressed. Herein we find the pernicious elements of a kind of empty multiculturalism,
as per Mika Ko: “Multiculturalism, for instance, can function as a form of cultural
containment in which the cultures of minority groups are confined in a fixed and never-

15
Yates (1986, November 5). Japan Minority Hits Nakasone Hard. Chicago Tribune.
16
Lewallen (2015).
17
Morris-Suzuki (2003), pp. 171-186.
12
changing form.”
18
This prison of cosmetic multiculturalism is particularly relevant to the
Ainu because the sites of their material consumption by the majority Japanese, the tourist
villages, have historically been the only acceptable spaces for them to practice their
cultural heritage.
19

The “extinct Ainu” therefore can fit into a continuity of Japanese homogeneity
because the Ainu, in the eyes of the majority Japanese, are not a living people or
oppressed population but rather a form of ethnic memory that is only temporarily
actualized in specific artificial cultural spaces and commodities. So long as the Ainu
remain contained safely within the space of touristic consumption, they pose no
meaningful threat to the logical integrity of the grand narrative of Japanese homogeneity.
The various gazes at play here—the tourist, academic, ethnographic, and colonial
gazes—all co-relate within a suprasystem of gazes which precludes the visibility of the
Ainu from impinging on the narrative of their extinction. This narrative of extinction,
coupled with the economic development and settlement of Hokkaido, results in
something of a paradox. Why represent Hokkaido as a frontier if it and its indigenous
people, having been thoroughly incorporated into the national polity, is therefore no
longer really an actual frontier space?

The Ainu Film Boom
Surveying the films that comprise the Ainu boom, almost all the films take at least
a superficially sympathetic stance towards the Ainu. Along the same lines as the
scholarship of Takakura, the Ainu are typically depicted as allies to Japanese protagonists

18
Ko (2013), pp. 26
19
Hiwasaki (2000), pp. 393-412.
13
or as innocent victims of the stories’ antagonistic forces. In rare cases, the Ainu
characters are the protagonists themselves (such as in Naruse Mikio’s 1958 adaptation of
the novel Kotan no Kuchibue), but more often they are relegated to background or
ornamental roles. In many instances, the most prominent Ainu character would be of
mixed (both Ainu and majority Japanese) descent, while the other Ainu characters would
simply serve in limited, often non-speaking, roles to populate Ainu village backdrops or
ceremonial set pieces.
A cogent example of this is Ship of Outlaws (gorotsukibune, Mori, 1950), where
the most prominent Ainu character is the protagonist’s biracial love-interest, whose
sudden recollection of her long-forgotten memory of her Ainu mother and heritage
enables her to––at the crucial, desperate moment when the heroes are outnumbered by the
villains––use smoke signals to summon a savage Ainu horde who overwhelm the
villainous gang and rescue our protagonists. This use of the Ainu, while nominally
casting them as “good,” recalls the kind of depiction Chinua Achebe criticizes Joseph
Conrad of in Heart of Darkness, that is, one of “Africa as setting and backdrop which
eliminates the African as human factor.”
20
Ship of Outlaws accomplishes something
similar, while promising a likewise liberal affinity for the Ainu it keeps them at arms’
length, reducing them to a kind of non-human, non-speaking extension of the natural
frontier that is its Hokkaido setting.
Another common element of many of the films of this period is that one of the
primary Ainu characters is almost always a young woman who is often of potential
romantic interest to the male protagonist. This figure might, as in the case of Ship of
Outlaws or Mito Komon’s Journey to Ezo, be of mixed-descent, but she also may not. In

20
Achebe. (1977), pp. 782-794.
14
instances where she is not, as is with the second installment of Oba Hideo’s melodrama
trilogy Always in My Heart (kimi no na wa dai ni bu, 1953), the Ainu woman is often set
up as a kind of openly promiscuous counterpoint to a conventionally Japanese notion of
femininity. In Always in my Heart, the Ainu character Yumi is a tomboyish rancher’s
daughter who uses the masculine pronoun ore in speech and whose sexuality is
contrasted against the classically feminine Japanese female lead when Yumi forwardly
and aggressively propositions the male protagonist Haruki.
I bring up these examples to illustrate that a significant narrative impulse of many
of these films is to emphasize if not fetishize the alterity of the Ainu, whether racially,
sexually, or culturally. The otherness of the Ainu is not just an unintentional outcome, but
an explicit narrative and, I intend to argue, visual strategy as well as representational goal
of the texts. It is precisely through this alterity that I am interested in exploring how
these films choose to deploy representations of the Ainu in order to instruct our
understanding of post-war Japanese national identity.
If I have dwelt heavily on comparisons between early modern and postwar
policies towards Hokkaido, it is because I believe in both instances the novel formation
of a national identity was heavily dependent on defining boundaries, real or imagined, at
what was perceived to be the national frontier. I’d like to continue that comparison by
reading in pair two films from the twilight years of the Ainu film boom that each take
radically different approaches toward the issue of national identity especially as it relates
to representations of Hokkaido and the Ainu: Mito Komon’s Journey to Ezo (1961) and
The Rambler Rides Again (1960).
15
Mito Komon’s Journey to Ezo is one of many entries in the immensely popular
Mito Komon franchise, almost all entries of which closely follow a basic narrative
formula. Mito Komon, a high-ranking official of the Shogunate, travels with his
bodyguards to various regions of Tokugawa Japan disguised as an unassuming elderly
retiree. He and his associates inevitably find corruption, and, after getting into trouble
with the nefarious parties, Mito Komon will flash the seal of the Shogunate, revealing his
identity and allowing him to settle the issue before wandering on to the next episode.
Journey to Ezo works in much the same way. Conflict is brewing between the
Ainu and the Matsumae clan, who were historically given responsibility and exclusive
privilege to handle Ainu trade relations. The Matsumae’s survey map of Ezo (the
previous Japanese name for Hokkaido and other surrounding islands) has been stolen,
and fears arise that the stolen map might fall into the hands of the Russians if it is not
recovered in time. Amidst suspicions, violent struggle breaks out between the Matsumae
and the Ainu, who are led by their half-Japanese military leader Shakushain. Shakushain
and his sister were abandoned by their Japanese father, which has bred in him distrust and
contempt for the Matsumae. Mito Komon reveals that disloyal members of the Matsumae
clan are responsible and have been collaborating with the Russians to manipulate the two
parties into conflict. This revelation ends the fighting between the Matsumae and the
Ainu, and Mito Komon declares that both Matsumae and Ainu are the same Japanese––
and turns to Shakushain and offers to adopt him if he still is in need of a father.
The film takes an explicitly assimilationist stance towards the issue of
Japaneseness. Mito Komon insists throughout the film that the Ainu ought be considered
and treated as nihonjin (Japanese people), despite the fact that historically no such
16
attitude would have been possible prior to the formation of the modern Japanese state.
The film is clearly sympathetic towards the Ainu, portraying them as victims of evil
renegade Japanese and the encroaching Russian threat. But the events of film, much like
Mito Komon’s anachronistic use of ‘Japanese’, correspond little with any lived historical
reality. While it is true that there were instances in which private Japanese working
without orders from the central government ruthlessly exploited certain populations of
Ainu,
21
absolving the central government of primary responsibility and deflecting it
towards Russia is a form of historical revisionism that seems to be in line with Japan’s
emergent post-war view of itself as a humanitarian, pacifist state.
22
Mito Komon’s
adoption of Shakushain is likewise a thinly veiled metaphor for the incorporation of the
Ainu into the Japanese nation state (it bears remembering that the Emperor, the head of
the Japanese state, is traditionally seen as the ‘father’ to all denizens of Japan). It acts to
defang and obscure the violence of colonialism, and rewrite the history of the Japanese
incursion into Hokkaido as benevolent “adoption” rather than coercive colonization.
Read through this lens, the film formulates an attempt to absolve Japan of
culpability for the colonization of Hokkaido and forced assimilation of the Ainu. The
Ainu were not, in the logic of the film, forced to become Japanese––they were simply
always Japanese to begin with. And therefore their present-day ‘extinction’ is no different
from the extinction of, say, the Matsumae when the Meiji restoration abolished the clan
system as a part of modernization. The outcome of this is the erasure of the hegemony
and coercion involved in the assimilation of the Ainu by the Japanese state. In this way,
Journey to Ezo is the perfect mouthpiece for the postwar narrative of homogeneity. By

21
Howell (1994), pp. 69-93.
22
Oguma (2002), pp. 322.
17
framing the Ainu as a historical memory whose teleological end is to become Japanese, it
reinforces the tourist gaze of the contemporaneously popular Ainu tourist attractions. The
Ainu manifest only to be gazed at as a form of consumption, but they are not enabled the
agency to exist outside these tightly contained spaces lest they imperil the ideological
structure of Japaneseness.
The focus on Russia of course highlights the political status of Hokkaido as
Japan’s postwar political frontier against perceived encroachment by the Soviet Union.
The continued dispute over the seizure of the Kurile Islands designates Hokkaido as the
vanguard of Japanese sovereignty and as frontier because the imagined possibility of
reintegrating the northern islands renders, in the Japanese political consciousness,
Hokkaido as not a permanent or fixed boundary point but a temporary one, interminably
awaiting the deferred northward relocation of that very boundary point. Expansion further
north is always on the imagined horizon, so long as the border dispute remains
unresolved, which allows the opportunity for Hokkaido to be a frontier in perpetuity
rather than a settled border delineating the Japanese state from decidedly non-Japanese,
Other, territory.
The Rambler Rides Again takes a far different approach to representing Hokkaido
and the Ainu, although there are certainly some superficial similarities. Another franchise
film, The Rambler Rides Again is an entry in Nikkatsu’s Rambler series of films
following a wandering guitarist and gunman played by Kobayashi Akira. Unlike Journey
to Ezo, which is a jidaigeki (period film), The Rambler Rides Again is a gendaigeki
(contemporary film)—although that classification is complicated by the text’s unusual
diegetic world. The film is a literal Japanese western, with a protagonist who dons a
18
brimmed hat, rides a horse, and shoots a revolver. Explicitly modeling its setting
generically after the visual and political dimensions of Hollywood westerns, Hokkaido
serves as the frontier in place of the Wild West and the Ainu substitute for Native
Americans. In particular, the film seems to be directly inspired by pro-Indian westerns of
the 1950s, with the Ainu being cast sympathetically as the aforementioned ‘good
Indians.’ The setting’s temporality is particularly bizarre because it appears to be, despite
the anachronistic 19
th
century western elements, otherwise set in contemporary Japan.
The narrative of the film generally fits into the normative pattern of depictions of
the Ainu at this period. The story principally revolves around the plight of the Ainu and
their exploitation at the hands of greedy business developers, but the Ainu serve more as
passive secondary characters while Kobayashi’s character Taki does most of the active
problem-solving (principally via violence). But the unusual genricity and temporality
preclude us from neatly situating the politics of the film’s depiction of the Ainu. The film
is an example of mukokuseki eiga, or “nationless films.” The Japan depicted here appears
not to be Japan at all; in fact, it appears not to take place in any country whatsoever. As
Watanabe Takenobu puts it,
The real locations of these films prove most effective not at the moment that they
express their true regional existence, but rather when they completely
metamorphize into such a peculiar space that it makes one want to exclaim, “Is
there really a place like that in Japan?”…the narrative or background becomes “a
place that is nowhere” and is bathed in abstraction.
23

The condition of nationlessness has interesting implications for both how the film
engages Japaneseness and how the Ainu fit into the problematic of post-war national
identity. Taki is Japanese, yet outwardly presents like someone out of a Hollywood

23
Watanabe (1981), pp. 121. (translation by Aaron Gerow)
19
western. The Ainu likewise initially seem like what you might encounter in a modern
tourist village, but they practice anachronistic behaviors like using bows and arrows to
fight, and, as Centeno Martín points out, participate in ceremonies that aren’t really Ainu
at all but rather more closely resemble those of North American plains natives such as the
Sioux.
24

And while some critics like Oishi Kazuhisa see this depiction as primarily
discriminatory, the film presents one of the most explicit rejections of assimilation of this
period.
25
In contrast to Journey to Ezo, the Ainu in The Rambler Rides Again actually
speak the Ainu language, and don’t merely resist the occupation of their ancestral lands
because of a misunderstanding. Their oppression by the majority Japanese business elite
is explicit, which justifies and supports rather than excuses and forgives their resistance.
But as Aaron Gerow explains, this dynamic is subverted in part by the fact that the
business is question is a tourist company:
It is significant then that the bad guys run a tourist business. While on the one
hand, the film acts like publicity for Hokkaido tourism, on the other hand, it hides
its status as an ad by displacing the crime of consumerism––as well as the guilt of
its own representational violence towards the Ainu––onto the bad guys.
26

The film, perhaps despite good intentions, still locates the Ainu within a kind of
normative cinematic tourist system wherein a franchise film traipses to Hokkaido in one
of its installments to gaze at the Otherness of the far north and those who live there. But
while the depiction of the Ainu here certainly veers towards the previously discussed
prison of multiculturalism, where the Ainu are essentialized and idealized, that

24
Centeno Martín (2017), pp. 70.
25
Ōishi (2011), pp. 172-185.
26
Gerow (2003).
20
essentialization is undermined somewhat by the transmutation of American Indian
practices onto the Ainu. The Ainu, just as is Hokkaido and as is the majority Japanese in
the film, are likewise nationless. It is within this erased, nationless Japan that the
unforeclosed potentiality of Hokkaido as an open canvas emerges.
By comparing Journey to Ezo and The Rambler Rides Again, we can see how the
oppositional strategies taken up by each film open up different avenues for understanding
how Ainu representations reflect back on nation and nationality. Both films feature
warped, mismatched temporalities: Journey to Ezo transposes contemporary notions of
Japan onto a Japan-less past, while The Rambler Rides Again does the reverse. The result
is a nationalized past versus a nationless present. The nationalization of the past involves
more than just constructing ahistorical notions of a unified Japanese national identity at a
time when that would be impossible; it also involves rewriting Ainu history to suit a
contemporary political end for the Japanese state. Shakushain is an actual historical
figure, and a celebrated folk hero in Ainu communities for leading one of the most
significant armed rebellions against the Shogunate. By transforming Shakushain into a
misguided half-Japanese who happily accepts his newly bestowed Japanese national
identity, the film robs his historical antecedent of its symbolic and mythical power.
On the other hand, the nationless present offers an ahistorical space wherein
resistance and escape from the specter of colonialism seems on the surface possible. By
constructing a world where Japanese identity structures, and indeed Japan itself, is
fundamentally imperiled, Saito’s film opens up a representational universe in which the
Ainu are simultaneously non-essentialized and unassimilated. By liberating the present
from the shackles of nationality, the film engages a fluidity of identity that offers some, if
21
in actuality limited, hope. Journey to Ezo and The Rambler Rides Again each propose
what they in turn see as “happy” endings for the Ainu: Journey to Ezo concludes with a
move towards assimilation while The Rambler Rides Again ends with assimilation being,
at least temporarily, staved off.

Conclusion
In the immediate aftermath of the war, Hokkaido found itself the subject of a
variety of competing attentions and gazes. Developers, tourists, authors, and film
producers each looked northward and saw potential for their own ends in what they
perceived as the open, unforeclosed possibilities of the frontier.
The history of Ainu in Japanese cinema is, still today, mostly forgotten. But
buried within that history are pressing, urgent questions about the role of periphery and
colonial minorities in configuring post-war Japanese national identity. And while the
existing discourse tends to focus on ethnographic film or documentary self-representation,
fictional depictions of the Ainu played a fundamental role in the construction of Japanese
self-images. Embedded within the history of how the Japanese represent the Ainu in
cinema is a history of how the Japanese nation articulates its own boundaries and
peripheries. In order to negotiate the continued presence of a highly visible minority
group in the era of supposed homogeneity, Japanese representations of the Ainu tended to
exoticize the Ainu while simultaneously locating them safely within familiar narratives of
extinction and assimilation. This allowed the Japanese film and cultural production
industries to profit off of the populace’s hunger for cosmetic consumption of Ainu
multiculturality, without having to concede the Ainu persistently existed as a
22
disenfranchised and historically oppressed group. These films adopted various strategies
to this end, using the Ainu to both expand the imaginative content of Japan through
exploiting Ainu alterity while stressing and emphasizing the rigidness of Japan’s national
and ethnic boundaries.
Even films such as The Rambler Rides Again, which works to undermine the
rigidity of Japan’s supposed essential national character, ultimately reinforce colonial
relations between the Japanese state and Hokkaido. By playing into fantasies of the exotic
and the foreign through using Hokkaido to create a sense of mukokuseki, the film actually
reaffirms the self/Other colonial paradigm. The pleasure of that generic nationlessness is
the dislocated thrill of feeling simultaneously within and without the nation––the same
logic which forms the basis for the tourist gaze that led and leads so many majority
Japanese on holiday to the North. For these films, the Ainu function both as the boundary
against which Japaneseness can be defined and as a kind of colonial ethnic specter that,
much like Hokkaido, remains within and without the national character.

23
III.
Borrowed Frontiers:
Transposing Hollywood’s West on Japan’s North

Introduction
I had taken Horace Greeley's advice literally: Go west, young man, go west,
and seek fame, fortune, adventure.
Ransom Stoddard, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

Channeling the legendary Horace Greeley-attributed slogan of manifest destiny,
“Go west, young man,” Yamada Yoji’s first entry in his unofficial Hokkaido trilogy,
Where Spring Comes Late (kazoku, 1970), chronicles a Kyushu family’s odyssey to
Hokkaido in search of a better life as cattle ranchers on a so-called “American-style”
dairy farm. The family patriarch’s dream of an independent existence away from the toil
of laboring within an oppressive wage system as a miner, one where he serves as his own
boss and owns his own land, mirrors the promise of manifest destiny for would-be
settlers aiming for the American frontier. But in order for later films like Where Spring
Comes Late to use Hokkaido as a stand-in for the open promise of the American West,
they relied on cultivating a pre-existing frontier iconography built in the preceding
decades that aligned Hokkaido with the so-called Wild West.
Towards the end of the 19
th
century, geographers and frontier historians—most
famously perhaps Frederick Jackson Turner
27
—shifted away from the classical view of
frontiers as fixed national boundaries towards more zonal conceptions of the category. By

27
Turner (1896).
24
the early 20
th
century, scholars had mostly moved on from using frontier interchangeably
with boundary and instead saw the former as, in Fawcett’s terms
28
, an area or zone of
transition while the latter represented a discrete line.
29
But a settler-colonial frontier is, as
Kenneth Lewis reminds us, both definitionally fugacious and more constitutively
complex than just a designated region of ambiguous political sovereignty:
Because of the nature of expansion, the frontier is both spatially and temporally
impermanent…Because colonists must repeat their adaptation as the frontier
incorporates new lands, the process of colonization follows an evolutionary
sequence in the sense that the pattern of change that once occurred at the center of
a newly settled area is later repeated along its periphery. A frontier is the region
where settlement occurs as well as the adaptive process by which colonists
establish themselves.
30

This framework aids us in thinking about the frontier because it reminds us that, even
more than just a fixed location or zone, a frontier is a process. If the physical and political
conditions that initially bounded Hokkaido as northern settler frontier ceased to be, the
process that is the frontier could persist in the form of a continuing cultural adaptive
operation by which Hokkaido’s frontier status is renewed in the form of cultural
production (e.g., cinema) and economic activities like settlement, tourism and tourist
villages, and development.
In order to fully contextualize this, it is worth highlighting the long-standing
historical relationship of Hokkaido to the United States. Hokkaido’s defacto slogan
“Boys, be ambitious!” was bequeathed to it by William S. Clark, one of several
influential Americans who was brought over at the request of the Meiji colonial project in

28
Fawcett (1918).
29
Prescott (1965), pp 15.
30
Lewis (2002), pp 4.
25
order to modernize Hokkaido. But the American-overseen modernization of Hokkaido
was not simply about bringing Hokkaido into line with the same standard of
Westernization and modernization of the naichi (the mainland islands of Honshu,
Shikoku, and Kyushu); it actually involved using Hokkaido as grounds for further
experimentation with Western practices that were not necessarily put into place back
south.
31
To this day, cities like Hakodate and Sapporo feature a striking amount of
American-influenced architecture that gives the human geography of Hokkaido an
additional distinct presence from the rest of the Japanese archipelago beyond the more
immediately obvious differences in the look of the landscape itself.
The primary aim of this chapter is to address the ways in which cinema in
particular has helped cultivate and proliferate the pioneer, ‘Wild West’ image of
Hokkaido that had become in many ways uncritically naturalized over the course of the
20
th
century. It’s worth remembering though that while cinema is perhaps, as I’ll argue,
the dominant author of the dissemination of this North American-styled frontier
iconography in the immediate post-war, other sources at other times have likewise
contributed to the project of visually mythologizing Hokkaido as a national frontier
space.
The most significant of these are perhaps museums, most of which were
coincidently built in the years directly following the Ainu boom discussed in the previous
chapter. The Pioneer Memorial Museum, which was commissioned in 1966 and
completed in 1971, was part of a government effort to continue spurring post-war
industrialization and settlement by reaching back into the past so that “‘the next
generation could inherit the pioneer spirit’ of the Meiji era migration policy that led to

31
Day (2012).
26
Hokkaido’s development.”
32
The previously mentioned open-air Historical Village
Museum of Hokkaido, Higashi reminds us, was directly inspired by a similar 1891 open-
air museum in Sweden which was expressly built in order to create rather than merely
reproduce the nation by spatially and artificially integrating a Swedish natural and
cultural historical identity.
33

The very existence of these museums, and their stated purpose of memorializing
and preserving the ‘pioneer spirit’ and frontier identity of Hokkaido, suggests that such
an identity was no longer necessarily visible in the now-developed urban landscape of
settled society. Two years after the release of Where Spring Comes Late would come the
Sapporo Winter Olympics in 1972; a sure sign of international recognition of the
industrial development of the northern region, despite the continued dissemination of a
more rugged and bucolic frontier image in popular media.
That Hokkaido continued to be represented as a kind of frontier territory in
Japanese cinema, even after additional waves of industrialization, settlement, and the
supposed complete assimilation of its indigenous population, implicates those films in the
structural order by which Hokkaido’s frontier status was renewed to pursue particular
state and cultural ends for post-war majority Japanese society. But the visual practices
that reconstructed contemporary Hokkaido as frontier were not developed in isolation:
they were borrowed, consciously, from across the Pacific Ocean and generically modeled
after films in the popular Western genre of Hollywood cinema.

Fantasizing the Frontier: Dislocating Genre and Nation

32
Higashi (2014), pp. 246
33
Higashi (2014).
27
When discussing the relationship of the Western to Japanese cinema, the
conversation has conventionally collapsed around the well-documented reciprocal
exchange between the Western and the jidaigeki, or period film. Less, however, has been
said regarding the clear influence of the Western on gendaigeki, or contemporary films.
Some instances, such as The Rambler Rides Again (1960), Covered Wagon (1960,
horobasha wa yuku), or Quick Draw Joe (1961, hayauchi yaro), are quite literally and
explicitly Japanese Westerns. In the case of The Rambler Rides Again, the generic
imitation goes beyond the cosmetic reproduction of Western visual elements like
costumes, saloons, equestrianism, etc. As outlined in the previous chapter, The Rambler
Rides Again goes as far as to even structurally reproduce the ethno-national logic of the
Western in how it chooses to depict the national ethnic self (the majority Japanese) versus
the indigenous Other (the Ainu).
But ornamentalizing indigenous populations is not the only way Japanese cinema
borrowed from Hollywood––and, certainly, Japanese filmmakers were watching
Westerns. Famous of course is Kurosawa Akira’s appreciation of John Ford, but the
indelible marks of the Western genre on films set in Hokkaido are to be found in other
forms as well. In some cases, such as Kinoshita Keisuke’s A Legend, or Was It? (shitou
no densetsu, 1963), Japanese films might announce the Western as a source of inspiration
through means as varied as the non-diegetic soundtrack of the film. Kinoshita’s reflection
on the buried trauma of violence on the home front during the Pacific War chronicles the
brutal treatment of a family of refugees from Tokyo at the hands of local Hokkaido
villagers who mistakenly blame the relocated outsiders for a variety of misfortunes that
befall the small community.
28
The film begins contemporaneously in the 1960s with beautiful color photography
of Hokkaido’s vast, open landscape and happy villagers enjoying a seemingly idyllic
bucolic existence. The film fades to black, and before the opening credits begin to roll,
we hear the recognizable boing of a Jew’s harp over the black screen. The color gives
way to black and white photography as the film temporally shifts back to the wartime
period, but it is the characteristic and iconic sound of the Jew’s harp (a staple of
Hollywood and spaghetti Western scores) that locates us immediately at the frontier. The
Jew’s harp in question is in all likelihood not the kind you would find in a Western score,
but rather a mukkuri––a form of Jew’s harp native to the Ainu, who are notably absent
from the film.
The mukkuri returns prominently at the film’s conclusion, which mirrors (if not
directly homages) the finale of Anthony Mann’s classic Winchester ’73 (1950), where the
rifle—a central object in both films—brings the diegesis to its mortal, violent conclusion
in an extremely long-range shootout that seems to emphasize the sheer scale of the
frontier surrounding the characters. Characters in many of these Hokkaido-set films ride
horses and ranch livestock, and it is easy when viewing one to forget at times that one
isn’t in fact watching a Western, even when the film is more subtle than The Rambler
Rides Again in signaling its generic influences. Such an affinity between the Hokkaido-
set film and the Western might be palliated were it a tonkori (a zither-like Ainu
instrument) rather than a mukkuri that featured so commonly in the soundscapes of
Hokkaido-set film––even when the film features no Ainu characters, such as in the case
of A Legend, or Was It? or Fukasaku Kinji’s North Sea Dragon (hokkai no abare ryu,
1965). The mukkuri, both possessing a sound familiar to anyone who’d seen a Western
29
before and being a popular tourist commodity owing to its handheld size and ease of play,
was able to fulfill a unique role in locating the films within a touristic Hokkaido that was
also a reflection of the aural iconography associated with the standard representations of
the 19
th
century American West.
When the Ainu film boom took off in the 1950s, it was set against the backdrop of
a critical historical development across the Pacific. Hollywood had begun to critically
reexamine the binary of ‘good’ cowboys and ‘bad’ Indians that had previously
characterized the overwhelming majority of entries into the Western genre. Pro-Indian
films like Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway (1950) and Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrow
(1950) broke from classical depictions of native peoples as purely violent savages to
instead take somewhat more sympathetic stances towards their plight and exploitation at
the hands of white settlers. Likewise, almost all of the films of the Ainu boom take at
least a superficially sympathetic position towards the Ainu. Uchida Tomu’s The
Outsiders (mori to mizuumi no matsuri, 1958) is frequently compared to the work of
Mann, and clearly drew from the pro-Indian template several years before The Rambler
Rides Again did so in unusually explicit fashion.
Uchida’s film offers a complex narrative treatment of the issue of Ainu
discrimination, synthesizing issues like assimilation, the academic gaze, taboos regarding
miscegeny, etc. Other elements of the film however remain narratively imbricated in the
generic trappings of the Western, replete with gunfights, drunken fighting, and daring
escapes on horseback. The visual schema reinforces this, with the color widescreen
photography emphasizing the sheer scale of Hokkaido’s vast landscapes. The opening
credits feature a montage of pristine landscape shots––a vision of nature entirely
30
unmolested by human development. These images serve to locate the viewer in a frontier
far away from Japan’s urban metropolitan core and transition us into the film’s opening
shot: a 1m19s long-take in which a young Takakura Ken, beginning as a barely-visible
figure against the massively open horizon, rides into frame for the first 25 seconds before
a pan tracks his arrival to a bucolically rendered Ainu kotan where he distributes supplies
to its residents.
This opening sequence elegantly if not troublingly crystalizes the film’s
understanding of the Ainu kotan as a part of the frontier geography and landscape of
Hokkaido. The depiction of Hokkaido as a vast landscape of inestimable scale coupled
with the harmonious, unobtrusive kotan ultimately exoticizes both and mirrors, as
Centeno Martin writes, “the iconography of the Far West, embodying romantic and
savage roles similar to those of the Indians in Hollywood Westerns.”
34
And certainly
depictions of Native Americans in Hollywood cinema have, decades before the Ainu-
boom, fallen into similar trappings as the previously mentioned issues with Ship of
Outlaws; a tendency to visually and narratively equate the indigenous residents of the
West with the landscape itself, amongst many other failings. The climatic encounter of
the protagonists and the Apache in John Ford’s influential Stagecoach (1939) might be
seen, as John Price puts it, as “standard use of Indians for excitement…without historical
accuracy or even sufficient fictional explanation.”
35
But for Ford’s film, the Monument
Valley setting is as much a spectacle as are the Apache. The Apache—frequently shot
from below with the landscape instead of shot from above against it, as is the

34
Centeno Martin (2017), pp 72.
35
Price (1973), pp 159.
31
stagecoach—co-function as part of a system of spectacle alongside the towering features
of one of the American West’s most iconic, awe-inspiring locales.
I bring up this example primarily due to Stagecoach’s stature and noted influence
on Japanese filmmakers working in the 1950s and 60s like Kurosawa Akira and Okamoto
Kihachi. Exoticized depictions of the Ainu were certainly part of the theatrical draw of
the flurry of Hokkaido-set films in the decades immediately following the war, but they
don’t account for the whole picture. The images of Hokkaido itself, rendered as
wilderness, produced sufficient spectacle to warrant the production of so many films in
such a relatively short window of time. The fixation on the alterity of Hokkaido’s
landscape is, of course, not unique to cinema. Noriko Day has outlined much of the
complex negotiation of Hokkaido’s status as internal colony in the world of Japanese
literature.
36
But where a literary figure like Doppo, according to Karatani, would use
Hokkaido as a site to sever “the connection between landscape and ‘famous sites,’” in the
cinematic case the landscape is contrarily used to forge new connections between
landscapes and famous sites—only here, the ‘famous sites’ in question (i.e. the American
frontier as depicted on film) have no corresponding spatial relation to Hokkaido but
rather are representationally linked to the island through the generic relationship of the
texts in question to the Western.
37

I’d like to posit that the construction of this generic frontier is consequential
beyond the limits of the screen. Representing Hokkaido through these borrowed genre
elements certainly enabled for audiences a kind of fun spectacle, but it also signaled to
those audiences the centrality—or perhaps, oppositely, the dialectic peripherality—of

36
Day (2012).
37
Karatani (1980), pp 65.
32
Hokkaido’s place in the new post-war order. These generic elements served to define the
nature of Hokkaido’s very identity as the boundary which itself defines inside from out.

Imagined Boundaries: To Borrow Myth, Legend, and Frontier
When a newspaperman is faced with the admission that a legendary shootout––
one so consequential it literally leads the territory to statehood––is actually based on a lie,
he tears up his notes and replies simply: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes
fact, print the legend.” The now iconic summation of Ford’s late masterpiece The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance reminds us that the foundational basis of the American nation
is predicated on a sustained belief in erasure, misrepresentation, false heroism, and
concealed violence; a mythos of justice (built on a deliberate misprision of factual reality)
and the potential for the ‘civilized’ East with its supposed Law and Order to tame the
wild frontier West. In some ways, it echoes the mid-century turn in histories of the
American West away from uncritical acceptance of the Turnerian notion of the frontier as
the source of the unique American character: individualistic, democratic, and egalitarian.
Rather, the film resembles those New Western historians’ critiques of Turner’s Frontier
Thesis, which frequently and exhaustively took Turner’s idealistic accounting of the
settler-colonial American frontier to task particularly for his omissions of such features of
the frontier as:
…the readiness to commit and willingness to tolerate violence; the frequent
ruthlessness of the frontier mind, to which Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans
could testify and which had its repeated reverberations in national policies; the
arrogant, flimsy, and self-righteous justifications of Manifest Destiny engendered
33
by American expansionism; the smugness, provincialism, and cant anti-
intellectualism common to most of America but especially keen in the West.
38

But what Hofstadter here acknowledges alongside Turner and, in turn, Ford as well, is the
“reverberations” of the West in the modern nation-building project. This is the element of
Turner’s thesis that most attracted Tohoku regional historian Takahashi Tomio, who
attempted to borrow Turner’s framework in order to re-read the history of pre-modern
Japan as a history built on the northeastern frontier. As Nathan Hopson reminds us, for
Takahashi—a native of Tohoku who grew up profoundly aware of northern Japan’s
marginalization by the national core—using Turner’s thesis as a model, despite its
discredited status by American historians, would allow him to upend the structural order
by which Japanese history had long relegated histories of Tohoku to the margins.
39

In fact, Hopson suggests that for Takahashi it was precisely because of the
exploitative and expansionist nature of both the United States and Japan that Turner’s
thesis, despite its failure “to recognize the subjectivity of the frontier’s indigenous
inhabitants,” could be accurately reapplied to a Japanese historical context. Takahashi
concluded that the frontier “creates both state and nation,” a determination with which
Ford’s film and perhaps much else of genre of the Hollywood Western, albeit without
Liberty Valance’s criticality, seems to concur.
40
I’d like to then return to the issue of
genre or, more specifically, how the transposition of Western genre elements onto the
context of representations of Hokkaido serves to create a frontier which in turn creates
the nation.

38
Hofstadter (1968), pp 147.
39
Hopson (2014).
40
Hopson (2018).
34
The American West being invoked in order to imagine one’s own national
boundaries is not per se a unique phenomenon. For instance, in the case of Canada,
standard narrativization of the Canadian West aligns it with a combination of freedom
and safety that is contrasted against the lawless violence of its American counterpart to
the South.
41
The Canadian frontier, according to Calder, is therefore triangulated in its
relation not just to the Canadian East but also the American West. What’s different in the
case of post-war Japan is that the triangulation occurs not between two actual frontiers
but instead two imagined frontiers: the imagination of a now-settled Hokkaido as frontier
and the fictive bygone 19
th
century American West as portrayed on sound stages in urban
Southern California.
Although Benedict Anderson’s concept of the imagined community has been
challenged on its relevance to film, to some degree for its theoretical reliance on print
culture rather than image culture but also for its attendance to the creation—but not
necessarily the maintenance––of nations,
42
the case of Japan in the post-war feels like a
particularly apt candidate for its application. Japan in the immediate post-war represents a
nation, once formed under the conditions of a newly-imported print capitalism, re-
forming itself under a new cold-war paradigm with it stripped of its former territorial
boundaries and vacated of its former national identity under the Emperor system.
A nation suddenly parted from its imagined boundaries and creation myth
required a substitute, and indeed found that substitute in Hokkaido—not the real
Hokkaido, which much of the Japanese populace would never see outside perhaps a
rigidly performative tourist visit, but rather the fictive Hokkaido found on screen at their

41
Calder (2000).
42
Williams (2002).
35
local cinema. And with Soviet acquisition of Sakhalin, the Japanese public faced real
anxieties about the definition of its frontier to the North, especially under the framework
of its American-aligned place in the new cold war paradigm. As Anderson writes, “The
nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them… has finite, if elastic,
boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with
mankind.”
43
But even if it is inevitable, as Anderson suggests, that Japan imagines
boundaries for itself, why make Hokkaido the locus of that imaginative process?
Tessa Morris-Suzuki has written on how the core-periphery system relating Japan
to its two major frontiers (in this case Okinawa and Hokkaido) has been a crucial, if
problematic, means by which the Japanese center has defined itself through its perceived
boundaries since antiquity.
44
In the immediate post-war, Okinawa remained under the
control of the United States even after the end of the occupation (and would continue to
do so until 1971). That left Hokkaido, at the time of Japan’s post-war reformation, as the
only remaining colonial holding in the modern Japanese nation-state. This, coupled with
the looming threat of the Soviet Union and the border disputes over the Kurile Islands
that persist to the time of this writing, made Hokkaido the most vulnerable and visible of
Japan’s physical and legal boundaries.
In order to imagine a boundary that fit the American-shaped hole left by the terms
of Japan’s defeat and political re-organization by SCAP, Hokkaido was cinematically
imagined as parallel to the American frontier in very literal terms. If America was built,
as Turner and Takahashi suggested, on the process of assimilating the frontier—perhaps
Japan could be as well. In imagining Hokkaido as Wild West, post-war Japanese film re-

43
Anderson (1991), pp 7.
44
Morris-Suzuki (1996).
36
imagines the very fabric of Japan’s creation mythos. The fictive nature of Hokkaido’s
mythic reconstruction parallels Turner’s erroneous but nationally influential accounting
of the West, and Stoddard’s legend in Liberty Valance. The frontier, in the end, must be
built on fantasy.
I’d like then to return to the formerly discussed pair of films from Chapter 2: Mito
Komon’s Journey to Ezo and The Rambler Rides Again. On their own, these films, as I
previously argued, take almost oppositional strategies to the issue of representing
Hokkaido and the Ainu. One aims to nationalize the past while the other makes the
present nationless. Read individually in this way, an observer might imagine these films
at odds with one another, competing over the same setting but reaching diametrically
opposite representational ends.
Read in tandem, however, the way in which these films function as part of a
codependent, coaxial system becomes increasingly apparent. Frontier as process involves
the constant, perpetual settlement and re-nationalization of Hokkaido. And while a film
like The Rambler Rides Again opens up ambiguities by imperiling the national location of
Japan, rendering Hokkaido nationless actually enables it to—in its indefinition—remain
perpetually frozen in a frontier state, a kind of periphery that serves as a kind of dialectic
against which the national center is formed or performed. Mito Komon’s Journey to Ezo
nationalizes the frontier, but that process tautologically requires the presence of a frontier
to begin with. Texts like The Rambler Rides Again create a kind of perpetual motion
machine when placed in conjunction with their contrapositives in the form of films like
Journey to Ezo. Precisely, texts like Rambler and A Legend, or Was It? dislocate genre
37
and nation, and thereby provide a canvas upon which film texts like Journey to Ezo can
impress a nationalizing ‘taming’ of the Hokkaido frontier in perpetuity.

Conclusion
The narrative fabric by which imagined threads stitch together a nation are
themselves imagined. Ransom Stoddard did not ‘tame’ the West with justice and law; the
West was violently conquered with little regard to the principals that supposedly defined
its identity. In the case of colonial Hokkaido, its long-intertwined relationship with the
United States rendered it a particularly apt candidate to be the site of Japan’s own
national imaginings under the supervision of the Allied occupation. But in the highly
contested and complex context of the post-war, the mechanism of that imagination in
large part found itself refracted through the additionally ahistorical and fictive pathways
of the Western genre defined by popular Hollywood cinema.
The contradiction of course is a Japan obsessed with defining its own
uniqueness—both culturally through the post-war turn to nihonjinron (or discourses on
Japaneseness) and politically through an emphasis on the development of its most
vulnerable frontier in the form of Hokkaido—while simultaneously aping the historical
and cultural structures through which America defined itself. This is a national self-
imagining triangulated through multiple layers of fictive distantiation. A nation, gazing
over the shoulder of its neighbor, to the see the refracted, rippling portrait of them as
itself.

38
IV.
Frontiersman:
Takakura Ken and Settler Masculinity in Hokkaido

Introduction
From the late 1960s and onwards, films set in Hokkaido continued to be produced
at a higher clip than other ‘peripheral’ Japanese regions, including areas such as Okinawa
and Shikoku. A significant transformation, however, was that these films generally
ceased to include depictions of the Ainu and, at least on the surface, in some cases moved
away from the more obvious homages to Hollywood Westerns. Duel at Fort Ezo (ezo
yakata no ketto, Furusawa Kengo, 1970) would be the last commercial production by a
major studio to feature Ainu characters for over two decades. In contrast, films set in
Hokkaido starring Takakura Ken proliferated following the runaway success of the
Abashiri Prison film series which saw an initial ten installments produced between 1965
and 1967, all starring Ken-san, as he is affectionately referred to by fans and the public.
Takakura would by the end of his career go on to star in (including his appearances in the
combined 18 Abashiri Prison series and New Abashiri Prison series films) over 30 films
set or filmed in Hokkaido.
This is a remarkable output for a single actor to feature in so many films set in
what normally might be considered a relatively niche regional shooting locale. But
Hokkaido is more central to the story of Japanese film than its peripheral status might
lead one to assume—and certainly, Takakura Ken is as big a movie star as any the
Japanese film industry has produced. That the Toei icon who became, as many have
suggested, a kind of national symbol of masculinity spent so much of his career
developing the image of that masculinity against the backdrop of Hokkaido perhaps
39
suggests something about the role of frontier fantasies in reconstructing post-war notions
of gender.
And while scholars such as Saito Ayako, Isolde Standish, and Kimberly Icreverzi
have written about Takakura’s masculinity—particularly in relation to the chivalry film
(ninkyo eiga)—little has been written about Takakura’s more sensitive (and less, in
Saito’s terms, homosocial
45
) roles in collaboration with Yamada Yoji. Takakura starred
in two Yamada-helmed films, both set in Hokkaido, both co-starring Yamada regular
Baisho Chieko, and both featuring Takakura as a convict—newly freed in the case of The
Yellow Handkerchief (shiawase no kiiroi hankachi, 1978) and on the lamb in the case of
A Distant Cry from Spring (haruka naru yama no nakigoe, 1980). These films not only
work metatextually with each other (they can be and often are loosely read as part of an
unofficial trilogy along with Where Spring Comes Late) but also from the image of
Takakura as a noble criminal cultivated from his roles in ninkyo eiga like the Abashiri
Prison series.
As previously noted, much of Japanese social order was thrust into radical reform
in the wake of the country’s defeat in the Pacific War. In particular, the figure of the
salaryman came to occupy for Japan a position of what Connell has termed hegemonic
masculinity.
46
The salaryman represented everything Japan supposedly became in the
post-war era: pacifistic, economically industrious, committed to providing financially for
a heteronormative nuclear family that would eagerly use surplus income on consumer
spending and luxury goods.
47
As the high-growth era took off the in 1960s, the salaryman
cemented its position as the hegemonic form of masculinity firmly supplanting its

45
Saito (2004).
46
Connell (1995).
47
Dasgupta (2003).
40
primary pre-war and wartime competitors in the figures of the soldier and the farmer.
That the ascension of the salaryman as the dominant gendered expression of Japanese
masculinity coincided with the twilight of the Ainu film boom and the transition away
from more explicit depictions of Hokkaido as Wild West perhaps suggests the dwindling
need by the 1970s for images of rugged frontiersmen assimilating a hostile landscape and
its ‘uncivilized’ indigenous population.
I would like then to instead consider the ways in which a particular kind of
transitionary post-war settler masculinity emerges here: in a space absent of the Ainu,
condemned men who yet retain a kind of stoic nobility, emblematic of prior forms of
honor-bound violent masculinity, need to be and are reformed in order to import a
working post-war Japanese social order to the frontier. The key figure in this would be
Takakura Ken. As a symbol of a kind of bygone masculinity, Takakura embodied the
generational mismatch of more traditional masculine forms now adrift in a post-war
structural order that rejects much of the very foundations of their identity. And while the
honorable yakuza of the ninkyo eiga almost always ultimately maintains his complete
commitment to jingi (yakuza ethical rules or honor code) over newfound social
obligations of the post-war age, the protagonists of the Yamada films are made to
reconcile with and reform themselves into the new social order. Hokkaido would serve as
the backdrop for negotiating this crisis, once again signaling that the peripheral becomes
the vantage point from which the core-in-crisis can be intervened in.

Takakura Ken in The Yellow Handkerchief and A Distant Cry from Spring
41
Takakura Ken was born in Fukuoka in 1931. The consummate Kyushu man, he
became one of the premier Toei “tough guys”—appearing in over 180 films for the studio
by the time of his departure from Toei in 1976.
48
His most iconic performance would be
in the Hokkaido-set Abashiri Prison series of films, where he plays an honorable gangster
navigating conflicts stemming from his internment in Japan’s most hostile, remote prison
facility. After Takakura’s release from Toei, he would return to Abashiri by starring in
two sensitive ‘revisionist’ Hokkaido films helmed by Shochiku director Yamada Yoji.
One of Yamada Yoji’s most celebrated films outside of his career of helming
nearly every entry in the Tora-san series (otoko wa tsurai yo), The Yellow Handkerchief
is a film adaptation loosely inspired by a 1971 New York Post column about a man, just
loosed from a long stint in prison, who had written to his lover asking of her that he
would be driving through town and if she still loved him to tie a yellow ribbon around a
large tree in town. If he didn’t see the ribbon, he’d drive and through and that would be
that—with the story happily ending with an image of a tree covered in yellow ribbons.
Yamada’s film generally follows the same template: Shima Yusaku, played by Takakura,
is released from a three-year term at Abashiri prison. He encounters young pair Hanada
Kinya (played by Takeda Tetsuya, also a Fukuoka-native) and Ogawa Akemi (Momoi
Kaori), who are driving through Hokkaido together after each being spurned by lovers in
their respective hometowns.
The film charts Kinya’s desperate and, occasionally forceful, attempts to win
Akemi’s affections, but it principally revolves around the slow revelation of Yusaku’s
past—his violent youth as a petty criminal, his reformation as a coalminer in Yubari, and
his eventual marriage to Mitsue (played by regular flame to Takakura’s characters,

48
Hoover
42
Baisho Chieko). After Mitsue miscarries, Yusaku drunkenly gets into a street fight where
he accidentally kills his opponent. While in prison he forcibly divorces Mitsue in order to
encourage her to remarry before she is too old—but upon release writes to her saying that
if by any chance she’s still waiting to tie a yellow handkerchief outside their home as a
signal to him. When the trio finally reaches Yubari from Abashiri, they are met with
dozens of yellow ribbons.
The second collaboration between Yamada and Takakura would be a Distant Cry
From Spring, where fugitive Tajima Kosaku (Takakura) takes shelter during a storm at
the ranch of widowed mother Kazami Tamiko (Baisho). Departing somewhat from the
Shane (George Stevens, 1953) template it borrows from
49
, Kazami struggles to manage
the ranch alone while raising her son without a father, and Tajima, needing a place to lay
low, offers his labor for room and board. The relationship between the two over time
becomes romantically intimate as Tajima increasingly becomes a surrogate father to
Kazami’s young son. But over their idyllic ranch life looms the law, pursuing Tajima
from Hakodate for killing a loan shark who drove Tajima’s wife to suicide. Tajima
chooses to surrender himself to the police at the film’s conclusion and accept his fate, and
Kazami promises to wait for his release.
These films are, for the ever-humanistic Yamada, principally tales of the
possibility of change, redemption, and forgiveness for a form of broken and toxic
masculinity. Takakura’s characters are both reformed murderers hoping to earn
acceptance despite their past from the women in their lives, but the side characters in both
films also parallel this narrative arc. In The Yellow Handkerchief, Kinya’s forceful
advances become assault as he ignores Akemi’s rejections on multiple occasions—

49
Nolletti 1985
43
prompting Shima to lecture him on a more tender masculinity in order for Kinya to repair
his relationship with the clearly traumatized Akemi. In A Distant Cry from Spring,
wealthy businessman Abuta repents for his unwanted and forceful advances on Kazami
by financially supporting her until Tajima’s release from prison. In both Kinya and
Abuta’s cases, Yamada toes a dangerous line of sexual assault-apologia in favor of his
humanistic outlook on forgiveness and the inherent good of all characters. There are no
real bad people in either of these films (at least on screen); just characters who are either
beset by difficult circumstances or are temporarily misguided but still capable of
changing for the better.
Embedded in this discourse on the salvageability of toxic masculinity is an
allegory for the nation. These men are, as is the Japanese state, guilty of a terrible crime
in their past. But they are, as per the liberal neo-Imperialist line of thought regarding the
‘pacifistic’ post-war Japanese state, now reformed and deserving of forgiveness. But in
order to fully understand the way masculinity and nation intersect through these
Hokkaido-set films, it requires a deeper consideration of the particular historical
manifestations of masculinity and nation in order to properly situate a generic reading of
these texts in their broader contexts.

Missing Men at the Vestiges of Frontier
By the late 1970s, the political, social, and economic position of Hokkaido
relative to the rest of Japan had changed dramatically. Hokkaido had since supplanted
some long-established regions of the naichi like Shikoku in terms of population and
economic productivity. If Hokkaido was not really much of a “Wild West”-style frontier
44
by the 1960s, it certainly was not one by the end of the 1970s. Hokkaido was instead by
most standards a fully developed region of Japan. The political circumstances of the Ainu
were beginning to shift as well. Inspired in by burakumin liberation movements, a new
generation of Ainu rejected the previous lineage of stereotypical and offensive depictions
in majority Japanese media, and began efforts to take control of their own
representational destiny.
50
It is unlikely coincidence that the Ainu mostly disappeared
from commercial Japanese cinema around this time—not only would studios have to
worry about whether or not their depictions would be deemed offensive and prompt
protest from Ainu communities, concurrent developments in nihonjinron
51
(discourses on
Japaneseness) meant that a renewed championing of Japanese-specificity and emphasis
on the erasure of minorities in favor of the myth of homogeneity meant that any
reminders of the continued present-day existence of the Ainu would challenge the
prevailing political currents.
Ainu-less films set in Hokkaido in turn began to reflect these changes. Economic
developments across Japan meant a shift away from coal and precious metals mining that
had hitherto been a critical element of the economies of Hokkaido cities such as Yubari.
Rural populations in Hokkaido, as with much of the rest of Japan, dwindled as people
increasingly relocated to regional urban centers like Sapporo, Hakodate, and Asahikawa.
The settler colonial “pioneer” imagery that characterized much of Hokkaido’s depictions
was even less representative of Hokkaido’s lived reality by the 1970s. One other iconic
characteristic of Hokkaido’s economy, the emphasis on ranching livestock over the more
traditional rice cultivation on the mainland, was also quickly becoming more fantasy than

50
Centeno Martin (2017).
51
Dale (1986).
45
fact. Hokkaido, despite its reputation, became in reality the second largest producer of
rice after Niigata prefecture.
52
Films set in Hokkaido confronted these shifts, with
Hokkaido-set entries in serials like the Tora-san series or Truck Rascals series dealing
directly with these economic and demographic changes.
At their core, these films are dealing with the post-war absence of men. As the
hegemonic form of masculinity centered around urban living, the picturesque rural
locales that formed the settings for these films were left with widows and divorcees. In
both A Distance Cry from Spring and Truck Rascals 3: Truckstar Goes to Hokkaido
(torakku yaro: bokyo ichibanboshi, Suzuki Noribumi, 1976), a woman with no husband
struggles to maintain a ranch on her own. In Tora-san Goes North (otoko wa tsurai yo:
shiretoko bojō, Yamada Yoji, 1981), a jilted divorcee returns to her rural hometown after
falling out of passion with her Tokyo husband. Each of the above films, perhaps not
coincidentally, features a cow birth scene but lacks the presence of any bulls. In the case
of A Distant Cry from Spring, a cow is even artificially inseminated on-screen. The age
of salarymen creates, as Muriel Jolivet puts it, a Japan full of “de facto ‘single’
mothers.”
53
The symbolic male lack afforded the opportunity for highly masculine—and
highly sexed—figures like Sugawara Bunta (another Toei “tough guy” and the star of the
Truck Rascals series) and Takakura Ken to inject missing masculinity into these spaces
of absence.
And while these male figures are at once “traditionally” masculine foils to the
effeminate and de-sexualized white-collar worker, they also complicate the notions of the
“traditional” by invoking Western, rather than purely Japanese, archetypes of

52
Takahashi (1980).
53
Jolivet (2004).
46
masculinity. Kondo has previously written on the complex and often contradictory
navigation of developing modern masculinities while toeing along the fissures of racial,
national, and cultural transformations against the backdrop of the West/East paradigm.
54

In the case of a Distant Cry from Spring, Takakura borrows from the Hollywood Western
figure of the mysterious wanderer—like the titular protagonist of Shane—in order to
configure a form of masculinity that stands outside modern/Western versus
traditional/Japanese alignments.
The contradiction at the very structural core of the post-war Japanese nation is
that, by retaining the Emperor system but stripping it of its symbolic and political
authority, the national body was left with its proverbial father in a state of absence or
negation. The nation remains in a state of perpetual deferral; best depicted by Oshima
Nagisa in Death by Hanging (koshikei, 1969) where—when the capital punishment
system finds itself at an unlikely standstill due to the failure of a hanging to properly
execute a condemned man—the responsibility of deciding how to procedurally deal with
the situation is persistently and comically deferred ad infinitum. There is no ultimate
authority at the top of ladder––which leaves the nation in a state of what Asada Akira
terms as infantile capitalism.
55
Asada sees Japan in the 1970s as economy of perpetual
children, with the value placed on entering adulthood in sharp decline.
Infantile capitalism meant for masculinity that “despite frequent arguments about
Confucian patriarchy, the Japanese family is an essentially maternal arena of "amae,"
indulgence, and both the father and the children are softly wrapped in it (in other words,

54
Kondo (1999).
55
Asada (1989).
47
the mother is forced to provide that kind of care).”
56
By providing the last remnants of
masculinity in a land without men, Hokkaido once again is the site by which the nation in
crisis (in this case, a crisis of masculinity) attempts to navigate a solution. For Yamada,
who resisted much of the political and formal trappings of the New Wave as the more
moderate counterpart to filmmakers like fellow Shochiku director Oshima, Takakura
provided the opportunity to intervene in the crisis of masculinity by using a national
symbol of masculinity. But Yamada is a liberal humanist, not a reactionary: he uses the
more traditionally masculine figure of Takakura in a gentle and tender turn in order to
reach a kind of middle-ground. Crucially, a key plot-element in both films is Takakura’s
character teaching the younger male generation what it means to be a man. So while the
violent masculinity of these characters is ultimately reformed in the films, there is a give
as well as a take. Shima and Tajima both reform and are reformed by the contemporary
social order. But perhaps most of all, they fulfil the settler-colonial paradigm by
consummating a nuclear family structure and promising to rejuvenate the rural
settlements now depopulating due to economic and demographic shifts.

Conclusion
It’s difficult to say that Yamada and Takakura’s intervention into masculinity did
much to stall the long-term disappearance of the more traditional forms of manliness in
contemporary Japan. In Miike Takashi’s recent First Love (2019), a Chinese immigrant
to Japan relays her frustration at having moved to the country due to her love of Japanese
movies starring Takakura Ken and similarly manly men—only to find upon her arrival
none of the sort were still extant in the country.

56
Asada (1989).
48
Instead, these films catalogue fractures along forming alongside the incongruities
of the emergent postwar masculine landscape. Men, played by macho figures like
Takakura and Sugawara, drift into spaces defined by male absence. They save the women
who occupy these spaces with their distinct—but ultimately evanescent—masculinity as
they drift back out. The crisis lies here in this contradiction: the nation is a space that both
requires the presence of this masculinity but is ultimately incompatible with it in its
modern incarnation and therefore demands its reformation or even banishment. And
while it’s difficult to argue that Takakura’s performances staged a successful intervention
in negotiating this divide, what Yamada and Takakura’s collaborations do reveal,
however, is the continued role of Hokkaido’s regional alterity and generic positionality in
configuring Japanese national identity.
Hokkaido in the post-war served as a national boundary point as well as a land of
exile for outcasts, prisoners, colonial refugees, and other marginal figures. Its mythical,
rather than actual, quality as a frontier let it serve as a space for interventions into issues
of national identity: in this case, a crisis of post-war masculinity as the hegemonic mode
of masculinity in Japan—the white-collar salaryman—came to increasingly emblematize
the effeminate and the infantile. From a conversative perspective, men were nowhere to
be found at the core of Japanese society, so Yamada Yoji turned to the periphery in order
to find the remnants of masculinity at the vestiges of frontier.

49
V.
Conclusion

From the side, a whole range; from the end, a single peak:
Far, near, high, low, no two parts alike.
Why can’t I tell the true shape of Lushan?
Because I myself am in the mountain.
Su Shi, Written on the Wall of West Forest Temple

Regional alterity is the condition by which the peripheral is differentiated, or
othered, from the metropolitan core. For Hokkaido, the visual regime of post-war media
exploited its geographic, economic, and demographic differences from the rest of Japan
in order reinforce its Otherness as the sole colonial holding in the post-Imperial state. The
particular mechanism of this visual regime was the structure of the Hollywood Western.
Hokkaido became a theme park rendition of Wild West: a land of cattle and horse
ranches (in reality, rice farming came to dominate Hokkaido’s agricultural economy) as
well as bonafide ‘Indians’ in Hokkaido’s indigenous population. These conditions were
packaged cinematically and commodified into touristic experiences that enabled majority
Japanese society a canvas by which to test the boundaries of self-definition.
Hokkaido became the site through which crises of national identity were filtered.
The crisis of security, of ethnic identity, of masculinity; each was cast against northerly
shores in order to configure the national self. But there remains much to be done that lies
outside the scope of this thesis project. Cinema is but one of the ways Japanese visual
culture has engaged with Hokkaido—within media studies, more is to be researched on
depictions in television, video games, and comic books, with many important texts in
50
each medium taking place on the northern island. Further work on topics circumstantially
engaged by this thesis, namely tourist and museum culture, must be done. Additionally,
more work needs to be done on contemporary depictions of Hokkaido and the Ainu in
cinema, as shifts in political climates have given increased voices to indigenous
communities throughout the world, the Ainu included.
Finally, utilizing what Tessa Morris-Suzuki terms an “anti-area studies” approach
to seeing Hokkaido as part of a global system of peripheral regions might allow us to
better understand its place detached from the rigid axes of a Japanese colonial
paradigm.
57
The concern of this thesis, however, has principally been not what Hokkaido
is but how it is rendered by a film industry almost entirely located within the Tokyo-
Kansai bimodal metropole core. The Hokkaido in question is a fantastic space, much like
the Wild West it was modeled after, deployed in order to reflexively define the core
through its fictive delineation as a frontier.
The nation, faced with a crisis of identity at the conclusion of the Pacific War,
ironically defined itself through its most peripheral locale. But the process of that
definition involved projecting fantasy onto Hokkaido, and in turn, a fantastical history
back onto itself. Japan could reverse-engineer a world in which its settlers were cowboys
and pioneers, and the Ainu as happy Indians who were graciously assimilated into the
fold of Japanese industrial modernity. The resultant fantasy is wrought with
contradictions: a Japan supposedly completely unique in character had fantasized a
parallel history with the United States. The fractures only grew with time, as the gap
between the imagined (e.g. Takakura Ken as the national symbol of masculinity) and the

57
Morris-Suzuki (2000).
51
actual (e.g. the actual figure of hegemonic masculinity, the salaryman) continued to
widen.
If indeed “the shape of things becomes clearer when on looks at the edge than
when one looks at the center,” what happens when the true shape of the edge is
obfuscated?
58
Whether it is truly possible to discern the frontier from the fantasy remains
yet to be seen.

58
Morris-Suzuki (1994).
52
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Asset Metadata

Creator Silverman, Adam Paul (author)

Core Title Frontier fantasies: cinema, regional alterity, and Hokkaido at the boundaries of nation

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program East Asian Area Studies

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 07/28/2021

Defense Date 07/25/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Ainu studies,area studies,Hokkaido,Japanese cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest,Takakura Ken

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Choe, Youngmin (committee member), Yasar, Kerim (committee member)

Creator Email adam.paul.silverman@gmail.com,asilverm@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15658932

Unique identifier UC15658932

Legacy Identifier etd-SilvermanA-9914

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Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Silverman, Adam Paul

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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