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Training For Empire And Modernity: Japan’S Development Of Hokkaido From The 1870s-90s, Keegan J. Cothern

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Most history texts place the beginning of Japan’s colonial empire in 1895, with the acquisition of Formosa (now Taiwan) and Korea in 1910. The first Japanese experience with administering and developing a land not traditionally their own, nor inhabited by ethnically Yamato Japanese, however, might be found in the relatively inhospitable northern island of Hokkaido during the first half of the Meiji era (1868-1912). Hokkaido can be viewed as a colonization laboratory, where the blueprints of the later Japanese Empire were initially developed. It was not solely by native Japanese knowledge that the exploration, research, development, and the creation of …