Highlights of Ainu and Ezochi Rare Materials at the Library of Congress: Takeshirō Matsuura, 19th-Century Humanist Explorer of Ezochi

(The following is a post by Eiichi Ito, Japanese reference specialist, Asian Division)

The Library of Congress holds a collection of rare materials, including books, manuscripts, and maps produced during the 18th and 19th centuries, documenting the life and culture of the Ainu people and their homeland. Some of the most notable items are available online through the Ainu and Ezochi Rare Collection, which was launched in 2020. (Read more on its launch in this post from June 18, 2020).

The Ainu are an indigenous people who have traditionally lived in an area encompassing the far north of the Japanese archipelago, especially the island now called Hokkaido (known as Ezo prior to 1868), as well as Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands (present-day Russia). During the Edo period (1600-1868), many Ainu people also resided in the northern part of Honshū, the largest island in Japan. In the Ainu language, these traditional homelands are called Ainu Mosir (Land of the Ainu), while Japanese long referred to these areas as Ezo or Ezochi (Ezo Land).

Because the Ainu people did not possess a written language, nearly all textual materials about the Ainu or Ezochi before the 20th century, whether records, documents, or travel narratives, were produced by non-Ainu people who traveled, explored, or resided in Ezochi.

Among the Japanese who visited Ezochi and had direct contact with the Ainu, Takeshirō Matsuura 松浦竹四郎 (1818-1888), sometimes called the “Godfather of Hokkaido,” stands out as one of the most notable travelers to Ezochi in late 19th-century Japan.

Matsuura was born in 1818 in a village in Ise Province, now part of present-day Matsusaka City in Mie Prefecture. After studying under a Confucian scholar, he left Ise in 1833 at the age of 16 to embark on what would become a lifetime of journeys. After a decade of touring all around Japan, from the northeastern city of Sendai to Kagoshima on the southwest tip of Kyushu, the most southerly of the four main islands of Japan, Matsuura traveled to Ezochi three times between 1844 and 1849. Motivated by insatiable intellectual curiosity, Matsuura sought out opportunities to engage with Japanese traders and doctors who dealt with the Ainu. They were in need of assistants like Matsuura, who was eager to explore the northern frontier, and they hired him for their travels into Ezo. He later went on three more expeditions to Ezochi as a government official hired by the Tokugawa shogunate between 1856 and 1858.

Matsuura’s first three expeditions to Ezochi established him as an expert on the region, leading to the Tokugawa shogunate’s hiring Matsuura to explore and investigate Ezochi further. On these later journeys, his mission was to explore, map, and document the geographical features of Ezochi, an assignment that should be viewed against a backdrop of rapidly changing international relations and the increasingly frequent appearance of Russian ships around Ezochi and Japan’s northern frontier.

Matsuura wrote a series of travelogues about his first three expeditions. In these writings, he described the life and culture of the Ainu whom he directly observed. He also noted how the Ainu people were placed in extremely difficult living conditions under the governance of the Japanese in the Matsumae domain. This domain, located on the southern tip of what is now Hokkaido, was controlled by the Matsumae clan, who held a special monopoly on trade with the Ainu. It was also the northernmost administrative unit controlled by the Tokugawa shogunate and was something of a borderland, straddling the frontier between Japanese and Ainu lands.

The Ainu and Ezochi Rare Collection holds 12 unique titles authored by Matsuura (as well as seven duplicate or variant editions of some of these titles) that reflect the range of his travels in Ezochi and descriptions of what he saw there. Another work, “Hokkai-ō nenpu” 北海翁年譜, offers a detailed chronology of Matsuura’s life.

Looking at how Matsuura documented his travels, one can see how his observations reflect a humanist’s sympathetic eye and mind. One visible example is the contrast between two related images that appear in “Kita Ezo yoshi” 北蝦夷餘誌, which record his findings in Karafuto (present-day Sakhalin).

The first illustration from the book, displayed here, shows Matsuura being led by an Ainu person from the Taraika (Gulf of Patience) area on Sakhalin’s central east coast and followed by individuals belonging to two Indigenous people groups: the Orok, from the central part of Sakhalin, and the Nivkh, from the northern half of Sakhalin.

The second image depicts a group of Ainu people on the right, kneeling to present gifts to a Japanese government official. Two Ainu people holding out the gifts, a large fish and some vegetables, are smiling but with adulation, and the other three Ainu people behind them appear helpless. On the right, three Ainu people carry an expression of resignation.

The stark contrast of Ainu facial expressions and postures in the two images can be viewed as part of Matsuura’s criticism of the official policy towards the Ainu people. Such discoveries in this digital collection, like Matsuura’s sympathetic eye and mind, aim to stimulate more research and learning about the Ainu people and the methods used to document their land and culture.

For questions or additional information about the Ainu and Ezochi Rare Collection or any other Ainu-related materials in the Japanese collection, please use the Asian Division’s Ask a Librarian service.

 

Learn More:

Matsuura Takeshiro Memorial Museum. “Matsuura Takeshiro.” Site maintained by city government of Matsusaka City, Mie Prefecture. Last updated Feb. 20, 2012.

Sano, Yoshikazu. Matsuura Takeshirō: Shisamu Wajin no hen’yō 松浦武四郎 : シサム和人の変容. Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikaku Sentā, 2002.

Smith, Henry D. “Lessons from the One-Mat Room: Piety and Playfulness Among Nineteenth-Century Japanese Antiquarians.” Impressions, no. 33 (2012): 54–69.

Starr, Frederick. The Old Geographer Matsuura Takeshiro. Tokyo: Fukuin Printing Co., 1916. Available online via HathiTrust.

Yokoyama, Takao. Kita no kuni no hokoritakaki hitobito: Matsuura Takeshirō to Ainu o yomu 北の国の誇り高き人びと : 松浦武四郎とアイヌを読む. Tokyo: Kano Shobo, 1992.

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