ABSTRACT
Comparison is a practice that folds multiple landscapes together. Focusing on salmon management in Hokkaido, Japan, this chapter explores how the comparative practices of the island’s government officials, fishermen, scientists, and activists have become a powerful force in the formation of its human–nonhuman arrangements. Since the mid-nineteenth century, natural resources management in northern Japan has been profoundly influenced by how people within and beyond Japan have compared Hokkaido’s landscapes to those of other places. After the Meiji Restoration, Japanese officials sought to colonize Hokkaido and “develop” its lands and waters to make the new Japanese nation-state more legibly “modern” to Euro-American audiences. Their comparisons, however, were not between Japan and an undifferentiated “West”; instead, they engaged in heterodox analogies that reached out to the American West, the Russian East, New Zealand, and Chile. Today, the way Hokkaido residents compare their forests, fields, and waters with others around the world continues to affect the region’s approaches to environmental management, as well as its physical landscapes. By examining such comparisons, this chapter opens up the practices and geographies through which we understand landscape-making and shows how comparisons pull material pieces of multiple worlds together in ways that remake Hokkaido’s watershed ecologies and salmon bodies.
