ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the settler colonization of Ainu Mosir as an encounter in the following two senses of the term. The first is the encounter between the Indigenous Ainu and the Wajin (Japanese) settlers; the second is the encounter between the Meiji government's emigration policy and the American settler colonial expansion called the Westward movement. The understanding of the Ainu as a “vanishing race” emerged precisely at the moment the notion of survival of the fittest rose to the surface as a new hegemonic ideology in modernizing Japan. The label of “vanishing race” resulted from the installation of the capitalist mode of production in Hokkaido, through which the Ainu were rendered as a useless population and subsequently replaced by prison laborers. Indigenous peoples did not become wage laborers but were made into members of “vanishing races” as a result of being dispossessed of their means of sustenance.
