Intercontinental Borderland: The Second Russian-American Company Colony on Urup in the Performance of Russo-Japanese Relations

• In Event: The Mist-Covered Borderland – Early Modern Ainu-Japanese-Russian Relations in Ezo

Abstract

The second Russian-American Company (RAK) colony on Urup Island (1828~1855) in the middle of the Kuril/Chishima archipelago formed an unlikely bridge between Russia, Japan, and North America. Unlike an earlier colony the RAK had maintained on Urup at the turn of the 19th century, a conduit for Japanese foodstuffs obtained through surreptitious trade with Japanese merchants via the indigenous Ainu, the latter colony was a modest sea-otter hunting settlement. Its inhabitants were strictly forbidden from initiating contact with Japanese or southern Ainu, even on Kunashir/Kunashiri Island immediately to the south, in compliance with an official Russian government pledge made at the insistence of Tokugawa authorities after the Golovnin Incident of 1811-1813.

Yet in Japanese eyes, by scrupulously avoiding contact the Russians actually set themselves up as political inferiors of the Tokugawa, thus integrating their country not only into the Tokugawa foreign relations system, but into Japanese domestic politics. As far as Tokugawa officials were concerned, the Russians were satisfied with their prescribed role as permanent outsiders, which helped the Tokugawa legitimize themselves in vis-à-vis other Japanese clans. At the same time, the colony was officially integrated into the Russian-American Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Aleuts from Kodiak Island were forcibly relocated to Urup to do the actual hunting. In addition, there is evidence that unsanctioned trade between Ainu living in the Russian and Japanese spheres of influence continued. This presentation will, for the first time, analyze the second RAK colony as the intercontinental borderland it truly was.

Author

• Viktor Shmagin, University of California, Santa Barbara