Ezo
- Japanese: 蝦夷 (Ezo), 蝦夷地 (Ezochi)
"Ezo" or "Ezochi" is an old name for the region historically beyond the northern edges of Japanese settlement and governance, comprising Hokkaidô, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, the homelands of indigenous peoples including the Ainu. The term Ezo uses the same characters as the term emishi, which is often translated as "barbarian."
Over the course of the Edo period, Matsumae han (and at times the Tokugawa shogunate directly) took over parts of the region, incorporating them into Wajinchi (lit. "the land of Japanese people") and thus shrinking the space the Japanese saw as "Ezochi" (i.e. "the land of 'barbarians'"). That remaining as "Ezochi" was consistently seen as iiki 異域, a "foreign region," outside of "Japan."[1]
History
Edo Period
In 1855/2, the shogunate reassigned jurisdiction and responsibility for Ezochi, dividing among Sendai, Kubota, Hirosaki, Morioka and Matsumae domains what had previously been overseen by Matsumae alone.[2] Later that same year, in 1855/10, the shogunate permitted shogunal vassals, retainers of the various domains, and commoners to relocate to Ezo, and granted loans to those who engaged in developing (kaitaku, 開拓) the land.[3]
References
- ↑ By comparison, consider the terms takoku 他国 used to mean "another province" or "another domain" within Japan, and ikoku 異国 used to refer to "foreign countries" outside of Japan such as Ryûkyû or Korea. Luke Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa, Cambridge University Press, 1998., pp5-6.
- ↑ Ishin Shiryo, vol 2, pp19, 36.
- ↑ Ishin Shiryo, vol 2, p133.
