Since the mid-nineteenth century, agricultural development and fisheries
management in northern Japan have been profoundly shaped by how people
within and beyond Japan have compared Hokkaido's landscapes to those of
other places, as part of efforts to make the new Japanese nation-state
more legibly "modern." In doing so, they engaged in non-conforming modes
of thinking that reached out to diverse places, including the American
West and southern Chile. Today, the comparisons made by Hokkaido fishing
industry professionals, scientists, and Ainu indigenous groups between
the island's forests, fields, and waters and those of other places
around the world continue to dramatically affect the region's approaches
to environmental management and its physical landscapes. In this
far-ranging ethnography, Heather Anne Swanson shows how this traffic in
ideas shapes the course of Hokkaido's development, its fish, and the
lives of people on and beyond the island while structuring trade
dynamics, political economy, and multispecies relations in watersheds
around the globe.