Fantasy? Today it might seem so, but by 2012 Hokkaido could be a major centrifugal force in Japan, just as it was once a major unifying force. After 1869, Tokyo’s drive to colonize the northern “wasteland” marked Japan’s birth as a modern nation. Now, more than a century later, calls for expanded self-government, statehood in a Japanese federation or “divorce” from the motherland resonate among Hokkaido’s intellectual elite. So unusual is this revolt, one has to wonder whether it foretells a new kind of global-age independence movement: the rebellion of provinces fed up with the economic failures of once rich, stable nations.
If any wealthy country could be called a failed state, it is Japan. In Hokkaido, intellectuals began debating independence when the national economy began its long slide in the early 1990s. Their ranks include sociologists bent on creating a postcolonial identity for the island, agricultural experts who envision ecofriendly commercial farms that could someday feed much of Asia and business people eager for local companies to replace subsidiaries controlled from Tokyo. They’ve done exhaustive studies forecasting Hokkaido’s evolution into a quasi-independent “special economic zone” and encouraged a local tycoon to establish Air Do, a Sapporo-based airline that now competes with carriers from “mainland” Japan. Their ideas even inspired a risky work of science fiction, serialized in Hokkaido’s largest newspaper last year, in which the Sapporo government declares independence from Japan. The story could “motivate… the rediscovery of Hokkaido’s values,” said Tatsuya Hori, the island’s real-life governor.
Unlike most postwar independence movements around the world, Hokkaido’s has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity. In fact, most Hokkaido nationalists are scions of the families that planted the Japanese flag on the island in the late 1800s. Their ancestors include anti-Meiji samurai clans exiled to the frontier after 1870, and “soldier farmers” later sent to Hokkaido to defend the territory from Russia.
Mythologized as Japan’s “frontier,” Hokkaido was nonetheless less than a full-fledged member of the empire. Tokyo central planners focused investment on resource extraction (chiefly coal, timber, grain and fish) and the roads, harbors, dams and aqueducts it required. Even today Hokkaido, with just 4.5 percent of Japan’s population, consumes about 10 percent of the national public-works budget. That translates into approximately ¥800 billion per year in new concrete–an addiction that will stop the local economy cold when Tokyo inevitably stops spending. “Hokkaido contributed to the growth of Japan, but was it beneficial for us?” asks Nobuaki Shirai, author of the pro-independence tome “The Theory of Hok-kaido.” “Japan’s zaibatsu [prewar conglomerates] exploited our island as a resource base, and after being managed by the central government and Tokyo corporations for so long, Hokkaido has become an object to be taken advantage of.” Shirai hopes to champion the cause of independence by establishing a Hokkaido National Party when conditions are ripe.
More-mainstream Hokkaido politicians have seized on Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s call for economic “regionalization” to demand a greater say in how development aid is spent. Above all, they want new industries, for the day when the natural resources are tapped out. In Tokyo, however, the aim of decentralization is to force prefectures to generate their own revenues, weaning them from federal subsidies. “Outsiders look at us and think: ‘They’re stealing money from Tokyo’s pockets’,” says Hisashi Inoue, an economist at Hokkaido University. “In the rest of Japan people are now saying: ‘We gave Hokkaido a 50-year moratorium to become financially independent, but we can’t afford it anymore’.”
As the economy founders, separatist sentiment is brewing in the most unlikely places. Take Naganuma, a rice-growing town of 12,500 located less than an hour by car outside Sapporo. Nobuyuki Komatani is head of the local agricultural cooperative and, like many rural leaders in Japan, a stalwart of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Yet even he sees a separatist crisis on the horizon. Public-works spending, which supports many of his constituents in part-time construction jobs, is drying up. Agricultural income is plummeting owing to competition from China and Southeast Asia. Worse, proposed national reforms would cut the number of lawmakers, leaving fewer voices for Hokkaido in Parliament. “There is a limit to what I can endure,” says Komatani. “If these things continue, even I would go independent.”
Others are already moving that way. The Hokkaido Institute for Future Advancement was founded in 1976 to advise the central government on local development projects. Now its major aim is to wean Hokkaido from public works, before Tokyo cuts the money flow. But with 7 percent unemployment and one in eight of its workers in construction, Hokkaido has limited options. “We have to face the fact that we must survive without the central government’s help,” says Isao Hara, the institute’s president. “When the economic deterioration begins to affect their daily lives, the Hokkaido people will wake up.” Hara forecasts an economic crisis leading to a United States of Japan in which Hokkaido collects taxes locally and manages its own economy.
In the vision of a bloodless rebellion spun recently in the local paper, the governor simply transmits a secession notice to the prime minister and declares the independent Ezo Republic, taking the name of a real-life military rebellion that flared on Hokkaido in 1868. Ezo endures a rocky start. The local economy collapses as Japan turns off the financial tap, triggering an exodus of 100,000 people a month. Then something unexpected happens: failed salarymen–modern equivalents of the 19th-century samurai–begin arriving from Japan to take up farming. Foreigners take advantage of Hokkaido’s collapsing currency to set up manufacturing facilities, laying the foundation for recovery. By the end of the series Hokkaido is back on its feet. The story’s final installment appeared in the newspaper’s April Fools’ Day edition. Laugh now. By 2012 an independent Hokkaido could be more than a prank.
