The recurring “discovery” of Hokkaido and the Ainu: three decades of nineteenth-century British travelogues

What is the explorer or scientist to do when rapid advances in technology, communi-cations, and transport leave few truly untouched regions for them to “ discover ” ? This article will explore the case of Europeans and Americans during the second half of the nineteenth century who sought to make a name for themselves by exploring Hokkaido and studying the Ainu, a people indigenous to the Okhotsk region in Northeast Asia. I will argue that despite appearances, a careful reading and comparison of published sources from this period reveals that the Ainu in fact were visited by a signi ﬁ cant number of Westerners and that these “ explorers ” made extensive use of a pre-existing travel infrastructure which expanded over time. I will analyze the diverse strategies that these Westerners combined to sell their travelogues to a British reading public, including emphasizing and exaggerating their supposed “ discoveries, ” claiming important contributions to science, and employing humor and exoticism.


Background
The outline of modern Japan is easily recognizable, but what is currently considered the northernmost of Japan's "main islands," Hokkaido, was in fact a recently incorporated colonial frontier in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was originally the primary homeland of the Ainu people, part of what they called Ainu Moshir and the Japanese earlier had called Yezo ga shima or "Barbarian Island." The very name "Hokkaido," reminiscent of the far older Tōkaidō highway linking Tokyo and Kyoto, was in fact adopted in 1869 to make the island sound more Japanese. As a result of the Meiji Restoration that would dramatically alter the course of Japanese history, the previous year had seen the establishment of a colonial development authority known as the Kaitakushi to oversee a systematic program of settlement and resource extraction on the island. The Ainu had earlier been exploited by the feudal domain of Matsumae, forced to work in fisheries under terrible conditions and periodically forbidden from engaging in agriculture (Morris-Suzuki 1994), but the establishment of the Kaitakushi marked the initiation Bird's famous account of 1870s Japan has been studied extensively and Landor's Hokkaido travelogue has also received some scholarly attention (see, for example, Williams and Clark 2017;McAdams 2014;Siddle [1996] 2012), by juxtaposing these three texts from successive decades, this article will give greater insight into the context in which their authors operated, as well as investigate continuities and changes in the attitudes and situation of British travelers in this Japanese settler colony during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Three decades of British travelogues Thomas Blakiston (1832-1891, an amateur naturalist and captain in the British Army, was sent to China around the time of the Second Opium War. After being discharged, he returned to Asia in the mid-1860s, where he set up a sawmill in the treaty port of Hakodate in Hokkaido ("Captain" 1891). After having lived in Hakodate for a number of years, he was commissioned by the Japanese government to journey around the entire coast of the island with the primary aim of collecting items that had been recovered from the H.M.S. Rattler, which had been wrecked off the northern coast. Blakiston sailed from Hakodate to the southeastern corner of the island, from which point he continued on horseback or on foot around the rest of the perimeter of the island. Unlike the later narratives of Bird and Landor, his 1872 account was primarily intended to present useful scientific and geographical facts to a learned audience rather than to serve as the basis for a profitable literary reputation. Blakiston is also different in that he is less of a conventional "travel writer" than Bird and Landor, being to some extent rooted in and previously familiar with the society about which he wrote. Two versions of Blakiston's travelogue were published the same year: "Journey Round the Island of Yezo" (1872a) in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London, the version which was presented at the Royal Geographical Society meeting by Sir Harry Parkes (1828-1885), a prominent British diplomat to Japan; and a longer version of around 60 pages, "A Journey in Yezo, " (1872b) published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London. The first of these seems to have been heavily edited by Parkes, and contains a large amount of his own commentary, whereas the latter seems to be Blakiston's original manuscript.
Six years later, British travel writer Isabella Bird (1831Bird ( -1904 undertook an extended, ostensibly solo, journey through Japan. Her travels through parts of Hokkaido and several-day stay with the Ainu form the bulk (more than 150 pages) of the second volume of her enduringly popular work Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880). This was part of a highly successful series of travel books that earned her a significant reputation in Britain (Williams and Clark 2017, 2). The book was republished numerous times over the following decades, including an abridged version and a German translation. Moreover, Bird's observations and impressions of the Ainu were taken as important data by ethnographers and race biologists for years to come. Although women were generally excluded from membership, an exception was made and she was elected to the Royal Geographical Society. She lectured for academic and parliamentary audiences in Britain (Williams and Clark 2017, 2;9). Her travelogue was greatly praised by the eminent Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850Chamberlain ( -1935, who also researched the Ainu, and by his account her book did more than any other work to mold British attitudes towards the Ainu: "To many Europeans Miss Bird is the sole authority on the subject " (1887, 137). Bird seems to have been familiar with Blakiston's account, lamenting that she was unable to visit him while in Hakodate (1880, 2:128).
After the passage of another decade, the Anglo-Italian traveler and artist Henry Savage Landor (1867Landor ( -1924) published yet another work on Hokkaido, Alone with the Hairy Ainu (1893), which emphasized the Ainu even more. A monograph of more than 300 pages, this work aimed at a more adventurous and humorous tone than the previous ones and initiated Landor's travel writing career, which would take him to other regions of East-and Southeast Asia (Farmbrough 2004). Landor also included numerous sketches and paintings of the Ainu and the Hokkaido landscape in his book. As we shall see, he was sharply critical of previous Western writings on Hokkaido. He generally avoided citing or mentioning these by name, but it is very likely that Bird was among those he meant to criticize, as her book was by that point well known. Though longer and published later, his account of the Ainu was far less influential than Bird's, and no new editions were published during the author's lifetime (Cambridge University Press republished it as part of a series of vintage travel writings in 2012). Although these three texts have significant differences in style, popularity, and influence, as unusually long British travelogues written across a thirty-year period of particularly rapid change in Hokkaido, a comparison of these texts gives useful insights into how Western travel writing on the Ainu developed in the decades after the Meiji Restoration.

Not-so-unbeaten tracks
All three texts are characterized by a striking tension between claims of discovery of the unknown and clues that travel in Hokkaido was in reality far more mundane. Though less interested than Bird and Landor in self-promotion, Blakiston boasted that he had "complet[ed] a journey of 900 miles, almost entirely over ground hitherto untrodden by any foreigner " (1872b, 140). The very title of Bird's work, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, draws on the same adventure tropes, and she similarly claims that "From Nikkô northwards my route was altogether off the beaten track, and had never been traversed in its entirety by any European" (1880, 1:vi). Though arriving two decades after Blakiston's journey, at a point by which a great many Europeans and Americans had already visited Hokkaido, Landor also felt compelled to stake a claim to discovery in Hokkaido, in his case by denigrating the European traveler who sticks to an easy coastal itinerary and then "tells his friends that he has been round and about and through Yezo, while in fact he has seen absolutely nothing of Yezo or its inhabitants " (1893, 20).
In fact, in all cases, it quickly becomes apparent that the tracks these explorers followed were not so "unbeaten" after all. All three drew on a pre-existing travel infrastructure, which only expanded over the course of the period. Traveling around the Hokkaido coast, Blakiston carried a special pass from the Japanese government that gave him the same status as a Japanese official, allowing him, among other things, to rent horses at a fixed price at posts along the way and find accommodation and food at inns and waystations prepared for official inspection tours (Blakiston 1872b, 77, 85, 90). Moreover, apparently without any difficulty, Blakiston was able to engage Ainu guides and porters at every turn. In a scene reminiscent of Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes (1992), Blakiston describes how at the beginning of his journey, "I landed through the surf in a small boat, pulled by a couple of Ainos, one of whom carried me ashore dryshod on his back" (1872b, 83).
Bird had much the same experience, receiving similar government papers that accorded her preeminent status wherever she went (1880, 2:27). Although describing herself as "a lady travelling alone," (1:vi) she was accompanied on most of her journey through Hokkaido by a Japanese servant and made frequent use of Ainu guides and porters. The Japanese government, besides providing her with helpful papers, also telegraphed ahead to instruct a steamboat to await her arrival and arranged for her to ride for long segments in a passenger cart that was normally used as an ambulance (2:28). Most tellingly, at one point Bird describes what seem to be incipient patterns of seasonal tourism in parts of Hokkaido: In summer, as now, it is very lively, owing to the frequent arrivals and departures of European ships of war, and the visits of health-seeking strangers, who go up to some pretty lakes which lie at the foot of the flushed volcano of Komono-taki, or adventure into the interior as far as Satsuporo [Sapporo], the nominal capital. (2:13) Although Bird herself explored less-frequented areas than these, she reports crossing paths with several other Western "explorers" on her way to the main Ainu village she visited, Heinrich von Siebold and a Count Diesbach (2:47), the former of whom was himself a prolific writer on the Ainu. Together with the information on her mode of travel, this reveals that her claims of traveling "off the beaten track" are mostly hyperbole.
Landor very deliberately tries to distinguish himself from his predecessors by emphasizing in the beginning of his book that he was truly roughing it: "I accomplished the whole journey . . . perfectly alone. By alone I mean that I had with me no friends, no servants, and no guides. … I carried no provisions and no tent " (1893, ix). He also emphasizes that he tried to live like the Ainu during his journey, adopting their customs and food. Nevertheless, it is not long before Landor complains about the difficulty of making Ainu at one village carry his luggage (44). Landor also made use of Japanese infrastructure, of which there was considerably more than in Blakiston's day. For example, he took a regular (if infrequent) ship to the Kuriles from the northern coast and later hitched a ride on a Mitsui mine train (97; 121). Most notably, Landor had no qualms about making full use of the Japanese colonial authorities in his disputes with the Ainu. When some Ainu objected to his sketching them, reportedly out of a belief that figurative depictions of people and animals would bring catastrophe, Landor paid them no heed until they, according to him, destroyed his drawing and roughed him up a bit. Landor promptly went to the nearest police station. After the Japanese authorities had rounded up the responsible Ainu, Landor forgave them, but only "on condition that they should all come and prostrate themselves at my feet, imploring pardon and forgiveness and offering submission, as well as confessing their sorrow" (15). He then added insult to injury by presenting them with a copy of the destroyed sketch which he had recreated from memory, proudly narrating this entire incident in his book (16). Landor's assertions to the contrary, this was obviously far from "roughing it" and adopting Ainu ways out of respect and curiosity for their culture.
As if in a feeble attempt to reconcile these clashes between the trope of discovery that was the main selling point for their narratives and the reality of their journey, which seems to have been difficult to hide (perhaps because of the possibility of fact-checking by other Western visitors to Hokkaido), all three accounts place great emphasis on the discomforts of the journey. The poor quality of the roads, the food, the inns, and the horses together with omnipresent filth and vermin are constant complaints, emphasizing the difficulty of the trek. In particular, Blakiston and Bird complain of the "miserable repair" of the roads, and both place "roads" in scare quotes to emphasize their point (Blakiston 1872b, 85; Bird 1880, 2:52). Bird recounts that on one occasion, "my horse sank up to his chest in a very bad bog, and as he was totally unable to extricate himself, I was obliged to scramble upon his neck and jump to terra firma over his ears" (1880, 2:52). While often humorous, such complaints also unintentionally give the accounts a whiny tone that frequently undercuts their claims to brave adventure.

Imperial eyes and descriptions of the Ainu
Despite being one of the main selling points of the narratives, their descriptions of the Ainu are contradictory and seem to indicate that the Ainu were not as exciting as the authors may have hoped. In their accounts, the Ainu are noteworthy for their supposed "primitiveness," but are unexpectedly calm and polite, in contrast to most Western tropes of "savagery" of the time that emphasized arbitrary and brutal violence (see, for example, Spurr 1993, chap. 5). Apart from the custom of ceremonially trapping and killing bears, the skulls of which adorn Landor's book, there is precious little material to make these British travel accounts more thrilling. Instead, Bird and Landor are largely reduced to elaborating on what they describe as the enormous, incurable ignorance of the Ainu and the misery of their living conditions.
Reading between the lines, many of the characteristics that the authors attribute to Ainu customs and "primitiveness" can in fact be reinterpreted as more confirmation that Blakiston, Bird, and Landor were only several in a long series of visiting Westerners. They can also be read as signs of the power disparities inherent to the colonial situation. Both Bird and Landor express astonishment at the Ainu's lack of curiosity about and desire to learn from them and explain this as a sign that the Ainu are hopelessly intellectually inferior (Bird 1880, 2:67;Landor 1893, 13). In fact, the Ainu were clearly familiar with Westerners by this point, and their apparent lack of curiosity is far better explained by fear of the arbitrary brutality with which foreigners could summon the colonial police, as exemplified by Landor. The Ainu had apparently learned to be on their guard. They frequently begged the travelers not to tell the Japanese authorities about the cultural knowledge (relating to religious ceremonies, legends, and the like) that the Westerners had demanded that they bequeath (which the travelers nevertheless duly published in their accounts after their return) (Bird 1880, 2:57). Similarly, the generous hospitality of the Ainu, which all three authors extensively avail themselves of but generally describe as a "primitive" cultural quirk (Bird 1880, 2:101;Landor 1893, 291), can be seen as a reflection both of the power Westerners held even in a Japanese colonial context and of the frequency of Western visits to the Ainu.
While intentionally or unintentionally ignorant of these aspects of colonial power dynamics, all three travelogues exemplify what Pratt has famously described as "imperial eyes," that is, viewing the landscape with an eye to future colonial development (1992). Though presenting parts of Hokkaido as "unbeaten tracks" or impenetrable wilderness when it suits them, all three authors traveled in a settler colony that was rapidly clearing land for American-style farms and ranches, laying railroads, and controlling the lives of the indigenous population ever more tightly. While all three clearly imagined a future pastoral landscape where it did not yet exist, the authors have very different ideas of the place of the Ainu in that future and different evaluations of the success of the Japanese colonization project up to that point, reflecting shifting colonial attitudes during the decades in which they wrote.
Writing at a time when the Japanese government was lavishing money on the colonial development authority for Hokkaido and numerous American scientists, engineers, and expert farmers were engaged to facilitate technology transfer, Blakiston is the most enthusiastic about the future "development" of the island. Like the Japanese government's official publications (see Mason 2012), Blakiston views the Meiji Restoration and its northern colonization scheme as dramatically demarcating the past and future of Hokkaido, noting that "future travellers must expect to find some important changes " (1872b, 84). Mirroring the writings of the American advisors hired by the Japanese government, Blakiston's log overflows with advice on how to encourage further settlement and make the island economically profitable. Productive farms and fisheries are conjured forth in Blakiston's mind, along with modern infrastructure to connect them. Unsettled land is viewed as a squandered opportunity, and Blakiston laments that "it seems a pity that the country has so long laid waste " (126). Though the Kaitakushi is not presented as achieving unqualified success, both Blakiston and Parkes have hope for the future. In Parkes's estimation, "nothing was wanted but industry, enterprise, and population, to make the island of Yezo as prosperous as any other part of the Japanese empire " (1872a, 202).
In contrast to later, more biologically determinist accounts, Blakiston views the Ainu as having a future role in this "developmental" endeavor. He (or possibly Parkes) is not hesitant to criticize the Japanese government for marginalizing the Ainu: "No attempt has been made by their rulers to raise their social condition" (1872a, 189). "Progress" is mainly seen in terms of agriculture. Though having heard that the Ainu were hunter-gatherers who did not possess agricultural skills, Blakiston reveals that he discovered this to be false, at least in one region, where they "successfully" raised millet, potatoes, turnips, and other vegetables (1872b, 134). In his presentation of Blakiston's journey, Parkes celebrates this observation as a hopeful sign: "This fact . . . shew[s] that this peculiar race possess a degree of natural intelligence and courtesy which denotes considerable capacity for improvement, when the opportunity for advancement is extended to them" (1872a, 193). In fact, as Tessa Morris-Suzuki (1994) has demonstrated, the Ainu had long practiced various forms of agriculture and animal husbandry, but over several centuries had largely been reduced to hunting, gathering, and fishing by Japanese economic pressure and legal injunctions against agriculture (so that the Ainu could instead provide cheap labor for Japanese fisheries). Whether out of ignorance or by design, both Japanese and foreign commentators from the mid-nineteenth century persistently depicted the Ainu as hunter-gatherers since time immemorial, basing their evaluations of their intellectual and moral capabilities largely on this "fact." Blakiston's intervention was therefore an important one but would generally fall on deaf ears.
On the whole, Bird's account is characterized by similar "imperial eyes" as Blakiston's, with important differences in her evaluation of the Ainu. She revels in the possibilities that Hokkaido affords for colonization, making note of the "nearly inexhaustible" timber, rich soil, and abundant coal (2:2). Like Blakiston, Bird has mixed views of the Kaitakushi: "This Department has spent enormous sums upon Yezo, some of which have been sunk in unprofitable and costly experiments, while others bear fruit in productive improvements" (2:3). Here, Bird and Blakiston are reflective of wider public opinion at the moment in which they wrote. From initial years of enthusiasm in the early 1870s, by the end of the decade the Kaitakushi came to be increasingly viewed as extravagant and ineffective by foreigners and Japanese alike. It was dissolved in 1882 in what became a massive corruption scandal, when its numerous assets were sold off to wellconnected individuals at a fraction of their value (Mason 2012). While the Japanese government had succeeded in Bird's eyes with some "productive improvements," for her the Ainu were completely absent from any utopian future. They are repeatedly described as "adult children" (Bird 1880, 2:95, 107), with no prospect of "maturing": These Ainos, doubtless, stand high among uncivilised peoples. They are, however, as completely irreclaimable as the wildest of nomad tribes, and contact with civilisation, where it exists, only debases them. (2:107). Like Blakiston, Bird notices Ainu agriculture, but is extremely dismissive of it, describing, "small patches of millet, tobacco, and pumpkins, so choked with weeds that it was doubtful whether they were crops" (2:52). Nor does she place any faith in earlier Japanese education schemes, reporting that save for proficiency in Japanese, Ainu who had studied in Tokyo had "relapsed into savagery, retaining nothing" (2:107).
These remarks on schooling aside, Bird is strangely ambivalent about Japanese treatment of the Ainu. On the one hand, she frequently expresses sympathy for the Ainu and reprimands her Japanese guide for treating them poorly. On the other, she bluntly discounts Ainu fears of punishment at the hands of the Japanese government and even accounts of abuses by her contemporary, Austrian diplomat Heinrich von Siebold (1852Siebold ( -1908: They [the Ainu] have a singular, and I hope an unreasonable, fear of the Japanese Government. Mr. Von Siebold thinks that the officials threaten and knock them about; and this is possible; but I really think that the Kaitakushi Department means well by them, and, besides removing the oppressive restrictions by which, as a conquered race, they were fettered, treats them far more humanely and equitably than the U.S. Government, for instance, treats the North American Indians. (2:69-70) Though not subscribing to the "dying race" discourse that other nineteenth-and twentieth-century Western authors frequently used to describe the Ainu (Siddle [1996] 2012), Bird actually expresses regret that their numbers are increasing again after a period of decline given their "hopelessness" (2:107). Although Bird also continually indulged in openly racist, degrading comments about the Japanese throughout her travelogue, her complete rejection of any capacity for improvement among the Ainu made her complicit in their fate at the hands of Japanese expansionism.
Landor expressed much the same views in even harsher terms. He also laments the slow pace of Japanese colonization and the "waste" of perfectly good farmland (1893, 75), but the involvement of the Ainu in any future development is for him inconceivable. Even after spending months living among them, he describes them as the lowest of "primitive" races: "Various natives in other parts of the world show signs of an earlier state of civilisation, but the Ainu do not. They have never had a past civilisation, they are not civilised now, and what is more, they will never be civilised. Civilisation kills them" (216-217; see also 228). Inconsistently, the only Ainu farming he describes he attributes to "contamination" from Japanese "civilisation" (24). Drawing on increasingly popular British ideas about the preeminence of heredity in shaping human abilities, Landor argues that their inherited stupidity precludes the possibility of educating the Ainu (266). Similarly, he believes the Ainu "race" to be dying out, not because of mistreatment at the hands of the Japanese or poor living conditions, but because extreme inbreeding within Ainu villages and miscegenation with Japanese has rendered the remaining Ainu weak and infertile (267-268). Reflecting both more recent race biological studies in Europe of lower-class inbreeding and older notions of miscegenation propounded by defenders of slavery (see, for example, Gould 1996), Landor's racist assertions weaken Ainu claims to their land.
Though all three authors are united in their desire to see Hokkaido "modernized" with (more) roads, rails, efficient industry and Western-style farms, their views of the Ainu and their place in this future vision are starkly different. This not only reflects Blakiston's, Bird's and Landor's individual views, but also shifts in prevailing attitudes towards colonization. As Raymond Betts has demonstrated in his classic account of French colonial theory during the second half of the nineteenth century, theories of colonial assimilation increasingly fell out of favor in colonizing countries, replaced by a more economical, laissez-faire approach in which little effort would be made to "uplift the natives" or change their customs (Betts [1961(Betts [ ] 2005. This shift in attitudes was widely shared among colonial elites in different empires (Hennessey 2018). The rejection of assimilation went hand-in-hand with a rise in hardline scientific racism, according to which stark racial differences made it fruitless to spend resources educating indigenous populations. Indigenous people, biologically incapable of taking part in the modernization project, needed to make room for more "vigorous" settlers, hence the "dying race" discourse so frequently used to describe the Ainu. Blakiston, or Parkes, who seems to have heavily edited the former's text, noted that the Ainu had "materially diminished" as a direct result of their "harsh treatment" by the Japanese (1872a, 189), but for them this decline was reversible through responsible policymaking, whereas in later decades, Ainu decline tended to be increasingly attributed to inexorable biological factors. Perhaps not coincidentally, viewing the Ainu as irredeemable savages also made for more exciting reading, supplemented by both Bird and Landor with other sensational features.

Sex and shock value
Employing a genre-straddling type of writing, travel writers in all contexts "find themselves having to negotiate two subtly different, and potentially conflicting, roles: that of reporter, as they seek to relay accurately the information acquired through travel, and that of story-teller, as they seek to maintain the reader's interest in that information" (Thompson 2011, 27). The texts examined here strike different balances between these poles. Befitting the staid scientific publications in which his accounts were published, as opposed to the commercial ventures of Bird and Landor, Blakiston's texts are dry and almost devoid of personal touches. In contrast, both Bird and Landor deliberately added racy scenes, whether real or imaginary, to their accounts.
As a female (and on the whole more "respectable") author, Bird was generally more delicate with such matters, although certain lines in her account doubtless scandalized her more prudish British readers. Her extensive travelogue makes no attempt to hide that she is "a lady travelling alone," instead flagging this in the introduction as one of the main selling points of the text (1:vi). Traveling unaccompanied to a group of "savages" was bound to be seen as foolhardy by many of her readers, adding to the excitement of her tale. Bird reassures her readers that the "Ainos, who are complete savages in everything but their disposition," are "said to be so gentle and harmless that I may go among them with perfect safety" (2:27). Aside from the implicit threat of rape, any kind of physical relationship between the "dirty" "savages" and a respectable English gentlewoman was supposed to be unthinkable, but Bird nevertheless adds some strikingly suggestive passages to her account. She repeatedly praises the "beauty" of one of the Ainu men in sensuous terms: I think I never saw a face more completely beautiful in features and expression, with a lofty, sad, far-off, gentle, intellectual look, rather than that of Sir Noël Paton's "Christ" than of a savage. His manner was most graceful, and he spoke both Aino and Japanese in the low musical tone which I find is a characteristic of Aino speech. These Ainos never took off their clothes, but merely let them fall from one or both shoulders when it was very warm. (2:37) Later on, she had an opportunity to admire Ainu men naked: We emerged upon an Aino hut and a beautiful placid river, and two Ainos ferried the four people and horses across in a scow, the third wading to guide the boat. They wore no clothing, but only one was hairy. They were superb-looking men, gentle, and extremely courteous, handing me in and out of the boat, and holding the stirrup while I mounted, with much natural grace. (2:46) The erotic suggestion continues in another passage, in which Bird rides on the shoulders of another "beautiful" Ainu man through a swamp, enjoying herself and laughing at the "ludicrous" situation (2:38-39). Female Victorian travelers risked severe ostracization back home if suspected of "inappropriate" behavior abroad and had to strike a careful balance between making their tales exciting and reassuring their readers that they had "maintained female modesty" (Thompson 2011, 181). Straying dangerously close to the boundaries of Victorian propriety, Bird employs masterful subtlety to add erotic intrigue to her tale while just managing to keep her tale acceptable to polite British society.
Characteristically, Landor is far less subtle. Although frequently described by other Western visitors as extremely modest and unwilling to be seen naked (whether for "anthropological research" or otherwise) (Bird 1880, 2:82-83;Montandon 1927, viii;Yaguchi 2000), the Ainu in Landor's account frequently roam around almost or entirely naked, leading one to strongly suspect exaggeration to emphasize their "savagery" and the travelogue's general sense of adventure. Landor also goes around half-naked by the end of his journey after wearing out his clothes, a fact proudly advertised in the book's frontispiece with the caption "When my clothes came to an end I did without them" (Figure 1).
Though complaining about their filthiness and facial tattoos, Landor argues that most Ainu women are "beautifully formed, straight, lithe, and well-developed, with small feet and hands, well-arched insteps, rounded limbs, well-developed busts, and a firm, elastic gait . . . " (1893, 77-78). The not-so-implicit clues of Landor's attraction to Ainu women become completely explicit when he describes being "the hero of a tender little idyll," and satisfying the desires of a pretty Ainu girl who approached him (139-141), whom he also sketched (and included in his book) in an erotic pose. This intimate episode also strengthened Landor's claims to knowing the Ainu better than any other Westerner.
Here and elsewhere, Landor seems to revel in shocking his British audience, calculating that this would sell books. It is difficult to otherwise explain Landor's candor in describing actions that undoubtedly would have scandalized many of his readers, even during the high age of imperialism and scientific racism. Besides his explicitness in describing his sexual relationship with a young Ainu woman, Landor also recounts several episodes in which he teaches a lesson to people who he feels mistreated him, like the Ainu he sketched and brought to "justice" at the hands of the Japanese police. After ostensibly being cheated at a Japanese inn, he threatens the proprietor with his revolver in a harrowing scene, and in another passage that makes difficult reading, he describes giving a senile Ainu man "a sound thrashing" when he attempted to steal from him (1893,72,148). He admits to taking food from frightened Ainu when he was hungry (because of his insistence on bringing no provisions of his own), while simultaneously observing that food was in short supply in the region (154-155). Landor also describes stealing a grave ornament from an Ainu burial place, himself calling the action "stealing" and explaining in detail how offensive the Ainu find grave robbery, but pathetically arguing that he felt entitled after the hardships of his journey (180-181). While grave robbery, abuse of power in racial hierarchies, and sexual relations with the local population were of course common features of the colonial situation around the world, Landor is unusual in describing such things so bluntly and unashamedly. This undoubtedly reflects the idiosyncrasies of its author, but also reveals a need in Alone with the Hairy Ainu to spice up what otherwise would have been a dull travelogue of an island that had already been visited by a great many Westerners.
Research during the past several decades has argued that Victorian prudishness is often greatly exaggerated or stereotyped (Furneaux 2011), but Bird and Landor still arguably pushed the limits of what was considered acceptable for publication and knowingly used sensuality to excite their audiences. In this they were not alone. But even the boldest of those who sought to explicitly eroticize the non-West, like Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), were frequently censored or forced into self-publishing (Phillips 1999). Similarly, Bird was not the first woman travel writer to publicly flout the convention of male escorts during travel, but even the flamboyantly titled Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria, and on the Top of Mount Aetna (1859) had to be published anonymously, and Bird is often cited as one of the freest of Western female travelers of the period (Buzard 1993, chap. 2;Thompson 2011, 55). Thus, although certainly not unique in their sexual suggestiveness, the writings of Bird and Landor still clearly tested the boundaries of the acceptable as yet another strategy to sell their travelogues.

Contributions to "science"
Though hardly the primary aim of their travels, all three figures felt obliged to make their accounts more valuable and attractive by adding "scientific" observations, which were strongly tied to ideas of the seriousness and "manliness" of travelogues at the time (Thompson 2011, 175). As scholars have argued, while a gap between travel writing and bona fide scientific writing increasingly widened over the course of the nineteenth century, an earlier tradition of viewing accounts of "voyages and travels" as important scientific sources persisted into the early twentieth century (Thompson 2011, 60). There is an unspoken assumption in all three accounts that a British traveler in distant regions was obliged to record observations that would be useful to science. This was most obvious in the case of Blakiston, given the context of the Royal Geographical Society, but his account is mainly marked by geographical and geological observations, with little on the Ainu, although they are described as "a very interesting subject of ethnic enquiry " (1872a, 189). Whether because of the geographical venue of his paper, his experience living in Hokkaido for a longer time and developing a familiarity with its inhabitants, or that the systematic scientific study of so-called "primitive races" had yet to enter its most intensive phase, Blakiston seems largely uninterested in questions of race and generally does not seem to find either physical anthropology or ethnological observations to be valuable enough to include in his account.
Bird's travelogue was not published in the same kind of academic venue but is clearly influenced by the scientific ideas that were floating around British society at the time. She states her purpose in humble terms at the beginning of volume 1, merely as "an attempt to contribute something to the sum of knowledge of the present condition of the country [Japan]," although like Landor, she asserts that she can provide a "fuller account of the aborigines of Yezo, obtained by actual acquaintance with them, than has hitherto been given " (1880, vi-vii). Her authority rests with first-hand observation and interviewing the Ainu directly through an interpreter, although she also frequently cites other studies of the Ainu and corroborated her notes with those of von Siebold (1:viii-ix).
Though not presenting them in tabular form as systematically as later racial anthropologists, Bird also took anthropometric measurements, cited research that had been conducted on Ainu skulls and employed technical jargon (like "prognathism" for the protrusion of the lower jaw, frequently employed in scientific racism at a time when "facial angle" was seen as a key racial characteristic), revealing that she had at least some scientific ambitions in her presentation of the Ainu (2:75). In seeking to separate the facts from "a mass of rubbish" (1:viii), she also actively sought to refute certain stereotypes about the Ainu, for example asserting that their hairiness was greatly exaggerated in most accounts (2:137).
Though not attempting a systematic racial classification of the Ainu like many other Westerner visitors, Bird is troubled by the disparity (in her view) between the Ainu's excellent physique and poor intellectual endowment (as well as the opposite situation among the Japanese). Remarks about "criminal types" make it clear that she subscribed to the then-current notion that supposedly innate attributes like "criminality" bore a correlation to physical appearance, at one point going so far as to question the culpability of a criminal she viewed on a tour of a prison, since he was "a superior-looking man" (2:24). She ruminates in detail on the "stupidity" and "apathy" of the Ainu, despite the fact that "their physique is very fine" (2:107, emphasis in original). Clearly, this state of affairs disturbed the natural order of things in Bird's mind, although she did not go so far as to attempt a scientific explanation for this "anomaly. " Landor went the furthest in his anthropological probings, reflecting the steady rise of scientific racism during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This is an explicit goal of the book, which Landor hopes "will prove interesting to anthropologists and ethnologists as well as to the general public" (1893, ix). Landor again boldly criticizes his rivals for not truly understanding the Ainu, stating bluntly that. I regard myself as qualified to speak with some authority, as I am the only foreigner who has seen and studied all the different tribes of Ainu in Yezo and the Kuriles; while other writers, the few who have actually been there, have based their statements on a few half-castes or Ainu in the more civilised part of southern Yezo, collecting from them ideas left behind by previous travellers, and offering them to the public as purely Ainu. (282; emphasis in original) Besides a detailed account of his journey, the last third of Landor's book is comprised of ten more "scientific" chapters on the different characteristics of the Ainu, including arts and crafts, burial customs, "Ainu heads, and their Physiognomy," "Movements and Attitudes," marriage patterns, "Heredity," and physiological and psychological observations. A host of anthropometric measurements on Ainu from different villages are also included in an appendix. Clearly, Landor was trying to sell his book to a variety of audiences, be they readers seeking adventure, humor, or scientific observations. Nevertheless, a careful reading of Landor reveals that he was only poorly acquainted with the scientific trends of the day, and there is in fact evidence that his observations were scoffed at by the European scientific establishment (Montandon 1927, 192-19;Kreiner 1993, 42;Farmbrough 2004). Landor repeatedly makes unflattering comparisons between the Ainu and monkeys, and as Richard Siddle has observed, he greatly exaggerated the hairiness of Ainu men in several of his sketches that illustrate the book ([1996] 2012, 79). He proudly asserts that his descriptions of the Ainu "strongly support Darwin's theory of evolution, and the hairy arboreal ancestor with pointed ears from which the races of men are descended" (Landor 1893, 280). Far from providing novel information, however, Darwin's On the Descent of Man was by this point more than two decades old ( Figure 2).
In addition, several references to Ainu head shape and the relation of bumps to personality traits reveal Landor to be a believer in phrenology, even though this had generally fallen out of favor in Britain decades earlier (137, 146). By his own account, Landor goes to great lengths in his attempt to examine Ainu skulls, but never systematically presents his findings, if any (146-148). Landor also expresses an almost charmingly naïve view of archaeology, such as when he imaginatively asserts that rocks that he found at the base of a prehistoric "fort" had been projectiles used in an ancient fight between the Ainu and the (hypothetical) previous inhabitants of Hokkaido (81). Rather than revealing him to be a consistent Darwinist, Landor's references to scientific theories throughout his book show that he subscribed to a grab-bag of scientific and pseudoscientific ideas, of which he had only a shallow understanding.
Landor's "scientific" data is further compromised when it becomes blended with the other genres of his book. This is most apparent in his collection of anthropometric data on the Ainu. Landor unabashedly recounts in great detail how he collected such data without the consent of the subjects, to put it mildly. He took many intimate measurements when his subjects (and hosts) were asleep, among other things poking their tongue with a pencil (278). Like his disregard of their objections to his sketches of them, he had no qualms about using any means necessary to examine them. In a particularly violent passage, he describes wrestling with a mentally ill Ainu man in order to phrenologically analyze the bumps on his skull (146-148). Was "scientific observation" merely a pretense for writing about such acts of violence and exploitation against the Ainu? It is difficult to judge from this unconventional text alone, but in any case, based on the aforementioned criticism and paucity of citations, Landor's book does not appear to have been viewed as equally valuable by the scientific community as Bird's text.

Epilogue
Comparing these three British travelogues on Hokkaido and the Ainu that were published at about one-decade intervals in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one can get a better sense of the actual conditions of their authors' journeys and strategies for selling their work. This also affords an opportunity to observe important shifts in attitudes towards race, science, and colonialism over this period. All three claimed to be promoting science, and taken together, they reflect the gradual shift towards a harsher brand of scientific racism that emphasized immutable, hereditary "racial" traits. Blakiston's account, published in scientific journals, is less interested in self-promotion, although it shows the same tendency to celebrate the adventure of being the "first" European to set foot on supposedly unexplored ground as Bird's and Landor's. Although all resorting to the hackneyed trope of adventure in unexplored regions, comparing the accounts and taking into consideration what is known about the context of nineteenth-century colonial Hokkaido demonstrates that their claims to being the first Westerners to truly explore Hokkaido and understand the Ainu are all greatly exaggerated. Their travels were facilitated by a preexisting and expanding colonial infrastructure and apparent Ainu familiarity with Western visitors, whom they understood to wield significant power. As Hokkaido became increasingly well known to and well visited by Westerners, Bird and Landor had to resort in their commercial publications to humor and scandal, playing ever more on Ainu stereotypes to sell their work.
The touristic exploitation of the Ainu of which Blakiston, Bird and Landor were representative has never truly ended. As Kirsten Ziomek has shown in her research on later periods, an elaborate tourist infrastructure had developed by the second quarter of the twentieth century (2019,(322)(323)(324)(325)(326). Most recently, while the Japanese government received very positive international media attention for supposedly according the Ainu "indigenous" status in 2019, this has been criticized by a variety of scholars, activists, and Ainu groups as merely a cover for an unwelcome program of cultural tourism aimed at drawing international visitors in conjunction with the 2020 Olympic Games (Morris-Suzuki 2018; "CEMiPoS Statement" 2020). In fact, the Ainu were officially recognized by the Japanese government as "indigenous" in 2007 when Japan signed the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a convention that both Ainu and human rights activists have accused Japan of not living up to in practice ("CEMiPoS Statement" 2020). It seems clear that the struggle over the representation of Ainu culture, already at issue in the nineteenth century, will continue for some time.