Settling Cities in Modern Hokkaido

Sapporo, today the capital of Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido, was built as Japan’s first modern colonial city in 1869. This talk explores how salmon and the Indigenous societies that depended on them shaped the ecological and social conditions that led to the city’s founding. When Japanese settlers began colonizing the region in the late nineteenth century, they partnered with Western sojourners passing through the area, forging links to new imperial and transnational networks and helping turn Sapporo into a laboratory of Japanese colonial urbanism.

Michael Thornton is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of History at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the history of Japanese cities from the seventeenth century onwards. His current projects include a study of Sapporo and its role in turning Hokkaido into a Japanese colony as well as a co-authored historical guidebook to Tokyo that shows how ordinary people have contested power and place across the metropolis. Born and raised in Japan, he now splits time between New York and Boston