The farmer-soldier (tondenhei) system was the centrepiece of the Meiji period program to develop and populate Hokkaido. It sought to establish communities of farmer-soldiers in order to accomplish a number of pressing objectives, including the fortification of the vulnerable north, the provision of opportunities for destitute members of the former samurai class, and the establishment of settled agricultural villages in Hokkaido. Established in 1874, it facilitated the relocation of over 7,000 households to Hokkaido before its abolition in 1904. In most historical accounts of Hokkaido’s Meiji period development/colonization, the tondenhei system is given pride of place. The farmer-soldiers are commonly cast as heroic pioneers who engaged in a courageous, and ultimately successful, battle to tame the harsh northern wilderness and protect it from the designs of looming foreign encroachment. In this chapter, I evaluate the contribution of the tondenhei to development and defense. Tracing the fortunes of a large number of farmer-soldiers and their communities across I recover some of the silence on the individual experiences of farmer-soldiers and reveal a mixed record in Hokkaido’s development/colonization. If anything the tondenhei system’s main contribution was to provide a mechanism for reconciling some of the former enemies of the Meiji government.

One of the defining features of the early modern political order in Japan was the monopoly of the means of violence held by the samurai class. In the decades preceding the Meiji Restoration, however, some Japanese officials at the regional and local level began to advocate for the mobilization of commoners into militia. They were motivated by the belief that the existing samurai-based military and security forces were not sufficient to meet the challenges they faced - first, from foreign powers, and then, increasingly, from domestic disorder. Japanese historians have long been interested in these farmer-soldiers, or nōhei, generally with the goal of assessing the revolutionary implications of farmers taking up arms and forming militia. This chapter will take a different approach to the study of nōhei by situating them within a larger trend in local governance in the late Edo period. Nōhei militia were one of many examples in which local elites, motivated by the desire to restore order to communities they perceived to be in crisis, took on new leadership functions and intervened in new areas of public life.