“June 14, 1973”

When that first stake was hammered into the soil, the soil of Usu Bay,
That moment,
The earth howled fiercely
Men could you not hear it?
The bellowing…
The ocean, feeling the earth’s pain
Recollecting this deep lament,
Shivered with anger

Imperial radio NHK, its announcer at the site, screaming hysterically over the airwaves, “The power plant is urgently needed, Now. Hokkaido’s electricity will not suffice!”
Energy for what?
For the corporates? Or for NHK?
For the Prefectural office? Or to power the SDF base? Or for the pref. police?
Who lacks energy?

This history,
repeats
Callously it reveals itself again

Lacking, any capacity or technique for resisting, defenseless,
This earth

Aiming toward it,
As capitalists
As invaders
Without shame,
Without memory of this history,
The stake is driven in¹

The stake that pierced the earth above anchored one of Hokkaido’s earliest energy development projects: southern Hokkaido’s Date Thermal Power Station, ultimately completed in 1978. Funkawan had nourished the Indigenous Ainu of Yaun Mosir (present-day Hokkaido) for centuries, and likely millennia. Well into the mid-20^th century Ainu fishers were sustained by the bounty of scallops, flounder, octopus and seaweeds like wakame, kelp, nori, and the occasional yori-kujira (stranded whale), offered up by the bay’s repun kamuy (guardian of the ocean). Funkawan (the bay neighboring Usu-Date) also supported one of Hokkaido’s most productive fisheries. Usu was located on the western flank of Hokkaido’s industrial heartland: Muroran fired the engines of settler modernity with heavy industries like Japan Steel Works (ca. 1907), and neighboring Tomakomai had expanded its manufacturing and shipping capacity throughout the 20^th century. Rushing to multiply its postwar industrial production, the central government pushed Hokkaido Electric Power Company (HEPCO) to expand energy production.  In early 1970, HEPCO proposed a 250 MW oil-fired power plant and quickly ramped this up to 700 MW. As I document in this struggle, the settler state’s alienation of Hokkaido’s waterways and kamuy (multispecies relations) from Ainu helped entrench settler colonial routes into ancestral Ainu lands through energy colonialism.

Living with the residue of Japan’s worst nuclear catastrophe, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, Indigenous Ainu lands in southern Hokkaido now face old and new forms of energy colonialism. The legacy of the Date Power Plant struggle has a long arc which continues to fuel energy and resource colonialism. Ainu in Hokkaido did not sign any treaties with the Meiji government of Japan nor receive any payments when the government unilaterally annexed the island in 1869, adding 20% of mineral, forests, and arable wealth to Japan’s total land mass. Ainu have never enjoyed Indigenous sovereignty, even after Japan signed the 2019 New Ainu Law, officially recognizing Ainu as Japan’s Indigenous peoples, yet refusing sovereign legal or political status under this law. Instead, both the government and Japanese publics have classified Ainu as a “separate and inferior race,” and often as a “vanishing race.” In this way, state and private entities have long deployed racialization to shift the discursive register and disguise the settler colonial project of seizing Hokkaido’s land, minerals, air, water, and now its subterranean spaces.  By narrating the struggle over Date’s fisheries, here I expose how energy (and resource) colonialism animate and legitimize colonial governance.

Settler energy extraction projects (like Date) today enjoy support from local governments across Hokkaido who are vying to host the nation’s most toxic nuclear waste. Japan’s central government proposed a Deep Geological Repository to house the nation’s High Level Nuclear waste in 2020, and two Hokkaido towns (Suttsu and Kamoenai-mura) have volunteered for the project’s first stage. “Poisons were made with no knowledge of how to erase them,” observed Ainu elder and poet Ukaji Shizue in a recent teach-in. “These 50 years, 100 years, we humans laid waste to the land and prioritized human economic growth, treating the earth so badly. And now here in Hokkaido nuclear plants have been built, and for nuclear waste, this survey to choose the Final Nuclear Waste site in our land is moving forward. The bill for these poisons we created but cannot erase is coming to all people, we will face much sadness,” she continued.

In the 1970s, the 700 MW power plant was the largest of its kind for the region and was intended to fuel the region’s growth as Japan’s northern industrial hub. What Ainu fishers knew of the ocean ecosystem and its delicate balance with plankton and other tiny species, sprang from their Indigenous epistemologies and daily routines of living with these ecosystems. Plankton’s survival was not a biological enigma; the Usu fishers knew that its survival was inextricably bound with their own. Today this reciprocal ethic of care has come to be known as Traditional Ecological Knowledge. TEK entails managing the flora, fauna, and waterways of one’s local ecosystem as an extended kin network, the survival of which is entwined with one’s own.  Centuries of assimilation policies and attempts to erase Ainu management systems mean that few recognize the place-based and ancestrally honored system of ocean-management as TEK. After all, ethnic Japanese (wajin) fishers had laid the infrastructure for the earliest settler extraction by enslaving Ainu as corvee labor in the 17^th-19^th century “contract fisheries,” which obliterated Hokkaido’s herring stocks. But the Usu and Date fishers had cultivated sustainable resource systems, complex bio-feedback mechanisms that would inevitably collapse, they knew, if the plant and its sulfur dioxide ecosystem were introduced into the human-marine life balance that the fishers had sustained up until the mid-1970s.

Usu and Date fisheries unions had given permission for the thermal plant’s construction until they realized what it meant for the marine ecosystem. To understand its impact, they set up citizen study groups to examine how the chemical effluents would bio-accumulate in the bodies of fish. Using citizen science and dialoguing with communities in southern Japan who had mobilized against local oil-combustion plants, the fishers began to understand that heated wastewater from the plants would raise the ocean temperature. Heat-sensitive biota like plankton would perish and seaweed growth would suffer thus driving key fisheries like flounder and scallops away. Pollution systems, they learned, overlapped. First, heavy oil combustion would release sulfur dioxide into the ocean and airways; and second, heated water from the plant’s outtake pipes would elevate ocean temperatures between 8-10 degrees Celsius. For humans, sulfur dioxide would lead to asthma, chronic bronchitis, and emphysema. In short, their livelihood and key food source hung in the balance. As leader Shiiyama Iwao argued, “As fishers we depend on a living ocean, an ocean that feeds us protein and provides our livelihood. If the ocean ecosystem is ruined, we will be forced to depend on import[ed foods], and we fishers will be out of a job.”

Following HEPCO’s power plant proposal, Ainu fishers joined with farmers, teachers, doctors, and other residents to resist the proposed development. After months of heated protest and protracted court battles, HEPCO and local boosters prevailed in constructing the plant, which now feeds between 15-17% of Hokkaido’s electrical grid, since the region’s nuclear plants have been shut down in the decade since the Fukushima meltdowns.