Yezo
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or EZO, less correctly YESSO, native HOKKAIDO, the most N. of the four great islands of Japan; still only partially settled; area, 36,299 square miles; pop. about 700,000. Its official name is Hokkaido, or "Circuit of the Northern Sea," received in 1870, when it was brought under a special colonization department. An agricultural mission from the United States assisted in founding model farms, laying out roads, and building bridges. The capital was changed from Matsumae to Sapporo, which was provided with a railroad to Otam, its port, and to Poronai, the great coal district inland. An agricultural college, breweries, canning factories, beetroot sugar factories, etc., were established, but with inconsiderable results. The coal mines are worked by convict labor. A system of military settlements has of late years been put into force, partly with the view of furnishing a militia against possible invasion from Russia, which is supposed to covet the fine harbors of Yezo. The exposed port of Otam will probably be abandoned for the more sheltered harbor of Mororan, on Volcano Bay, now a naval harbor, to which a railway from Poronai mines has been built. The principal seaweed, sulproducts of Yezo are coal, phur, fish, the catches of salmon on the river Ishikari being sometimes enormous. At the restoration in 1868 the supporters of the Tokugawa government made a last stand here, and were finally defeated at Hakodate. Yezo has a rigorous climate, being for six months in the year under snow and ice (two feet in the S. to eight feet in the N.). The center of the island is but little known, though it has been crossed twice or thrice by Japanese and European explorers; s; the Ainos live mostly near the mouths of the rivers. The interior is mountainous and inhospitable; there are several active volcanoes.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 the island held "about 700,000" people and was "still only partially settled"; Hokkaido now has roughly five million residents, and Sapporo alone, then a frontier capital, is a city of nearly two million that hosted the 1972 Winter Olympics. The interior the article called "but little known" was mapped and largely protected as national parkland, Daisetsuzan being designated in 1934. The coal on which so much of the entry rests is gone: the mines, worked in 1921 by convict labour, closed through the later twentieth century, and the old pit town of Yubari went bankrupt in 2007. Instead of the feared Russian invasion, the island's great link is southward through the 53.85-km Seikan Tunnel, opened to trains in 1988 and carrying shinkansen since 2016; the Ainu, treated here as a coastal remnant, were formally recognised by Japanese law as an indigenous people in 2008.
Written for this edition, 2026.