Cowboys and Samurai: Overview of the Settler-Japanese Territories

 It would make sense to talk about the two "states," of Nambokudo and Kyokuhokudo; they are after all the largest timeline change in the entire setting.

During initial landing phase in California there are clashes with the local Spanish authorities; it's worth remembering that at this point in time New Spain stretched up quite a bit of the West Coast. What we would know as California +Nevada and some other territory brushing those borders was (sort of) known then as Alta California, and after reports of clashes with out-of-place but numerous Japanese settlers, a Spain bankrupt and exhausted and still reeling from its own part in the Seven Years War (1756-63) had a choice: spend the vast amount of men, resources, and money it would take to blockade and bring terrestrial war to California...or make a deal. A reforming Japan is an excellent business opportunity, and it didn't take long for King Charles to reach out to Shogun Tokugawa Ieharu with a letter as opposed to naval artillery.

It took a while for the official borders of Nambokudo to be outlined but they would match up well with our own maps of Alta California: including modern-day California and Nevada in their entirety, a small corner of modern Arizona, and all of modern-day Utah. In the latter territory's case, Nambokudese settlers had only just started making their way to the Great Salt Lake by the time the Mormons arrived in what they would know as Deseret. Alta California's bordering territories of Nuevo Mexico, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja California were all still territory of the Spanish Crown.

Viceroyalty of New Spain after the Adams-Onis treaty of 1819. "Alta California," had been codified officially in 1822 which puts it a bit out of line with our alt-history, but I suppose that's what alt-history is for. In order for it to have been codified, it had to exist at least in discussion and concept prior to; we'll rely on that.

This purchase does not necessarily mean that all is well between Crown and Shogunate. As the setting's timeline advances, new waves of Japanese settlers seeking land find their way into Baja California where illegal colonial villages are springing up and about in flagrant disregard of established treaty. Loathe to treat with what is viewed as the colony of Nambokudo, Spain gets nothing but frustration when going directly to a Shogunate that has little control. These half-loyal daimyo are in a distant land and not inclined to answer to a distant warlord they feel has abandoned them.

Depending on when in the setting's timeline one plays, there's also the added stressor that is the Mexican Revolution occurring earlier than it does in our own timeline. The new history of Texas and Mexico is going to be its own post, but needless to say that despite the early hope of good relations by expanded trade on the Home Islands enabled by a timely sale of Alta California, tensions between Spain and Japan--and by extension, Spanish colonial territory and Nambokudo--are at an all-time high.

Agriculturally the settler-Japanese in southern California had a much harder time than those in northern California. What we know as the Sacramento River Valley (but known to the Nambokudese as Yo-doi no Keikoku after some of the first natives that helped the Japanese establish themselves; the Spanish explorer Gabriel Moraga would not have named the river Rio de los Sacramentos until 1808) is actually incredibly kind to the crops and animals that many of the settlers brought along with them. Indeed, in our own modern-day timeline the Sacramento Valley provides a truly incredibly amount of the West Coast's food; especially rice, a staple crop of Nambokudo. With the help of many of the local Wintun peoples (in particular the River-Patwin people; their village Yo'doi was the first river-village seen by the Japanese and it is where the Nambokudese name for the Sacramento River Valley comes from) the Japanese were able to establish themselves by clean running water and with easy access to fields and easily-terraced hills.

There are the ruins of some villages and early forts where settlement failed further south, and it isn't until the Nambokudese are relatively well-established that we see them exercising colonial influence over some of the local Native American tribes. This militant history isn't much better than our own in Nambokudo specifically, but that's a story for another time.

In the "modern day," of the setting (somewhere in the 1840s, there's a post after this one) Yuba and Yo-doi are the two largest cities in Nambokudo; the latter is where the council most often meets. There are, in Japanese fashion, often villages and warlord forts mere miles away from each other where population density allows, though obviously the area is not nearly as dense as on the Home Islands. Natives are more frequent in modern Nambokudo than they would be under our own timeline's American settlers, and this includes local hispanic Californios and those few Spaniards who elected to stick around during the Alta California Purchase. In some ways, the few cities in Nambokudo feel genuinely metropolitan.

Kyokuhokudo's colonial history is more relatively calm experience, at least at first. Primarily made up of travelers from two different directions: seaborne warlords and wako riding the coastline until they find what we know as the Strait of Juan de Fuca but they would know as the Shikiichi no Umi, and a slower progression of settlers up the Siskiyou Trails across California's northern mountains into what we know as the vast forested mountains and valleys of western Oregon.

While the latter group especially maintained peaceful relations as they traveled north, the former did find violence; short-lived and paradoxically fruitful.

The Haida nation are Pacific North-West natives north of the Shikiichi no Umi, out of the Haida Gwaii archipelago. They are a powerful and fierce people, known for their excellent craftsmanship and seamanship; and for their raids and slave-taking. Often equated to the Vikings, they were a holy terror to a great many of the Pacific North-West peoples. It was only inevitable that after landing in what we know as Victoria and the San Juan islands, the Japanese settlers would come to clash with these people. With at least equal knowledge and skill of coastal sailing and combat, the advantages of steel armor, weapons, and muskets, the Japanese were victorious in several skirmishes and clashes.

A painting of a Haida raiding party, Raven Warrior by Bill Holm (1991). Even without muskets they traded for, these were a frightening and powerful people. It would not take long after they fought the settler-Japanese before they endeavored to get guns of their own, as with so many indigenous warriors through history.

This violence might seem like a poor first impression, but it did two things for those who would call the land around the Salish Sea Kyokuhokudo: the first was that it made clear to locals that the Japanese were not going to be swept away easily, and it endeared the Japanese to the Lummi and Coastal Salish peoples that they had inadvertently saved from the Haida who targeted them regularly; the second benefit came from the Haida people themselves, who were so impressed that they immediately opened talks and trade. This would begin a near constant rotation over the years of trade, mild conflict, and fragile peace.

Kyokuhokudo has a much different relationship with its native peoples than does Nambokudo. I'll explore this more later, but in brief: the Pacific North-West peoples are in a notably stronger position at this time period than are California natives, so have a more equitable relationship with their local Japanese. Nambokudese warlords who consolidate settlers into fiefs and territories have capitalized on this with more traditional aggressive colonization efforts after securing their position; conflicts were often one-sided. Further north, early conflicts with the powerful Haida, positive trade relationships with the Coastal Salish, and the relative isolation of initially colonizing what we know as the San Juan Islands ensured their own native interactions were distant but respectful; peaceful but tense. There are more Nambokudese than Kyokuhokudese even in the setting's modern period, so military-scale action north of the Siskiyous is uncommon.

Making rice take in the PNW is more difficult, but still possible; the growing season is shorter and the rice more prone to outright failure if the temperatures aren't quite right that year. As such (and because pre-contact Salish peoples didn't do much agriculture beyond slash-and-burn and land management), Kyokuhokudese emulate the locals in fishing for a lot of their diet. Both peoples have an exceptional amount of coastal sailing talent, and it's not at all uncommon in the modern era to see Salish peoples sailing local-material bezaisen, kitamae-bune, or "sengoku-bune," coastal trading ships, or Kyokuhokudese villagers rowing Salish-style canoes for fishing.

Despite not being literal "sengoku-bune," which is itself a mildly misleading term, these kitamae-bune (photographed by Yonezo Ida in the transition between the Meiji and Taisho periods) are almost entirely unchanged with the exception of its sail rigging. The Japanese created a truly excellent coastal sailing design early on and did not need to change it very much over the centuries.

Some ink spilled on languages before leaving today's entry. North America in this timeline is notably more linguistically diverse than we're used to, or even as was in the 1800s of our own time.

In Nambokudo and Kyokuhokudo the primary language is Japanese, as one would expect, but secondary languages and dialects abound. In particular, the further south one goes the more frequently folk tend to have Spanish as a secondary language. In Nambokudo proper it serves as an extremely reliable secondary tongue, and is often used by visitors from the American East (or, much more often, from Texas) who don't speak Japanese. Despite Spanish's value as a trade language, Japanese remains the spoken and written word of daimyo-ruled courts and thus the language of cultural prominence. Local indigenous dialect groups are present in daily life, though due to the sheer size and cultural presence of large cities like Yo-doi and nearby Yuba, Wintun is most commonly known and used.

In Kyokuhokudo Japanese and Salish are most common, though the Pacific North-West has a few unrelated linguistic families. Translation here is less easy. Fortunately Russian, of all languages, has done well to serve as an intermediary trade tongue; in part thanks to fur traders from Alaska. As the timeline moves on this becomes less commonly used, making Japanese the proper lingua franca of the area as more colonizers find their way to the temperate rainforests. Due to relatively positive (or, more accurately, sensitive) relations between the settler-Japanese and indigenous peoples, however, Salish never fully drops off as a secondary language you'd bump into day-to-day.

In the American East things are also more varied. By the 1840s, one of the two periods where the setting really takes place, the Louisiana purchase is still living memory. In the bottom right of the country French is still arguably more present than English, and with the general lessened power of the United States in the timeline that may well stick for a while. North of the Mason-Dixon, English is in a cultural struggle with German after relatively recent waves of immigrants. This is less likely to win over as, in our own history, the language of northern administrators and courts was quite comfortably English by then. German is likely to stick around as a common secondary language for a good long time, though.

We'll be re-visiting these territories as I explore the setting in more detail. This does well enough for loose overviews, but feel free to ask questions! I'd love to specify anything you feel I may have left out.