Something that comes up repeatedly in 19th century documents related to Hokkaido is the idea that the colony was a "laboratory" and that colonial policies were "experiments".

This was party because Hokkaido was Japan's first colony, and it wasn't clear at all to the settler colonial government (or to settlers) what would work and what wouldn't, especially as it was a northern region principally colonized by people from subtropical southern Japan.

This makes perfect sense considering turning a profit and having agrarian settlers be able to feed themselves w/o subsidies was critically important for the Sapporo or Tokyo-based colonial governments, and considering that Japan had no experience in large-scale colonization.

Indeed, according to veterans and their families, the villages in which the Tondenhei farmer-soldiers lived were "laboratories" to grow cash crops within hermetic. government-controlled setting.

Simultaneously, Hokkaido was a nexus for further colonial expansion. It was a springboard for the Japanese expansion of Karafuto/Sakhalin, and Hokkaido Colonization Office director Kuroda Kiyotaka personally led early Japanese gunboat diplomacy in Korea.

Others, like Nitobe Inazo, applied the Euro-American colonial theory which he learned at Sapporo Agricultural College to Taiwan, where he acted as a colonial administrator. The Hokkaido model was later applied to Manchukuo.

Shirani Takeshi, the Japanese governor in the Kwantung Leased Territory, had extensive experience in Hokkaido and helped write the Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act. When Natsume Soseki met with Shirani, he noted that many of Shirani's associates were from Hokkaido.

Even more grimly, colonial racism inflicted upon the Ainu as "savages" or "barbarians" was lifted from Hokkaido and transposed onto Taiwanese Aborigines, Polynesian islanders, and others.

This continues today. For example, in 2016 a riot cop from Osaka derisively called Okinawan demonstrators "dojin" ("natives"): a term, according to Nakamura Jun, which took on its pejorative meaning through its use in Ainu policy. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/10/19/national/police-officer-dispatched-osaka-insults-protesters-okinawa/

Hokkaido was, moreover, colonized amidst Japan's "bunmei kaika" movement, in which Euro-American "civilization", as it were, was imported wholesale to Japan, both by Japanese reformers and Euro-American advisers.

The island was colonized to resemble the United States and not Japan. Settlers lived in balloon-framed houses in towns laid out in grid patterns. Wheat and potatoes were their principle staples.

The government imported Devon cows and Berkshire pigs and stopped just short of bringing in Sockeye salmon to replace Hokkaido's native fish. Some settlers complained about having to eat meat even though they had trouble digesting it.

Many of these products were grown either because they were seen as more "appropriate" for Hokkaido's climate, or because they could be exported to British colonies in Asia, or because Euro-American advisers claimed they were superior (...) to Japanese species.

American adviser Horace Capron explicitly understood the American-esque cultural/socio-economic foundations of Hokkaido as a model which the mainland would then emulate. He thought the mainland, in a sense, would be colonized by Hokkaido and not the other way around.

In all of this, while the colonial laboratory Hokkaido was widely characterized by Meiji era pundits as an "unpeopled outland", many recognized it as a hub of modernity and of empire. Historically speaking, the latter is much more accurate.

While the coloniality of Hokkaido is today widely disavowed, acknowledging it and locating Hokkaido as a (or perhaps the) centre of the wider Japanese colonial empire allows for a totally different reading of the history of modern Japan.