Wabanaki: The Land of the Rising Sun
AD 1620
“The argument has been made that if North America had been settled from west to east, instead of the other way round, New England would still be uninhabited.” - Joel Garreau,
The Nine Nations of North America
TLDR: An industrializing Japan discovers North America in 1445 and settles it starting from the west coast and the lower Mississippi. New England and neighboring Canada are just about the last places they reach, and they mostly leave the region alone on account of its bad climate and dearth of resources and farmland. The St. Lawrence valley has been thoroughly colonized, but elsewhere the native people remain predominant, mostly living something close to their traditional lifestyle.
Tribal territories and towns with populations over 10,000 are shown, with red diamonds indicating native settlements and black circles for those of the Japanese and other colonists, as well as rail and rail barge routes (rail being the primary form of transit).
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「しずかなは
わばなきのもり
のじんかい
こどくわかれら
あかいせいふく」
“Silent leaves,
the Wabanaki forest’s
battle-conches.
Solitude, their
scarlet conquest.” - Kosei,
The Bluewater Book of Tanka
“That lonely sea where the coal steamers, veiled in snow, begin to appear as natural as the dark shore behind them--those bright, wintry lakes flowing toward a sun at the Earth’s last edge--that valley of the distant North where the boxcars trundle to the iron’s meager end to load a few bushels of potatoes--those are no more than cusp of Wabanaki, the lip of the cup of the wild. You have not understood the Dawn Country if you have seen only those outer, over-civilized places. They are merely desolate, but the wilderness is an animate desolation. They are merely frigid, but the cold of Wabanaki excites an inner fire, like a star born from the void of space. Their inhabitants are merely poor, but the hard-featured hill people have nothing, not even poverty. Those who come to Wabanaki are searching for some such unfathomed paradox, which could exist only there in all the world, where the yellow light of our morning still drifts among the branches of birch and elm like a lost kite, and hangs like a dream on the minds of men.” - Jozefu Korosuki,
The Sun in the East: A Coastal Tale
***
This story begins in southern China in the 12th century AD. Under the pressure of the Jin dynasty, their rivals the Southern Song were beginning to organize, combine, make efficient. The factory and early steam engine appeared. Then came the Mongols, and the empire fell. It had only its new methods, its mass production and theoretically interchangeable parts, to help it, and they were not enough. The blow the Mongols struck ruined the new standards. The beautiful harmony of the industrial State disappeared, and the dreams of the last Song emperors seemed dead. Then something strange happened. The invaders could not hold down the country. That was not strange--it was mountainous and full of resistance, after all, and there was civil war in the north of China and rebellion in their empire’s far west. What was strange was that the factious, grasping warlords who opposed them seemed to know more about industry than the majestic, wise emperors they had succeeded. In fifty years of fierce warring and competition, external and internal, they invented rifles, steam power, telescopes, and spinning jennies. The most successful drove the Mongols back towards their homelands, farther and farther each year. The newly-conquered coal deposits of the north were fought over by the new soi-disant emperors, and in the end one man ruled the whole of the Huang He plain. But the south would not be reconquered, or reunited. No single state controlled the new technologies and methods, and they spread rapidly across East Asia.
Progress was not smooth. East Asia’s relatively underdeveloped sciences could not support cumulative technical improvements, and many disruptive new practices were suppressed by emperors and kings for good reasons and bad. The Asian industrial revolution was a slow, conservative affair by our standards. Growth, expansion, exploration, the Glorious Future, were not much romanticized. In 1445, when a Japanese steamboat thought lost at sea returned with tales of an unknown eastern land, where the natives lived in perfect innocence and simplicity off the freely-given abundance of the Earth, it was a vessel with hardly a technological superior anywhere in the world--yet the ship was decades old.
The overcrowded, sooty Old World poured out into the New. The Japanese, from their first settlements in Oregon, spread up and down the coast, bringing their way of life with them. The desperate poor and restless rich of Asia’s cities swarmed the new lands, always driving farther than the last railhead. They wanted liberty, a return to nature, escape from hereditary debt peonage, the mythical plenty of the first sailors’ descriptions. And life really was better there, for most of them, but at a cost to the world. They came much faster than the Europeans of our timeline did, driven by greater population pressure and aided by better technology. The Cascades and Sierra Nevada filled with poor farmers when the valleys brimmed over, who felled the redwoods and lived hardscrabble on the eroding slopes. All the settlers were brutal to the people they encountered. In the mountains where colonial plows and rifle-barrels did not reach, new diseases wiped out many of the natives and then swept eastward across the continent. Mesoamerica was conquered by a Korean exile proclaiming himself Emperor of the East, and subsequently warred over by Japan, Korea, and Fujian. The Japanese ended up with little of it, but enough to make the transcontinental hop to the mouth of the Mississippi.
Rail travel had been common in Japan for over a century. Now, in the Mississippi basin, rail had its golden age. The system became highly sophisticated, with many tracks in parallel, even above and below one another, specialized to different kinds of transit. Every village and neighborhood had its stop, often on multiple lines, and schedules were made more flexible and responsive to demand. The word “road” now meant a train track in colloquial speech, and its old meaning had to be specified with a phrase like “foot-road,” “path,” or “carriage road.” New lines were built as fast as the land could be cleared for them, and by 1550 the Mississippi colony was quasi-independent and growing in power. It had spread to the St. Lawrence valley and shipping its abundant coal to the new markets in Europe as well as the old ones in western and southern North America. Oil, a new favorite fuel source in the home country, was discovered too. Trains and riverboats crossed the flat expanse of its territory with ease, bringing prosperity to the whole country.
Besides the far north, only the coast east of the mountains have not shared in this rapid development. Between the Carolinas and Quebec, the often swampy, often rocky, inaccessible Atlantic shore, with its relatively poor soils and scanty resources, has few Asian settlers at all. In the Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson valleys, homesteaders are the majority. They are typically suspicious of the big, collective, train-riding civilization of the plains, and want their own little slice of ground, a horse and a cow, and privacy. The St. Lawrence valley is more thickly settled, being decent farmland on a shipping route to Europe, and more like the rest of the country. Between these two regions of sparse settlement lie the forested hills and granite shores known as Wabanaki. “Wabanaki,” or variants of it such as “Wampanoag,” means “Dawn Country” in the Algonquian languages, and the coincidence of meaning with “Nippon” may have done something to soften the Japanese attitude towards the tribes dwelling there (collectively called “Wabanaki” too). More important, no doubt, were the exhaustion of imperial desires, the feeling of guilt over past exterminations, the increasing awareness that the continent was finite in size and resources, and most of all the simple uselessness of the land for anything that an industrial people might care to do with it.
For all these reasons, the Wabanaki nations have retained their autonomy, lands, and lifeways--though naturally somewhat have changed since the time of contact. Most live by subsistence farming, hunting, and fishing, as well as logging and other resource extraction for Japanese companies. Some areas are popular with tourists, but most of the interior is inaccessible by rail, the Wabanaki having never adjusted to that aspect of modern life. Boat travel is the most convenient method on the coast, and small airplanes are common in the mountains, typically one or two held in common by each village. There are about 800,000 Wabanaki and 600,000 Japanese and others of Old World descent in the region covered by the map. The two communities interpenetrate in places and live in peace, but for the most part they remain separate, speaking different languages and following different laws. A few fragments of Wabanaki culture, such as maple syrup, have become ubiquitous in North America--but most people do not know their origin.
The Wabanaki are commonly associated with an imagined primeval epoch in Japanese history. Through the generations, the significance of that association has varied: sometimes they have been viewed as brutal savages, sometimes as wise quasi-ancestral beings, more rarely as mere detritus of the past. As the 17th century enters its third decade and the centuries of coal and oil use catch up with global society, they are becoming objects of envy and admiration. The imperfect chemical and atmospheric sciences of the day can construct only the vaguest understanding of climate change. Many, however, hold some aspect of modern life responsible, naturally or supernaturally, and see the Wabanaki as untainted, with simple and resilient lives in a time of recession and uncertainty. Others see them as unfortunate victims, too poor and too specialized to their land to adapt as the industrial nations remake their world by accident.
This map, fictionally produced by Bluewater Charts in AD 1620, shows the Wabanaki region in that year. Towns of more than 10,000 are marked with a red diamond (for native-majority towns--most of these have almost 100% native populations) or black circle (for Asian-majorities). Railroads and rail barge routes appear, as well as tribal names and territories and special symbols for places of cultural significance: the city of Hiroimizu (at the site of Montreal) for the Japanese settlers, and three sacred mountains for the natives. The tribal territories don’t imply jurisdiction over the entire population within their borders, or have any legal status at all outside of certain agreements between tribal governments. Some of these areas are primarily Japanese in population. Note that some of the tribes included are not properly Wabanaki, i.e. not speakers of eastern Algonquian languages--a common error among the settlers.
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This map combines two ideas I’m fond of--a low-population US northeast and a Song Dynasty industrial revolution--with my total ignorance of Japanese. Apologies to those who can read hiragana and spot my errors!
