The Ainu and Japanese Modernity

The Assimilation and Ethnocide of Japan's Aborigines

Jul 4, 2007 Woorama

How Japan's quest for modernity and uniformity has almost eradicated the Ainu peoples of the Hokkaido.

The Ainu are Japan's dirty secret. They are referred to as "former aborigines", a hidden shame that threatens to disrupt Japan's colonial myth of cultural uniformity.

Ainu Moshir included most of the Hokkaido until the mid 19th century, when Ainu social, economic, cultural and linguistic independence was subsumed by a mythological beast.

This beast was the new construct of Japanese modernity - centralised, monocultural, monolingual, united. The state struggled to present this false monocultural image, and the Ainu were a threat to this image. So in 1868 they colonised Hokkaido, which was also rich in resources and land. Japan took on some Western affectations to achieve this, including the concept of "terra nullius" as well as discourses of "civilization" and "primitivism" to justify Ainu dispossession.

The dispossessed Ainu, after being stripped of their land, were also stripped of their names and language. They were given Japanese names and forbidden to speak their native language.

Then in 1899 the Japanese parliament introduced the "Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act", an assimilationist policy under which Ainu were forced to merge their identity with the rest of Japan. The term "former aborigines" left no doubt as to the government's stance on Ainu sovereignty.

Almost a century later Ainu activist Kayano became the first Ainu member of the Japanese parliament, leading the implementation of the 1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Law. That same year Hokkaido district court condemned the government over the building of a dam on the village of Nibutani on Ainu land. They found the compulsory acquisition of the land illegal. This was the first time in history a Japanese court had recognised the Ainu as an indigenous people.

Despite this landmark case, the Ainu Cultural Protection Law failed to recognise land or resource rights, or Indigenous representation in central or local government.

In the United Nations Ainu struggled to be recognised as minzoku which means people or nation in Japanese. Before that, the Japanese had deceived English observers by using ppuru as the word for people, when it actually means persons as individuals, thus acknowledging the Ainu while at the same time sidestepping their right to self-determination as a people.

Under the 1997 Law, the Ainu are struggling for recognition of fishing and forestry rights, and the creation of the "Ainu Independence Fund". However, the law really only supports the protection of Ainu cultural artefacts and language.

And the funding that is available for this goes mostly to non-indigenous anthropologists and linguists, rather than the aboriginal people themselves.

The threat of the Ainu to Japan's monocultural image is defused through this very research, which constructs Ainu culture as being separate from reality, a world of dreams and rituals and mythology. This emasculates the Ainu as a political entity, and allows Japan's centralised, modernised state to remain unblemished in its colonial uniformity.

The copyright of the article The Ainu and Japanese Modernity in Aboriginal Rights is owned by Woorama . Permission to republish The Ainu and Japanese Modernity in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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