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In 2008, 140 years after it had annexed Ainu lands, the Japanese government shocked observers by finally recognizing Ainu as an Indigenous people. In this moment of unparalleled political change, it was Uzawa Kanako, a young Ainu activist, who signalled the necessity of moving beyond the historical legacy of “Ainu studies.” Mired in a colonial mindset of abject academic practices, Ainu Studies was an umbrella term for an approach that claimed scientific authority vis-à-vis Ainu, who became its research objects. As a result of this legacy, a latent sense of suspicion still hangs over the purposes and intentions of non-Ainu researchers.
This major new volume seeks to re-address the role of academic scholarship in Ainu social, cultural, and political affairs. Placing Ainu firmly into current debates over Indigeneity, Beyond Ainu Studies provides a broad yet critical overview of the history and current status of Ainu research. With chapters from scholars as well as Ainu activists and artists, it addresses a range of topics including history, ethnography, linguistics, tourism, legal mobilization, hunter-gatherer studies, the Ainu diaspora, gender, and clothwork. In its ambition to reframe the question of Ainu research in light of political reforms that are transforming Ainu society today, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in Indigenous studies as well as in anthropology and Asian studies.
Contributors: Misa Adele Honde, David L. Howell, Mark J. Hudson, Deriha Kōji, ann-elise lewallen, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Hans Dieter Ölschleger, Kirsten Refsing, Georgina Stevens, Sunazawa Kayo, Tsuda Nobuko, Uzawa Kanako, Mark K. Watson, Yūki Kōji.
- Sales Rank: #2269824 in Books
- Published on: 2013-12-31
- Released on: 2013-12-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 6.25" w x .75" l, 1.30 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Review
It is one of the world’s most comprehensive non-Japanese-language publications of its kind about Ainu studies based on the latest research results. . . . the book’s juxtaposition of perspectives in Japan and elsewhere is expected to provide a strong stimulus for consideration regarding efforts to resolve such issues, and the effectiveness of its methodological framework will be revealed in future Ainu studies. (Pacific Affairs)
About the Author
Mark J. Hudson is professor at Nishikyushu University (University of West Kyushu), where he teaches anthropology and environmental humanities.
Ann-Elise Lewallen is assistant professor in the East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Mark K. Watson is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Beyond Ainu Studies
An Introduction
Mark K. Watson, ann-elise lewallen, and Mark J. Hudson
On June 6, 2008, 139 years after officially colonizing Hokkaido and more than 500 years since the first Japanese settlements appeared in southern Ezo (as the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido was previously known), the Japanese Diet shocked both the Ainu movement and their supporters by hastily passing a resolution unanimously recognizing Ainu as “Indigenous to the northern part of the Japanese archipelago, and especially Hokkaido.”1 This decision represented a distinct break from previous policy. For the greater part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the suppression of historical memory underpinning Japan’s celebrated claims of monoethnicity made being Ainu (or any minority for that matter) a difficult proposition (Weiner 1997). Historically, Ainu people dwelled in an area that encompassed parts of northern Honshu, Hokkaido, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and southern Kamchatka. They gradually lost control of their ancestral lands as the fledgling Japanese nation-state, fearful of Russian encroachment from the north, sought to consolidate national borders. From the sixteenth century, Japanese representations of Ainu in the artistic tradition of Ainu-e (Ainu genre paintings) had consistently depicted them as an inferior and barbaric Other. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Ainu were popularly known as a “dying race” and effectively written out of national history by the passing of the Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Act (hereafter FNPA) in 1899. However, Ainu resilience and a growing political movement during the second half of the twentieth century achieved a number of concessions. Prior to 2008 the most important of these had been the repeal of the 1899 law and the passing of the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act in 1997 (see Siddle 2003; Stevens, this volume). Still, nothing quite prepared even the Ainu movement for the truly monumental decision by the Japanese parliament to recognize the Ainu as an Indigenous people.
Nevertheless, this legislative triumph was tempered by conditions attached to Japan’s 2007 signing of the United Nations Declaration on the government took an exceptionalist position to international discourse by stating that what the international community regarded as “Indigenous” did not apply in Japan.3 This stipulation stated that neither self-determination nor collective rights, two core elements of the Indigenous rights framework, of experts charged with assessing the resolution, questions such as colonial history, Hokkaido settlement, and Ainu identity were carefully framed to sidestep calls for decolonization or recommendations for constitutional reform. Most central, the report positioned Ainu as “citizens of Japan,” possessing the same constitutional rights as Wajin (ethnic Japanese), and avoided labeling them as a colonized minority community. This approach allowed the panel to interpret Japan’s gradual expansion into and settlement of Hokkaido as a natural extension of the Japanese archipelago.
The Historical Significance of Ainu Studies
Although the Japanese government’s “new” position on Ainu is, at the time of writing, an exciting and bold proposition if foreshadowed, perhaps, by a limiting conservative agenda, we believe that this moment of unparalleled political change presents us with an opportunity to readdress the role of academic scholarship in Ainu social, cultural, and political affairs. The status of Ainu research has always, to some degree, been difficult if not controversial. Indeed, its history is inextricably entwined with the rise of the Ainu political movement, which gained significant strength and traction during the twentieth century through its vehement opposition to Ainu Studies (Ainu gaku), an umbrella term that at its simplest refers to a research positioning of scientific authority vis-à-vis Ainu individuals who became research objects. We discuss the rise of Ainu political resistance further below, but we think it first prudent to elaborate on the history and politics of Ainu Studies.
In general terms, scientific inquiry into and knowledge of Ainu people, collated under the nomenclature of Ainu Studies, were employed to develop state and prefectural policy directives for colonizing and modernizing Ainu people. With American zoologist Edward Morse’s introduction of Darwin’s theory of evolution to Japanese students during the 1870s and the availability from the 1880s of translations of Herbert Spencer’s writings on social evolutionism, differences in Ainu cultural practice and perceived evolutionary backwardness compared to the Japanese populace were integrated with pre-existing ideas linking social inferiority to bodily difference, generating local discourses on race. Within this framework, as Hudson and Deriha in this collection explain, Ainu subsistence practices such as hunting and fishing, together with the lack of a written language, became tagged as criteria to place Ainu in a lower evolutionary tier, and were used to rationalize assimilation policies such as agriculture.
By the late nineteenth century, Meiji officials had already put in place key policy decisions to formalize Japan’s borders and unify the national population. These included the goal of Ainu assimilation into Japanese society. Legal initiatives such as the aforementioned FNPA (1899) helped reinforce public caricatures of Ainu as a people who had failed to adapt to the rapid changes brought by modernity (see Morris-Suzuki, this volume). Against this background, scholarly fascination (a term we use purposefully) with the rapid disappearance of Ainu society precipitated frenzied interest in Ainu cultural forms. This galvanized amateurs and professionals in the pursuit of salvaging material culture, oral literature, and memoirs, as an antidote to the
On Physical Anthropology
One of the earliest areas of research in Ainu Studies was physical anthropology, a field that began with George Busk’s 1868 paper “Description of an Aino skull.” Outside Japan, this research was stimulated by an interest in explaining what were then thought to be large physical differences between Ainu and other East Asian peoples. As Hanihara (1997, 148) reminds us, however, what should have been a noteworthy turning point in the scientific study of Ainu people had a “disgusting history” lying behind it. In 1864 and 1865, a small group of foreigners including the British consul in Hakodate, southern Hokkaido, Captain Howard Vyse, and a Russian doctor, visited several Ainu villages where, under cover of darkness, they removed Ainu remains from cemeteries. This led to a major diplomatic incident resulting in Vyse being relieved of his duties and the other three participants being sentenced to “imprisonment at hard labor” by the British legation in Tokyo the Japanese literature since at least Abe (1918), collecting of Ainu skeletal and other biological samples using unethical methods continued for at least a century, inaugurating a period of scholarly research that remains highly controversial for many Ainu.
The greatest controversy still surrounds scholars of anatomy and anthropology, the majority of them Wajin, who sought to demonstrate the scientific modernity of their research as equivalent to European counterparts. One leading twentieth-century figure in osteological research was Kodama Sakuzaemon, professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Hokkaido University. During a career spanning four decades (1929–1970) Kodama collected and analyzed more than a thousand Ainu skeletal remains. In spite of vigorous protests from Ainu themselves, Kodama and other researchers stole human remains and burial accessories from Ainu cemeteries across Hokkaido. In some cases, this research was allowed to continue under the supervision of local law enforcement agencies (Koida 1987). In Ainu elder Ogawa Ryūkichi’s recollections of events in the Hokkaido hamlet of Mori during the 1930s, for example, we are told how the entire village police force was enlisted to assist Kodama’s team and when three or four elderwomen threw their bodies over their ancestors’ grave sites they were unceremoniously removed by attending officers (Paresuchina Rentai Sapporo 2007, 173).
In addition to skeletal remains, anthropologists took body measurements on living Ainu and obtained blood, earwax, and other samples. The vast majority of this physical data was obtained without informed consent, and blood samples and anthropometric data were at times garnered by the false reassurance to donors that these samples would help advance epidemiological research on smallpox and other diseases (Koganei 1935; Siddle 1993, 41–42). Today, Ainu ancestral collections remain the property of Japan’s largest research universities (Ueki 2008; lewallen 2007), and as Morris-Suzuki details in Chapter 3, these collections and the ethics of managing Ainu ancestral remains, are deeply contested in local communities across Hokkaido.
Of course, the way that early anthropologists approached Ainu skeletal remains was not unusual for the time. In the same year (1888) that Koganei Yoshikiyo, Tokyo Imperial University medical professor and later founder of the Japanese Association of Anatomists, was collecting skulls and measuring Ainu in Hokkaido, Franz Boas, the “father” of American anthropology, was on a similar expedition in British Columbia where he managed to collect about two hundred ancestral remains of Cowichan and other First Nations in the region (Koganei 1935; Thomas 2000, 58–63). A primary reason for these practices was the significant political and academic (and, in some cases, economic) capital that anthropologists derived from them. In terms of Ainu Studies conducted by Western scholars during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the power derived from linking Europeans with the exploited “Caucasoid” Ainu was used to promote, however indirectly, the idea of European superiority vis-à-vis the exploitative “Mongoloid” Japanese. In the post–Second World War era, however, the power accrued from Ainu Studies was much reduced, at least for Westerners. Unlike many other Indigenous peoples of the North, Ainu never became part of the Cold War strategy of “Area studies” (cf. Stern 2006) and consequently received little of the attention and money that supported such research in other regions. Instead the balance here shifted to some Japanese scholars, such as Umehara Takeshi, who used Ainu culture and history to generate academic power associated with discourse on Japanese origins (cf. Hudson 2007).
Notwithstanding the many controversies over research on Ainu ancestral remains, today the findings of Ainu Studies are being interrogated for crucial empirical data in order to shore up political arguments about Indigenous Ainu settlement in Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurils. Echoing Lisa Stevenson’s (2006, 20) comment that traditional Eskimology still retains a “richness and scientific importance both to scholars and to modern Inuit seeking their roots,” a small number of scholars and Ainu are working together to revisit the yields of Ainu Studies research. Influential Ainu such as Kaizawa Kazuaki (2010), for example, have commented publicly on its important role in providing a scientific consensus for the antiquity of Ainu settlement in Hokkaido, and these arguments have been cited in national policy making such as the report of the Expert Meeting on Ainu Policy (Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Japan 2009).
The Outcome of Ainu Political Resistance to Academic Research
Yet in spite of these collaborative moves, the history of anthropological and medical research continues to form a very real part of the historical trauma experienced by Ainu people. Indeed, as Iwasaki-Goodman (2013) notes, memories of the past are still so sensitive that modern-day researchers interested in Ainu community health must focus on social and cultural activities rather than on direct medical interventions. According to the young Ainu activist Uzawa Kanako in this collection, Ainu Studies continues to be perceived as inimical to present-day Indigenous rights and cultural revival work. In spite of Ainu reticence and in many cases open resistance to scholars’ empirical and quantifying practices, the discourse of a dying race was internalized by many Ainu, for whom identifying as Ainu became synonymous with physical and mental inferiority and a truncated state of development.
It is this state of affairs that provoked a sustained and organized movement of Ainu resistance to scientific colonialism. Especially from the 1970s on, certain Ainu groups began to organize politically and target those whom they felt had discriminated against Ainu under the rubric of Ainu Studies with public displays of criticism and denunciations (see Siddle 1996). At the same time, this fledgling Ainu political movement started to re-imagine the place and role of Ainu as an ethnic and later as an Indigenous people. This movement’s engagement with historical and cultural rediscovery and the drawing of boundaries around Ainu identity served to promote pride and
worth in being Ainu. This process of collective self-discovery and revalidation that one finds Indigenous peoples engaged in the world over is what Ronald Niezen has called “therapeutic history.” Niezen points out that the most important quality of such history is how it changes the way communities feel about themselves: “Though presented as truth about the past and the essence of one’s being,” he writes, “the self-representations of therapeutic history are actually part of a creative process of becoming” (Niezen 2009, 168). For Ainu this was not simply an intellectual exercise in cultural reclamation or social analysis; it was, as Sasaki Masao, an Ainu poet and writer in the 1970s, put it, about Ainu overcoming their “situation,” about escaping from the colonial categorization of Ainu rooted in developmental dysfunction, inherent inferiority, and racialized difference from majority Japanese (Winchester 2009). It was about Ainu defining their own struggle.
In the work and actions of Yūki Shōji, Sunazawa Bikky, Hiramura Yoshimi, Tōtsuka Miwako, and Narita Tokuhei among others, Ainu started to redefine their history as a shared, Indigenous struggle against colonial expropriation of their traditional lands, resources, and cultural heritage, and to forge a collective identity as an ethnic nation (Siddle 1996, 2006). This newfound awareness and Ainu affirmation of their historical survival in spite of national (Japanese) amnesia, empowered them to engage in new ways with the legislative process. Overseas, international exchanges with minority nationalities in China and First Nations communities in Canada in the late 1970s fostered transnational solidarity and political mobilization at home. Newfound membership in the community of Indigenous peoples led Ainu representatives to participate in the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in the early 1980s, and later the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva from 1987. Ultimately, without the Ainu political movement there would have been no government recognition of Ainu indigeneity in 2008.
The Future of Research
In this climate, therefore, we do not think it an overgeneralization to posit that today most scholars engaged in Ainu research actively support the Ainu cultural and political movements. In fact, as Howell observes in Chapter 7, “scholars who do not present themselves as impassioned defenders of the Ainu risk being tarred as crass assimilationists.” In spite of a small backlash launched by nationalist ideologues in referring to Ainu as “Ainu-born Japanese” in the wake of the Japanese government’s recognition of Ainu indigeneity (Sunazawa 2010; Kobayashi 2008; Nishimura 2009; Matoba 2009), these voices remain in the minority. Broad support for Ainu participation in, and usage of, the Indigenous rights movement, for example, has developed the basis for more activist-oriented scholarship. Non-Ainu scholars have helped link Ainu with Indigenous peoples globally for symposia, international summits, and exchanges, including a 2008 workshop on ecotourism and Indigenous archaeology in Shiretoko (see Figure 1.1), the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir in July 2008 (lewallen 2008), and the Ainu and Pacific Northwest Cultural Collaborations Project based at the University of Washington Burke Museum from 2009 through 2010 (see Figures 1.2, 1.3). Scholars are collaborating with Ainu across Japan to develop ecotours to showcase Ainu practices and knowledge embedded in the landscape and waterways and to reclaim Ainu histories in spaces ranging from the Shiretoko World Heritage site to Hokkaido University and downtown Sapporo (Ono 2007; lewallen 2011; Hudson and Aoyama 2011). Institutional reform has also followed. In 2003, Tomakomai Komazawa University in southwest Hokkaido opened the Research Center for Ainu and Pacific Cultures and became the first academic unit in Japan to offer a curriculum dedicated to Ainu history, literature, livelihood studies, language, and regional culture. This was followed in 2007 by Hokkaido University’s establishment of the Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies.
Of course, personal and collective memories of the Ainu Studies era are transmitted intergenerationally and continue today to influence Ainu self-esteem and the reception of researchers in Ainu communities. In spite of signs of change, tensions between Ainu communities and scholars still exist and both Watson (2014) and lewallen (2007) discuss their experiences of “ethnographic refusal” elsewhere. At the same time, with a number of Ainu gaining post-secondary qualifications, a new generation of native Ainu academics is beginning to follow in the footsteps of the famed Ainu linguist and Hokkaido University professor Chiri Mashiho (1909–1961), including Kitahara Jirōta, who became the second Ainu linguist in history to take up a post at Hokkaido University upon joining the Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies in spring 2010 (see Miyajima 1998, 117–121; also Tsuda, this volume). This promises to not only consolidate the re-emergence of scholarly interest on historical and contemporary issues affecting Ainu but also establish the need for a definitive discipline independent from Japanese studies.
Beyond Ainu Studies: This Book
The transformative effect of the history of Ainu Studies on Ainu–academic relations cannot be understated. While the exercise of therapeutic history helped Ainu rediscover collective self-worth and a historical identity, its founding against the racist and discriminatory actions of Ainu Studies scholars continues to preoccupy many Ainu and non-Ainu alike in questioning the utility of conducting “Ainu research” at all (Nakamura 2010). For their part, many Japanese cultural anthropologists have been unwilling to engage with Ainu critiques of Ainu Studies and have come to regard Ainu research as academically hazardous (Sasaki 2010).
Against this historical backdrop, our intention in this book is to reinvigorate discussion of the possibility and significance of Ainu research. In doing so, we are not arguing for the resurrection of an earlier Ainu Studies. Instead, building on an expression used by Uzawa Kanako in this collection of papers (and also previously with Hasegawa Yūki at a roundtable on Ainu research in 2009 [lewallen and Watson, co-chairs]), we want to endorse the need to move beyond its legacy at a time of historic change within the Ainu political movement. Of course, in broaching this subject, we accept that tensions inevitably remain and it would be naïve to assume that this “post”-stage of Ainu research is universally acknowledged by all Ainu or across all disciplinary, national, and linguistic borders or generational divides. Our position, therefore, is not to propose an untenable axiom but rather initiate a new conversation and point of departure on the subject of Ainu research.
At this time of unparalleled change, more dialogue is clearly needed. Writings in Native and Indigenous studies often discuss the relationships between academic work and political activism and ask whether these two things can or should be separated. In our view, however, these two interact closely within the cultural contexts in which ideas about Native peoples are reproduced. Talking about Native American studies in a recent interview, Philip Deloria (2009) has argued that academic research influences broader cultural forms and arguments, which in turn can impact political debates.
What kind of essays will you find in this collection? Foremost, perhaps, is a fusion of different voices. While the standard historical model of Ainu Studies emphasized a relatively limited group of topics, research interest in Ainu issues today extends through various disciplines from a radically different point of departure. In light of this context, we are aware of the need to cater to (as best as one can in an edited collection) both readers knowledgeable of the issues at hand and newcomers to this subject. Therefore the chapters in this book cover a range of styles and disciplines: reflective and analytical essays from Ainu, review-style papers by both Japanese and non-Japanese scholars that establish, as well as contest, some of the fundamental issues in cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, material culture, and history, alongside new research drawing on ongoing fieldwork or collaborative material. It is also an occasion to highlight the work of junior researchers alongside more established scholars of Ainu society such as Deriha Kōji, David Howell, Mark Hudson, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Hans Dieter Ölschleger, and Kirsten Refsing. We have also purposefully organized the bibliography as a whole at the end of this book to serve as a discrete resource for research.
We are keen to emphasize our intention to provide a volume that represents a small if important step toward a more ambitious and wide-ranging reappraisal of the project of Ainu research. However, we anticipate that for some readers this collection’s mix of overview type essays with Ainu voices and new research may not do enough to replicate the success of more interventionist approaches being made elsewhere in Indigenous studies, particularly in the North American context. Yet the fact is that, even today, Ainu research remains so closely associated with colonial detachment from the everyday plight of Ainu people that the type of collaborative work conducted with Native Americans by Les Field (2008), for example, has yet to be imagined, let alone enacted, in the Ainu context. Similarly, and in spite of identified needs, the kinds of participatory health- and-heritage based interventions that one now sees the world over (e.g., Frank et al. 2008; Potvin et al. 2003) have yet to gain traction in Ainu society due in large part to the legacy of distrust engendered by erstwhile Ainu Studies and the weak political (tribal) organization of Ainu communities.
In effect, the delicate history of Ainu–academic relations discussed above precludes programmatic statements of the way forward for Ainu research without extensive Ainu community collaboration. To propose a new model of Ainu analysis in isolation from such collaboration would contradict and compromise our objectives in moving beyond Ainu Studies. Therefore, we believe our present efforts better suited to establish the foundations of a discussion of the relevant issues and to highlight the critical―by which we mean reflective, analytical, organic, polyvocal, and politically engaged―aspects of work being produced today on Ainu issues. In doing this, we hope to open up discussion of future possibilities for collaboration, alliances, and the transformative potential of academic scholarship.
Thematic Structure: Perspectives in Dialogue
The chapters in this volume are divided into four thematic clusters. The first such theme brokers questions and issues of representation, particularly the relationship between the colonizing nation-state and the burgeoning fields of anthropology and Ainu Studies in Japan, which addressed Ainu individuals as research objects. In Chapter 2, Hans Dieter Ölschleger establishes the social background informing early ethnographic visions of Ainu by addressing the reports and opinions produced by Western travelers and anthropologists between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter serves as an introduction to the broader literature on this subject
and Ölschleger clearly demonstrates how impressions of Ainu people during this period were ideological constructs inextricably tied to shifts in Western political and philosophical thinking. From the notion of Ainu as Wild Man to Noble Savage to Good Primitive to, finally, the idea of them as a social and scientific “problem,” Ölschleger establishes how the referent for Western ways of seeing Ainu has been an invention of the Western imagination. The historical representation of Ainu society by non-Ainu as little more than a fixed and exotic Other highlights the self-appointed authority that government officials and academics have wielded over time to define Ainu culture whilst circumventing the agency of Ainu to represent themselves.
Shifting to nontextual sources of representation, Tessa Morris-Suzuki in Chapter 3 addresses how the seemingly disparate practices of tourism, anthropological research on Ainu bodies, and control over cultural representations were united through the telescoping effects of colonial power. She explains how with the rise of urban middle classes and the founding of the Japan Tourist Bureau in 1912, cultural diversity was transformed into an object of pleasure for mass consumption and urbanites became frequent travelers in the northern regions. Ainu who were subjected to the tourist gaze, however, placed their critique of this objectification (misemonoka) at the center of their movement for human rights and dignity. In almost identical language, their Ainu peers rejected researcher prerogatives in using Ainu bodies as “physical material for research” (Konobu 1994, 27–28, cited in Morris-Suzuki, this volume). Ainu rejected objectification on both counts, asserting control of cultural representation and working to build more equitable relationships with non-Ainu researchers. In conclusion, Morris-Suzuki posits that the Ainu assertion of control over representation has repercussions for how cultural heritage should be appraised and cultivated under the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act (1997).
A second thematic cluster in this collection constitutes a new critical response to the issue of Ainu representation above. One of the most enduring images of Ainu is as a northern people tied to the forests, lakes, and coastlines of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurils. Three chapters in this collection by Watson, Uzawa, and Sunazawa take issue with this conventional “regionalization” of Ainu society. Together they highlight how Ainu migration extends beyond and, importantly, redefines the boundaries of Ainu society. In parallel with urban Indigenous situations elsewhere, this commitment challenges us to rethink the usage of fixed and sedentary metaphors of indigeneity with a new vocabulary emphasizing the geographical extension of Indigenous societies and ongoing efforts by those in diaspora to reterritorialize their identities in nonlocal settings (Gordillo 2011; Watson 2010).
Mark Watson in Chapter 4 provides the general context to this approach. Based on extensive field research, Watson addresses the long overlooked issue of Ainu migration to southern mainland cities. In particular, he focuses on the history and social organization of Ainu people in Tokyo and the wider Kantō region. He points out that from the perspective of Ainu on the main island of Honshu, the symbolic conflation of Hokkaido’s geographic borders with the cultural boundaries of Ainu society mistakenly isolates, contains, and defines Ainu ethnicity. In spite of the fact that the
Ainu population in Japan’s capital has steadily increased since the 1950s (and, indeed, echoing the opinion of anthropologist Umesao Tadao, it is not unreasonable to suggest that more Ainu may actually live outside of Hokkaido today than within it [Umesao and Ishii 1999, 219]), he outlines how Ainu migration or mobility toward the south has been consistently relegated to a footnote of twentieth-century Ainu history. Watson explains that in light of the Japanese government’s 2008 resolution, scholars and politicians have begun to formally acknowledge and strategize about the national scope of Ainu issues, but that to make sense of the relevance or potential of any legal change requires a broader understanding of the social and historical context.
In Chapter 5, Uzawa Kanako picks up the issues raised by Watson and reflects on how they impact her life as a young Ainu woman living abroad. Her essay highlights the moral complexities of her personal journey back and forth from Nibutani (Hokkaido) to Tokyo and beyond to other countries, and her ongoing attempts to reconcile her identity as Indigenous and Ainu of mixed Japanese descent while receiving a graduate education at a Norwegian university. In grappling with how dominant images of Ainu as a rural and sedentary people impinge on how she thinks of herself as Ainu, Uzawa extends the idea of moving beyond boundaries to the domain of culture. She reflects on an Ainu dance she was invited to choreograph and perform as part of a Saami National Day celebration. Here, she expresses the difficulties faced in authoring her own identity as a young, modern Ainu in the face of the constraints of tradition and authenticity imposed on her by the audience and assembled newspaper reporters. Uzawa’s analysis of this event raises broader questions regarding the capacity of Indigenous youth to appropriate and interpret traditional culture.
It is this focus on tradition that inspires Sunazawa Kayo in Chapter 6 to reflect on the opportunities and challenges she has faced as an Ainu woman. Sunazawa speaks about the legacy bequeathed to her by her great-grandmother, Sunazawa Kura, which she treasures today as a moral guide and a source of Ainu Indigenous knowledge. A highly respected Ainu elder in her community, Kura was the first Ainu woman to document her own life in autobiographical form. Her The Story of My Lifetime (Ku sukup oruspe, Sunazawa 1983) was serialized in the Hokkaidō shimbun newspaper. As she describes in this account, Kayo has drawn on her great-grandmother’s legacy in linking Ainu struggles with Indigenous colleagues in Asia and the Pacific. Overseas experiences with Indigenous communities in Southeast Asia helped her foster a pan-Asian Indigenous identity and led her to critically examine the position of Ainu in Japan, whom she sees as less radicalized than colleagues in Malaysia. This chapter outlines an ongoing dilemma and a call to action for Ainu youth: how can young Ainu acknowledge their Ainu belonging and cultivate pride in this identity, but also be moved to advance linguistic and cultural revival and the recovery of Ainu political rights? Through her commitment to empowering Ainu youth, Sunazawa continues to grapple with how she can maintain her strong sense of connection to the Ainu community across Japan while living as a “transnational Ainu” in Malaysia.
The next thematic cluster addresses questions of scholarly authority in imagining Ainu and clarifies how understandings of Ainu were shaped by academic disciplines. Several essays in this collection grapple with issues of academic hegemony in disciplining Ainu as a field of study. More specifically, this refers to fundamental concerns of historical writing such as the status of Hokkaido as an inalienable territory of the Japanese nation (Howell) and archaeological arguments that Ainu subsistence economies were primitive, static, or strictly hunter-gatherers (Hudson and Deriha).
For example, in Chapter 7 historian David Howell reviews the work of three Japanese historians to illuminate how Ainu history has been balkanized within the discipline of Japanese history, citing in particular the barrier of language. To many readers of this book who are not scholars of East Asia, Howell’s chapter title (“Is Ainu history Japanese history?”) may seem obtuse. Yet, for Ainu activists who envisioned a separate, vernacular history in the 1970s, the possibility of writing an Ainu history independent from the colonial state meant the possibility of emancipation. Along these
lines, Howell’s title reaches the crux of one of the fundamental issues considered in this book: if Ainu Studies has so far been primarily positioned within a broader Japanese studies, how can Ainu research escape this history and be considered on its own terms? Howell’s choice to discuss the work of Japanese historians at the expense of Western historians (such as Richard Siddle, Brett Walker, and Howell himself) reflects his position that for real and sustainable change on Ainu issues to occur, the geopolitical and national parameters within which Japan imagines itself must also shift. While Howell concludes that the self-censorship of academic and popular media in Japan constrains open or critical discussion of Ainu history, he argues that original and exciting work has already been accomplished in this area. As he notes, cultural anthropologist Sasaki Toshikazu has been quite influential in debates on Ainu history and much of this chapter will
be of interest to Ainu scholars who are not historians. Howell’s discussion of the work of modern historian Ogawa Masahito, for example, shows how recent historical scholarship has attempted to go beyond the narratives of assimilation and resistance that have tended to dominate Ainu Studies so far. Drawing from Howell’s framing of Ainu history as a dilemma, we posit that as the field matures, scholars may be better positioned to overcome the constraints of periodization, geographic essentialism, and insider politics currently limiting the scope of inquiry.
Analysis of the surrounding ecology and cultural environment informing Ainu Studies represents another normative mode of writing Ainu society. Ainu sustained themselves, indeed prospered, through blending subsistence hunting and gathering with trading activities, until the full-scale colonization of Ainu lands compelled a shift to agriculture, codified under the 1899 Protection Act. A normative view of Ainu as hunter-gatherers became widespread outside Japan from the 1960s, stimulated in large part by Watanabe Hitoshi’s chapter on Ainu in the influential 1968 volume Man the Hunter.Despite its title, this volume represented an important reevaluation of hunter-gatherers as a much more complex and diverse group of peoples than had hitherto been realized. As portrayed by Watanabe, Ainu seemed to provide a representative example of the new view of hunter-gatherer affluence. Despite this trend, however, little actual research was conducted on Ainu subsistence until pathbreaking work by Deriha and others began in the 1990s (e.g., Deriha and Tezuka 1994; Deriha 2002).
For students of hunter-gatherer literature, Hudson in Chapter 8 suggests that revisiting Ainu people’s subsistence practice would illuminate our knowledge of human foraging on a global scale. While historical models that positioned Ainu as moving from primitive to civilized gained traction in Japan, ecological models such as Watanabe’s “Ainu ecosystem” garnered interest in academic and popular writing outside, if not inside, Japan. Recent writing on relationships between traditional ecological knowledge and climate change, Hudson observes, has begun to elaborate a narrative of Ainu as having lived in harmony with nature. But imagined stereotypes that exaggerate Indigenous peoples’ eco-sensibilities can inflict as much damage as critiques that Native peoples “exploited nature” and caused resource depletion. Echoing Morris-Suzuki, the idealized image in popular culture of who Ainu should be, continues to be deployed in imagining what or how Ainu might choose to be. As such, lack of access to hunting and natural resources
should not be misconstrued to mark today’s urban and contemporary Ainu as “less Ainu because they do not hunt” (Hudson, this volume; also see Watson 2010, 2014). Finally, rather than drawing from essentialist readings of Ainu traditional practice, Hudson argues for the use of ethnohistorical
and archaeological sources that would not only deepen understanding of ecology and resource use in cold temperate hunter-gatherer societies but also have practical applications (e.g., for wildlife management).
Timelessness and stability are the frequently used tropes one finds in writing on Ainu hunting, as Deriha Kōji discusses in Chapter 9. Early twentieth-century Japanese-language research on Ainu hunting practices, couching analysis in the “ethnographic present,” branded Ainu society as “eternally primitive.” Anxiety about the loss of scientific knowledge as they witnessed Ainu hunters acquiesce to assimilation policies spurred researchers before the 1940s to filter archaeological data through the lens of extant hunting practices. More recent scholarship has focused on exchange theory and given greater attention to individual strategizing in measuring historical subsistence needs against trade demands. As with Hudson and Howell preceding him, Deriha urges readers to consider how our contemporary knowledge of Ainu has been cast in the mold of the scientific trends in each era and the ideological enterprise of Ainu Studies. To illustrate the salience of this point, he raises the question of periodization and urges future scholars to think carefully about the shifts from one period to another, including technological change, environmental conditions, and the political economy of the Ainu social environment.
In the final thematic cluster, three chapters respond to the discursive limitations placed on representations of Ainu through culturalism whereby Ainu identity is equated with cultural fluency, and lack of cultural fluency or expertise may constrict or raise criticism of identity claims. The discourse of culturalism, and the restrictions placed on self-determination and identity therein, parallels the racialized myopia of Ainu Studies past, albeit with a new moniker. This section endeavors to expose the potential hazards of policing the boundaries of cultural identity and looks to dismantle erstwhile caricatures of Ainu identity and heritage as fixed and unchanging. In taking this position, the section’s four chapters serve to broaden the frame in which Ainu cultural practice may be imagined, and spur innovation in fields ranging from museology, language, and heritage revival to gender studies and legal analysis.
In Chapter 10, Tsuda Nobuko’s contribution has an ambitious goal: to advance an “archaeology of Ainu material culture” by drawing upon Ainu genre paintings combined with analysis of Ainu material culture heritage in European and Japanese museums (see Figure 1.4). Like many in her generation, Tsuda was raised in a pro-assimilation Ainu family and endeavored to learn heritage culture by apprenticing herself to elderwomen across Hokkaido. A quest to deepen her understanding of precolonial textile making led Tsuda to embark on a graduate degree and she will soon be the third native Ainu PhD in history. As an Ainu heritage textile artist and a scholar, Tsuda’s work helps free cultural practice from its entrapment as traditional toward an approach to culture as fluid and shifting across time. Her work embraces the critical approach we see emerging from within the Ainu community. Heritage textile practices today identified as traditional, she argues, are better categorized as one stage in a multicentury course of continuous evolution. Combining analysis from physical objects, oral histories collected from heritage practitioners, and her own attempts to duplicate the historical technology in her art, Tsuda writes that Ainu clothing materials transitioned from mostly locally produced plant- and animal-based materials to cottons and silks garnered through trade with neighboring peoples. Tsuda’s contribution introduces how shifts in the Ainu worldview, spirituality, and economic practice may be revealed through parsing the material culture record as an archival resource. Taken together with oral literature, the material record offers a critical repository of gendered male and female self-expression in place of conventional written texts.
A shared concern with the authenticity of tradition links Tsuda’s concerns with ann-elise lewallen’s exploration of the resurgence in clothwork heritage and practice among Ainu women. From a view of the ongoing Ainu cultural revitalization movement, lewallen examines the critical role that women’s engagement with culture plays in the negotiation of their Ainu identities. She argues that heritage, whether practiced, reclaimed, or legislated for, has less to do with actual pasts than with how people think about and envision the future. Based on findings drawn from long-term fieldwork, lewallen demonstrates how Ainu utilize (re)attachments to traditional culture to fuse real and imagined histories of the past with present realities, thereby recasting their relationships to the ancestors and to each other in new and socially meaningful ways. This chapter represents an important contribution to ongoing debate over the Japanese government’s 1997 Cultural Promotion Act and gives weight to the position that cultural practice is beginning to empower Ainu in unanticipated ways.
From the standpoint of the Ainu language, Kirsten Refsing in Chapter 12 provides a comprehensive introduction to the international history of research into Ainu linguistics. Her account of the first word lists to appear in the seventeenth century to research on dialects and revitalization efforts today helps address a well-known lacuna in the English literature and contains information that will certainly appeal to specialized and general readers alike. Rather than occupying a neutral space of objective scholarship, Refsing demonstrates how preoccupation with the genetic affiliations and distinct attributes of the Ainu language have long made linguistic research an empirical device for defending particular theoretical and political positions. In the work of early twentieth-century missionary John Batchelor, for example, we learn not only how research into Ainu grammar became a medium for conjecture about Ainu racial origins and other topics of colonial concern, but also see in his method as a “prescriptive grammarian” the depth of intellectual hubris employed by the standard Ainu Studies scholar. Indeed, the famed native Ainu linguist Chiri Mashiho’s withering critique of Batchelor’s Ainu-English-Japanese Dictionary (1888)―“rather than saying that it has many flaws, it would be closer to the truth to say that it consists solely of flaws” (Chiri 1956a, 237, cited in Refsing, this volume)―resonates strongly. Yet, at the same time, Refsing points out how Ainu language studies have also offered hope of cultural renewal and empowerment. Far from a dying field, for instance, there are vibrant and ongoing traditions of collaborative work between Ainu and non-Ainu on oral literature, dialects, place names, and language revival. In this context, language is an important site of intercultural resistance against scientific colonialism.
In Chapter 13, Georgina Stevens approaches cultural practice from a different angle, as a base from which to mobilize for judicial and legal leverage toward achieving political rights. For newcomers to this wide-ranging subject, Stevens provides a review of legal rulings pertaining to Ainu, but also develops an integrated assessment of how legal mobilization both at home and abroad has leveraged Ainu claims in “shaming the state.” Ainu achieved international notoriety by exposing the Japanese government’s misdeeds in United Nations meetings, and linkages established there further galvanized the movement at home. While Ainu people have rarely seen concrete legal outcomes resulting in legal redress for historical or contemporary injustices, Stevens concludes that the collective gains of legal mobilization―symbolic, political, and economic―have helped improve and empower their domestic human rights situation. In this extended essay, Stevens brings the politics of the international movement up-to-date in discussing the content and potential effects of the Japanese government resolution in 2008 to recognize the Indigenous status of Ainu.
In Closing
For an edited volume such as this, where the collection of essays deals with a wide range of thematic material and comprises a diverse grouping of authors, it is imperative for the introduction to situate the book’s rationale and justify its ambition. In terms of historical context, we have
discussed how this venture seeks to move beyond the legacy of traditional Ainu Studies that continues within collective Ainu and academic memory to shape the delicate and often political nature of Ainu research (Ueki 2008; lewallen 2007; Bogdanowicz 2005; Siddle 1996). We have made clear how our ambition to move beyond the racialized focus of Ainu Studies past is in order to reframe the question of Ainu research in light of political reforms that are transforming Ainu society today. Indeed, one could make the closing argument that this book’s interest in opening up new spaces of engagement with contemporary Ainu research is indicative of changes within the Ainu movement itself. For the last twenty to thirty years at least, we have witnessed how the political writings of select organic Ainu intellectuals (e.g., Yūki Shōji 1980) have gradually given way to a range of personal and decentralized projects (incorporating new media) that Ainu are increasingly using to challenge and dismantle the limitations and constraints surrounding Ainu self-determination and expressions of identity. While the political conviction to renew an Ainu sense of belonging in the world has remained a constant, these projects have opened up new spaces of engagement in which individuals and groups are asking fundamental questions about the value of their lived experience as Ainu vis-à-vis traditional models of culture based on heritage.
For these reasons you will find at the start of this book a poem entitled “Message from Ainu-Mosir” by Ainu artist Yūki Kōji. This poem was originally written for World Peace and Prayer Day in Japan in 2004. In recent years, Yūki has gained increasing prominence in Japan for his writings on climate change and environmental destruction, and for his efforts to locate solutions for lifestyle change within Ainu oral literature. Positioning Ainu in current debates on global environmental change raises a range of issues about Indigenous peoples and environmentalism, and furthermore how Indigenous thought can “help us interculturally think about a climate system that is interconnected to human practices” (Leduc 2010, 6; see also Aoyama 2012). We feel that Yūki’s verse provides fitting contemplation on the source of cultural knowledge and inheritance and how Ainu ethnicity may be envisioned for the future. In many ways, our rationale for this book, to break with the past and move beyond the constraints of traditional Ainu Studies, reflects this position.
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