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Policy toward the Ainu during the Meiji period reflected the state's dual program of bringing peripheral peoples within the polity as Japanese nationals while at the same time attacking those elements of Ainu society and economy deemed incompatible with their eventual participation in the nation as civilized moderns. The Ainu became increasingly vulnerable during the Meiji period. The Welfare Policy for Former Aborigines within Nemuro Prefecture sought to promote family and communal farming among the Ainu, with improving education a secondary objective. The Meiji state conducted an aggressive and extremely disruptive experiment in social engineering on the Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu. It is shown that although the policies implemented in both cases were similar, the response of the Ainu differed in a number of important respects. The Japanese government's policies did great violence to Ainu culture and without question weakened Ainu ethnic identity.

This chapter describes the “archaeology of Ainu material culture” by drawing upon Ainu genre paintings combined with analysis of Ainu material culture heritage in European and Japanese museums. Heritage textile practices today identified as traditional are better categorized as one stage in a multicentury course of continuous evolution. Combining analysis from physical objects, oral histories collected from heritage practitioners, Ainu clothing materials transitioned from mostly locally produced plant- and animal-based materials to cottons and silks garnered through trade with neighboring peoples. 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.

This chapter presents the international history of research into Ainu linguistics. It particularly 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, research into Ainu grammar became not only a medium for conjecture about Ainu racial origins and other topics of colonial concern. In addition, 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.

This chapter looks at the spread of the common law doctrine in the new century into new settings, notably Malayasia, Belize, and southern Africa as well as its resurgence in New Zealand (foreshore and seabed controversy) and infiltration into New Zealand. It examines how it influenced the rapid development of international law norms from the 1990s, including the United Nations and Inter-American and African regions as well as the Philippines, Kenya, Scandinavia, and Japan. Aboriginal title spread and influenced forms of legalism that by the millennium were becoming global. As this happened, the key distinction between imperium and dominium began to dissolve as aboriginal self-determination became the new propellant of juridical development.

This chapter examines the political implications of the revisions made to Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by Isabella Bird. The idealization of the Ainu people, the culminating northern point of her journey, consigns them to historical defeat, victims of the racial struggle for existence. In particular, it investigates how editorial changes alter the character of the traveler. It also shows how representations of Japan are accordingly modified. Finally, it reviews the most conspicuous difference between the two editions — the erasing of most of the references to missionary activities in Japan. Perhaps the act of travel writing is itself an effort to redefine identity, which contact with the other destabilizes to some extent. If this is the case, differences between the first and the popular editions of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan cast an interesting light upon the ways in which cultural boundaries are redrawn in the process of recounting travel.

This chapter addresses the long overlooked issue of Ainu migration to southern mainland cities. 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, Ainu migration or mobility toward the south has been consistently relegated to a footnote of twentieth-century Ainu history. 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. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the history and social organization of Ainu people in Tokyo and the wider Kantō region.

This chapter discusses the legacy of Sunazawa Kura, a highly respected Ainu elder in an Ainu community, as well as the first Ainu woman to document her own life in autobiographical form. Her work The Story of My Lifetime (Ku sukup oruspe, Sunazawa 1983) was serialized in the Hokkaido shimbun newspaper. As she describes in this account, Ainu struggles are linked with Indigenous colleagues in Asia and the Pacific. 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.

Shinano was not a classic Japanese region. This province had a singular geography mounted on the highest mountains anywhere in the country. Working with maps of early modern Shinano illuminates a subtle way in which Bizen's geography made it distinctive. The shift of power from Kyoto to Edo barely registered from the vantage point of Bizen. Local resources might be marshaled under a succession of different regimes, but all of those modes of organization developed within a consistent spatial framework that was oriented to the east. Shinano reveals a sharply different story by viewing those same centuries from a different standpoint. Shinano lays to the east relative to the original imperial capital to the rugged gateway to the unconquered lands of the Emishi and the Ainu. Shinano was no longer a route to the eastern frontier from the standpoint of Japan's medieval and early modern governments.

This chapter discusses how long-standing economic relations on Japan's northern frontier were ritualized to secure Matsumae's place in the early modern polity, and how the combination of economic engagement and ritual determined the Ainu's position as barbarians within the status system. The Ainu's growing involvement in the commercial fishing economy was critical, for it decisively secured the ability of the Matsumae domain to institutionalize the Ainu's position as barbarians in the geography of civilization. The uimam and umsa rituals were effective because they fit both Ainu and Japanese expectations of the proper relationship between the two peoples. As the status system provided a framework to articulate identities, there could not be a social space defined by in-betweenness.

This chapter investigates the association between civilization and barbarism as mediated by customs in the early modern period. After a short introductory discussion of the place of the Ezochi and the Ryukyu kingdom as peripheries of the early modern state, it examines the relationship between customs and status in the core polity and the marking of the Ainu alternately as barbarians and as Japanese through the deployment of customs. It tries to show that the geography of civilization was rooted in a spatial understanding of Japan's place in East Asia. The connection between customs and notions of civilization had deep roots in Confucian thought. Matsumae's attitude toward visible symbols of Ainu identity similarly reveals the nature of the civilizational boundary in Hokkaido. The Ainu's perception of both ritual and labor as forms of trade reflects the organic quality of the relationship.

The linking of identity with territoriality was not shared by the states with which nineteenth-century Japan competed, particularly Russia and China. Civilization could be imposed unilaterally on the Ainu population as a whole. The linguistic diversity of the archipelago is considered. A number of critical differences distinguished the Ainu and outcastes during the Tokugawa period. The same process of selective ethnicization occurred on the Ryukyu Islands. The modern Japanese state appropriated Japanese identity by tying modernity to civilization. Status and civilization combined to lay the groundwork for a conception of a unitary ethnicity subsumed within national identity—not in its contemporary guise, of course, but rather in a form that antedated the emergence of the modern nation-state. If modern ethnicity is a construct, it follows that early modern society provided the raw materials from which it was fashioned.

This concluding chapter 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, The collective gains of legal mobilization—symbolic, political, and economic—have helped improve and empower their domestic human rights situation. The remainder of the chapter enumerates the content and potential effects of the Japanese government resolution in 2008 to recognize the Indigenous status of Ainu.

This chapter first sets out the book's focus: one strand of the vast river of oral tradition that Chiri Yukie (1903–1922), a young Horobetsu Ainu woman, received from grandmother Monashnouk (1848–1931), namely the Ainu shin'yōshū (Collection of Ainu chants of spiritual beings). This was the only part of her oral heritage that she was able to transcribe, translate, and arrange to have published during her short life. Yukie had created this manuscript, containing thirteen kamui yukar (chants of spiritual beings) in the Horobetsu Ainu dialect, by transcribing the Ainu words in the Latin alphabet and providing facing Japanese translations. The remainder of the chapter discusses the Ainu and their oral culture; Yukie's girlhood and receipt of oral traditions; and Yukie's encounter with wajin (ethnic Japanese) linguist Kinda'ichi Kyōsuke and the writing of the Ainu shin'yōshū.

The traditional Ainu of Horobetsu, as a culture based primarily on hunting, fishing, and gathering, lived in intimate relationship with the natural world (including its spiritual dimensions). Not surprisingly, their social structures reflect this close engagement. In traditional society, norms for social interaction involved both human-human relations and, because the kamui are alive and responsive just as human beings are, human–kamui relations. These two sets of interactions and social structuring are not highly distinct; the two were interrelated, modeled upon each other, and governed by the same sets of assumptions. This chapter gives a brief description of these social arrangements, starting with human-human relationships and then considering human–kamui relationships and interactions.

This introductory chapter examines the passing of a resolution recognizing Ainu as “Indigenous to the northern part of the Japanese archipelago, and especially Hokkaido.” This legislative triumph was tempered by conditions attached to Japan's 2007 signing of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Firstly, it was made clear that the Japanese government took an exceptionalist position to international discourse by stating that what the international community regarded as “Indigenous” did not apply in Japan. Secondly, in a 2009 report drafted by a panel 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.

This chapter presents the social background of early ethnographic visions of Ainu through reports and opinions produced by Western travelers and anthropologists between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 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, finally, the idea of them as a social and scientific “problem,” 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.