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This chapter explores national identity entrepreneurship related to Japan’s territories occupied by the Soviet Union in the waning days of WWII and focuses on the origins and transformations in the “Japan’s inherent territory” narrative. Originating in the critical juncture created by the defeat, the Soviet occupation, and the domestic reforms, the “inherent territory” framing of the occupied islands was initially utilized by the grassroots movement as part of an attempt to draw attention to the economic plight of those that suffered from the Soviet occupation. In the early 1950s, Hokkaido Prefecture embraced the irredentist cause as a means of political struggle with Tokyo. From the late 1960s, as a result of Tokyo’s appropriation of the “Northern Territories” and cooptation of the grassroots organizations, the narrative has changed significantly. From legitimation strategy, the “inherent territory” has gradually transformed into an end in itself, a symbol of injustice inflicted upon the nation.

The map of Japan—a collection of forty-three prefectures, forming a smooth arc from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south—is as familiar as to seem eternal. Japan's best known episodes took place along the state's borders. The Yamato chiefdom eratically expanded from its original home in western Honshu until its descendants had claimed most of the archipelago through a millennium of warfare and diplomacy. The recent study traces the restoration of one bounded region in central Honshu. Its terrain—the sprawling district officially known as Nagano Prefecture, or more colloquially by its older labels, Shinshu and Shinano—is in a singular map in many ways. Shinano is known to students across the country as the home of Japan's highest ranges, longest rivers, biggest ski resorts, and the ur-landscape of a mountainous archipelago.

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.

This chapter starts with an examination of the long history of Ainu’s subjugation to mainland Japanese and their quiet acquiescence until the 1970s, when the Hokkaido Utari Association began to engage in international exchange. The international experiences from the 1970s gradually transformed Ainu leaders’ movement actorhood, leading to much more assertive collective mobilization by Ainu that leveraged international human rights forums with help from transnational activists. Their international activities exerted significant pressures on the Japanese government, prompting legislation of new laws to protect and promote Ainu culture and an official recognition of Ainu as an indigenous people. Ainu activists also contributed to the consolidation and expansion of international human and indigenous rights forums, legitimating the issue of indigenous rights outside typical settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, and bringing in some resources to international indigenous forums.

Modernist historiography has long bracketed Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) and Okinawa as internal colonies, conventionally dismissing them from discussions of Japan’s imperial project. This historical perspective rationalizes and codifies the narrative that Hokkaido especially is an inherent, inalienable part of Japanese territory. However, this version of history begins to fall apart when we take account of the interrelations between Ainu women and ethnic Japanese men (wajin). The interpellation of Ainu women as objects of sexual desire established the intimate frontiers of Japan’s modernist recasting of Ezo as a distinctly Japanese imperial zone long before its political and administrative incorporation into the Japanese nation-state. The sexual subjectivity of these women in turn provides a different perspective revealing how Japan’s territorial expansion and its nascent imperialism was charted through the terrain of Ainu women’s bodies, and demonstrating how sexual intimacy and sexual violence are corollaries of political and physical power.

This chapter describes the cultural and social changes in the Ryukyu Islands during the Gusuku Period. The period marked a fundamental change in the life of the Ryukyu islanders, a transformation from hunting and gathering to cultivation and to small states within a span of a few centuries. Ironworking, which had been introduced into the Amami Islands around AD 500 (Kamimura 1999), became widespread throughout the Ryukyus. In addition, a new magnitude of extensive trade links connected the island communities to the surrounding regions of East Asia. More than a millennium of prior experience in the trade of various tropical marine shells to Japan as far north as Hokkaido, and to China and Korea, allowed the people of the Ryukyus to use the knowledge, capital, and economic expertise that flowed into the islands to achieve new forms of political and social organization.

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 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 highlights the moral complexities of author Uzawa Kanako's 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 Kanako thinks of herself as Ainu, Uzawa extends the idea of moving beyond boundaries to the domain ofculture. 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.

Examines the numerous changes, many of which were initiated within government, that resulted in Shinto becoming independent from Buddhism and assuming new public roles associated with the perpetuation of indigenous tradition. Examines the process through which Shinto came to be deemed nonreligious, the construction of new shrines in partnerships between government and local communities, and the public funding for shrines. Earlier research has treated the period 1868 to 1945 under the rubric of State Shinto. Critique of that concept produced the idea of “state management” as an alternative. The chapter experiments with that term to explore its advantages and limitations.