The Ainu, indigenous people of Japan, facing the challenges of identity reconstruction

September 2017

1The Ainu aboriginal population is now officially about 25,000 people (unofficial data however include 250,000 individuals), in a Japanese archipelago of 127.3 million inhabitants.

2The vast majority of its members reside in Hokkaido, the second largest island in Japan, populated by 5,700,000 inhabitants and extending over 83,500 km² including its disputed lands, the famous territories of the North claimed by both Russia and Japan (Hoppo ryodo, comprising the four most southerly Kuril islands: Kounachir, Itouroup, Shikotan and the archipelago of the Habomai Islands). There is also an Ainu diaspora, whose members have settled in the main urban centers through Honshu to look for work and to escape long-term discrimination (about 10,000 people live today in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area).

Hokkaidô.

3Until its annexation by the Meiji government in 1868, this great northern territory was known by the name of Ezo-chi, the land of the Ezo, a foreign region inhabited by mysterious savages, whose southernmost point fenced the distant border of the young modern political Japanese regime. The relationship between the “Shamo” (the vernacular term for the Japanese) and the indigenous peoples who inhabit this vast area, who call themselves “Ainu” (men) to distinguish themselves from the Kamuy, the animistic deities of their pantheon, and who refer to their land as Ainu moshiri (the land of men, which formerly included the north of Honshu, Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin and the Kamchatka Point), were long inscribed from the Japanese point of view, in the logic of “ka i chitsujo”, a system inherited from ancient China, then adapted to the particular island model. It was articulated around a civilized center and its periphery made of a multitude of barbarian peoples, whose degree of savagery increased with distance. On the basis of this particular situation, some specialists in Japanese historiography have positioned the Ainu on the same level as other nationals of foreign countries, in the forefront of which were major trading partners such as Korea or the Kingdom of the Ryukyu, who were also colonized in the past. Thus, from the very beginning of the relations between the two ethnic groups, the people of Ezo, living as fishermen-hunter-gatherer tribes, never appeared as members of the national territory, even if they were not nationals of a completely foreign country, because of their geographical proximity and the important maritime trade that they had established between several countries.

Ekashi, Akan, Marimo matsuri.

4Their origins were long controversial. The process of formation of Japanese anthropology was characterized at the outset by bitter academic debates, in which this question was important. On the basis of morphology, foreign amateur ethnographers missionaries and explorers asserted that the Ainu were members of a distant lost Caucasian race, quickly arousing a tenacious phantasmagoria in the Far East as in the West (researchers of the Third Reich even exploited this idea to consolidate the rapprochement of the Axis forces). Now, thanks to the results of DNA studies, it is commonly accepted that the Ainu are the descendants of the proto-Mongoloid Jomon people who lived in the Japanese Neolithic age (-10,500 to300BC.) and created the first culture of Japan. If the question of their origins is not completely elucidated, the discussions are more serene and scientists have finally demonstrated that the Jomon, the Ryukyu and the Ainu all carry an identical genetic marker (haplotype ab3st) commonly shared by the Mongoloid populations and also present at various levels among the Koreans, Tibetans, Tungus, Eskimos and Yakuts of the Republic of Sakha. It is in particular the characteristic trait of the Buryats, the largest Siberian ethnic minority group (about 450,000 people) inhabiting the Baikal region. It may therefore be thought that the distant ancestors of the Jomon were originally from this southern region of eastern Russia, thus conferring on the Ainu and their Shamo neighbours with whom they had largely mixed, distant Siberian origins. An alternative theory of their origins suggests that Jomon originates from the Sundaland, an Indomalaysian area corresponding to the islands and peninsulas of Southeast Asia, where a large human flow from the African continent passed by India, and would have traveled through Taiwan, the Ryukyu, then Kyushu and Honshu.

Icharupa, Porotokotan, Shiraoi.

5The Ainu language, which for a long time was a linguistic mystery, is very isolated. Spoken until the beginning of the twentieth century in Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, it is of agglutinative type, traditionally unwritten and sometimes assimilated to Palaeosiberian languages. Today there are only about thirty known individuals speaking it fluently. Since the early 1980s, however, there has been a renewed interest in Ainu for their linguistic and cultural heritage. Many classes have grown and multiplied since the Ainu Shinpo Cultural Promotion Act passed in 1997 and the recognition of Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan in 2008.

6Ainu’s religious thought is based on animism and recognizes the existence of a soul in all living beings, objects, phenomena and natural elements (called kamuy). The ekashi (elders) in charge of worship, whose highlights are the “kamuy nomi” (honorary ceremony for the kamuy), the “icharupa” (ceremony in memory of the ancestors) and the “iyomante” (ceremony of the dismissal of animal spirits, of which the bear is the most famous), are also remarkable craftsmen specialized in woodworking. Indeed, the “inao”, carved sticks considered as winged messengers acting as intermediaries between humans and kamuy in order to present requests or to return the essences that they contain, are necessary to all the rituals. Made of a material known for its protective effectiveness against demonic spirits, they contain a large amount of “ramat”, an energy akin to Polynesian mana. More than a dozen different woods are used according to the kamuy for which they are intended. They can be placed on the ground or fixed on a “nusasan” altar, acting as a “launching ramp” propelling the requests contained in the inao from Ainu moshiri, the world of humans, to Kamuy moshiri, the world of Kamuy. These ceremonies, like Ainu shamanism, serve to maintain the balance between the two worlds by immutable rules, allowing the reincarnation of souls and their inscription in the eternal cycle of renewal of life.

Menoko, Toyohiragawa, Sapporo.

7Like other indigenous peoples facing similar challenges, the Ainu have been attempting with varying degrees of success since the 1960s to reappropriate their past, which experienced a brutal break because of the socio-cultural acculturation of the group. State power sought to accelerate its assimilation, notably through an alienating indigenous law (Kyudojin Hogoho) enacted in 1899, fostering the eradication of the language, customs and values of traditional society. Long engaged in the struggle for rights related to their status as indigenous peoples of Japan, the Ainu are in constant search for this fragmentary past, the quest for which is indispensable, in the hope of reconstructing it, or understanding its disappearance.

8This passionate search also supports more pragmatic political demands based on a history and origins different from those of the majority, which they continue to define and articulate. Indeed, while the Ainu have rapidly favored the education of the youngest and the socio-cultural mimesis as much as possible to facilitate their integration into this new society, they have nevertheless developed in parallel, in their households and during political meetings, strategies of resistance to acculturation by questioning their indigenous specificities. Despite the fierce attempts of existential effacement, they are the creators and the holders of a historicity that the State has long wanted to deny to them, in order to better dispossess them. The Ainu community is characterized rather by a valorization of combativeness and an extraordinary capacity of resistance through certain heroic figures as well as by the development of strategies inspired by the struggle of other minorities. Open to the world, Ainu political activism and its timetable have been restructured around the long-term socio-cultural changes that the ethnic group has been experiencing, while adapting to its immediate needs.

9In the mid-1960s, an important movement began, entailing an effort to reinterpret the Ainu identity and its history. This marks a growing emergence into an international network, as the Ainu seek to break their isolation and to put pressure on a government not inclined to hear their claims with a favourable ear. From then on, the activists focused on an argument positioning the Ainu as an indigenous people or nation, seeking to regain decision-making autonomy while benefiting equally from the opportunities offered by the society in which they now lived. Through modern political strategies, they sought to combat the recurrent a priori supposition of their racial and cultural inferiority and to transform it skillfully into a set of positive socio-identity characteristics, insisting in particular on a privileged link to the Earth and an ensemble of specific values presented as unknown to the Shamo society or probably forgotten by it : humanistic consciousness, close relations with the environment, animistic spirituality respectful of men, living beings and gods of insular animism. Revitalized, these values became a source of permanent inspiration and testimonies of the vitality of an indestructible culture despite the onslaught of unrelenting colonial modernity.

10This crucial moment marks the beginnings of the construction of contemporary Ainu history by the Ainu themselves, and appeared simultaneously with the birth of a sense of “aboriginality” whose terms, largely sociopolitical, served to define the orientations of the Ainu contemporary militancy. Traditional clothes with unique motifs, dances, songs and instruments of the animist cult, intangible symbols of the Ainu culture, began to appear again during ethnocultural demonstrations (ceremonies commemorating the return of salmon, Shakushain memorial celebration, Marimo festival in Akan, etc.). Identification with other aboriginal destinies gave them the opportunity to break their isolation that hitherto cut them off from a fundamental existential alternative : the possibility of a struggle for the restoration of indigenous rights, which they now had consciousness of having been deprived of and which they could henceforth reclaim, as well as the claim for a new identity through cultural hybridization. It was by integrating this parameter that they redefined their relations with the State, insisting on their historical and cultural specificity and their legitimacy to obtain specific rights related to their autochthony.

9^e Inkaru ushipe kamuy nomi, Moiwayama, Sapporo.

11Today, the Ainu nonetheless pursue their fight against state violence and multiple facets of discrimination. These challenges are the cause of tenacious intensive quarrels in communities, preventing the good conduct of common emancipation projects, chronic symptoms that do not belong to any Ainu socio-cultural specificity, but rather to postcolonial paternalistic inequality patterns perpetuating the belief in a monocultural society obsessed with authenticity. Faced with this oppressive situation, the exploitation by a bureaucratic caste and the deprivation of land rights, one of the great challenges of tomorrow for the Ainu will be to unite and speak with a common voice to overcome these strategies always seeking to divide them a little more. To this end, the support of other solidarity-based indigenous communities who became specialists in community reconciliation and in the art of thwarting colonial processes seeking to fragment minorities, would be a considerable asset.