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For years, Japan tried to keep their existence a secret. But the Ainu people refuse to disappear

Japan's Ainu people have their own history, languages and culture. But, as the victims of colonialism, assimilation and discrimination, much

abc.net.au

As a young boy in school, Masaki Sashima would be dragged out of his classroom and beaten by his fellow students.

Masaki, now 72, was different to the other kids. 

He was Ainu, an Indigenous people from the country’s northern regions, most notably the large island of Hokkaido.

“During recess, the hallway door would open, and several guys would yell at me to come out,” he said.

“I clung to my desk in the classroom and kept quiet.

"Everyone would surround me and beat me.”

Japan has long portrayed itself as culturally and ethnically homogenous, something that some have even argued is a key to its success as a nation.

More than 98 per cent of Japanese people are descendants of the Yamato people. 

But the Ainu are distinct, with their own history, languages, and culture.

But, as the victims of colonialism, assimilation, and discrimination, much of that identity has been lost. 

An Ainu woman named Chiri Yukie wrote down some of her people’s oral traditions into Japanese because, as a child, her people were being displaced by Japanese settlers in Hokkaido. Her language was disappearing, so she (ironically) saw translating the stories into Japanese as a way to preserve them. She died at age 19.

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Some of the objects from the Ainu exhibition at Japan House in London this year, showcasing traditional Ainu skills and culture. There is a campaign to get Ainu recognised as an official language, at least in Hokkaido, and small steps are happening, for example, bilingual bus stops. It reminds me of the struggle for Welsh to be revived after suppression for centuries.

second image ID: the cover of The Song The Owl God Sang: The collected Ainu legends of Chiri Yukie, Translated into English by Benjamin Peterson. end ID

Also, this is a good short ~25 minute documentary that shows Ainu people fighting to recover their ancestral bones and bodies from Hokkaido University that’s worth a watch.

This is something which it is extremely important to understand about Japan as a nation. It has a national and international narrative about itself as a unified, geographically and culturally consistent polity, but from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south, to the Ryukyuan island chain near Taiwan (and well beyond at various times), the Japanese have undertaken imperial conquest and colonization of their nearby territories, and have attempted brutal assimilation or eradication of the indigenous people of those places, and the Japanese government has historically been wildly resistant to recognizing those minority groups as minority groups, likely in part because it would commit the country to offering them appropriate legal protections.

Japan IS ethnically diverse, Japan IS linguistically diverse, it IS culturally diverse, and the portrayal of Japan as a homogenous society is a portrayal which serves the political aims of particular groups, often the far right and conservative wings of Japanese society, and certainly the apologists for empire.

To grab a quote from Wikipedia:

Initially, to justify Imperial Japan’s conquest of Continental Asia, Imperial Japanese propaganda espoused the ideas of Japanese supremacy by claiming that the Japanese represented a combination of all East Asian peoples and cultures, emphasizing heterogeneous traits. Imperial Japanese propaganda started to place an emphasis on the ideas of racial purity and the supremacy of the Yamato race when the Second Sino-Japanese War intensified.

Fuelled by the ideology of racial supremacy, racial purity, and national unity between 1868 and 1945, the Meiji and Imperial Japanese government carefully identified and forcefully assimilated marginalized populations, which included Okinawans, the Ainu, and other underrepresented non-Yamato groups, imposing assimilation programs in language, culture and religion.

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photograph by Alexander Coke Smith

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