Escaping Japan by Blai Guarné

Author:Blai Guarné
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Reasons for escape: historical, political and socio-cultural trajectories of Ainu

The migration south from Hokkaido to Tokyo has resulted from different historical, political and socio-economic trajectories of Ainu over, many decades. Since the late 1800s, the Ainu have found themselves a minority within their traditional territories as a consequence of the Japanese government’s comprehensive measures to subjugate, relocate and assimilate the Ainu into mainstream Japanese society. The assimilationist policies of the Meiji Restoration government (1868–1912) represent a time of massive upheaval within the many Ainu communities. Prior to this, the Ainu had resided in river-based communities with their cultural practices primarily revolving around fishing, hunting, trade, and, depending upon the region, some agriculture. The Ainu language varied depending upon the region and can be divided into three main varieties: Hokkaido, the Kurile Islands and Sakhalin (Heinrich 2012). These language varieties, and up to nineteen dialects, contain rich oral traditions with around twenty-seven different types of spoken performance genres, including the yukar (long heroic narratives) and uwepeker (stories of interesting events concerning either humans or non-humans) (Strong 2011). Given there was not any one interregional Ainu language, some Ainu people were multilingual in the diverse Ainu varieties to communicate across settlements and regions as well as in the languages of their trading partners, the Nivkh and Ulita in Sakhalin, Russians, Chinese and Japanese.

The late 1800s saw the introduction of stringent colonial legislations which included the 1899 “Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act” (Hokkaidō kyūdojin hogo hō).3 It was during these later years of the nineteenth century that language shift towards Japanese began to occur amongst the different Ainu communities, and by the 1920s, the Japanese language had become the Ainu people’s first language (Tamura 2000; Maher 2001). However, Ainu people have persisted in using their ancestral language in the domains of music, prayer, ceremonies, and performances in their homes, at festivals and as part of tourist events. Today, even though there is the mainstream belief of Ainu as an assimilated people, the Ainu themselves have survived and continue to practice their distinct cultural and linguistic traditions.

In the most recent Hokkaido government survey in 2013,4 the Hokkaido Ainu population is estimated to be around 17,000 with 70.1% of self-identified Ainu residing in the south-eastern sub-prefectures of Hidaka and Iburi. The Hokkaido Ainu Association, though, concedes that this figure greatly underestimates the actual number of Ainu people ‘due to the constraints of the survey’. One of these constraints concerns gaining access to individuals and families of Ainu ancestry to accurately reflect the realities of Ainu demographics. Over many decades, the Ainu have been characterized as a primitive and inferior people who were destined to be a ‘dying race’ (horobiyuku minzoku). Heinrich (2012: 96) argues that “this general perception of the Ainu as racially inferior, and fit only for assimilation, [has] changed little even after many of the restrictions of the 1899 act were lifted.” Consequently, the Ainu people still find themselves marginalized within contemporary Japanese society and the victims of economic, social, cultural, political and linguistic discrimination.

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