Japan's Ainu Minority in Tokyo by Mark K. Watson

Author:Mark K. Watson [Watson, Mark K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317807568
Google: DMITAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-03-14T05:56:02+00:00

5

Rera Cise: a home in the city

YŪKI’S STORY

Hasegawa Yūki is a young Ainu woman, born and raised in Yamanashi prefecture to the west of the Kanto region. We first met at the Caranke matsuri, a festival co-organized by Ainu and Okinawan groups in Tokyo’s Nakano ward during the first few months of fieldwork in the fall of 2002. I believe it was Terachi Goichi, professor at the Tokyo School of Economics, who had first forwarded me Yuki’s email and as the festival was coming up she thought it best if we met there. Although this retelling of how we met seems plausible, we struggle to actually remember. It is over five years ago already and, for the moment anyway, the exact details seem to matter little. At the height of an oppressive Montreal summer, I am staring at a computer screen. Modern-day fieldwork. Yuki’s voice is crackling a little over the microphone I have just bought to talk with her over Skype. Yuki is in Melbourne, Australia. We are talking about this book and of life in Tokyo. I am also attempting to fill in the gaps of a conversation we had had some years earlier, the notes about which I am no longer able to decipher in my fieldwork diary.

Yūki is now in her early thirties and has been an active member of the Ainu community since the early 1990s. She has traveled internationally giving statements on issues affecting Ainu in the Kanto region to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva as well as at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. Her identity as Ainu, however, is deeply implicated in a personal journey of acceptance and understanding; a journey that along with other young Ainu she finds sense in by talking about her experiences at the Rera Cise restaurant. In coming to write this chapter, I have worked closely with Yūki on the idea that her experiences of working and socializing at the Cise are also expressive of wider issues that weave in and out of being young and Ainu in the capital. What follows therefore is a reflective analysis of the Rera Cise as a place or “hub” that adopts Yuki’s voice as a guiding narration. Its intention is to illuminate questions of urban Ainu identity and community and to highlight the role of memories in shaping both the present and future for Ainu in Tokyo.

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