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• A glimpse of Ainu culture.
• Ainu are a northern hunting and fishing people, part of the Siberian "Okhotsk" culture. ... From the 15th century on the Ainu fought numerous battles against the "wa-jin", the ethnic Japanese, but as the wa-jin expanded their political influence northward the Ainu were forced to either assimilate or retreat to the northernmost islands.
• Through the help of Yoshida-sensei of the Sapporo School of the Arts I was fortunate to be able to meet a couple of Ainu activists who are working to preserve their language and culture. ...
• The Historical Museum of Hokkaido has an exhibit of a traditional style Ainu house:.

• Ainu discrimination defies the law .
• TOKYO - The Ainu, Japan's indigenous people, are complaining of growing discrimination despite a landmark law enacted in 1997 that for the first time recognizes their culture as unique and officially promotes their rights. ...
• In a recent interview, 51-year-old Kazuyuki Yamamura, chairman of the Ainu Museum in Hokkaido, said many Ainu people do not want to reveal their identity despite the new law because they still fear, and experience, discrimination. ...
• 4 percent of Ainu had faced discrimination, such as being rejected by potential marriage partners. ... 7 percent of the people questioned also said they had heard of other Ainu people suffering discrimination, a rise of 5. ...
• Ainu are the original people to have inhabited Hokkaido, formerly called Yezo (Ainu Island). There are currently 25,000 Ainu living in Hokkaido, according to government surveys. ...
• It replaces the 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Law, which supported the total assimilation of the Ainu into mainstream Japan through farming and Japanese education. Under the law, the Japanese government disbursed grants in the form of cash, tracts of land and other payments to the Ainu communities in the name of development. However such assets were never given directly to the Ainu people and were instead managed as ''Ainu common properties'' by the Hokkaido prefecture government. ...
• Severe criticism of the law by the Ainu, international pressure led by the United Nations Human Rights Committee that recognizes the rights of indigenous people, and the support of other Aboriginal groups around the world has helped improve the situation. ''The UN has spearheaded much needed change in Japan by forcing the Japanese government to recognize the rights of the Ainu,'' says Yoshihito Yoshida, head of the Ainu Culture Exchange Center, set up for the expansion of Ainu culture. ...
• Yoshida, himself an Ainu, says that despite continued discrimination, the new law is important because it recognizes the rights of indigenous people of Japan. ... '' Yoshida says the next step is to educate the Japanese about Ainu culture and then push for better recognition and protection of their human rights. ...
• Indeed the foundation, with the Hokkaido government's financial backing, broadcasts Ainu-language lessons on the radio, provides cultural classes in which elderly Ainu teach native epic poetry, and organizes Ainu festivals. It even advises the Education Ministry on a new curriculum for primary and junior-high schools that will teach Ainu history. For the first time in history, the Japanese court allowed the use of the Ainu language in trial in October 1999 as stipulated by the new law. ...

• (This is a reprint of the May 13, 1997 editorial of the Japan Times newspaper regarding the enactment of a new Ainu law that replaced an assimilationist 98-year old law. ...
• It took until last week for this country to abolish the controversial and infamous Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Law of 1899, which was designed to 'Japanize' this country's Ainu minority.
• Now this Meiji-era law has been replaced by the "Ainu new law," which has been generally welcomed as both proper and historic. But at least one spokesman for Japan's Ainu community of some 50,000 people has dismissed the new act as little more than an "Ainu cultural welfare law. ...
• So the new law can be said to be a victory for democratic maturity and the growing strength of Japanese liberalism; but at the same time it may be described as a toothless monument to Japanese paternalism, reflecting profound degree of public ignorance about the sorry history of the Ainu people.
• Although the Ainu represent only a tiny minority of JapanÕs population - a mere fraction of a percentage point - the issue is quite sensitive, even irritating. This is because for many people on both sides of this controversy, the contest between traditional 'monoculturalism' and a new Japanese version of 'multiculturalism' is defined by a testing trade-off, even a zero-sum game, between Ainu pride and Japanese identity.
• Social Democratic politicians have been pushing for new legislation on the Ainu problem; more conservative politicians have sought to blunt the force for any change. But the collapse of the Liberal Democratic Party's one-party rule in 1993 clearly encouraged Ainu hopes for official recognition as a distinct minority, that is, for the creation of a category of native-born Japanese citizens who are not of Japanese blood.
• The new "Law to Promote Ainu Culture and Disseminate Knowledge of Ainu Traditions" does contain the first implicit recognition of an ethnic minority in this country. But it fails to designate the Ainu explicitly as a legal Japanese aboriginal minority; this has been affirmed in a separate non-binding resolution.
• Resistance to a more generous law came from the bureaucracy, which was alarmed by the suggestion that recognition of indigenous rights for the Ainu might enhance the minority's claims on land and natural resources in Hokkaido. This anxiety was fanned by a ruling handed down last March 27 by the Sapporo District Court, which basically endorsed the argument that the Nibutani Dam in Hokkaido had been built on lands held sacred by the Ainu.
• The history of judicial activism on behalf of the Ainu minority can be traced back at least to 1975. That year a Hokkaido court first questioned the legitimacy of the term 'former aborigine' as the official expression for Ainu. ...
• During the past two decades, support for the Ainu cause in the courts and local governments has gradually grown. ... Rejecting the conventional defense of Japanese racial and ethnic homogeneity, Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto declared last March, "it is a fact of history that the Ainu people are aboriginal to Japan. ...

• Ainu exhibition.
• The Ainu people of Japan, victims of centuries of social discrimination, lost territory and political and economic subjugation, are relatively unknown beyond their homeland where some would prefer to think of them as a people of the past.
• Chisato Dubreuil is the person credited with bringing to life the Smithsonian’s Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People.
• Born to a mother of Ainu descent, Dubreuil was hired by the Smithsonian just after completing her master’s degree in native art history at the University of Washington in 1995. ...
• Chisato and her husband David Dubreuil (an American Mohawk/Huron Indian who left his career to serve as the exhibition’s project manager) became involved in almost every aspect of staging the exhibition, the largest and most complex representation of Ainu life ever assembled.
• “The theme of this exhibition is a celebration of (Ainu) spirituality, culture, history and art. ...
• The Ainu are believed to come from the Jomon culture, a Neolithic people who occupied much of the Japanese archipelago between 20,000 and 2,000 years ago -- before ancestors of today’s Japanese population migrated from mainland Asia and drove the Ainu north to Hokkaido and the remote Kurile and southern Sakhalin islands. In the latter part of the last century, Japan’s Meiji Restoration forged into Hokkaido and the Ainu’s adherence to traditional ways was seen as an .
• the late Ainu artist and activist Bikky Sunazawa.
• An Ainu “protection act” was passed in 1899, but its actual intent was to terminate Ainu culture and force assimilation into Japanese society.
• It was not until 1997 that the Japanese government, through legislation, for the first time provided positive support for the culture and language of the 25,000 to 50,000 who call themselves Ainu at the risk of discrimination and social stigma.
• The Dubreuils poured their lives into the Ainu exhibit. ... ) to book publishing (an impressive history of Ainu culture and art was issued by University of Washington Press last month to complement the exhibition). They worked alongside William Fitzhugh, director of the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Centre, to inspect various museum collections of Ainu artifacts that had mostly been.
• The show covers 5,000 square feet and includes over 300 pieces representing the anthropology, geography, history, spirituality, art and community of the Ainu.
• Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi saw the exhibition just after it opened this spring, making him the first Japanese head of state to visit an Ainu exhibition. ...

• The Bear Ritual of the Ainu.
• The Ainu are an aboriginal hunter/gatherer/fisher people who once inhabited many of the islands that bound the southern half of the Sea of Okhotsk north of the main Japanese island of Honshu. There were Ainu populations, now extinct, who were on the Kurile islands. 1 The few hundred Ainu who inhabited the southern half of Sakhalin Island were relocated to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido at the end of World War II when Sakhalin became a territory of the recently defunct USSR. 2 The Ainu native to Hokkaido are, and were, the most numerous and are the best known to the outside world; they are still living on Hokkaido, although their tribal culture has been obliterated. The origins of the Ainu have been a puzzle to physical anthropologists since they were first observed by Westerners in the late nineteenth century. ... A variety of archeological and dental evidence suggests that the Ainu are descendants of the Jomon people of the early Neolithic in Japan and that the Jomon people are, therefore, not the ancestors of the present day Japanese (Ohnuki-Tierney 1974, Turner 1976).
• The interest of the Ainu to us concerns the most spectacular element of their culture which served to call the Ainu to the attention of the Western world. The Ainu practiced an elaborate bear cult into the 1920s which immediately calls to mind the Paleolithic bear cult and the epiphany of the Great Goddess as Bear Mother. The Ainu captured a bear cub, nurtured it for months and then sacrificed it during an elaborate ritual. They are the only people to have retained a full fledged bear cult into the twentieth century and the Paleolithic elements are unmistakable; the Ainu are truly spectacular from a Western anthropologist's viewpoint.
• The bear in Ainu ritual is distinctly masculine and not the Great Goddess as Bear Mother. ... This Ainu bear is the earthly manifestation of the head of the mountain gods, Chira-Mante-Kamui; his bear form is his disguise when visiting the earth. The Ainu gods view humankind as equal to them. ...
• The Ainu do not conceive of these rituals as involving concepts of this sort. ...
• "The Concepts Behind the Ainu Bear Festival (Kumamatsuri)". ...

• Origins of the Ainu.
• My teaching schedule at the University of Toronto kept me from hopping on a plane for several months, but when I finally got to the lab on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, I realized the full import of Yoshi's news - namely, that the history of Hokkaido's indigenous people, the Ainu, was about to be rewritten.
• The immediate predecessors of the Ainu, who are the native people of northeastern Japan, occupied the site. Many archeologists consider the Ainu to be the last living descendants of the Jomon people, who lived throughout Japan from as early as 13,000 years ago. ...
• Archeologists and historians have long described the Ainu, like the Jomon, as hunter-fisher-collectors and, because the two peoples lived in the same region, they had few qualms about assuming the Ainu were living representatives of Jomon culture. However, the Ainu, at least in the last few centuries according to historic records, lived in above-ground, rectangular dwellings and used metal tools as well as wooden and ceramic bowls, pots, and dishes. These characteristics contrast with those of the Jomon, but in the minds of historians and archeologists it was the lack of agriculture in both cultures that forged the link between the Ainu and Jomon cultures. Further bolstering this opinion, the skeletal biology of Jomon populations demonstrates a strong resemblance and therefore a close affinity to the Ainu. Justifiably, the Ainu seemed a relic of a primitive hunting-and-gathering people who had inhabited northeastern Japan for thousands of years.
• Continue: The Relationship between the Jomon and the Ainu.
• Origins of the Ainu | Ainu Legends | Find Your Way.

• Religion: Since surrounded by the flourished nature, the Ainu had developed spirituality toward the nature and worshiped number of gods as well as animals. ...
• This ritual is a crucial to understand how profoundly the Ainu culture was related to the nature. ... When the Ainu hunted a bear, they took back its child and raised the bear for 1 or 2 years. ... Since the Ainu believes in that the animals are gods, these rituals have spiritually significant meaning as well as providing them great feast. This ceremony of the killing bear was one element that Japanese thought the Ainu was barbaric and primitive. ...
• jp/kseikatu/ks-soumu/soumuka/ainu/ .
• The Ainu men hunted mainly bear, deer, and hare and the rivers provided them salmon and trout. ...
• jp/kseikatu/ks-soumu/soumuka/ainu/ .
• The tattooing was the another element that Japanese considered the Ainu barbaric and prohibited their tradition to continue. ...
• jp/kseikatu/ks-soumu/soumuka/ainu/ .
• Linguistic: Even though the Ainu does not possess any kind of writing system, the Ainu has possessed a rich oral literature and the distinctive linguistic. The literature is mostly the stories of gods or legends sparkling with wit of the Ainu. Due to the prohibition of use of Ainu in public spaces after 1869, there are only few Ainu today who can speak Ainu in daily usage. The language, Ainu, is also facing a danger to perish in the wave of the modern culture. However, the Ainu language school has established to preserve the core of the Ainu culture, the linguistic, and the Ainu children and others are learning in the school. ...

•   The Ainu Library .

• Home Visit - Ainu Village.
• Two huts in the Ainu Village museum.
• My host family took me to see the Ainu Village Museum outside of Asahikawa. The Ainu are a native people of Hokkaido, who have lived in Hokkaido for around ten thousand years. ... I found a nice website which tells more about the Ainu, if you are interested in reading more about them, click here to visit it.
• Some of the many artifacts of the Ainu culture at the Ainu Village Museum.   The photo shows an Ainu playing a musical instrument. ...
• Here are some photographs taken of the Ainu in the past fifty years. ...
• Weaving and carving of wood are very important parts of Ainu culture.
• Ainu Village Museum building, where many artifacts are seen.
• While at the giftshop I was able to try on an Ainu outfit, and met up with fellow FMF teacher Scott who also tried on an outfit. ...
• Inside is a "fireplace" and many tools and utensils used by the Ainu. ...
• I had a great time visiting the Ainu village museum.

• Ainu Moshiri.
• Ainu Association of Hokkaido Sapporo, Hokkaido .
•         The human rights condition of the Ainu people, the indigenous people of Japan, can be summarized by the following points. The Japanese government should deal appropriately with the Ainu issue in the light of the facts as presented. ...
• Japanese Assimilation of Ainu.
•         The Japanese government has consistently followed an assimilation policy with regard to the Ainu people, and no policy based on the concept of self-determination of the Ainu people has ever been adopted, or even considered, by it. ...
• " Moreover, until that time, Japanese government leaders had been ignoring the Ainu people and had been making similar statements. In a Diet session in March 1988, Prime Minister Takeshita made a statement in which he recognized the resistance of the Ainu people, but he did not recognize the need for a "new act for the Ainu people" which would recognize their national rights and demand expansion of their rights, declaring that "there is no problem in the present measures for the Ainu people. ...
•         That the present assimilation policy is aimed at the extinction of the Ainu people, is clear from the fact that there is not legislation in Japan that guarantees the national rights of the Ainu People, nor is there any government agency concerned with the affairs of the Ainu people. In March 1973, the then Welfare Minister Saito promised in the Diet to establish a special government council which would include Ainu people among its members. ...
•         The Ainu people are native to Japan and currently live mainly in Hokkaido. ... The Ainu people are considered one of those racial groups. " Furthermore, a Japanese government representative told the 324th session of the 12th Human Rights Committee of the United Nations, held in 1980: "the Ainu people should rightly be called Utari people, but that as a result of the rapid develop of communications since the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century, it has become difficult to recognize any distinguishing features in their mode of living. ...
•         These statements reflect unilateral assimilation policy of the Japanese government and ignore the right of the Ainu people to self-determination. ...
• Restrictions Imposed on Ainu .
•         The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, which granted certain tracts of land to Ainu people, limits the transfer of those lands by Ainu people, and places their common property under the control of the governor of Hokkaido. Furthermore, the Japanese government had confiscated all the Ainu people's land 30 years before the formulation of this act in 1899 and partitioned the confiscated land to Japanese colonizers. ... ) Furthermore, the land grants to Ainu people were extremely discriminatory in that their land holdings were limited to only 15000 tsubo (about 50000 square meters , and were apportioned without any consideration paid to their suitability for farming. In view of this historical background, the statements by the Japanese Government that the Ainu people are not legally discriminated against are clear indications of the suppression of the human rights of the Ainu people by the Japanese government. ...

• Ainu Subjugation and the Development of Racist Ideology in Japan .
• ”  As Social Darwinism became the trademark of “civilized” discourse within this racial ideology, the Japanese elite too found complicity with constructions of race through the colonization of Hokkaido and its Ainu people.   Therein, Ainu subjugation helped Japan petition Western powers for recognition as a “civilized state. ”  While the Japanese had already adopted Chinese Confucian ideas of the barbarian and the civilized, the racialization of the Ainu people cemented justifications for their continued physical and psychological exploitation, being used as yardsticks for Japanese progress into Western ideals of civilization (Siddle 27-32).   Studies on the Ainu, both by Japanese and Western researchers, have even recently tended to appear only within the fields of anthropology and archaeology, with almost ubiquitous reference to them as a “dying race” (Siddle 6). ...
•      The Ainu were not always a colonized people.   Dating back even before the first historical chronicles of Japan, The Ainu had already established sovereignty in the Ezo area (now Hokkaido) (Hudson 38, 206-208).   Indeed, the fairly recent reidentification of the Ainu nation is at the crux of Ainu assertions of not simply being a passively dominated group “in need of social welfare, but a ‘nation’ desirous of decolonization” (Siddle 171).   Therein, historical identification of Ainu nationhood is not trivial. ...   Even though several attempts at “unification” (read: expansionism) up through the Tokugawa era endeavored to submit the Ainu to Japanese rule, the Ainu were able successfully to offer resistance up through the end of the tyrannical Nobunaga years (20-27). ...
•     Not until the Tokugawa government granted the Matsumae clan exclusive rights to trade with the Ainu, did official policy towards the Ainu begin to truly shift the balance in power. The motivations of this first exclusively sanctioned “Ainu-Wajin” relationship originated out of greed (what Matsumae Yoshihiro perceived to be Ezo’s “mountains of gold”) and ended in ever-evolving trade (and power) disparities (Walker 36).   The exclusive policy restricted Ainu trade potential by routing them through a single resource, but also inhibited cultural exchange between Ainu and Japanese while granting the Ainu token protections from other aggressive Japanese.   The tone of the edict-pseudo-benevolent prospectus-established the subsequent tone of Ainu discourse that continues to linger even today (37). ...   In reality, the Matsumae abused the Ainu (both physically and psychologically).   The Ainu practically lost all autonomy, lost all former land (being resettled), and lost all freedom (forced into labor)  (Siddle 46).   Many of the Ainu women were forced into sexual slavery, many of the men into physical slavery (Honda xx). ...   In 1807, the Edo officials estimated the census population of Ainu to be 26,256. ...   Disease, along with direct subjugation, helped the Japanese to define the Ainu as weak. ...

• Japan's indigenous Ainu still fighting for their land and dignity.
• TOKYO, Nov 21, 2002 - Discriminated against and almost wiped out as a distinct ethnic group by disease and assimilation, Japan's surviving indigenous Ainu people are fighting a legal battle to defend their rights and heritage which culminates in two court hearings next month.
• In a case before District Court in Sapporo, prefectural capital of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island, the Ainu are demanding the return of land seized from them and compensation for two centuries of exploitation by settlers and merchants until the early 20th century.
• The cases arise from the passage in 1997 of a new law replacing the 1899 legislation, the Law for the Promotion of Ainu Culture, and Dissemination and Enlightenment about Ainu Traditions, which obliges the government to make restitution for assets including seized land.
• meant that we could receive a certain amount of compensation for land and funds for self-support, but we received no compensation and no fund," said Ainu rights campaigner Shinrit Eoripak Ainu Kawamura at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan this week.
• "560 million yen has been budgeted but it can only be used for Japanese teachers to study the Ainu language, not for the Ainu themselves," said the bearded director of the Kawamura Ainu Museum in Asahikawa, Hokkaido.
• Kawamura, 51, resplendent in a traditional ceremonial jacket with floral designs, decried the low level of the compensation on offer, estimating that it would mean the 49 Ainu families in his village would have to share a payout of just 750,000 yen.
• "If we win the case and receive compensation, we would like to use it to create a fund to give pensions to Ainu and scholarships to children," Kawamura said.
• With 30 percent of Ainu working in agriculture, 30 percent in fishing, and only 10 percent in business and manufacturing, while another 30 percent get by as day labourers, the Ainu are among Japan's poorest people.
• The second case handled by the Sapporo High Court concerns a history of the Ainu by an anthropologist Motomichi Kohno published in 1980.
• The book reproduces two lists drawn up by doctors in 1896 and 1916 identifying by name Ainu who died of diseases carrying social stigma such as tuberculosis, leprosy, syphilis, without saying they were victims of introduced diseases against which they had no resistance.
• "Those diseases were brought to Ainu people by the merchants and the farmer-soldiers sent by the Meiji (1868-1912), government to Hokkaido.
• We want to have the publication stopped and the books recalled from the stores," said Kawamura, adding the suit sought "to restore Ainu's pride. ...
• The case brought by five Ainu plaintiffs was rejected in a district court ruling last June, but they have appealed and the first hearing in the appeal will be held on December 24.
• There are around 70,000 Ainu in Japan, including about 5,000 in the Tokyo region, according to Kawamura, although after a century of assimilation, very few are full-blood Ainu.
• The government puts the Ainu population of Hokkaido at some 25,000 and the true figure is hard to gauge.

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