Forgotten race wins Japanese heritage fight

Published on Saturday 5 July 2008 19:54

THEY were nature-worshippers with their own traditions and their own island home. The fair-skinned Ainu had a distinctive language and culture, with the men preferring full beards and long hair and the women decorative tattoos around their mouths.

But as with many native peoples around the world before them, they were over-run by foreign invaders from the south who seized their land and gradually subsumed the Ainu culture into their own. Their island was renamed Hokkaido – North Sea Road – and became the northernmost extension of imperial Japan.

Now, almost 150 years on, the Japanese government has finally, and unexpectedly, recognised the Ainu as an "indigenous people".

Parliament has passed a resolution stating that the Ainu had a "distinct language, religion and culture", setting aside the belief that Japan is an ethnically homogeneous nation. Last week, Tokyo agreed to set up a commission to investigate Ainu requirements.

The official recognition – coming after decades of opposition by a government fearful of compensation claims – in Hokkaido, and particularly in towns like Nibutani that have a high concentration of Ainu, has engendered strong emotions ranging from satisfaction at a long-sought status to suspicion that Tokyo's commitment will not last beyond this week's G8 summit meeting on the island.

Tadashi Kato, president of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, said: "Some people are saying that this is meaningless. But that's not the point. That parliament approved this – this is the first step."

Ainu history stretches back to around 1200AD when settlers may have reached the northern Japanese islands from mainland Russia or Tibet. They existed on farming and fishing, and battles were fought for centuries against the invading Japanese until resistance crumbled in the early 19th century. Government estimates now put the number of people with half or more Ainu ancestry at around 50,000 although the century-long repression has all but rendered their dialect extinct.

What, then, is the next step? Is it to reclaim traditional lands or argue for special hunting or fishing rights, as indigenous peoples elsewhere have done?

Shiro Kayano, director of the Nibutani Ainu Museum here, said the Japanese government should follow other governments' examples and offer a broad apology, but

Yasuko Yamamichi, who runs an Ainu language school in Nibutani, is hesitant about reclaiming traditional lands. "It's a little late for the Ainu to start telling the Japanese to do this and that," said Yamamichi.

A study in 2006 found

that 3.8% of Ainu received welfare benefits, compared with 2.5% of the non-Ainu living in the same communities. Only 17.4% of the Ainu had graduated from college, less than half of the 38.5% for the rest of the population.

"There is certainly a gap between the Ainu and the general population, but the gap is far smaller compared to, say, Native Americans or Inuits," said Teruki Tsuneomoto, a law professor.

But the downside is that the Ainu have few of the special rights granted to indigenous peoples elsewhere and all but a minority were absorbed into the larger culture.

"That's why I think it's a good thing that Japan lost the Second World War," said Koichi Kaizawa, an official at the Biratori Ainu Culture Preservation Association. "If Japan had won, so many others would have lost their language and culture."