“In the 20th century, Japanese anthropologists and officials tried to hide the existence of the Indigenous Ainu”
“For much of the 20th century, Japanese government officials and academics tried to hide the Ainu. They were an inconvenient culture at a time when the government was steadfastly creating a national myth of homogeneity. So officials tucked the Ainu into files marked “human migration mysteries,” or “aberrant hunter-gatherers of the modern age,” or “lost Caucasoid race,” or “enigma,” or “dying race,” or even “extinct.” But in 2006, under international pressure, the government finally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous population…
Humans first landed on Hokkaido at least 20,000 years ago, probably arriving from Siberia via a land bridge in search of a less frigid environment. By the end of the last ice age, their descendants had developed a culture of hunting, foraging, and fishing… In time, the Ainu homeland, which included Hokkaido and Rebun, as well as Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, now part of Russia, joined a large maritime trade. By the 14th century, the Ainu were successful middlemen, supplying goods to Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and later Russian merchants…
The Ainu call ethnic Japanese Wajin, a term that originated in China, or Shamo, meaning colonizer. Or, as one Ainu told a researcher: people whom one cannot trust…
The Saru valley is also where a famous Ainu leader, Shigeru Kayano, took a stand against the Japanese government. In the 19th century, a samurai took Kayano’s grandfather to work in a herring camp: the homesick boy chopped off one of his fingers, hoping his Wajin masters would send him home. Instead, they told him to stop crying. Kayano never forgot the story. In the 1980s, the Japanese government expropriated Ainu land along the Saru to build two dams: Kayano took the government to court. He fought a long legal battle and finally won a bittersweet victory. In 1997, the Japanese judiciary recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous people — a first from a state institution. But as the parties battled in the courts, dam construction went ahead. Kayano continued to fight for his people’s rights. As the case went through the courts, he ran for a seat in Japan’s parliament, becoming its first Ainu member in 1994.”
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