The Ainu of Northern Japan: Indigeneity, Post-National Politics, Territoriality (original) (raw)
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This article seeks to contribute both to the scholarly debate on Japan's territorial dispute with USSR/Russia and to the broader body of academic literature devoted to the ideational factor in foreign policy. By focusing on the formative years of the dispute and examining the variety of symbolic meanings attached to the Soviet-occupied islands by the domestic actors, this article examines the process of the emergence of the idea of the ‘Northern Territories’ as a national mission. It argues that the formation and institutionalization of the idea of the ‘Northern Territories’ in its present form can be traced to a complex web of power relations among the domestic actors, none of which perceived the return of the territory as its ultimate goal.
Hokkaidō 150: settler colonialism and Indigeneity in modern Japan and beyond
Critical Asian Studies, 2019
This roundtable presents the proceedings of the "Hokkaidō 150: Settler Colonialism and Indigeneity in Modern Japan and Beyond" workshop held at the University of British Columbia in March 2019. The sesquicentennial of Japanese settler colonization of the northern island of Hokkaidō or Ainu Mosir received only scant attention either in Japan or around the world. The goal of this roundtable is to reinsert settler colonialism into modern Japanese history while introducing the case of the Ainu into global conversations of Indigeneity. Katsuya Hirano draws attention to how the Meiji state manipulated ideas of ownership to enable exploitation of Ainu lands. ann-elise lewallen recenters Ainu women's resistance to the sexual colonization of Hokkaidō. Mai Ishihara interrogates her own positionality and asks why many people with Ainu heritage remain silent. Sheryl Lightfoot reviews how the case of the Ainu in Hokkaidō complicates prevailing paradigms of settler colonial studies. Musicians Mayunkiki, Tomoe Yahata, and Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson discuss issues of Indigenous identity and their practice. Finally, Danika Medak-Saltzman concludes the roundtable by re-situating Ainu at the intersection of settler colonial and Native studies, challenging Japan scholars to more meaningfully engage and prioritize Indigenous studies.
2021
The Ainu are the indigenous inhabitants of Hokkaidō, Japan’s northernmost part. Throughout the past centuries, the relations between Ainu and ethnic Japanese (wajin) has been one of unequal agency and domination by the wajin. In this paper, I want to focus on the mutual construction of articulations of identity. Articulation here follows James Clifford (2013), describing a dynamic, performative concept of identity which can be self-defined, but also embodies the potential of outside ascription. In the interchange of ascribed articulations (imposing an identity upon) and self-articulations, I seek to demonstrate the interrelation of articulations in asymmetrical actions and the potentials of appropriating discursive fields for taking control of self-determination. Starting with a discussion of the trifold construction of Japanese identity articulation within the literary genre of nihonjinron (“theories of Japaneseness”), I follow wajin determinations of Ainuness before looking at how the Ainu have dealt with these ascriptions and used them to formulate their own discourse of cultural revitalization. In the end, I argue for a larger, inclusive framework transcending the mere Ainu-wajin relations to hint at commonalities towards a more inclusive framework of becoming with. I implement this by using salmon as a guide throughout the entangled histories of Hokkaidō and Ainu international connections.
UNISCI Discussion Paper No 32, 2013
This paper joins the constructivist debate on Japan's national identity and foreign policy. Mainstream constructivists that look at norms as main components of national identity have focused on Japan's anti-militarist or pacifist identity. While paying attention to the process of the emergence and institutionalisation of the anti-militarist norms their works have implied the existence of certain coherence between the intentions of the various actors that participated in this process and the final institutionalised norm. On the other hand, critical constructivists that construe identity of the national "self" as constructed in opposition to the difference of multiple "others" have focused on broad identity discourses and have paid little attention to the role of concrete issues and events in the continuous reproduction of these discourses as well as the processes through which these identity discourses emerge. This talk is guided by the critical constructivist ontology. It will focus however on the processes that led to the emergence of two territorial disputes, Northern Territories and Takeshima, as main building blocs in the discursive construction of Japan's postwar identity vis-a-vis Russia and South Korea respectively. It examines the role of sub-state actors such as municipalities and civil society groups in these processes. I will argue that while both of the final constructs are quite similar, the processes that led to their emergence have some very important differences. Furthermore, by analysing the interests of these actors the paper argues that their interests had little in common with the final identity constructs. This argument questions the ideational coherence of the process of national identity construction implied in mainstream constructivist works.
Japanese Journal of Political Science, 2010
This article sheds light on a relatively unexplored aspect of theNorthern Territories dispute by examining the views of residents in Nemuro – the symbolic frontline in Japan’s Northern Territories Reversion Movement (NTRM). The NTRM began in this northern periphery as a movement of divergent attitudes but was soon coopted by the Japanese government for political reasons. Local opposition to the government’s four island en bloc policy existed in some quarters but was largely kept in check by state largesse. However, as a result of demographic and socioeconomic changes, dissent is slowly emerging in Nemuro. There are signs of an emerging disjuncture between national policy and local aspirations. This disjuncture has both theoretical and policy implications. Theoretically, this paper is congruent with politico-institutional arguments emphasizing the impact of the regulatory regime in shaping civil society organizations. From a policy perspective, public opinion in Nemuro indicates a potential avenue for compromise in Tokyo’s negotiating strategy, although pressure for change is unlikely to emerge from the bureaucratized NTRM.
2020
The former Tokugawa bakufu exercised varying degrees of suzerainty over the Indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido for centuries. However, increasingly direct challenges to Japanese territorial sovereignty by the rapidly expanding American, British, and Russian colonial empires pushed the new Meiji regime to formally annex Ainu territories across the northern island in 1869, claiming them as terra nullius (empty, ownerless land). Thereafter, with the support of a contingent of foreign advisors, educators, and diplomats, the modernizing Meiji state began to transform Hokkaido into an export-driven resource colony resembling not the Japanese mainland but New England. Settlersmany of them penniless former samuraitook on the role of white American frontiersmen, "breaking" a land re-imagined as uninhabited, primordial, and virginal. Meanwhile, colonialists began to re-cast the Ainu as akin to the "Indians" of the American frontier. These "Indian"-like Ainu were subjected to a series of discourses and policies which aimed to "de-Indigenize" them, conceptually rendering them non-native in their own colonized homeland. This facilitated the dispossession of their land, their resources, and ultimately, of their own bodies. A transnational settler colonial project, Hokkaido was not simply a "Westernized" region internal to Japan, but an outer territory which became "Japanese" precisely through its Westernization. And, far from an obscure outer periphery, settler colonial Hokkaido was central to the development of the modern Japanese nation-state and wider colonial empire. Accordingly, the present study builds upon a growing wave of revisionist literature which challenges conventional historiographies which assert that the Japanese colonial period began with Japan's acquisition of Taiwan in 1895 and ended with Japan's defeat in the Asia Pacific War in 1945 and instead understands Hokkaido as an ongoing settler colonial project.