Japan’s native people, the Ainu, once hunted bears and fished for salmon in the wild forests of the country’s far north, but today they are an ethnic minority fighting for their cultural survival.
Like Aboriginals elsewhere, the Ainu suffered through an era of forced assimilation that took a heavy toll on their customs, language and way of life, leaving them a disadvantaged minority in modern Japan.
As the group keeps struggling to redress past wrongs and revive its rapidly fading traditions, its community leaders say they hope for support from Japan’s new center-left government, which took power in mid-September.
The electoral seat of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is on Hokkaido island, part of the ancient homeland of the Ainu, which once stretched from northern Honshu island to the Kuril and Sakhalin islands now ruled by Russia.
Hatoyama, in a recent parliamentary address, said he wants a society free of discrimination and prejudice, and hopes to promote cultural diversity, including by “respecting the history and culture of the Ainu people.”
His Democratic Party of Japan has promised a kinder, gentler society after more than half a century of almost unbroken conservative rule, and the prime minister often speaks of his vision of a society shaped by “fraternity.”
The Ainu hope the new spirit of brotherhood will also apply to them as they continue to struggle with higher incidences of unemployment and poverty than the rest of Japan, and lower levels of health and education.
“After a long, negative period, I believe that great possibilities are opening up now that, in the political world, the Democratic Party of Japan is about to launch a new era,” Haruzo Urakawa, a former chairman of the Tokyo Ainu Association, wrote in a letter to Hatoyama.
The new prime minister, days after his Aug. 30 election win, met Tadashi Kato, chairman of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, who urged the incoming government to establish a new Ainu law and boost measures to support his people.
The Ainu were only recognized in June last year as Japan’s Aborigines, in a resolution passed months before Japan hosted a summit of world leaders, the G8 conference, on Hokkaido.
Japan signed up in 2007 to the UN Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples, but still lacks a national law to formally recognize the Ainu.
“At the moment, the most urgent issue for us is the establishment, in concrete terms, of specific legislation at the national level,” Kato said.
Although the content of such a law has not taken shape yet, Ainu have in the past called for greater self-determination, control over natural resources, school texts in their native language and a formal apology for past wrongs.
Most of Japan’s people, Kato said, have a lot to learn about the Ainu, whose number has been estimated at 70,000, but is uncertain because many have integrated with mainstream society and some have hidden their cultural roots.
Some anthropologists believe the Ainu once lived across Japan’s four major islands, but were pushed northward by later waves of migration from mainland Asia.
Fairer-skinned and more hirsute than most Japanese, the Ainu traditionally observed an animist faith with a belief that God exists in every creation — trees, hills, lakes, rivers and animals, particularly bears.
Ainu men kept full beards, while women adorned themselves with facial tattoos which they acquired before they reached the age of marriage. Ainu clothes were robes spun from tree bark and decorated with geometric designs.
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