As we saw in Chapter One, Japanese is not the only language spoken in Japan, although it is of course, as the national language, the main one. It has never faced the struggle for dominance against the language of a colonizing power we find in other parts of Asia and elsewhere; there has been no other contender for the status of national language. That does not mean, however, that Japan's linguistic profile lacks complexity. Regional dialects, the minority languages in use among various ethnic groups and the powerful influence of English mean that the linguistic landscape is far from one-dimensional. This chapter will examine the ways in which minority and other languages have played an important role in the construction of Japanese identity, either by defining an “other” against which the “self” (or “the nation”) can be delineated, as in the case of the Ainu and the Okinawans, or by enabling an expanded notion of the self as citizen of the world.

Ainu

The Ainu language was reputed to be in danger of dying out until a 1997 law mandated its protection and promotion. The Ainu people themselves, who today number around 25,000 and live mainly in the northern island of Hokkaido, experienced considerable oppression at the hands of the Japanese over the last four centuries, during which time the use of their language had been at one time mandatory and then later proscribed.