This article is based on comments in Japanese prepared in response to Tsuboi Hideto's presentation “Mizukara no koe o honyaku suru” for the workshop Gurobarizeshon to imin (Globalization and Migration), held at Cornell University in 2007. Gavin Walker translated the original version of this text which has been expanded and substantially revised for The Asia-Pacific Journal. I wish to thank Tom Lamarre, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, and Mark Selden for their valuable comments on the earlier versions of the article. My thanks also go to Gavin Walker who translated the original version of the article which has been expanded and substantially revised for The Asia-Pacific Journal. Walker is a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Literature at Cornell University. His article, “The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the Autofictional Machine,” is forthcoming in positions: east asia cultures critique.

[1] The difference in use of the terms “wajin” and “Nihonjin” from the Meiji to the Taisho periods is a crucial point. While “wajin” was meant to connote the pure ethnicity of the people living in this archipelago from the Yamato period (300-550 CE) onwards, the term “Nihonjin” (“Japanese” in contemporary language), was used for any single citizen of the Japanese empire, and therefore indicated membership. At the base of this differentiation is the assumption that while the Ainu or the Ryukyu people could become “Japanese” through the process of assimilation, they could never become “wajin.” Clearly, Ainu themselves came to use wajin as a way to distinguish themselves from people on the archipelago in the process of assimilationist policies. Chiri, Yamabe and Takekuma all used this term to mean “authentic Japanese ethnos” as opposed to “Japanized” Ainu.

[2] Hokkaidoshi, vol. 1 (Hokkaido-cho, 1918), 3-5.

[3] Shinsen Hokkaidoshi (Hokkaido-cho, 1937), 47.

[4] Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 142. My addition in brackets. Foucault goes on to argue that “if the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is something altogether different behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.” My critique of history based on the conceptions of ethnicity and progress is aimed precisely at this kind of metaphysical assumption of essence and timelessness. And I believe that the perspective of colonial translation is an important corrective to historicism and ethnocentrism because of its ability to unpack historical processes in their singularity, heterogeneity, and contingency.

[5] Deleuze and Guattari use the term “deterritorialization” to explain the process by which the right to utilize a certain piece of land is revoked, and the land itself expropriated from those who previously used it for their own livelihood. They use “reterritorialization” to indicate the reordering of the multiplicity of place and territoriality into a unitary space, the process by which the heterogeneous inscription in the land is translated into a homogenized, geometric space. In the context of colonialism, “deterritorialization” is the process of the violent seizure from its indigenous people of the means of production (land and the forms of life based on it) necessary for their existence, while “reterritorialization” is the reintegration of these means, now transformed into the means of capitalist production, into a homogeneous, geometric territoriality. What I refer to in this article as “colonial translation” indicates this total process. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

[6] Iwasaki Naoko, Rekishi to Ainu: Nihon wa doko e iku no ka (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2003), 209-211.

[7] The history of Japan's early colonies such as Okinawa also attests to the point here.

[8] Tsuboi Hideto, “Mizukara no koe o honyaku suru” in Ikyo no shi, eds. Nishi Masahiko and Sakiyama Masaki (Tokyo: Jinbun shoin, 2007), 87.

[9] Otomo Yukio, Kindaichi Kyosuke to Ainugo (Tokyo: San'ichi Shobo, 2001), 29-30.

[10] Kindaichi Kyosuke, “Ainu no dan: Kokoro no komichi yowa” in Gengogaku gojunen (Tokyo: Takara Bunkan, 1955), 201-203.

[11] Otomo, Kindaichi Kyosuke to Ainugo, 83-84.

[12] Kindaichi, “Chiri Yukie san no koto” in the Kyodo kenkyusha reprint of Ainu shinyoshu, 2^nd ed. (Chiri Mashiho o kataru kai, 2002), 1.

[13] Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Henkyo kara nagameru (Misuzu Shobo, 2000), 110.

[14] Kindaichi, “Chiri Yukie san no koto,” 2.

[15] This bilingualism should be distinguished from that which Ainu had gained long before the Meiji period in order to trade with the “Wajin.” The former was a by-product of colonial policy of monolingualism that forced Ainu to renounce their language and adopt Japanese as their own.

[16] Ogawa Masato, Kindai Ainu seidoshi kenkyu (Hokkaido tosho kankokai, 1997), 10.

[17] Morris-Suzuki, Henkyu kara nagameru, 136-138.

[18] Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), 86-106.

[19] Tsuboi, “Mizukara no koe o honyaku suru,” 107.

[20] Yamabe Yasunosuke, Ainu monogatari, ed. Kindaichi Kyosuke (Hakubunkan, 1913), 189. Takekuma Tokusaburo, Ainu monogatari (Fukido Shobo, 1918), 14-15.

[21] Maruyama Takashi, “Chiri Yukie no shi/shi” in Ikyo no shi, 15.

[22] Maruyama, “Chiri Yukie no shi/shi,” 16.

[23] Of course, this is not necessarily the case for other colonial societies. Neither did the people of the Dutch East Indies lose their languages to the Dutch, nor did the Koreans or the Taiwanese lose theirs under Japanese colonialism. It would be important to point out that one important dimension for the elimination of language is that it often took place in societies whose linguistic system was grounded in oral transmission. The question of the size of the colonized and colonizer populations is also a factor.

[24] Sato-Rossberg Nana, “Chiri Yukie to Chiri Mashiho no Ainu shinyo yaku” in Ikyo no shi, 133-137.

[25] Otomo, Kindaichi Kyosuke to Ainugo, 89.

[26] Yukie's reminder that Yukar was an improvisational art form suggests that storytelling was understood by Ainu people not primarily as an act of reciting/recording but of creating/writing. In this regard, the conventional wisdom that Yukie's contribution in Ainu shinyoshu was to record the vanishing Ainu language needs to be reconsidered: she was an author of the stories in the volume.

[27] Chiri Mashiho (1909-1961), a younger brother of Yukie, was a linguist trained at the Imperial University of Tokyo. He taught at the University of Hokkaido while conducting extensive research on Ainu language and culture. He remained critical of his mentor Kindaichi's scholarship about Yukar and Ainu language throughout his life.

[28] Maruyama, “Chiri Yukie no shi/shi,” 30.

[29] Nakai Miyoshi, Chiri Yukie: jukyusai no igon (Sairyūsha, 1991), 240-241.

[30] Chiri Yukie (ed.), Ainu shinyoshu [Kyodo kenkyusha reprint, 2^nd ed.] (Chiri Mashiho o kataru kai, 2002), 1-3.

[31] After having been neglected for years, Chiri's Ainu shinyoshu was republished by a major publisher, Iwanami, in 2001. There is clearly a marked resurgence in serious scholarly interest in Ainu history in Japan and elsewhere in recent years. This seems to correspond to the rising tide of postcolonial studies in the global scene in the last few decades or so. It is yet to be seen whether this renewed interest in Ainu history could be an important momentum for rethinking the very conditions of modernity.

[32] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 257.