The geographic center for the Ainu people, an ethnic group, has for the last four hundred years been the Japanese island of Hokkaido and farther north. Their ancestors, in the ancient time period of Jōmon (15,000 B.C. to 300 B.C.), were the original inhabitants of the Japanese main islands. The arrival of migrants from the Asian continent during the Yayoi period (300 B.C. to 250 A.D.) pushed them to the north. There were still many Ainu on the northeastern third of the main island of Honshu for the next millennium but by the early modern era, they mainly lived on the northern island—slightly smaller than the state of Maine—which was then called Ezo by the Japanese. Ezo in Chinese characters can also be read as Emishi, a name not only for an area but also for a group of people. Emishi meant to Japanese people “the barbarians,” which is how they thought of the Ainu ancestors who had earlier lived in a larger portion of Japan. The Ainu people themselves called their northern island Ainu Mosir, which means “the peaceful land for people.” Then, when the other three main Japanese islands were unified under a Shogunal government in 1600, the samurai leaders of the Matsumae domain monopolized trade with the Ainu, which they exploitatively conducted. Many Ainu men were forced to labor under brutal conditions and many women became sex slaves to the Japanese. When a merchant working for the domain was suspected of murdering an Ainu chief in 1789, the Ainu carried out an uprising against the domain that came to be called the Menashi-Kunashir Rebellion. The rebellion was swiftly put down and the Ainu leaders were executed.

Non-Japanese often see the Japanese as an ethnically homogeneous group, but there are actually a number of different groups constituting the whole, including minority communities in Japan that have robust cultures and interact dynamically with the Japanese majority. The Chinese and Korean migrants who came to Japan during Japan's colonial period (late 19th to early 20th centuries) and their descendants constitute the two largest minority groups in Japan today. As many of them have connections overseas, however, this article categorizes them as “outsider minorities” and distinguishes them from “insider minorities.” The Ainu are one of several “insider minorities,” and this article serves as a useful introduction not just to the Ainu and their modern predicament but also to the challenges facing these other groups. As Roth explains, the “Ainu had a distinctive language, clothing, material culture, and social organization that set them off from other Japanese. A century of assimilation programs, however, [have] destroyed much of what made [the] Ainu distinctive.”

The Diene Report of 2005 represents an instance in which an international organization investigated Japanese official treatment of minority communities in Japan in relation to international standards, and their findings strongly supported the Ainu activists. The United Nations sent Doudou Diene, their Special Rapporteur, to Japan to look into discrimination and racism. Diene's report harshly criticized the racism that exists in Japan and suggested that improved measures are necessary to protect the Ainu and other minorities there. This article is a response to his report by five Japanese individuals who have long been committed to countering discrimination and racism in the country. Four of the five contributors agree with the overall content of the Diene report and provide further information. They see the report as a small but positive impetus that will help the 21st century activism that further counters discrimination and racism in Japan. On the other hand, William Wetherall criticizes the report as seriously flawed, because he thinks it misunderstands the main aspects of the issue.

This article discusses Mamiya Rinzō (1775-1844), a Japanese cartographer during the Edo period (1603-1868); Mamiya was a Shogunate official who, for the first time in history, succeeded in scientifically mapping the Japanese north and also documenting the original inhabitants in Sakhalin. The article explains that the growing rivalry between Japan and Russia at the time was a main motivation for the Japanese in their exploration of Ezo and Sakhalin. At that time the Russians named the island “Sakhalin,” as it is known today. The name comes from the island's Manchu name “Sahaliyan” which signifies the “black (soil).” “Karafuto,” the Japanese name for Sakhalin, derives from its Ainu name “Kara Put.” It meant “(the island that the deity) made at the mouth of the river.”

Like Brett Walker's article, this article also indicates how Japanese colonization of the farther north proceeded spatially. After Mamiya Rinzō's mapping, other spatial transfigurations led to the de-culturing and subjugation of the Ainu during the Meiji period. While the Matsumae domain controlled Ezo trade and subjugated the Ainu in the earlier two centuries, from 1868 the new Meiji government attempted a thorough absorption of the Ainu after annexing Ezo and renaming it Hokkaido. This article discusses first the designing and building of the city of Sapporo, the largest city in Hokkaido, in which Japanese administrators such as Shima Yoshitake (1822-1874) and Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840-1900) played a vital part. The Japanese built Sapporo to be like major cities in Honshū (the largest island in Japan) as part of their efforts to Japanize the northern island. Vivian Blaxell, a historian, then goes on to show how the Japanese brought wet-rice farming into the north and thus remade the whole landscape of Hokkaido. This was achieved largely by Nakayama Kyuzō (1828-1919), who developed a variety of rice that was resistant to the cold. Introduction of modern, uniform farming to Hokkaido destroyed Ainu hunting grounds and played a crucial role in damaging the Ainu communities, their economy, and their culture.

Many Japanese and others today understand Hokkaido as an ancient part of Japan, and do not know that the island was only formally absorbed in the mid-19th century. This article explains the process by which the island of Ezo was annexed by the Japanese in 1868 and renamed Hokkaido (“the path to the northern seas”). The Japanese also began transforming Ezo, now Hokkaido, in order to thoroughly incorporate the island into the new central polity. This transformation had dire consequences for the indigenous Ainu population. This article also introduces two Japanese laws that were ratified in the late 19th century: the Emigrant Protection Law of 1896 and the Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Law of 1899. “Enacted like bookends on the (First) Sino-Japanese War,” the latter was to have an especially serious effect on the livelihoods of the Ainu. Komori argues that Japan sought through those two laws to protect its territorial interest vis-à-vis the major Western colonial powers in two different places and ways. The Emigrant Protection law was legislated to encourage and also protect Japanese migrants who were rapidly moving into Hawai'i and other areas internationally while the Hokkaido law encouraged migration to Hokkaido by suppressing the Ainu.

How do the Ainu see themselves, nature, and the world? The Ainu did not have a written language, but they carried a rich oral tradition that has been passed on for centuries. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus offers two samples of Ainu oral stories; both are short but nevertheless distill important aspects of the Ainu's lives and their views of the world.

Kayano Shigeru (1926-2006) was an inheritor and preserver of Ainu culture. As collector of Ainu folk utensils, teacher of the prominent Japanese linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke, and recorder and transcriber of epics, songs, and tales from the last of the bards. He was also a fierce fighter against the construction of a dam in his village that meant destruction of a sacred ritual site as well as of nature. In addition, Kayano was the compiler of an authoritative Ainu-Japanese dictionary, a chanter of old epics, the founder of a museum of Ainu material culture as well as of an Ainu language school and a radio station. He was the first (and so far the only) National Diet member to address the assembly in Ainu. Kayano was also an inspiration behind today's appreciation of Ainu culture in which young people, Ainu and non-Ainu of various nationalities, join to celebrate aboriginal cultures and their contemporary development. That includes recent youthful attempts to create new forms that combine traditional Ainu oral performances with contemporary music and dance. “Ainu Rebels” which formed in 2006, for example, is constituted mostly of Ainu youth but also includes Japanese and foreigners. They are a creative song and dance troupe that draws on Ainu oral tradition adapted to hip hop and other forms, as well as engaging in artistic activities that combine traditional Ainu art with contemporary artistic elements. The three major genres of Ainu oral tradition were kamuy yukar, songs of gods and demigods, yukar, songs of heroes, and wepeker, prose, or poetic prose, tales. The Ainu linguist Chiri Mashiho (1909-1961) saw the origin of Ainu oral arts in the earliest kamuy yukar songs of gods, in which a shamanic performer imitated the voices and gestures of gods. In Ainu culture, everything had a divine spirit: owl, bear, fox, salmon, rabbit, insect, tree, rock, fire, water, wind, and so forth, some not so esteemed or even regarded downright wicked, and others revered as particularly divine. This gestured mimicry apparently developed into kamuy yukar songs of gods, or enacting of songs sung by gods, in which a human chanter impersonates a deity. Kamuy yukar later included songs of Okikurmi-kamuy (also called Kotan-kar-kamuy), a half god, half human hero who descended from the land of gods to the land of the Ainu (humans), to teach how to make fire, hunt, and cultivate to humans living in kotan (hamlets).

Those who want to know more about Chiri Yukie and her adaptation of “The Song the Owl God Himself Sang: An Ainu Tale” should read this article, which directly addresses the context for Chiri's retelling of an Ainu legend. The process of empire building and colonialism is always disruptive. Moreover, it usually leaves behind victimized, traumatized, and marginalized indigenous people. Their common misfortune is that militarily and technologically superior outsiders arrived to annex them and their lands by force. The Ainu were no exception, and even the seemingly innocent Collection of Ainu Legends was inseparable from the Japanese colonization of the Ainu.

The Japanese WWII defeat in 1945 also meant that the Japanese empire disintegrated. Although many colonial subjects returned to Taiwan, Korea, and elsewhere, some stayed in Japan either because they had put down roots there or because, especially in Korea, ongoing warfare made returning dangerous. Koreans and Taiwanese who stayed in Japan were deprived of their Japanese citizenship in 1947, and they and their descendants have lived there as foreigners ever since, experiencing various forms of discrimination. Ainu did not lose their citizenship and Hokkaido remained a Japanese prefecture but they did face similar ongoing social discrimination.

Despite a general state of ignorance and neglect on the part of the Japanese toward the Ainu people and their cultures, Ainu political and cultural activism developed apace in post-WWII Japan. Eleven years after passing the Ainu Cultural Promotion Law, which aimed to make Japan a “society in which the ethnic pride of the Ainu people is respected and to contribute to the development of diverse cultures,” what still needed to be done? This article discusses what Ainu people themselves saw as remaining tasks in 2008, at the Indigenous Peoples Summit (IPS) held in Hokkaido.

This article can be read together with “Indigenous at Last! Ainu Grassroots Organizing and the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir.” The Indigenous Peoples Summit (IPS) was not the only NGO conference that took place in connection with the G8 Summit in Hokkaido in July 2008. This article discusses another conference, “Peace, Reconciliation and Civil Society: Toward a Sustainable Peace in East Asia and Europe,” which Oda Hiroshi, an anthropologist at Hokkaido University, organized.

The conference focused on achieving reconciliation between different parties in East Asia, especially between Japanese victimizers and non-Japanese victims. Japanese colonization of the Ainu and their land was only one such occurrence of victimization discussed there. How can reconciliation between the Japanese and their victims be achieved? The conference participants debated what to do given that an official apology that includes compensation by the Japanese government is nowhere in sight. They hope that reconciliation attempts by civil society will provide models for the government in the future. This article is authored by Lucasz Zablonski and Philip A. Seaton.

It is very difficult to say anything useful about Kobayashi Yoshinori today. Not least, because it was very hard to say anything about him in the first place. The lashings of masochistic self-irony in his work have been more than well commented upon. The more the manga artist and one contemporary face of cultural fascism in Japanese popular culture is criticized, the more it seems he feeds upon that controversy; the more he is pronounced “dead” as a significant cultural force, the more he seems to bounce back into necroperformative life.

If acknowledged at all, Japan's indigenous population the Ainu are usually represented as a rural, exotic group, bound to ancestral homes in Hokkaido and the Northern territories. Yet, large numbers of Ainu, perhaps even the majority of their population, now live in urban centres outside Hokkaido. The recent documentary TOKYO Ainu challenges traditional, detrimental representations of Ainu culture as solely rural and sedentary, and records the complex contemporaneous reality of urban indigeneity lived by those Ainu within Greater Tokyo. This article firstly reports the main themes of the film. It then compares the relative success of TOKYO Ainu in broadening discourse and understanding of Ainu identity to the Japanese government's recent living conditions survey released this year. Japan's indigenous population the Ainu are usually represented as a rural, exotic group, bound to ancestral homes in Hokkaido and the Northern territories. Yet, this narrow discursive frame ignores the 5000 to 10000 Ainu who live in Tokyo and the surrounding Kanto region (Greater Tokyo), as well as those who live elsewhere on the mainland. While a government survey found 23,782 Ainu inside Hokkaido in 2006, some commentators, including the late Umesao Tadao, founding president of the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, now estimate their population outside Hokkaido to exceed that number. Modern depictions of the Ainu as a rural “(post-) hunter-gatherer people” and of their identity as absolutely conflated with Hokkaido have been described by Watson as a “detriment to the large number of Ainu who live in urban centres on the mainland.” A new documentary, TOKYO Ainu, challenges these engrained representations and emphasises the existence of Japan's indigenous people within its capital city. The film charts the urban migration of Ainu elders from Hokkaido to Greater Tokyo; and, while preserving their voices for future Ainu generations, it also documents the contemporaneous reality of urban indigeneity lived by them, their children and grandchildren in the Kanto region today. After briefly outlining the context of “Ainu-Japanese” relations in which TOKYO Ainu has been made and providing a short background history of the Ainu in the Kanto region, this article introduces the main themes of the documentary. TOKYO Ainu successfully records the myriad experiences of urban Ainu within a compact and cohesive narrative. Its success contrasts sharply with a Japanese government survey also published this year. This survey, the Hokkaidogai Ainu no seikatsu jittai chousa, attempts to report on the living conditions of Ainu outside Hokkaido; however, its methodology has been criticised by Ainu within the Kanto region and its poor response rate reveals enduring problems with the state's approach to the Ainu.