Japan’s forgotten indigenous people

“This is our bear hut,” the short, vivacious woman shouted through a hand-held loudspeaker, her smile creasing her forehead with deep wrinkles. A blue hat was perched on her head and her short tunic, embroidered with pink geometric designs, was tied sharply at the waist. She pointed at a wooden structure made of round logs, raised high above the ground on stilts.

“We caught the bears as cubs and raised them as a member of the family. They shared our food and lived in our village. When the time came, we set one free back into nature and killed the other to eat.”

Having treated the bear well in life, her people believe the spirit of the sacred animal, which they worship as a deity, will ensure the continued good fortune of their community.

Kimiko Naraki is 70 but looks decades younger. She is Ainu, an indigenous people who now live mostly on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, but whose lands once spanned from northern Honshu (the Japanese mainland) north to Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands (which are now a disputed part of the Russian Federation). The Ainu have long been of interest to anthropologists because of their cultural, linguistic and physical identity, but most travellers will not have heard of them. That’s because although they were the earliest settlers of Hokkaido, they were oppressed and marginalised by Japanese rule for centuries.

The Ainu have had a difficult history. Their origins are murky, but some scholars believe they are descendants of an indigenous population that once spread across northern Asia. The Ainu called Hokkaido “Ainu Moshiri” (“Land of the Ainu”), and their original occupation was hunting, foraging and fishing, like many indigenous people across the world. They mainly lived along Hokkaido’s warmer southern coast and traded with the Japanese. But after the Meiji Restoration (about 150 years ago), people from mainland Japan started emigrating to Hokkaido as Japan colonised the northernmost island, and discriminatory practices such as the 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act displaced the Ainu from their traditional lands to the mountainous barren area in the island’s centre.

“It’s a very ugly story,” said Professor Kunihiko Yoshida, law professor at Hokkaido University.

Forced into agriculture, they were no longer able to fish for salmon in their rivers and hunt deer on their land, Yoshida said. They were required to adopt Japanese names, speak the Japanese language and were slowly stripped of their culture and traditions, including their beloved bear ceremony. Due to the wide stigmatisation, many Ainu hid their ancestry. And the long-term effects are clear to see today, with much of the Ainu population remaining poor and politically disenfranchised, with much of their ancestral knowledge lost.

Among other nefarious practices, Japanese researchers ransacked Ainu graves from the late 19th Century to the 1960s, amassing huge collections of Ainu remains for their study and never returning the bones.

Recently, however, things have started to look up for the Ainu. In April 2019, they were legally recognised as an indigenous people of Japan by the Japanese government, after many years of deliberation, which has resulted in a more positive appreciation of Ainu culture and renewed pride in their language and heritage.

“It is important to protect the honour and dignity of the Ainu people and to hand those down to the next generation to realise a vibrant society with diverse values,” said government spokesman Yoshihide Suga, as reported in The Straits Times.

Naraki continued showing us around the Ainu kotan (village). Still smiling, she pointed to a wooden, cupboard-like structure. “This is the toilet for the men,” she said, giggling. Next to it was a smaller, teepee-style hut. “And this one is for the women.”

BBC