Speaking for Themselves
For the Ainu of Japan, long-denied cultural recognition
Anthropology began with inquisitive Westerners gawking at people whose civilizations they considered outlandish, and many natural history museums still treat the study of other cultures as an adventure into the exotic. Whether celebrated as "noble savages" or belittled as "backward primitives," the people whose lives are put on display often remain enigmatically mute. A landmark exhibition opening at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History this week aims to give a voice to one such society: the aboriginal Ainu of northern Japan.
The Ainu are believed to be descended from the Jomon culture, a Neolithic people of unknown origin who occupied much of the Japanese archipelago between 20,000 and 2,000 years ago. Toward the end of that time, ancestors of today's Japanese population moved in from the Asian mainland, gradually mixing the Jomon stock with their own gene pool. Driven steadily northward, the unassimilated people who would eventually call themselves "Ainu" (their word for humans) took refuge in the northern forests of Hokkaido and on the remote Kuril and Sakhalin islands.
With their large, hirsute bodies and pale Northern skin, the wavy-haired Ainu women and luxuriantly bearded Ainu men looked very different from the Japanese. The first Western anthropologists who encountered Ainu considered them to be Caucasian cousins of Europeans, a theory that has long since been discredited. Until forced resettlement and competition from Japanese and Russian fishermen drove them to the interior of Hokkaido in recent centuries, the maritime Ainu had been formidable hunters of whales, seals, swordfish, and sea lions.
History is written by the victors, and the Ainu had no written language even to record an alternative version of their slow defeat. Since most of their art and handicrafts have been made of wood and other perishable materials, there are few surviving archaeological artifacts to fill the cultural vacuum. Scholars trying to reconstruct a picture of Ainu society prior to the 19th century have had to turn to the pictures painted by the Japanese: For the previous 600 years, "Ainu-e," a genre of Japanese illustrations of Ainu life with detailed notes written in the margins, fed the public fascination with a people depicted as hairy, half-civilized curiosities. "Ainu-e represent the biases of their creators, but they're still a valuable source," says William Fitzhugh, director of the Smithsonian's Arctic Studies Center. "The challenge is to separate out the ethnographic realities from Japanese prejudices."
The treatment of the Ainu by mainstream Japanese society has close parallels with that of the original inhabitants of the United States. Both groups were removed from their ancestral lands by acts of government, both have faced overwhelming pressure to assimilate, and both suffer continuing ethnic discrimination. Chisato Dubreuil, co-curator of the exhibition, notes that Japanese children still taunt Ainu classmates by calling them "Inu"-- Japanese for dog. Dubreuil (herself of Ainu ancestry) and her husband, David, (an American Indian of Mohawk and Huron descent) say that this shared experience gives the Ainu show a special relevance in the United States.
Tourist attraction. Japanese legislation of 1899 sought to curb all expressions of Ainu identity, and with each decade more Ainu have lost touch with their heritage. Ainu culture had long been permeated by Japanese influences, with even holy rituals borrowing Japanese elements like rice, sake, and steel swords. After generations of intermarriage and "passing" for Japanese, about 25,000 Ainu are now listed in the census, and only a handful of these can still speak their ancestors' language.
advertisement
