The Ainu

The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan. This may appear a straightforward statement of an obvious truth; after all, the subordination and dispossession of the Ainu under a colonial regime in Hokkaido has numerous parallels among other Fourth World populations, such as Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Inuit, Māori, Sami and others, estimated to number between 200 and 300 million people. Sparked into political activism by the wave of worldwide decolonisation that followed the Second World War, many internally colonised ‘native’ or ‘tribal’ populations have redefined themselves as ‘indigenous peoples’. The Ainu share a common history with these groups. They were dispossessed of their ancestral land and resources by the expansion of a vigorous colonial state, and their traditional lifeways collapsed as hunting and fishing territories were settled by waves of immigrants and transformed into agricultural land. Government policies of relocation and assimilation aimed at the eventual extinction of the Ainu as a people and were aided by a system of ‘native education’ that actively discouraged Ainu language and customs.