The struggle by activists to stop construction of a dam on the Saru River has become a rallying cry for Japan’s indigenous people, the Ainu (pronounced AY-new), whom the government still doesn’t officially recognize.
Legend has it that the mountain god gave the Ainu the lush, low hills that surround this valley as a permanent place to pray. The Ainu ceremony for launching new canoes, called the chipusanke, is held every summer here on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago.
But in the early 1980s, the Japanese government decided to dam the river for flood control and to supply water to an industrial park along the coast. The $90 million project will turn one of the last rivers on Hokkaido that still flow unimpeded to the sea into another concrete-lined water trough, a familiar sight in a country that has destroyed virtually all of its natural beauty.
According to the Ainu activists, the rationale for the dam has disappeared. The industrial park is on hold, a victim of the recession. While there have been four minor floods in the last 20 years, Ainu activists say it is mostly farmland that lies within the floodplain.
Yet dam construction continues. When it’s finished in three years, about 300 acres of Ainu farmland will be flooded and turned into a reservoir.
“The dam is just for the profit of the construction business and the government,” said Koichi Kaizawa, a lifelong resident of the valley and one of the Ainu leaders fighting the dam. “There is no benefit for local people.”
Despite the protests and a court suit, the prefecture government is pressing ahead. “The opposition from local citizens is in the minority,” said Yasushi Morita of the Hokkaido Development Bureau’s river planning section. “We have been considerate of the Ainu. We’ve secured a new place for their festival down river instead.”
The Ainu-whose hunting domains stretched as far as present-day Tokyo, 450 miles to the south on the main island of Honshu-were once the only people on Hokkaido. Tribes of fishermen and hunters thrived along the island’s 57 fast-moving rivers, fed by the steep mountains that are covered with snow seven months a year.
Their civilization extended into Sakhalin, the long island 20 miles to the north off the Russian coast.
For centuries, the wooden canoes of Ainu fishermen were the only vessels navigating the frigid waters around the Kuril Islands, which stretch like a pearl necklace from Japan northeast almost 800 miles to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
But the relentless push of Japanese civilization north over the last millennium overwhelmed the native culture.
The Ainu (which means “human being” in the native tongue) rarely resorted to armed resistance. A revolt in 1457 is one of the few recorded instances of an uprising against authorities.
Convenient integration
For most of their joint history, the Japanese refused to allow the Ainu to integrate into the mainstream culture. But in the 19th Century, fear of Russian expansion forced the government to change course.
The authorities in Edo (the old name for Tokyo) sponsored massive emigration to Hokkaido as a bulwark against the Russians and insisted that the Ainu learn Japanese so they could integrate them into the wider economy. They forced Ainu hunters to work in their commercial salmon farms, which they set up along the coasts.
In 1871, the government passed an Ainu Custom Prohibition Law, which forbade the practice of native rituals and festivals. The Ainu were forced to take Japanese names.
By the end of the century, virtually the entire island was held by the Japanese-either privately or by the government. While the government passed an Indigenous Persons Protection Act in 1899, it did little to protect Ainu rights, outlawing their language and denying them any claim to independent status.
Bitter days of Japanese domination were discussed in August by Shigeru Kayano, the 67-year-old Ainu leader who is one of the few remaining speakers of the language.
He spoke at a conference here that attracted indigenous people from North and South America, Africa and Scandinavia, who had come to Nibutani to support the Ainu’s demand that Japan recognize their independent rights in what the United Nations has designated as the Year of Indigenous Peoples.
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“When the samurai came to this village in 1858, they put their hands on their swords and said they would kill everyone unless their orders were followed,” he said in recounting a tale told by his grandfather, who was then 12.
Forced into endless servitude in a salmon fishery, the boy chopped off his little finger in an attempt to get sent home. When that didn’t work, he smeared blow-fish bile over his body so it would look as if he had jaundice.
“The Japanese seeing this sent my grandfather back to his village,” Kayano said. “Whenever I see his picture without his finger, it is a reminder for me of the pains of the Ainu people.”
Kayano’s father also was forced to work on salmon farms, yet the Japanese forbade him from catching fish in the river. In the 1930s he was arrested for poaching and sent to prison.
“Salmon and deer meat were our staples,” he said. “But because of overharvesting by the Japanese, they ordered us not to catch what we needed for our sustenance. It was as if they had ordered the Japanese people not to grow rice.”
Remains of a culture
The pre-World War II suppression of Ainu culture was part of the virulent nationalism and imperial ideology that dominated Japanese politics at that time. By the end of the war, Ainu language and culture had almost disappeared from Japan.
“It was a forced assimilation policy,” said Kohei Hanasaki, a leading Hokkaido authority on Ainu culture. “The government said all Japanese people were the children of the emperor, and the Ainu people should be assimilated.”
Although the legal status of imperial divinity ended after the war, little remained on which to rebuild an independent Ainu community.
Today a few museums scattered around Hokkaido and tourist shops that sell Ainu crafts-depressingly similar in style and content to the trading posts on American Indian reservations-are just about all that remain of the once-proud culture.
The Hokkaido government estimates there are only 16,000 self-identified Ainu on the island, with possibly 10,000 more sprinkled around Japan. Yet if they were honest, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Japanese could claim their Ainu ancestors.
There are many reasons that individuals deny their Ainu heritage. Physically, the Ainu have wider noses and lips and considerably more body hair than the average Japanese, features deemed ugly by the Japanese mass media.
Ainu who come out of the closet also face discrimination in the job market. “If an Ainu young man wants a job in a big company, they’re not considered clean,” Hanasaki said. “There is also the myth that the Ainu people are lazy and won’t work hard.”
More politically active
Still, there has been a minor cultural renaissance among people of Ainu heritage over the past decade, helped in part by funding from the Hokkaido government. Community centers in towns like Nibutani, which claims a majority of Ainu among its 500 inhabitants, have begun offering residents classes in Ainu language and traditions.
The remaining Ainu have becoming politically active as well. In 1987 the Japanese government was stunned when a delegation from the Utari Association (“utari” means “comrade” in Ainu) traveled to Geneva to take part in a UN working group on indigenous people.
The Utari Association also proposed a major change in the 1899 Ainu supression law that remains on the books and still officially regulates government-Ainu relations.
The revision, which the Hokkaido Prefecture Assembly endorsed, calls for official recognition of the Ainu as an indigenous people and designation of two seats in Japan’s lower house in parliament for Ainu representatives.
The central government has ignored that proposal. No bureau in Japan’s usually far-reaching bureaucracy exists to deal with Ainu issues.
And in a country that likes to think of itself as a monolithic entity without the ethnic divisions that plague other countries, official recognition of the Ainu would become a constant reminder of the fiction behind the national myth.
“The government has no consciousness of ethnic issues-not only in Japan but in America and other countries,” Hanasaki said. “That’s why they are very nervous about the Ainu question.”
Ainu activists also point out that the refusal to recognize the group as an official indigenous people may be related to the Japanese government’s diplomatic offensive to regain the four southernmost Kuril islands, seized by Russia at the end of World War II. The only “Japanese” who lived on those islands before the end of the 19th Century were Ainu.
“If they recognized us, the Foreign Ministry would have to begin dealing with many things,” said Kaizawa, one of the Ainu landholders challenging the Saru River dam in court.
“They would have to let us sit at the table while they talk about the Northern Territories,” the Japanese name for the four islands.
“They would have to admit they invaded and took Ainu land, and talk about compensation.”