Why Japan’s Ainu Recognition Bill Upsets the Ainu

Much like the Native Americans of the USA, and the Aborigines of Australia, the Ainu people of Japan have suffered discrimination, forced assimilation, and stringent government policies that threatened to strip them of their cultural heritage and language. Despite measures providing welfare and cultural promotion, the Ainu remain on the edge of obscurity in the public consciousness. In 2014, Sapporo City assemblyman  Kaneko Yasuyuki tweeted that the Ainu people no longer existed, which prompted an Ainu association to ask when exactly they ceased to exist.

This year the government is trying to bring the Ainu into the spotlight. A draft bill codifying the Ainu as Japan’s “indigenous people” was submitted to the Diet for review on February 5, and later approved by the Cabinet. Experts, professors, economists, and so on lauded how the bill would finally legitimize the Ainu as an indigenous people; that a fight the Ainu had fought for years was finally over.

The Ainu, however, had other things to say. At a press conference for the Foreign Correspondents’s Club oj Japan, various Ainu ekashi (the Ainu word for ‘elders’) decried the vague wording of the bill and the notable absence of indigenous rights. They demanded the government retract the bill from Diet consideration and review it thoroughly.

Other rights’ groups have questioned the government’s motives behind the bill’s submittal. The Sankei News reported what the bill’s main intention was: to appeal to the world by promoting the Ainu to foreign visitors ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. Other news outlets reported similar summaries of this bill, leaving the preservation of Ainu culture as an afterthought. That’s nothing new, given Japan’s long history of demeaning and subjugating the Ainu.

By Alyssa Pearl Fusek

Reference:

https://medium.com/@unseenjapan/why-japans-ainu-recognition-bill-upsets-the-ainu-facbc582e8b5