Title: Indigenous Japanese suffer from racism, discrimination
Date: 11/01/93
ASAHIKAWA, Japan (AP) - The Ainu of northern Japan tell the tale
of a fox that stole a villager's catch of salmon. Fearful that
he and his kindred might be driven away, the fox begged an old
man for protection, and was forgiven.
"Therefore, children, not only the Ainu but also the living animals
can eat salmon and deer; they all have the same right as the
Ainu have," the story says.
Shigeru Kayano, who published this story in a collection of his
people's folk tales, thinks it strange that the Ainu themselves
are allowed to take only a few salmon from their own waters.
"It is as if the Americans were to come to Japan and say, `You
cannot eat rice'," says Kayano, who is lobbying for an Ainu share
in the natural wealth of their homeland on the northern island
of Hokkaido.
Of the millions of salmon caught in Hokkaido waters each year,
the Ainu are allowed to take only 400 among all of them. That's
for ceremonial purposes, not sustenance. Essentially, they have
been deprived of their hunting and fishing rights, period.
Historians say the Ainu originally populated much of Japan -
as well as the Russian-held regions of Sakhalin and the Kuriles
- hunting, gathering and fishing in abundant rivers and coastal
waters.
The Ainu may have lost their lands, but Kayano and other Ainu
leaders are determined to keep alive their language, their heritage
and their pride.
"They call us `dojin' - it's not a very nice word," says Kenichi
Kawamura, referring to the Japanese word for an aborigine, which
carries a derogatory connotation of vulgarity or uncleanness.
Kawamura, 42, runs an Ainu culture center in the Hokkaido city
of Asahikawa, 593 miles northeast of Tokyo. His suburban neighborhood
once was an Ainu "reservation" of about 150 households. Now,
only 15 Ainu families remain. The others all sold their land.
"Ainu really aren't very good at farming," Kawamura says, "but
the land was too lousy to make a living anyway."
The only visible sign of the area's ethnic past is Kawamura's
family compound: a roadside wooden museum, small shops selling
handicrafts, and a traditional grass-thatch Ainu hut, one room
built around a hearth, with a sacred window facing east.
Kawamura, a gruff, serious man with shoulder-length black hair,
beard and mustache, spends Hokkaido's long, frigid winters carving
and making bark baskets and bags, collecting the materials he
needs for his handicrafts from the forest.
The tourist trade is a major source of livelihood for the Ainu.
Many others work as day laborers, making barely enough to get
by.
Most Ainu, like Kawamura, are married to Japanese or are part
Japanese themselves. Official statistics count only 25,000 Ainu
descendants, but the 15,000-member Ainu Association of Hokkaido
puts the number as high as 100,000.
The Ainu are more hairy than the Japanese. Anthropologists once
described them as Caucasian. They are thought to have migrated
to the Far East from the Ural regions of Siberia.
Like the American Indians and other indigenous peoples, the Ainu
were decimated as newcomers brought new diseases and better weapons,
pushing them out of their native lands.
For 1,000 years, beginning in the eighth century, the Ainu fought
a sporadic war of attrition against the Japanese. But their poison
arrows were no match for samurai swords and rifles. By the 18th
century, they were confined to Hokkaido - the rugged, unspoiled
land that was Japan's last frontier.
From their conquerors, the Ainu borrowed fishing nets and farming.
They traded native carvings, feathers, furs and weaving for rice
wine, tobacco, rice and clothing to replace robes made of bark,
animal and fish skins.
Japanese colonizers sought to obliterate the native language
and customs: It was an English missionary, Dr. John Batchelor,
who gave the Ainu a written language and compiled their first
dictionary.
Where force may have failed, assimilation prevailed.
The Ainu were encouraged to shave their beards and dress their
free flowing hair in Japanese style and to stop speaking their
native tongue. The earrings and the blue facial tattoos favored
by Ainu women were banned.
Ainu names were replaced with Japanese - a practice still required
of any non-Japanese wanting to gain Japanese citizenship, even
Japan-born Koreans.
"The natives in Ezo (Hokkaido), although they are human beings,
are a very ignorant people," said the 18th-century Kyumei Koki,
a government book on colonizing the island. "All-in-all, it is
a problem demanding patience."
The Ainu were forbidden to hunt deer and to fish for salmon.
The 1889 "Hokkaido Former Aborigines Act" granted Ainu families
small parcels of land that could be confiscated if not cultivated
within 15 years, but no other resource rights. Today, the Ainu
are lobbying for a new law, one that would give them a share
in the island's rich fish and timber resources.
An official in the Cabinet secretariat, who spoke on condition
of anonymity, said the proposed law is still under debate because
of disagreements over the definition of the word "indigenous."
Kayano, who made an unsuccessful bid for the upper house of parliament
in 1991, defines the problem differently: "The Japanese invaded
our lands. If they pass the law, they'll have to admit that.
They'd rather look the other way."
Unable to get official attention at home, the Ainu appealed to
the United Nations, which in November 1992 recognized them as
Japan's aboriginal nation.
"That didn't make the government very happy," Kayano says wryly.
The 67-year-old scholar, who left school at age 13, has devoted
his life to saving Ainu traditions from extinction. He has memorized
and published scores of Ainu folk tales. He runs a language school.