Saturday April 11, 2009
The first Japanese
By GRAHAM SIMMONS
For a taste of Ainu culture, head to the Ainu Memorial Museum, in Asahikawa, Hokkaido.
The fate of indigenous people around the world has been tragic, with traditional cultures threatened and even destroyed by the encroachment of modern ways of living. The Australian aborigines, the Inuit of Canada and the Indians of the Amazon basin are just three of the groups whose cultures nearly suffered extinction.
But the original inhabitants of some other nations have fared even worse, with government policies of cultural denial stretching well into the 21st century.
Such is the case of the Ainu, the original settlers of Japan’s Hokkaido Island, now numbering around 25,000. Recognition of the Ainu as the indigenous people of Hokkaido came as late as June 2008, just before the G8 summit at Hokkaido’s Lake Toya-ko.
A traditional Ainu dance being performed at the Ainu Museum. Ken’ichi Kawamura, son of legendary Ainu elder Kaneto Kawamura, who was a demonstrator at the G8, is scathing in his opinion of the Japanese government’s policies towards the Ainu.
“Recognition is not enough” he says. “I won’t rest until we get both land rights and hunting rights too.”
I caught up with Ken’ichi in the central Hokkaido city of Asahikawa, where he welcomes visitors to Kaneto Kawamura Ainu Kinenkan, the Ainu Memorial Museum established by his father Kaneto Kawamura. He explained a little of the background to the long period of suppression of Ainu culture.
“We used to have a comfortable lifestyle before the start of the Meiji era,” he says. (That would have been about 210 years ago, around the time of the French Revolution).
“Then the government adopted a policy of assimilation, and the Ainu were prohibited from following their traditional lifestyles. We weren’t even allowed to use our own Ainu language. The blame for this policy can largely be levelled at the American Dr William S. Clark (the first Resident of Sapporo University), who persuaded the Japanese government that assimilation was the best idea.”
With the banning of traditional Ainu ways of life — including hunting and fishing — the Ainu were persuaded to take up agriculture. The privileged few were given government positions. One of the lucky ones was Kaneto, who became a skilled railway surveyor.
The Kaneto Kawamura Ainu Memorial Museum features an excellent collection of traditional Ainu artefacts, from hunting spears to sake bowls; sasa-grass mats to fur clothing and dugout canoes.
“To make a canoe would have taken six people about two weeks,” says Ken’ichi.
In the grounds of the museum is a traditional Ainu cisé house, made from reeds and bamboo-grass. The one big room inside is dominated by a hearth, which the Ainu believe to be the gateway between humans and the gods. Kamui, the Goddess of the Hearth, is said to preside over rebirth, with the hearth also being known as “the dwelling place of the ancestors”.
Typical Ainu houses The Ainu worshipped numerous gods, including the nature gods of fire, wind, and thunder, animal gods such as bears, foxes and owls; plant gods and “object” gods, like those of boats and pots, as well as gods of lakes, mountains and so forth.
The word “Ainu” refers to the opposite of the realm of the gods, namely the world of human beings.
There are various theories about the origins of the Ainu. The most recent hypothesis is based on the supposition that there were once two groups of Mongoloid peoples — the Northern Mongoloid and the Southern Mongoloid.
Around 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, the Southern Mongoloid peoples moved north and started migrating to the Japanese archipelago, where they became the predecessors of today’s ethnic Japanese. Later, the Northern Mongoloid migrated to Hokkaido, where the Satsumon culture (characterised by making earthenware and by hunting and fishing) lasted from about the seventh Century AD until the 15th Century.
At around that time, Okhotsk immigrants (from Siberia) and the Satsumon intermarried to become the Ainu, who produced and traded in goods shipped to the main Japanese island of Honshu.
Traditional Ainu houses and lifestyles are also highlighted at the Ainu Museum (Porototokan) in the little southern Hokkaido town of Shiraoi, about an hour by rail from Hokkaido’s capital Sapporo. The centre is a large museum plus performance halls, all set on the shores of super-scenic Lake Poroto, where dugout Ainu canoes dance in the light of the setting sun.
Playing a traditional Tonkori zither The exhibits at the Ainu Museum are a little patchy, but the music and dance performan-ces are excellent.
Master of Ceremonies Ikuo Yamamaru gives an animated introduction to the performance, in both Japanese and universal gesture language. Then follows a series of dances, ranging from the lively emus rimse sword dance to tender love-songs and the haunting iyomante rimse, a ceremonial dance for sending the spirits of captured bear cubs back to heaven. The dances are all accompanied by music played on the mukkuri, a traditional harp.
Kawamura Shinrit Eoripak-ainu (Ken’ichi Kawamura), son of Ainu leader Kaneto Kawamura Back in Sapporo, the Ainu Centre Hokkaido has a small but significant collection of artefacts and artworks. Importantly, the Centre is home to the Ainu Association, which was established in 1930 but banned during World War II, only to be revived as late as 1960. Since then, the Ainu Association has been the most vocal organisation agitating for Ainu rights, with one section of the centre featuring photographs of Ainu protest rallies held throughout Japan.
About 40 minutes from downtown Sapporo, Sapporo Pirka Kotan (the Sapporo Ainu Culture Promotion Centre) is a new complex featuring hands-on exhibits and a wide-range of audio-visual resources.
But for an encounter with Ainu culture, I’m privileged to try some genuine Ainu food at Takeshi Morimoto’s extraordinary Kumagera restaurant in the central Hokkaido city of Furano.
Besides such specialties as raw beef and a hotpot of deer, duck and chicken with wild vegetables (as served to Japanese army corps troops in the early 1900s), the menu features one staple of Ainu cuisine — namely bear meat braised with soy sauce and ginger. The flavour is tasty, but I later find myself acting more bearishly than prices on the New York Stock Market. So maybe bear-meat is an acquired taste — one that I didn’t have long enough to acquire.
But the Ainu certainly did have long enough to acquire a taste for bear-meat, along with some of the world’s finest salmon and other varieties of seafood. On the other hand, they do not seem to have at all acquired a taste for Tokyo-style fast living.
Whether these two vastly different lifestyles can find common ground still remains to be seen.
Addresses
>Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Kinenkan
(Ainu Memorial Museum)
Hokumon-cho 11-chome
Asahikawa, Hokkaido
Tel +81 166 51 2461
Open: 9am-5pm, daily
>The Ainu Museum 2-3-4 Wakakusa-cho Shiraoi, Hokkaido (About 45 minutes by rail from Sapporo, then a 10-minute walk.
Note that only three to four trains a day stop at Shiraoi — get an up-to-date timetable from the info centre at Sapporo station) Tel +81 144 82 3914
Open: 8.45am-5pm, daily
>The Ainu Centre
Level 7, Kaderu 2.7 Building
Kita 2-jo, Nishi 7-chome, Chuo-ku
Sapporo, Hokkaido
Tel +81 11 221 0462
Open: 9am-5pm, Mon-Sat, closed on public holidays
>Sapporo Pirka Kotan
(Ainu Culture Promotion Centre)
Koganeyu 27, Minami-ku
Sapporo, Hokkaido
(Take the Jotetsu bus from Sapporo station, and get off at Koganeyu Onsen bus stop)
Open: 8.45am-8pm; closed
Mondays, holidays and the last
Tuesday of the month
>Further Information:
Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture, see: http://frpac.or.jp
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