La freccia e il cerchio
anno 5, numero 5, 2014
pp. 176-178

Chiara Ghidini
Voices in Absence. The Ainu of the North
in Japan’s Modern History

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?
The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air,
and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

   The Ainu are the native population from the north of Japan with origins still uncertain, who used to inhabit the vast territory called Ainu moshir (The Land of Humans), and have suffered, together with other “minority” groups, discriminatory policies carried out through Japan’s modern history. Their voice has been suppressed at the end of the 19th century with the Hokkaidō Ex Aborigine Protection Act (Hokkaidō kyōdojin hogohōkōfu, 1889, reviewed in 1937), through a form of internal colonisation, articulated according to strategies of cultural, legal and administrative assimilation, meant to turn the Ainu into Japanese citizens, that is to say into imperial subjects, and to obliterate their traditions.
   Between 19th and 20th centuries, Ainu voices are replaced with voices about the Ainu: their history, their language and culture become object of interest and curiosity of Japanese and Europeans, with motivations and aim whi are often ambiguous. Amazed, European scholars and travellers take note of Ainu somatic traits, defining them “Aryan” (Albert Bickmore, 1868) or Caucasian (Erwin Bälz, 1900); see in their songs similarities with Norwegian folk songs (David Brauns, 1885), and describe in an evocative way their naive animistic beliefs (John Batchelor, 1901). In Italy, at the end of the 1930s, the famous photographer, poet and ethnologist from Florence, Fosco Maraini (1912-2004), immortalises “the Last Ainu” in photographs portraying the most important socio-religious event for their communities, the iyomante, the bear ritual celebrated in winter with the aim of releasing the spirit of the animal and send it back in the realm of deities.
   The need to go back to the ethnic-linguistic roots of the Japanese people and of the japanese language turn the Ainu into a national academic object of interest. Members of the emergent Japanese anthropology, making use of the comparison of skeletons, hypothesise crucial similarities between the Ainu and the ancient population from the Jōmon period (circa 10,500 – 300 B.C.E.).
   In the sametime, some linguists connected with the Research Centre on the National Language at the Imperial University of Tōkyō devote themselves to the study of the Ainu language, as well as of other “peripheral languages”, in order to reconstruct the proto-Japanese.
   Japanese and European intellectuals of the time, in spite of the diversity of their production, share the persuasion that Ainu should be considered in strict relationship with the notion of “primitive society”.
   More or less unchanged since the Jōmon period, they are supposedly bound to disappear with the Japanese colonisation of their territories (and with Japan’s appropriation of their natural resources): to use the formula chosen by anthropologist Edwin Wilmsen to define the San population from the Kalahari in Southern Africa, Ainu are “permitted antiquity while denied history”.
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