Indigenous food and foodways: Mapping the production of Ainu food in Tokyo

James Clifford remarks that tribal groups ‘have never been simply “local”: they have always been rooted and routed in particular landscapes, regional and interregional networks’ (Clifford 1994: 309-310). In this chapter, I take up the tension between fixity and movement raised by Clifford to explore the spatial politics of indigenous identity as realized through approaches to indigenous food. I do so, in order to focus on the production of Ainu food in Tokyo and how indigenous Ainu resident in the capital region are engaged in a new politics of place energized by and through lived relationships that extend and ‘stretch’ beyond the traditional northern homeland of Hokkaido.