ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the changing transnational imagery of “good nation” shaped politics around the Ainu, an indigenous people in Japan. In much of the debate about minority politics, observers tend to assume that the root causes of injustices against minority groups lie in local society, whether it is racial bigotry in people’s minds or discriminatory policies by the local government. For those individuals who bear the brunt of those injustices on a daily basis, a link between their hardship and transnational imagery of “good nation” might seem trifling. However, recent scholarship in comparative historical sociology and global and transnational sociology has uncovered that transnationally legitimated models of treatment of minorities can have transformative impact on local minority politics. When international frameworks legitimate domination of minority groups, the government’s main approach might be repression, exploitation, or even genocide. When broader models encourage assimilation, the government might fancy itself a paternalistic benefactor to minorities, providing minimal welfare in exchange for cultural submission. When transnational human rights norms promote self-determination of minorities, minorities become empowered into activism for more rights. Consequently, the state might reluctantly give in and abolish discriminatory laws. Even in this case, minority discrimination may not completely disappear; it tends to persist in informal social realms. In all these scenarios, minorities face injustices, but in very different forms. What was a blatant aggression against minorities turns into an arrogant imposition of majority culture and then more subtle social discrimination.
Drawing on interviews and archival data, I examine such transformation of politics around the Ainu since Japan’s modernization in the late nineteenth century. Throughout this period, the transnationally located conceptions of “good nation” have informed the Japanese government’s policy toward Ainu as well as the Ainu’s political orientation. In the first few decades of modern Japan, based on social Darwinist views of the Ainu, the government colonized Ainu lands and characterized the Ainu as “a dying race” and “savages to be civilized.” Dispossessed of material resources and their traditional life-styles, most Ainu had no choice but to become subordinates within Imperial Japan and live on what little welfare it offered. Soon thereafter, with the rise of concerns that the Ainu’s deplorable living conditions might bring embarrassment to Japan in the international community, provision of minimal welfare and efforts toward assimilation began. In the post-World War II period, the government adopted the ideology of homogenous Japan and pushed the Ainu more forcefully into assimilation. Ainuness was shunned not only by the mainstream Japanese but also by the Ainu themselves, and Ainu culture was on display only within the confines of tourist industries and anthropological research. Correspondingly, the government claimed that the Ainu have been completely assimilated into mainstream Japanese society. Since the 1970s, however, inspired by the global indigenous rights movement and domestic leftist/anti-colonial activism, the Ainu slowly transformed themselves into a proud indigenous people and have actively mobilized politically to achieve significant successes. The government was hard-pressed to continue its denial of the Ainu’s existence, acknowledging them as an indigenous people in 2008. Thus, reflecting changes in the dominant approach to ethnic minorities among the nations of the “developed world,” the Japanese government’s approach to the Ainu has shifted from colonial domination through cultural assimilation to finally cultural autonomy/multiculturalism. While the level of cultural autonomy for the Ainu is still quite limited, respect for Ainu culture is beginning to take root in contemporary Japan. This dramatic change, I argue, was possible because transnationally legitimated understandings of “good nation” shifted during this period from a dominant colonial power through an assimilationist nation-state to a diverse multicultural community.
