ABSTRACT
Since Japan’s ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in September 2007, and subsequent Diet resolution Calling for the Recognition of the Ainu people as an Indigenous People in June 2008, a loose, yet organized, negative campaign to deny the indigenous status of the Ainu people has gained a foothold in Japanese political life. Beginning with the ranting of a long-time problematic anthropologist and the popularization of his “theories” by public figures, including politicians and an infamous manga artist, this “campaign” came to the fore in August 2014 when a Sapporo City Assemblyman denied the Ainu people’s existence inciting a wave of online racist hate speech culminating in an anti-Ainu demonstration in the nation’s capital. The movement appeared within the context of the emergence, since the 1990s, of a relativist and revisionist new Right in Japan that has flourished under the Abe administration. This chapter examines the context for this movement, its discursive expansion and the necessity of anti-racist measures to counter it.
