1 1 Beyond Ainu Studies An Introduction Mark K. Watson, ann-elise lewallen, and Mark J. Hudson On June 6, 2008, 139 years after officially colonizing Hokkaido and more than 500 years since the first Japanese settlements appeared in southern Ezo (as the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido was previously known), the Japanese Diet shocked both the Ainu movement and their supporters by hast- ily passing a resolution unanimously recognizing Ainu as “Indigenous to the northern part of the Japanese archipelago, and especially Hokkaido.” 1 This decision represented a distinct break from previous policy. For the greater part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the suppression of histori- cal memory underpinning Japan’s celebrated claims of monoethnicity made being Ainu (or any minority for that matter) a difficult proposition (Weiner 1997). Historically, Ainu people dwelled in an area that encompassed parts of northern Honshu, Hokkaido, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and south- ern Kamchatka. They gradually lost control of their ancestral lands as the fledgling Japanese nation-state, fearful of Russian encroachment from the north, sought to consolidate national borders. From the sixteenth century, Japanese representations of Ainu in the artistic tradition of Ainu-e (Ainu genre paintings) had consistently depicted them as an inferior and barbaric Other. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Ainu were popularly known as a “dying race” and effectively written out of national history by the pass- ing of the Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Act (hereafter FNPA) in 1899. However, Ainu resilience and a growing political movement during Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 11/22/19 11:02 AM