Reading notes on Shinya Gyō

Source: A History of Ainu Resistance
(Ainu Minzoku Teikō Shi. Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō, 1977.)

This source, published during the surge of Ainu activism in the 1970s, represents a major break from traditional "Ainu studies" literature that knowingly or unknowingly took the side of the colonizer and articulated Ainu history through the lens of positivist cultural anthropologists. This being a bad thing because, as with native people around the world, anthropology tended to be based on a top-down, observer and observee, subject and object, civilized and savage, modern and ancient, otherwise condescending, universalizing, and overwhelmingly colonial paradigm. And (I strongly assume) is non-Ainu, his work is vital in that it takes a critical and confrontational look at the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido and the bodies and minds of Hokkaido, interrogating the violent, sometimes genocidal results of Japanese indigenous policy. He does this, for instance, by looking at the Former Aborigine Protection Law (北海道旧土人保護法), which was still on the books at the time he was writing, as it related to land theft and forced assimilation. This is of course laudable, but the book has interesting faults as well.

The chapter I focused on, on the Meiji period policies, is thorough and -- to be honest -- much better than a lot of more recent work because of this uncompromising critical edge, but nevertheless, Shinya argues over Meiji era land theft on the assumption that ”the Ainu were a people who innately had no concept of land ownership" (pg. 181). This becomes the leitmotif of the chapter, which is used to explain away what Shinya seems to characterize as a kind of Ainu patsyism. Three things about this:

1. Shinya doesn't distinguish between private and public property, or what "ownership" (所有) means in a legal or practical sense. Other than giving an anthropologically-rooted explanation about the Ainu worldview, he doesn't consider, for instance, individualized family dwellings that many Ainu -- according to most accounts -- lived in throughout at least the 19th century, or what public and private would mean regarding those dwellings, or anything else like that.
2. Whether true or not, the historical reality is, until the end of the Tokugawa period, Japanese people didn't have a "concept of property ownership" either, when it came to post-Enlightenment discourses of private property, or that 90-95% of Japanese people were landless peasants during this period, But there's absolutely an assumption that property was a defining difference between the Japanese and Ainu.
3. Regardless, this seems to be rooted on the assumption that Indigenous people live in a "state of nature". The assumption that "Indians" or "natives" or "savages" don't have a concept of property is exactly what the doctrine of terra nullius is rooted in, and, likewise, was mobilized by seemingly softer or more liberal forms of colonialism where the colonizing power declares they have the duty to "help" Indigenous people who need to be taught little things like this. 

It's fascinating in itself that an author, who I'm sure rattled a few cages with this overall confrontational book, nevertheless falls back on colonial-era stereotypes. I could write a lot about this, but I'll save it.

One major issue I have with Shinya's analysis of Meiji-period settler colonialism is that most of the laws, he argues, are throwbacks to earlier Japanese frontier policy, or a mere continuation of Matsumae policy. This simply isn't true, and this analysis lacks any international focus, except for a brief mention that the Japanese state was anxious about "Russified" Ainu on the Kuriles and mirrored this policy of cultural or linguistic assimilation in response. But there's no mention at all of how Indigenous people were treated, for instance, in the British settler colonies. Or that the Japanese Ainu policies reflected the aims or the modernizing/Westernizing state which were markedly different in both intention and execution from the Tokugawa period. Everything gets blurred, and we learn that the only interest that the Japanese government has in Hokkaido is as a buffer against Russia. While there's no doubt that the impetus to colonize as aggressively as the Japanese did was because of fears that the Russians would beat them to it, don't we see similar colonial competition (with the Russians no less!) in British Columbia? In all of this, it's not clear from the text why the Japanese state did what it did. It's left vague, and falls back on "use it or lose it" excuses at places. 

One great thing about this text is that it introduces an account of Ainu schools taken from a collection of personal accounts, 近代民衆の記録. This may be worth looking into.