From Sasaki, Masao. Genshi Suru "Ainu". Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 2008.
Written during the heated debate over the future of the Former Natives Protection Act, Sasaki's Asahi Newspaper article, included in the anthology of his work Genshi Suru "Ainu", provides an extremely sharp and concise critique of this law.
Sasaki attacks the law from two angles: one is how the law played a role in racializing the Ainu. The term "Ainu" itself is questioned throughout the article, put into quotation marks along with terms like "kaitaku" (colonizing/'opening up' the land), "Wajin" (ethnic Japanese settlers), or "Nihon" (Japan). This doesn't simply give the impression that Sasaki is trying to express, as one often does with scare quotes, a hesitation to use these terms literally. But rather, he seems to be suggesting that these terms are mutually constitutive ideological constructions and can only exist on conjunction with each other. The imagined community of the Japanese ethnic nation-state is, in other words, constituted in part through the abjection of racialized groups like the Ainu, and vice versa. Moreover, while Sasaki is not entirely clear in his intentions, he appears very self-conscious of the fact that many ethnic Japanese, in or out of Hokkaido, have a particular image of terms like "Ainu" or, worse still perhaps,"kyūdojin" (former natives) as signifying primitive, inferior barbarians. The stigma around the term "Ainu" as it was used by Japanese in the early and mid 20th century led many in Sasaki's generation to reject it outright as an ethnic slur. In this, the Former Natives Protection Act played a key role in racialized subjectification. Those to whom this law applied to could be said to be legally "former natives"/Ainu and those to whom this law did not apply were thereby legally "Wajin"/Japanese. But this isn't to say that there were clear cut understandings of what constituted an "Ainu" at the time this law passed. After all, the first bill of the Former Natives Protection Act failed to pass in 1892 because it wasn't clear to the committee members assessing the bill who and who wasn't Ainu. This shouldn't be overstated, especially given the presence of Japanese descendants of Tokugawa-era settlers whose lineage may not have been clearly traceable by the state, and who themselves may have been, in some cases, quite hybridized in terms of obvious cultural markers such as clothing or language. There was no clear line between Ainu and Japanese, in other words. And, the fear was, most likely, more about labeling Japanese as Ainu than wrongfully labelling Ainu as Japanese. But curiously, in the reading of the second Former Natives Protection Act in the Diet, as Sasaki alludes to, the question of children of unclear lineage came, and how the law would apply to them. When asked whether these children would be considered Japanese or Ainu, Shirani Takeshi simply replies that if the child looks Ainu, they're Ainu. Or in other words, if a child meets the physiognomy of a cliched racist image of an Ainu, that's good enough for the state. Sasaki rightly sees this almost arbitrary racialization as consequentially applying to all Ainu, children or not.
The second key argument Sasaki makes is to attack the enduring idea that the Ainu race had simply lost the survival of the fittest to the Japanese race on an even playing field. This was a key rationale for the need for 'protection': that the Ainu were natural inferior and needed their lives to be directly managed by the state in order to protect them from natural processes by which they would eventually face extinction simply through contact with the racially superior Japanese settlers. Sasaki responds to this by looking directly at laws targeting Ainu hunting and fishing, the basis of their economy and a major source of food for them, as having an absolutely devastating effect on their community. The other effect of these bans on Ainu hunting as well as the encroachment of the forestry industry was that many Ainu lost access to furs and birch bark used to make clothing. This effectively meant the Ainu could no longer easily make their own clothing needed to survive in the frigid northern winters. These laws produced the precarity that many Ainu found themselves in. And the Former Natives Protection Law, in addressing this precarity as rooted in Ainu inferiority rather than the effects of colonial policy, not only did nothing to change the conditions of this precarity, but naturalized and normalized the Japanese settler colonial presence which led to these laws being passed in the first place.
Sasaki is equally critical of the land 'grants' given to Ainu households as based on the precondition that they farm the land and that the land remains in the family, and can't be transferred outside of the family without government approval. This is both because many Ainu, who were primarily hunters and fishers, were simply not easily able to sustain themselves with vegetables gown on family farms. Moreover, settlers usurping Ainu land continued. As the land was leasable through civil law, many lessees used loopholes to claim the land and, according to Sasaki, and had great success in continuing the land theft that the Protection Act ostensibly aimed to curb.
In all of this, Sasaki is arguing for the abolition of the Former Aborigines Protection Act by attacking the basis on which it was enacted. As an Ainu writing in the late 1960s, he describes the law as "humiliating" for Ainu, and preserving the the racist assumptions from the 19th century that the law is predicated on.
This source is the first of several Ainu critiques of the Japanese settler colonial law targeting the Ainu that I'll be looking at. Sasaki is in some ways the most radical of this group of Ainu writers, but as Mark Winchester demonstrated with his brilliant analysis of Sasaki's long form essays, his almost deconstructive approach to his own racial subjectivity in many ways anticipates post-structuralist and post-colonial politics and can be used quite effectively in critiquing Japanese settler colonialism.
Moreover, Sasaki's discussion of such simple, matter of fact things as the Ainu not being able to collect birch bark to make clothes because of the forestry industry is extremely relevant in any discussion of the effects of these laws on the Ainu ability to sustain their own communities without relying on the Japanese state or, for that matter, becoming more and more integrated into the Japanese capitalist economy as a matter of contingency. Sakaki illuminates in a short article how these processes worked. Cutting Ainu off from resources, or greatly restricting access they had to resources, also freed them up for economic exploitation by both small time capitalist settlers, or more often, it seems, large conglomerates from the mainland. Ainu land, of course, was and remained the object desire of the colonization of Hokkaido, and putting them onto small parcels of farmland kept them off the great majority of their former territories. These laws were just as much about removing the limits of Japanese exploitation of the natural resources of Hokkaido as they were about limiting the Ainu. Sasaki Masao is a powerful voice in revealing this power relationship.
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