The three sections of this report aim to find fault in Ainu hygiene by investigating clothing, food and drink, housing, as well as marriage, childbirth, work/employment, bathing, exchange with other Ainu communities, life expectancy, and funerals. With these analyses, the author(s) aimed to demonstrate how and why Ainu populations were dropping so sharply.
While the word "study" may apply to this document, it's not scientifically rigorous in any way. Areas where one might ordinarily consider hygiene -- either in the 'personal' or 'public' senses -- such as food preparation, for example, are not seriously considered in regards to the spread of disease. Even less so than Sekiba Fujihiko's writings which tend to simply inscribe any aspect of Ainu culture that Sekiba did not approve of as "unhygienic", there is nothing in this study that even approaches a medical analysis of hygiene in these Ainu communities. Instead, this study links -- with absolutely no evidence -- things such as the soily smell of earthen floors in Ainu houses to a decline in the Japanese population.
We do see much of the same deeply ethnocentric assimilationist discourse as Sekiba, however, and clearly much of the impetus for the eventual Former Natives Protection Act comes from this sort of pathologization of Ainu daily life.
Sapporo District Ainu
The author of the report on Sapporo district appears to have learned enough about the Ainu in this region to give Ainu names for particular textiles and articles of clothing, though this may be based on second hand reading rather than observation. While at times the report is quite a matter of fact, other times he makes what appear to be sweeping generalizations and exaggerations. For example, in discussing childbirth, he writes:
Pregnant women, unlike during ordinary times, are given extremely simple clothes and plain food and just barely escape from destitution (tōtai). Moreover, these pregnant women, suffer through a livelihood without frills, without the time to make decisions about things such as their health, being sent to the mountains to gather kindling, and facing the elements out in the wasteland. And also, they're sent to fish on the seashore and made to do hard labour. And in regards to how this babies are nurtured after they're born, even if they don't grow up to be excellent (zenryō), the Ainu mothers tenderly nurture their children with emotion. I think even more than ordinary people (jōjin).
This description of Ainu women as borderline slaves (not to mention the characterization of Ainu babies as collectively destined to grow up as less-than-excellent people) is reminiscent of Orientalist stereotypes of Asian/non-Western women as collectively devalued and abused, continuing today with the so-called "white savour complex". It's one of many references to Ainu women which take on a specifically gendered tone.
The author of the first report notes that statistics (likely the koseki) lists Ainu in this district as living upwards of 70 years -- which in reality is staggeringly high for the 1880s. The author wonders, then, why the population is decreasing year after year. Here he returns to his image of hard done by Ainu women, and states that women going barefoot, braving the elements and being exposed to the cold air damages their uteri and that these elements can also damage the health of already pregnant women. He further states that not having proper bedding and, mentioned above, the earthy smell of Ainu homes damages their bodies, and women have miscarriages (ninki wo ushinashi) as a result. Moreover, he lists the heavy labour that pregnant women supposedly perform as a reason for the population decline. The lack of choice of foods for pregnant women and eating uncooked food are further given as reasons.
While, even if his report was true, much of this might be attributed to the realities of deep poverty, what does the author think should be done? The author describes the Ainu, referring to colonialism in the most indirect terms, explains that,
compared to other races that live in mixed environments [with other races], they are slow in raising their level of civilization (kaika) and escaping from their old traditions and adopting new ways. They have been neglectful of all of the necessities of life, and this has caused great damage to their health.
He concludes his analysis by simply stating that there are "too many reasons for their population decline to count", and as if to say that the Ainu are truly doomed, closes this section by discussing Ainu funerals.
Tsuishikari Ainu
The second author (I'm assuming there were two or three authors because of major stylistic differences in the writing itself), in discussing Karafuto Ainu far away from their homeland in Tsuishikari is in some ways much more straightforward and compared to the first author. For example, the first author claims that Sapporo district Ainu have no real form of cooking, no real form of marriage ceremonies, no real form of funerals, and the second author gives whole recipes and discusses Ainu ceremonies in detail. While it's not clear how accurate these observations are, they are largely without obvious personal bias. And, there are places -- such as his description of Ainu textiles made from treated tree bark -- where he directly gives examples of close Japanese equivalents. This almost gives the impression that the author thinks of the Ainu as not so different from the Japanese. However, there are other areas where the analysis is crudely culturalist and not just deflects Japanese colonialism or the fact that the Karafuto Ainu were ethnically cleansed from their far off homeland, but disavows these things altogether. He states, for example, that "the Ainu custom of building homes on uncleared swampland (mikai shichi) is the reason for the spread of disease" as a key reason for the decline in population. Much more troubling, the only other reason that the author gives for the population decline is that "as their homes and food are quite crude, when [Ainu] women have friendly relations with Japanese (wajin), they come to hate [other] natives. For this reason, there are a lot of bachelors amongst Ainu men and women." He concludes, before discussing funerals, by declaring the value of human life and advocating "giving the sick medicine, improving homes, and changing eating habits". Or in other words, he pushes for assimilation on explicitly biopolitical terms; a phenomenon which we see much more intensely later. The focus on Ainu women, both in terms of the quasi-orientalist "saving Ainu women from Ainu men" trope as well as the assertion that "friendly relations" with Japanese men have turned them off to Ainu men are typical of gendered colonial writing. Other sources, like the aforementioned Sekiba, have a strong gendered approach to Ainu women as well, giving special/especially creepy focus on them while Ainu men are treated as default. Given that still most immigrants travelling alone to Hokkaido were men, the focus on Ainu women as objects of desire is perhaps unsurprising, but it's odd to repeatedly see these references embedded in biopolitical writing.
Muroran Ainu
Lastly, the Muroran section is by far the shortest, and compared to the other two, is the most clinical. It's precise, including both descriptions of how Ainu houses are built and measurements of typical structures, and describes Ainu diet in detail simply missing from the first author's account of Sapporo district Ainu. Outstandingly, the third author has nothing disparaging to say about the Ainu at all. The picture of Ainu domestic life is in fact just that-- it's presented in a way that does not Other them in any explicit way, regardless of the veracity of the information presented itself. Interestingly, however, the section on life expectancy, where the other two authors discussed their harebrained theories as to why the Ainu population was decreasing, is nowhere to be found. Given the brevity of the entire section, it's possible the author only gave a cursory account of their field work, though this seems somewhat unlikely given the precision with which the third author talked about Ainu cooking or carpentry. They simply do not given an opinion as to why the Ainu were supposedly disappearing.
There is an overwhelming tendency in late 19th and early 20th century Japanese accounts of the Ainu to characterize them as a 'vanishing race'. This still persists today, particularly but not exclusively with the Japanese ethnic nationalist right who have a tendency to declare the Ainu as extinct. Ainu activists sometimes comment on how their people are viewed as semi-mythological by Japanese settlers in Hokkaido with no bearing in reality. Well known academics, even non-Japanese ones writing in English, describe them in past tense ('The Ainu were a people that lived in Hokkaido'). But, the idea that there was a major population drop in the late 19th century itself should be interrogated. The main thing to consider is there are Ainu accounts of a sort of exodus into the interior of the island, away from settlers. Similarly, some settlers mention Ainu running away as soon as they see them. Like today, during this time, the Japanese government kept track of births and deaths using the koseki (family registers), in which many Hokkaido Ainu were first recorded in the late 1870s, When someone changes their permanent address, they would have to move their koseki as well. Especially given the limited access to on-the-ground information in the 19th century, it's not impossible that there were Ainu who were tied to a particular address on their koseki who simply got up and left and in a legal sense became missing persons, or were even declared dead. After all, there aren't accounts of huge numbers of Ainu dying at once, but of particular towns losing Ainu populations. This could very well account for at least part of this drop in population so widely reported.
The other thing to consider is the actual effects of Japanese and Russian settler colonialism in Ainu lands. The only references to the Japanese in these reports, the creepy 'once you go wajin you'll never go back' comment in the second report and a reference in the Muroran report that mentions trade, are incredibly oblique. There's absolutely no mention of the fact that Ainu lands were confiscated by the state and were redistributed to settlers and mainland corporations for economic exploitation. There's no mantion that Ainu were restricted in hunting and fishing as well as gathering daily use goods like tree barks used to make clothing, completely tanking their trade-based economy and severely restricting their access to the bare necessities of life. And there's no mention that many Ainu were forcibly moved from their homes and put into what for some were alien environments, like seaside Karafuto Ainu communities sent to interior swamp areas in southern Hokkaido. What impact did these things have on the Ainu populations? How many people simply weren't able to survive with these massive, catastrophic changes to their communities? Was there violence inflicted on Ainu communities, especially with individuals who refused or resisted colonization? Did settlers ever forcibly take land from Ainu or harm them in other ways? These questions remain unanswered, and at least partly it seems that this was on purpose.
The fact that these reports or many others like them, including writings by supposed critics of the Japanese state's treatment of the Ainu like John Batchelor, do not mention colonialism at all and instead offer a thousand different excuses for Ainu population based on something lacking in the Ainu itself is very telling. It's certainly not that individuals didn't know or just missed it altogether. And it's not even that colonialism in Hokkaido was a taboo topic as it is now: colonialism itself was widely discussed and celebrated. Rather, there was a conscious choice to divorce Ainu precarity from the effects of settler colonialism. And the inevitable conclusion reached by these sorts of reports was simple: the essential faults with the Ainu as a culture or, worse, as a race could only be fixed through assimilation campaigns. So, in other words, the unspoken effects of colonialism could only be fixed with more, deeper colonialism. Domestic spaces were to be colonized, which is exactly what happened in the two decades after this report was published.
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