Source analysis: "Fujimura Hisakaza and I" by Umehara Takeshi in Henka to ahachi

I'm working on a piece which details 1860s-70s Japanese sovereignty claims to Ainu land by the likes of Okamoto Bunpei. Okamoto fancifully described the contemporary Ainu as preserving the language, culture, customs, and religion of the very ancient Japanese. This creates a sense of kinship between the Ainu and Japanese in Okamoto's time, though, perhaps with two siblings at very different ages. I argue that this has the effect of rendering the Ainu proto-Japanese and thereby legitmizes Japanese colonial incursions into Ainu territory. Moreover, with the increasingly aggressive stance of the Russian Empire in the boundary dispute in Karafuto/Sakhalin, this would render Ainu territories across the island always-already Japanese territories. In other words, it de-legitimized the Karafuto Ainu as a distinct political or cultural entity, in effect de-indigenizing them, while, in turn, indigenizing the Japanese settlers who Okamoto hoped would settle the island in great numbers. And as it was, after all, a numbers game, rendering the thousands of Ainu present in southern Sakhalin "Japanese" would greatly bolster the settler body politic, then numbering in the hundreds.

Stunningly, this discourse has continued to recent times, co-existing with settlers' claims that the Ainu have "disappeared' through their forcible assimilation into the Japanese mainstream. In fact, I was astounded and troubled by the inclusion of a short essay by the 20th century Japanese philosopher Umehara Takeshi which was included in Henka to ahachi -- a book of interviews with Hokkaido-based Karafuto Ainu. The essay, acting as a forward, is stunning in how it reproduces Okamoto's colonialist discourse, with the philosopher asserting that the Ainu -- still in the 1980s when the book was published -- represent a truly ancient, primordial, and thereby pure/authentic form of Japanese culture left over from the Jomon period. Describing his great excitement as a nationalist in learning about (and hoping to "understand" (rikai)) Ainu culture, he stated that in more perfectly understanding the Ainu, he could more perfectly "understand" a timeless Japanese culture as well. Such Ainu culture was, according to Umehara, fundamentally anti-modernist and adopting it allowed him to overcome the Cartesian mind-body split which supposedly characterizes all modern philosophy. His proof for all of this? Exactly like Okamoto, he turns to the most superficial of linguistic and religious similarities (ie. Japanese kami = Ainu kamui). Essentially, this mode of categorization reproduces (or, perhaps it's better to say, "updates") the colonial discourse of Ainu as primitive, as unchanging, or as in a state of nature while erasing them as a distinct Indigenous people.

There's little more to say about this which I didn't write above about Okamoto, but what's even more curious than this discourse's own "essence" proving to be fundamentally changeless 150 years into the future is the efficacy in which Ainu themselves responded to it in the same volume. Henka to ahachi contains an incredible critique of such colonial de-indigenizations. The Karafuto Ainu man, Nishihira, describes Japanese legitmizing their own theft of Ainu land through creating histories of the Ainu consisting of "nothing but lies". Nishihira, in turn, claims that the Japanese themselves were from Thailand (comparing the Ainu epithet for settlers as "Shamo" to the medieval southeast Asian kingdom Cham) or from the northeast Asian mainland. All of Japan, he reminds his interlocutor, was originally Ainu land.