Ainu trivia [a partial entry on Ainu Wedding (1971), Ota Ryu]
[Could you sympathize with Ota Ryu?1 Is there anything for you in Ainu Revolution Theory? Is there anything for you in revolutionary fantasies? Which of your causes are lost?]
[As usual, I can relate only trivia. I don’t know what Ota Ryu remembered about the fall of Karafuto, or if his revolutionary consciousness might have been formed by an awareness of the crimes needed for its survival. In what conditions did he see the Koreans imported by Mitsui to labor there? Were the Oroks still in their villages? He left before the Soviets arrived. He joined the Japanese Communist Party a short time later. He soon left to pursue Trotskyism. Please tolerate my choice not to attempt to unravel the next three decades of activism. I am more familiar than most with Japanese leftist politics of the postwar period, but what does that mean? There is a good reason that nobody has attempted a complete genealogy in any language of the Japanese postwar left, since one name, one tendency, one event leads to dozens more. So, let me say only that Ota Ryu was involved in student activism, albeit as a fringe player, an organizer of misfits on the wild political edge. ▣ ▣ And here is a piece of trivia that leads us too tidily into our story to be true: Ota Ryu was converted from a global revolutionary ideology derived to something stranger and more powerful by his viewing of a documentary film called Ainu Wedding (1971). Taking all this at face value, then, this short ethnographic feature by Himeda Tadayoshi produced out of Ainu Revolutionary Theory, and Ota’s break with Marxism, or Bolshevism, or Trotskyism, or student activism.2 ▣ ▣ We shouldn't rely on trivia and supposition. Where did kyumin kakumeiron—a theory, disconnected from Marxist class struggle, of revolution of particular groups of poor, racialized minorities—come from? How did Ota come to his idea of overthrowing Japan from the margins.3 It is hard to say how he came to deem the Ainu as revolutionary subjects. Was he imagining his role as the traveling revolutionary agitator—the sekai kakumei ronin, traveling to the frontiers of the empire—as something like the adventurer-revolutionaries of the empire—the tairiku ronin? Were his models Takahashi Satokata and Kita Ikki? Too many questions. Was he homesick for Karafuto? Was he trying to wash away some guilt that stained him in childhood? No, let’s go with the trivia. Let’s conclude that he saw in Ainu Wedding a vision of primitive communism!]
[Ainu Wedding was the second of several ethnographic Himeda Tadayoshi filmed in Hokkaido. It follows a bride and groom as they prepare for their wedding. The participants had no memories of Ainu weddings, so what we get is not the usual ethnographic record of a culture on the verge of disappearance, but rather an attempt, itself informed by ethnographic research, as much as by oral tradition, to revive, and necessarily to invent, a tradition that had disappeared about a century before.4 ▣ ▣ The bride is a farmer and the groom works at garage. Most of the short feature is about the ceremony and the ceremonial equipment necessary for it.]
[In a sense, although it was not his right to do so, and although it was not ethical, Ota could invent the Ainu. The idea of the Ainu was, after all, merely a convenience for Japanese administrators of the Meiji: the Ainu were the indigenous people living on Hokkaido and the islands to its north that were not Japanese.5 But so, Ainu culture, broadly speaking, had been almost completely eradicated by the 1970s. A century of forced or voluntary assimilation, as well as epidemics and deportation meant that very few people fitting the definition given by colonial administrators could be found.6 Nobody spoke Ainu.7 And so, Ota was following those that revived Ainu identity in the late 1960s. The people doing this work were ancestors of Hokkaido indigenous people that needed to understand their roots, as well as native and Japanese activists and tourism entrepreneurs.8 Ainu culture was not revived from nothing—but the establishment of a broad category of indigenous people, or Ainu, and the decimation of indigenous culture did mean that there was a degree of invention, or of putting together things that should have not been matched.9 So, what we see in Ainu Wedding is the tension between ascribed identity and self-identification; there is enough of the traditional, attested to by ethnographers and oral tradition, but, of course, also some invention, some adaptation.]
[A process of ethnic revival will always be conservative, I would argue, in the sense that it adopt past traditions that were preserved in folk culture, or whatever ethnographers saved. It must be defined against the mainstream, which in this case is Japanese postwar culture. It must be primitive because it is defined against technology and progress. This is precisely what appealed to Ota Ryu at first, perhaps. ▣ ▣ What happened to the bride and groom? What happened to Ota? ▣ ▣ The liberationists were in it for their own goals, separate from those of Ota, I might summarize the situation. An Ainu Republic of any political foundation was a project that never caught on. To hold a wedding in the language of one’s ancestors was not even particularly interesting to most. Jail time was too high a price to pay, even for a man that had been given the death sentence by Trotskyites, to scratch the dedication off a monument. Let’s be dismissive. He gave up on the Ainu, at least as revolutionary subjects.10]
Have I fallen victim to the same fantasies? I’m sure I have.
It is important to note that, in the sense that it is one of the first events I could place on a timeline of current events in my lifetime, my awareness of politics starts with Oka.
Like a foreign reporter showing a picture of the confrontation of between a citizen and a tank near Tiananmen, I would be met by confusion or bewilderment if I showed to anyone under the age of fifty the picture of a Van Doos soldier staring down a protester at Oka in 1990. I’m too young to remember seeing the Oka Crisis on television. Was it burned into my memory flipping through old issues of Maclean's at the doctor’s office? Was it in our school textbooks? I don’t know. What was the outcome of the Kanehsatà:ke struggle? The federal government intervened to purchase the disputed land. We had a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.
It was not Oka alone that had an impact on me. There were other struggles, which I only took part in as a spectator, or, at best, a passive supporter. I mean that my adolescent vision of a political revolution would have meant indigenous sovereignty. I mean that I read Leonard Peltier’s books. I mean that I once went to a rally below the Cornwall Centre to support the calls by a local indigenous group to rectify the police force. I learned Cree at university perhaps as much out of linguistic curiosity as some sense that it was a subversive act, or that it might show my solidarity to indigenous causes. I will stop there. I’m not trying to valorize my commitment to indigenous struggles. I am trying to say two other things. The first is that my commitment to indigenous struggles, or my conception of them, perhaps, was possible only because I was completely disconnected from the lives of indigenous people and the practical work of decolonization. The second thing is that indigenous struggles seemed central to the political activity or political consciousness of many young people at the time.
I mean that I am from another generation and from another place than I imagine most of my readers are. I don’t remember Oka, but I remember remembering Oka. I want you to understand that I have fallen victim to the same romanticism as Ota Ryu.
Another question might be whether or not there was some sense of shame in my halfhearted expressions of solidarity with indigenous causes. I believe that must have inspired Ota Ryu, who was born a settler in Karafuto. He never said so. I won’t say it about myself, either.
William Andrews’ Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture, from 1945 to Fukushima talks about Ota Ryu at length, and I’m drawing from his account. He doesn’t mention Ainu Wedding, however.
Earlier this year, a fugitive named Kirishima Satoshi was discovered by police in a hospital in Kamakura. He had been on the run for fifty years, accused in a bombing in Marunouchi. Kirishima died in hospital. He was a member of one of several branches of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front.
The East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front were, I think it’s fair to say, under the influence of Ota Ryu. The politics of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front could be summed up this way: they saw no break between the wartime Japanese empire and the postwar nation, with the only difference being that the latter carried out their activities under the aegis of the American empire, or, broadly speaking, a liberal international order. They saw Japan as an active participant, for its own imperialist goals, in the subjugation of the powerless. That is how I would describe them.
Kirishima went to bomb Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which had been charged by activists with serving the American war machine. Let me quote the declaration, which is translated and quoted in William Andrews’ Dissenting Japan, sent by the cell of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front that carried out the Mitsubishi bombing:
Mitsubishi has functioned as the nerve centre of Japanese imperialism, under a pillar of Japanese imperialism eating the flesh of the dead beneath the shadow of a mask of business. Mission Diamond was an attack on the invasive corporations and colonialists of Japanese imperialism of which Mitsubishi is the boss. … They are parasites on the nerve centre of Japanese imperialism and participants in colonialism, colonialists growing fat on the blood of the people of the colonies.
There were other targets. Kirishima was not involved, as far as I know, with the cell of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front that blew up a statue in Asahikawa and set off a bomb at the Institute of Northern Cultures.
There was minor damage. This was intended as a blow against the imperialist forces of the Japanese that were occupying the Ainu homeland. This is what Anna Bugaeva reports in "Southern Hokkaido Ainu," in The Languages of Japan and Korea.
Why does it seem shameful to point this out? We can point out the fiction involved in producing an ethnographic film. We can comment critically on a process of ethnogenesis after the devastation of indigenous culture. It seems sleazy, however, in this case. I can’t say for sure why.
This is the argument that Katarina Sjöberg makes in The Return of the Ainu: Cultural Mobilization and the Practice of Ethnicity in Japan. She means this in the sense that the Ainu never referred to themselves as Ainu, but that the term came to refer to a range of people that spoke different languages and inhabited territories quite distant from each other.
This is venturing into treacherous territory. Let’s say that by their own self-definition that there were few Ainu left by the 1970s. I can’t find the number that choose at the present to register on the census as Ainu. Kirsten Refsing in The Ainu Language: The Morphology and Syntax of the Shizunai Dialect gives it as twenty-five thousand in 1988. Membership of the Hokkaido Utari Association was about the same number. That number has fallen since the 1980s. The number of Ainu people that self-identify as such with the government seems to hover around ten thousand. If we expanded the definition to include everyone with some amount of Ainu ancestry, as the Hokkaido Utari Association did for their unofficial estimate of two to three hundred thousand Ainu living in Japan, the number would be higher. If we restricted the definition to those that can claim to be junketsu no Ainu— pure-blooded Ainu, going back four generations—the number might be about a hundred or so, at least according to one survey that I can find (the 2008 version of Gendai Ainu no seikatsu to ishiki no tayosei). (I run the risk here of projecting onto Japanese indigenous issues ideas that I have picked up in other places. Self-identification has been the most important way that the Ainu have defined themselves since the revival of the 1960s.)
Kirsten Refsing dates language death to 1940. Writing in 1988, she concluded that “Ainu has been dead for decades,” with only a few years left before it lost the last of its native speakers. “A number of young Ainu have taken up the study of Ainu as a foreign language,” she writes, “but their admirable efforts will hardly prolong the life span of the Aniu language.” Of course, people still speak Ainu. There are classes in it. But the “last speakers” that Refsing wrote about it the 1980s died a long time ago.
As you can see, this is all superficial. Katarina Sjöberg’s book on this topic is a good place to start.
Sjöberg gives an example of an Ainu woman in one of the villages where she did fieldwork, who claimed to be a shaman, despite the fact that shamans were traditionally non-existent in the area.
More could be said here about the later life of Ota Ryu. Briefly, like many revolutionaries of his generation, he turned away from any version of traditional politics to alternative medicine, environmentalism, and attacking networks of global financial capital under the control of Illuminati.