Global Courant
Masaki Sashima stared through the fog at the gray waters of the Tokachi River in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, on a recent afternoon. From here, his native people, the Ainu, once used spears and nets to catch the salmon they considered to be gifts from the gods.
Under Japanese law, river fishing for this salmon, an essential part of Ainu cuisine, trade and spiritual culture, has been off limits for over a century. Mr Sashima, 72, said it was time for his people to regain what they see as a natural right, and restore one of the last vestiges of a decimated Ainu identity.
“In the past, salmon in our culture was for everyone in the community to enjoy,” he said. “The salmon is here for us and we want to ensure our right to catch this fish.”
Mr Sashima is leading a group suing the central and prefectural governments to reclaim salmon fishing rights, four years after Japan’s parliament passed a law recognizing the Ainu as the country’s indigenous people.
For centuries, Japanese assimilation policies have deprived the Ainu of their land, forced them to give up hunting and fishing for farming or other menial work, and pushed them into Japanese-language schools where it was impossible to maintain their native language.
When the government banned all river fishing during the Meiji era, which ran from 1868 to 1912, the main justification was to protect salmon stocks as they spawned on their way to the Pacific Ocean.
The move coincided with a government policy to push the Ainu away from fishing as their livelihood to give an advantage to Japanese fishermen who would take salmon from the sea, said Shinichi Yamada, a humanities professor at Sapporo Gakuin. University who wrote about Ainu. history and fishing rights.
“Japan is a country that says it follows the rule of law, but they are very behind on indigenous rights,” said Shiro Kayano, director of a private museum in eastern Hokkaido and the son of the only Ainu to study Japanese culture. parliament. “Ainu people who choose to do this should have the opportunity to go back” to the traditional Ainu lifestyle, Mr Kayano said.
The ranks of the Ainu have shrunk so low that in the latest official survey, conducted in 2017, only 13,118 people identified as Ainu in Hokkaido, which has a total population of about 5.2 million. UNESCO has designated the Ainu language as “critically endangered.”
This year, the Japanese government plans to spend about $40 million to support Ainu cultural activities, tourism and industry, under the 2019 law that recognized the Ainu as an indigenous people. The new law enshrined an earlier resolution from a decade earlier.
In 2020, the government opened an Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, south of Sapporo, the prefectural capital, to celebrate Ainu traditions such as dance, woodcarving, archery, and embroidery. A historical timeline in the main exhibit hall recognizes that Japanese invaders “suppressed” the Ainu, brought with them diseases that wiped out parts of the population, imposed Japanese customs, and gifted them farmland that was “often uncultivable.”
Critics say neither the new law nor the museum, the Upopoy National Ainu Museum and Park, goes far enough to empower the Ainu after centuries of being ignored by Japanese politicians who insisted Japan was an ethnically homogeneous nation.
While the government emphasizes Ainu crafts, music and dance, “I think we should have political rights,” said Kanako Uzawa, an Ainu rights expert and the niece of a prominent Ainu leader.
With an education system that barely recognizes the existence of Hokkaido’s indigenous people in textbooks or curriculum, some Ainu say they want more than an isolated museum.
Miyuki Muraki, 63, deputy executive director of the Ainu Museum, said her family never spoke about their Ainu identity as a child at home, and classmates compared her and other Ainu children to dogs.
“In all of society, we just learn about Japanese culture,” she said. “They say it’s because there aren’t enough of us. But that’s partly because we haven’t been able to live our lives freely.”
According to Mr. Sashima, that can only happen if the Ainu can catch salmon from the river whenever they want.
The prefectural governor grants an annual exemption to the Ainu to collect a limited number of salmon from the river for ceremonial purposes. Mr Sashima said that even if his group, the Raporo Ainu Nation, won the lawsuit, it would never need much more than the 100 or 200 salmon that are already regularly allowed annually.
“It’s about our rights, not the number of fish,” says Mr. Sashima, who co-owns a local company that makes fishing nets and has a commercial fishing license for the sea.
The case could go to court as early as this fall. In lawsuits, the Japanese government says the ban on river fishing applies to all residents of Hokkaido and that the Ainu are not entitled to any special rights beyond the annual ceremonial exemption.
Michiaki Endo, a spokesman for the Hokkaido Prefectural Government’s Ainu Policy Department, declined to comment, citing the ongoing lawsuit. Representatives from both the Council for Ainu Policy Promotion within the Central Cabinet Secretariat and the National Fisheries Bureau also declined to comment.
Even within Hokkaido’s Ainu community, opinions are divided on how best to preserve their culture.
Kazuaki Kaizawa, secretary general of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, an advocacy group, said it would favor lobbying government officials over fishing rights, along with access to land and forests.
Ainu heritage workers at the Upopoy museum said that instead of facing lawsuits, they were exploring their cultural roots.
The lawsuit “is very important, but at the same time we are a modern Japanese people,” said 34-year-old Tatsuaki Muta, a museum worker who recently demonstrated a traditional wooden canoe. “So we shouldn’t follow the laws?”
Several of the 12 members of the Raporo Ainu Nation – almost all of whom work for Mr. Sashima – have discovered their roots as the lawsuit continues.
As a child, Koki Nagane, 38, thought the Ainu were already extinct. He never thought he could be Ainu himself.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Nagane sat with several other members of the group at a table in the local community center, diligently working a needle of yellow thread into a strip of indigo cloth. The teacher, Kazuko Hirokawa, 64, teased him about his skill with traditional embroidery, despite his thick fingers hardened by long days of braiding ropes and stretching large nets.
For Mr. Sashima, pursuing the lawsuit and preserving Ainu traditions is about leaving a legacy. Like many other Ainu, as a child he suspected – but was never sure – that he was a member of the indigenous group.
But at the age of 40, he got into a fight in a bar when another man taunted him for his Ainu heritage. It was then that he decided to devote his life to cultural and political activism.
“Even when we were doing embroideries or carvings and absolutely no one was interested, I worked hard on my own,” he said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “Ethnic discrimination does not disappear wherever you go. You can’t hide from it.”
