HIEA 112 — Week 2 Medium Post
Prompt: Put yourself in the shoes of an Ainu person who lived through the extension of the boundaries of the old Tokugawa regime to include your ancestral homelands. How might your life change on an everyday level? How might you respond, either individually or collectively to this imposition of colonial rule over you?
Response:
At the surface level, the “Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Law” appears to benefit the Ainu people. For people under the law’s jurisdiction, it “granted free of charge no more than 12 acres per household,” and also provided people with the equipment and resources required to begin farming (57). Furthermore, the law additionally provided people living in Hokkaido with welfare and medical care free of charge (58). However, this “protection” that the law claimed to provide was barely applicable to the Ainu people, and was in reality more aligned with a “forced assimilation,” as described by author Komori Yoichi (55).
If I was an Ainu person living through the time period of the “Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Law,” where Japan was attempting to extend its northern boundaries through my homeland, I would be forced to forfeit my personal traditions, the sense of community I had with my people, and the fundamental societal structures which dictate how I obtained basic necessities. In an announcement to the Ainu people living in Hokkaido, the Hokkaido Development Agency passed legislation stating that men could no longer wear earrings and women and girls could no longer be tattooed (Yoichi 10). Furthermore, this same announcement also stated that everyone would have to make an attempt to learn Japanese, both orally and through writing (10). Since the Ainu people spoke a different language from Japanese, that was only communicated orally, the rule surrounding language would work to replace the existing means of communication I have with my community, which would make me feel isolated and slightly lost as people from mainland Japan rapidly “immigrated” into Hokkaido (11). The rules pertaining to earrings and tattoos would further accelerate the loss of sense of community that I would have with other Ainu people. Even the new laws which were providing my people with land for farming would likely prove overwhelming to me, since I would be used to a hunting-based food system (10). Therefore, in response to this legislation, I would be forced to rapidly shift my lifestyle to an agriculture-based diet, and immediately attempt to learn Japanese so that I could communicate with the influx of people from mainland Japan who were moving into Hokkaido.
With this colonial rule now coming from Japan, in conjunction with rising citizenship struggles due to political conflict with Russia, I would collectively try to gather the Ainu people, and offer a negotiation with the Japanese government (11). I would hope to reach a negotiation where the Ainu people could continue our lifestyles, and perhaps pay a small fee to the government in return. Alternatively, I would try to move out of the area and potentially find a new place to live, though this may prove difficult due to the “Emigration Protection Law” (4).
