The Politics of Non-Recognition: Fissures, Frictions, and Ainu Indigeneity in Contemporary Japan

Event details
Speaker : Dr Ann-Elise Lewallen
               Postdoctoral Fellow, Hokkaido University
Date      : Friday, 1 February 2008
Time      : 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Venue    : AS4/03-28 (JS Meeting Room)

Abstract

In September 2007, the United Nations General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples providing a “Bill of Rights” for indigenous communities within nation-states. While Japan has continued to reproduce an ideology of homogeneity as an index of national cohesiveness, internal minority communities such as Ainu and Okinawans have contested these attempts at ethnic erasure. Ainu in particular have lobbied for recognition as indigenous peoples, political rights, and economic incentives, since the early 1980s. In recent years the Japanese state has gradually acknowledged that ethnic minorities do exist in Japan , but still refuses to accord Ainu indigenous rights. Moreover, what is revealed at the moment of the Declaration's passage is that Ainu themselves are more divided by legacies of colonialism and factionalism than united in the quest for recognition as Japan 's indigenous people. In this presentation I will examine the rationales behind state reluctance to negotiate with Ainu and describe current strategies deployed by Ainu to realize their claims of indigeneity. I will also consider how culture has been politicized as a proxy for indigenous rights, and how Ainu women are – in spite of the absence of political concessions – honoring ancestors and creating hybrid expressions of indigenous identity through clothwork.

About the speaker

Dr. Ann-Elise Lewallen is a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellow at Hokkaido University. She has lived and worked in Japan for nine years and has conducted fieldwork in several Ainu communities across Hokkaido. In her current research she is investigating how indigenous ecotourism may provide a catalyst for reclaiming traditional communal lands as sacred sites and support claims for asserting indigenous political rights at the national level.