Third Edition Spring 2013 - Institute of East Asian Studies, UC ...

Maps, Histories, and OwnershipMaps themselves are metaphors: they reveal our orientationto land and water, and convey, through the portrayal of boundaries,the underlying organization of power over the resourcesthey depict. Often, what is not included reveals as much as what is.Pre-modern Japan’s relationship with the waters that surroundedit could be characterized as ambivalent. On the one hand, theoceans were rich in life-sustaining resources. At the same time, theopen sea was a source of great risk and uncertainty. Accordingly,the earliest known maps of Japan as a unified realm, from theeighth century, show the three large islands of Honshu, Shikoku,and Kyushu surrounded by water. No other lands, such as the Koreanpeninsula, the vast continental China, or the large island to thenorth of Honshu known today as Hokkaido, were depicted. In fact,Hokkaido wasn’t included on national maps until the early modernperiod. Though widely considered to be the ancestral home ofAinu, Hokkaido is not the only historical Ainu land. In addition toHokkaido, Ainu occupied northern Honshu, the Kuril Islands, andthe disputed island of Sakhalin. The necessary simplification of informationrequired to create maps demonstrates the difficulty ofshowing a relationship between land and people that extends beyonda single, dominant narrative. By definition, indigenous statuslinks people to land, but at the same time, renders them subject toa defining authority. Maps, in short, reveal an intense ambiguity ofownership.The question of ownership is similarly applicable to the productionof historical narratives. Is Ainu history Japanese history?David Howell asks this essential question in his eponymous article.6 Just as maps are ill suited to display conflicting narratives, so,too, are national histories; the power to author one’s own historyis not freely bestowed. Howell states that Ainu history must be toldin the context of Japanese history, even though this limits the typesof questions that can be asked and the ways they can be answered. 7He identifies three barriers preventing the emergence of an Ainuhistory apart from Japanese history: 1) The broader acceptance ofAinu history within academia; 2) the expansion of viable sourcematerials (reflecting a bias against oral tradition within ‘official’historical narratives); and 3) the political tensions surrounding thestudy of Ainu.In regard to the obstacle of acceptance, Howell observesthat, “Ironically, it will be hard for Ainu history to establish itself asa field until historians of Japan come to incorporate the Ainu routinelyinto their narratives, for that is the only way to overcome thecurrent near invisibility of the Ainu in scholarly discourse.” Speakingto the issue of Ainu history as politically fraught, Howell notesthat, “scholars who do not position themselves as impassioned defendersof the Ainu risk being tarred as crass assimilationists. This[…] has parallels in the politics of indigenous studies elsewhere inthe world. It helps to account for the tendency of many studies ofthe Ainu to include denunciations of discrimination past and presentas a framing device.” In other words, the present production ofAinu history is at once contained by and resistant to a dominantJapanese narrative; as a product of resistance, it draws either supportor denial, and thus does not yet ‘exist’ in its own right.Howell overtly suggests a relationship between Ainu history anda broader narrative of indigenous colonization that transcends Japan.8 Maps and histories both function as currencies of dominantpowers, constructed to convey selective information. Symbolicallycontained within their boundaries, indigenous lands, histories, andthus, people, become enfolded and obscured rather than included,or even identified.Producing Scientific RacismIn 2005, Taro Aso (now the former prime minister of Japan,then the internal affairs and communications minister) gave6 David K. Howell, “Is “Ainu History” “Japanese History”?” Journal of NortheastAsian History Vol. 5:1 (2008): 121-142.7 Ibid.8 Ibid.73 Valerie Black Ainu Indigeneity 74