Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.
They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.
Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in Japanese history, law, sociology, political science, minority rights, and related subjects.
Our Land Was A Forest: An Ainu Memoir is by Kayano Shigeru.
The Ainu are indigenous people of lands surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, including Hokkaido Island and Northeast Honshu Island.
The TU Library collection contains other books about different aspects of the life and culture of the Ainu.
Official estimates place the total Ainu population of Japan at 25,000. Unofficial estimates place the total population at 200,000 or higher, as the near-total assimilation of the Ainu into Japanese society has resulted in many individuals of Ainu descent having no knowledge of their ancestry. As of 2000, the number of “pure” Ainu was estimated at about 300 people.
In 1966, there were about 300 native Ainu speakers; in 2008, however, there were about 100.
Kayano Shigeru was one of the last native speakers of the Ainu language and a leading figure in the Ainu ethnic movement in Japan.
His book is a document on Ainu material culture, lifestyles, beliefs, and ideologies. To preserve Ainu culture, Ainu knowledge centers have been established, where lessons on the Ainu language, history, material culture, and crafts (such as weaving and wood carving) are offered. This initiative by the author showed a practical synthesis between tradition and change.
Our Land Was a Forest is a memoir set in Hokkaido, the native land of the Ainu people.
By describing the experiences of his family, Kayano establishes that integrating the Ainu into wider Japanese society meant suppressing their own lifestyle. He notes tht the Ainu were treated unfairly by officials: they were forbidden to speak their language, their material culture was considered inferior to Japanese culture, and they were described as an inferior race.
As a result, many Ainu tried to conceal their origins.
According to one online reviewer,
Since the 1970s, Kayano Shigeru has been a leading figure in this Ainu campaign for human rights, cultural preservation, and recognition as an indigenous people. In 1994 he achieved national prominence by becoming the first Ainu to be elected to the Diet, entering the Upper House as a member of the Socialist Party (now Shakai minshu to). During the 1990s Kayano has also been involved in a long running legal battle over the construction of a dam in his home community of Nibutani which ended recently in an ambiguous decision by the Sapporo High Court rejecting his suit but recognising Ainu grievances. Kayano is also well known as an authority on Ainu language and culture and has published widely on these topics, most recently in the form of a detailed Ainu-Japanese dictionary. In short, he is perhaps the most well-known Ainu both inside and outside Japan.
In the book, Kayano has given an honest and moving account of his life and the awakening of his sense of identity and heritage. Born into the Ainu community of Nibutani in 1923, Kayano’s early childhood was spent on the banks of the Saru River among “kind, though poor, people” (p. 21). His grandmother, Tekatte, spoke to him in Ainu and entertained him with numerous folktales (uwepekere) containing the wisdom of a hunter-gathering people. After entering school Kayano’s experiences of poverty and humiliation led to prolonged absences, but since the majority of children were Ainu he did not experience the discrimination that was rife (and still exists) in other schools with few Ainu pupils. Certain early experiences, however, were formative to his sense of identity as an Ainu. Perhaps one of the most important (which I have heard him refer to many times in speeches and lectures) was the arrest of his father, Seitaro, for “poaching” salmon for food. As Kayano points out, while the Ainu depended on salmon as a staple it was shamo (immigrant Japanese) overfishing that was depleting salmon stocks; as a hunting people the Ainu never took more than they needed. Hokkaido was originally the territory of the Ainu, and the multitude of Ainu place names for every creek and hollow bear ample witness to this. The Japanese occupation of this land, Ainu Moshir, was an outright invasion since it was never sold or leased by the Ainu (pp. 59-60). Yet Kayano’s father became a criminal in the eyes of the Japanese state merely for feeding his family in the traditional way. Seitaro retained a traditional orientation as a hunter all his life; unable to adapt he rarely worked and lost himself in alcohol. One of the most moving incidents in the book is the scene of three elders, including Kayano’s father, discussing how the luckiest would be the one who died first, since those remaining would be able to conduct a proper Ainu funeral and guide him to the other world (pp. 106-108) […]
This is the story that Kayano tells. He tells it simply, with a moving sincerity. While there is anger in abundance, anger at both the sufferings inflicted upon his family and at the dispossession of his people, hatred is singularly lacking. Alongside its personal interest, however, the appeal of this book lies also in the insights it gives into the broader picture of Ainu history. Kayano himself is keenly aware of this issue; while wishing to leave a “monument to the Ainu” he worries that “writing too much would make this into self-aggrandizement, whereas writing too little would not help people trying to comprehend our truth” (p. 157). He has negotiated this conflict neatly. By including the stories of his grandparents and parents, Kayano has provided us with an exquisite miniature of modern Ainu history, of how the Ainu have been dispossessed, marginalised and incorporated into the modern Japanese state as “racially” inferior “former natives” (Kyudojin). All the main elements of that history are here: forced labour for the fishing stations in Edo period Hokkaido; the destruction of traditional lifeways as Hokkaido was then colonised as terra nulliusand its natural resources depleted; forced relocation under the euphemism of “protection”; Japanization in “native schools” and the armed forces; the ravages of imported tuberculosis; the image of the Ainu as a “dying race” propagated by scholars and tourism; and discrimination and poverty in wider settler society. Equally importantly, through the story of Kayano and his family we come to see not just the operation of these powerful historical forces and agents but also their human costs, as individual Ainu struggle against their enforced marginality. Some, like his father, are crushed and seek refuge in alcohol, while others, especially the women, strive to adapt while preserving their dignity.
But Kayano’s story is more than just that of simple “ethnic” conflict between an indigenous people and the settlers who take their land. It has underlying subtexts, not always explicit, that deal also with the destruction of rural life by modernisation and the nature of ethnic identity in a modern state. Those seeking the narrow stereotype of nature-loving indigenous peoples battling the exploitation of Mother Earth by rapacious capitalism will be disappointed. Indeed, Kayano’s own enthusiastic participation in that exploitation as a woodcutter and forestry boss make such stark distinctions difficult to maintain. One of the values of Kayano’s book is that through his individual experience he undermines the rigid categories that have obscured our understanding of the Ainu.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)