The Politics of Colonial Translation: On the Narrative of the Ainu as a ‘Vanishing Ethnicity’
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Japanese imperial authorities sought to justify their imperial project in Hokkaido by racializing the Ainu, whom they displaced in 1869. At the time, the Ainu, with their Caucasian features and beards, were considered racially and culturally distinct from the Japanese (wajin), explaining why some western anthropologists marveled at the feat of a yellow race colonizing a white race. Therefore, the Japanese racialization of the Ainu as a culturally inferior and primitive race at the brink of extinction turned conventional racial taxonomies on their head. In this article Hirano introduces the term “colonial translation,” referring to the process by which the cultural and social differences between the Ainu and Japanese were rewritten to cast the Ainu as primitives. The institutionalization of these depictions of Ainu as primitive people enabled the colonizer to justify rule over the colonized. Although by the turn of the 19th century the majority of Ainu were engaged in wage labor or trade with the Japanese, the passage of the 1899 Protection Act attempted to turn the Ainu into farmers. More precisely, the imperial project in Hokkaido was justified by the argument that the Ainu were not capable of settling the land and cultivating it; the Japanese as a more civilized and advanced race needed to take charge. Expropriation of land and the limitation of Ainu hunting and fishing rights all occurred simultaneously with the “nativization” of the Ainu.
Source: Japan focus
Authors: Katsuya Hirano, Gavin Walker
Language: English
Topic: Japanese History and Culture
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W4410183504