Who are the Ainu and why do Japan need them?

 In the Japanese city of Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido on September 14, a symposium on the development of tourism and culture of indigenous peoples will be held.

The event is noble only at first glance. In fact, the Japanese government plans to use the problem of the almost exterminated by the Japanese Ainu people, who once inhabited the Japanese islands from Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands and Hokkaido in the north to the southern Ryukyu archipelago, as an instrument of territorial claims.

The exercise is surprising to many, given the evidence of centuries of discrimination, oppression and extermination of aboriginal peoples in the past. Now the Ainu on the Japanese islands number about 16 thousand people. Japan has not yet recognized the long-term genocide of the Ainu, but at the island conference they are ready to discuss the culture of this people. It is noteworthy that the Japanese were helped to exterminate the Ainu by consultants from the U.S., who understand how to "assimilate" the Indians.

The Japanese fought with the Ainu for a long time and pushed them to the north, but they were able to defeat them only in the 18th century after the invention of artillery. In 1777 about 1500 Ainu on the islands of Iturup, Kunashir and Hokkaido accepted Russian citizenship. On the territory of modern Japan, the Ainu at that time found themselves in the position of slaves. They were herded into reservations where they died of disease and starvation.

For the first time Japanese made claims to Russia about Sakhalin and Kuril Islands in 1845. After 1855, Sakhalin became a joint possession of Russia and Japan. The islands of Kunashir, Iturup and Hamobai were given to the latter. After the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-1905, the southern part of Sakhalin was also ceded to Japan. This time they decided not to exterminate the Ainu, but to assimilate them, giving them Japanese names and forbidding them to speak their native language and conduct religious rituals. On Sakhalin, the Japanese exterminated the Ainu by forbidding them to use nets and blocking the mouths of rivers to keep fish out of the territories where the people lived.

Journalist Isabella Jude writes that until the mid-20th century, Japanese anthropologists and authorities tried hard to conceal the existence of the Ainu. The Ainu in turn struggled to be recognized.

"They were an inconvenient culture at a time when the government was creating a national myth of a homogeneous nation. In Hokkaido, the Japanese government pursued a policy of assimilation by hiring American consultants who had experience in assimilating Indians. The government forced the Ainu to attend Japanese schools and changed their names, took their lands, and radically changed their way of life by forcing them into wage labor," Jude writes.

In the 1980s, the Japanese government took Ainu lands along the Saru River to build dams. In the 1990s, artist and nationalist Yoshinori Kobayashi and other adherents of a unified nation challenged the data that the Ainu were the original population of Japan, arguing that the only indigenous people were Japanese.

It is also interesting that the Ainu appear in Tokyo's claims to the Kuril Islands, where the "indigenous population of Japan", i.e. the Ainu, live. By the way, the Ainu were recognized as the indigenous people of Japan only in 2008, before which their existence was denied by the Japanese government. At that time 75 thousand Ainu were registered in the country. Most of these people actually consider themselves Japanese, having a vague notion of their native language and culture.

The Japanese authorities periodically bring up the Ainu in the Kurils, stating their territorial claims, but forget to bring the legislation on the Ainu to UN requirements and grant them fishing rights without restrictions.

"The ardent preachers of this policy in Japan should not forget that their active exploitation of the issue of "northern territories", including with an emphasis on the "Japanese belonging of the Ainu population" may cause Russia's "issue of southern territories". After all, the aboriginal population of the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin and Japan (Hokkaido and Ryukyu) are not the Japanese, but the Ainu, who appeared in the Far East more than 12 thousand years ago. This is written in the book "The History of Japan from Ancient Times to 1868" by the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences," says political scientist Valery Kulikov.

Isabella Jude writes that the Japanese government has still not officially apologized to the Ainu for the genocide and assimilation, has not recognized Hokkaido as the traditional territory of the Ainu. From 2006 to 2013, the number of Ainu people in Japan dropped from nearly 24,000 to 16,000. Compared to ethnic Japanese, the Ainu have poorer education, fewer job opportunities, and lower incomes.

Given that the Ainu continue to be oppressed to this day, it is surprising that Japan is counting on the Ainu community to help revise the outcome of World War II. Aboriginal peoples were exploited for that very purpose, not to restore historical justice for the years of colonization and oppression. Against this background, Tokyo's claims to the southern Kurils are particularly outrageous. Having once taken land from the Ainu people and practically exterminated them, Japan now covers itself with concern for the aboriginal peoples. First, Tokyo needs to restore the rights of the Ainu, rather than dreaming about the return of territories that rightfully belong to Russia according to the results of World War II.