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Paper short abstract:

Which would be more appealing to Japanese viewers: a message that Ainu can and will be assimilated into society or one which stresses heterogeneity, focusing on exotic cultural differences? I will analyze several film depictions of the Ainu to argue postwar Japanese cinema paradoxically chose both!

Paper long abstract:

One question that has plagued the modern nation-state of Japan is how to define the boundaries of Japaneseness. Are the indigenous Ainu fully Japanese as well? If so, how can society and the state balance laudable egalitarian goals with a respectful attitude towards Ainu culture? The tension between desire to assimilate (and thereby, arguably, erase) the Ainu, and racial fear that the assimilation project might actually succeed, is at its most visible in Japanese cinema. How did filmmakers approach the delicate issue of the Ainu ‘Other’ in postwar cinema? Which tactics did they employ in representing Hokkaido’s indigenous inhabitants on screen?

In this paper, I will focus on comparative analysis of several of the highest-profile postwar narrative (fiction) films that purport to show the Ainu. A 1947 romance entitled Lila no hana wasureji (dir. Hara Kenkichi, starring Takamine Mieko and Fujita Susumu), is the trailblazing example. As the pioneering attempt to depict what at that time was Japan’s only indigenous Other, the filmmakers (in this film and in the various other cinematic efforts which followed) must come to terms with how visible they wish to make the ‘natives’ (since the main plotline is typically focused on ethnically Japanese characters). Such films, particularly in the early postwar period after the war stripped away all other vestiges of Empire, also had to wrestle with Hokkaido as the last colonial territory remaining to Japan, and the Ainu as—potentially—postwar Japan’s only colonial subjects.

Viewers will soon notice that these films fall into familiar Orientalist patterns, seeking to exaggerate “exotic” Ainu differences (be they sartorial, linguistic, or cultural). Yet the filmmakers, confusingly, also attempt to erase some of those very differences over the course of their films, as though to suggest that despite their outlandish ways, the Ainu can (and should?) be assimilated after all. Taken together, postwar Japanese cinema’s engagement with the Ainu people, and the paradoxical assimilationism it promotes, ultimately offers a complex and problematic legacy which warrants further study.