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Paper short abstract

This presentation analyzes Ainu Puri (2020) through Lewallen’s notion of “becoming Ainu,” which conceives Ainu identity as an intentional, fluid process. The film demonstrates this framework by depicting how a father and a son negotiate heritage and modernity, enacting indigeneity through lived practice.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines Takeshi Fukunaga’s documentary Ainu Puri (2024) as a reconfiguration of Ainu Indigenous representation in contemporary cinema. Drawing on Ann-Elise Lewallen’s concept of Ainu-ness as “becoming” (2016), it argues that the film moves beyond earlier ethnographic representations that constructed Ainu identity as a fixed state of being. Historically, films about the Ainu have privileged externally visible features through which Ainu identity is made visually recognizable, including ceremonial attire, rituals, dance, hunting, material culture, and other culturally marked practices. By treating these features as evidence of “authentic” Ainu-ness, such representations locate Indigenous identity in what can be seen and documented, often marginalizing experiences that fall outside this visual framework. Ainu Puri, by contrast, shifts the representation of Indigeneity from visual markers toward embodied and relational subjectivity. The film portrays Ainu identity as a chosen and ongoing process shaped by intergenerational relationships, care, grief, syncretic spirituality, economic aspirations, uncertainty, and everyday negotiation. Its intimate focus on Shigeki Amanai, his wife Aika, their children Motoki and Yoshiki, and their wider community places Ainu life within domestic and emotional spaces rather than isolating culture as spectacle. Through family relationships, memories, and acts of transmission, the documentary reveals Ainu-ness as continually performed, negotiated, and rearticulated. In this sense, Ainu Puri makes visible Ainu-ness as “becoming”: a relational and agential process through which Indigenous identity is continually constituted within contemporary mainstream society.

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Paper short abstract

This study examines Ainu traditional ecological knowledge through archaeological plant remains that span over 1,000 years. The results presented speak to the ingenuity of the Ainu's subsistence system - a form of cultural heritage whose academic neglect is linked to the politics of colonization.

Paper long abstract

Despite the Ainu's long history of engagement with Hokkaido's rich forests, little is known about their traditional ecological knowledge pre-contact due to a lack of early ethnographic work on the topic. Many early depictions of the Ainu neglected the intricacies of traditional subsistence in favor of simplistic depictions as hunter-gatherers, serving Japan's territorial expansion.

In this setting, the research presented here attempts to shed light on the Ainu's plant TEK through an analysis of archaeological plant remains spanning over 1,000 years of subsistence data. Results indicate a progressive tendency towards woodland resource diversification - a practice that is often associated with risk-management in small-scale economies. This evidence is investigated in the historical context of Hokkaido's changing climate and the concurrent encroachment of the Japanese into the island in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Ainu's forest subsistence system forms a part of a larger body of TEK, a form of cultural heritage whose academic neglect is tied to the local political context, with telling implications for the present day.

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Paper short abstract

Numerous royal treasures of the kingdom of Lūchū (Ryūkyū) were looted or destroyed in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. In this presentation, I discuss four ugui royal portraits recovered in 2024, several of the treasures still missing, and the circumstances of their disappearance in 1945.

Paper long abstract

Numerous historical documents, paintings, lacquerware and porcelain items, textiles, musical instruments, ritual objects, and other priceless cultural artifacts went missing from Nakagusuku udun, the mansion of the former royal family of the Kingdom of Luchu (Ryukyu), in the aftermath of the Battle of Okinawa, a battle which saw the devastation of Okinawa Island and the deaths of perhaps as much as one-third of the island’s civilian population. While some were tragically destroyed in the battle, many of the missing royal treasures are believed to have survived only to be looted afterwards.

Among those lost were roughly twenty posthumous official portraits of the kings of Luchu, known as ugui. For decades, not a single ugui was known to survive; textual descriptions and black & white prewar photographs were all that was known to survive of them. In 2024, however, four of the missing ugui were recovered and returned to Okinawa. In this presentation, I discuss the recovered portraits, a number of treasures still yet to be recovered, and the circumstances of their disappearance in 1945.

The recovery of these paintings, along with sixteen other treasures from Nakagusuku udun, provides an invaluable opportunity for scholars to gain new insights into historical Luchu Kingdom court culture and court painting. It is also a profound symbolic and emotional event for many in the Okinawan community, the recovery of pieces of a past, a cultural heritage, that has been fragmented, of which so much has been lost. Alongside rebuilt and restored structures such as Sui gusuku (Shuri castle) and revived arts traditions, these original historical objects, made centuries ago, lost for decades, and now recovered, are powerful resources for Okinawan efforts to recover knowledge and pride in their history and cultural heritage, and to present that history and culture to the world.