Short Abstract

Challenging scholarship that dates Western ideas of Ainu “whiteness” to the 1500s, this paper argues that the classification of the Ainu as racially akin to Europeans is a modern social construction no older than the Meiji Restoration, originating with American naturalist Albert Bickmore.

Long Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a large number of Western scientists became preoccupied with the Ainu, whom they viewed as an anthropological anomaly. The Ainu were widely viewed as “white,” “Caucasian,” or “Aryan,” but also as “primitive,” especially in comparison with the “non-white” Japanese who were colonizing their homeland. What did it mean that a “white” people was located in Northeast Asia and seemingly losing out to a “non-white” people in a Darwinian struggle for survival? In my forthcoming book, I argue that the discussion surrounding this “anomaly” was significant not only for Western views of Japan but for Western race science and views of “whiteness” overall.

This paper challenges existing scholarship that dates Western notions of Ainu “whiteness” to the sixteenth century. Instead of forming a centuries-long racial discourse based on an objective “reality” of Ainu physical appearance, I argue that the idea of Ainu “whiteness” in a modern racial sense is a social construction that is no older than the Meiji Restoration. I trace the origin of the “Aryan” or “Caucasian” Ainu discourse to American naturalist Albert Bickmore (18391914), who visited Hokkaido and Sakhalin in 1867 and published scientific articles on the Ainu in 1867 and 1868. Despite his fame as the founding father of the American Museum of Natural History, Bickmore’s writings on the Ainu have been ignored in contemporary scholarship.

This paper contextualizes Bickmore’s racialization of the Ainu with the theories of Orientalist Friedrich Max Müller, and explores their influence on later research. While “Aryan” was originally popularized by Max Müller as a linguistic term intended to describe Indo-European peoples, it gradually morphed into a more specific, racialized physiognomic term. Bickmore’s writings illustrate this shift, theorizing that the Ainu migrated from a proto-Aryan homeland in Central Asia as Max Müller had proposed for other groups, but arguing for their “Aryanness” based on their physical appearance, rather than their language. Though having only a marginal influence on later Japanese anthropology, which was less interested in “whiteness,” these ideas would shape Western perceptions of Japan for generations.