Ainu Cultural Representation: Exposing The Visual Narrative. Preliminary Findings

The Indigenous Ainu community of Hokkaido, Japan, are no strangers to tourism. Since the Meiji Restoration (1868) and the annexation of Hokkaido (1869), colonialism and tourism have developed hand-in-hand, sometime involving, but often objectifying their community. This led to a divide among Ainu, those who embraced tourism and saw it as a new method of earning income, but who were derogatorily called misemono Ainu (spectacle Ainu), by those of the opposing view. The National Ainu Museum, opened in 2020, has faced similar criticism over its level of representation and control by the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism, with some Ainu choosing to work with the museum, and others heavily criticising its existence – showing the ongoing nature of this debate. This paper presents preliminary results of two phases of fieldwork, conducted in 2023 and 2024, and reviews visual data in the form of observational photographs, as well as visual representations of the community transmitted through social media site Instagram. This paper argues that both tourism and research are still viewed with suspicion, another pattern of coloniality through which Ainu voices are silenced. The Ainu are still placed in a ‘representational cage of tradition’ that limits public perception and denies Ainu modernity. However, it will discuss that perhaps conversely, the items collected in the context of Ainu-owned and managed museums, may in fact serve, as per Heersmink (2023), as ‘cognitive-affective embodied artifacts’ that aid Ainu collective remembering and cultural preservation