by Jasper Domanowski

In April 2019, the Japanese government passed the Act on Promoting Measures to Realize a Society in Which the Pride of the Ainu People is Respected. The law marked the first official policy that legally recognized the Ainu as Indigenous people and that sought to improve the condition of the Ainu nationwide. This was intended to be achieved through the promotion of Ainu culture to increase tourism, especially through the construction of the National Ainu Park Upopoy. The strategy of marketing a local craft to stimulate tourism to struggling rural areas of Japan has been used for many years in the name of rural revitalization (Reiher 2010). Therefore, by promoting Ainu culture and building Upopoy, rural areas across Hokkaido with traditional Ainu villages may see an increase in tourism, thus working to revitalize said areas, improve the economic conditions of the Ainu living there and bring more people in contact with Ainu culture. However, the law’s sole focus on cultural promotion was perceived as a performative gesture ahead of the 2020 Olympic games in Tokyo, to draw attention away from questions of legal rights for Ainu as legally recognized Indigenous people (Zaman et al. 2022: 10, Komai 2022: 158) Furthermore, the reliance on tourism to improve economic conditions has been an ongoing criticism for decades (Dubreuil 2007: 41). In this post, I will explore whether cultural promotion successfully leads to a more accepting society for Ainu and discuss why the cultural promotion policies fall short.

The Ainu are an Indigenous people native to northern parts of Japan, including Hokkaido, the north of the main island Honshu, and the Kuril and Sakhalin Islands. Due to the oppressive force of assimilation policies in the late 19^th and into the 20^th century, many Ainu today hide their heritage, which makes it difficult to estimate how many Ainu live across Japan today. This is due to the Former Natives Protection Act (FNPA) of 1899 effectively tying Ainu recognition to living in Ainu settlements in Hokkaido. The policy that replaced it, the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act of 1997, reinforced this belief of Ainu being a “regional issue”, as well as setting a narrow definition of what constitutes Ainu culture eligible for promotion. After the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was formally adopted in 2007, the Japanese government committed itself to drafting a new law for the Ainu. However, the 2019 Ainu Policy Promotion Act focused once more on culture and tourism above all else (Zaman et al. 2022: 10). Eleven of the 40 articles are concerned with the development and construction of the National Ainu Museum and Park Upopoy (Tsunemoto 2019). Notably, of the 660 million yen in grants tied to the APPA, 470 million yen were given to tourism and industrial promotion projects, while the promotion of understanding of Ainu culture and tradition, and the preservation of Ainu culture only received 20 million yen each.

The park Upopoy was planned to open alongside the Olympics, giving many the impression that the focus was more on tourism and presenting a favourable image to the world rather than celebrating Ainu culture. Interviewed prior to the opening, one Ainu worried Upopoy would become a theme park. If visitors were to see only art and performances, without being given context of Ainu history and oppression, “it would be like a zoo” (Asahi Shimbun 29.10.2019). The sanitized version of history presented at Upopoy and the complete lack of references to contemporary discrimination remain a point of criticism to this day. Kitahara Jirota of Hokkaido University argues in 2021: “Without necessary context, people just see something culturally interesting” (The Economist Asia 26.06.2021). According to its own website, the objective of the National Ainu Museum is to raise awareness of Ainu history and culture, which are supposed to be explored from an Ainu perspective (Upopoy 2019). Notably, the descriptions of Ainu culture and way of life focus heavily on the past, with no mention of contemporary Ainu lives, art or cultural developments in sight. This gives the impression that Ainu are separate from modern society. By analysing the language use, framing of the Ainu, and selective historical recounts on Upopoy’s website, one gets the impression that a purposeful effort is made to rewrite/reframe Ainu-Japanese history, while borrowing legitimacy by claiming to represent the Ainu’s perspective.

On the website, Ainu culture is repeatedly described as being “under threat” or “on the verge of extinction”, yet no mention of the reason for this – namely the assimilation policies of the Meiji era – is made. The comparison to the website of the previous Ainu Museum shows that the intention of Upopoy is not to present Ainu history from an Ainu perspective. The Ainu Museum Porotokotan was an Ainu-run museum at the same location, which closed in 2018 to make way for the National Ainu Museum at Upopoy (AMPK 2019a). Porotokotan’s webpage for Ainu history directly names the assimilation policies and talks about the “oppression and exploitation of the Ainu” during the colonisation of Hokkaido. Furthermore, it plainly states that “discrimination against the Ainu still remains today and has become a major social problem” (AMPK 2019b). Despite the claim that “the spirit of [Porotokotan] lives on in Upopoy and its core facility, the National Ainu Museum” (NAM 2019), Japan’s colonial history in Hokkaido is completely absent at Upopoy.

Rather than giving the Ainu a space to share their history and culture and allowing visitors to understand the influences that still shape Ainu culture today, Upopoy commodifies the Ainu to support “a national narrative of Japaneseness”, in which they are mere “relics of nature” to be preserved by the benevolent Japan (Zaman et al. 2022: 10). Upopoy works to legitimize a version of history that minimises or outright erases the harm done to the Ainu and thus absolves Japanese society of feelings of responsibility and the need for accountability. Visitors to Upopoy are able to partake in Ainu culture, enjoy the song and dance and marvel at the kotan, without needing to contend with the ugly history of colonisation and assimilation at the hands of the Japanese which still influences the ongoing struggles of modern Ainu. Cultural promotion can be – under the right circumstances – an important tool to foster understanding and raise awareness for Indigenous issues. However, as long as the Japanese government avoids acknowledging Japan’s history of colonisation of the Ainu and works to rectify the harm done, Ainu culture promotion policies will necessarily fall short.

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References

AMPK (Ainu Museum Poroto Kotan) (2019a), „Ainu Museum“, accessed via https://web.archive.org/web/20190924204840/http://www.ainu-museum.or.jp/en/study/eng15.html (Zugriff am 15.04.2026).

AMPK (Ainu Museum Poroto Kotan) (2019b), „The Ainu People“, accessed via https://web.archive.org/web/20190924204836/http://www.ainu-museum.or.jp/en/study/eng01.html (Zugriff am 15.04.2026).

Dubreuil, Chisato (Kitty) (2007), „The Ainu and Their Culture: A Critical Twenty-First Century Assessment“, in: The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 5 (11) S. 1-56.

Komai, Eléonore (2022), „The Ainu and Indigenous politics in Japan: negotiating agency, institutional stability, and change“, in: Journal of race, ethnicity, and politics, 7 (1), S. 141-164.

NAM (National Ainu Museum) (2019), „About The Museum“, https://nam.go.jp/en/about/ (Zugriff am 15.04.2026).

Reiher, Cornelia (2010), “Selling tradition in Japanese rural tourism,” in: Orientwissenschaftliche Hefte 28, S. 121–151.

The Asahi Shimbun (2019), „Japan builds ‘Ethnic Harmony’ tribute to indigenous Ainu“, 29.10.2019, accessed via https://web.archive.org/web/20240123121441/https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13059978 (Zugriff am 17.04.2026).

The Economist (2021), „Japan’s Ainu people have a new museum. Many feel it omits a lot“, 26.06.2021, https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/06/26/japans-ainu-people-have-a-new-museum-many-feel-it-omits-a-lot (Zugriff am 17.04.2026).

Tsunemoto, Teruki (2019), „Overview of the Ainu Policy Promotion Act of 2019“, in: Foreign Press Center Japan, S. 1-4.

Upopoy National Ainu Museum and Park (2019), „Facility Information – National Ainu Museum“, https://ainu-upopoy.jp/en/facility/museum/ (Zugriff am 15.04.2026).

Zaman, Mashiyat; Charbonneau, Leni; Maruyama, Hiroshi (2022), „Critiquing the Colonialist Origins of the New National Museum Upopoy“, in: FOCUS Asia-Pacific, HURIGHTS OSAKA 107, S. 15.

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Jasper Domanowski is a student in the BA program in Japanese Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.