Japan’s Ainu Minority in Tokyo: Diasporic Indigeneity and Urban Politics

Abstract

It was a puncture. A bad one. I took my machine to the bicycle shop: a small place off the main road in Kichijoji, west Tokyo, squeezed between a Tully’s coffee shop and a second-hand clothing store with Louis Vuitton bags in the window. The tyre had blown. I sat warming myself by the stove, ready for a long wait, complementing the repairman on his picture on the wall—a framed photograph of a man wearing a fancy robe. He laughed. The costume was yellowy brown. Its typical openings and edges were patterned purple and black—to protect the wearer from evil gods from slipping into the garment though openings. It was an attush of typical elm fibre with cotton appliqué. The classic Ainu robe. Beautiful. We talked. This Ainu–Japanese couple had come from Obihiro, Hokkaido, through various diversions—Sendai and Ibaraki—to Kichijoji and Tokyo in the 1970s. The man was vaguely connected with Ainu things, an occasional event, their eldest son was interested in learning Ainu. His boys were interested in learning how to take free kicks like Keisuke Honda. And so it goes. Urban Ainu with a picture and a bicycle shop—a durable transposable habitus in which representations and memory and ancestry are adapted to a particular place and an unexpected outcome—a downtown shop in Tokyo. Mark Watson’s fine book on Ainu living in Tokyo is an exploration of just my repairman’s experience: the Ainu diaspora, collective struggle and cultural transmission.