Lost Aryans? John Batchelor and the Colonization of the Ainu Language

Abstract

The idea that the Ainu minority in Japan is of Caucasian origin goes back to the seventeenth century and it continued to fascinate observers far into the twentieth century until recently, when the very notion of 'race' has come into question. In the late nineteenth century, the British Anglican missionary John Batchelor settled in Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, and spent the next sixty years working among the Ainu. Apart from his missionary activities and his social work to alleviate the poor living conditions of the Ainu, he also wrote prolifically on the Ainu culture and language, producing a grammar, a large Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary, and translating several biblical works into Ainu. Unfortunately, as he had received no linguistic training, his work was fraught with misconceptions. But, since he was the most well-known western scholar working with the Ainu, it was accepted in the west well into the twentieth century as the authoritative source on the Ainu language. This paper attempts to evaluate Batchelor's work in the light of recent western and Japanese studies of the Ainu language, and to provide an analysis of the underlying attitudes which determined his approach.