The limits to citizenship in Japan: multiculturalism, indigenous rights and the Ainu

Abstract

The struggle of the indigenous Ainu for equal participation in the political, social and economic life of Japan is a direct challenge to widely held notions of Japan as ethnically homogeneous. The conflation of racialized ethnicity with citizenship, and the popular postwar notion of a ‘unique’ Japan with a mono-ethnic citizenry, have served to marginalize and disempower the Ainu. The state has worked to contain the ‘Ainu problem’ by enacting the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act (CPA) in 1997, the first ‘multicultural’ legislation in Japan. But given the exclusive focus on cultural rights and the continued negative attitude of the government when it comes to providing any other kind of rights or guarantees to overcome Ainu exclusion, the CPA has been a mixed blessing. Ainu culture has indeed been protected and supported, but not the Ainu people as a distinct ethnic group, let alone as an indigenous people. Special rights for the Ainu, to provide additional resources or support to enable them to fully enjoy the human and democratic rights they should possess as citizens, have not been recognized, and the concept of ‘indigenous rights’ has been explicitly rejected by the state.