Protection And Inheritance Of Ainu Culture

In the past, the Ainu, the Japanese aborigines, lived mainly in Hokkaido, Kuril Islands and south Karafuto. They had formed a traditional economic mode based on hunting, fishing and gathering, and created and developed their original language, culture and religion."Aynu", which means "human" or "human beings" in Ainu, is an antonym of "kamuy", which means "god". After the Yamato coming to Hokkaido, the aborigines began to name their nation "Ainu" in order to make a distinction between themselves and other nations.The Japanese government began the overall domination after the establishment of the Meiji government. In1869, the second year of the Meiji period, the Japanese government set up an exploitation office in Hokkaido, which symbolized its formal colonial rule over the Ainu. The government persuaded the aborigines to engage in agriculture through forbidding the traditional means of living, implemented the household register system that regarded the Ainu as the "Japanese residents", imposed the policy of assimilation, and prohibited the Ainu’s traditional customs and original language. As time passed by, the traditional Ainu culture was facing the risk of extinction. However, in the last two decades of the20th century, the Ainu’s national consciousness was greatly developed. Campaigns aiming at the protection and inheritance of the national language and traditional culture kept emerging; the representatives of the Ainu came onto the platform of the United Nations and continuously made their appeal to the government for the aborigines’rights. In1997, the Japanese government promulgated "Ainu Culture Resuscitation Act"; in2008, the congress passed "The Resolution of Acknowledging the Ainu as the Aborigines". Nowadays, the Ainu culture is being resuscitated and developed.The culture of each society consists of the mainstream culture that occupies the dominating position and the minority culture that belongs to the minority groups. When these two kinds of culture contact each other frequently, they will be mutual-influenced and mutual-absorbed, and generally speaking, the influence of the mainstream culture upon the minority is more profound. As a minority culture, the Ainu culture has experienced the process of independent formation and development, imposed assimilation, decay, and resuscitation. Through a dynamic view on this whole process, this research makes an effort to analyze the track and rule of the change and development of the minority culture under the impact of the mainstream culture. This research focuses on studying the efforts of the Ainu members and the role of the Japanese government during the process from decay to resuscitation, in order to summarize effective experience for our country to use for reference in the protection and inheritance of the minority culture. The innovation of this research lies in that it utilizes the anthropologic research method to make a detailed description and recording on the dynamic process of the Ainu culture from thriving, through decay, to resuscitation, and that it provides new materials for the research of the Ainu and our country’s foreign ethnography study by contributing a great amount of first-hand information obtained through field research.The dissertation includes three parts:the introduction, the main body, and the conclusion.The introduction mainly explains the origin and meaning of the research, the status quo of the relative research at home and abroad, and the theoretical structure and methodology of this research.The main body consists of four chapters. Starting from the forming process of the Ainu and its culture, the first chapter makes a detailed description on every aspect of the traditional Ainu culture, such as living, clothing, foods, housing, language and religion and elaborates the gradual decaying process of the Ainu culture under the control of Japanese government and the impact of the mainstream culture. Chapter Two and Chapter Three describe the gradual resuscitating process of the Ainu culture. The second chapter records the measures of cultural protection and inheritance taken mainly by the Ainu. This chapter describes in detail the specific endeavor made by the Ainu in order to protect their traditional national culture, which includes the protection and inheritance of the Ainu language, religious rites and traditional literature and arts, and the cultural inheritor training system. Meanwhile, Chapter Two also illustrates the Ainu’s active reasonable exploitation and utilization of their traditional cultural resource in combination with the development of the market economy and tourist economy. The third chapter deals with the methods and treasures taken by the Japanese government in order to protect and promote the traditional Ainu culture since the issuing of the "Ainu Culture Resuscitation Act". Chapter Four analyzes the characteristics of the Ainu cultural rebuilding and points out its inspiring function for the protection and inheritance of minority cultures of China.The conclusion part summarizes all the above parts and puts forward the viewpoint of this research.