Broad nosed faces

My Grandfather and I in Castro Valley, California, 1996

Photo Credit: Veija Kusama

“広い鼻” (hiroi hana) he would tell me, tapping the slope of my nose with the calloused pad of his forefinger.

“アイヌ” (Ainu).

His tone was always reticent. Rooted in the belly of history, in the timbre of family and tradition. Laced with something bitter, a tinge darker. Not quite manifested as shame, never quite asserted as pride. I did not know what Ainu was. What it meant for me and my broad nose. Nor did I ask. Somehow, I knew not to.

Ainu Chieftan

Photo Credit: Midnight Believer

A human being

The name Ainu literally translates to ‘a human being’, traditionally contrasted with kamuy, or ‘divine beings'. Historically residing primarily in the Hokkaidō, Sakhalin, and Kuril Islands, the Ainu are believed to be descendants of the ancient Jōmon culture, which dates back over 10,000 years. Beginning in the 9th Century, Ainu communities began to fall to Japanese subjugation and by the 18th Century they were the target of concerted forced assimilation policies.

Throughout the Meiji Restoration of the 19th Century, Emperor Mutsuhito forced the Ainu peoples off their land, disrupting their relationships with their spiritual heartlands, and terminating their traditional ways of life. As Bri Lambright of Ursinus University notes:

"Ainu land was stolen, and small plots were returned with the express purpose of farming. With traditional hunting practices banned in order to allow Japanese manufacturers to capitalize on exporting deer meat and hides to the mainland, the Ainu were left with little option but to adhere to the government’s plans, lest they face starvation and burial beneath the waves of Japanese settlers who could readily take the community’s place."

Faced with an impossible choice, the Ainu were blamed for the predicament in which they found themselves, as evidenced by letters exchanged between the Nemuro and Naimushō Prefectures dated November of 1882:

“They have brought this difficulty upon themselves since they lack the spirit of activity and progress. In their society in the past there was nothing they needed to record through writing, no stimulus to develop their knowledge through learning; when thirsty they drank, when hungry they ate. They are a purely primitive people.”

Google Translation Screenshot - Ainu

Barbarian, savage, vandal

As the hallowed halls of Edo were devising the extinction of the living, a rising consortium of scientists began to covet the currency of the dead. As Noah Oskaw writes in his piece for Unseen Japan:

"The impetus for the veritable grave plundering of Ainu bones was ostensibly scientific: the desire by Japanese researchers to learn more about the physical and, later, genetic make-up of the indigenous ethnic minorities native to Japan’s northern borders… In both 1864 and 1865, mere years before the fall of the Tokugawa dynasty, the British consul in Hakodate led a group of foreigners interested in uncovering the mystery of the Ainu’s 'Caucasian' features to secretly raid Ainu gravesites… Most infamous of the grave robbers was Hokkaido University Professor Kodama Sakuzaemon, who led various state-sanctioned raids into local boneyards throughout the 1920s to 1970s – all against Ainu protests - sometimes police were called in to help hold off Ainu from physically preventing the unearthing of their ancestors."

Final resting places rendered temporary. Ancestors dragged to lay upon steel tables. Loved ones etched by the scalpels of foreign hands. For nearly one hundred years, the people of Ainu waited.

Interior of an Ainu Home in Yezo, 1906

Photo Credit: Snapshots of the Past

Homecoming

In 2012, a cohort of Ainu elders banded together to achieve the return of their ancestors. Banding together under the slogan, ‘Return the Ainu Remains to the Soil of the Ainu Kotan’, they brought suit against Hokkaidō University demanding repatriation. Mounting political pressures, further exacerbated by Japan’s recent ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which includes a provision requiring governments to work for the return of indigenous people's remains, resulted in a historic 2016 settlement. The case was the first legal domino of its kind, and a chain reaction of “small but significant” repatriations have followed.

In July of 2007 the Berliner Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie returned a skull stolen from an Ainu cemetery in Sapporo by a German tourist in 1879. In May of 2023, a set of four skulls were returned from Melbourne, following their 1911 exploitation by a pair of anthropological pen-pals: a prewar exchange by which the National Museum of Australia sent Aboriginal skeletal remains to the University of Tokyo in return for Ainu skeletal material. And next month, officials from the Japanese government will travel to Britain to receive the remains of five Ainu previously housed at the National History Museum in London and the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum.

Ainu Woman Playing the Mukkuri

Photo Credit: Midnight Believer

Locating the lost 

While the ten sets of returned remains mark a promising trend, the number of stolen Ainu is estimated to be in the thousands, and for a culture on the brink of extinction, preservation has begun to equate survival. Today, only a few isolated pockets of Ainu people remain scattered across rural Hokkaido, with most of the estimated 20,000 Ainu assimilating into cities and towns around the island. After decades of government proscription, the Hokkaido Ainu language is likely extinct, as there remain no known native speakers, and many individuals of Ainu descent have no knowledge of their ancestry or tradition. To state it quite starkly, the Ainu are disappearing.

My Grandfather and I in Hakodate, Hokkaido, 2025

Photo Credit: Veija Kusama

Good for breathing 

My grandfather is now 82 and his tone regarding our Ainu heritage has shifted in recent years. What was once coated in a glaze of indignity has come to be considered with a degree of quiet contentment. Now, when he regards the nose his genes placed upon my face, he adds a simple but emblematic qualifier. “広い鼻” (broad nose), “呼吸に良い” (good for breathing). Perhaps, the repatriation movement is not only about reclaiming the skulls of our ancestors, but rather about reclaiming the faces they gave us.