CHAPTER SEVEN Other Comparisons

ENTANGLED WITH SALMON

Archeological remains indicate that people have inhabited the island that the Japanese government now calls Hokkaido—and interacted with its salmon—for at least twenty thousand years (Ono 1999, 32).⁵ According to the middens they left behind, most early island inhabitants appear to have eaten at least an occasional salmon, but until the most recent millennia, the inhabitants of this island do not seem to have been salmon-centric. While archeological evidence is always problematic and partial, current research indicates that they hunted large numbers of marine mammals, ate quite a few deer, and farmed barnyard millet and wheat raised from seeds they acquired through trade with Honshu (Yamaura and Ushiro 1999, 45). Similarly, archeological finds indicate that although some of their village sites were located near salmon rivers, many of their communities were located in upland areas away from major salmon spawning grounds (Segawa 2005, 2007). For early inhabitants, salmon seem to have been one species among many—important to be sure, but not indispensable.

But about nine hundred years ago, something seems to have shifted. Villages located on non-salmon-bearing streams seem to have been abruptly abandoned. At the same time, the number of dwellings located near salmon spawning grounds appears to have dramatically increased (Segawa 2007). Suddenly, people could not seem to live without being near salmon. What had changed? Around 1200, the island’s peoples established new economic ties with Honshu that transformed their relationships with both salmon and trade goods. Prior to this time, they were clearly involved in significant trade relationships that linked them to the Japanese archipelago, Kamchatka, and mainland Asia. By the tenth century, the island’s peoples had already obtained seeds, swords, metal products, and glass (Yamaura and Ushiro 1999, 45). The volume and regularity of such trade, however, seems to have been limited, with imported goods serving as supplements to, rather than replacements for, locally made products (43). Around 1200, at the same time that villages relocated to salmon streams, the number and variety of imported goods—particularly from Honshu—skyrocketed. The influx of goods likely sparked substantial transformations across the island. People appear to have stopped making ceramics as they switched to using imported vessels (45) and to have developed new ritual forms in which Japanese-produced rice and ornate lacquer vessels played central roles (Walker 2001, 112–17).

What were the island’s peoples exporting in exchange for all of these new goods? Largely salmon. The island’s Ainu peoples found that dried salmon, long a valuable winter food source, were also popular with wajin (a term for ethnic Japanese).⁶ Inexpensive salmon was a popular protein-rich foodstuff among farmers and other lower-ranking people in northeastern Japan. As Ainu became more entangled in these new economic connections, their relationships with salmon seem to have intensified. They began catching and preserving greater numbers of fish, developing new fishing techniques in the process. They also began to harvest salmon more intensively in river reaches navigable by boat so that they could easily ship the dried fish to distant markets. As salmon became a valued trade good, they also came to take on a larger role in everyday life. Ainu peoples began to eat more salmon themselves, hanging them to dry in the rafters of their houses. They used salmon skin as fabric for making boots, shirts, and children’s toys. In short, Ainu peoples became increasingly salmon-centric.⁷

With dried salmon as one of their key products, Ainu peoples extended their already expansive trade networks. Written records from Tosaminato, an important port city along Honshu’s Sea of Japan coast, indicate that between 1185 and 1573, Ainu arrived there in their own boats to trade kelp, dried salmon, and sea otter pelts (Kikuchi 1999, 77). But Ainu peoples’ trade routes did not link them only to Japan; their trade networks stretched across the Okhotsk Sea and deep into continental Asia. When Japan was allegedly “closed” to the world during the Tokugawa period, Ainu were important transnational brokers who dealt in sea otter pelts from the Kurils, eagle feathers from Kamchatka, and fabrics from China (Segawa 2007). The people and landscapes that emerged from such exchanges were highly cosmopolitan; Ainu engaged with Aleuts, Indigenous Kamchatkans, Russians, and Mongolians. Furthermore, prior to wajin colonization, Ainu were already farming crops that originated in the Western hemisphere, including potatoes and two types of American squash (Kohara 1999, 204–5).

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, challenges began to mount for Ainu. In 1604, the Tokugawa shogunate granted one of its feudal domains, the Matsumae han, a charter that gave them exclusive rights to trade with the Ainu (Siddle 1999, 69). The Matsumae domain invited traders from Honshu to set up offices at the southern tip of Hokkaido and work as their agents, bringing profits to the feudal domain’s coffers. Matsumae traders took advantage of their monopoly—backed up by substantial military might—to exploit Ainu peoples. First they blocked Ainu people from traveling to Honshu to trade on their own terms. According to one scholar, “After 1644, Ainu boats were no longer to be seen in Tohoku [northern Honshu] ports, an indication of the success of Matsumae attempts to monopolize trade” (Siddle 1999, 69). Matsumae traders were highly exploitative; seeking to maximize their profits, they significantly reduced the amount of rice that they paid Ainu for dried salmon. Ainu peoples protested the unfavorable rates of exchange, eventually waging a war against the Matsumae domain in 1669. For Ainu, the goal of this conflict (called Shakushain’s War) was not to entirely sever relations with wajin but to end the Matsumae domain’s monopoly and return to more just trade relations (Howell 1999, 97). The Ainu were militarily defeated, and afterward, they became subject to progressively more exploitive Japanese demands.⁸

In the early eighteenth century, the Matsumae domain began subcontracting trading posts, located along the coast of Hokkaido, directly to Honshu traders.⁹ Although the Matsumae continued some trading with Ainu peoples, these posts also developed a system called basho ukeoi, where wajin subcontractors brought in their own boats and nets, repositioning Ainu as laborers, not trading partners. The wajin traders cornered Ainu into this direct-labor system through violence and threats of violence. Sometimes, ethnic Japanese traders relocated entire Ainu villages to camps next to trading posts. At other times, they rounded up Ainu men and shipped them to distant parts of Hokkaido to labor in the fisheries there (Walker 1999, 103). In 1858, a Japanese official noted that “of forty-one Japanese fisheries supervisors in Kushiro, thirty-six had taken Ainu women as ‘concubines’ after sending their husbands to work at the neighboring Akkeshi fishery” (103). While many men were forced to labor in Japanese salmon fisheries, women, children, and the elderly struggled to catch and preserve enough salmon for subsistence use and trade. Furthermore, intensified interactions with the fishing posts brought Ainu people into contact with new diseases, including smallpox and syphilis, that further affected their communities. Recurring epidemics were documented from the seventeenth century onward (Walker 2001, 181). In 1807, shogunal officials recorded 26,256 Hokkaido Ainu; forty-seven years later, they tallied 17,810. Regional-level population estimates point toward even sharper declines and devastating effects (182).

The introduction of ethnic Japanese salmon harvesting also impacted the fish. Ainu peoples typically harvested the majority of their salmon at or near the fishes’ spawning sites, after they had laid their eggs and released their milt. Because most of these salmon had already reproduced and were on the verge of death, one could harvest a large number of such fish without endangering future generations of salmon. In addition, Ainu people chose these fish because post-spawning salmon made for longer-lasting dried salmon. Because salmon consume most of their fat reserves as they produce gonads, migrate upstream, and dig their spawning nests, post-spawning salmon are exceptionally lean. Salmon caught in the ocean had such a high fat content that they could not be effectively dried; they would spoil too quickly. Post-spawning salmon, however, had nonoily flesh that could be easily dried and that could last more than a year without becoming rancid. The duration that the salmon remained edible mattered, as Ainu people could then trade these long-lasting fish in the spring following their harvest, a time when ocean waters were much calmer and allowed for safer boat travel.¹⁰ Ethnic Japanese, however, harvested salmon in a different way. They typically caught salmon in bays or at river mouths, long before the fish reached their spawning grounds. The salmon not only did not have a chance to reproduce before capture; they also had a very high fat content. Their oiliness required a different kind of processing, one that involved large quantities of salt. Ethnic Japanese transported salt from Honshu to their remote Matsumae trading posts to sustain their salmon industry.¹¹

Ainu people were forced into a corner; they had fewer salmon at their upriver fishing sites, as more fish were harvested at river mouths by the Japanese, and they had fewer people to harvest them, as more of their men were forced to labor at Japanese fishing stations, yet they still needed trade goods beyond the minimal rice that Ainu men received in exchange for their work. Furthermore, Honshu residents tended to prefer wajin-style salted salmon to Ainu-style dried ones. Regardless of processing method, prior to the twentieth century, Ainu Mosir’s salmon were a staple protein source for poor Tohoku farmers and lower-class urban residents rather than a “fish of kings.”¹² By the time they reached markets, salmon from Ainu Mosir were as hard as rocks, so tough that they could not be cut with a knife. To eat the salmon, one had to first soak it in water or broth. While such problems ran across all processing methods, ethnic Japanese style salted salmon was a bit softer and thus considered a bit higher quality. Ainu salmon producers, however, did not have access to the salt resources needed to produce that form of preserved salmon. Unable to compete with the salted fish, they were forced to sell their unsalted dried and smoked fish for prices lower than those fetched by salted ones. These ethnic Japanese forms of salmon processing also impaired the salmon reproduction, as their mode of producing fattier salted fish shifted the harvest to pre-spawning fish. Salmon had thrived within Ainu worlds, where people caught them largely after they had laid their eggs, but it was difficult for them to do so within ethnic Japanese ones.

CAUGHT UP IN COMPARISONS

Within the basho ukeoi system, Japanese traders and merchants sought to enroll Ainu in unequal economic relations, but they did not engage in projects that explicitly aimed to craft Ainu identities.¹³ Their goal was to produce profit, not citizens or state territory. After the formation of the Meiji state, however, the goals of ethnic Japanese engagements with the Ainu and Ainu Mosir shifted from commercial exploitation to governance. With Western imperial nation-states as their model, the central Japanese government wanted the island to be more than a place within a loose Japanese sphere of economic influence; they wanted it to be specifically Japanese territory, to lie within the body of the nation. With this new project, the Japanese state was no longer content to exploit Ainu people; they now wanted to make them into national subjects. Beginning in 1869, the central Japanese government began its campaign to make the island “Japanese” by aggressively promoting both ethnic Japanese settlement of Ainu Mosir and Ainu assimilation.¹⁴

Desires for resource exploitation did not require such changes. The basho ukeoi system did a brutally outstanding job of extracting salmon (as well as herring) from the island’s waters.¹⁵ Because Ainu laborers were able to partially feed themselves through gathering, hunting, and fishing, ethnic Japanese could compensate Ainu at a level below what was necessary to sustain them as laborers. In contrast, the Meiji state was more concerned about forceful claims to territorial sovereignty, fearing that if they did not assert rule over Ainu Mosir, Russia soon would. To bring Ainu Mosir into the fold of the Japanese nation, they sought to make it undeniably Japanese.

At the same time that the Japanese government promoted ethnic Japanese migration to Hokkaido, they also sought to slot Ainu people into their projects of nation-making. The Japanese government wanted the Ainu to become Japanese state subjects, but in a way that positioned them as marginal and lesser than ethnic Japanese. While the Japanese government wanted to make the Ainu “Japanese” so that they did not become Russian, they also positioned Ainu as second-class citizens to justify the colonization of Ainu land. Historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki describes how such paradoxical goals shaped citizenship in Japan’s colonies: “The ruling state’s urge to exalt and spread the values of its own ‘civilization’ contended with its desire to maintain the differences that justified unequal access to power” (1998a, 161). While the government sought to assimilate the Ainu, they actively pursued measures, including special land policies and financial controls, that ensured that the Ainu were “assimilated” as relatively powerless, impoverished citizens.

Efforts to remake Ainu identities became a clear state project, one that the Japanese government enacted through countless comparisons. Immediately after annexing Hokkaido, the Japanese government banned the basho ukeoi system and “freed” the Ainu from forced labor. They then turned to the American West as they considered how to fashion the Ainu into citizens. In dealing with the so-called Ainu problem, Hokkaido colonial officials drew on a particular strain of US Indian policy—that which stressed assimilation over reservations. As noted in chapter 2, they solicited the opinions of Horace Capron, one of the American advisors to the Kaitakushi, who had previously served as a US government Indian agent in Texas (Medak-Saltzman 2008, 97). Capron was an enthusiastic supporter of US efforts to convert Indians into farmers; he was also a proponent of the 1877 Dawes Act, which broke communal Indian lands into individual allotments for native families (freeing up “excess” lands for white settlers) (102, 104). In building their own policies, Hokkaido officials drew on Capron’s opinions as well as on US institutional forms. Japanese leaders, such as Nitobe Inazō (an instructor at the Sapporo Agricultural College and a government official), was familiar with the native policies of New Zealand and other countries but seemed particularly inspired by the Dawes Act and comparisons with US Indian policies, personally translating into Japanese an American’s 1894 speech about the act (Harrison 2009, 99).¹⁶

But there were also other comparisons at play. Japanese government officials were also comparing the Ainu with themselves. In the bizarre worlds where the status of “colonizer” marks a nation as “civilized,” Japanese officials sought to prove that they were building a modern nation by constructing the Ainu as their inverse—as people to be colonized. Through brute force, unjust policies, and narratives of Ainu “primitiveness,” the Japanese state attempted to convert the Ainu—a prosperous and worldly trade society—into a “dying” culture in “need” of colonial uplift. Erasing histories of violence, the Japanese government turned Ainu assimilation policies into an imperative to uplift poor primitives, helping them to achieve a more civilized form. Although the primitive/civilized dichotomy is common across state-making endeavors, the Japanese state had its own civilizational ideals. In the Meiji period, notions of Japanese-ness were tied to a very specific multispecies formation: rice paddy agriculture. As anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (1993) has described, ethnic Japanese have consistently used rice to negotiate boundaries between self and other. Claiming “rice as our food” and “rice paddies as our land,” ethnic Japanese have defined themselves as fundamentally “agrarian” (regardless of the actual occupations of most Japanese) (4). Within this logic, making a landscape Japanese has meant the “transformation of wilderness into a land filled with succulent heads of rice. In short, rice paddies created ‘Japanese land’ ”(132). From an ethnic Japanese state perspective, then, the ideal way to make the Ainu “Japanese” would have been to turn them into rice farmers. However, until the development of cold-resistant rice strains in the 1930s, rice cultivation was difficult in Hokkaido (Irish 2009, 220). In the face of long, frigid winters, the Hokkaido government decided to try to convert Ainu people into farmers, but with wheat, corn, sugar beets, and beans as substitutes for rice.

Ethnic Japanese traders had already secured access to Ainu fisheries, but in order to force Ainu into farming, they sought to outright prohibit their ability to fish. As long as they possibly could, Ainu people sought to maintain their own ways of life, preferring salmon fishing, hunting, foraging, and farming on their own terms to the agricultural lots assigned by the Meiji government. In the late nineteenth century, the Japanese government recognized that as long as the Ainu had continued access to salmon and other resources, they were not likely to accede to state plans. As a result, the Hokkaido Colonization Commission sought to eliminate Ainu access to and relationships with salmon. In 1877, the commission established a hatchery beside an Ainu village on the Chitose River at the same time that it banned fishing in that river basin (Kosaka 2018, 71). While Sapporo-based officials raised concerns about depriving Ainu people of salmon, nineteenth-century government officials in Tokyo insisted that plans to combine hatcheries and fishing bans go forward, replying to the Sapporo office:

We expect artificial breeding will bring about economic benefit in the future. When you take total gains and losses into account, the damage to the minority can be ignored. You should not adhere to residents’ welfare. They may be driven to be farmers. (Yamada 2011, 168, as translated in Kosaka 2018, 71)

In 1879, the Colonization Commission banned salmon fishing in more of Hokkaido’s rivers, claiming that such an act was necessary to protect the island’s salmon populations from overharvest (Aoyama 2012, 119). The ban, however, was a barely veiled attempt to eliminate Ainu lifeways, and it did nothing to conserve fish. Because Japanese commercial fishermen harvested salmon in the ocean and in the mouths of rivers, rather than in the rivers themselves, the new freshwater salmon fishing ban had no effect on their activities. The Japanese fishermen continued to harvest huge numbers of salmon with abandon, while all Ainu fishing was rendered illegal. Ainu people had no access to the capital necessary for large coastal fisheries operations, and they were completely dependent on upriver fisheries, where they could harvest easy-to-preserve low-oil fish. The Japanese claim that river-harvest bans were necessary to preserve salmon spawning was a ruse; because Ainu people typically harvested salmon after they spawned, their fishing activities had minimal impacts on salmon populations. In reality, the intent of such laws was to force Ainu people to stay on government-assigned plots and to participate in assimilation programs.

Without access to salmon, the Japanese government realized, Ainu people could not be Ainu. In his memoir, Our Land Was Once Forest, prominent Ainu activist Kayano Shigeru (1926–2006) wrote that the “law banning salmon fishing was as good as telling the Ainu, who had always lived on salmon, to die. For our people, this was an evil law akin to striking to death a parent bird carrying food to its unfledged babies” (Kayano 1994, 58–59). After the ban, Ainu people tried to continue salmon fishing, but they became “poachers” in their own rivers. The Japanese government began to crack down on Ainu salmon fishermen, arresting them and putting them in jail. Ainu people who tried to remain Ainu—who tried to feed their families with salmon—became “criminals” (57–61).¹⁷

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the Japanese government also used hatcheries to further disassociate salmon from the rivers and Ainu communities. The Meiji era government’s campaign to move salmon spawning out of rivers and into hatcheries radically remade Hokkaido’s salmon and watersheds, modified salmon genetic population structures, and altered regional ecologies by removing the nutrient inputs that salmon carcasses provide. But moving salmon into hatcheries also aided policies aimed at assimilating Ainu people. Hatcheries made enforcement of river fishing bans easy; they virtually eliminated salmon from Hokkaido’s rivers. Hatcheries used weirs to block upstream salmon migrations, capturing brood stock for their programs near the mouth of rivers. With the advent of hatcheries, Hokkaido’s Japanese commercial fishermen no longer needed rivers and their salmon spawning grounds to fill their nets. Ainu people could do little but watch the numbers of salmon spawning in Hokkaido’s rivers plummet as more and more waterways were used for hatchery production, blocked by dams, or degraded by channelization and pollution.

These changes not only damaged Hokkaido’s environment; they also fractured the multispecies relationships at the core of Ainu worlds. For example, Blakiston’s fish owls (Bubo blakistoni) are gods who guard Ainu villages, depend on healthy river habitats, and feed on salmon carcasses. Although they once ranged across Ainu Mosir, the owls, critically impacted by river modifications and the hatcheries that relocated salmon bodies and their nutrients to human food and fertilizer industries, have been listed as an internationally recognized endangered species (Japan Bird Research Association 2010). The direct losses from salmon industrialization were amplified by terrestrial colonization and development initiatives, including systematic, government-sponsored hunting of more than half a million Ezo deer between 1873 and 1878 alone. The resulting venison was canned and exported, drawing on the same techniques used in salmon canneries and often targeting similar export markets in France and the United States (Hirano 2015, 205–6; see also B. Walker 2005, 148–50). Wolves were also exterminated as part of projects to establish safe pasture for cattle, horses, and sheep as timber harvests deforested large tracts of land (B. Walker 2005).¹⁸ These acts to make Hokkaido more “productive” at once upended ecological assemblages and killed Ainu people; according to one estimate, between the 1870s and 1920s, more than 70 percent of the island’s Ainu population died, often from starvation (Hirano 2015, 214).¹⁹

In the century after salmon were forced into hatcheries and Ainu people onto farms (and into starvation), Ainu, as “former natives” stuck in a limbo produced by the Japanese imperial nation-state, were forced to assimilate but denied the opportunities to actually do so, as racial prejudices often blocked their efforts to pursue educational opportunities or obtain mainstream jobs. In the face of such challenges, Ainu-ness was sometimes transformed, sometimes forgotten, and sometimes actively expunged. Many Ainu people hid their identity, adopting Japanese customs and speaking only Japanese. They often did not tell their children about their Ainu heritage to try to spare them the stigma of being Ainu. One acquaintance of mine who suspects that she may be of Ainu decent said her now-deceased parents refused to tell her anything about her grandparents—even their names. Within such contexts, Ainu peoples’ relationships with salmon did not disappear, but they significantly changed. During the twentieth century, in lieu of salmon fishing and bear hunting (which had become difficult to enact), activities such as dance, song, clothing, and art became more common enactments of Ainu-ness. Some Ainu people were able to garner commercial fishing rights with Japanese government systems by becoming members of fishing cooperatives and applying for salmon set net licenses (chapter 5). Yet in these settings, salmon were a market product, and overt Ainu-ness was not welcome. While constrained through dispersed social discrimination as well as targeted legal maneuvers, Ainu relations to salmon remained present enough to become a central part of the efforts—beginning in the 1970s and intensifying in recent decades—that have been variously referred to as Ainu revitalization, revival, resurgence, and efflorescence (Roche, Maruyama, and Kroik 2018; Uzawa 2018).

OTHER COMPARISONS

An Ainu man once asked me if I had heard about how the Japanese divide the world into two kinds of people—rice people (Japanese) and bread people (Westerners). It is wrong, he told me. The world as he saw it had three—not two—kinds of people: rice people, bread people, and salmon people. The Ainu, he explained to me, occupied a third space. At the same time that he implicitly accepted certain comparative premises—including the seemingly natural juxtaposition of Japan and the West—he was also seeking to undo the binarism that underpins them and makes a space for another way of being.

Throughout experiences of colonial violence, Ainu people have always been making Other comparisons—comparisons that are at once engaged with and distinct from those made by the modernist Japanese state. Their Other comparisons do not come after but are rather contemporaneous with those of Japanese nation-making. At the 1904 World’s Fair, mentioned earlier, Ainu were not passive “objects” displayed by the Japanese; instead, they interacted with other Indigenous peoples (Medak-Saltzman 2010). One photograph from the 1904 fair documents a meeting between an Ainu woman named Santukno Hiramura and a Patagonian Tzoneca woman named Lorenza (592). As she bent curiously toward Lorenza, who was holding her dog named Kik, Santukno Hiramura was likely enacting other comparisons within and against the modern/primitive ones that underpinned the 1904 World’s Fair (596).

The importance of transnational comparisons and alliances for Ainu movements is more clearly documented from the 1970s onward. Interactions and comparisons with other Indigenous peoples have assisted Ainu to develop their own modes of challenging myths of Japanese homogeneity and an intransigent Japanese state, which repeatedly denies their rights claims (Siddle 1996, 2). For example, in a 1977 newspaper report of a meeting between Ainu leaders and two Inuit representatives, one of the Inuit makes clear the comparability of their claims, stating that “the Ainu have their rights and they are the same rights as those of the Eskimo” (quoted in Larson et al. 2008, 58). In the early 1980s, Ainu leaders began regularly participating in international conferences, such as the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (Larson et al. 2008, 58), and in 1992, Giichi Nomura, the executive director of the Ainu Utari Association, was invited to give the opening address at the United Nation’s launch event for its International Year of the World’s Indigenous People.²⁰

As Ainu people develop their own forms of Indigenous identity, cultural resurgence, and rights movements, such comparisons produce neither certainty nor solidity but open questions. Like any Indigenous or ethnic group, Ainu people have diverse opinions about what it means to enact Ainu-ness. Furthermore, the thousands of Ainu who live in Tokyo often describe different experiences of Ainu identity than those who reside in Hokkaido (Uzawa 2020; Watson 2014). For some, being Ainu is primarily about bunka (culture)—song, dance, handicrafts, and festivals. Others place a stronger emphasis on the struggle for recognition of Ainu kenri (rights). For many younger Ainu whose parents hid their ancestry in the midst of discrimination, shifting relationships to their own Ainu-ness is not uncommon; some describe being Ainu at certain times and in certain contexts but not others.²¹ When I was trying to establish contact with Ainu commercial fishermen, an Ainu man told me not to bother looking for them at the local fishing cooperative. In the context of the fishing cooperative, no one is Ainu, he told me. If I want to find Ainu fishermen, I needed to go to local Ainu events and ask who fishes commercially.²²

In the midst of this diversity and exploration, salmon are integral to a wide range of Ainu resurgence efforts. Intertwined with cultural forms such as the first salmon ceremony but also linked to issues of natural resource access, salmon swim at the interface of culture- and rights-focused modes of enacting Ainu-ness. Through public ashiri chep nomi, or first salmon ceremonies, Ainu people seek both to foster Ainu community and to increase visibility within spheres dominated by assumptions of Japanese homogeneity.²³ Especially since the passage of the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act in 1997, various city governments have been supportive of these festivals as displays of Ainu culture.²⁴ But these ceremonies also implicitly challenge the idea of “culture” as separable from rights as the ceremonies require access to salmon. In their materiality, salmon create a slippage between bunka (culture) and kenri (rights) that is important to Ainu movements, as well as to the salmon themselves.

After years of Ainu advocacy, the Hokkaido government began to allow very limited and circumscribed Ainu salmon harvests in 2000 under the rubric of “cultural promotion.” Within this frame, the Hokkaido prefectural government allowed limited Ainu-style salmon harvests not through an idiom of Indigenous rights but through languages of historical preservation and cultural revitalization, carefully worded to avoid legally acknowledging any Ainu claims to fish.²⁵ The special harvest permits, granted for specific rivers and time frames, typically allow for the harvest of only a small number of fish—often three to eight fish a person or fifty to one hundred for a group ceremony—with stipulations that prevent any of the salmon from being sold. As one Ainu man explained to me, the Ainu community of which he is a part initially asked the government to allow them to catch a few fish simply because they wanted their ceremonies to incorporate salmon caught with traditional tools rather purchased from a grocery store.

Yet such access to salmon, even in this limited form, has brought Ainu people into deeper conversation with transnational Indigenous rights movements and sparked more expansive rights claims. Such dynamics are visible within an attempt to block the construction of an industrial waste disposal site along a salmon-bearing river in northern Hokkaido. In this movement, which began in 2009, Ainu people, urban environmentalists, and local residents came together to obtain the first pollution control agreement that protects wild salmon and recognizes Ainu rights. The agreement itself is significant, but it is not the only outcome of opposition to the waste dump. Through this effort, the region’s Ainu community, Ainu rights discourses, salmon conservation policies, and the evolutionary trajectories of local salmon have taken new directions.

MONBETSU AINU

Satoshi Hatakeyama-ekashi is the head of the Ainu organization in Monbetsu, a town perched on the edge of the Okhotsk Sea, and its most vocal member.²⁶ Indeed, Hatakeyama-ekashi takes up so much space that it often seems that he is the entirety of the Monbetsu Ainu branch. In his late sixties, Hatakeyama-ekashi, with his thick neck, square jawline, and booming voice, is the region’s most visible and outspoken Ainu. Growing up in Monbetsu, a rural area known for its fishing and dairy industries, Hatakeyama-ekashi always felt marginalized. A descendant of a local Ainu leader who governed several small villages in the late nineteenth century, Hatakeyama-ekashi was born in an Ainu kotan (settlement). Because everyone knew about his family background, he faced such serious bullying as a child that he dropped out of school before completing the seventh grade. While Hatakeyama-ekashi sometimes struggles to read kanji characters, he is a smart and savvy businessman who owns his own commercial fishing boat. After facing discrimination in his youth, he spent most of his adult years trying to distance himself from his Ainu heritage, refusing to attend Ainu festivals or related events. Occasionally, his Ainu heritage continued to dog him. For example, when Hatakeyama-ekashi became a fisherman, the local fishing cooperative initially refused to admit him as a full member, relenting only after Hatakeyama-ekashi had an official from the Ainu Association’s Sapporo headquarters pressure the co-op to drop their discriminatory stance. For decades, Hatakeyama-ekashi did his best to hide his Ainu-ness, to be as Japanese as possible. But about thirteen years ago, he decided to publicly express his Ainu identity after his older brother died. Hatakeyama-ekashi’s brother had embraced their Ainu heritage, attending festivals in other towns with more active Ainu communities and making a deathbed request for an Ainu funeral. But even those gestures did not convince Hatakeyama-ekashi to return to the Ainu fold. After his brother passed on, Hatakeyama-ekashi decided to “quit being Ainu” once and for all (Ainu wo yameru). But Hatakeyama-ekashi’s deceased brother objected to this plan. He visited Hatakeyama-ekashi in a dream, urging his younger brother to reclaim his Ainu-ness.

Hatakeyama-ekashi decided that a request from the other world was not to be ignored. In 2002, he rekindled the local Ainu branch and began organizing ashiri chep nomi, or first salmon ceremonies, in Monbetsu. But although Hatakeyama-ekashi knew quite a bit about hiding Ainu-ness, he found that he knew little about how to more visibly enact it. He did not know any prayers or songs or how to use an Ainu fish spear, called a malek. When Hatakeyama-ekashi wanted to hold a first salmon ceremony, he invited Ainu elders from other parts of Hokkaido to lead the event because neither he nor anyone else in Monbetsu knew how. Such a situation is not uncommon. In the wake of intensive assimilation pressures, Ainu often turn to each other and to ethnic Japanese scholars to revitalize various practices. But while many Ainu try to base their cultural practices on oral histories with elders and carefully researched historical data, Hatakeyama-ekashi was less interested in questions of cultural authenticity and more focused on issues of rights. Hatakeyama-ekashi scheduled the 2010 Monbetsu first salmon ceremony for August instead of in September (as is common for other Ainu groups) so that it would coincide with an environmental event hosted by ethnic Japanese activists, who seemed like potential allies for his efforts to block the construction of a waste disposal site in the upper reaches of the Monbetsu watershed by asserting his Indigenous rights. Hatakeyama-ekashi was undaunted by the fact that in August, there are almost no chum salmon in its waters, only pink salmon, which are considered trout within Ainu and Japanese classificatory systems. Hatakeyama-ekashi simply turned the first salmon ceremony into a first trout ceremony, with a different silver fish on the ritual altar. When only a few Ainu people showed up for the unseasonal event, Hatakeyama-ekashi did not hesitate to draft non-Ainu—including this anthropologist—to fill ceremonial roles, as the ritual itself became a space for new kinds of multiethnic collaborations.²⁷

Hatakeyama-ekashi and his group are not only geographically far from Hokkaido’s larger Ainu communities; they also often work outside of the established channels of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido. Although officially an independent entity, the Ainu Association receives government funds for cultural revitalization activities, and its leaders tend to be more restrained in the demands that they make on the Japanese state. In contrast, Hatakeyama-ekashi forges his networks largely through collaborations with ethnic Japanese NGOs in Sapporo and Tokyo that focus on social justice, transnational Indigenous rights, and environmental protection. These alliances are not without tensions, negotiations, and compromises. Hatakeyama-ekashi is vocally pro-whaling—not only as an Indigenous but also as an industrial practice—and for a short time, he worked on one of the Japanese whaling ships dispatched to Antarctica, which are opposed by most international environmental groups. Furthermore, in his early days of collaborating with the environmental and social justice groups, Hatakeyama-ekashi also suggested that the Ainu establish their own high-value salmon hatcheries by introducing Chinook and coho from the United States, an idea that runs counter to notions of biodiversity conservation.

MONBETSU SALMON

Yet despite such differences, Hatakeyama-ekashi was able to make Monbetsu’s Ainu-salmon worlds of interest to such groups. This took substantial work, as the town’s river system and its salmon were not, on their own, seen as ecologically valuable. With a fifteen-foot-high concrete slab embankment on one side and a thirty-foot hill of bare dredge spoils and a mix of gravel and broken scallop shells on the other, the mouth of the Monbetsu River is far from being an exemplar of romantic nature. One of the upper tributaries where adult salmon spawn is a straight, four-foot-wide agricultural drainage ditch, its banks lined with pasture grasses, while another section flows outward from a denuded construction site and over an earthen dam covered by a blue tarp.

While international salmon and river conservation groups have taken an interest in some of Japan’s aquatic worlds, the Monbetsu is not one of them. When fisheries professionals seek to protect “wild salmon,” they are typically seeking to conserve genetic specificity, which the Monbetsu salmon are thought to lack. Although the exact history of the river’s fish is unknown, records indicate that hatchery-reared juvenile salmon were trucked to the river and released into it prior to 1994. The river’s current fish are probably descendants of these earlier fish releases, along with more recent strays from nearby hatcheries. While Monbetsu salmon are likely “wild” under Hokkaido law, which defines fish as such once they have spawned outside a hatchery for at least two generations, fish with such recent hatchery backgrounds are not considered fully wild by many salmon biologists (especially those outside of Japan), because they do not have a specific genetic link to their river or adaptations that make them a distinct population from those in nearby hatcheries. In the comparisons of major international salmon and river conservation groups, Monbetsu salmon are seen as less valuable than those whose genetics, behaviors, and populations have been less affected by hatchery practices. When a North American environmental group decided to invest in salmonid conservation in northern Hokkaido, they were drawn to a less concretized and more scenic river to the west of Monbetsu with a population of Sakhalin taimen (Parahucho perryi), a species closely related to salmon that has never been subject to artificial propagation. Listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the taimen and their river more closely aligned with established environmental priorities.

WASTE DISPOSAL SITE STRUGGLE

However, through Hatakeyama-ekashi’s efforts, the Monbetsu Ainu community and the Monbetsu’s more-than-human assemblages began to garner more attention. In June 2008, just days before Hokkaido played host to that year’s G8 Summit, the Japanese government announced that it would officially recognize the Ainu as Indigenous people. Because Japan had already signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples the previous year, this meant that in principle, the Japanese government would be bound by international law to recognize Ainu rights. But in the months following this official recognition, nothing changed. The Japanese government set up a committee to “study” Ainu issues, taking no immediate actions and making no changes to domestic laws. Hatakeyama-ekashi soon became frustrated by what increasingly seemed to be a meaningless gesture. He wanted real “rights recovery” (kenrikaifuku). He began sending formal letters to the Hokkaido governor, petitioning the Hokkaido prefectural government to live up to the central government’s announcement and recognize Ainu rights. At first, Hatakeyama-ekashi cast his net widely, making broad appeals for scholarships for Ainu youth, Ainu participation in natural resource management, Indigenous fishing and whaling rights, and economic empowerment programs. Hatakeyama-ekashi’s primary goal was to assert that Indigenous rights cannot merely be enacted through empty and abstract words but must be meaningful in the everyday lives of Ainu people. The Hokkaido government did not respond.

Hatakeyama-ekashi was also facing another dilemma: the impending construction of a waste disposal site in the upper reaches of the river where the Ainu group harvested its ceremonial salmon. In 2005, the local government had decided to stop accepting industrial waste at its public municipal landfill in order to extend its life. The decision proved costly for the town’s processing plants and agricultural firms, which had to pay to transport and dispose their waste outside of the city. Groups such as the food manufacturer’s association, famers’ union, and dairy union lobbied city officials for a new facility. They soon drew up plans for a forty-one-hectare repository on one of the hillslopes of the Monbetsu River watershed (Noguchi 2017, 205). In 2007, Hokkaido Prefecture approved the proposal.

From the beginning, Hatakeyama-ekashi strongly opposed the project as both a fisherman and an Ainu. The Monbetsu watershed was already a mess. Its mixed conifer and broadleaf forests had been heavily logged in the mid-twentieth century and replanted with a non-native pine species. Its waters had been polluted by an upstream gold mine that continued to leach chemicals into the river. In Hatakeyama-ekashi’s opinion, the watershed did not deserve any more insults. One tactic for stopping this kind of project could have been to mobilize the fishermen’s cooperative. In Japanese environmental politics, fisheries cooperatives, which have recognized stakes in maintaining water quality, have played important roles in demanding improved pollution control and resisting the construction of seaside nuclear power plants. But this time, the co-op was not on the side of the Monbetsu River and its salmon. The river itself produced few of the salmon that the cooperative harvested, most of which came from a hatchery on another river. Furthermore, the fishing co-op had been enrolled as one of the alleged beneficiaries of the new waste dump, where the town’s seafood processors would be able to deposit scallop shells, a by-product of the fishing co-op’s most valuable species. Because the co-op needed another place to put shells, it did not oppose construction of the disposal site, despite the project’s potential to leach dangerous chemical compounds into local waters.

Hatakeyama-ekashi, frustrated by the fishing cooperative’s shortsightedness, began to wonder if he could use his Ainu-ness to block construction of the waste dump while simultaneously advancing Ainu rights. “I’m not doing this as Ainu for Ainu,” he once told me about his anti-dump efforts. His aim was to show that Ainu rights could be used to protect the environment and benefit the larger Monbetsu community, that Ainu rights were not about taking resources from others or asking for handouts but about using rights to give back and enrich the town. The city council, however, was not impressed when Hatakeyama-ekashi began arguing that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples required that they consult with him before ruling on the waste dump’s construction permit. Ignoring his demands, the city council approved the final construction permit in February 2010 without consultation with local Ainu.

Frustrated and angry, Hatakeyama-ekashi turned to the alliances that had already been supporting his efforts for several years. Since 2008, Hatakeyama-ekashi had collaborated with a community educator and head of a Japanese “freedom school,” a social-justice-education NGO loosely inspired by the Freedom Schools of the American civil rights movement. In 2009, the school organized a study tour, in which I participated, that helped spread awareness of his fight to block the waste dump and connect him with a representative from the Japan Council on the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, an umbrella networking organization for Japanese NGOs with links to UN programs. Those allies and their onward connections allowed Hatakeyama-ekashi and his Monbetsu group to submit an official statement to the UN Human Rights Council and amass fifty-six documents of support from international Indigenous organizations (Noguchi 2017, 208–9). Hewing to Japanese colonial logics—birthed within a particular set of comparative practices—the national government, Hokkaido Prefecture, and other Japanese administrative units continue to refuse Ainu rights while insisting on the legitimacy and primacy of the nation-state’s territorial sovereignty. To counter such comparisons, Hatakeyama-ekashi and his NGO allies mobilize their own: those associated with Indigenous rights. By comparing Japan’s ongoing refusal of Ainu rights to international standards for Indigenous recognition, rights, and environmental comanagement, they try to portray as out of date the Japanese government’s reticence to acknowledge the settler-colonial violence it enacts in the name of nation-state modernity. By comparing Japan’s Ainu policies to Indigenous rights legislation in places such as New Zealand, Canada, and Scandinavia, the Ainu coalition seeks to shift the Japanese government’s stance on the waste disposal site processes through comparative pressures—especially the shame of falling behind in international arenas.

Such efforts indeed forced some changes in Hokkaido governance practices, including the admission of Hatakeyama-ekashi and the Monbetsu chapter of the Hokkaido Ainu Association into the Hokkaido Industrial Pollution Examination Panel’s arbitration proceedings in relation to the waste disposal site. As part of that process, the panel formally recognized the Monbetsu Ainu as a stakeholder, yet to the disappointment of Hatakeyama-ekashi’s coalition, the panel also ruled that the construction and operation of the dump could proceed. Still, based on the stakeholder recognition, in March 2012, Hatakeyama-ekashi’s alliance pressured the company building the waste disposal facility into signing a pollution control agreement (kōgai bōshi kyōtei) directly with the Monbetsu Ainu group, acknowledging the rights of the Monbetsu Ainu to inspect the operation at any time and to receive regular monitoring reports (Noguchi 2017, 208, 209). The agreement was legally significant; until the Monbetsu case, only local government authorities had been considered legitimate signatories of pollution control agreements. But it did not stop the facility from being built.²⁸

COMPARING WITH SALMON

Salmon were themselves significant to these alter-comparative practices. Hatakeyama-ekashi’s claims to rights and stakeholder status were made possible by the Monbetsu salmon and the very ceremonial fish harvests laws that had been written to obviate Ainu rights claims. At the time of the waste dump controversy, Hatakeyama-ekashi and the Monbetsu Ainu group had applied for and received permits for “cultural promotion” salmon harvests in the Monbetsu River for about a decade. As previously mentioned, the Hokkaido government carefully crafted the law so that it does not acknowledge Indigenous rights or even ethnic difference. The law is written such that even as a foreigner, I was able to be part of an application for one of its permits to harvest salmon for “cultural purposes.” But Hatakeyama-ekashi torqued this law that was designed to be legally impotent to make nascent rights claims, a move aided by the legibility of salmon fishing activities within transnational Indigenous rights spaces.

Salmon rights struggles have a deep history in US and Canadian histories of Indigenous activism. During the 1960s and 1970s in the US Pacific Northwest, and in the Columbia River in particular, salmon “fish-ins” were a central practice for asserting tribal rights. At such events, American Indians refused to buy state fishing licenses to catch salmon at off-reservation traditional harvest sites to assert their ongoing treaty rights to fish—rights that US state and federal officials willfully ignored. The American Indian activists then used their arrests and fines to bring court cases through which they successfully argued for their legal rights to fish.²⁹ In subsequent decades, Columbia River tribes have secured more substantial participation in salmon management and restoration by organizing through the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which they established in 1977. Such histories of salmon-related Indigenous activism are not unique to the Columbia River but instead stretch from California through Alaska, a region where diverse Indigenous communities share deep relationships to salmon and most groups practiced some form of a first salmon ceremony. Through their kamui chep nomi, Hatakeyama-ekashi and the Monbetsu Ainu group emphasized their kinship with and comparability to other North Pacific salmon people, whose rights to fish have been acknowledged to a greater degree than they have been in Japan. In this way, salmon embodied and fostered an important comparative frame.

Hatakeyama-ekashi’s comparative rights practices were also dependent on the materiality of the Monbetsu salmon. Without their bodily presence in the river, it would have been more difficult for him to assert his rights to participate in the waste disposal site proceedings, draw the attention of international Indigenous organizations, and even garner a ceremonial fishing permit in the first place. Hokkaido Prefecture was almost certainly more inclined to grant permits for ceremonial harvest in the Monbetsu River because it already viewed the river’s salmon as marginal—as outside of industrial hatchery and harvest systems—after it ceased hatchery releases there in 1994. While the logics for this particular management change are not clear, it was likely influenced by the more general conditions of the Hokkaido salmon industry at that time, which was suffering from a surge in salmon returns at the same time as price declines due to rising numbers of Chilean farmed fish (see the interlude and chapter 5). Yet while hatchery producers and industrial fishing abandoned the small river, the salmon did not. Enduring the river’s concrete mouth and drainage ditch spawning beds, the former hatchery salmon kept on inhabiting the river, creating a population outside of the hatchery system that was large enough to support the Monbetsu Ainu group’s salmon harvests but too small to draw industrial-scale attention or create conflicts with the nearby fishing cooperative.

In 2018, Hatakeyama-ekashi decided to further assert Ainu rights by fishing for the salmon for that year’s kamuy chep nomi without securing a ceremonial harvest permit, maintaining that Ainu had never relinquished their right to salmon. Hatakeyama-ekashi and the other salmon ceremony participants arrived at the Monbetsu River to find prefectural police waiting for them. In a statement to the assembled group, Hatakeyama-ekashi spoke of Japanese colonial violences at the same time that he positioned Ainu claims in relation to transnational Indigenous movements: “I am one man among the world’s Indigenous peoples. I have globally recognized rights to self-determination. That’s why I’m doing this. The Japanese government is going against the flow of the rest of the world” (Kosaka 2019, 147).³⁰ The police arrested Hatakeyama-ekashi as he tried to lower his dugout canoe into the water, then subjected him to three days of hours-long interrogations before bringing criminal charges against him for harvesting salmon without prior permission (Indigenous Peoples Rights International 2020). In 2020, after Hatakeyama-ekashi suffered a stroke and was hospitalized, a district court suspended, but did not entirely dismiss, the charges, a move that some attribute to concerns on the part of Hokkaido Prefecture and the Japanese government about the negative publicity that the case could generate. The suspension of the indictment leaves the legality of Ainu fishing in limbo, as the court neither established nor rejected Ainu rights to harvest salmon (IWGIA 2021).

COMPARISONS TO COME

The ripples of Hatakeyama-ekashi’s project, which mobilized a variety of alter-comparisons against those born from Japanese state colonialism, have been far from trivial. In August 2020, in solidarity with Hatakeyama-ekashi’s efforts, the Raporo Ainu Nation in eastern Hokkaido sued Hokkaido Prefecture and the Japanese government to assert that their river-based salmon harvesting rights have never been extinguished by Japanese law (IWGIA 2021).³¹ As a gesture of alliance, in early September that year, members of the Raporo Ainu brought salmon to the Monbetsu group so that they could hold a kamuy chep nomi, despite Hatakeyama-ekashi’s hospitalization and their ongoing legal challenges (CEMiPoS 2020). While the trajectories of these solidarities and movements is uncertain, such new arrangements are likely to have multiple effects in the coming years.³²

Hatakeyama-ekashi’s initiatives have not only affected Ainu mobilizations; they have also impacted Monbetsu fish. It is important to remember that the rice, bread, and salmon of the Ainu man’s classification in the earlier vignette are more than symbols. They index ecological assemblages. The comparisons with salmon that are part and parcel of Ainu rights movements at once depart from and affect more-than-human landscape arrangements. When Hatakeyama-ekashi began collaborating with various environmental NGOs, the Monbetsu River salmon were simply sake, or chum salmon. But through their joint work—including salmon surveys, water quality checks, and a salmon-focused workshop that brought Indigenous and environmental activism into closer conversation—the Monbetsu fish gradually became wairudo sāmon, a transliteration of the English term “wild salmon,” and began stressing their non-hatchery origins. While the shift was discursive, it is not merely so. Because of their connections with Hatakeyama-ekashi and the Monbetsu Ainu, these salmon are likely to become different beings. Before the kamuy chep nomi and the Ainu rights movement, few people paid much attention to the river’s salmon. Now, they are on the radar of several metropolitan environmental NGOs that seek to build networks between Hatakeyama-ekashi and biodiversity conservation initiatives, and their innovative propositions for new forms of salmon management explicitly build ecological sustainability outward from the practices of kamuy chep (Kamuycep Project Research Group 2021).

Exactly what this will mean for the fish is unclear, but it is possible to hazard a guess. Already, the pollution control agreement, which subjects the waste facility to extra surveillance, is helping to protect the river’s water quality, increasing the odds that fish will survive there. Furthermore, if their rights movements are able to gain any traction, the Monbetsu Ainu group would like to take a more substantial role in watershed management, potentially altering forests and river habitats in other ways. If the number of salmon in the watershed grows in response to such changes, it would probably have substantial follow-on effects, as the carcasses from post-spawning salmon nourish organisms from stream insects to birds of prey to the brown bears, who are central parts of Ainu spirit worlds. Barring too many strays from nearby hatcheries, the river’s former hatchery salmon are also likely to adapt to its specificities and develop unique place-based traits, their intergenerational futures taking a different path than they would have without Hatakeyama-ekashi’s interventions. Bound in co-constitutive relations for hundreds of years, Ainu and salmon continue to recursively transform each other.

The relations of Ainu and salmon in Monbetsu show some of the challenges of living with the ongoing legacies of modernist (and statist) comparative practices. Fortunately, despite its concerted efforts, the Japanese state has not been able to completely control either the fish or Ainu-salmon relations. If everything had gone according to its plans, there would be no Ainu or free-spawning salmon in the Monbetsu region—only homogenized “Japanese citizens” and industrialized hatchery fish. But both are there. Persistence, though, has not been easy. The Monbetsu Ainu group and the Monbetsu salmon cannot opt out of the comparative structures that the state has used to render them marginal. Instead, they compare against them in creative and determined ways as they explore possibilities for remaking worlds rent apart by settler-colonial and industrial projects.