Story and Photograph by Lehan Winifred Ramsay
My friend came to visit me in Hakodate. He thought he would write a travel story for an inflight magazine while he was there. He called the City Hall to ask them about local artisans or people of interest, but the City Hall pointed him in the direction of a souvenir sausage shop, which he wasn’t really interested in.
I want to meet some Ainu people, said my friend. But it was common knowledge in Hakodate that there were few if any people in the town calling themselves Ainu. Then I remembered Machan. I’d heard from a journalist friend that he was Ainu. Machan was a little-bit-wild looking man who I often saw around riding his bicycle with his dog following along. We had talked a little bit a few times without any particular connection. He had a shop across the road from the International Hotel. So we went along to Machan’s shop.
Machan’s shop had a kind of log-cabin look to it, and inside it was a bit dark and a bit shabby. There were certainly some carvings of bears and owls, but they looked a lot like the mass-produced carvings you find in all the souvenir shops, and the recycle shops, just a bit dustier. Other than that there really wasn’t much you could buy. Mostly when it was warm enough Machan sat with his dog on the front step of his shop, which looked out on to the lobby of the International Hotel.
My friend asked Machan a bit about the Ainu. Did he know any Ainu people living in the town my friend could talk to? Not really. Did he know of any Ainu artists? Not really. Did he know of anything interesting he could write about? Not that he could think of. Anyone who made things? Nah. Machan’s shop is gone now, but it was there quite a long time.
Somehow the response we got that day did not surprise me. I used to see Machan around a lot, riding his bicycle, with his dog following along, one time he gave me a CD he had in his basket; The Beatles, for no particular reason; I took it and said thankyou. I like to see Machan’s life as a complicated and contradictory act of civil disobedience, of social education. Somehow I must have been prepared by the people around me to understand that. But here – I am speaking for him again. I will stop.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/mrbojangles.html
LikeLike
It sounds a bit like the Sasak people of Lombok. The tourism is often the cause of a trivialisation of a culture. I remember going to visit an original tribe of Sasak people high up a mountain in Lombok. They were supposed to be still unrelated and uncontaminated to Islamic and Hindu culture. Of course, through the years and with many tourists doing the same, we were greeted by a Coke sign after arrival. They were still producing the double ikat weaving cloth that they are famous for. We bought a piece of it which is now on top of our sideboard.
LikeLike
I imagine the real Ainu, like any colonized minority group, are so despised by the wider society they now live in that even they have come to put a negative valuation on the name… A sad reaction to colonialism, but that’s what happens… and the Ainu were colonized a looooooooooooooong time ago!
Nice story Lehan.
🙂
LikeLike
Hi Asty, thanks for reading. You know, the Ainu weren’t colonized so long ago, it began in the 1700’s but real colonization was not until around the 1860’s. But it does seem to have been a humiliating life for them after that. I was thinking more about what happened to them more recently in history; when they became commodified by the tourism industry. Suddenly they were of interest, but in a fairly shallow way that particularly focused on the kinds of decoration and “exotica” that could be sold to tourists. That was why I felt Machan’s approach was so interesting. He put himself right in the middle of that, but then he didn’t quite play the game. And maybe not much occurred to the people who partook in his “tourism experience”. But I know that it changed my thinking.
There was an “Ainu village” tourist attraction somewhere else in Hokkaido, I never went. There was a Museum that was at least partly devoted to Ainu artifacts in my town, I really didn’t like it. One time I heard from some young musicians that they went every year to an Ainu music festival that was a local gathering, that sounded interesting; I was glad to hear that it was happening, though I could never verify if it had authenticity. In the local museum I once saw things that were not “ainu decoration” but gave some indication of lives spent – clothes that were fashioned out of discarded kimono, hand-made household implements. To me, it felt as if the ainu had disappeared, leaving a region starved for tourist dollars to construct a wax museum approximation of the kinds of cultural practices that they had tried to make disappear.
LikeLike
Lehan, I was under the impression, perhaps mistaken (I trust my memory less and less these days), that the Ainu were the very original indiginous inhabitants of Japan, before the Chinese effectively did a Cortez on ’em some 300 bc… it was this colonisation I was referring to…
🙂
LikeLike
Wikipedia explains it very succinctly, Asty, if you look under Jomon, Ainu, Yayoi and Japanese peoples. They’re, like, cousins or something.
LikeLike
It’s a succinct explanation, kind of goes like this, if you’re not inclined to look it up.
A? Yeah, yeah, I remember, kind of. He was one of the kids – how many kids did they have? Six? Maybe Seven? Let me think. There was the oldest one, and then there was a girl, and another boy, and….yes, I think it was seven. The kids of – oh, what was the name of that one? He worked with his hands, you know the one, he married the girl from across the river. The girl that was always hanging up washing just before it rained. Yeah, that one. Her folks came from – now where did they come from? Somewhere south, maybe? Anyway, they weren’t around long. There was talk that they were, you know – what’s that love? Dinner’s ready? Maybe farmers or something. Maybe there’s something about it in the suitcase under the bed. What’s that love? Your mum says don’t go messing with the suitcase under the bed.
LikeLike
But maybe more succinct than that.
LikeLike
Yeah, yeah… I get the picture… I wuz right tho… they wuz colonized; I just got the timeline a bit skewed is all…
😉
LikeLike
I had the impression more that they were semi-colonized, asty.
LikeLike