The Ainu in Japan: Ethnic Identity and Cultural DefinitionsThe Ainu in Japan: Ethnic Identity and Cultural Definitions

At the beginning of the year 1997 the Japanese government officially recognised the Ainu as an indigenous minority group of Japan. This was the first time in Japan that a minority ethnic group has gained specific treatment because of its ethnic differences, at least at the level of official categorisation. To the precedents of this political act belong a very intense contact between the Ainu and the Japanese inhabitants (mainly in Hokkaido) of more than 100 years that resulted in the assimilation of the Ainu to the Japanese way of life, furthermore the Ainu’s participation at international human and ethnic rights organisations and a legal case in Nibutani. Ainu in the 1980s began to take part in the new ethnic movement because they recognised their own situation to be very similar to that of other ethnic groups, i.e. of the Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians or Arctic peoples. Parallel to this development, Ainu culture became in the last decades either a tourist attraction or museum artefacts.

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