Photo/Illutration A cemetery built by the government within the Upopoy park in Shiraoi, Hokkaido, stores unclaimed 1,600 sets of remains of Ainu people that were collected for research purposes. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

The remains of four Ainu indigenous people have recently been returned from Australian museums and are back in Japan for the first time in about a century.

Researchers actively excavated and collected the remains of Ainu people from their graves in Japan starting in the Meiji Era (1868-1912) and continued the practice well into the postwar years.

The four sets of remains had been donated by Japanese researchers to their Australian colleagues at a time when research using the remains of indigenous peoples was drawing international attention.

During a repatriation ceremony held in Australia, a senior museum official reportedly met representatives of the Ainu people and apologized for the pain inflicted on people because the remains were taken.

Let us look back on the situation in Japan.

The government has expressed the view that the Ainu remains excavated and collected in the past “likely include those collected against the will of the Ainu people.”

There is deep-rooted criticism that many of them were plundered in what is practically tantamount to grave-robbing. It has also been learned that many of the remains have been stored in a slipshod manner.

Such acts of trampling on the dignity and the human rights of the ethnic group should never be forgiven.

The government has finally set about investigating the matter in recent years and has found that more than 1,900 sets of Ainu remains were stored, as of 2018, at 12 universities in Japan, including Hokkaido University, Sapporo Medical University, the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University.

Some of the remains have since been returned, including after Ainu people took the matter to court, but similar cases account only for a small fraction.

The government’s basic policy says the Ainu remains should be returned to their areas of origin, but the effort has made little headway.

The local community does not always want to receive the human remains back even when it is known from where they were excavated. In some cases, the Ainu community, to which the remains could have been returned, is no longer there.

The government has temporarily enshrined some 1,600 sets of the remains, which are difficult to return immediately, in a memorial facility built in Hokkaido. Three of the sets of remains returned from Australia have also been laid there.

The assimilation policy of the modern period coincided with academia disturbing the natural resting places and collecting so many human remains. That fact is extremely sobering.

It is, however, doubtful whether the government and the universities have faced up squarely to the gravity of the matter.

They have rarely conducted sufficient self-assessment over the development to date. And, before everything else, they have seldom made an apology, except in a handful of cases.

There has, in the meantime, been a move involving academic societies for setting ethical guidelines for using Ainu remains in research.

It is all too natural that the Ainu people embrace a strong distrust of the stance for solely looking conveniently toward the future while being insufficiently remorseful over the past.

The Ainu policy promotion law, enacted four years ago, espouses respect for the pride of the Ainu, which the law says are an indigenous people.

Given that, it appears appropriate for the government and the universities concerned to apologize for having hurt the dignity of the Ainu people.

The government of Australia defines the return of human remains to the country’s aboriginal peoples as a step toward healing and reconciliation.

Now is the time for Japan to learn from Canberra’s stance.

--The Asahi Shimbun, May 14

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