LONDON--Across a darkened exhibition hall, lit in islands containing artifacts and video installations, the voice of tenacious rights activist Shigeru Kayano croaks out words in the threatened language of Japan’s northern indigenous people.

The exhibition at Japan House London displays Ainu life in a manner unlike previous official presentations. Titled “Ainu Stories: Contemporary Lives by the Saru River,” it opened at the state-funded facility in November and focuses on a single community in Biratori, Hokkaido. The exhibition will continue until April 21.

This is not the first presentation of the Biratori Ainu in London; a delegation was brought to the city in 1910 for a very different display of Japanese culture. Aside from this exhibition, a new national museum devoted to Ainu affairs opened in Shiraoi, Hokkaido, in 2021. But this event still represents a departure in their depiction, not least for the involvement of the Biratori community.

“It’s a wonderful thing I think,” said Atsushi Monbetsu, 41, a member of the Ainu community who attended the launch event. “Until now, we did not receive such a spotlight, rather we mainly received discrimination.”

‘WHAT NEEDS TO BE SAID’

The Ainu are an indigenous people of Japan who once formed the principal community in Hokkaido and northeast Honshu. They coexisted and at times had confrontations with the seat of Japanese power in Tokyo before being decisively brought under its control at the turn of the 20th century. The experience of Japanese settlement radically altered their way of life, and policies of forced assimilation endangered their culture.

The starting point of the exhibition at Japan House London is the present. The community in Biratori, with Japan’s highest percentage of Ainu residents, has become bolder in advancing its heritage. The exhibition introduces practices in food, forestry, wood carving and agriculture. Allowing the community members to speak on their own behalf was at the center of the curation, according to Japan House Director of Programming Simon Wright, who said, “It was important to have their voices so people can hear for themselves what they want to say and what needs to be said.”

A common criticism of previous presentations of Ainu culture is that much was left unsaid.

“In the past, members of this community were not able to fully express their distinct culture,” say introductory materials for the exhibition without mentioning why this was the case.

However, the exhibition itself, with Kayano’s activism as a dominant feature, does not hide the fact that rights had to be fought for. “A series of policies designed to assimilate and ostensibly protect the Ainu resulted in discrimination,” say the text notes.

“Exhibitions in Japan have tended to present timelines and not address problems and issues in how we live,” said 23-year-old Riku Yuki, a Biratori Ainu. “In that sense, this exhibition is very interesting.”

A STATEMENT OF IDENTITY

Since the settlement of Hokkaido from the south, control over Ainu identity has been contested.

The exhibition now, with its emphasis on the Ainu describing who they are, contrasts with the presentation of them at another Japanese cultural display more than a century ago, in 1910. At that time, the Japan-British Exhibition, held roughly 3 kilometers from the current Japan House site, contained pavilions with demonstrations of Japanese strength in technology and the arts.

It also included reconstructed villages that showed Japan as an imperial power, with Ainu from the wider Biratori region brought in to populate one. The display of the Ainu in such circumstances was meant to highlight the comparative civilization of the new Japanese state, and to resonate with Britain in its age of empire.

Japan House London is the modern counterpart of such state-led efforts to present Japan overseas.

Although it opened five years ago, the facility only now has mounted a major presentation of one of Japan’s minority communities. For any such promotional institution, the representation of uncomfortable topics and histories is one of the hardest challenges it can take on. But Wright rejects any notion of a coming of age. “I suppose I was a little brave in broaching the subject, maybe. But it was not difficult at all. It is something that was thought about right from the beginning.”

In a statement, the Japanese Embassy in London said: “The aim of the exhibition is to enable people in the U.K., keen to embrace different cultures, to experience firsthand the diversity of Japan and the appeal of the region, and for Japanese people, including the Ainu, to reaffirm the splendor of Ainu culture.”

While the topic is the Ainu, and the Biratori community is the focus of the exhibition, it ultimately makes a statement about identity in Japan today.

The capacity of the country to include indigenous peoples within its presentation of itself was a challenge also addressed at the Tokyo Olympics held a year behind schedule in 2021 because of the pandemic. While reviews of such past efforts have been mixed, the opinions of residents attending the London exhibition launch were positive.

Sakurako Yamada, 29, moved to Biratori and organizes a small tour business. “It is hard to change from the inside” she said. “If it could be known from outside Japan that the Ainu are alive today, that the culture continues and was under threat, then that would be a source of strength.”

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Will Blathwayt is a staff reporter at The Asahi Shimbun’s London Bureau.