Ainu

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Ainu from the island of Ezo ( Hokkaidō ) in traditional costume (from: The Gazebo , 1880)
Japanese Ainu from 1904

The indigenous people of northern Japan and parts of Russia ( Sakhalin , Kuril Islands ) are called Ainu or Aynu ( ア イ ヌ ), more rarely Aino . Genetic and anthropological studies suggest that they are to be regarded as direct descendants of the prehistoric Jōmon culture , whose members date from 14,000 to 300 BC. Lived in all of Japan.

Today the indigenous Ainu call themselves Ainu or Utari. Ainu means “human” and Utari “comrade” in the Ainu language . They lived as traditional hunters and gatherers until recently .

Settlement area

Main settlement area of ​​the Ainu on Hokkaidō according to the Ainu Association on Hokkaidō (1999)
Replica of a dwelling in Nibutani

The historical settlement area of ​​the Ainu is Hokkaidō (old name: Ezo), South Sakhalin , the Kuril Islands and the area of ​​today's Aomori prefecture .

It is controversial whether Ainu also settled on Kamchatka , at the Amur estuary and other areas on Honshū . Some researchers argue that the ancestors of the Ainu were widespread in northern Eurasia before they were slowly displaced or assimilated by the people of East Asia . According to historical documents, they were still in the northernmost area of ​​Honshū - today's Aomori Prefecture - until the early modern period. Place names in the prefectures of Aomori , Akita and Iwate indicate that the language was spoken there earlier. The most common names are -nai (nai) and -betsu (pet) - Ainu words for "river".

Today there are officially between 25,000 and 200,000 people in Japan who call themselves Ainu.

For centuries there has been a progressive mixing with Japanese, so that the assignment is based primarily on self-attribution. Due to the still existing discrimination against the Ainu, it can be assumed that their number is actually significantly higher. In South Sakhalin and on the Kuril Islands there is said to be no Ainu since the forced resettlement of the Japanese by the Soviet Union after the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Origin and Relationships

Ainu, around 1880

Genetic studies have shown that the roots of the indigenous "indigenous people" of Japan lie in the Jōmon period . While today's Ryūkyū peoples emerged from a mixture of the Jōmon with direct ancestors of the Japanese, who lived around 300 BC during the Yayoi period . Immigrated to Hokkaidō, the Ainu remained unmixed for many centuries.

Research and finds suggest that the Ainu originally descended from a Paleolithic Siberian population that immigrated to Japan before the formation of the typical East Asian characteristics (outdated “ Mongolian type ”). The Ainu originally had a lighter skin color, eyes more reminiscent of Europeans without the typical East Asian crease and had comparatively thick body hair that was dark brown or black (the long, full beards of men are particularly well known here). Some anthropologists of outdated racial theories therefore saw them as a European type for a long time . The occurrence of later genetic markers in East Asia can be traced back to the centuries-long policy of mixing and assimilation of the Ainu people, promoted by the Japanese .

The oldest archaeological finds are dated to around 18,000 BC. Dated (i.e. still to the Pleistocene ).

The relatively greatest genetic relationship between the Ainu and the prehistoric Jōmon is to Siberian populations (such as the Buryats , Selkupen , Chukchi , Niwchen , and Koryaks ) and to the North American indigenous people (especially the Tlingit , Haida and Tsimshian of the northwest coast culture ). Although the Ainu also have the haplogroup D of the Y-DNA , which is widespread in Central Asia , they are not related to the Tibetans and Andamans . Scientists point out that haplogroups alone cannot say anything about relationship or ancestry.

Ainu man from Hokkaido - Japan

According to some historians, the Emishi ( Ezo ) people mentioned in the ancient Japanese sources are identical to the Ainu. Others see one of the two peoples as a regional group of the other or both as separate ethnicities.

history

The Ainu in northern Honshū came under massive Japanese influence as early as the Heian period around the year 1000. The Japanese first worked on the south coast of Hokkaidō (then Ezo ) in the Kamakura period (1185-1333). However, their influence remained limited to the Oshima Peninsula until the end of the 16th century . That changed in 1599, when Hokkaidō was given to the family of the same name by the Shogunate as a fiefdom Matsumae . The land was viewed as worthless, as it was not possible to grow rice in the northern latitudes at that time; corresponding varieties were only developed in the Meiji period . Therefore, the Matsumae limited themselves to setting up posts for trading in fur and dried meat.

In the 19th century the Matsumae set up fishing harbors at Ezo and forced the former hunters and gatherers to work on fishing boats and in ports. In 1869 Ezo became a part of Japan as Hokkaidō, and the land was opened for settlement by Japanese. There have been attempts to give land to the Ainu and turn them into farmers. These attempts failed. The traditional Ainu culture was finally destroyed by this and by the burgeoning Japanese nationalism. Because of forced labor, the destruction of their culture and failed attempts to settle them as farmers, many Ainu ended up in poverty and alcoholism. Japan relied on aggressive assimilation: the indigenous people had to attend Japanese schools and adopt Japanese customs. Their traditional tattoos ( Anci-Piri : the "Ainu beard" in women), clothing, religion and sacrificial rituals were banned.

The Ainu on Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands were able to keep their culture free from foreign influences for a little longer. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Ainu who lived on the northern Kuril Islands had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and also spoke Russian. After the islands fell to Japan, most of them were forcibly moved to Shikotan closer to the Japanese islands, where they, decimated by poor living conditions, clung to their Christian faith and built their own church. Some emigrated to Kamchatka . When the Soviet Army took the southern Kuril Islands, including Shikotan, towards the end of World War II , the remaining Ainu emigrated to Hokkaidō. The Kuril Ainu are now considered extinct. The last known Kuril-Ainu woman died in 1972 and was church buried.

It was not until the 1970s that the first state-supported attempts at reconstruction were made, also for the motive of promoting tourism. After the linguistic rule in Japan for a long time that Japan simply had no minorities, the Ainu are now a recognized minority. Some Ainu have left Hokkaidō and settle in other parts of Japan, where they are no longer recognized as a minority and therefore do not suffer any status disadvantages.

To this day, however, a subliminal racism persists in Japanese society, on the one hand because the Ainu are generally more hairy than the Japanese and are therefore perceived as primitive, on the other hand because the Ainu mostly belong to the poorer classes. This keeps many prejudices. Efforts to preserve and promote the Ainu culture are only slowly bearing fruit and are also felt by many to be inadequate. For example, many Ainu today speak the language of their ancestors only brokenly or not at all.

Political recognition as an indigenous people

In June 2008 the Japanese parliament passed a resolution in which the Ainu were recognized as a culturally independent indigenous people for the first time . The resolution does not contain any concrete measures to promote the Ainu, but calls for the establishment of a panel of experts to advise the government on political issues affecting the Ainu, and refers to the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples .

language

The isolated Ainu language, which has no known linguistic relationships with other languages, is rarely used today. Almost all Ainu speak Japanese in everyday life. There are four important dialects within the Aini language: the Hokkaido dialect, the Sakhalin dialect, the Kuril dialect, and the Kamchatka dialect. The existence of an Ainu dialect in today's Amur region is represented by some historians.

There is an all-language newspaper, the Ainu Times .

society

Ainu group, 1904

In the Kuril Islands, the Ainu were able to preserve their traditional way of life most, without the centuries-old Japanese influence. Hence the customs of the extinct Kuril Ainu provided the best examples of the original Ainu culture.

Sakhalin-Ainu

The activities and the spiritual life as well as the genealogy are different for the Ainu according to sex. The men hunt and fish, the women are collectors and farmers.

With the Ainu, women count themselves according to the female line, while the men count according to the male line. The kinship support system common in matriarchal societies only works in these lines , which brings about a strong cohesion of women on the one hand and men on the other. Here, strict exogamy applies in the maternal line , but not in the paternal line. Women wear belts under their clothes as a sign of their clan-like ties, and a man is not allowed to marry a woman who wears the same belt as his mother. The emerging male family member is the maternal uncle.

As part of his work, the social psychologist Erich Fromm analyzed the willingness of 30 pre-state peoples, including the Ainu, to use ethnographic records to analyze the anatomy of human destructiveness . He finally assigned them to the “non-destructive-aggressive societies” whose cultures are characterized by a sense of community with pronounced individuality (status, success, rivalry), targeted child-rearing, regulated manners, privileges for men and, above all, male tendencies to aggression - but without destructive tendencies (Destructive rage, cruelty, greed for murder, etc.) - are marked (see also: "War and Peace" in pre-state societies ).

While the Ainu were largely hunter-gatherers, they had a distinct culture. But there are also some indications for a simple form of agriculture.

Culture

Old Ain men - unlike the Japanese - wore flowing beards. The women have the " Ainu beard ", a tattoo. They live in a clearly separated two-gender society, practice ancestral cult and, in the case of the Japanese Ainu, they practiced the craft of war against the Yamato-Japanese who displaced them, which is not peculiar to their culture and their social structure is somewhat patriarchal .

The two most popular traditional musical instruments of the Ainu are the five-string shell zither tonkori and the bamboo- framed jaw harp mukkuri . In rituals, the single-headed frame drum kačo is used as a shaman's drum . Most instrumental music is designed to mimic animal sounds. The unusual wind instrument ippaki-ni , which is classified as a membranopipe , used to serve as an animal call .

The most important styles of vocal music are upopo ("sitting song"), in which the participants sit in a circle and imitate bird calls in a polyphonic, cacophonic overall sound, and rimse ("dance song"), a dance in which the participants used to stamp their feet, to drive away evil spirits. In addition to this music, which is performed in groups, there is the individual, epic singing style yayshama , in which each melody can be assigned to a certain tribe.

Since 2012, cultural events and collaborations have been taking place between the Ainu and the Sami of Finland .

religion

Ainu bear sacrifice, Japanese scroll painting (ca.1870)

The Ainu religion is an animistic and polytheistic religion with a multitude of different spirits and gods. The concepts of "Ramat" (spirit, soul), "Kamuy" (deity, spiritual being), and "Inau" (offering, prayer or devotion) are of central importance.

The development of the original belief of the Ainu is a prime example of the versatility of ethnic religions and their function as an “ideological manifesto ” of the respective social structures. Before the year 1000 they formed a pre-state, agrarian hierarchical society whose hierarchical structures were reflected in a polytheistic pantheon . When it was displaced to the climatically rougher island of Hokkaido, the way of subsistence changed to hunting, fishing and collecting. Accordingly, their belief changed to a typical hunter animism of "all-soulness": Every natural appearance and many objects - from the sun, moon, thunder, wind, water and fire to animals, plants and tools - were valid as animated by gods (or spirit beings , so-called Kamuy ). These included the house guard, the god of fire, the window, the hearth, and much more. The traditional Ainu believes that every appearance can be a “disguised” god - either with good or bad qualities. According to the missionary John Batchelor , the Kamuy, in the Ainu religion, are mediators of an almighty and eternal creator god, Kotan-kar-kamuy, who rules over the entire universe and is subordinate and responsible to it, regardless of their power (hence exist Assumptions that the Ainu religion was originally monotheistic ). Norbert Richard Adami criticizes the monotheism thesis, however, and is of the opinion that the views already pointing in this direction in Batchelor would lose their value “because of the narrow and sometimes misinterpreting perception resulting from his beliefs”. Through offerings or ceremonial dances one tried to please the good gods or to scare away the bad ones. A particularly important act was the sending of the gods back into the spirit world: If an animal was killed and eaten, an object was defective or things were turned to ashes by burning, the gods who lived in it had to be sent back by the people. Spiritually, there used to be a clear dichotomy between the sexes: men practiced the rituals associated with hunting and fishing, while shamanic rituals were performed by women.

The bear cult , a central ritual of classical shamanism , to which the religion of the Ainu is also counted, has always had central importance in the Ainu culture . The male or female shamans ( Tusu Kur ) served the community as healers and ritual leaders - for example for the central bear sacrifice. In addition, they preserved the customs and above all the taboo regulations . They used trance for healing and fortune telling and dream interpretation . In contrast to the Siberian shamans , the Ainu shaman was not an actual mediator between this world and the other world, but was able to drive away evil spirits and knew the spirit world. The Ainu shamans of Sakhalin , however, had advanced skills, such as hunting magic, as well as the connection with auxiliary spirits. The contact to the spirit world was usually made through the fire goddess Ape-huci-kamuy . They did not use temples for this, but holy places in the open air and especially the hearth in the center of the house. According to Batchelor, the Ainu beliefs in the afterlife that Kotan-kar-kamuy, after the death of a person, uses Ape-huci-kamuy to inform a guard dog of the decision whether the deceased will go to heaven or according to his earthly deeds go to hell . Should the deceased, after having learned this from that watchdog, deny his sins, Ape-huci-kamuy appear to him, who shows him his whole life in reply. In fact, the oral tradition of the Ainu does not contain the belief in hell . Instead, there is a belief that the soul of the deceased (Ramat) becomes a kamuy itself after death. Also there is the view that the soul of a sinner, suicide , murder victim or someone who died a very painful death, a ghost or a kind of demon will that the living shall visit to that fulfillment to find (Tukap) which you was denied in life.

As a result of the ethnocide by the Japanese, the traditional religion is hardly practiced today. Traditional bear worship continues - but is mainly practiced as a tourist attraction. In addition, the ritual dances survived, which are now increasingly practiced again - but no longer primarily against a religious background.

Ainu people in the different countries

country number
Japan 25,000-200,000
Russia up to 1,000 (estimated)

See also

literature

  • Takeshi Kimura: The Beginning of a Long Journey: Maintaining and Reviving the Ancestral Religion among the Ainu in Japan. In Greg Johnson, Siv Ellen Kraft (Ed.): Handbook of Indigenous Religion (s) (= Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion, Volume 15). Brill, Leiden 2017, ISBN 9789004346710 , pp. 309-323.
  • Richard M. Siddle: Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan. Routledge, London 2014, ISBN 978-1-138-00688-1 .
  • Michael Knüppel: Ainu and Altaisch - a side note. (PDF; 157 kB) ( Archive ( Memento from November 7, 2013 on WebCite )) News of the Society for Natural History and Ethnology of East Asia (NOAG), University of Hamburg, vol. 78, issue 183-184, 2008, pp. 181– 186.
  • Mark Hudson: Agriculture and Language Change in the Japanese Islands. In: Peter Bellwood, Colin Renfrew: Examining the Farming / Language Dispersal Hypothesis. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge 2002, pp. 311-317 (English).
  • Miyajima Toshimitsu: Land of Elms. The History, Culture, and Present Day Situation of the Ainu People. United Church Publishing House, Etobicoke 1998, ISBN 1-55134-092-5 , pp. 100-104.
  • J. Kreiner, HD Ölschleger: Ainu. Hunters, fishermen and gatherers in northern Japan. Catalog of the collection of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-923158-14-9 .
  • Horst M. Bronny: The Ainu. In: Merian No. 11, 1980, pp. 120-123.

Individual evidence

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  3. Hideaki Kanzawa-Kiriyama, Kirill Kryukov, Timothy A. Jinam, Kazuyoshi Hosomichi, Aiko Saso: A partial nuclear genome of the Jomons who lived 3000 years ago in Fukushima, Japan . In: Journal of Human Genetics . tape 62 , no. 2 , September 1, 2016, ISSN  1434-5161 , p. 213–221 , doi : 10.1038 / year 2016.110 ( nature.com ).
  4. Ryukyuan, Ainu People Genetically Similar . In: Asian Scientist Magazine | Science, technology and medical news updates from Asia . December 6, 2012 ( asianscientist.com [accessed June 19, 2018]).
  5. Hideaki Kanzawa-Kiriyama, Kirill Kryukov, Timothy A Jinam, Kazuyoshi Hosomichi, Aiko Saso: A partial nuclear genome of the Jomons who lived 3000 years ago in Fukushima, Japan . In: Journal of Human Genetics . tape 62 , no. 2 , September 1, 2016, ISSN  1434-5161 , p. 213–221 , doi : 10.1038 / year 2016.110 ( nature.com ).
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  13. Ainu | Definition, Culture, & Language. Retrieved July 17, 2020 .
  14. Erich Fromm: Anatomy of human destructiveness . From the American by Liselotte and Ernst Mickel. 86th to 100th thousand issues. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1977, ISBN 3-499-17052-3 , pp. 191-192.
  15. ^ Gary W. Crawford, Masakazu Yoshizaki: Ainu ancestors and prehistoric Asian agriculture . In: Journal of Archaeological Science . tape 14 , no. 2 , March 1, 1987, ISSN  0305-4403 , p. 201-213 , doi : 10.1016 / 0305-4403 (87) 90007-0 ( sciencedirect.com [accessed July 17, 2020]).
  16. ^ Peter Ackermann: Japan . In: Hans Oesch : Non-European Music (Part 1). ( New Handbook of Musicology , Volume 8) Laaber, Laaber 1984, p. 142
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  21. ^ Batchelor: The Ainu and Their Folk-Lore , pp. 575-585.
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  30. Bernhard Scheid: Which religions are there in Japan? . Introduction in: Religion in Japan - Basic Concepts on univie.ac.at, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, accessed on September 20, 2015.

Web links

Commons : Ainu  - collection of images, videos and audio files