Please take her as your wife

Abstract

This article investigates linguistic and visual representations of the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan, in Satoru Noda’s popular televised Japanese anime Golden Kamuy (GK). The study employs multimodal analysis, focusing on content, context, characters, and perspectives related to the deployment of the Ainu language using the perspectives of raciolinguistics, coloniality, and intersectionality, to examine GK’s representations of Ainu regarding two Japanese national discourses on race: the current discourse of “ethnic harmony” (or multiculturalism) and Ainu as a dying race, popularized in the early 20th century. It argues that GK unintentionally constructs a sanitized Ainu-Japanese relationship that epitomizes the discourse of ethnic harmony by erasing Japan’s colonial past. Simultaneously, GK reproduces Ainu as a dying race discourse by contrasting a young bilingual Ainu co-protagonist and her monolingual grandmother. The article discusses how advanced/backward distinctions that the Japanese elites appropriated from the 19th-century colonial discourse are reinscribed in this anime with a modern twist. It also advocates our need to raise critical questions about language, race, and power for a just society in various contexts, including popular media.