The fight for self-representation

Abstract

Film representation of the Ainu people is as old as cinema but it has not remained stable over time. From the origins of cinema, Ainu people were an object of interest for Japanese and foreign explorers who portrayed them as an Other, savage and isolated from the modern world. The notion of “otherness” was slightly modified during wartime, as the Ainu were represented as Japanese subjects within the “imperial family”, and at the end of the fifties when entertainment cinema presented the Ainu according to the codes of the Hollywood Western on the one hand; and Mikio Naruse proposed a new portrayal focusing on the Ainu as a long-discriminated social collective rather than as an ethnic group, on the other. However, Tadayoshi Himeda’s series of seven documentaries following the Ainu leader Shigeru Kayano’s activities marked a significant shift in Ainu iconography. Himeda challenged both the postwar institutional discourse on the inexistence of minorities in Japan, and the touristic and ahistorical image that concealed the Ainu’s cultural assimilation to Japanese culture. The proposed films do not try to show an exotic people but a conventional people struggling to recover their collective past.

1968 and rural Japan as a site of struggle. Approaches to rural landscapes in the history of Japanese documentary film

“…For example, Lumière brother´s catalogs and subsequent travelogues across the world showed the boundaries of the new Japanese empire. 10 By the late-1930s, nonfiction formats were being used to show the developments of the war in China. But Fumio Kamei noted that Snowed Country marked an inward turn toward a new kind of exoticism found within rural Japan.…”