Osteo-hermeneutics: Ainu racialization, de-indigenization, and bone theft in Japanese Hokkaido

Abstract

This article analyzes the late nineteenth century Euro-Japanese desecration of Ainu graves across the island of Hokkaido. Stolen Ainu crania were utilized by Japanese physical anthropologists such as Koganei Yoshikiyo and Kodama Sakuzaemon to define a ‘pure’ Ainu race. Amidst the ongoing dispossession of Ainu land and resources, these scholars deemed the increasingly racially mixed Ainu population ‘impure’, and thereby non-Ainu. Some, using ‘specimens’ of Ainu crania as evidence, displaced the racial origins of the Ainu outside of the space of their colonized homeland. Such scholarly research collectively ‘de-indigenized’ the Ainu and, by consequence, worked to reaffirm Japanese claims of Hokkaido as terra nullius (ownerless land). Accordingly, exogenous claims of ownership of both Ainu land and Ainu bodies were inextricably linked in the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido.