Once upon a time, I was flipping through an encyclopedia of
hunter-gatherers, and came to the Ainu section, the wild people of Japan. There was a photo of a longhaired man, with a
long beard, standing knee deep in a stream, a fish hanging from his spear. I was immediately fascinated. The image did not blend in with my other
images of Japan — images of highly efficient people who spend their stressful lives
indoors, as we do. The wild man struck
an ancestral chord — many of my wild European ancestors were salmon people, too. I had to learn more.
Japan is not an archaeologist’s paradise, because the climate
is wet and the soil is acidic, so much of the evidence from the past has been
erased (annual rainfall is up to 120 inches / 300 cm). No one knows when humans arrived in Japan,
but it was not less than 32,000 years ago.
During the ice ages, sea levels were sometimes 500 feet (152 m) lower
than today, and there were periods when land bridges connected Japan to Korea
and mainland Russia. All the main
islands of Japan were also connected.
In Paleolithic times, Japan was home to mammoths, Yabe giant
deer, Naumann elephants, giant elk, brown bears, steppe bison, wild boars,
Siberian lions, aurochs, wolves, tigers, and horses. This also did not fit into my image of Japan,
because it was so incredibly wild, pure, and powerful. Our modern world is so empty. Most of these large animals vanished between
15,000 and 10,000 years ago, and humans played a role in this, as did a
changing climate.
The standard folk history declares that the Japanese were the
original human inhabitants of this land, but modern
research strongly indicates that they didn’t arrive until maybe 400 B.C. The Japanese seem to be closely related to
the Koreans,
but this notion is extremely offensive to both nations, because of centuries of
fierce mutual loathing. The immigrants
from the mainland got rolling on the island of Kyushu, in southern Japan (close
to Korea), in what is called the Yayoi period, which spanned from 300 B.C. to A.D.
300.
When the Yayoi colonists arrived, Japan was already inhabited
by the indigenous Jōmon hunter-gatherers.
The Jōmon period spanned from 12,000 B.C. to 300 B.C. The analysis of DNA and skull shapes
indicates that the Jōmon people were more closely related to the Ainu than the
Japanese. They lived in a land blessed
with an abundance of wild foods, a paradise for hunter-gatherers. This enabled them to live in permanent
villages, in population densities that were unusually high for hunting people. They may have engaged in horticulture on a
small scale, and they probably planted useful trees. They had no livestock, chiefs, or classes.
The Yayoi colonists were poor mainland farmers moving into a
land of prosperous hunter-gatherers.
Japan was also a farmer’s paradise.
Rain was abundant during the summer growing season, which led to plant
productivity that was well above average.
Some locales may have planted two crops per year. In the wake of 12,000 years of Jōmon
stability, the invasion of Yayoi farmers sparked an era of accelerated
ecological disruption, which continues to this day.
The colonists imported the Iron Age to Japan. They brought full-scale wet-rice agriculture
and full-scale warfare (moats, watchtowers, metal weapons, and abundant battle
casualties). They brought domesticated
pigs, wheel-thrown stoneware, and hierarchical society. Rapid population growth spurred ongoing expansion
into the lands of the wild folks. From
their start on the southern island of Kyushu, they spread northward, onto the
main island of Honshu.
It is likely that the ancestors of the Ainu once occupied all
the islands of Japan. Many locations have
place names that are Ainu, including Mount Fuji (Fuji means fire goddess). The Ainu language has no relationship with
any other language. In their appearance,
the Ainu resemble Caucasians, but their genes are Asian. The men have long beards, and “the most
profuse body hair of any people,” according to Jared Diamond.
Over the centuries, the rice farmers spread northward,
eventually occupying much of the main island of Honshu. Hokkaido and northern Honshu remained Ainu
turf for a long time, because the climate was not ideal for rice, and invaders
were clearly unwelcome. The Ainu
heroically resisted ongoing Japanese expansion, fighting major battles in 1457,
1669, and 1789. They lost all three, and
eventually fell under Japanese control.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese arrived in 1543, bringing with them
guns, missionaries, and smallpox. The
visitors were expelled in 1639, having worn out their welcome. Missionaries were either killed or
deported. Their 300,000 converts had to
choose between renouncing their faith or death.
All guns were rounded up, melted down, and recycled into a huge statue
of Buddha.
Japanese farmers acquired two new exotic crops, potatoes and
sweet potatoes, both highly productive.
A population explosion soon followed. By 1720, Tokyo was the biggest city in the
world. To feed the growing mob, efforts
were increased to acquire more food from the Ainu regions, via unsustainable commercial
hunting and fishing.
Eventually, the Ainu became dependent on the trading posts
for their survival. Acquiring goods,
primarily rice and sake, required them to hunt and fish at levels well beyond
traditional subsistence levels. At the
same time, diseases like smallpox, measles, cholera, and tuberculosis took a devastating
toll. By the time of the Meiji
Restoration in 1868, the Ainu were powerless to oppose Japanese expansion. The northern island of Hokkaido, the center
of the Ainu world, was annexed, and their lands were redistributed to Japanese
settlers.
On Hokkaido, the hunter-gatherer way of life survived until
the nineteenth century. Missionary John
Batchelor arrived there in 1877, and some of his Ainu friends still lived in
the traditional manner. In the woods,
they hunted bear, deer, raccoons, foxes, and hares. Along the coast were herring, cod, sardines,
mackerel, sole, plaice, sharks, swordfish, black fish, bonito, whales, seals,
walruses, porpoises, large crabs, shellfish, and seaweed. The streams provided abundant salmon, pike,
mud trout, and perch. On a small scale,
they grew sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and some vegetables. Old-timers remembered the abundance of
wildlife in the days of yesteryear, but this wealth was unknown to the younger
folks.
The Ainu seemed to be close to extinction, just a few hundred
survived. Batchelor wrote a book, to preserve
the memory of them. He lamented, “Whenever
I think of the quiet, free, un-anxious life they lived up there and compare
that time with the present I cannot help sighing. But those halcyon days departed when the tax collector
and modern civilization came in. I quite
enjoyed seeing their life of quiet security and simplicity, alas, now gone for
ever.”
The Hokkaido Aborigine Protection Act was passed in 1899. The Ainu were forced to speak Japanese, take
Japanese names, abandon ancient cultural practices, and become farmers. The Japanese oppressed and exploited them. By 1945, the Ainu language was nearly
extinct. Officially, in 1984, there were
about 25,000 Ainu in Japan, but the actual number was probably closer to
200,000. Many hid their identity to
avoid discrimination. There are few
full-blooded Ainu today, but many of mixed blood.
In 1992, the Ainu were officially recognized as indigenous people
by the United Nations. At that time, the
Japanese government still did not recognize their existence. In 2008, the government finally recognized
them as “an indigenous people who have their own language, religion, and
culture.”
In 1853, the American Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo,
bringing an end to 200 years of isolation and self-sufficiency. By 1914, Japan had become a bustling
industrial nation. Between 1910 and
2010, the population of Japan exploded from 51 million to 128 million.
Japan is the world’s third biggest producer of nuclear
energy. It has 50 reactors, of which six
are at Fukushima. All will need to be
safely decommissioned at some point in time, at great expense, to avoid future
horrors, hopefully.
According to the CIA
World Factbook, Japan
is the world’s second largest importer of natural gas, and the world’s third
largest importer of crude oil. There
will come a day when the supply of fossil energy becomes far more expensive and
unreliable, and this will close the curtains on industrial Japan.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Japan is the
world’s third largest importer of agricultural products. Based on total calories consumed, Japan
imports about 60 percent of its food each year.
In the coming decades, feeding the people will be a growing challenge.
The Ainu story is just one more rerun of farmers stomping
wild people. On the bright side, they
were lucky to enjoy a beautiful existence for thousands of years, as our wild
ancestors once did. The Japanese story
is just one more rerun of becoming addicted to an unsustainable habit, leading
to reckless overshoot, zooming down the fast lane to helter-skelter. Circle the progress in this picture. Following the collapse of the global
civilization, could we turn off the reruns?
Could we learn some vital lessons from our mistakes? Could we envision a way of life that works?
Ainu, First People of Japan, The Original
& First Japanese [7 minute
video]
Batchelor, John, Ainu
Life and Lore, Kyobunkwan, Tokyo, 1926.
Hudson, Mark, “Japanese
Beginnings,” A Companion
to Japanese History, edited by William M. Tsutsui, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, U.K.,
2009.
Kambayashi, Takehiko, “Japan's
Ainu Hope New Identity Leads To More Rights,” The Christian Science Monitor, June 9,
2008.
Lee, Richard B., and Daly, Richard, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Hunters and Gatherers, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999.
Starr, Frederick, The
Ainu Group at the Saint Louis Exposition, The Open Court Publishing
Company, Chicago, 1904. [Free download
from Google Books, well illustrated.]
Walker, Brett L., The
Conquest of Ainu Lands — Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion 1590-1800,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001.
No comments:
Post a Comment