NEW YORK –
An Ainu Summer Festival showcasing the Indigenous individuals’s various traditions opened on the Japan Society in New York on July 22, bringing artists, cultural practitioners and educators from Hokkaido to the United States in a serious worldwide tribute to pioneering Ainu chief Shigeru Kayano.
More than 25 individuals, together with conventional craft artists and cultural inheritors from Biratori, Hokkaido, traveled to New York for a program that includes movies, dance performances, lectures, meals tastings, language shows and workshops on woodcarving and embroidery. The competition is being held over 4 days on July 22, July 23, August 12 and August 13.
The occasion was organized by Biratori and the Japan Society to commemorate the a hundredth anniversary of Kayano’s beginning. Born within the Biratori group of Nibutani on June 15, 1926, Kayano turned probably the most influential figures within the fashionable revival of Ainu language, tradition and political rights.
Kayano grew up at a time when many Ainu households confronted poverty, discrimination and powerful stress to desert their language and customs. Japanese assimilation insurance policies had disrupted conventional life, whereas the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 handled the Ainu as individuals to be absorbed into mainstream Japanese society moderately than as an Indigenous inhabitants with a definite tradition.
Raised amongst audio system of the Saru dialect of the Ainu language, Kayano discovered conventional tales, songs and beliefs from older kinfolk, notably his grandmother. Ainu was a part of his childhood surroundings, however Japanese was the language of formal schooling and public life.
Like many Ainu kids of his technology, Kayano skilled discrimination and initially sought to distance himself from his background. He later wrote that his outlook modified as he noticed researchers and collectors take ceremonial objects, family utensils and different culturally essential supplies out of Ainu communities.
Fearing that the objects and the information hooked up to them would disappear, Kayano started amassing conventional implements within the Nineteen Fifties. He spent years touring by way of Ainu communities, buying or receiving instruments, clothes, ritual objects and on a regular basis objects whereas recording how that they had been made and used.
His assortment ultimately grew to incorporate 1000’s of artifacts. In 1972, he opened a museum in Nibutani to show and protect them, creating the establishment now generally known as the Shigeru Kayano Nibutani Ainu Museum. His work additionally contributed to the event of the close by Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum, serving to set up the small Saru River group as considered one of Japan’s most essential facilities for Ainu cultural preservation.
Kayano didn’t deal with the objects merely as reveals from a vanished society. He regarded them as a part of a dwelling tradition and labored with craftspeople and youthful residents to protect the information wanted to make and use them.
Language turned one other central a part of his work. Kayano recorded elders reciting oral narratives, epic poems, prayers, songs and accounts of conventional customs, preserving voices and expressions that may in any other case have been misplaced.
Ainu tradition had traditionally been transmitted largely by way of speech moderately than a broadly used Indigenous writing system. As the variety of fluent audio system declined, Kayano transcribed oral traditions utilizing written notation and translated them into Japanese, constructing an intensive document for future generations.
He turned generally known as an achieved narrator of Ainu oral literature and revealed quite a few collections of folktales and epic narratives. His books launched Ainu views to readers all through Japan and abroad, whereas his recordings later turned essential sources for researchers, lecturers and language revitalization initiatives.
Kayano established an Ainu language college in Nibutani in 1983, offering native kids and adults with a possibility to review a language that earlier generations had usually been discouraged from talking. The initiative helped encourage the creation of further Ainu language lessons in Hokkaido and elsewhere.
He additionally ready educating supplies and took half in radio schooling. His scholarship culminated within the publication of an intensive Ainu-Japanese dictionary in 2002, documenting vocabulary from the language he had heard and spoken within the Saru River area.
Kayano wrote scores of books on Ainu tradition, historical past and language. His memoir, revealed in English as Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir, described the lack of Ainu land, the hardships skilled by his household and his gradual resolution to commit his life to cultural restoration.
His activism ultimately moved from museums, school rooms and publications into native politics. Kayano was elected to the Biratori Town Council in 1975 and served for practically twenty years, utilizing the place to advertise cultural schooling and defend the pursuits of the Ainu group.
He later entered nationwide politics and joined the House of Councillors in 1994, changing into the primary overtly Ainu lawmaker to serve in Japan’s National Diet. He remained within the higher home till July 1998.
Kayano often used the Ainu language within the Diet, giving it an unprecedented presence within the heart of Japanese political energy. His election carried symbolic significance for a individuals whose language and id had lengthy been marginalized by authorities coverage.
One of crucial political struggles of his life involved the development of the Nibutani Dam on the Saru River. The river and surrounding land had deep cultural and non secular significance for the native Ainu group, supporting fishing, ceremonies and the transmission of conventional information.
Kayano and fellow Ainu landowner Koichi Kaizawa challenged the obligatory acquisition of land for the dam. Although development proceeded and the disputed land was finally submerged, the lawsuit produced a landmark resolution from the Sapporo District Court on March 27, 1997.
The court docket discovered that the federal government had failed to present enough consideration to Ainu tradition when approving the challenge and acknowledged the Ainu as an Indigenous individuals with a definite tradition. The judgment turned a turning level in Japanese authorized historical past, regardless that the court docket didn’t order the finished dam to be eliminated.
Kayano additionally performed a distinguished function within the marketing campaign to abolish the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act. The regulation, enacted in 1899, had remained in pressure for practically a century regardless of criticism that its terminology and assimilationist method have been discriminatory.
In 1997, the Diet repealed the laws and enacted a brand new regulation selling Ainu tradition and the dissemination of data about Ainu traditions. The measure was restricted in that it concentrated totally on tradition moderately than recognizing broad Indigenous rights, but it surely represented a serious departure from the insurance policies of the earlier century.
The passage of the regulation was one of many defining achievements of Kayano’s time in nationwide politics. It gave institutional assist to cultural promotion and language analysis whereas growing public consciousness of Ainu historical past.
Kayano continued his cultural and political work after leaving the Diet. He spoke about Indigenous rights, educated guests at his museum and inspired youthful Ainu to study their language with out disgrace.
In 2001, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Class, in recognition of his public service and cultural contributions. He died of pneumonia at a hospital in Sapporo on May 6, 2006, on the age of 79.
Two years after his dying, each homes of the Diet adopted a decision recognizing the Ainu as an Indigenous individuals in June 2008. Japan later enacted the Ainu Policy Promotion Act in 2019, the primary nationwide regulation to explicitly describe the Ainu as Indigenous.
Kayano didn’t dwell to see these later developments, however his analysis, political advocacy and authorized challenges helped create the circumstances that made them doable. His work additionally left bodily and linguistic archives that stay central to up to date efforts to revive Ainu tradition.
His son Shiro Kayano has continued the household’s work as director of the Shigeru Kayano Nibutani Ainu Museum and thru language schooling and cultural preservation actions in Biratori.
Throughout 2026, Biratori is holding a collection of occasions beneath the Shigeru Kayano Memorial 100 program. A joint exhibition at three museums within the city, together with the Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum, the Saru River Historical Museum and the Shigeru Kayano Nibutani Ainu Museum, is scheduled from September 1 to November 15.
The exhibition’s title attracts on an expression cherished by Kayano that may be understood as that means “a human being worthy of being called human.” Through artifacts, language, movie and private testimony, the exhibition will hint his efforts to dwell his tradition, restore satisfaction and rights, and move Ainu information to future generations.
The New York competition carries that work past Japan by presenting Ainu traditions not as relics of the previous however as parts of a dwelling Indigenous tradition maintained by up to date artists, educators and households.
A century after Kayano’s beginning and 20 years after his dying, the performances and workshops on the Japan Society mirror the central precept of his life: that cultural survival relies upon not solely on preserving objects and written data, however on permitting individuals to talk, create, educate and follow their traditions overtly.
Source: Kyodo