Translation across space and meaning: Katsuya Hirano, Daniel Abbe, ‘Settler-Colonial Translation: “Civilization” and the Ainu Voices’, in Talal Asad, Jun’ichi Isomae, Naoki Sakai, Katsuya Hirano, Gouranga Charan Pradhan (eds), Beyond the Untranslatable: Theorizing Postcolonial Translation, Routledge, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Translation across space and meaning: Katsuya Hirano, Daniel Abbe, ‘Settler-Colonial Translation: “Civilization” and the Ainu Voices’, in Talal Asad, Jun’ichi Isomae, Naoki Sakai, Katsuya Hirano, Gouranga Charan Pradhan (eds), Beyond the Untranslatable: Theorizing Postcolonial Translation, Routledge, 2026

26Jun26

Abstract: In this chapter, I examine how imperial Japan’s settler colonization of Hokkaido produced a regime of translation that effectively rendered the Indigenous Ainu people a vanishing race. Focusing on Kyosuke Kindaichi, the founder of Ainu linguistic studies, and his relationship with his Ainu assistant, Yukie Chiri, I maintain that the contemporary translation practices of Japanese linguists functioned as a mode of domination, enabling the settler-colonial logic of dispossession and elimination to masquerade as a civilizing mission aimed at liberating the Ainu. I show that this paradoxical logic of liberal humanism—simultaneously erasing and claiming to protect—was structured by the binary of humanitas and anthropos as argued by Naoki Sakai, as well as by Talal Asad’s concept of the violence inherent in secular translation. By situating the regime of translation within these theoretical frameworks, I highlight how linguistic practices can reproduce systemic violence and explore the broader ethical and political dimensions of translation under settler-colonial conditions.

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