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Indigeneity is misrepresentation: Delaney Johnson, Ainu (mis)representation: A close reading of contemporary Japanese media, MA dissertation, University of Victoria, 2026

29Aug26

Abstract: The concept of the Japanese nation, the “identity” of the Japanese people, and the external and internal political, ethnic, and historical relationships Japan has fostered have often been precariously feeble. These concepts, I argue, are especially prevalent regarding Japan’s relationship with the Ainu, the peoples Indigenous to Japan’s northernmost island, in Hokkaido. From the Tokugawa period (1600 C.E.–1868 C.E.) to the Meiji era (1868 C.E.–1912 C.E.), Japanese governmental bodies deployed significant colonial tactics either to culturally assimilate Ainu peoples into Japanese society or to alienate and ostracise Ainu communities to create an “exoticized” aesthetic and marked spatial “difference” from Japanese culture. It is the latter description which is central to this thesis and is the main method identified by which Ainu peoples are represented in modern Japanese-made media. This project includes a selection of primary works— Osamu Tezuka’s 1962 comic, Yuusha Dan, and Rintaro’s 1985 animated film, Kamui no Ken—as the basis for evaluation. This thesis aims to explore a broader discussion of Japanese creative works within historical contexts by performing a close reading of Yuusha Dan and Dagger of Kamui. Utilising frameworks, such as Tessa Morris Suzuki’s commentary on mass media’s representations of historical narratives, Sidney Xu Lu’s discussion of Malthusian expansionism, and Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” this analysis uncovers that contemporary Japanese media of the later twentieth century represents Ainu peoples and Ainu ancestral lands within mystifying, phantasmal, and exotic pretenses, thus perpetuating Meiji era colonial paradigms of Ainu peoples. In identifying these themes, this research underscores the intersection where Ainu myths become a foundation for the practical necessity of Japanese colonial realities, and how these notions are repeated and reinterpreted into modernity.


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