07/31/2017

Grave robbery: ceremonial return of an Ainu skull (Berlin, July 31)

An important step for indigenous peoples: Japan must finally end discrimination against the Ainu (Press Release)

Although Japan has officially recognized the Ainu as an indigenous community in 2008, most of the up to 100,000 indigenous people feel discriminated against in Japanese society – and their land rights on the island of Hokkaido, where most of the Ainu lived for centuries, are usually not recognized. Photo: cactusbeetroot via Flickr

According to the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), the Berlin Ethnological Collections are finally paying the indigenous peoples of Japan the necessary respect. The human rights organization welcomes the plans to return an Ainu skull, which was taken from a grave in the nineteenth century, as an “important step” for the indigenous community and for all of Japan, because this is the first time that Ainu bones which were taken abroad are returned. “However, the suffering of the Ainu continues to this day. They are still discriminated against in their home country,” explained Ulrich Delius, the director of the STP, in Göttingen. “The ceremonial return of the remains should not be used to conceal the fact that situation of the indigenous community is still problematic. Japan must finally respect the people’s rights in everyday life and go to more trouble to protect them and to ensure that they are treated as equal citizens.”

Today, the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory (BGAEU) will hand over the skull to Japanese government representatives during a ceremony at the Japanese embassy in Berlin. In 1880, Georg Schlesinger, a German traveler, reported that the skull had been secretly taken from a clearly marked Ainu grave near Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido. The skull was used for measurements in the context of anthropological research – as the Ainu were considered to be one of the oldest peoples of the world, and the renowned university professor Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) had been trying to find bones of native inhabitants of Japan for his anthropological research. There are also other Ainu skulls and bones in the Berlin Ethnological Collections – but they either originate from the island of Sakhalin (now belonging to Russia) or they weren’t robbed.

The Japanese government is planning to set up a national memorial for ethnic harmony and for the history of the Ainu in April 2020, before the beginning of the Olympic Summer Games in Tokyo. Although Japan has officially recognized the Ainu as an indigenous community in 2008, most of the up to 100,000 indigenous people feel discriminated against in Japanese society – and their land rights on the island of Hokkaido, where most of the Ainu lived for centuries, are usually not recognized. In surveys, more than 70 percent of the Ainu stated to feel discriminated against and treated as inferior in everyday life. Thus, many indigenous people deny their identity, and there aren’t many who would publicly admit to belong to the Ainu.

Header Photo: cactusbeetroot via Flickr