Screenplay by Marcos Centeno Martín, Almudena García Navarro; editing by Almudena Garcia Navarro; voice over, Mayumi Matsushita; DVD edition, Sento Paredes; soundtrack, Shōji Fukumoto and Barnakústica. [Japan]: Produced by Marcos Centeno Martín and Almudena García Navarro; Released within Año Dual España-Japon, 2014. 1 online resource (82 min.) In Spanish, Japanese, English and French, with English, Spanish and Japanese subtitles. Url: ainumemoryfilm.com. Online viewing and DVD contact: ainu.pathstomemory@gmail.com.
An 82-minute montage of interviews with museum specialists, scholars, and a limited number of Ainu culture bearers, the documentary Ainu: Paths to Memory represents the culmination of the efforts of Spanish filmmaker/scholar Marcos Centeno, capping nearly a decade of study of Japan’s minorities, to “try to find what were the possible ways to retrieve Ainu identity” (documentary Homepage). This film was created in conjunction with the four hundredth anniversary of Japanese and Spanish contact, under the auspices of the 400 Years of Relations fund. As “the first event of the Indigenous Ainu made in Spain,” it represents an important and much-needed first step to introduce the presence of the Indigenous Ainu people of Japan to contemporary non-English-speaking world audiences.
The film accurately portrays the Ainu as an Indigenous people of northern Japan, Sakhalin, the Kurile Islands, and the Kamchatka Peninsula, whose current population is estimated at between 30,000 and 300,000, and who were subjected to severe marginalization due to assimilation policies under Japanese expansionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Originally, Ainu were a hunter-gatherer people who also engaged in extensive trade with Japan to the south and Russia and China to the north. Under this expansionism, Ainu society and culture were decimated by stringent assimilation measures leading to severe poverty, which when combined with heavy social discrimination led to negative ascription and passing as mainstream ethnic Wajin Japanese. It is only in limited tourist regions and isolated cases of well-to-do or well-learned families that we find exceptions. Presently only a few Elders in their eighties and over can be regarded as speakers of the Ainu language.
Together with the United Nations-supported right to self-determination, the potential revitalization of the Ainu language and culture as everyday lived praxis remains tenuous and direly in need of a boost. Scholars and other depictors of the Ainu such as Mr. Centeno thus need to be mindful of their work’s potential influence in creating “external pressure” on the Japanese government to support indigenous Ainu rights. One of the most needed of these is a comprehensive policy to shift the nexus of knowledge about the Ainu, and decisions about its use, away from non-Ainu scholars and into the hands of Ainu cultural practitioners and scholars themselves (Cf. Linda Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, Zed Books, 1999).
In covering the majority of knowledge sources available as prospective building blocks of contemporary Ainu identity and the issues surrounding them, this work has touched upon all of the elements that it should have in its effort to “help the Ainu people in their task to regain their dignity and culture, and make it available as an aspect when approaching Japanese history.” Structured as a travel journey throughout the island of Hokkaido and beyond to Europe, centred around key interviews in each locale, the first half of the documentary seeks to dislodge the myth of Japanese ethnic homogeneity, and features the above themes of discrimination, assimilatory policies, disempowerment, loss of the Ainu language, history of research of the Ainu, and social and institutional hurdles to Ainu self-empowerment. The second half concentrates on issues of identity, generational attitudes toward the Ainu movement, the current state of cultural transmission, and issues of cultural authenticity.
On the other hand, contrary to recent films like Tokyo Ainu and Kamui to Ikiru, whose entire focus is on contemporary Ainu, Ainu: Paths to Memory, despite numerous shots from present-day Hokkaido, remains mainly a “tour of history,” relying on “the collaboration of several European museums that store large amounts of Ainu antiques and photographs; and the help of Japanese experts and researchers” for the bulk of its footage. This movie remains for the most part, as the title suggests, a review of pathways to culture featuring non-Ainu academics and experts. Out of a sum of approximately thirteen interviewees, only three Ainu are featured for a total of approximately fifteen minutes out of a 82-minute film. Thus, despite its good intentions, the film runs counter to recent trends in the academic disciplines of indigenous studies and anthropology toward prioritizing the indigenous voice, and thereby inadvertently poses the quite real danger of undermining Ainu self-determination (Smith, Decolonizing).
Meanwhile, value of cultural hybridity granted, the director’s choice to almost exclusively omit narrative and make the film content to “speak for itself” creates confusion as to the distinction between Ainu and Wajin interviewees, Ainu versus other locations, the Ainu and Japanese languages, and Ainu music versus music from other genres. For example, Wajin scholars are never identified as such, while Buddhist music such as the Heart Sutra is played in several key scenes featuring non-Buddhist Ainu.
Indigenous Ainu activism at the UN is only mentioned for the first time in the movie at minute 48, and at that in the context of the Ainu being used by other indigenous peoples. This reviewer got the impression that Mr. Centeno had not versed himself adequately enough in the ethics of working with indigenous populations (Cf. Alaska Federation of Natives Guidelines for Researchers), and that in this sense the film may have been shot a bit hastily ahead of its time, perhaps due to the four hundredth anniversary deadline. The film could have greatly assisted the status of the Ainu by seeking out contemporary activists to comment on the status of Ainu self-determination as an indigenous people vis-à-vis international human rights instruments.
The film poses the counter-intuitive challenge to the viewer of understanding possible ways to retrieve Ainu identity without first ever explicitly outlining who the contemporary Ainu are. In this sense viewers will need to put to use the ever-growing information provided in the extensive documentary homepage, to weave together the somewhat sketchy images and narratives of the film and retroactively supplement their understanding of the Ainu people. However, keeping the above caveats about foreign support for Ainu self-determination as well as scholarship driven by the Ainu themselves in mind, this film is on the mark in its spirit and I hope that the director will continue to pursue his cause of upgrading the website.
Jeffry Gayman
Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
pp. 757-759