The Ainu, the Indigenous people of Japan
hakaimagazine.com
hakaimagazine.com
1) Fascinating story. I had no idea the Ainu existed. Their way of life seems very reminiscent of the Haida and other indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest.
2) I thought the author's description of the iyomante was precious and patronizing. TLDR: according to the article, the iyomante is the ritualized slaughter of an adult bear that has been taken from its mother as an infant and raised in confined captivity. It's not a quick death, according to the article:
> At the start of the ceremony, an elder offered a prayer first to the goddess of the fire and hearth, Fuchi. The elder led the men to the bear cage. They prayed. They released the bear to exercise and play, then shot him with two blunt arrows before strangling and beheading him, freeing the spirit. People feasted, they danced, they sang. They decorated the head and an old woman recited sagas of Ainu Mosir, the floating world that rested on the back of a fish.
I get that knowing how this ceremony was carried out is extremely important anthropologically, and there's something to admire in the extent to which the Ainu were connected to the ecosystem in which they lived. That said, I thought the article really went out of its way to romanticize the captivity and torture of a non-domesticated wild animal.
Both the non-Ainu "regular Japanese" and the modern Ainu have indigenous common ancestors.
I thought it was turtles all the way down. Is the fish on the back of the topmost turtle?
No it's not. Being attracted or repulsed by other people's behavior is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human.
Of course, if you are doing or studying anthropology, you should be as objective as possible. But in the course of just being a person, it's good to be critical, because basically everyone is doing almost everything wrong, and it's good to point that out when you see it.
That is, any group can arbitrarily make up rules and belief systems that point in any arbitrary direction. Just because you happen to be apart of a larger group, doesn't mean yours are any better than anyone elses.
A simple example can be summed up with the mutilation of genitals. At a first glance an uneducated person would probably say "no, that's completely wrong, I don't care what anyone says, there is something fundamentally crazy about mutilating your genitals." An educated person would have at least taken 10 minutes to hear out that, some people are born believing their sex is incorrect and to help them live a better life they sometimes modify their genitals to match the sex they believe themselves to be.
Very Star Trek.
Aside from that, Star Trek has Latinum bars and Credits as the plot dictates.
It seems the Ainu are considered indigenous because some have maintained their culture instead of assimilating into the larger group, which is unlike the Jomon and Yayoi people who many believe are the ancestors of modern Japanese people.
"Indigenous" is frequently used in a context where a people's rights to their ancestral lands are threatened. It is an assertion of their claim to places where they are threatened. In the case of the Ainu, much of Japanese colonization and colonialism was justified with the ideology that the Ainu were "dying race" or "disappearing". This was acompanied by the usual policies of social oppression and linguicide—taking them away from their parents to Japanese-only schools and beating or shaming them if they dared to speak the language of their parents.
Sort of. It's worth clarifying that "indigenous peoples" is a specific legalistic term which connotes more (less?) than just "indigenous". In that context the "Yamato people" as the dominant cultural group in Japan typically do not qualify as an "indigenous people". Confusing matters further, "indigenous" itself is often used in the same, more restrictive context.
Not what it means.
This is true in Australia and the US as well, the Aboriginals and Native Americans just came several thousand years before the next waves of settlement.
I'm certainly not claiming that 'indigenous' means their ancestors literally sprouted from that ground.
There are some other relevant characteristics, which make the definition a bit fuzzy.
The biggest one is that they need to have retained some identifiable aspects of their culture in the face of subsequent settlement.
But to a first approximation, first to settle - or at least being among the first to settle - is the primary basis for determining indigenousness.
We were recently in Northern Hokkaido, but didn't have enough time in Abashiri to visit the prison museum. That part of the island is nothing like the rest of Japan.
Samurai Showdown was straight up a 90s arcade game, which arguably means that Nakoruru's placement as a Ainu character would have been before the official recognition of those people.
Nakoruru's moveset revolved around her Bird (either a falcon or an eagle... I forgot exactly), as well as her own dagger style. So it seems like the Ainu are very similar to the Native American tropes (Natural and close to the earth).
If you're interested in this sort of thing, there has been more written on the okinowan experience which is similar.
What really gets me is the obvious role this ritual plays. It is a baby-killing game. It is meant to harden people against the slaughter of a being raised as a member of the family. It was raised as more than a pet. Women nursed this animal. Then they tortured it to death. How did those women feel? Watching such things, accepting them as normal, makes killing of friends and family that much easier. This is torture being used to enable more torture and is far from unique. Shall we also celebrate how our ancestors trained themselves to be cruel? Should the British Navy celebrating the grand traditions of whipping sailors?
This is how I feel about dog ownership. We take children from their species, sterilize them, and gaslight them into thinking they're part of our family instead. The only reason dogs are domesticated is because we've been inbreeding their species for thousands of years and they literally can no longer live in nature because of how we've bred them. If anything, raising, hunting, and killing an animal is more natural than what we do.
The tl;dr is that dogs really do identify us as family, and in all likelihood, the first ancestral wolves to become domesticated dogs took as many co-evolutionary steps towards us as we did them.
Humans and dogs have been evolving alongside each other for at least 15,000 years. The sorts of dog breeds that can't survive in the wild (bulldogs, etc.) are a fairly recent innovation in all of that time, dating back to the mid 1800s and the emergence of the modern breeding program.
Dogs like being with us as much as we like having them around. They were the first domesticated species, and they are literally the only mammals we know of who can read human facial expressions and emotions as well as the great apes can. Our relationship with them is a partnership, not an enslavement.
If you want to take issue with the way humans treat animals, there are so many better targets for outrage than our treatment of the dog. Take the cow or the chicken, for instance, most of whom lead a tortured and awful existence and would want nothing to do with us in a state of nature.
Another example is Deer. I live in New Jersey and we have an overpopulation of Deer, to which the most common response is that we should cull them so they don't become dangerous to roads. The moral stance would be to design our transportation in a way that doesn't frequently kill other species. Another common response is that the overpopulation will lead to them dying anyway as their isn't enough food to sustain them, so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.
The Ainu people believe that their treatment of bears is just. I'm just pointing out that I'd rather see all of these animals free from human emotional projection.
There are too few wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, and bears to keep the population in check, so we do it.
>so the argument boils down to kill them because they're going to die anyway.
There's more to it than that. Overpopulation will cause damage to more than just deer. One of the biggest is the increase in the deer tick population and the subsequent increase in Lyme disease.
Instead of killing them ourselves, we could try to reintroduce predators, but why would a deer prefer being killed by a mountain lion to being killed by a human?
I'm ok with that but I think you'd find that an untenable policy for most Americans.
We have reintroduced wolves to national parks like Yellowstone, evidently with great success. I hope we do the same in other national parks if/where needed. Wolves do not prey on humans, contrary to popular belief, and generally keep a lot of distance from wandering hikers or campers.
Nature may not be "fair," but all things considered, I'd rather we let the wolves do the job of deer population control than humans. We are not as good at it, and we also pump the ecosystem full of heavy metals while we're shooting at the critters.
Wherever you see a forest where there is a deer problem, the trees you see today will not be replaced when they die.
Deer eat all the undergrowth and new saplings.
> I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer
Source: Thinking Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold http://www.eco-action.org/dt/thinking.html
There are many problems with dog breeding though. The health and wellbeing of the animals do not seem to be prime motivations in at least some breeds.
But at least it contrasts with cows and chickens, which are domesticated and selectively bred as meat producing machines that survive just long enough for slaughter (for 99.99% of individuals of those species).
From the perspective of nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, humans create a huge number of niches which dozens (hundreds?) of species have evolved to fill. (And to be fair, eliminated a vast number of niches as well.) We've created niches like "human head and body hair", which lice exploit, "provide emotional support for humans", which dogs and cats fill, "carry heavy shit for humans", which horses, donkeys and oxen have filled (and still do, in some places), and "produce huge numbers of delicious offspring, most of whom humans will eat", which pigs and chickens and cows fill.
From nature's perspective, these niches are no more strange or unnatural than the bacteria which live in guts to break down plant matter for their hosts, the birds that pick insects off of large animals, coral reefs or the ants that farm aphids. Even meat animals aren't really a significant aberration: countless species produce huge amounts of young, from dozens to millions at a time, with only one or two of those offspring surviving to reproduce themselves ("r selection").
Nature is all about the survival of the genes most fit for the existing niches. It doesn't care about what niches existed in the past or might exist in the future, and it doesn't share your biases. As far as nature is concerned, cows and dogs are more fit than buffalo and wolves, because cows and dogs are better-adapted to the existing niches.
You can choose to believe otherwise, that wolves are inherently superior to dogs and buffalo to cows, but that's your judgement, not nature's.
In fact it can explain why I have empathy with other living things, and want them to have happy lives. Maybe that will be an expanding niche, who knows. I know nature doesn't care, but I do.
If, as you rightly claim, everything is just interacting fields, should it make or break the argument if the specific interaction of particular (as yet unknown) combinations of fields is as yet unknown?
It can also be questioned if an individual's thoughts are special enough in the grandest scheme of things - or if they're merely a mechanism, that seems special to the body where those thoughts are occurring. For example, moving away from humans: animals have thoughts too, yet their behavior(s) can be abstracted into proper theories (apex predator theory, food chains, etc.) backed with sufficient evidence, without much regard to the thoughts of individual creatures, or even entire species - classifying creatures as predator vs prey is sufficient to study a lot of large scale ecological phenomena.
Of course, there can be various kinds of explanations for why one feels empathy for others - evolution: humans evolved to live in groups and empathy was an asset to group-living, incentives/economic: those that show consideration for others were similarly reciprocated, etc. etc.
PS: I wrote the parent, different alias.
PPS: the dog breeding problems are very real, and I do hope a rich dog-loving American can hire veterinarians and lawyers to simply sue some of the organizations involved in setting/promoting the ludicrous breed standards (resulting in GSDs with sloping backs, pugs that can't even breed without human assistance, etc.). The difference with cows and chickens is one can find enough dog lovers to make an actual issue out of this, compared to (live) cow lovers or (live) chicken lovers.
Does that book talk about the phenomenon of baboons stealing puppies from wild dogs and raising them?
Every time we look at it we end up pushing back the date of human canine cohabitation. If it turns out that this coevolution with dogs predates hominids, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
The dog was, in all likelihood, domesticated multiple times over multiple thousands of years in various parts of the globe. The lineage that survived to present is likely to have come from the Fertile Crescent area, even though its domestication predates the agricultural revolution. (Dogs joined us when we were hunter-gatherers, and cats joined us when we settled down to store grain and thereby attracted rodents).
I am not convinced that non-human apes "domesticated" the dog the same way we did, even if modern apes seem capable of taking actions superficially analogous to domestication. Ancestral wolves specifically followed human camps around and lived among us for (presumably) thousands of years before it even occurred to us to domesticate them as such. By that time, nature had 'pre-selected' them for us -- the friendly and cooperative ones, who could survive at the margins of our hunting parties, outcompeted their more feral cousins, who kept their distance from humans and then starved when the mammoths ran out. The first ancient wolves we came into frequent, nonviolent contact with were, in all likelihood, the result of many generations of natural selection before we set about artificially selecting them.
Ironically, and counterntuitively, dogs were more naturally fit than wolves to survive in the early days of the Homo sapiens.
Dogs can't live in nature? I think that needs a citation. Or at least we need some kind of explanation for the apparently impossible phenomenon of stray and feral dogs.
Dogs with extremely flat faces (think pugs)? They have a lot of trouble breathing. Also, their eye sockets are shallow and so their eyes will pop out of the socket sometimes. There's a litany of health issues related to chasing the breed standard for dogs, sometimes related to how the standard has been taken to an extreme that deform the dog and sometimes related to the massive inbreeding that's happened as a result of chasing the breed standard.
There are certainly some dogs that can live in the wild, and there are certainly some breeders who try hard to be responsible about how they breed for the standard and how they breed their lines together, but the average purebred dog is not one you can just drop in the woods and it'll go find its own food and survive.
He fiercely guards food and will snap at anyone that reaches for him. He hunts insects including flies and cockroaches (he caught at least a few of those on our walks).
I don’t think he’d be as effective as a rat terrier, but I suspect he could hunt and kill field mice and maybe small rats.
There are ways to be responsible about pet ownership for animals like dogs and cats. It doesn't need to be this horrific experience you've painted it as.
People mostly treat their dogs in a straightforward way.
This bear stuff would be just fine too if they didn't torture it to death at the end.
This is false. The accepted mechanism is that wolves self-domesticated, and that humans and dogs co-evolved.
You have also misused the word 'children'.
Now puppy mills and the like are not good, but the very concept of dog ownership is wholesome.
In my observations (and some bias; I am openly admitting it) which were sometimes reinforced by meeting real Japanese people, most Japanese are xenophobes, racists and very easily collectively agree not to speak about stuff they dislike / feel threatens some imaginary dominance / endanger their prejudices.
For all the glorification the country and its people get around the globe, and for all the romantic blemish their fatalistic and stoic philosophy receives, the Japanese I've encountered and observed remotely are pretty ordinary people with a lot of prejudice and hostility towards foreigners attached.
Not impressed. And this news comes as no surprise as well.
Guess people just love to glorify stuff that's very different from their own, with zero thought if that's actually a good thing?
I lived in Japan for several years on and off. Near the end of one of my longest stretches, I clearly remember walking by the glass window of a storefront in Osaka. I saw someone in the reflection that had an absolutely startling appearance, and gasped aloud. Taller, with different hair, eyes, and skin than anyone I'd seen in months. It was me.
The experience of returning to the USA was particularly jarring that time, too. I remember feeling surprised at how fat everyone in the airport was, how there were people with different skin colors everywhere, how loud and lacking in politeness social interactions were. I was born and raised in the USA but there I was, experiencing fight or flight response in completely ordinary situations.
I learned to forgive the Japanese after these experiences.
You know, I couldn't give two shits about xenophobic and racist people like them, really. Let them do that and be happy.
As we say in my country however: "be stupid but get the fuck off the road".
Bad influences on young people from old and prejudiced (and bitter?) people is never good. We need a world with more open-minded people and societies like the Japanese aren't helping matters at all. But to be as objective as possible -- not sure our societies help matters either.
You've just described most groups of people, particularly in the older age brackets. People are afraid of what they don't understand and generally dislike change and unpredictability.
That's not to say that xenophobes/prejudiced people can't produce anything interesting or worthy of admiration. Isolation in many ways has led to interesting solutions to problems, and the preservation of culture can have benefits just as it has disadvantages.
Related: have you seen Japanese wood joinery? Gods, that thing is next level!