Hokkaido Highway Blues

and oil refineries. On either side, the pincer claws of Aomori’s northern peninsulas closed in as we slid by, like a lover escaping an embrace.
    I pulled my hood down and stood on the deck, face in the wind, the taste of salt water in the air. I might have stayed out there in my heroic pose for the entire crossing, but the winds were cold and I had to pee.
    Inside, there was only the hum and throb of the engines and that suffocating silence of a ferry at night. Bodies were asleep at all angles, as though nerve gas had swept through the cabin. I wandered among strangers and ended up sharing a room with a cigarette-smoking, swampy-eyed man and a woman who scowled in her sleep.
     

 
     

 
     

1
     
    HOKKAIDO IS A vast, underpopulated island with a climate that is closer to Oslo’s than Tokyo’s. The summers are short and the winters are long; this is a place that sees icebergs off its northern coast.
    In many ways, Hokkaido is the least “Japanese” of all the main islands. It’s Texas and Alaska rolled into one. The last frontier and the end of Japan. It was not formally colonized until after the Meiji Reformation of 1868, and even then it wasn’t completely opened up by settlers until the 1880s—at about the same time that the American Wild West was at its peak, with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday blasting away at the OK Corral. Hokkaido even looks like the American West.
    This is cattle country, with rolling fields, high mountains, and shimmering Texas-style metropolises. They even have their very own oppressed aboriginal minority, the Ainu. The Ainu were seafarers, fur trappers, and hunters, and though they had no written language, they passed down yukar, epic sagas, from generation to generation. They worshipped the bear, they tattooed themselves in elaborate—almost Celtic—patterns, they built a complex system of salmon weirs and lived in interconnecting communities along the northern riverways.
    Where the Ainu came from remains something of a mystery. The consensus seems to be that they migrated from the Siberian steppes. Their skin is paler than that of most Asian people, but they are not—as many commentators purport—Caucasian. Nor are they particularly “hairy” (The fact that the Japanese describe the Ainu as being hairy—and, as often as not, “smelly”—says more about Japanese prejudices than it does about actual Ainu physiognomy)
    Although not formally conquered, the Ainu in the northern regions were brought under heel by the early shōguns. In 1669 a widespread Ainu uprising was brutally crushed, and for two hundred years they remained a subjugated people. It was only in the late nineteenth century that they were formally annexed as a people and as an island. The Ainu were stripped of their ancestral rights, forced onto farmlands and into enclaves, and made to renounce their religion and culture. Their language was banned, and they were deemed “noncitizens.”
    The Ainu were not officially recognized as being Japanese citizens until 1992. The Japanese government refuses to use the term indigenous when discussing the Ainu (to avoid having to accept responsibility for what happened and to stave off growing demands for a land claims settlement). An important point: the Ainu never ceded their lands nor ever acknowledged Japanese authority, making them one of the few aboriginal groups in the world that have never been offered a treaty by the people who invaded their territory. In a nation like Japan, which has decreed itself “racially and culturally homogenous,” people like the Ainu simply do not enter the paradigm/mythology. At best they are a novelty, a source of amusement. At worst, they are simply pests.
    Today, twenty-four thousand people claim Ainu ancestry, but few are pure-blooded and their language is all but dead, thanks largely to a relentless and concentrated campaign of assimilation mounted by the Japanese government. The Ainu influence appears to have once extended quite far south into Honshu—the “Fuji” in Mount Fuji is thought to be of Ainu origin—but the present-day Ainu have been reduced to a tawdry tourist sideshow. Ainu elders sit stoically, baring their tattoos like lepers on display, while Japanese tourists giggle and pose beside them for photographs. It is very dispiriting, these human zoos, and it was one of the reasons I decided to avoid the main tourist areas around Akan Lake, once an Ainu heartland and now, well —not an Ainu heartland.
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