There are a few pockets of Ainu spaces online.

December 26, 2019 9:06 AM

Ainu Instagram. English language Ainu museum websites. Via this page whose 'more you might like' offers an excellent curation of Ainu related content on Tumblr, better than a direct search.
posted by Mrs Potato (14 comments total)

I visited the sites posted, and can't tell you anything about what Ainu is, outside of (and I'm guessing here), "something Japanese." (just wikipedia'd it, Russian indigenous people. My mistake)

I would love some context, if you'd care to share that in either a link or a short blurb about what these links are about, and who the audience is.

Seems like I'm missing out...
posted by Chuffy at 10:28 AM on December 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

The Ainu are a people indigenous to Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan.
posted by praemunire at 10:30 AM on December 26, 2019 [9 favorites]

Oh gosh. THANK YOU.
posted by Young Kullervo at 12:18 PM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

The full text of Ainu : spirit of a northern people (1999 Smithsonian exhibit catalogue) is up on the Internet Archive and can be downloaded.
posted by gudrun at 12:31 PM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

The Ainu have a very complex genetic legacy among East Asian populations (as well as North American indigenes, if I'm reading that link correctly).

I've never been able to get straight what language group linguists think they fit into.
posted by jamjam at 1:18 PM on December 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've never been able to get straight what language group linguists think they fit into.

It's a language isolate. Any relationship is just too far back in the past to be demonstrated - the evidence is gone.

Isolates aren't terribly uncommon, but they tend to attract attention. Some linguists have proposed that they're related to various other Asian languages, but none of these proposals are widely accepted.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 4:19 PM on December 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

I am stoked to learn more about the Ainu. Thanks for the post!
posted by rhizome at 4:19 PM on December 26, 2019

My family has always kidded that I may be part Ainu, but due to ambiguities in my grandparents generation, it may actually be true.
posted by snofoam at 5:03 PM on December 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

There are also a lot of FPP's about the Ainu people in the Related Posts section, including this article about how the Ainu are/were discriminated against by the Japanese, and how they're asserting & sharing their cultural heritage.

Yeah, I didn't think I'd need to introduce or contextualize the FPP but I should have done a previously but technically it wasn't a previously per se and the related section seems more natural.
posted by Mrs Potato at 3:17 AM on December 27, 2019

thank you for this, it's absolutely fascinating, I had no idea there was an indigenous population of any part of japan at all. Dr. Kinko Ito, a professor of sociology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock , made a documentary in 2015 about the Aino peoples and it's on youtube in it's entirety.
posted by FirstMateKate at 9:03 AM on December 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

The Ainu are facing a lot of the same pressures faced by Native American and other indigenous people regarding their definition of culture: they have been gradually swallowed up by Japanese culture and language for centuries - most courses in Ainu language are taught by Japanese teachers - with the greatest changes coming in the last century. Maintaining Ainu identity became more and more difficult as the Ainu language disappears: it is probably down to less than ten elderly people who can speak it fluently, none of whom are going to raise children who would speak the language fluently. That's how a language dies. You can fund language museums, produce language CDs, but unless you have a community sending its children to preschool in the language there is not going to be a revival.
That doesn't mean that Ainu will have disappeared as a people, but as these instagram pages show, modern Ainu identity is something that has to interact and bargain with the dominant modern Japanese identity all the time.
posted by zaelic at 11:23 AM on December 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

I had no idea there was an indigenous population of any part of japan at all.

You might also be interested in the Ryukyuan peoples.
posted by Not A Thing at 12:37 PM on December 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Thanks for posting this, I am enjoying digging into the links! The list of Instagram accounts is great as I use my account mainly for learning about other people, cultures, social justice issues, etc. I highly recommend that approach, social media can work in our favor in that way. Thanks!
posted by fairlynearlyready at 2:20 PM on December 27, 2019

I will just add the Instagram feed for HaruKor, a fantastic Ainu restaurant that I really should visit more often.
posted by Umami Dearest at 6:02 AM on December 28, 2019