This article examines a particular instance of Ainu counter-narrative and colonial indigeneity that emerged in an Ainu school named Abuta gakuen established by Oyabe Zenichirō in 1905. The Ainu schools exposed contradictory systematic forces of Ainu inclusion and exclusion. Japanese teachers transformed Ainu children and communities and attempted to incorporate them into the modern Japanese system; however, the Ainu school curriculum was kept simple and differed from that of other Japanese elementary schools. One key figure was Yoshida Iwao (1882-1963), who was a Japanese ethnographer, a colonial educator of the Ainu, and an adviser to the government of Hokkaido. Although Yoshida won extensive respect and praise from both the Wajin (ethnic Japanese) and Ainu public, he was deeply troubled by his experience teaching in the Ainu schools. Yoshida’s personal conflicts vis-à-vis his double missions of Ainu education and ethnography were highlighted while he was teaching Japanese history at Abuta gakuen. In these moments in the classroom, while the Ainu children were constituting their subjectivity by speaking and crying, Yoshida was de-constituting his subjectivity by remaining silent. However, both Yoshida and the Ainu students shared the moment of articulation of the contradictions within Japanese colonialism, coupled with a simultaneously unsolvable despair on the part of Yoshida. In this article, I analyze this unusual moment by reading Yoshida’s documented archives and his feelings, particularly his distress expressed in speeches and essays. By sharing these moments of despair in the classroom, Ainu children also experienced the complex interrelated workings of Japanese colonial modernity.
Kazumi Hasegawa (Sun,) studied this question.