Indigenous Archaeology in Japan: An Indigenous Outsider’s Inside Perspective

About 2500 years ago, people from the Korean peninsula migrated to the Japanese archipelago, bringing with them metal tools, wet-rice agriculture, and associated social structures different from that of the local Jōmon culture with which they inter-mingled. The resulting culture, known archaeologically as the Yayoi, formed the basis for the Japanese state. It was at this time that the trajectories of the archaeological cultures of the Japanese mainland and Hokkaidō Island began diverging. This divergence contributed to the historic and contemporary relationships between ethnic Japanese (Wajin) and Ainu people, such that the Japanese considered themselves “civilized” and the Ainu “barbarians.” In the nineteenth century, the Meiji government fully xcolonized Hokkaidō and the Ainu, exerting social and political control over the Ainu groups living there. In this article, I offer a brief background on the archaeology of Japan, with attention to the differential culture history of the ethnic Japanese and Ainu. Following this, I present a brief discussion of the Ainu to situate their historical and political position in contemporary Japanese society. I then provide an overview of Indigenous archaeology with a more focused discussion of its recent history in Japan and a critical evaluation of its possibilities and ways it could be beneficial to the Ainu. Finally, I discuss the ways that archaeological resources are again being used to create a new, homogenized nationalist past as a faux reflection of Japan’s “homogenous” culture.