Ainu Geographic Names and an Indigenous History of the Herring in Hokkaido, Japan

IntroductionThe Ainu people are an indigenous people of Hokkaido Island of northern Japan (figure 1), as well as southern Sakhalin Island and the southern part of the Kuril Islands in Northeast Asia. They may have lived in the southernmost part of Kamchatka Peninsula and the Tohoku region in northern Japan as well ( Fitzhugh, 1999). Most Ainu people are believed to reside in Hokkaido today. According to a survey conducted by Hokkaido prefectural government in 2006, the present population of Ainu there is estimated to be approximately 24,000. However, this figure only reflects the Ainu population in Hokkaido, and it is difficult to know the size of the Ainu population and their living conditions in other parts of Japan ( Watson, 2014). It was not until 2008 that the national government finally recognized Ainu as an indigenous people, though the discussion on the restoration of indigenous rights -as well as an official apology by the modern and nationalist regime for wrongdoings against Ainu over a period of 150 years - has not been developed much.Mistreatments toward indigenous Ainu by colonists date back at least to the seventeenth century when Japanese merchants and settlers, supported by the Matsumae domain expanded their fisheries operations to include herring and salmon in the coastal areas of Hokkaido - then called Ezochi, or 'Ainu land' (Kayano, 1994). Ethnohistorians describe the extent to which Ainu historically adapted to maritime environment, including their participation in a large trading network in Northeast Asia and sea-mammal hunting and nearshore high-trophic fishing (Kikuchi, 1994). However, little has been known regarding lifeways of pre-contact coastal Ainu. Also in the studies of the prehistoric history of Hokkaido, Ainu are usually described as little more than victims of the Japanese-led development of preindustrial herring fisheries. This inhibits our understanding of Ainu-herring ecological relations, Ainu society, and coastal environments, leaving us to wonder about the extent that indigenous coastal communities utilized and relied on coastal fisheries resources as a part of their substance cycle before the spread of Japanese colonialism.In order to fill in those spatial and thematic gaps, this article examines the Pacific herring as a case study to demonstrate an Ainu-centered historical ecology of coastal Hokkaido. Today the cultural history of Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) in Japan is predominantly associated with the development of pre-industrial and commercial herring fisheries in Hokkaido around the turn of the twentieth century (Howell, 1995). I will argue that the absence of indigenous Ainu as active actors in the description of Japan's cultural history of herring is due in part to the hegemonic narrative construction by the Wajin (ethnic Japanese)1 but also to the neglect of regional variations in Ainu's cultural adaptation to and knowledge associated with given environments. An important part of the story left untold by mainstream history is that Ainu herring culture predates modern and early-modern Japanese fisheries. This paper reviews archaeological and ethnohistorical literature and analyzes Ainu geographic names related to herring and their ecological knowledge embedded therein. The etymological examination of geographic names indicates that the coastal Ainu recognized the abundance of herring and engaged in spring herring fishing. The study of Ainu geographic names vis-a-vis herring will enable us to narrate culturally diverse and multiethnic histories of Hokkaido, and it will open doors to future studies on prehistoric and historic Ainu and the degrees to which herring were economically and symbolically important for this indigenous group.Method and data collectionThe study of geographic names has a long history in North American anthropology. Since the early twentieth century, the recording of indigenous place names and their meanings and identifying their lo- cations have been an integral part of anthropological fieldwork (Boas, 1934; Kroeber, 1916; Waterman, 1922). …

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