Why the Subaltern Cannot Speak in Japan

The Ainu, the Gaze of Natural-History, and the Anthropology of a Defeated Nation

Abstract

As early as 1931, Kotaro Konobu, an Ainu scholar decried the dehumanizing gaze of wajin (Japanese) scientists toward the Indigenous people. His subaltern voice was silenced as fascination with the wild, indian, and Other gathered momentum in Taisho and early Showa Japan, and intellectuals pursued racist science as a profession in an increasingly chauvinistic state academy. This paper explores why the subaltern cannot speak in contemporary Japanese anthropology by drawing on the work of Mai Ishihara, a multi-racial anthropologist with Ainu roots who brought Indigenous feminism to Japanese anthropology. I argue racism and wajin-chauvinism in the forms of primitivism and romanticism—however subtle—still prevail in Japanese anthropology. What keeps Japanese anthropology still a "wajin public space"(cf. J. Hill's "white public space") are these practices of silencing that occur at the epistemic level—namely, the gaze of Natural-History, the roots of which can be traced to 17th-century Europe.