SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Between the fifties and sixties, the image of the Ainu people in documentary cinema experienced a significant rupture with the early ethnographic footage and the propaganda documentaries of the Pacific War. From the postwar era, Japanese filmmakers faced a double problem: the touristic commercialization of the Ainu image and the rejection of the existence of minorities in the political and institutional discourse, based on the notion of a homogeneous nation. The first response at the end of the fifties is the socially committed cinema, which showed the poverty of marginalized sections by the economic growth. An example is the tv documentary ‘Kotan People. Minority of Japan’ (1959). The second one began with Shinya Matsuoka’s documentaries in the mid-sixties and continued with Tadayoshi Himeda’s works in the seventies. In Himeda’s films, there is no longer any direct protest against discrimination. However, together with Shigeru Kayano, he becomes an ally of the Ainu, trying to make the difference (‘otherness’) visible. His documentaries do not try to project an exotic ethnicity but try to recover their lost dignity by learning about their past throughout the memory.