Ainu people accuse Japanese government of rewriting history
The indigenous people of what is today northern Japan have accused the government of historical revisionism and racism after the education ministry revised school history books to claim that land was given to the Ainu people after Hokkaido was assimilated.
The education ministry’s screening panel intervened after claiming that a passage in the school book published by Nihon Bunkyou Shuppan Company could cause misunderstanding.
The original passage in the school book read: “Following the enactment of the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act in 1899, the government confiscated the land of the Ainu people, who were mainly hunter-gatherers, and encouraged them to practice agriculture.”
That has now been altered in the newest version of the book to state: “Following the enactment of the protection law, the government gave plots of land to the Ainu people, who were mainly hunter-gatherers, and attempted to change their lifestyle to centre around agriculture.”
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Other books by different publishers have managed to avoid mentioning the fact that Ainu land was forcibly expropriated by the Mieji-era government, which set out to conquer the island in the 1860s before the equally expansionist Russians could lay claim to the area.
In 1869, the Japanese government unilaterally took away all the land of the Ainu people and changed the name of our homeland to Hokkaido
