A bit of a bump, but someone here needs to enter a plea for the Ainu, a race so relentlessly persecuted that they appear to have disappeared off the mental map of most people, especially in the West.
The Ainu were the indigenous people of Japan, living in the north of the archipelago in Hokkaido. They lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and their origins are an ongoing puzzle for anthropologists since they did not look Asian. In fact, although they had some Asian characteristics, they looked more Caucasian, with thick beards, light skin, blue eyes and wavy hair.
The Japanese (as we now know them) arrived from the Pacific while Europe was going through the Dark Ages. As the Japanese became more numerous and powerful, they came into conflict with the Ainu - a process which started in around the fourteenth century. By the fifteenth century, the Ainu's homelands in the north were the scene for struggles over power and control between the Japanese and Russia, and so particular efforts were made to "Japanesise" the area, encouraging Japanese settlers and doing everything possible to wipe out the native culture.
The Ainu increasingly suffered the fate of indigenous people everywhere: marginalised and persecuted, their language was forbidden, their culture oppressed, and the Ainu themselves enslaved. They fought their oppressors in a number of battles, and were invariably defeated.
It was in the nineteenth century that the Ainu were really broken. Ravaged by disease, their population fell drastically, and the hard slavery and policies of splitting up families to encourage the decay of their culture meant that they could not recover. In the Meiji period (1868-1912), the Japanese government stepped up the persecution by declaring that it owned all Ainu land. The Ainu were officially homeless, and their land was given to Japanese settlers. This was half a century *after* the Treaty of Waitangi, note, when European settlers in New Zealand at least tried to respect the rights of the indigenous people and their land. The Japanese government, for its part, did enact something called the Hokkaido Aborigine Protection Act in 1899, to provide the Ainu with help in establishing themselves as farmers. In fact, of course, this legislation was designed to gloss over, and indeed assist, the policy of eradicating Ainu culture. It provided Ainu with small plots of land to farm, but all the best land had already been taken by Japanese settlers. Inevitably, the Ainu failed in the new lifestyle that had been forced upon them.
At the same time, Ainu were forbidden from following their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, and made to farm the lands that had just been stolen from them. And further attempts were made to eradicate the Ainu language, by making all Ainu children attend schools in Japanese alone.
Here's the worst part of the whole sorry tale. Today, we all know about the struggles of Jews, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, the Maoris, and the rest. Today, these people are respected and their governments do their best, on the whole, to treat them with dignity. And they themselves are proud of their heritage. None of this is true of the Ainu. True, after WW2, the active persecution and attempts to eradicate Ainu culture ended. Moreover, in 1979, Japan ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as part of its own law - an international ruling that protects the rights of cultural minorities to exist and perpetuate their culture. But Japan did not officially recognise that any such minorities existed within its boundaries - in other words, the Ainu's status as a cultural minority was simply denied. It wasn't until 1991 that Japan officially recognised their existence as an ethnic minority, but continued to deny them any rights, land-related or otherwise, as an indigenous people.
Would you believe that it was only in 1997 that the Japanese government officially recognised the existence of the Ainu as an indigenous people in Japan, and offically endorsed the study and preservation of their culture? It was quite a step forward, given the history - but still, the government did not lay down any rights that the Ainu might enjoy as an indigenous people. And if you think that they even hinted at any wrongdoings in the past, or considered apologising for them - well, you're being a tad optimistic there.
And do the Ainu enjoy the respect and pride of the Maori, the Native Americans, and the rest? No. Polls show that most Japanese regard them as a barbaric and rather embarrassing minority. They do not learn about Ainu culture in school, and the only contact most Japanese have with them is in nicely "preserved" villages for the tourist trade. The terrible history of persecution, and the ongoing ethnic strife, is simply swept under the carpet. Like the invasion of Manchuria, the official Japanese line is: "We don't want to know."
Worst of all, the Ainu themselves have learned to be ashamed of who they are. Today they call themselves not "Ainu" ("human being" in their language) but "Utari" ("Comrade"). Hardly anyone speaks the Ainu language, and of course their religion isn't exactly thriving, even by the standards of overwhelmingly secular Japan. Estimates of their numbers vary wildly, hovering around several tens of thousands - they are so inaccurate because many Ainu do not identify themselves as such (intermarriage, of course, has helped to accentuate the "Asian" features of many Ainu over the more striking "Caucasian" ones). Many more don't even know that they are Ainu at all, because their parents didn't tell them, in order to protect them. The attempts by the Japanese over the centuries to erode the cultural and racial distinctiveness of the Ainu has clearly succeeded.
Given the appalling history of Japanese treatment of the Ainu, and their sorry status today compared to more well-known marginalised groups, they get my vote for "most persecuted people".
