Emerging Indigenous Governance: Ainu Rights at the Intersection of Global Norms and Domestic Institutions

Abstract

While indigenous peoples have made great strides to institutionalize principles supporting indigenous rights in the global arena, many of these advances will require recognition and implementation by nation-states in domestic contexts to have their greatest effect. How do these emerging global norms shape the potential for indigenous peoples to influence domestic governance? To provide insight into this question, we use historical research and interview data to examine Japan's policy toward the Ainu. Globally, indigenous peoples are defined by a collective subjective process; that is, in international meetings in which indigenous peoples participate, indigenous peoples act together to recognize other peoples as indigenous. Such recognition by the global indigenous peoples' movement provided legitimacy and enhanced agency for the Ainu in the face of the Japanese government's continued nonrecognition of the Ainu as an indigenous people. Despite this international legitimacy, the institutional structures of the Japanese state mediate the effects of international influences and limit Ainu domestic self-determination and participation in governance. Domestic policies based on cultural promotion and Ainu welfare provide few points of direct contact between Ainu leaders and the Japanese bureaucracy; further, these points of contact tend to be isolated from the parts of the bureaucracy most subject to international influence. Although the pace of change has been slow and its extent limited, Japan's continued lack of recognition of the Ainu as an indigenous people creates policy tension that enables Ainu and others influenced by global norms to use these limited channels of domestic influence and global pressures to renew calls for further changes.