日本原住民族─Ainu族(阿伊努人) 14000年歷史。
根據研究，Ainu族是一個與圖博民族還有印度的安達曼群島的人種血緣相近的民族，Ainu族男性蓄鬍、蓄髮，Ainu族人還有藍色的眼珠。古老的Ainu民族以漁獵、採集維生。
Ainu民族是原來生活在日本群島的人民，是現在日本的原住民族，根據研究，大約14000年前就已經定居在日本群島，比歷史上所記載第一批抵達日本的大和民族還早了至少10000年，但如果根據Ainu的神話，Ainu在當地生存的歷史，至少已經超過10萬年，一直到大約3000年前，現在自稱圍太陽之子的大和民族的人民，就開始入侵日本群島，Ainu族人開始淪為大和民族的奴隸，被迫離開這塊土地，甚至被殺死，最後終於逃亡到現在的北海道。
這段珍貴的影像，得來不易，拍攝的就是Ainu族的族人與部落 ，這是一個跟大和民族的長相、文化特質、飲食、社會組織截然不同的民族，女性會在臉上，嘴部周圍紋面，也會在手臂上紋身。
Ainu民族的神話傳說，與熊，不可分，相傳Ainu的祖先把熊殺死，從此祭拜熊的靈魂，儀式當中會歌舞，會飲酒，熊提供了 Ainu族人的生活所需，Ainu族人充滿感激，這是一個跟現在日本大部分的人口所屬的大和民族截然不同的民族，是一個長年遭遇打壓，無法體限自我認同的民族，現在有越來越多人，想要找回原本應該屬於Ainu族的一切，當務之急，就是至少必須先把語言找回來。
飛機抵達了北海道，根據統計，目前日本的Ainu族人只剩下24000人，Ainu的族語幾乎快要消失，這個村落，叫作 Biratori，是北海道地區積極保存族語的Ainu族村落。現在看到的是Ainu文化節，Ainu族人很努力，想要做點什麼。有族語，有舞蹈，有音樂，除了這些，還有什麼? 老人家決定，必須定期開族語課。
有一位快要80歲的老人家Kazunobu Kawanano，並不是從小就說Ainu語，因為不能講，他說：「不，不能講！因為日本人不准，就算是我的父母小時候他們都說，『如果你不學日本話，不學日本人的文化，你就會無法生存！』Ainu族的語言根本不值一提，你必須要在學校裡非常非常認真去學日本話，所以我的父母根本不會跟我講Ainu。」
老人家帶我們到田裡，因為這裡有Ainu的秘密：「這個已經成熟了，當我離開這裡五天就成熟了，這個稱為inakibi，它曾經是我們的主食，當你把Mnakibi跟白米混合煮，實在很好吃。」
Ainu的老人家對即將消失的族語，有深沉的焦慮：「我希望我們的政府，可以有政策來保存我們的Ainu文化，因為語言就是第一個消失的。有一些文化的東西，比較容易保存，例如雕刻或是傳統的歌謠。但是我們每天必須使用的語言，是更難保存的。」
另一位老人家，是Ainu文化保存協會的成員Tamotsu Nabesawa，唱的歌的內容，是要告訴其他人，要如何維持魚肉的乾淨和新鮮，告訴後代要尊重食物，不過他也有許多擔心：「以前有很多老人家，都還知道傳統儀式如何進行。在以前那些儀式是很普遍的，但到了現在，這些儀式只有在特定場合才看得到。我以前從來不曾想過，有一天我也會變成老人，還必須要舉行儀式，雖然我所知道的已經不多了，我覺得很難過，做為一個Ainu族人，如果我沒有辦法說清楚我的話，那實在太悲哀了。」
大部分的人，已經都講日語了，這位老人家Sachiko Kibata，以身作則：「當我的孫子聽到我用Ainu族語錄的錄音帶，他說『阿嬤妳為什麼要講外國話』。現在我的兒子住在都市裡，他已經可以舉行我們傳統的叫作『kamuynomi』的儀式，現在我的孫子也會了，我真的覺得太棒了喔！他們開始關心自己的文化，因為他們看見我一直在學我們的Ainu族語，我現在已經80歲啦！但是我還一直努力學，絕對不會停止，嗯，就是一直學。」
每年夏天，在這個地區的Ainu族人都會舉行一個稱為Chipsanke的儀式，這是以古法製作的獨木舟，老人家用祖先划船的方式帶著年輕人上船，還有傳統的儀式正在進行，喝著傳統的米酒，用煙火潔淨靈魂，這是目前在日本的Ainu族 人，所努力傳承的。
一直到2008年6月6日，日本政府才承認Ainu族是日本的原住民族，這樣的語言，已經快要消失了，如果有一天語言真的消失了 ，那麼Ainu族還剩下什麼？
Japanese sea-drifters
When Japan was a secret
Dec 19th 2007 | NAKANOHAMA AND RISHIRI ISLAND
From The Economist print edition
From The Economist print edition
Long before Commodore Perry got there, Japanese castaways and American whalers were prising Japan open
Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery
IF THAT double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.
Herman Melville, “Moby Dick”, 1851The first English-language teacher to come to Japan landed in a tiny skiff, but before he did so, Ranald MacDonald pulled the bung from his boat in order to half-swamp her, in the hope of winning over locals with a story that he had come as someone who had fled the cruel tyrannies of a whale-ship captain and then been shipwrecked. The four locals who approached by boat, though certainly amazed, were also courteous, for they bowed low, stroked their huge beards and emitted a throaty rumbling. “How do you do?” MacDonald cheerily replied. This meeting took place in tiny Nutsuka Cove on Rishiri Island off Hokkaido on July 1st 1848, and a dark basaltic pebble from the cove sits on this correspondent's desk as he writes, picked up from between the narrow fishing skiffs that even today are pulled up on the beach.
Rishiri is about as perfect a round volcanic island, perhaps nine miles across, as it is possible for a schoolchild to draw. It is also just about as far north in Japan proper as it is possible to be: if you start climbing the volcano, the coast of Russian Sakhalin comes into view. MacDonald took an intentionally oblique route to get into closed Japan. And indeed, the locals who approached MacDonald were not Japanese at all, but rather the supremely hairy Ainu, whose women tattooed their upper lip.
The Ainu were the original inhabitants of much of northern Japan, while related groups had long settled Sakhalin and Kamchatka. One 19th-century British explorer and naval captain, Henry Craven St John, described the fair-skinned Ainu as “something like a strange drop of oil in the Ocean, being surrounded by Mongols [including Japanese] yet not one of them.” But just as European settlers were pushing the American frontier westwards—MacDonald himself was born in present-day Oregon of Princess Raven, favourite daughter of the Chinook king, and a Scottish fur trader with the Hudson's Bay Company—so the Japanese were pushing north. Modern-day Hokkaido (literally, the way to the northern seas) was then known as Ezo, whose written characters connote wildness and barbarity. Today, only vestigial communities of Ainu survive.
Far from fleeing a tyrant, MacDonald had in fact had to plead with a concerned captain of the Plymouth, a whaler out of Sag Harbour, New York, to be put down in the waters near Japan. MacDonald had an insatiable hunger for adventure, and the desire to enter Japan—tantalisingly shut to the outside world—had taken a grip on him. Both men knew of the risks, but the captain was less inclined to discount them. For 250 years, since the Tokugawa shogunate kicked Christian missionaries and traders out, only a tightly controlled trade with the Netherlands and China was tolerated in the southern port of Nagasaki, with a further licence for Koreans elsewhere. Though British and Russian ships had from time to time prodded Japan's carapace, an edict in 1825 spelled out what would happen to uninvited guests “demanding firewood, water and provisions”:
The continuation of such insolent proceedings, as also the intention of introducing the Christian religion having come to our knowledge, it is impossible to look on with indifference. If in future foreign vessels should come near any port whatsoever, the local inhabitants shall conjointly drive them away; but should they go away peaceably it is not necessary to pursue them. Should any foreigners land anywhere, they must be arrested or killed, and if the ship approaches the shore it must be destroyed.
Two decades later the despotic feudalism of the Tokugawa shogunate was under greater strain. At home the land had been ravaged by floods and earthquakes, and famines had driven the dispossessed and even samurai to storm the rice warehouses of the daimyo, the local lords. Abroad, Western powers were making ominous inroads. After the opium war of 1840-42 China ceded Hong Kong to Britain. Meanwhile, thanks to a growth in whaling and trade with China, the number of distressed Western vessels appearing along Japan's shores was increasing. Moderate voices made themselves heard within the government. A new edict was softer:
It is not thought fitting to drive away all foreign ships irrespective of their condition, in spite of their lack of supplies, or of their having stranded or their suffering from stress of weather. You should, when necessary, supply them with food and fuel and advise them to return, but on no account allow foreigners to land. If, however, after receiving supplies and instructions they do not withdraw, you will, of course drive them away.
MacDonald knew the risks, and approached Japan obliquely in order to minimise them. Even so, he spent the next ten months in captivity.Ocean streams
MacDonald's curiosity about Japan had first been aroused as a child, with the arrival in 1834 of three Japanese castaways. More than a year earlier a full Japanese crew had set off in the Hojun-maru from the port of Toba with a cargo of rice and ceramics intended as annual tribute for the shogun up the coast in Edo (modern-day Tokyo). Very quickly they were blown offshore by a sudden autumn storm. Fourteen months later the crippled junk and its survivors were washed ashore on Cape Flattery, in current-day Washington state, along with the bales of rice and boxes of fine porcelain. A delighted band of Makah Indians seized what they could of the cargo and enslaved the survivors. The Hudson's Bay Company, who traded with the Makah, found the sailors and bought them.Seafarers from the isles of Japan have been drifting eastwards in crippled vessels for hundreds of years, and perhaps millennia. Presumably, they mingled blood if they survived along the way—MacDonald himself felt he might be a recipient.
Their conveyor belt was the Kuroshio (Black) Current, named after the deep colour of its waters. The Kuroshio is the north Pacific's Gulf Stream, for it brings warm water from the tropics up east of Taiwan, north-eastwards along the Japanese coast and on towards the polar regions, sweeping east below the Aleutian isles and down the American coast (see map). To this day Japanese fishing floats and even monks' wooden sandals are washed up on the shores of the Pacific Northwest. Katherine Plummer in “The Shogun's Reluctant Ambassadors: Japanese Sea Drifters in the North Pacific” (Oregon Historical Society, 1991) relates the case of the ghost ship Ryoei-maru, a motorised but stricken coastal fishing boat found off Vancouver Island in 1927 with the parched corpses of the crew on board and a poignant diary of their last days.
Tokugawa xenophobia increased the risks of wreck or drift. To prevent sailors going abroad, shipbuilding rules restricted the seaworthiness of Japanese vessels. The coastal traders that brought grain and other tribute to Edo were in essence overloaded arks. They lacked stability. The wind caught their high sterns, hampering manoeuvrability. Meanwhile, they lacked the sturdy centre-mounted rudders of Chinese junks or Western craft, and Japanese rudders mounted to one side snapped readily in heavy seas, just when the craft most needed steerage.
Jukichi, reckoned to be the first recorded Japanese to land in America, returned home four years later, via Alaska and Kamchatka, and spent the first night in the village temple, as he had promised the gods. He spent the rest of his life begging funds for the memorial stone he had promised his crew.
The shogunate's hungry demand for tribute, which forced many vessels to set sail after the autumn rice harvest, no doubt increased the number of sea-drifters: that there was a word for them, hyoryumin, attests to their number. The plentiful supply of krill at the point where the warm waters of the Kuroshio meet Arctic waters, which attracted whales, no doubt increased the number of hyoryumin picked up by Western ships. A whaler from Brighton, Massachusetts, is reckoned to have been the first in Japanese waters, in 1820, when it came upon a pod of sperm whales. A year later 30 American ships cruised around Japan, and by 1839 the number of Western whalers had grown to 550, four-fifths of them American. It was off Japan, of course, that Captain Ahab lost his leg (“dismasted”) to the great white whale that was his nemesis, and in Herman Melville's imagination the mystery and danger of Moby Dick is fused with the land around which he swims.
As the north Pacific became more crowded, some of the Japanese sea-drifters were bound to help unlock the double-bolted land even before Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Edo Bay in 1853 demanding recognition for the United States. One such was Otokichi, the youngest of the three found enslaved near Cape Flattery. The Hudson's Bay Company factor had sent the crew to London, with a notion that they might be used as a means to open up trade with Japan. They were then shipped to Macau, where they helped Karl Gutzlaff, an indefatigable missionary with a Hong Kong street still named after him, to translate St John's gospel into Japanese. They hoped to return to Japan in an American trader, but the vessel met with cannon fire in Edo Bay and Kagoshima. Rebuffed, they resumed their life in Macau.
Otokichi went on to Shanghai to work for a British trading company, married an Englishwoman—perhaps the first Japanese to do so—and prospered; after her death he married an Indian. As a British subject, John Matthew Ottoson was to return twice to Japan, the second time with the Royal Navy in 1854, to act as translator during the negotiations that opened Japan up to British trade. He is buried in the Japanese Cemetery in Singapore.
Manjiro, who made it back
The most famous sea-drifter is known in the West and even Japan as John Manjiro. Two days after Melville set off in early 1841 from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, on the whaling adventure that provided the material for “Moby Dick”, Manjiro, the youngest of five crew, set out fishing near his village of Nakanohama on the rugged south-western coast of Shikoku, one of Japan's four main islands. On the fourth day, the skipper saw black clouds looming and ordered the boat to be rowed to shore. It was too late. Over two weeks they drifted east almost 400 miles, landing on Torishima, a barren volcanic speck whose only sustenance was brackish water lying in puddles and nesting seabirds. In late summer even the albatrosses left. After five months, while out scavenging, Manjiro saw a ship sailing towards the island.The castaways' saviour, William Whitfield, captain of the John Howland, a Fairhaven whaler, took a shine to the sparky lad. In Honolulu he asked Manjiro if he wanted to carry on to Fairhaven. The boy did, studied at Bartlett's Academy, which taught maths and navigation to its boys, went to church and fell for local girls. He later signed on for a three-year whaling voyage to the Pacific, and when he returned, joined a lumber ship bound round Cape Horn for San Francisco and the California gold rush. He made a handsome sum and found passage back to Honolulu.
By early 1851—the year of “Moby Dick” and two years before Commodore Perry turned up—Manjiro was at last back in Japan, and things were already changing. He and two of the original crew had been dropped in their open sailing boat by an American whaling ship off the Ryukyu Islands. They were taken to Kagoshima, seat of the Satsuma clan. The local daimyo, Shimazu Nariakira, grilled Manjiro, but the tone was inquisitive more than inquisitorial: please to explain the steamship, trains, photography, etc. In Nagasaki, Manjiro had to trample on an image of the Virgin and child. He was asked whether the katsura bush could be seen from America growing on the moon. He described America's system of government, the modest living of the president and how New Englanders were so industrious that they used their time on the lavatory to read. Amazingly, he dared criticise Japan's ill-treatment of foreign ships in need of wood and water, and made a heartfelt plea for the opening of Japan, going so far as to put the American case for a coal-bunkering station in Japan to allow steamships to cross the Pacific from California to China.
Leeds Museums and Galleries
Rather than being kept in prison, he was freed to visit his mother—in Nakanohana she showed him his memorial stone—and was even made a samurai. In Tosa (modern-day Kochi), he taught English to men who were later influential during the overthrow of the shogunate and the establishment of constitutional government in the Meiji period, from 1860. During negotiations in 1854 with Perry, Manjiro acted as an interpreter. Later, in 1860, he joined the first Japanese embassy to America. But as Christopher Benfey explains in “The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics and the Opening of Old Japan” (Random House, 2003), if the terror of being lost at sea was the defining experience of Manjiro's life, then his greatest gift to the Japanese was his translation of Nathaniel Bowditch's “The New American Practical Navigator”, known to generations of mariners as the “seaman's bible”.As for Ranald MacDonald, though he was handed over by the Ainu and taken by junk to Nagasaki for interrogation, he was treated decently. With a respectable education and a gentle presence, he was clearly a cut above the usual rough-necked castaway, and he was put to teaching English. Some of the students who came to his cell later flourished as interpreters and compilers of dictionaries. The most notable, Einosuke Moriyama, served as the chief translator in Japan's negotiations with Perry, as well as interpreter to America's first consul to Japan, Townsend Harris.
In the spring of 1849 the American warship Preble arrived in Nagasaki, its commander, James Glynn, ignoring the imprecations from assorted Japanese craft to “go away, go away”. The American government had heard that the Lagoda, an American whaler, had been wrecked on the Japanese coast and a number of crew taken prisoner. (Historians now think the crew, whose numbers had diminished in prison through sickness and a suicide, were deserters.) The Preble was dispatched from Hong Kong to rescue them, the government thinking no doubt this was also a useful exercise in testing Japan's exclusionary resolve. To Glynn's surprise, he learnt that MacDonald, who had been presumed dead, was also in Nagasaki. The Preble carried the exultant adventurer to Macau, where he promptly signed on a ship that took him to Australia's goldfields.
A secret no more
Very soon after, Japan opened to the world. Its adoption of industrialisation and Western constitutional government was perhaps the most abrupt transformation of a country in history. That is well recorded. Less noticed was the change to sailors around Japan's coasts. Yet St John, the British explorer, relates a foreign shipwreck on Hokkaido just two decades after MacDonald left Nagasaki. The captain of the Eliza Corry was found by locals close to death on the shore. In short order, they made European clothes for him, even finding him a wide-awake hat. A table, fork and small and large spoon were fashioned for him, while a junk, dispatched in a hurry, returned with three Californian apples and three sheets of foreign notepaper to complete his contentment.As for whaling around Japan, vestigial echoes reverberate. Every northern winter, Japan faces barbs for sending a whaling fleet into Antarctic waters. And why, asks the mayor of Taiji, a small whaling port, should Japanese ships have to go so far, suffering international outrage? Because, he says, answering his own question, the Americans fished out all the Japanese whales in the century before last.
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