On 8 March 1974, a 22-year-old
ethnically Japanese man from Hiroshima named Yagi Tatsumi entered the office of Asari Giichi (浅利義市), the also-Japanese mayor of
Shiraoi,
Hokkaido, and stabbed him in the neck. The attempted assassination was performed, according to the statement Tatsumi read before the stabbing, to protest the exploitation and commodification of the
Ainu people
The Ainu are the indigenous people of the lands surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, including Hokkaido Island, Northeast Honshu Island, Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula and Khabarovsk Krai, before the arrival of the Y ...
of Hokkaido. The incident was a part of a string of anti-Japanese violent actions performed by pro-Ainu groups such as the
East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front
The was a Japanese New Left terrorist organization that existed from 1972 to 1975.
The EAAJAF self-identifies as a leftist group which espouses Anti-Japaneseism ideology of revolution against the Japanese state, corporations, and symbols of Jap ...
.
Background
The rise of
1960s counterculture
The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed throughout much of the Western world in the 1960s and has been ongoing to the present day. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the civil rights mo ...
around the world kicked off an increasing movement for Ainu rights within both Ainu and non-Ainu communities. The Ainu rights movement mostly involved organized protest and the defacement of monuments. However, the movement also involved multiple instances of serious violence, such as the
in 1972. Although most of these incidents, while connected to the Ainu, were not perpetrated by Ainu, they brought increasing tension and attention to the "Ainu problem".
The town of
Shiraoi, Hokkaido
is a town located in Iburi, Hokkaido, Japan. As of September 2016, the town had a population of 17,759. It was established in 1867 by the feudal lords of Sendai. Most of the area of the town is forested and parts lie within the Shikotsu-Tōya Nat ...
had been a popular destination for
cultural tourism
Cultural tourism is a type of tourism activity in which the visitor's essential motivation is to learn, discover, experience and consume the tangible and intangible cultural attractions/products in a tourism destination. These attractions/produ ...
throughout the 20th century. Multiple locals had complained about the commodification of Ainu for tourism purposes – one described it as "heartbreaking to see these 'tourist Ainu' who had been robbed of their own subjectivity". Tatsumi, the perpetrator of the stabbing, claimed that these "tourist Ainu" were being exploited – they made and sold cultural artifacts, but were paid low wages, the money made instead going to ethnic Japanese.
Aftermath
The attempted assassination failed, and Giichi survived. However, acts of violence continued, with a similarly-intentioned arson attack in September 1974 in Shiraoi. In more reformist politics, the
Hokkaido Utari Association was formed in the mid-1970s to address the problem of the commodification of Ainu culture that Giichi was attacked for. The Ainu were turned against the continuing violence by ethnic Japanese, leading to a paradigm shift among Ainu towards Ainu tourist centers. The string of violence kicked off Ainu studies of Ainu culture and the transformation of Ainu tourist centers into places where Ainu culture and identity is protected and a forum is created for Ainu from around Hokkaido.
References
Bibliography
Books
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Articles and papers
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* {{cite thesis , last=Sjöberg , first=Katarina , date=1992 , title=Mr. Ainu: Cultural Mobilization and the Practice of Ethnicity in a Hierarchical Culture , type=PhD , publisher=University of Lund , url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nTtC-pyVg9sC&pg=PA122 , access-date=21 June 2021
Failed assassination attempts in Japan
1974 in Japanese politics
Ainu history
History of Hokkaido
Stabbing attacks in Japan
March 1974 events in Asia