(The following is a post by Eiichi Ito, Japanese Reference Specialist, Asian Division.)

Against a backdrop of increasing international awareness and recognition of indigenous groups through such milestones as the “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” in 2007, scholars in Japan and around the world have shown a growing interest in the study and preservation of Ainu language, history, and culture over the past three decades. The Ainu are an indigenous people whose historical homeland is centered on Hokkaido, known to Japanese speakers as Ezochi (or “Ezo land”) prior to 1869, the northernmost and second largest of the four main islands in the Japanese archipelago. In the past, the Ainu lived across a much larger area that extended south to northern portions of the main Japanese island of Honshu and north to the Kurile Islands and Sakhalin in Russia, where smaller numbers of Ainu still reside. Following Japanese colonization of Hokkaido in the late 19th century, the central government instituted a set of policies that forced the Ainu to assimilate into the majority ethnic Japanese population. As a result, few native speakers of the Ainu language remain today, and Ainu activists and scholars work to preserve other aspects of Ainu cultural heritage in danger of being lost.

During the 1990s, an international group of researchers conducted a survey of Ainu artifacts in North America under the auspices of the North American Ainu Documentation Project (1990-1996). Their findings were presented in a chapter by principal investigator Yoshinobu Kotani, titled ‘Ainu Collections in North America: Documentation Projects and the Frederick Starr Collections’ and included in the edited volume “Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People,” (Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, 1999, pp. 136–147). This volume was a collaborative work that brought together historical, cultural, and archaeological research on the Ainu from around the world. The team’s survey identified about 3,200 Ainu items and associated archival holdings in natural history and art museums across the United States and Canada and documented the provenance of many of these collections. They also discovered that a significant number of these artifacts and archival resources on Ainu had been collected by the American ethnologist and anthropologist Frederick Starr (1853-1933).

Frederick Starr served as professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago from 1892 to 1923 and, throughout his career, traveled widely for research, including to Mexico, the Philippines, Korea, China, and the Congo Free State. He also visited Japan frequently, making 15 trips to the country between 1904 and 1933. Starr’s connection to and interests in Ainu research started when he traveled to Japan for the first time to arrange for the participation of an Ainu group in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, an event also known as the Saint Louis World’s Fair. The Ainu group lived onsite as part of an “exhibition” alongside other indigenous people from the United States and around the world. The group Starr recruited had nine people, including two children with their parents. It was during this and two subsequent trips to Japan that Starr acquired a large number of Ainu artifacts, print materials, and photographs.

The Ainu Documentation Project’s 1999 report describes the sale of Starr’s collection of Ainu artifacts to the Brooklyn Museum in 1912 and mentions that Starr’s personal archival materials, including field notes, correspondence, and other manuscripts are stored at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. But it also notes a curious omission: there seemed to be no trace of the Ainu-related books recorded in Starr’s field notes at any of the related museum or library collections in North America (Kotani, 143-46). Given the size and scope of Starr’s collection of Ainu artifacts, not to mention his personal papers, it seemed odd that his books wouldn’t have been preserved as well. What had become of Starr’s collection of Ainu-related books?

In the late 1990s, a different research team—comprised primarily of Japanese literature specialists—made successive trips from Japan to survey roughly 4,700 titles in the Japanese rare book collection at the Library of Congress over the course of three summers. While many of the items they encountered were familiar literary classics and historical texts, other titles stood out to the team as more distinctive and unusual. One part of the collection that particularly caught their attention was a grouping of 91 illustrated manuscript and woodblock-print books from the 18th and 19th centuries about the Ainu people and Ezochi (Ezo land). The term Ezo, which was long used by Japanese speakers to refer to “uncivilized” people groups on the northern peripheries of Japan, came to be synonymous with the Ainu by the 17th century. In the “Catalog of Japanese Rare Books in the Library of Congress,” which the team published in 2003 as a culmination of their multi-year survey, the researchers commented that this collection of “northern materials” (hoppō shiryō) merited further in-depth study. They noted that it was considerably rich for a collection of Ainu and Ezochi materials outside of Japan and remarked that it did not seem to be well known among researchers.

Among the more than 90 books on Ainu and Ezochi that the research team surveyed in this collection is “Ezoshi” (“Records of Ezo land,” a colorfully illustrated manuscript book originally authored by Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725). This work is one of the oldest descriptions of the Ainu people and Ezo land. This particular copy consists of illustrations originally drawn by an anonymous artist who produced them based on actual observations of the Ainu and their daily life.