Politics of Alterity in Japan's National Identity: Russia, Ainu and Japan's Quest for Northern Territories.

When the interests of Tokugawa Japan and the Russian Empire clashed for the first time in the second half of the 18th century, Ainu, the native people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kurile islands, were in the center of the dispute. Furthermore, at least from the Japanese side, the notion of culture has defined the dispute. Namely, the potential Russian expansion of influence was seen as expansion of superior culture, conducted through enlightenment and amicable policies which could result in the voluntary embracement of the rule of the Russian empire by the Ainu (Akatsuki 1987.)In the last five decades the same border zone, namely the South Kurile islands (known as Northern Territories in Japan) have continued to occupy the central place in Japan's agenda vis-a -vis the Soviet Union and, after 1992, Russia. However, the existent scholarship has paid little attention to the role of culture and the Ainu in the contemporary dispute over control of the islands. This paper hopes to bridge this gap by bringing together the debate on the place of Ainu in Japanese society that emerged in early 1970s and the concurrent cultural construction of the Japan's "sef" vis-a -vis Russia.The first part of this paper provides a brief review of modern Japan's engagement with the Russian and the Ainu "other" in terms of national identity construction. The second part examines the contemporary dialogue between the two "others" within the broader context of identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s. It starts by analyzing the critical reevaluation of Japan's history of colonization of Ainu lands and the relocation of Ainu culture from the realm of the inferior assigned to it by the prewar discourse. This paper argues that this reconstruction presented a challenge not only to the conception of Japan as a homogenous nation but also undermined the validity of Japan's claim to the South Kurile islands as a quest for the return of inherent territory as it granted subjectivity to the Ainu "other" and allowed for the Ainu participate in the public discourse. The paper follows by introducing the cultural discourse on Russia and Japan that emerged almost simultaneously with the debates on Ainu. It argues that one of the functions of this construction of the national "self" was to suppress the challenges posed by the contemporary debates on Ainu by presenting a hierarchical construction between Japan's "self" and the Russian "other" and through this reaffirming Japan's belonging to the realm of the civilized and the normal. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]