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Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan's Insider Minorities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Joshua Roth
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Non-Japanese often see the Japanese as an ethnically homogeneous group, but there are actually a number of different groups constituting the whole, including minority communities in Japan that have robust cultures and interact dynamically with the Japanese majority. The Chinese and Korean migrants who came to Japan during Japan's colonial period (late 19th to early 20th centuries) and their descendants constitute the two largest minority groups in Japan today. As many of them have connections overseas, however, this article categorizes them as “outsider minorities” and distinguishes them from “insider minorities.” The Ainu are one of several “insider minorities,” and this article serves as a useful introduction not just to the Ainu and their modern predicament but also to the challenges facing these other groups. As Roth explains, the “Ainu had a distinctive language, clothing, material culture, and social organization that set them off from other Japanese. A century of assimilation programs, however, [have] destroyed much of what made [the] Ainu distinctive.”

Type
Part I- The Ainu People: A Minority in Japan
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 14 , Special Issue S15: Course Reader No. 15. The Ainu People: Indigeneity, Culture and Politics , January 2016 , pp. 11 - 32
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2016

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