This dissertation examines the ways in which Ainu indigenous identity is produced and maintained in contemporary Japan and how this particular construction is implicated in an ongoing symbolic and political territorial reorganization of parts of Northern Japan and the disputed Northern Territories. Land claims based on indigenous identity derive their political efficacy not solely from an association with a group's historically anterior relation to the state, but also from a very specific late modern method of engagement with states through supranational institutions like the United Nations and indigenous rights NGOs. I trace the emergence of the bureaucratic methods of organization and expertise to the historical development of regional civil society organizations that proliferated in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. This model of organizing tribal affairs eventually engenders a pan-tribal Ainu identity and the technical capacity to link up with indigenous groups at the regional and global levels. I find the increasing bureaucratization of Ainu activities through these organizations central to the inter-generational effort to realize long-term goals including official recognition of indigenous groups by national governments, the reassertion of tribal sovereignty over ancestral territories, and the elaboration of group rights which contravene the legal category of citizenship and cultural notions of national belonging. While my informants relied on tropes of cultural difference to assert an identity that is categorically distinct from contemporary Japanese ethnicity, in order to remain effective both within the byzantine prefectural and national bureaucracies in Japan and among the international forums where decisions regarding the drafting of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples were being made, Ainu representatives were also building a sense of communitas through metaphors of blood, culture and historical connection. The reterritorialization of specific areas in Hokkaido has been mediated through the Hokkaido Utari Kyōkai's complex involvement with the United Nations, an association that has exerted steady pressure on the Japanese government over the last three decades, and local activists who assert the importance of place to tribal identities and economic development. I characterize these dynamics as a partial post-nationalization of Japan, where the autochthonous local complicates the ideology of nation-space through its claims, no less ideological, to “pre-modern” modes of organization and occupation, and the distinctly late modern practice of ethnopolitical organizing through supranational institutions.
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