At the beginning of the 20th century, Japan was quickly settling into its new incarnation as an urban, modernizing nation. However, for the indigenous Ainu in Hokkaido, the twentieth century heralded further erosion of their culture and ways of life.
The Ainu growing up under stricter assimilation policies included writers and activists constantly questioning their Ainu identities in a modernizing Japan. Of these Ainu, three stood out as renowned poets: Batchelor Yaeko, Moritake Takeichi, and Iboshi Hokuto.
The work of Iboshi and others was integral to a greater movement keen on eliminating the dying race rhetoric perpetuated by the Japanese. Through his poetry and activism, Iboshi sought to dismantle long-held Ainu stereotypes and rekindle pride in Ainu culture and identity.
The state of Ainu in the new century
The 17th-century Matsumae domain’s policies decimated Ainu agrarian ways, forcing many Ainu into wage labor and commercial fishing. The 1868 Meiji Restoration, lead to a renewed effort to tame Hokkaido and establish a stronger foothold against Russian interests.
In 1872, Iboshi’s grandfather Manjiro was one of 35 Ainu sent to an Ainu education facility on the grounds of the Buddhist temple Zojoji in Tokyo. Afterwards, he worked for the Hokkaido Development Commission overseeing the colonization of Hokkaido and secured a Japanese surname.
Along with the push to entice immigration to Hokkaido, the government also attempted to convert the Ainu into farmers. The Hokkaido Former Aborigine Protection Act in 1899 aimed to “rehabilitate” Ainu into common — read “useful” — citizens. Yet being plucked from relative stability into an uncertain livelihood left many Ainu more destitute than before.
Other shifts contributed to the slow erasure of visible Ainu culture: the adoption of Japanese clothing; decreasing fluency in the Ainu language, as Ainu had no written alphabet; and the dismantling of traditional Ainu homes, which the Japanese deemed unhygienic. By the time Iboshi was born, most visible aspects of Ainu culture were fading away.
Early life and school
Iboshi Hokuto was born Iboshi Takijiro in 1901 in the coastal town of Yoichi on Hokkaido’s Shakotan Peninsula. He was the fourth child and third son to his father Jinsaku and mother Haru. Jinsaku worked as a fisherman, primarily catching herring, but was also an accomplished bear hunter.
Manual labor was an inevitable part of Iboshi’s life. However, his mother Haru, fluent in Japanese, emphasized the importance of education. Rather than sending him to an Ainu school, she enrolled him in a Japanese primary school.
Various accounts claim Iboshi was unaware of his ethnic identity until he was eight years old, and school compounded his feelings of isolation. As one of only a few Ainu students, Iboshi’s Japanese peers quickly singled him out for ceaseless bullying.
The word “Ainu” quickly became an insult. Having his identity hurled at him like that instilled in him a sense of turmoil and shame. But amid this corrosive environment, Iboshi excelled academically and forged a lifelong friendship with his teacher Nara Naoya.
The seeds of a poetic spirit
With Haru’s death in his second year of school went Iboshi’s motivation to continue his education into high school. After graduating in 1914, he became a fisherman with his father. He also worked various forestry and construction jobs away from home.
Like school, Iboshi also dealt with discrimination. Work took its toll, and he fell seriously ill in 1918.
During his convalescence, he turned his mind to philosophical and sociological pursuits and began to read widely. He came across two tanka penned by Japanese poets in the Hokkai Times that portrayed the Ainu as drunkards squandering away their money on sake.
Those words further enflamed his bitterness towards the Japanese, who had ostracized and tormented him in school and work. Recalling these tanka years later, he wrote, “I’m grateful now to those tanka that cultivated the motivation in me and roused me to retaliate with my own poetry.”
An ideological turning point
1922 was a momentous ideological turning point for Iboshi. After recovering, he resumed working and joined the local Yoichi youth association. Around the same time, a brief conversation with a local elementary school principal altered his perception of Japanese and Ainu. Iboshi’s recollection of this meeting was later published in Shin Tanka Jidai (新短歌時代):
“One day he [the principal] asked me, ‘There are times when we prefer not to use the word Ainu, but there are occasions when saying Ainu is more convenient…. Would you prefer we call you [the Ainu] Ainu or aborigine?’ I was shocked. Until then, I’d considered all Japanese to be without compassion. Encountering a person like this who was so unreserved, especially a Japanese, amazed me.”
Flustered, Iboshi gave a half-hearted response and fled. But the question stuck with him. That night, he wept over his poor response. Perhaps the Japanese weren’t as callous and irredeemable as he’d thought. Perhaps reclaiming the word Ainu and reframing it with connotations other than “indigenous” wasn’t such a farfetched idea.
Poetry and a new life in Tokyo
In 1923, Iboshi was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army as a logistics officer in the Transportation Corps. They discharged him a month later, most likely due to his poor health.
He then intended to move to Tokyo, but the Great Kanto Earthquake halted those plans. In between jobs, Iboshi co-founded a retreat for Ainu youths and together self-published booklets.
Around this time, he joined a local haiku group and began submitting poetry to Tokyo-based magazine Nihihari (にひはり) using the pen name Iboshi Hokuto. Some of his earliest published work focused on traditional poetry concepts of nature, but portrayed a keen sensitivity to everything around him.
Thanks to his former teacher Nara’s recommendation, he subscribed to the culture magazine Jidou Dowa (自働道話), published by socialist Nishikawa Kojiro. Nishikawa, one of five founding members of the short-lived Social Democratic Party, visited Hokkaido and met Iboshi. Nishikawa later secured Iboshi’s golden ticket to stability: a clerical job with the Tokyo Market Association.
An Ainu in Tokyo
After a two-day train journey, Iboshi arrived in Asagaya in February 1925 and met with Nishikawa and his wife Fumiko, herself a writer and feminist activist. When he wasn’t working at the Tokyo Market Association, Iboshi assisted in editorial work for Jidou Dowa.
Soon after his arrival, he connected with the Ainu scholar Kindaichi Kyosuke. Kindaichi introduced Iboshi to a wider world of Ainu writers and activists, notably Japanese-Ainu translator Chiri Yukie and Ainu poet Batchelor Yaeko. Iboshi was reportedly deeply moved by Chiri’s work translating yukar, the Ainu heroic chants.
Kindaichi invited Iboshi to the Tokyo Ainu Conference, where he gave lectures and met Iha Fuyu, a pioneer scholar in Okinawan studies; folklorist Nakayama Taro; and publisher Okamura Chiaki, who’d published Chiri’s collection of yukar.
Between work, writing, mingling with scholars and socialists, and attending mountain retreats with his Jidou Dowa cohorts, Iboshi’s life in Tokyo was full and largely free of the discrimination he’d faced in Hokkaido. Yet disillusionment soon began to set in. He realized his special treatment by academics was predicated on the assumption he was part of a dying race.
If Iboshi truly wanted to help his people, he couldn’t do it in Tokyo. Neither could he leave the preservation of his people to scholars. “It must be an Ainu who revives the Ainu people,” he later wrote.
In a letter published in Ibungaku, he resented the idea that the Ainu were synonymous with “a dying race” and “ignorant and apathetic.” “Someone from the Ainu must go forth to research our people,” he wrote.
A year and a half after his arrival, Iboshi boarded the train for Hokkaido. He’d never see Tokyo again.
Back in Hokkaido
Iboshi’s first stop on his newfound quest was Hoboribetsu. There, he visited Batchelor Yaeko and Chiri Mashiho, who’d taken up his deceased sister’s work preserving the Ainu language.
He visited an Ainu school in Shiraoi and later wrote to the Nishikawas asking for children’s fairy tale books. “I don’t mind if they arrive a month late, and it doesn’t matter if they’re old, but I’d be truly grateful to donate them to these precious Ainu children,” he wrote. He later began writing Ainu folktales for Nishikawa Fumiko’s magazine Kodomo no Dowa (子供の道話), which he also distributed to schools.
Iboshi also began assisting in archeological digs, uncovering earthenware pieces believed to be made by the Ainu. Continuing his outreach to children, Iboshi spent time in Biratori assisting at the kindergarten run by Yaeko’s adoptive father and missionary, John Batchelor.
Returning to Yoichi
In early 1927, his nephew’s death brought Iboshi back to Yoichi indefinitely, and he took up fishing to help his family. As his tanka gained a wider audience, Iboshi broadened his horizons into essays and op-eds. The Otaru Shinbun profiled him in their December issue and introduced him as “The Savior of His Dying Race” (亡びゆく同族の救世主), perpetuating an image he’d spent so long railing against.
In his mimeograph zine Kotan, he lamented in length about the Ainu who chose to keep their identity a secret and fully assimilate. “Our ideal is a self-aware assimilation, not imitation,” he wrote.
The work of scholars in the Ainu studies field also perturbed Iboshi. The Otaru Shinbun published his op-eds on the recent archaeological discovery of carved pictographs and stone figurines in Fugoppe Cave in Yoichi. The carvings were quickly hailed as Ainu in origin, but Iboshi expressed skepticism. He argued the pictographs were forgeries, drawing on all the Ainu folklore and research he’d amassed over the years.
On the road
At the end of 1927, Iboshi became a traveling peddler selling hemorrhoid medicine. The Protection Act forced the relocation of several Ainu families into large farming communities, leaving only a few remote kotan (traditional Ainu village) scattered throughout Hokkaido. His route took him to many of these kotan, where he gave out copies of Jidou Dowa and spoke with Ainu elders.
Traveling didn’t slow his writing down. One tanka published during his peddling days reads, “The joy in traveling from kotan to kotan / A journey of paintings, of poems, of legends.”
His final days
In the spring of 1928, Iboshi returned to Yoichi to help with fishing, but illness waylaid him again. He was later diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Even while on bedrest, he penned tanka about his illness and corresponded with friends. In his diary, he vented his frustrations about being sick.
“I still cling to this life, I really do,” he wrote. “All the blood in my body boils when I think about dying in this state.”
While he still could, Iboshi began compiling an anthology of his works titled Hokuto-jo. Like hundreds of poets before him, he composed three death poems, or jisei (辞世), immortalizing his final thoughts on his life.
Iboshi’s legacy
Iboshi passed away on January 26, 1929 at age 28. Following the announcement of his death in the Otaru Shinbun, poets far and wide published tanka mourning his passing.
Two days after he died, his friend and poet Furuta Kenji retrieved his anthology manuscript and two of his diaries. With the help of Goto and her organization Kibousha, Iboshi’s works were published as Kotan: A Posthumous Collection in 1930.
In 1931, activists formed the Hokkaido Ainu Association. World War II halted the progress of Ainu rights and self-actualization, and Iboshi’s work lay largely forgotten until the 50s. Ainu researcher Kiroko Toshihiko established the Iboshi Hokuto Society in 1954, who assisted in the creation of a radio drama about Iboshi that played on NHK in 1955.
While the Ainu continue to fight for more rights and struggle against discrimination, many have embraced the Ainu identity Iboshi fought to idealize. Iboshi himself has also not been forgotten: a recent Google Japan Doodle made by celebrated Ainu artist Yuki Koji honored Iboshi’s life and work. One imagines that Iboshi would be proud of what his fellow Ainu have accomplished.
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Sources
違星北斗年譜. Iboshi Hokuto Research Society
Howell, David L. “Making ‘Useful Citizens’ of Ainu Subjects in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 63, no. 1, 2004, pp. 5–29.
余市町でおこったこんな話「その202 違星北斗と島田先生」. Yoichi Town
Celebrating Iboshi Hokuto. Google Doodles
