ABSTRACT
The Ainu people are the Indigenous inhabitants of the regions bordering the southern Sea of Okhotsk: the Kuril Archipelago, the island of Hokkaido and the island of Sakhalin, all of which were colonised at one time or another by imperial Japan. From the end of the 19th century until the mid-1960s, Japanese scholars from the fields of physical anthropology and anatomy, in the name of ‘Academic Research’, successively desecrated Ainu burial grounds of these regions to exhume over 1,600 Ainu remains, along with an inordinate amount of burial accessories, which remain to this day housed at universities and museums within Japan as well as abroad. This chapter argues the issue of violation of Indigenous rights – even now an acute problem in Japan – by tracing the historic Ainu Ancestral Remains Repatriation Litigation brought in 2012 by the residents of the affected Ainu kotans against these universities.
