36.3951, Reviews: Ainu of Japan Resisting the Suppression of Languages: Susan Samata (2024)

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Subject: 36.3951, Reviews: Ainu of Japan Resisting the Suppression of Languages: Susan Samata (2024)

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Date: 29-Dec-2025
From: Adam Singerman [asingerm at syr.edu]
Subject: Anthropological Linguistics, General Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Susan Samata (2024)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-418

Title: Ainu of Japan Resisting the Suppression of Languages
Subtitle: An All Obliterated Tongue
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
           http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
Book URL:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/ainu-of-japan-resisting-the-suppression-of-languages-9781350448636/

Author(s): Susan Samata

Reviewer: Adam Singerman

I teach an undergraduate course entitled “Indigenous languages: their
past, present, and future,” with “future” referring to ongoing
processes of revitalization, reclamation, and change. Since most of
the Indigenous students at Syracuse University are from the United
States or Canada and since I conduct my own research in Brazil, my
syllabus focuses on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the
languages that they speak (or spoke in the past).  My students express
interest in transnational perspectives to compare against the course’s
Native American case studies, and so I jumped at the chance to review
Susan Samata’s book. I hoped that this book would provide material
that I could use in my course to teach my undergraduates about the
Ainu, who reside in far northern Japan and far eastern Russia. Their
language, which is extremely endangered, does not bear any historical
connection to Japanese or Russian; in fact, it is an isolate
(Dougherty 2017).
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this monograph to others. The reason
is simple: Samata has written about an Indigenous population of which
she has no firsthand knowledge. Her book resembles a kind of armchair
anthropology that became obsolete in the twentieth century.
In this review I first provide a summary of the content of the
monograph. I then discuss the central problem, namely that the
author’s understanding of the Ainu people and their language is wholly
filtered through non-Ainu and non-Indigenous sources. Finally, I
discuss bibliographic issues which ought to have been fixed during the
editing process.
SUMMARY
The monograph is divided into seven chapters. The introduction gives
basic discussion of the phenomenon of language
endangerment/obsolescence and presents the author’s positionality.
Samata is upfront about her identity as a woman of European ancestry
who has lived in Japan for many years. Her command of Japanese must be
fluent, to judge from her ability to evaluate how Ainu people are
discussed by non-Ainu Japanese (ethnic Yamato) in public discourse.
The introduction also presents the idea of the “marketplace” as a
space in which individuals of different backgrounds interact and in
which various languages meet. Samata’s inspiration for the
“marketplace” metaphor comes from a poem by Omar Khayyam; it is this
same poem that gives the “all obliterated tongue” for the book’s
title.
Chapter Two, “Historical Context of the Ainu,” provides exactly what
its title says. It focuses on the ways that Yamato Japanese and the
Japanese government colonized Hokkaido, the northernmost part of
modern-day Japan and ancestral Ainu territory. Samata discusses some
legal cases from the late twentieth century that offered hope for a
change in the way that the Japanese government addresses the rights of
the Ainu minority. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how many
Ainu people have migrated from their ancestral lands towards the large
cities of the southern Japanese coast.
Chapter Three,  “Linguistics, Language, Languages,” presents a
critique of structuralist linguistics, broadly construed. Samata’s
criticism of Saussure (whom she uses as a stand-in for
structuralists/formalists in general) is intended to show how a focus
on vocabulary, grammar, and the like can stymie communities’ efforts
to reclaim languages that have fallen into dormancy. She claims that
the approach known as ecolinguistics can offer a better way to push
back against the kind of linguistic suppression that the Ainu have
suffered. Drawing upon Steffensen and Fill (2014), among others, she
argues that ecolinguistics talks about language in a way that will
prove useful for populations such as the Ainu, since this framework
does not reify distinctions between native/fluent speakers, on the one
hand, and people who are not (or do not consider themselves to be)
full or complete speakers, on the other.
In Chapter Four, “The Production of Public Perceptions,” Samata
discusses the representation of Ainu people and culture in Japan. She
gives detailed descriptions of several museums she visited as well as
point-by-point summaries of various documentaries and television
programs that she watched. She visits restaurants that offer Ainu (or
Ainu-adjacent) cuisine, commenting on their menu, location, decor, and
even the number of patrons that they can accommodate. She identifies
and criticizes the common portrayal of the Ainu as a non-urban people
who are locked in the past — a portrayal that will be familiar to
anyone who has paid attention to, say, the stereotypical
representation of Native Americans in the United States.
Chapter Five, “The Ainu ‘Situation,’” discusses difficulties or
contradictions in contemporary Ainu identity. Samata addresses the
work of the Ainu scholar Sasaki Masao as it has been analyzed by the
historian Mark Winchester, focusing on how Sasaki theorized Ainuhood
and personhood. This chapter also discusses Ainu
religion/spirituality, especially as it was described and analyzed by
the Scottish anthropologist Neil Gordon Munro in the mid-twentieth
century.
Chapter Six, “Wider Perspectives, Or How to Obliterate a Language,”
compares the endangerment of the Ainu language against cases of
endangerment elsewhere in the world. Samata draws on a varied
literature to discuss multiple examples, including the Sami, a
Uralic-speaking people of northern Scandinavia; Native peoples of the
modern-day United States and Canada, who were violently
disappropriated of their languages through boarding schools; and the
traditional residents of Shanghai, whose distinct variety of Chinese
has been supplanted by standard Mandarin through economic development
and nation-building initiatives.
The final chapter, “Resistance: Living with Obliteration?,” presents
Samata’s ideas regarding how communities and peoples may respond to
(or resist) the suppression of their languages. This chapter covers a
great deal of ground: it discusses topics as varied as the late Joshua
Fishman’s strategies for language maintenance, the way that a language
can persist through song and art long after it has ceased to be used
as a means of everyday communication, and even Judith Butler’s ideas
regarding vulnerability and resistance via performative acts. The
chapter concludes with a defense of the applicability of the insights
of ecolinguistics to the case of Ainu. The final paragraph summarizes
Samata’s perspective on why fighting the suppression of minority
languages is a worthwhile cause: “Simply to promote human happiness”
(pg 160).
EVALUATION
Lack of experience working with Ainu people or studying the Ainu
language
Ainu of Japan resisting the suppression of languages suffers from a
severe problem, namely the distance between Samata and the Indigenous
people she writes about. Whereas she has detailed personal knowledge
of Japanese language and culture, she cannot say the same for that of
the Ainu. This is true even under a broad definition of “Ainuhood,”
one which acknowledges that many Ainu people now live in cities
distant from their people’s ancestral lands and that intergenerational
transmission of the language has declined precipitously. All of
Samata’s research has been conducted through secondary literature.
Even the chapter that involves firsthand exploration of museums is
multiple degrees removed from any Indigenous voices.
At the point in the introduction when she explains the organization of
the monograph, Samata says that the fifth chapter “takes a view on the
lived experience of being Ainu” and offers “philosophical thoughts on
what it means to be Ainu, defining, accepting and rejecting
identification” (pg 9). In an endnote inserted at this point in the
text, the author admits that she has not shared her thoughts on this
complex topic with actual Ainu people:
“It is true that this area of discussion would benefit from such input
as can be derived from face-to-face interviews or focus group
analysis. However, due to factors including reluctance of individual
Ainu to participate, understandable in the cultural environment, and
time and financial constraints on the current study, this perspective
could not be included. It may be possible for future projects to
explore the more personal perspective.” (pg 161)
It is an understatement to say that “this area of discussion would
benefit” from the insights of Ainu people, however their ethnic
belonging is to be defined (through kinship, through cultural
practices, etc). What is the point of theorizing Ainu identity if Ainu
perspectives aren’t centered?
Samata sometimes acknowledges her lack of personal insight into the
Ainu experience. She recognizes that she could only access the rich
oral tradition of the Ainu through multiple mediators, “after it had
been written down and indeed translated more than once” (pg 59). In
the final chapter, she ponders why online resources for learning Ainu
are not more popular:
“I am surprised to find (an apparent) lack of enthusiasm for online
language education among Ainu, as gauged from YouTube viewing figures;
I had thought that the relative privacy of the medium would bridge
disaffection with previous school experience and open instruction to
more aspiring learners. How are we to interpret this? The rather
childish presentation [in some of the online videos — ARS] may be a
factor, or the fact that many Ainu reject any government-sponsored
programme. Perhaps older potential learners are not tech-savvy to
exploit online offerings. Then again, perhaps younger learners are
very much ahead of me on this and have developed private networks to
promote language dispersal.” (pg 145, my emphasis)
If Samata had visited a classroom where Ainu people are engaged in
relearning their ancestral language, instead of watching YouTube
videos of such classes, her observations about heritage language
learning would gain credibility. As it stands, they are just
conjecture.
This lack of credibility weakens Samata’s defense of ecolinguistics.
In the book’s penultimate paragraph she emphasizes that since
ecolinguistics situates language in a broader cultural and social
ecology than does traditional structuralism, it provides a way forward
for groups like the Ainu:
“The position taken in the current study is that the perspectives
being developed in the field of ecolinguistics allow the claim that a
language, no matter how far suppressed, can play a role in supporting
and shaping identity, creativity and development in minoritized
individuals and groups. It might be argued that this is slight and
tepid stuff, no structured programme of language promotion, no
hard-edged demand for rights; however, on a psychological level,
positive self-image, including one’s relation to language, and
feelings of at least the possibility of control of the ways one can
interact with one’s environment, including language, can have
far-reaching effects… Individual recognition of authentic connections
to a language that is personally significant, casual use of words and
phrases, snatches of song and ‘sayings,’ in daily life, these are
entirely valid ways of maintaining a language connection as an
imbricate part of an ethnic social identity” (pg 159 - 160)
Of course individuals and groups are free to maintain their historical
and cultural connections to languages which are no longer used in
daily communication. However, Samata does not show how the
ecolinguistics approach can be translated into implementable guidance
for minority populations who have been forced to shift to a majority
language. If the Ainu language is not transmitted intergenerationally,
how will young people even encounter the “casual use of words and
phrases” or “snatches of song and ‘sayings’” that create the
“authentic connections” to the suppressed language?   Samata presents
ecolinguistics as if it holds the key to the future survival of the
Ainu language, but if she wants to convince the reader that
ecolinguistics can turn “resisting the suppression of languages” into
a successful endeavor, we must know whether her ideas (ecolinguistic
or otherwise) resonate with the Indigenous people she writes about.
Incomplete references
The author sometimes explains how she found and selected sources, but
what she says does not inspire confidence. The third chapter tells us
that “very few” recent publications came up from “[a] quick Google
Scholar search for Ainu language” (pg 38). In the sixth chapter, the
author discusses language policy in China in the second half of the
twentieth century, highlighting “two journal articles from 1956,”
which she found via “Jstor and the internet” (pg 129). These two
articles are not authoritative sources on the matter, and I cannot
figure out why they are given such priority. We all take advantage of
electronic resources like Google Scholar and JSTOR when conducting
research, especially during the initial stages of a project, but
privileging certain sources over others requires justification.
Certain authors are missing altogether from the bibliography, such as
the linguist Anna Bugaeva, who specializes in Ainu. The author reveals
in an endnote that she could not access a recent handbook on the Ainu
language which Bugaeva edited:
“In November 2022, DeGruyter published Handbook of the Ainu Language,
part of the twelve volume series on Japanese language and linguistics.
The work of seventeen contributors provides the most comprehensive
overview of Ainu available in English. Unfortunately, it is
prohibitively expensive and unavailable to me.” (pg 162)
This handbook is indeed pricey: US$460. (At the time of this writing
it is slightly cheaper than the other volumes in the same DeGruyter
series.) But the exclusion of this handbook points toward broader
deficiencies in Samata’s list of resources, deficiencies that cannot
be explained just by the price of books. A reader who wants to learn
more about the Ainu language will find little that is useful in this
book’s bibliography. In fact, the only reference in Samata’s
bibliography to an actual grammatical description of Ainu dates back
to the first decade of the last century (Batchelor 1905).
The sole Ainu author who appears in the bibliography is Kayano
Shigeru, a politician who served in Japan’s Diet; Samata discusses his
memoirs at various points in the book. Yet work by other Ainu scholars
goes uncited. In the fifth chapter, Samata addresses the writings of
the Ainu scholar Sasaki Masao as they have been analyzed by Mark
Winchester; but while two articles by Winchester appear in the
references, none of Sasaki’s publications do. Samata says in an
endnote that she cannot engage with Sasaki in the original Japanese
and for this reason has drawn upon Winchester’s work (pg 165). But
Sasaki’s works could and should have been included in the
bibliography. I find it disturbing that a book that purports to inform
the reader about the Ainu people’s struggle to preserve their language
includes citations to so few works by Ainu authors.
These bibliography-related issues come down, in my view, to poor
editorial review. There are also many errors of punctuation, grammar,
and capitalization. The last chapter in particular is full of errors
that indicate insufficient editing. For instance, during a discussion
of the work of the late Joshua Fishman, Samata starts using the
abbreviation LX. Context shows that this abbreviation must mean
“mother tongue” or “heritage/ancestral language,” but it is not
defined. It just appears, and the reader has to figure it out.
Anti-recommendation
Ainu of Japan resisting the suppression of languages is the opposite
of what modern scholarship about Indigenous peoples and their
languages should be like. The book does not engage at all with
Indigenous voices or perspectives. Everything that Samata tells the
reader about the Ainu comes from secondary sources by non-Ainu; the
only Ainu scholar she talks about in any depth, Sasaki Masao, is
missing from the bibliography. Even though Samata has no experience
working alongside or learning from Ainu people, and even though she
lacks knowledge of the Ainu language, she nonetheless advances
proposals about how the Ainu ought in her view to conceptualize their
relationship to their language in the future. This book thus
perpetuates the colonialist practice of outsiders claiming the
authority to reach conclusions about, and make choices for, Indigenous
populations to whom they have no personal connection.
REFERENCES
Batchelor, John. 1905. An Ainu-English-Japanese Dictionary (including
a grammar of the Ainu language). Tokyo: Tokyo Methodist Publishing
House.
Bugaeva, Anna, editor. 2022. Handbook of the Ainu Language. Berlin,
Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501502859
Dougherty, Thomas. 2017. “Ainu.” In Campbell, Lyle, editor, Language
Isolates, pp 99-116. London: Routledge.
Kayano, Shigeru. 1994/1980. Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir.
Translated by Kyoko Selden and Lili Selden. Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press.
Munro, Neil Gordon. 1996[1962]. Ainu Creed and Cult. London & New
York: Kegan Paul International.
Sasaki, Masao. 2008. Genshi suru ‘Ainu’. Tokyo: Sōfūkan.
Steffenson, Sune Vork and Fill, Alwin. 2014. “Ecolinguistics: the
state of the art and future horizons.” Language Sciences 41(A), pp
6-25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2013.08.003
Mark Winchester. 2013. “‘To be the antithesis of all that is called
human’: Sasaki Masao and political redemption in contemporary Ainu
thought.” Japan Forum 25:1, 42-66, DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2012.738696
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Adam Singerman is an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University where
he teaches courses in the Linguistic Studies Program and in the Native
American and Indigenous Studies Program. His research focuses on the
grammatical description and analysis of Indigenous South American
languages, in particular Tuparí, an endangered Tupían language of the
Brazilian Amazon.



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