Upopoy

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On the west shore of a lake in the southwest of Hokkaido, in a village of thatched houses rebuilt from the memory of how they were made, stand rows of whittled willow. Each is a straight length of wood shaved so that the curls of the cut stay attached, hanging from the stick in a pale fringe. These are inaw, and they are not ornament. They are the instruments by which a word is carried — set at the sacred fence, offered at the hearth, they send prayer and thanks across to the persons who own the mountains, the rivers, the fire, the sea. The village has a name that is also a promise about what will happen inside it. Upopoy: in the Ainu language, singing together in a large group. The word is kin to upopo, the seated round-songs a company sings in chorus, one voice taking up the line as another lets it fall. Whoever chose the name meant it to say that this was to be a house of living voice, and not a case of relics behind glass.

Cross the water, though, and the register changes. On higher ground on the east side of the lake, set apart from the museum and the reconstructed kotan, is a low memorial. It is quiet by design. Kept there, under Ainu memorial rite, are the remains of more than a thousand people — ancestors dug out of their graves across a century of anthropology and eugenics, gathered now in one place because they cannot yet be returned to the communities they were taken from. The singing on the west shore and the silence on the east are the two things Upopoy holds at once, and the second is the harder of the two.

The name that means singing together

The place stands at Shiraoi, on the southern coast of Hokkaido, on the shore of a lake the Ainu named for the plain fact of its size: poro-to, from poro, big, and to, lake — Lake Poroto, the big lake. The Ainu — the indigenous people of Hokkaido, of Sakhalin, and of the Kuril islands, a living people whose homeland this is — have inhabited this ground past memory, and it already carried an institution before the national one arrived. On the shore stood the Poroto Kotan, an open-air village of traditional houses, and beside it the Ainu Museum at Shiraoi, a local foundation that had shown Ainu material culture for decades. That museum closed its doors on 31 March 2018, and the site was cleared to make room for something the Japanese state had decided to build (National Ainu Museum — Wikipedia).

What it decided to build was the operational core of a policy. For most of the modern era the Japanese state had held that the Ainu did not exist as a distinct people — that they had been, or should be, absorbed into a single Japanese nation. The reversal of that position came slowly and in dated steps. A unanimous resolution of the Diet on 6 June 2008 acknowledged the Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan; the acknowledgment was carried into statute in the Ainu Policy Promotion Act, promulgated on 26 April 2019 and effective from 24 May 2019, which named the Ainu in law, for the first time, an indigenous people of the country (Library of Congress). That law envisioned a national center — a Minzoku Kyōsei Shōchō Kūkan, a “Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony” — and Upopoy is its physical form. The phrase is worth holding in view, because much of what is contested about the place is contested through it: a state that spent a century unmaking a people had resolved to build them a symbol of harmony.

It was to open on 24 April 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the date back; the opening ceremony was held on 11 July, and Upopoy opened to the public on 12 July 2020. It is not one building but three things held on a single site. On the west side of the lake are the National Ainu Museum and, spread along the shore, the National Ainu Park with its reconstructed kotan of traditional cise houses. On the east side, on the hill, is the memorial. The whole is administered under Japan’s land ministry, and its scale is national: the first museum in the country dedicated wholly to the Ainu, opened as the flagship of the 2019 law.

Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum and Park at Shiraoi, on the shore of Lake Poroto — the operational core of Japan’s “Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony,” opened 12 July 2020. Photograph by Higa4, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

A house for the kamuy world

Read from within the Ainu world, Upopoy is an attempt to give a religion its public house back. The kamuy — the divine persons who fill the world, who come into the human land clothed in a body, bringing gifts and receiving honor before they are sent home — had for a hundred years been honored, where they were honored at all, in private and against the grain of the law. The reconstructed kotan on the west shore is built so the practices can be shown and taught rather than merely displayed. The willow inaw are cut and set. The round-songs and the dances are performed. And the recited literature is given voice: the yukar, the long heroic epics, and the kamuy yukar, the songs in which a deity speaks in the first person of coming down to Ainu Mosir, the land of the humans, and of returning home to Kamuy Mosir, the land of the gods. That first-person voice is the point. In the kamuy yukar the god is not described; the god narrates.

The museum takes the same grammar and turns it against a much older habit. Its permanent exhibition is built around six themes, and each is titled in the Ainu first person — Our Language, Our World, Our Lives, Our History, Our Livelihoods, and Our Exchange with neighboring peoples (National Ainu Museum — Wikipedia). The first of them, Our Language, carries the load: the Ainu word for language and for the word itself is itak, and the museum has made Ainu its primary language of display, so that a visitor reads the labels first in the tongue the state once tried to silence. The reversal is deliberate. For a century and a half the Ainu had been the object of a sentence whose subject was somebody else — cataloged, measured, spoken about by ethnographers and officials. Here the sentence is turned around, and the subject is “we.”

The park does not stage the closed rites. The bear-sending, the iyomante — the ceremony in which the mountain god Kim-un-kamuy is honored as a guest and sent home — is explained for its meaning rather than performed as spectacle, and much of the deep ritual life of the kamuy religion belongs, properly, to the communities and not to any exhibition floor. What Upopoy offers is a threshold: enough of the practice, taught by Ainu hands, to teach a public that had long been told the Ainu had vanished that they had not, and that their religion was never the “primitive nature-worship” the old ethnography had filed it under, but an ordered economy of hospitality between two peoples, human and divine.

The hill on the east shore

The gravest thing at Upopoy is the smallest to look at. The Memorial Site on the east side of Lake Poroto is where the state has gathered the Ainu dead it once allowed to be taken, and the manner of the taking is the reason the memorial has to exist at all.

Across the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa eras, from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, researchers excavated Ainu graves and carried off the bones. They did it for physical anthropology and, increasingly, for the racial science of the day — measuring skulls to argue questions of origin and hierarchy, a science that lent itself directly to the justification of colonial rule. Some of the digging was done openly; some was done at night, against the explicit refusal of the communities whose graveyards were being emptied. The bones went into the anatomical collections of universities. Roughly 1,600 sets of Ainu ancestral remains have since been documented in the keeping of Japanese universities — Hokkaido University holding by far the largest share, with others at institutions including Tokyo and Kyoto.

In the Ainu understanding this is not a matter of specimens. The dead are ancestors, owed rite and rest; a grave is not a source. The recovery of the remains became, from the 2010s, a formal policy: in June 2014 the government resolved to promote the return of Ainu remains to descendant communities, with the understanding that those which could not immediately be returned would be gathered at a single site where Ainu memorial services could be held over them until a system for their acceptance by the Ainu was in place. That site is the one at Shiraoi. The Memorial Site was established in 2019, and from late that year some 1,300 sets of remains were transferred to it from twelve Japanese universities (National Ainu Museum — Wikipedia). The official description is careful about the register in which this is meant: a place on high ground where the ancestors are kept in dignity and memorial rites are conducted, pending their return home (Upopoy — Memorial Site).

The remains that have come home from abroad end at this hill, too, and one of those returns closes a circle that runs straight through the history of how the Ainu came to be studied. In 1913 an Edinburgh-trained physician named Neil Gordon Munro, then living in Japan and later the author of an ethnography of Ainu religion, sent a set of Ainu skulls to the anatomy museum of the University of Edinburgh, where they sat for more than a century. In 2025 the university returned them; after a traditional ceremony in Edinburgh the remains were carried to Hokkaido and placed at the Upopoy Memorial Site (University of Edinburgh). The man whose ethnography is still read as a source on the kamuy religion is also the man who shipped the ancestors abroad; the same hill receives them back. The record of how the Ainu world was documented rests, in places like this, on outsiders who took as they described.

A symbol, and a fault line

Upopoy is celebrated and it is contested, and the two are not separable. It is at once a monument the Ainu revival long lacked and a fault line running through the community it was built to serve.

The dispute is sharpest at the memorial. Many Ainu hold that, under their own tradition, the right to keep the dead and to re-inter them belongs to the kotan — the local community from which a person came — and not to any national holding facility. On this reading the centralizing solution repairs one wrong by committing a smaller version of it: the ancestors, taken once from their home ground for the state’s institutions, have been gathered again into a state institution, and the transfer to Shiraoi has in practice made local reburial harder to obtain rather than easier. The argument moved into court in the spring of 2026. On 8 May 2026 a group of Ainu descendants — the Shibechari Ainu Tribe, from the town of Shinhidaka and its neighborhood, an association formed in 2019 — filed suit in the Sapporo District Court demanding that the government return 279 ancestral remains held at the Upopoy Memorial Site directly to their descendants. It was reported as the first lawsuit of its kind against the national government over remains already consolidated at Upopoy, and its claim was framed in the tradition’s own terms: that authority over the dead lies with the kotan (The Japan Times; Nippon.com).

A second line of criticism reads the whole institution rather than the memorial. A state-run “Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony,” heavily framed for tourism, carries a risk that observers both Ainu and academic have named: that a story of reconciliation can be laid over the record of dispossession so smoothly that the record softens. The century Upopoy exists to redress was not only grave-robbing. It was the Meiji annexation of Hokkaido and the settlement of Ainu land; it was the 1899 Hokkaidō Former Aborigines Protection Act, a law whose title branded the Ainu kyūdojin, “former aborigines,” a people spoken of as already past; it was the suppression of the language, of the women’s mouth tattoos, of the ceremonies — the iyomante itself outlawed in 1955 and exempted only in 2007. Critics writing on the site’s own signage have argued that the harmony frame can present all of this as a difficulty overcome rather than a wrong still open (CEMiPoS). The lawsuit over the 279 is the standing proof that it is not overcome.

And yet the same institution is defended, by many within the very revival that produced it, as indispensable. The modern reclamation of the Ainu language and religion — the work associated above all with Kayano Shigeru in the Saru valley, whose lawsuit over a dam at Nibutani had drawn from a Japanese court in 1997 the first official acknowledgment that the Ainu were an indigenous people at all — had always needed a national platform to reach a public schooled in the fiction that the Ainu were gone. Upopoy is that platform. It teaches itak to people who never heard it; it lets the kamuy yukar be sung where the state can be seen to host the singing; it puts the memorial on the map so the grave-robbing cannot be quietly forgotten. Both readings are true at once, and both are held together in the living community that uses the site — the community that files the suit and teaches the classes, that mourns on the east shore and sings on the west.

The name still governs the place. It was chosen to say that this would be somewhere people sang together, and the singing is real; the round-songs are taken up line by line as they always were. But the center of gravity has quietly moved across the water to the hill, where the ancestors wait, and where the question of who has the right to bring them home is being decided not as a matter of exhibition but as a matter of law.

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