April 20, 2026/ 1:00 PM

TBD

Colloquium with Rika Ito

According to the Japan Foundation’s 2021 survey, pop culture, such as anime/manga, is the second most common reason for studying Japanese worldwide. However, many scholars point out that popular media is one of the primary sites where we encounter “Others.”

In this talk, I will describe linguistic and visual representations of the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan, in Noda Satoru’s popular anime Golden Kamuy, set in early 20th-century Hokkaido. The main plot follows Saichi Sugimoto, a Russo-Japanese War veteran who teams up with Asirpa, an Ainu girl, to find the Ainu’s hidden gold. Incorporating the perspectives of raciolinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and media studies, I will demonstrate how Golden Kamuy’s Ainu language usage and visual representations contribute to imagining generation, blood, and modernity, linking them to Japan’s historical and contemporary national discourses on race and ethnicity: Ainu as a dying race and contemporary tabunka kyōsei (”ethnic harmony,” or multiculturalism).

My analysis of the first season of Golden Kamuy reveals that the show unintentionally constructs a sanitized Japanese-Ainu relationship that epitomizes the discourse of ethnic harmony by erasing Japan’s colonial past. Simultaneously, the show reproduces the Ainu-as-dying-race discourse by contrasting a young bilingual Asirpa with her monolingual grandmother without any negativity. I will discuss how the advanced/backward distinctions that the Meiji government appropriated from the 19th-century colonial discourse are reinscribed in this anime with a modern twist. I also advocate raising critical questions about language, race, and power across contexts, including the consumption of popular media, to build a just society.

Rika Ito is Professor of Asian Studies at St. Olaf College, teaching Japanese and linguistics. Her research centers on how language is used in different social situations and what that reveals about culture, power, and identity. Her publications include analyses of young Hmong Americans’ identity negotiation (Ito, 2021) and representations of foreign characters in anime (Ito & Bisila, 2020). Her recent project examines linguistic and visual representations of the indigenous Ainu in both virtual and physical spaces, in relation to contemporary tabunka kyōsei (multiculturalism) and the Ainu-as-dying-race discourse. She also serves on the editorial board of Language & Communication.

Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies