Ainu

Koho Kajiwara’s maroon bamboo “Peony Basket,” at TAI Modern, has a gorgeous, tear-drop-shaped handle several times taller than the basket itself, and Thomas Murray is showing an Ainu robe over a century old whose white-on-indigo patterns go back centuries further.

For example, Hitoshi Watanabe focused on ethnographic data about the Ainu, an Indigenous population in northern Japan and its surrounding areas.

Although Watanabe documented Ainu women hunting, often with the aid of dogs, he dismissed this finding in his interpretations and placed the focus squarely on men as the primary meat winners.

He was superimposing the idea of male superiority through hunting onto the Ainu and into the past.

A group representing the Indigenous Ainu people of Japan has sued the government to reclaim the right to fish for salmon.