NEW YORK - An Ainu Summer Festival showcasing the Indigenous people's diverse traditions opened at the Japan Society in New York on July 22, bringing artists, cultural practitioners and educators from Hokkaido to the United States in a major international tribute to pioneering Ainu leader Shigeru Kayano.
More than 25 participants, including traditional craft artists and cultural inheritors from Biratori, Hokkaido, traveled to New York for a program featuring films, dance performances, lectures, food tastings, language presentations and workshops on woodcarving and embroidery. The festival is being held over four days on July 22, July 23, August 12 and August 13.
The event was organized by Biratori and the Japan Society to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Kayano's birth. Born in the Biratori community of Nibutani on June 15, 1926, Kayano became one of the most influential figures in the modern revival of Ainu language, culture and political rights.
Kayano grew up at a time when many Ainu families faced poverty, discrimination and strong pressure to abandon their language and customs. Japanese assimilation policies had disrupted traditional life, while the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 treated the Ainu as people to be absorbed into mainstream Japanese society rather than as an Indigenous population with a distinct culture.
Raised among speakers of the Saru dialect of the Ainu language, Kayano learned traditional stories, songs and beliefs from older relatives, particularly his grandmother. Ainu was part of his childhood environment, but Japanese was the language of formal education and public life.
Like many Ainu children of his generation, Kayano experienced discrimination and initially sought to distance himself from his background. He later wrote that his outlook changed as he saw researchers and collectors take ceremonial objects, household utensils and other culturally important materials out of Ainu communities.
Fearing that the objects and the knowledge attached to them would disappear, Kayano began collecting traditional implements in the 1950s. He spent years traveling through Ainu communities, purchasing or receiving tools, clothing, ritual objects and everyday items while recording how they had been made and used.
His collection eventually grew to include thousands of artifacts. In 1972, he opened a museum in Nibutani to display and preserve them, creating the institution now known as the Shigeru Kayano Nibutani Ainu Museum. His work also contributed to the development of the nearby Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum, helping establish the small Saru River community as one of Japan's most important centers for Ainu cultural preservation.
Kayano did not treat the objects simply as exhibits from a vanished society. He regarded them as part of a living culture and worked with craftspeople and younger residents to preserve the knowledge needed to make and use them.
Language became another central part of his work. Kayano recorded elders reciting oral narratives, epic poems, prayers, songs and accounts of traditional customs, preserving voices and expressions that might otherwise have been lost.
Ainu culture had historically been transmitted largely through speech rather than a widely used Indigenous writing system. As the number of fluent speakers declined, Kayano transcribed oral traditions using written notation and translated them into Japanese, building an extensive record for future generations.
He became known as an accomplished narrator of Ainu oral literature and published numerous collections of folktales and epic narratives. His books introduced Ainu perspectives to readers throughout Japan and overseas, while his recordings later became important resources for researchers, teachers and language revitalization projects.
Kayano established an Ainu language school in Nibutani in 1983, providing local children and adults with an opportunity to study a language that earlier generations had often been discouraged from speaking. The initiative helped inspire the creation of additional Ainu language classes in Hokkaido and elsewhere.
He also prepared teaching materials and took part in radio education. His scholarship culminated in the publication of an extensive Ainu-Japanese dictionary in 2002, documenting vocabulary from the language he had heard and spoken in the Saru River region.
Kayano wrote scores of books on Ainu culture, history and language. His memoir, published in English as Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir, described the loss of Ainu land, the hardships experienced by his family and his gradual decision to devote his life to cultural recovery.
His activism eventually moved from museums, classrooms and publications into local politics. Kayano was elected to the Biratori Town Council in 1975 and served for nearly two decades, using the position to promote cultural education and defend the interests of the Ainu community.
He later entered national politics and joined the House of Councillors in 1994, becoming the first openly Ainu lawmaker to serve in Japan's National Diet. He remained in the upper house until July 1998.
Kayano occasionally used the Ainu language in the Diet, giving it an unprecedented presence in the center of Japanese political power. His election carried symbolic importance for a people whose language and identity had long been marginalized by government policy.
One of the most important political struggles of his life concerned the construction of the Nibutani Dam on the Saru River. The river and surrounding land had deep cultural and spiritual significance for the local Ainu community, supporting fishing, ceremonies and the transmission of traditional knowledge.
Kayano and fellow Ainu landowner Koichi Kaizawa challenged the compulsory acquisition of land for the dam. Although construction proceeded and the disputed land was ultimately submerged, the lawsuit produced a landmark decision from the Sapporo District Court on March 27, 1997.
The court found that the government had failed to give adequate consideration to Ainu culture when approving the project and recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous people with a distinct culture. The judgment became a turning point in Japanese legal history, even though the court did not order the completed dam to be removed.
Kayano also played a prominent role in the campaign to abolish the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act. The law, enacted in 1899, had remained in force for nearly a century despite criticism that its terminology and assimilationist approach were discriminatory.
In 1997, the Diet repealed the legislation and enacted a new law promoting Ainu culture and the dissemination of knowledge about Ainu traditions. The measure was limited in that it concentrated primarily on culture rather than recognizing broad Indigenous rights, but it represented a major departure from the policies of the previous century.
The passage of the law was one of the defining achievements of Kayano's time in national politics. It gave institutional support to cultural promotion and language research while increasing public awareness of Ainu history.
Kayano continued his cultural and political work after leaving the Diet. He spoke about Indigenous rights, educated visitors at his museum and encouraged younger Ainu to learn their language without shame.
In 2001, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Class, in recognition of his public service and cultural contributions. He died of pneumonia at a hospital in Sapporo on May 6, 2006, at the age of 79.
Two years after his death, both houses of the Diet adopted a resolution recognizing the Ainu as an Indigenous people in June 2008. Japan later enacted the Ainu Policy Promotion Act in 2019, the first national law to explicitly describe the Ainu as Indigenous.
Kayano did not live to see those later developments, but his research, political advocacy and legal challenges helped create the conditions that made them possible. His work also left physical and linguistic archives that remain central to contemporary efforts to restore Ainu culture.
His son Shiro Kayano has continued the family's work as director of the Shigeru Kayano Nibutani Ainu Museum and through language education and cultural preservation activities in Biratori.
Throughout 2026, Biratori is holding a series of events under the Shigeru Kayano Memorial 100 program. A joint exhibition at three museums in the town, including the Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum, the Saru River Historical Museum and the Shigeru Kayano Nibutani Ainu Museum, is scheduled from September 1 to November 15.
The exhibition's title draws on an expression cherished by Kayano that can be understood as meaning "a human being worthy of being called human." Through artifacts, language, film and personal testimony, the exhibition will trace his efforts to live his culture, restore pride and rights, and pass Ainu knowledge to future generations.
The New York festival carries that work beyond Japan by presenting Ainu traditions not as relics of the past but as elements of a living Indigenous culture maintained by contemporary artists, educators and families.
A century after Kayano's birth and 20 years after his death, the performances and workshops at the Japan Society reflect the central principle of his life: that cultural survival depends not only on preserving objects and written records, but on allowing people to speak, create, teach and practice their traditions openly.
Source: Kyodo
