In 1976, a gathering was held at a small auditorium in the northern Japanese city of Kitami. Only a short distance away lay the Sea of Okhotsk, upon which the sparkling blue ice flows can be seen in winter.
The group was gathered for a session of the Okhostk People’s History Workshop, a grassroots minshūshi (people’s history) movement which blossomed in Kitami during the ’70s and ’80s. In attendance were people from a wide variety of backgrounds; high school teachers, students, nurses, businessmen, Buddhist monks, and Catholic priests. They’d all come together to discuss the issue of protecting an indigenous community in their midst. This community wasn’t quite native to their surroundings in Hokkaido, but which, by some twist of fate and colonial policy, had come to find a new home in these furthest northern reaches of Japan. They’d come to discuss the Uilta people – a “minority ethnicity of the north.”
Two Uilta were in attendance that night: a brother and sister, both dressed in western-style finery. Kitagawa Gentaro and Aiko, by both name and appearance, could easily have been mistaken as ethnic Japanese. Both had spent the past decades attempting to fit into Japanese society, and both had been awarded citizenship. This night, however, marked a change for the Kitagawa siblings – whose family name, by birth, had been Daxinnieni.
Gentaro took the stage, all attention focused on his slender frame, demonstrating a litheness that belied his decades of hard manual labor, much of it coerced. He began to speak, his sister Aiko by his side.
“…Until last year, I’d been made small by the belief that ‘we Uilta are a doomed race (滅びゆく民族).’ I tried to hide the fact that I was Uilta, and attempted to become a Japanese. Now, however, things have changed. Spurred on by you all, I resolve to live not as a Japanese person, but as an Uilta. This is in order to protect Uilta culture. This has occurred because I realized that we Uilta must protect our own culture by our own hands.”
Aiko spoke up: “I will also follow my brother wherever he may go – as an Uilta.” This, Gentaro would later write, was what imparted to him his greatest sense of joy. Now, those who chose to live as Uilta would not be numbered as only his father and himself. His sister had now re-joined the declarative Uilta community. Their society had once been subsumed by the lies and false identities grafted onto them by the desires and pressures of the Shisha – the Uilta word used to describe the Japanese people. Now it was slowly experiencing a rebirth there, in Hokkaido, across the La Perouse Straights and a world away from the now-lost island homeland from which Gentaro and Aiko hailed: Sakhalin.
A “Forgotten” Community
Much has been written by authors both Japanese and foreign about the supposed homogeneity of Japanese society, a formula into which the various minority groups of Japan can scarcely fit. Click To TweetThe Uilta and their history with Japan, represented by Kitagawa Gentaro, make for an interesting case study. Much has been written by authors both Japanese and foreign about the supposed homogeneity of Japanese society, a formula into which the various minority groups of Japan can scarcely fit. Putting aside the diversity of historical language, dialect, and identity within Japan proper, there still exist today two well-known indigenous people groups who have entered into the Japanese milieu as a result of slow territorial expansion: the Ryukyu peoples of modern Okinawa, and the Ainu of northern Hokkaido Prefecture.
The image of Japan as being peopled essentially by one single “Japanese” group has often led to articles in English focusing on the “forgotten” Ainu. Of course, the idea of an extant ethnicity being “forgotten” is a bit absurd – after all, the 25,000+ Ainu in Japan certainly haven’t neglected to remember their own existence. Despite a somewhat shocking lack of familiarity towards the Ainu among some Japanese further south than Hokkaido, however, the Ainu have seen a major cultural resurgence of late – with commensurate attention being sent their way from both Japan and elsewhere as a result. While much remains to be done to respond to the hundreds of years of discrimination and prejudice the Ainu received from the Japanese encroaching from their south, it can at least be said that the Ainu are far from invisible.
However, both the Ainu and Ryukyuans are essentially people indigenous to the modern borders of Japan. Their homelands, although subsumed by larger Japanese society, are still where many of them live to this day. This allows them a certain visibility; a groundedness. Their local communities aren’t in diaspora. The same cannot be said of historical communities in Japan that exist as a result of the colonialism of the Japanese Empire; people who came to live in the modern boundaries of Japan from imperial territories throughout Asia and the Pacific now lost to Japan. Ainu history exists in the very soil of modern Hokkaido; where does Uilta history exist?
The answer lies only twenty-six miles north of Japan, in the dark forests and frost-bitten plains of what is now Russia’s largest island.
A Homeland Divided
Kitagawa Gentaro was born on the vast island of Sakhalin. His given name was Daxinnieni Geldanu. His home island, the 23rd largest in the world, is a land of dense pine forest, pristine rivers, extensive taiga, and near-unpassable marshland. From an outside viewpoint, Sakhalin lies on the extreme periphery of almost anywhere; to the Japanese, it was the north beyond the north; to the Russians expanding into Siberia, it lay at the far eastern end of the world. For the Chinese dynasties that occasionally included Sakhalin in their tributary systems, it was a distant island that lay beyond the already peripheral lands of the small societies of the Amur River.
This very distance allowed the people of Sakhalin to avoid being subsumed by larger societies until fairly recently, but its nearness to the Asian mainland allowed trade to flourish with nearby groups – and beyond. Sakhalin is so close to the mainland (only five miles at the nearest point) that Japanese and European explorers long wondered if it was in fact a peninsula, rather than an island.
But by the year of Geldanu’s birth, 1926, the southern half of his insular homeland had already been ruled by the Japanese empire as a settler colony for two decades. This territory, known as Karafuto (樺太) in Japanese, had been taken by a victorious Japan as a spoil of their triumph in the Russo-Japanese War. Sakhalin, long subject to contestation between Russia and Japan, was split in twain at the 50th parallel – a new border which severed the ties which had bound Sakhalin’s indigenous communities for a thousand years.
Geldanu’s adoptive father, Gergulu, belonged to an Uilta tribe which had formerly lived on the northeastern seaboard of Sakhalin, now on the Russian side of the border. Gergulu was a shaman, renowned for his spiritual powers as well as his hunting abilities. Born in the 1890s, he could remember when all of Sakhalin was a brutal Russian prisoner colony, and members of the neighboring Nivkh people would be hired by prison officials to track down escapees through the frozen taiga. Even then, before the island was split in two, colonial interlopers were disrupting life for the three indigenous peoples of the island.
Land of Three Peoples
Geldanu and Gergulu were members of the smallest of the three indigenous ethnicities of Sakhlain, the Uilta. Numbering only around 900 persons at the height of their population before the coming of the Japanese and Russians, they were dwarfed by their neighboring peoples. Not that the Ainu and Nivkh had huge populations – both groups only numbered in the lower thousands on Sakhalin, a fairly standard population for the ethnicities that lived in the difficult, transiberian terrain near the Amur river delta. The Uilta shared much in common with these neighbors, with whom they engaged in trade and often intermarried. The salmon that swarmed the rivers in their millions during the summer spawning season were an important food staple; their religion focused around communion with nature, with the bear being their most venerated spirit.
Some things set the Uilta apart, however. The Ainu and Nivkh both spoke languages that are isolates from any other on earth (which has led scholars to call them “paleoasiatics,” conjuring up notions of connections to an unknowable, primordial Siberian and Asian past.) The Uilta, in comparison, are but one among many small Tungusic-speaking Siberian and Far East groups. (In particular, the Uilta are close cousins of the Olchi people who live near the Amur River on the mainland.) Unlike their neighbors, the Uilta were seminomadic, traveling with great herds of reindeer and living in small, conical tents in the winter.
Together with the Ainu and Nivkh, the Uilta engaged in wide-ranging trade with peoples across the Bay of Tartary. Into the early 18th century, Uilta traders would journey across the bay in dugout canoes (or even by dogsled when the bay froze over), making their way to the Chinese tributary post in inland Daren. There, they intermingled with Manchu Qing officials (the Manchu being their distant linguistic cousins) and innumerable other small Siberian groups. Via their interactions with their Ainu and Nivkh neighbors, the Uilta were part of a trading network that spanned from Sakhalin to Kamchatka in the north, Japan in the south, and the Chinese empire to the west.
Russian Sakhalin
Life for the Uilta was not unchanging. Conflict with neighbors, shifting climates, and occasional epidemics from the mainland required constant adaptation. Nonetheless, the largest ruptures for Uilta society came with the arrival of Japanese and Russian officials and military men whose mission was to make Sakhalin their own. Long before, in the 13th century, envoys of the Mongol-ruled Yuan Dynasty of China has set up small forts on Sakhalin. But the short-lived Mongol presence on the island was not nearly as disruptive as these new arrivals.
From 1856, in the waning years of the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan and Russia agreed to jointly rule this huge island on their mutual frontiers. Needless to say, this amorphous governance quickly degenerated into conflict between the soldiers stationed on Sakhalin. Violence occasionally broke out. In 1875, the freshly-minted Meiji government of Japan, having replaced the old Shogunate elite, wanted to solidify its borders; they granted the whole of Sakhalin to Russia in exchange for the Kuril Islands. The new national border that existed between Sakhalin and Hokkaido cut off southern trade routes for the Uilta, Ainu, and Nivkh. Indeed, a third of the Sakhalin Ainu population was moved to Hokkaido along with the repatriating Japanese, depopulating their villages in the southern part of the island.
The arrival of Europeans on Sakhalin also meant the arrival of Western ethnographers, for whom the indigenous peoples represented a source of ongoing academic curiosity. For colonizing powers, the working knowledge created by classifying the people they ruled over was a sort of power onto itself. However, in the case of the Uilta and other small peoples of Sakhalin, this was an especially confounding undertaking. Lev Sternberg, a Jewish exile sent to the Sakhalin prison colony for revolutionary activity in 1889, spent his time on the island trying to better understand the Ainu, Nivkh, and Uilta.
What’s In a Name?
The issue of naming conventions imposed on indigenous people by outsiders is something that still affects us to this day. In fact, if you attempt to search “Uilta” on a search engine, you’ll likely be suggested pages labeled “Orok” instead. The decisions made by Russian ethnographers are a major source of this naming confusion.
The largest ruptures for Uilta society came with the arrival of Japanese and Russian officials and military men whose mission was to make Sakhalin their own. Click To TweetDuring his voluminous studies of the indigenous peoples of Sakhalin and the Amur river basin, Sternberg had a particularly hard time deciding where one ethnic group ended and another began. The Uilta fell under an umbrella group he called “Nani,” referring to all the Tungusic-speaking hunter-fisher cultures of the region, whose languages and cultures both seemed to exist on a closely related continuum. (For most of these various groups, the word “nani” simply meant “people.”) Shternberg took to simply calling the Uilta “Sakhalin Nani.”
Just who the “Uilta” were, then, is, from a colonial standpoint, murky. Indeed, in 1890s when Shternburg was active, personal senses of belonging for “Uilta” would likely have been tied more to where their families lived (which river valley or shoreline) and whom they descended from, rather than “dialectal or cultural factors.” Exactly who belonged to what tribe was a complicated subject to suss out. In fact, the people now called Uilta had numerous names to refer to themselves: “Ulta, Uylta, Ulcha, Olcha, Orcha, Orocha or another variant of a name shared with the Ulcha of lower Amur.”
Soviet ethnographers (who called the Uilta “Oroki” – hence why they’re still often called “Oroks”) established the official demarcations of ethnic identity which still persist. Reindeer herding was one of the cultural features thought to separate Uilta from other “Nani” peoples. However, “…these and other local cultural peculiarities often cut across ethnic boundaries,” as did local “…lineage and doha (lineage alliance) composition which is generally unrelated to the ethnic divisions.” The hard lines defining “Oroks” or “Uilta” into ethnic boxes were essentially created by Russian and Japanese ethnographers.
An Imaginary Border
In 1905, during the dying days of the Russo-Japanese War, Sakhalin was invaded from Hokkaido. The Japanese military routed and defeated Russian defenders of the island. This included at least a thousand of whom were local convicts mobilized under the promise of freedom. During and after the invasion, masses of convicts and free exiles fled the island, eventually assisted by Japanese transports. The demographic shift was huge. The Russian population of Sakhalin dropped from 40,000 to a mere 7000 in that year alone. The Uilta, Ainu, and Nivkh watched the dreary convict settlements surrounding them disappear, replaced in the south by a steady stream of Japanese transplants – first military, and then civilian settlers.
In the Japanese south of the island – now the colony of Karafuto – the indigenous people again became the focus of Japanese policy and academic interest. By now, Japan was a full-blown colonial empire, having taken Taiwan from Qing China. Karafuto would soon be followed by Korea in 1910 and the islands of Micronesia in 1915. As a colonial power, “backwards” indigenous peoples like the Uilta served to bolster Japanese claims towards benevolent rulership. While the Uilta’s seemingly prehistoric way of life demonstrated Japanese superiority, the opportunity to grant them the wonders of civilization could prove Japanese largess. Sakhalin would become another case study for Japan to prove to the world its ability as a colonizer.
The 50th parallel border split the Uilta population roughly in half, with slightly more finding their homes now in Japanese territory. From 1925, when the still-young USSR belatedly took over northern Sakhalin, the Uilta on the Soviet side of the border were held as the perfect subjects to prove the liberating potential of Communism. At much the same time, on the Japanese side of the border, Uilta were slated to become idealized denizens of the Japanese empire.
Whatever transformative plans both colonial regimes envisioned for their indigenous charges, the Uilta did not initially graft on to either identity. Indeed, up until the 1930s and the increase in border tension between Imperial Japan and the USSR, the Uilta on either side of the supposedly hard border – through which only a single road actually crossed – moved back and forth as they pleased, using forest pathways far from the eyes of colonialist guards. Whatever globally distributed maps or treaties might say, for a time these borders were less than imaginary to Uilta, who still operated as though they were masters of their own land.
Far From Being Japanese
Sakhalin would become another case study for Japan to prove to the world its ability as a colonizer. Click To TweetThe idea that the Uilta had yet to create an identity of colonial membership is further shown in the following example. In 1912, the Japanese government dispatched Nakanome Akira to study the languages of the Tungusic-speaking indigenous peoples of Karafuto. He spent summer after summer in an Uilta village in northern Karafuto, struggling to make sense of their language (despite the Uilta’s “…disinclination to spend hours repeating basic words and phrases to him.”) Eventually Nakanome began understanding some degree of the Uilta language. Significantly, he wrote that the Uilta “…think that their country is their own, and that it is an independent country.” For the Uilta, their land was still, indeed, their land, and they were very far from being Japanese.
However, Nakanome saw them as destined for the same sort of cultural obliteration via assimilation as the Japanese government had slated the Hokkaido Ainu for. He believed that the Uilta and Nivkh should be exposed to as many Japanese people as possible via settlement in their villages. They should also be made to work in Japanese fisheries to increase their exposure to the Japanese language, and shown Japanese technological achievements to impress upon them the value of civilization. This would turn them into the perfect Japanese citizens for the difficult northern terrain they inhabited. “The function of ‘native education,'” he said, was “nothing other than to turn them into permanently resident laborers (永住的労働者).”
Nakanome saw the Uilta as future citizens. Although citizens of a lower rung, their purpose as “people of economic worth to the state” was tied entirely to their role as permanent resident laborers. For this reason, he wrote that their education should focus on Japanese speaking and ethics, but not on making them literate. There was no purpose in teaching these laborers to read kanji.
The Manufactured Village
In 1926, Nakanome’s vision for the indigenous peoples of Japan’s new north was put into effect. The result was the establishment of the artificial “traditional” village of Otasu. Located where the Poronai and Shisuka rivers met, Otasu was essentially a small island of low buildings erected to house the Uilta and Nivkh population of Karafuto. The settler government, which had already begun to break up Ainu settlements and enact forced relocations to “modern” towns, began moving the hundreds of Uilta and Nivkh under their auspices to Otasu. Their goal was to provide a space in which the children of the indigenous people could be taught the ways of Japanese civilization. Equally important, however, was that Otasu served as a point from where the indigenous children could be seen learning.
When the single school for Uilta and Nivkh children opened in Otasu in April 1930, it did indeed focus on Japanese language and Shinto-derived ethics. However, it put little effort into teaching kanji. The school in Otasu could not help but greatly influence its Uilta pupils’ sense of identity. More and more, they took pride in speaking Japanese and felt shame at speaking the “Oroki” language in public. They wished to be recognized as Japanese citizens, despite comfortably speaking their own languages at home.
Geldanu grew up in Otasu, surrounded by fellow Uilta, neighboring Nivkh, and a near-constant stream of Japanese tourists. His walk to school took him by modern wooden houses next to traditional Uilta dwellings, not far from which grazed herds of thousands of reindeer. The animals in question were owned by the “chief” of the village, whose large house sat close by the purpose-built dojo and Shinto shrine – symbols of Japanese culture.
Indeed, said “chief” – Dmitri Vinokurov – was a well-off member of the Sakha people, having himself migrated from Russian Siberia. Vinokurov had thrown his lot in with the Japanese during their short-lived occupation of North Sakhlain during 1920-25, when the Soviets had yet to reach the island. An ardent supporter of an independent Sakha Republic, which he believed the Japanese could grant him, he proved a useful political tool for the village administration. Vinokurov would often regale visiting Japanese with tales of Communist disharmony with nature, and of Japan’s natural right to guard weaker indigenous peoples against rapacious Russia. The Uilta and Nivkh of Otasu generally ignored Vinokurov’s “chiefly” status.
Growing Up Uilta
Geldanu had not, in fact, been born in Otasu. The shaman Gergulu and his wife Anna found themselves and their children, Geldanu and Aiko, herded into the village alongside dozens of other families. Although Geldanu was adopted (a very common practice among Siberian peoples), his birth parents lived in the village as well. His birth mother, Orika, was blind. Geldanu would speak of how he could never forget taking her by her hand and leading her to the dugout canoe they took over the Poronai river to reach Otasu. During his youth, he would divide his time between his adoptive parents and Orika and his birth father, Washiraika. Geldanu was especially mindful of visiting his birth mother to help her with chores. According to Geldanu, he loved both familial sets equally. It was, he said, like having four parents.
Geldanu was soon attending the “native” school and was happily taking on the lessons of Japanese cultural superiority and the value of modern civilizations. He relished in the new name given him, “Kitagawa Gentaro.” The name pleased him so much that he’d inwardly cringe whenever one of his parents called him “Geldanu”. He wanted to become Japanese more than anything. He felt being called by his Uilta name took that away from him. “Gentaro” delighted in trips to the neighboring Japanese town of Shisuka, where he’d watch exciting Japanese films. Traveling there with his parents, however, risked being overheard speaking Uilta. That could result in ridicule from Japanese passers-by.
Gentaro and the other Uilta children split their time between taking on lessons in being Japanese and engaging in more traditional activities with their families. They did both as part of daily life and at the behest of the village administration. Washiraika would take Gentaro out into the nearby taiga to learn to hunt. Meanwhile, Aiko might be learning traditional Uilta embroidery (to be sold as a popular souvenir in the town gift shop). The desire of the Japanese administrators to Japanize and modernize their charges while profiting off of their indigeneity resulted in a strange counterbalance in Otasu.
Mixed Messaging
These contradictory pulls of Uilta life – towards their own culture as well as towards becoming more Japanese – were ignored in the commentary of some Japanese visiting Otasu. Samukawa Kotaru, for example, spoke of being entranced by the lifestyle and attitudes of the Uilta he met in the early days of the Karafuto colony. However, upon returning to the same villages in the 1930s, he was perturbed and disillusioned by the changes he saw in Uilta youth/
The young people have forgotten their own customs, abandoned their language, and adopted the bad habits of the Japanese. The girls smother their moon-shaped faces with cream. The young men walk around the streets of Shisuka wearing open-necked-jackets which smell of sweat…”
Geldanu’s Japanese teachers actively encouraging his peers to abandon “barbarity” and to become Japanese. Meanwhile, another visitor would be bemoaning the loss of Uilta culture and even insinuating that Uilta youth were involved in making a mockery of themselves by even trying. It was impossible for young Uilta to fit into a mold that would please all the desires and expectations of the colonial society surrounding them.
No Path to Citizenship
Despite Geldanu’s desire to become Japanese and the school’s stated aims of creating model citizens, one major roadblock stood in the way: Uilta were not Japanese citizens. Rather, they and the Nivkh of Sakhalin belonged to the “native registry.” They had no family register, a necessary document for obtaining so many social services or for doing business. Of the Sakhalin indigenous peoples, only those Ainu who had gone over to Hokkaido in 1875 were given citizenship,
In the early 1930s, Geldanu’s classmates in the native school helped translate the message of village elder Jonburainu, who, threatened by the ravages of the Japanese forestry industry, expressed the Uilta desire to become “Japanese,” and thus masters of their own fate, as quickly as possible:
For the natives of Otasu . . . there is no firewood for homes or logs to build houses, so we’ve got to ask for help. The Japanese living back of the Shimkuki River cut them down to their stumps, every year two miles long by a mile wide. That’s why we’ve got to ask for help. We want to become Japanese quickly, so please help us.
Yet this request was ignored. While all Sakhalin Ainu were finally made citizens in 1932, Uilta, Nivkh, and other indigenous peoples on Karafuto were not. The excuse used regarding this was that their “way of life” still precluded citizenship.
On the Otasu Ferry
Gentaro graduated from the native school and almost immediately gained employment with the village administration. Although he started off doing office work, he was soon sent to assist the captain of the all-important Otasu ferry. When the captain left for another posting, Gentaro was awarded the captain’s chair. He was inordinately proud that he, a mere “native,” was allowed such a position.
Others took notice of his position. In 1941, Kasai Komuru, a visiting ethnographer who waxed rhapsodic upon the successful modernization of the once backward Uilta, noted with excitement that the young man operating the ferry was indigenous. He gathered this not by speaking to Gentaro, but by noting his “dull and expressionless face,” apparently something he considered a marker of the indigenous peoples.
Gentaro enjoyed his cosmopolitan young adult life in Otasu. He had his family, many close Uilta and Nivkh friends, and liked to visit the local Koreans. (The Koreans, he would later learn, had been coerced into moving to Sakhalin.) He appreciated the trust his Japanese co-workers had in him, although they sometimes subjected him to various probing and insulting questions. Indeed, the stares and ignorant questions he received from tourists never ceased to irk him. The discrimination he encountered served to shatter any illusion he had of fitting in.
Soon, however, a letter would arrive that would grant him his greatest chance at becoming Japanese. But it would also alter his life irrevocably.
Called Into Service
In August of 1942, a letter arrived at the home of each young indigenous man in Otasu. The missive in question was a call to muster, ordering the 30 or so young men to assemble at the village dojo the next day. Gentaro greeted this call to arms with great excitement; finally, he would be undeniably a respectable member of the Japanese nation. As in so many countries worldwide, the chance to serve bravely in the military represented a seemingly unrefutable devotion to one’s nation.
Indeed, many Ainu had previously gained recognition for bravery fighting in the Russo-Japanese war. Visiting military representatives to the Otasu native school would tell the Uilta and Nivkh that they should strive to become soldiers, just like the Ainu. Indeed, they were told that “you all must do your best to not lose out to the Ainu.”
Gentaro and his cohort had been inducted into the Japanese army’s secret service. Provided with uniforms and given intensive training, their mission would be to use their experience amidst the taiga to sneak back and forth across the deep forest of the Soviet border. By this point, Japan was already at war with the US and Britain. The Soviets, preoccupied with affairs in Europe, had signed a non-aggression pact with Japan. But the Sakhalin border – the single land border in Japan proper – was still a site of great tension between the two countries. For decades, the Uilta had been slipping in and out of the border with their reindeer herds; Japanese intelligence pointed to Soviet use of Uilta and Nivkh as cross-border spies, and they intended to repay the USSR in kind.
Spies for Japan
Gentaro and his fellow recruits spent weeks in grueling training. During preparations, they were told to not “lose out” to the colonized indigenous peoples of Taiwan, who “fought like demons” on the southern front. Gentaro and his compatriots wondered who they were supposed to fight, given that there was as of yet no war on Sakhalin.
After weeks spent waiting for further orders, Gentaro was finally sent on a mission to the western border with the USSR. He and his fellow Uilta recruits were shocked by what awaited them. At their posting, a stern-looking Japanese sergeant invited them in to get drunk before their operations were to begin the next day. This seemed so strange to Gentaro that he was sure it was some sort of trick. Perhaps the soldiers meant to dull their wits and then murder them. He might well have held such worries. Further south, in Hokkaido, sake had previously been used by samurai to inebriate Ainu warriors before murdering them.
Missions in the field were wearying work. Gentaro and his compatriots would wade through miles of snow, clambering up mountain peaks and picking their way through bogs. Nor were the elements the only dangers. Gentaro also learned that a fellow Uilta soldier had died from a gunshot to the head. Yet that’s not what the official report said. Indigenous soldiers who died in the line of duty were all recorded as having “died from disease.”
Unending Intrusion
During his time as a soldier, Gentaro even had to experience a thoughtless tourist nosing in on one of his moments of greatest grief. He’d rushed home from military duties upon hearing that the woman who was supposed to become his fiancée was sick. Upon arrival, he found that she had already passed away. Gentaro had no choice but to begin digging her grave himself
As he did so, a Japanese tourist approached the girl’s bereaved mother, inquiring why they weren’t giving the girl a sky burial. “I’d heard the Orokko leave their dead to exposure. This isn’t what the pictures showed.” The pain and anger Gentaro felt, as he and the girl’s mother were made to be the object of aloof curiosity in one of their most private moments, stayed with him the rest of his life.
Worse of all for Gentaro, this intrusion rested on a stereotypical Shisha misunderstanding of Uilta culture. The widespread idea that Uilta gave their dead sky burials was, according to him, a wrongful assumption on the part of Japanese researchers and journalists. In winter, when the ground was frozen solid, Uilta would cover the bodies of their dead and place them in a high spot outside to wait for the thaw. Once the ground was more susceptible to shovels, the body would be given its full and proper burial. At some point, a Japanese researcher had seen a body placed outside during the winter and had simply assumed this was the extent of Uilta burial practices. The constant misunderstandings of his culture by outsiders would never cease to bother Gentaro.
The issue of Uilta and indigenous burial practices went even deeper. In 1995, a decade after Gentaro would pass away, a group of academics discovered a box of skulls in a Hokkaido University storeroom. Three of the six human skulls were labeled “Orok sky burial, Otasu village.” The discovery of these Uilta remains sparked off a major controversy over stolen indigenous remains, hundreds of sets of which exist in universities throughout Japan and the world. The delayed return of such remains continues to impact indigenous communities in Japan to this day.
Disaster
In 1945, Gentaro’s life as a subject and erstwhile soldier of the Japanese empire came to a sudden end. Called once again to the border, he found his post deserted. All the Japanese soldiers and staff had simply disappeared. Only a small note remained, stuck underneath some cans of food and onigiri that had been set out on a low table.
The note simply read, “Japan has lost the war. We will now be evacuated. Please eat what food there is here.”
The Japanese sergeant who had traveled to the posting with Gentaro grew enraged upon reading the note, insisting it couldn’t be real. “Ridiculous! This is misinformation. Once we return to the official residence, you’ll see. Nippon is indestructible. Let’s go!” The sergeant ran out from the building, his Uilta charges following behind.
Gentaro, for his part, believed the sergeant. There was no way the holy Empire of Japan could have fallen to foreign foes. Indeed, he and his fellow Uilta were woefully unaware of the true state of the war and how poorly it had been going for Japan throughout the past two years. Moreover, since this small group had been out on their mission for the past few days, they’d missed the fact that Karafuto itself had already been invaded. The Soviets had already defeated Japanese troops near the border and made aquatic landings near Toro, on the opposite side of the island.
Gentaro and his compatriots pushed on towards a transport boat. They had hoped to reach the military higher-ups in Shisuka for clarification. The wharf was swarming with evacuees attempting to flee Sakhalin. The sergeant became even more incensed upon seeing these civilians, angrily screaming at them that they’d been fooled by hostile propaganda and were falling into enemy hands. Upon pulling into the dock at Shisuka, the troop set off at a click towards the official residence. The sergeant barged inside, yelling about disinformation as he disappeared into the back, leaving Gentaro and the others to wait in an anteroom.
The sergeant failed to reappear. Finally, Gentaro began calling out for him, and a staff member came forward to calm him down. The sergeant, the man explained, would not be returning. “The Secret Military Agency has disbanded. This is because Japan, you see, has lost the war…”
An Inconceivable Defeat
Gentaro could simply not believe it. Japan was the advanced, modern country that had given him everything. His education. His livelihood. His status as a soldier. There was simply no way that the Great Empire of Japan, Immortal Land of the Gods, had lost in war to foreign barbarians. “It’s a lie! An enemy plot! Misinformation! You must be a spy of the enemy!”
One of Gentaro’s compatriots, Taichi, reached for his Mauser gun. The nervous attache held up his hands, stuttering. “W-wait. What will shooting me get you? I’m telling you the truth about the Secret Military Agency disbanding. If you think I’m lying, why don’t you go ahead and take all the things we have here. See, we have tobacco and sake. Take what you like, and I’ll take responsibility. See, I can’t be lying, can I?”
The truth slowly dawned on the Uilta soldiers. Taichi lowered his gun. The four Uilta men walked out of the office, carrying with them barrels of sake and packs of tobacco.
This was on August 17th. Japan had already surrendered on the 15th.
The End of Otasu
It seemed as though the ground was slipping out from underneath them. Gentaro and his comrades walked aimlessly through Otasu, wondering what they should do. The Japanese were fleeing Sakhalin. The settler colony they’d grown up in, and which had just three years previous been made an official prefecture of Japan, was falling apart. Seeing a light on at the Native School, the young men decided to ask Kawamura-sensei, their former teacher, for advice. He’d never before failed them.
For the Uilta of Otasu, the psychic wounds of this rupture in colonial identity would never fully heal. Click To TweetThe four Uilta were ushered into an inner room, where Kawamura-sensei and the other teachers were seated. After Gentaro and his compatriots sat down, Kawamura silently looked at each in turn. Then, closing his eyes, he placed his hands on the tatami floor and bowed his head to the ground.
“I’ve done something terrible to you all.” The other teachers joined him, bowing their heads to the ground. Kawamura continued, begging the Uilta to let him join their clans, that he might link his fate to theirs, whether they would flee to Japan or stay to face the Soviets.
Genataro spoke up. “Sensei…”
“Gentaro-kun, I’m no longer your teacher. A teacher musn’t inform his pupils of something that is false. But I now know that what I’ve taught you is wrong. Even if I apologize to you, I’ve made a mistake that can simply never be taken back.” Before Gentaro realized it, everyone in the room was weeping.
Gentaro’s sister, Aiko, later recounted a similar discussion with Kawamura-sensei:
When the Japanese were evacuated from Karafuto, the schoolteacher, Mr. Kawamura, apologized to me and said, ‘what I taught you was wrong.’ Then he said, ‘from now on, live according to your own beliefs.’ I answered ‘Yes, I can do that. But that means I will neither go back to being a Uilta nor will I become Japanese.’ And that has been my resolution ever since.
The experiment in Otasu had come to an end. Its mission was cut short and destroyed, its purposes laid to waste and weaknesses laid bare. For the Uilta of Otasu, the psychic wounds of this rupture in colonial identity would never fully heal. But for Gentaro, the worst was yet to come.
Kitagawa Gentaro, War Criminal
The day after meeting with Kawamura-sensei, Gentaro and his troop went door to door, consulting with each family upon whether they would try to find refuge in Japan with the hundreds of thousands of fleeing Japanese. In the end, they decided that they must abandon their homes in Sakhalin and try to find safety across the waters. They attempted to join the throngs lining the rivers and roads of now-lost Karafuto; but before they could make their way southwards, the Soviets arrived.
Almost immediately, the remaining indigenous soldiers of Otasu found themselves arrested. Gentaro was transported to a makeshift military tribunal in Toyohara (the prefectural capital, soon to be renamed as Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk). Gentaro was put under heavy interrogation, looking to find the extent of indigenous cooperation with the Japanese military. He would later proudly speak of how he and his fellow Uilta never broke. Nonetheless, he was found guilty of being a “war criminal.” Soon, Gentaro and the other indigenous soldiers departed Sakhalin for the first time in their lives, although not to the Japanese mainland. Their destinations were thousands of miles away, in the gulags of Krasnoyarsk. Gentaro would never see his home island again.
The story of Kitagawa Gentaro and the Uilta people continues in part two of this series, The Uilta: an Invisible Indigenous Group in Japan.
Part of this article series is based on the author’s master’s thesis, “Remembrance of Lost Empire: Inter-Cultural Belonging and Created Identity on Sakhalin Island.”
What to Read Next
The Indigenous Ryuku People of Okinawa
Sources
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Stephan, J. (1971). Sakhalin – A History. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. (2020.) On the Frontiers of History: Rethinking East Asian Borders. Australian National University Press.
Missonova, L. (2009). The Main Spheres of Activities of Sakhalin Uilta: Survival Experience in the Present-Day Context. Sibirica, 8(2). Berghahn Journals.
Morris-Suzuki, T. (1999). Lines in the Snow: Imagining the Russo-Japanese Frontier. Pacific Affairs, 72(1).
