Ainu Puri: a watchful tribute to the traditions of Japan’s indigenous Ainu community
Director Fukunaga Takeshi’s quietly moving documentary follows an Ainu man his family as they balance indigenous traditions with modern living on the island of Hokkaido.
- Reviewed from the 2024 Tokyo International Film Festival
The indigenous rights of the Ainu people of Hokkaido and the border islands between Japan and Russia are constantly under threat. A hunter-gatherer and fishing culture, they’re a people that have long had assimilation forced upon them, beginning with the banning of their hunting practices. Plenty of Ainu remain, all trying to protect their language and rituals, whether the government approves or not. The Ainu were only recognised as an indigenous people of Japan in a bill passed in 2019. In his detailed documentation of a small group of present-day Ainu, director Fukunaga Takeshi mostly avoids talking head interviews and simply observes the practices Amanai Shigeki, an Ainu man who has integrated his family’s customs with a modern lifestyle and hopes to teach those practices to his children.
The Hokkaido-born Fukunaga (who most recently directed episodes of FX’s 2024 series Shōgun) has long shown an interest in the modern lives of Ainu. His last feature, Ainu Mosir (2020), explored the revival of Ainu tradition from the perspective of a young boy. Such traditions, and the desire to preserve them, are the backbone of Ainu Puri (meaning ‘the Ainu Way’). An opening sequence follows Shigeki through a quick fishing hunt, then dinner with his family, then a deer hunt. Cinematographer Erik Shirai shoots handheld, often in closeup, studying that process, unflinching as Shigeki drains the blood from a deer. The preparation of the meat and the carcass are all part of the rituals which Shigeki and Fukunaga wish to preserve: one extended sequence simply watches the patient work of Shigeki and his friends making woodcarvings for prayer rituals. There’s a matter-of-factness to Ainu Puri’s depiction of these communal and familial practices, placed within the context of a modern Japanese town, which highlights the tension between these acts of cultural preservation and the forces of government that hinder them.
Such tension can be found in the experiences of Ryutaro, an Ainu friend of Shigeki’s who we meet working at his job as a fisherman. The footage of large-haul net fishing is in stark contrast to Shigeki’s more reserved spear fishing methods. Ryutaro explains the Ainu believe in taking only what you need, lamenting the nature of his workplace as they “catch too much”.
There is a grim irony that heavy fishing regulations are placed upon the Ainu. Shigeki takes just one salmon at a time when fishing but still requires a permit. Meanwhile the commercial forces restricting the Ainu are the ones depleting that resource. The film offers a small window into the infuriatingly slow changes to indigenous rights in the region: what does (the incredibly late) official recognition as a people mean if some of the same restrictions still exist over their cultural practices? Shigeki points out, too, that the community has no designated land of its own, while Japan and Russia dispute each other’s claim over the same land that was historically the home of the Ainu. Such debates rage in the background, but Ainu Puri opts for a more hopeful perspective. Instead of focusing only on its suppression, it foregrounds the traditions that keep this culture alive.