Kantō resident Ainu and the urban Indigenous experience

Today, a large proportion if not majority of the world's Indigenous peoples lives in cities or urbanized areas. Despite awareness of this fact from within the international Indigenous movement, city life is still represented as being peripheral to the authentic centre of Indigenous life 'at home'. In general, researchers have only just begun to critique this representation and attend seriously to the new forms and processes of Indigenous sociality that underpin such diasporic geographies. In this thesis, I examine the politics surrounding urban Indigenous mobility and propose an analytical approach to its study based on the concept of diaspora. I develop this diasporic framework with regard to the situation of Ainu---the Indigenous people in Japan---resident in and around the greater metropolitan region of Tokyo (Kantō ). Serious interest in Kantō resident Ainu history has been lacking in both academic and public domains, to the extent that the array of issues affecting and reflecting their social organization have represented a highly marginal if not altogether overlooked point of interest within the general field of Ainu studies. I demonstrate that to concentrate on the diasporic history and dynamics of Ainu resident in the capital region underlines the misguided regionalization of contemporary Ainu studies and affairs to northern Japan. It also raises important questions concerning Ainu identity, self-organization and political rights that contests established ideas about Ainu culture and society. On a broader level, it provides an original example of how Indigenous people negotiate their experience of the city and together form their own places, memories and connections through social relations in and beyond the urban environment.