Shifting Images of the Ainu in Japanese society under the historic transformation of the official indigenous policy.

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Media reports and commentaries with reference to the indigenous Ainu people have been systematically collected and analyzed. Extensively obtained materials have been processed into a 12 megabyte. machine-readable database on Macintosh OS with FileMakerPro 2.1 (convertible, to FileMaker Pro 5 format). The compiled database contains 14,512 records (85% from daily papers, 7% from weekly/monthly periodicals, and 8% from others), each record carrying 5 to 20 keywords for searching purposes. The survey has been up to the latest sources of January 2000. Through the analysis, 430 topic categories (structured by 108 primary folders and 322 subfolders) have been established. Hard copies of approx. 5,900 records of relatively high ranks in their informative and/or instructive values have been accommodated into an open-folder filing system available for visiting browsers.The research period coincides with such historic events as the legislation of the Ainu Cultural Heritage Promotion Law (July 1997) and the Nibutani dam ruling (April 1997), with prolonged and related aftermath in that and subsequent years. Thus, the corpus prepared by this research is an indicative reflection of the contemporary responses of mainstream Japanese society, varying from sincere (and often enterprising) shift of attitudes to rather reactionary ethnocratic backlash.