Reconstructing Ainu Culture based on overseas Ainu Collections.

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1) Through investigations of overseas Ainu collections carried out over last two decades, it can now be clearly sai that about 13,000 pieces of Ainu specimens are available in European, Russian and North American museums. All kinds of written information on them are now assembled and are ready to be put into an Ainu database, although vidual information still remains to be worked out.2) In mid-December, 2000, we held an international symposium on "Ainu collections in Europe and North America" at the University of Bonn, with participants from Germany, Great Britain, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, USA and Japan. The proceedings of this symposium are now being edited at the Institute of Japanese Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany and will be published later toward the end of this year.3) One of the important problems pointed out at the above-mentioned symposium is a necessity to build a database incorporating all the overseas Ainu collections(both written records and visual informa … More tion of them). All the participants agreed upon its importance as an initial step toward furthering of Ainu studies, but it was also pointed out that there is a difficulty in dealing with photographs or slides of museum specimens in Western Europe, where it is mandatory for each museum to charge a certain amount of patent fee on every artifact of which visual information is used even in such a database. We have thus made a decision not to make use of slides or other visual information on Western European Ainu collections simply because the total amount of such fees well exceed the upper range of the grant-in-aid from the Ministry of Education.4) The final report consists of two parts. Part one contains three research papers on Ainu collections in Europe and North America and then touch upon the important background against which roles of Meiji-era Japanese ethnologists and anthropologists should be re-examined. Part two contains three lists of Ainu collections in Western Europe, Leipzig Museum of Ethnology(former East Germany)and North America. These lists would serve as a starting point for further studies of the Ainu culture in general. Less