The return of four skulls of indigenous Ainu people from Australia to Japan in May 2023 sheds disturbing light on the history of the trade of human remains across national borders. It also highlights new international steps being taken to redress the wrongs of the past and return the dead to their homelands.

The Return of the Skulls

In the first week of May this year, unreported in the Australian media, members of the indigenous Ainu community from northern Japan and the Russo-Japanese border area took part in a small but significant ceremony in Melbourne. The ceremony marked the return to Japan of four Ainu skulls which were taken to Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and remained in Australian museum collections for over fifty years. The story of the Ainu skulls casts disturbing light on the history of anthropological collection practices in Australia and other parts of the world, but also highlights the growth of international networks linking indigenous communities, as well as illustrating how contemporary security tensions hamper efforts to redress injustices from the past.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Ainu people lived in self-governing villages in the island of Hokkaido, the southern half of Sakhalin and the Kurile Island chain. Although subject to growing economic pressure from their southern Japanese neighbours, they maintained their own self-governing communities and distinctive culture, centred largely around fishing, hunting, and trading. When modern nation-state borders were drawn between Japan and Russia, traditional Ainu lands were bisected by these frontiers and expropriated by settlers from the two rival empires. Meanwhile, by the early twentieth century, the origins of the Ainu had become a topic of fascination to Japanese and western anthropologists, particularly because their physique seemed in some ways closer to that of European groups than of their East Asian neighbours.

This was the age when racial and evolutionary theories led to a passion for the collecting of human skeletons, which were often used by anthropologists and others to buttress their theories about evolutionary hierarchies. As historian Tom Griffiths observes, in some ways, collectors of bones and indigenous cultural items “mimicked the hunters whose artifacts many of them studied. They were themselves nomadic within defined and beloved territories.” But (unlike those they studied) some anthropological collectors were also engaged in the trade of human remains both within and across national boundaries. The Ainu skulls which ended up on the shelves of Australian museums were part of a prewar exchange with the University of Tokyo anthropologist Koganei Yoshikiyo: Australian institutions sent Aboriginal skeletal remains to Tokyo in return for Ainu skeletal material.

Trading the Dead

The first two skulls, which ultimately found their way into the collection of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, arrived in Australia in 1911. They were sent to James T. Wilson, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Sydney and to William Ramsay Smith, the South Australian Inspector of Anatomy, in return for Aboriginal remains. The other two skulls were traded much later, in the mid-1930s. In this case, the mining engineer and collector Gilbert Rigg contacted Koganei via an acquaintance in the Japanese trading firm Mitsubishi Shoji to arrange an exchange of Aboriginal for Ainu remains. With Rigg as intermediary, a deal was set up between Koganei and Daniel Mahoney, Director of the National Museum of Victoria.

Koganei was eager to pursue the deal, but had difficulty obtaining Ainu remains to send to Australia. In 1935, he sent one damaged Ainu skull and the cast of another skull to Mahoney in Melbourne (labelled, for customs purposes, “natural history specimens”). Mahoney responded by sending Koganei two skulls of an Aboriginal man and woman, taken from the Northern Territory. Koganei then felt obliged to reciprocate by sending another genuine skull, and commissioned one of his younger colleagues, Yokoo Yasuo, to collect a skull during a fieldwork trip to the Japanese colony of Karafuto (Southern Sakhalin) in the middle of 1936 for dispatch to Melbourne.

Even in the era when these skulls were traded, it is clear that some collectors felt a nagging sense of unease at the dehumanisation involved in removing the remains of the dead without the consent of the communities from which they came. As far back as the first decade of the twentieth century, Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Piłsudski, after taking two Sakhalin Ainu skulls to send to a local museum, expressed remorse at his own actions. He could not forget, he wrote, how local Ainu watched him, and how they were “filled with indignation for this lack of respect” for the remains of the dead.

Yokoo Yasuo, who procured the skull which ended up in the Melbourne collection, wrote a paper based on his 1936 field trip to Karafuto/Sakhalin, but in this, he remained completely silent about his digging up of the skull. Indigenous bones removed from their resting places and traded across oceans were often bodies of the quite recent dead, leaving living relatives or descendants to mourn desecration as well as death. At stake here are, ultimately, not “human remains” but human beings: an exploitation and trafficking of the dead which paralleled the exploitation and trafficking of the living.

Righting the Wrongs

In recent decades, indigenous rights movements have given impetus to worldwide movements to redress these wrongs. In Japan, a campaign by Ainu elders resulted in 2016 in the first repatriation to community of some of the bones of almost 1000 Ainu people which had been dug up by Hokkaido University researchers in the early to mid 20th century. This led to further repatriations within Japan. In 2017, Australia and Japan entered into negotiations about the return of the Ainu skulls held in Canberra and Melbourne.

But important dilemmas remain. The Hokkaido Ainu skulls returned by Australia to Japan will be placed in a mausoleum constructed by the Japanese government in the grounds of Japan’s first National Ainu Museum, opened in 2020. But some Ainu activists argue that this is an inappropriate resting place, and that no real “return” will occur until the remains of the dead are buried according to Ainu tradition in the villages from which they were taken.

Particularly challenging issues arise in the case of the repatriation of the Ainu skull taken from Sakhalin. At the end of the Pacific War, Japan lost control of the southern half of this island and of the Kurile Island chain to Russia. The frontier was redrawn, and almost all the Ainu people living in those regions were relocated to Japan. The Sakhalin Ainu skull has been returned to the care of a representative group of Sakhalin Ainu (who, in their own dialect of the Ainu language, are known as Enciw). They hope to take the skull home to the area of Sakhalin from which it was removed – but meanwhile, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russo-Japanese relations have dramatically deteriorated, and there is no practical way at present to complete this process of return.

The struggle to redress the wrongs done by the trafficking of the dead has helped to forge transnational links between indigenous communities. In 2018, the symposium “Long Journey Home,” held at the National Museum of Australia, brought together representatives of Australian, Pacific, and North American indigenous communities, including Ainu, to discuss the challenges of repatriation. Such expanding networks may help to empower the long and still unfinished process of returning the dead to their homes.