In preparation for the upcoming 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Japan has sought to strengthen representation and scholarship about the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. Part of these arrangements includes the construction of a new Ainu museum, which will draw on collections of Ainu material culture internationally. Many museums in Japan lack 19th century and older Ainu materials because of the extensive collecting carried out by European and United States travelers, missionaries, and anthropologists. While museums in the United States now possess some of the oldest and best-preserved Ainu objects, they often lack Ainu or Japanese language documentation and some have yet to be digitized.
With the aid of the Stahl Grant, I visited the Ainu collections as the Milwaukee Public Museum and the Field Museum in Chicago, specifically examining individually-owned objects such as ikupasuy (prayer sticks) and tuki (cups used for rice wine during religious ceremonies) in order to document their origins and collecting history, as well as their carved marks of ownership (shiroshi) that once linked them to the Ainu who used them. This research is part of my ongoing work to build on the scholarship of Yoshinobu Kotani, Koji Deriha, and other experts on Ainu material culture who have worked to identify international Ainu collections and link their contents back to ongoing Ainu communities.