Letters to the dead: Grassroots historical dialogue in East Asia's borderlands

Abstract

On Ainu land In a small temple in central Hokkaido, Ogawa Ryūkichi, an elder of the indigenous Ainu community, stands facing the altar, speaking to a man he has never met. The rain patters steadily on the tin roof of the temple and on the lush greenery all around. Within the building, a group of people - Japanese, Koreans, including second and third-generation ethnic Koreans from various parts of Japan, and a sprinkling of visitors from Europe and elsewhere - sit on the mat-covered fl oor, listening intently. The altar is decorated with brocade cloth and fl owers. Behind it stand rows of small wooden memorial tablets to those who died in the hills around the temple, and whose bodies rested here, far away from their homes and families, for the fi nal night before their burial. Faded photographs on the walls of the temple show the places where they died: vast construction sites gouged out of hillsides and forests for dams, mines and railways.