Connecting indigenous Ainu, university and local industry in Japan: The Urespa Project

Abstract

This paper examines how collaboration amongst university, indigenous
community and private sector companies can promote Ainu participation
in higher education, drawing on a case study of the Urespa Project
in Sapporo University, Japan. In this project, the university offers
scholarships to Ainu students, requiring them to take a special course in
Ainu culture and history and develop collaborations with partner private
sector companies.
We suggest that ‘the two-way learning’ that the Urespa Project advocates
signifies a challenge to the conventional approach to Ainu education,
which has long centred on the majority wajin providing uni-directional
assistance to the Ainu in order to help them achieve the national
educational benchmarks. The ‘mutual learning’ approach (sodateai in
Japanese, urespa in the Ainu language) stresses a nurturing environment
in which both Ainu and non-Ainu students feel included. That such
initiatives came from private universities, rather than the national
government, is indicative of how Ainu education is perceived as a local,
rather than national, issue in Japan.