Bearing Colonialism in Japanese Popular Culture
This essay on how animal characters and mascots become colonial symbols is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.
You (the player) and your friends, Chie and Yosuke, pass through a television screen into an alternate dimension. For a second, all you can see in this new foreign place is a heavy fog penetrated by bright yellow lights. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a cartoonish character appears. Surprised, Chie exclaims, “What is this thing? A monkey? A bear…?” You are also confused. The figure looks like a blown-up doll with blue animal-like ears, large eyes, and a body like a clown suit. The head and body are separated by a zipper pattern. You settle on bear, as that seems closest.
You ask the “bear” what this place is. It responds, “This place is what it is. It doesn’t have a name. It’s where I live.” The encounter ends just as quickly as it began when the bear materializes old-school, cathode ray televisions and pushes you and your friends back into your original dimension.
This is the first of many encounters that players of the video game Persona 4 Golden have with the bear, later referred to directly as Kuma (“bear” in Japanese). In fact, Kuma becomes an important part of the player’s friend group as the game’s narrative takes shape. That’s not unusual. Bears are common companions to humans in Japanese popular culture. Whether it is the cutesy Rillakuma or villainous Monokuma from the Danganronpa video game series, some of Japan’s most memorable characters have been bears.
Video games allow players to reenact the history of colonization and become active participants in its present.
The persistent prominence of bears in Japanese popular culture is a testament to the ongoing cultural influence of the Ainu, an Indigenous people of Japan, as well as the legacy of their colonization. However, the often-cutesy animation and easy companionship of bears in popular culture belies the bears of Japan’s complex, violent political history.
Salvaging History
The story of colonialism in Japan is one of bears.
One of the first moves of the newly-established Japanese state was to form the Kaitakushi (Hokkaido Development Commission): a government body tasked with colonizing the northernmost island of Japan: Hokkaido. Supported by American advisors who promoted the genocide of Native Americans in their own country’s westward expansion, the Kaitakushi dispossessed and forced the Indigenous Ainu off their Lands, facilitating the settlement of Japanese tondenhei (farmer-soldiers) and the extraction of natural resources like coal and timber. This process of killing and removing the Ainu and settling their lands is the quintessential mechanic of settler colonialism: the elimination of the Native through replacement.
Despite colonizers’ efforts to replace the Ainu physically, politically, and culturally, the Ainu’s cultural influence persists in the bears of Japanese popular culture. Bears are often used to represent the Ainu because one of their most famous deities, kamuy in the Ainu language, takes the form of a bear. Further, a traditional Ainu bear-hunting festival, iyomante (kumamatsuri in Japanese), has continued to garner popular and scholarly interest. In fact, Zoe Antoinette-Eddy points out, the prominence of bears in popular culture by non-Ainu can be traced to nineteenth century Japanese paintings (collectively known as Ainu-e) and Western travelogues, both of which are fixated on iyomante and bears.
Interest in iyomante is driven in part by the colonial scientific practice of salvage anthropology: the study of and the collecting of sociocultural artefacts from peoples who are assumed to be at risk of dying out. The assumption that non-Western societies will inevitably die off by natural selection is Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism, in turn, is a form of White supremacy, since it assumes that Western civilization is superior in the first place. It is often the practitioners of salvage anthropology, those seemingly benevolent folk interested in “preserving” “dying,” non-Western cultures, that narrate the demise of non-Western cultures.
Without acknowledging the colonial history by which the bear became significant, the bear merely becomes a colonial icon.
For the Ainu, this story centers on their supposed barbarism. Popular portrayals of iyomante have framed the Ainu as animalistic. In Ainu-e, Ainu are imbued with bear-like characteristics, like hairiness, to emphasize their wildness. At the same time, Western scholars exhorted the cruelty of iyomante. Therefore, Western scholars have characterized Ainu as of the wild and threat to the wild, both bear-like and enemy to bears.
Their uncivilized, animalistic barbarism, salvage anthropologists implicitly surmise, render the Ainu liable to “die out.” And as an apparently dying society, the Ainu are relegated to history. They are a people both primitive and past, the two intimately linked. This narrative, shaped by bears and academics, upholds the Japanese government’s settler colonial project in Hokkaido. It allows the Japanese government and their Western collaborators to pretend their violent colonization of the Ainu is merely natural.
Indigenous Symbol to Colonial Icon
To survive centuries of dispossession justified by their association with bears, the Ainu have commodified the colonial connection. To this day, Ainu people sell wood carvings of bears, known as kibori kuma, to tourists. This practice is taboo, as depictions of kamuy outside of spiritual contexts is strictly forbidden, but it is a lifeline under the economic stranglehold of colonialism. Thus, through a “complex network of colonial interactions,” Antoinette-Eddy suggests, “the bear, as made manifest in the object, is…subsumed into an emblem of Indigeneity within the Japanese nation state.”
The prevalence of bear-related products, however, belies the genocide, removal, and erasure of Ainu people. These products are not a celebration of Ainu identity. Rather, the commercialization of Indigenous imagery facilitates the transformation of Ainu Lands into Hokkaido: culturally and economically. After all, the bears of contemporary Japanese popular culture are no longer symbols of the Ainu specifically.
One of Japan’s most internationally famous regional mascots is Kumamon, a black bear that represents Kumamoto Prefecture…despite the fact that black bears do not live in Kumamoto today. Kumamon, removed from his natural habitat, illustrates how the bear has transformed into an emblem of Hokkaido and Japan at large. Ainu culture and colonial history are further erased by this process.
This process of erasure is of course a central mechanism of settler colonialism. The settler state justifies its continued existence by denying the historical sovereignty of Indigenous nations. Using bears to represent Hokkaido the settler colony—without recognizing the Ainu specifically—naturalizes Hokkaido’s existence. That is, without acknowledging the colonial history by which the bear became significant, the bear merely becomes a colonial icon.
For example, one of the most notable new Pokémon introduced in Hokkaido-inspired video game Pokémon Legends: Arceus (2022) is Ursaluna, a brown, bear-like creature. Ursaluna embodies the unfinished colonial relation between Japan and the Ainu. However, by failing to address this history and present, the game downplays its imperial undertones.
Video games invite players to reenact the process of erasure through play. By simulating colonial history, players become active participants in its present.
Re-Enacting the Frontier Through Play
Interactions with bears in Japanese video games are colonial encounters. To see how this works, let’s go back to the dimension that Persona 4 Golden players are transported to.
Remember, this is where they meet Kuma.
As the player progresses in the game, they learn that the alternate dimension is a manifestation of Japanese peoples’ collective unconsciousness. The prominence of Kuma here, especially as the first character the player meets in this dimension, reflects the salience of colonization in the Japanese national imagination. Unconscious though it may be, colonial history continues to shape Japanese culture.
The often-cutesy animation and easy companionship of bears in popular culture belies the bears of Japan’s complex, violent political history.
If the player is a representative of the Japanese people and Kuma a representative of the Ainu, the player reenacts the colonial encounter when they meet Kuma. From this perspective, Kuma’s declaration that this dimension “is what it is. It doesn’t have a name. It’s where I live.” is haunting. After all, it is only through the act or promise of colonization that colonizers have historically come to recognize the value of a place. The Doctrine of Discovery, or terra nullius, has allowed colonizers to justify exploring and settling Indigenous land by characterizing them as empty.
To complete the game, players must explore this place-with-no-name. Along the way, the player and their friends’ initial horror toward Kuma transforms into friendship. We might understand this, in turn, as the “taming” of the Ainu—the “civilizing” mission and assimilative project so central to settler colonialism.
But Kuma is not only a friend. They are foremost a guide, helping the players as they navigate this new dimension. The characterization of Indigenous peoples as guides to a new world is not foreign to those familiar with American popular culture. Kuma is the Pocahontas of the game.
Redeeming the Settler
Kuma’s positioning as the guide to the world of collective unconsciousness romanticizes Indigenous peoples as spiritually purer than settlers. As Yupik scholar Shari Huhndorf notes, Native Americans in popular culture are defined through their role in white, Euro-American pasts. This narrative requires drawing a sharp contrast between Native American societies pre-colonization and the social ills that “modern” society built through colonialism.
Persona 4 Golden is set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time of social crisis in Japan wrought by the breakdown of post-war economic prosperity. A slowdown in economic growth decreased confidence that Japan was going in the right direction. Further, the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack and the delayed relief effort in response to the Great Hanshin Earthquake, both in 1995, undermined confidence in public safety. The Ainu-coded Kuma as a spiritual guide emerges as counter to these social crises.
Huhndorf suggests that the presentation of Native Americans and their cultures as an antidote to modernity frames Native Americans as victims of progress in the Social Darwinist vein. However, attributing the violent history of military conquest to the abstract notion of progress allows white Euro-Americans to avoid accountability for their ancestors’ removal of Native Americans from their Lands, as well as their own complicity in settler society.
These efforts to avoid accountability are complemented by portrayals of white Euro-Americans as “contemporary victims of progress.” In discussions about climate change, for example, the victims of progress narrative allow Euro-Americans to deny culpability. Simultaneously, this narrative denies the survival and ongoing resistance of the “old” victims—presumably vanished, Indigenous people—by implying white Euro-Americans are also at risk of vanishing.
Similar to the North American context, the Ainu-coded bear that Kuma represents paints the Japanese nation and its people as “contemporary victims of progress” who are at risk of “dying out” if an urgent solution to social ills is not found. The Japanese settler is redeemed through the universal abstraction of progress. Under the guise of progress, colonists evade responsibility for colonial violence in the past, present, and future. The Japanese society of the game is salvaged through meeting Kuma, and thus renewing contemporary settler colonial society in Japan.
The interaction between the player and the bear as colonial icon becomes a medium in which Japan’s nationwide social problems are expressed. The prominence of this interaction within the game’s narrative reflects the unconscious impact that colonial history has on Japanese culture and society at large.
Bears in Japanese popular culture are not just cute or kitschy. They accompany us as we experience haunting histories and presents of colonial violence. We need to reckon with the many ways in which animals and other more-than-human beings are mobilized in service of colonialism.
Only then can bears be bears again (if they were ever bears in the first place)!
Featured Image: A life-sized Rilakkuma, a fictional, anthropomorphized bear produced by the Japanese company San-X and created by Aki Kondo. Photo by ryanleeorg, 2006.
Benjamin Chin-Hung Kao is a Ph.D. student in Geography from Brazil and Taiwan at the UW-Madison. His master’s thesis explored the underlying misogynistic and settler colonial logics of Japanese nationalism through the video game, Persona 4 Golden. Kao’s doctoral project is interested in Transpacific settler colonial geographies of Pokémon and its worlds. During his free time, he enjoys listening and singing to cheesy love songs in various languages. Website. Contact.
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