Institutions
Most Hokkaido Ainu and some other Ainu are members of an umbrella group called the Hokkaido Utari Association. It was originally controlled by the government to speed Ainu assimilation and integration into the Japanese nation-state. It now is run exclusively by Ainu and operates mostly independently of the government.
Other key institutions include The Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture (FRPAC), set up by the Japanese Government after enactment of the Ainu Culture Law in 1997, the Hokkaido University Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies established in 2007, as well as museums and cultural centers. Ainu people living in Tokyo have also developed a vibrant political and cultural community.
Read more about this topic: Ainu Mythology
Famous quotes containing the word institutions:
“The question for the country now is how to secure a more equal distribution of property among the people. There can be no republican institutions with vast masses of property permanently in a few hands, and large masses of voters without property.... Let no man get by inheritance, or by will, more than will produce at four per cent interest an income ... of fifteen thousand dollars] per year, or an estate of five hundred thousand dollars.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Have we no culture, no refinement,—but skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil?—to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us? Shall our institutions be like those chestnut burs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only to prick the fingers?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You can’t talk about a kind of democracy unless those who are affected by decisions make those decisions whether the institutions in question be the welfare department, the university, the factory, the farm, the neighborhood, the country.”
—Casey Hayden (b. c. 1940)