Vintage Postcard Collections
Ainu Ethnography
Vintage ethnographic postcards are far from trivial memorabilia; they often offer the best photographic documentation we have of remote cultures in their intact state.
They were a very effective means of conveying what a traveler was seeing at a time when few people owned a camera.
The images tend to date from the later 19th Century until the 1920s, when camera ownership became more widespread, and exotic postcards went out of fashion. The Ainu are a small population of Paleo-Mongoloid racial stock living on the most northerly island of Japan, Hokkaido, as well as the lower half of the Russo-Siberian island of Sakhalin; the Ainu formerly inhabited the Kuril Islands but were evacuated to Hokkaido after WWII.
Ainu language, belief systems, tattoos and hirsute appearance are very distinct from that of the dominate Japanese society to the south and for this they bore much discrimination. Ainu means “man” in their own language but their historic name in proper Japanese translates as “descendants of dogs.” And yet DNA tests demonstrate that they in fact descend from the ancient Jomon peoples, the first arrivals to Japan, dating back 10,000 years. The Ainu are considered to be one of the earliest continuous world cultures with only the Australian Aborigines and the San (Kalahari Bushmen) being in this select group.
Aboriginal Taiwan
Taiwan’s original inhabitants are frequently known as Formosan Aborigines, a name derived from the island’s old name, Formosa. Theorists believe that they have lived there for at least 8,000 years. During the last ice age, the sea separating the Asian mainland and nearby islands like Taiwan became very shallow and relatively easy to cross by small boats or perhaps even by walking across.
Over time, there came to be 16 recognized tribes (and 12 not recognized), the most prominent being the Paiwan, the Rukai, and the Atayal. They share linguistic commonalities not only with each other but also with the Philippines, Borneo, the outer Indonesian islands, Madagascar to the west and Hawaii and other Polynesian islands to the east. Their sea journey began some 4,000 years ago as local island hopping and progressed to giant outriggers able to explore the vast Pacific, with the last discovery being New Zealand around the 12th Century; one of the greatest diasporas the world has ever known, the Austronesian Expansion all began in Taiwan and the present day Formosan Aboriginal tribes are thought to be the Austronesians that stayed behind.
Ethnic Han from the Chinese mainland have colonized the island since the 17th Century, progressively displacing the indigenous population from the more desirable coast towards the more inaccessible highlands. That remoteness helped preserve culture, as well as a fierce reputation for headhunting. The Japanese took Formosa as a trophy of war from the Chinese in 1895 and held it as a colony until 1945. Most old postcards date to this pre-War period. They not only convey visual information about the culture and lifeway of the people depicted, on another level, they are vehicles of socio-political propaganda. Postcard images can reinforce the not so subtle message that these savages need to be tamed and assimilated “for their own good…” and thereby justify an occupation by foreign overlords.
