Japan's indigenous Ainu dance dropped from opening ceremony

Indigenous Ainu Teruyo Usa waits for her turn to perform traditional Ainu dancing and song, backstage during a folk art concert in Tokyo, Japan, May 17, 2019. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon SEARCH "KYUNG-HOON AINU" FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH "WIDER IMAGE" FOR ALL STORIES.

Olympic organisers have dropped a dance by Japan's indigenous Ainu people from the opening ceremony of this year's Games in Tokyo, a representative of the group said on Friday.

"Ainu dancers will not be included in the opening ceremony in Tokyo," said Kazuaki Kaizawa, an official at the Hokkaido Ainu Association in Sapporo.

They were told there wasn't room to fit the dance into the July 24 performance, Kaizawa told Reuters. "We had been preparing and it is a disappointment, but we hope there will still be a chance for us to show Ainu culture elsewhere."    

Indigenous Ainu Teruyo Usa (R) attends a traditional ritual ceremony to mark the eighth anniversary of the opening of her Ainu restaurant in Tokyo, Japan, June 6, 2019. Scholars say the Ainu settled in Japan's northernmost island and across Sakhalin, Russia, by the 1300s. They hunted, fished, practiced an animist religion and spoke a language unrelated to any other. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon SEARCH "KYUNG-HOON AINU" FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH "WIDER IMAGE" FOR ALL STORIES.

Officials at the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ainu people, whose dwindling numbers are concentrated in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's main islands, have recently been getting more official attention from a state that had once colonised them.

The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is building a modernist "Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony" in Hokkaido, but some Ainu worry the new museum complex is mostly meant to burnish Japan's international standing ahead of the Olympics.

FILE PHOTO: Ainu Rebels, a performance group mixing traditional Ainu music and dance, dance during the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Sapporo on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido July 4, 2008, ahead of the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit. The Ainu people, a hunting and gathering people thought to be descendants of early inhabitants of Japan who were later displaced mainly to the northern island of Hokkaido, organised their summit with other indigenous people around the world. REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao (JAPAN)/File Photo

A 2017 survey counted just over 13,000 Ainu in Hokkaido. The actual number is estimated to be much higher, because many Ainu fear identifying as other than Japanese and have moved to different parts of the country.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly; Writing by William Mallard; Editing by Christian Radnedge)