54

Modern Japanese anthropology and prehistoric archaeology took shape during the years 1870–1880, following the scholars’ debates and the ethnographic missions of the previous centuries. These debates, which took place in the context of marking out modern borders and colonialism, assert that at the end of the 19th century, northern natives were prehistoric barbarians, as they were conceived of as a homogeneous entity when compared with the Ainu, who were different in terms of race from the Japanese people. The controversy in prehistoric anthropology that shook the Anthropological Society of Tokyo concerning the racial nature of the native settlement of the archipelagos can thus be considered in its political context, in the framework of the building of the modern nation-state.