Upon returning home and boiling some water to try Professor Kaminaga’s tea, I sat down to translate the over two hundred articles I had printed in Tokyo. Much of the Japanese was written with old, unused characters, with some sections almost unreadable because of the document’s deterioration. I spent the better part of a semester in the library, slowly hammering away at this task. Next to me sat Indi, writing her own papers and preparing her own presentations. Things like that made the work pass easier. 

For the longest time I put off actually analysing the content of the colonial newspaper. I felt nervous broaching the crux of my thesis, and instead spent another two months carefully polishing the text’s introduction, the historical background, the summaries on the culture and lifestyles of the Uilta, Nivkh, and Ainu. Then I convinced myself that investigating the data and numbers related to these articles would be a useful addition to the thesis. I made lists of the topics they discussed, and graphs about the days they were published. 

Only with the deadline closing in did I actually start analysing the complex content of my sources. Paragraphs turned into pages, and as the weeks went by, my thesis grew and expanded. I hadn’t fully realised what it meant, studying so many texts, and in the end I had to settle on an investigation that focussed only on the most striking material.

I found that the Sakhalin Daily Newspaper loved to present the indigenous population like exotic, wild barbarians, timeless and without hope of ever being ‘enlightened’. Such stories served to explain why the Japanese state was pressed to colonise and ‘help’ the indigenous, building Japanese-style houses, temples, and schools, grinding away at their traditional way of life. With time, the newspaper also started to frame the indigenous people as tourist attractions, inverting the push to ‘Japanise’ them, and instead demanding that they return to living in tents, wearing non-Japanese clothing. The Uilta, Nivkh, and Ainu found themselves in an impossible place, stereotyped as lazy and backward when they didn’t assimilate quickly enough, and criticised for not looking like exotic tourist-attractions when they did assimilate. 

That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Even after writing about them for weeks, and rewriting my paragraphs and conclusion multiple times, it’s not easy to summarise my thesis in ten lines of text. 

I found the same to be true when trying to finish the thesis itself. I sent a ‘final’ draft to friends and family for feedback, most of which responded with something like ‘pretty interesting, well written, no criticism’. Instead, Indi, a university student herself, sifted through the document and found issues on every page.

Work restarted and eventually those seventy pages grew into a hundred. I addressed all her comments as best I could, nuancing my observations, adding more context, and rewriting confusing sentences. Eventually the thesis was finished, actually finished. But still I couldn’t bring myself to let it go, to hand it in.

This project had been part of me for almost two years, to the point I now probably know more about the Uilta, Nivkh, and Sakhalin Ainu than almost anyone else on the planet. Starting in Tokyo, and even more so back in Europe, they have occupied my mind and become a part of me. Instead of turning in my thesis, I kept turning it over, rephrasing what had already been changed, picking synonyms where no edits were needed, and sorting my bibliography alphabetically instead of chronologically.

In truth I was struggling to let go. A project like this is never truly finished, and little edits can be made eternally. The end is not something you reach, it’s a decision you make. And after two years and lots of work, that decision did not come easily.