Transnational Ainu media: YouTube Itak before and after 2019

Abstract The Ainu are the Indigenous people officially recognized by the Japanese government, who live mostly in Japan. In recent times, three disruptions have affected the Ainu: the enactment of the “Act Promoting Measures to Achieve a Society in which the Pride of Ainu People is Respected” (also known as “New Ainu Law”) by the Japanese government in 2019; the beginning of the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020; and the Tokyo Summer Olympics celebrated in 2021. It is largely unclear how these disruptions affected Ainu creative outputs or the diffusion of their culture in a transnational level. One way that the Ainu have adopted to diffuse their public activities is social media. A previous study by the authors characterized 428 Ainu-related YouTube videos up to May 2021, focusing on production actors. This study analyses 1,387 Ainu-related YouTube videos up to May 2022, focusing on differences before and after the global disruptions mentioned above. We adopted Indigenous and Ainu methods of multimedia understanding and collected public video related information through the YouTube API. The Ainu Law, Tokyo Olympics and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to influence Ainu-related videos. There was a shift in prominent Ainu participating in video productions, and a unification of Ainu-related discourses after 2019. There also was a change in YouTube metrics, suggesting a shift on viewer perception. This study filled knowledge gaps regarding multiple versions of videos related to Ainu culture, identifying knowledge diffusion and cooperation areas that require attention.