When Yuko Honda, a professor at Japan's Sapporo University, tried to start a scholarship for Ainu indigenous students and a club to celebrate their culture, she ran into fierce resistance. "We faced a terrible backlash," says Honda. "The issue of the Ainu was seen as a taboo." That was in 2009, just a year after Japan's parliament finally voted to recognise the Ainu as an Indigenous people, following decades of pressure. Nearly 15 years later, the scholarship is going strong and the club has several dozen members each year, a mixture of Ainu and ethnic Japanese. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES ARRANGED IN SEQUENCES