This paper examines how collaboration amongst university, indigenous community and private sector companies can promote Ainu participation in higher education, drawing on a case study of the Urespa Project in Sapporo University, Japan. In this project, the university offers scholarships to Ainu students, requiring them to take a special course in Ainu culture and history and develop collaborations with partner private sector companies. We suggest that "the two-way learning" that the Urespa Project advocates signifies a challenge to the conventional approach to Ainu education, which has long centred on the majority wajin providing uni-directional assistance to the Ainu in order to help them achieve the national educational benchmarks. The "mutual learning" approach (sodateai in Japanese, urespa in the Ainu language) stresses a nurturing environment in which both Ainu and non-Ainu students feel included. That such initiatives came from private universities, rather than the national government, is indicative of how Ainu education is perceived as a local, rather than national, issue in Japan.