Ainu

The Ainu are the Indigenous people of Hokkaido and the lands around the Sea of Okhotsk, including Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, and once also of northern Honshu. Their own name means "human being", and they call their homeland Ainu Mosir, "land of the Ainu". After centuries of trade, conflict and forced assimilation under Japanese and Russian rule, the Ainu were formally recognised by Japan as an Indigenous people in 2019.

The Ainu are regarded as descendants of the Jōmon hunter-gatherers who lived in the Japanese islands from around 14,000 to 300 BCE. Most historians trace Ainu culture more directly to the Satsumon culture of Hokkaido and northern Tōhoku, with additions from the seafaring Okhotsk culture of the north. A recognisable Ainu culture emerged from about the thirteenth century. Place names suggest Ainu speakers once lived across northern Honshu, and some of the people early Japanese texts called Emishi probably spoke Ainu, though the two were not simply the same. The Ainu language has no proven relatives and is classed as an isolate.

Ainu communities lived in small villages, called kotan, along rivers and coasts, often of fewer than ten households. They hunted deer and brown bears, fished above all for salmon, which they called "god's fish", and gathered plants and shellfish. They were also active middlemen between Japan and mainland north-east Asia. In the thirteenth century Sakhalin Ainu clashed with the Nivkh and then with the Mongol Yuan dynasty, submitting by 1308; later Sakhalin chiefs brought fur tribute to Ming and then Qing officials in exchange for silk robes that travelled on to Japan.

Ainu religion holds that everything has a kamuy, a spirit or deity, among them the goddess of the hearth and the god of bears and mountains. Ritual sticks of shaved wood, called inau, are a feature shared with neighbouring Siberian peoples such as the Nivkh. The best-known rite, iyomante, sent the spirit of a bear raised in the village back to the world of the gods.

The Matsumae clan, based in southern Hokkaido, was granted a monopoly on trade with the Ainu by the Tokugawa shogunate and leased trading posts to retainers and merchants. Worsening terms of trade helped spark the revolt of Shakushain, an Ainu leader, in 1669; it was suppressed over about three years and left the Ainu bound to Matsumae. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many Ainu were forced into labour at Japanese fisheries, families were separated and smallpox spread. According to one estimate, the Ainu numbered 80,000 in the eighteenth century but only about 15,000 in Hokkaido by 1868.

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan created a development commission for Hokkaido in 1869 and opened Ainu land to Japanese settlers. The 1875 Treaty of Saint Petersburg gave Sakhalin to Russia and the Kurils to Japan. A law of 1899, the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, aimed at full assimilation; hunting, tattooing and religious rites were banned, and children were schooled in Japanese. Some Ainu men served in the Russo-Japanese War.

A 1997 court ruling over a dam at Nibutani recognised the Ainu as Indigenous for the first time in Japanese case law, and a law on Ainu culture followed the same year. The Diet passed a resolution in 2008, and a 2019 act gave the Ainu formal legal recognition as Japan's Indigenous people. The National Ainu Museum opened at Upopoy in Shiraoi in 2020. Numbers are uncertain: a 2023 survey in Hokkaido received 11,450 responses, while unofficial estimates run to 200,000 or more, since many people of Ainu descent do not know it. Hokkaido Ainu has no remaining native speakers, but learners are reviving it.

Our maps draw Ainu lands across Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kurils in every map year from -3000 to 1700. The early outline is a rough stand-in for their Jōmon and Satsumon forebears; later it sits beside the Kamakura shogunate in 1300 and the Tokugawa shogunate and Qing empire in 1700. See also Japan.