Ainu

Archaeologists trace Ainu culture to the fusion of the Satsumon culture of Hokkaido (roughly seventh to thirteenth centuries), itself descended from the Epi-Jōmon, with elements of the Okhotsk culture of the northern coasts. Genetic studies show that the Ainu carry a higher share of Jōmon ancestry than any other population in Japan, along with contributions from peoples of the Sea of Okhotsk region. By around the thirteenth century the characteristic features of Ainu culture – the bear ceremony, lacquerware obtained through trade, iron tools and the kotan settlement – were in place.

Ainu religion centres on the relationship between humans and kamuy. Kamuy visit the human world in the form of animals, plants and natural phenomena, bringing gifts such as meat and fur; humans return them to the world of the kamuy with prayers and offerings of carved willow sticks (inau) and rice wine. The most important ceremony, iomante, sent the spirit of a bear, raised in the village as a cub, back to the kamuy world with feasting and dance.

Oral literature held Ainu knowledge and history. Long epic chants (yukar) tell of heroes and the deeds of kamuy; the kamuy yukar are sung in the first person by the deities themselves. The young scholar Chiri Yukie transcribed and translated thirteen of them into Japanese in the Ainu Shin'yōshū (1923), a landmark of Ainu literature.

Ainu houses (cise) were built of wood and thatched with reeds or bamboo grass, with a central hearth sacred to the fire kamuy. Clothing was woven from the inner bark of the elm (attus) or nettle fibre, or made from salmon skin in some regions, and decorated with bold appliqué and embroidered patterns believed to protect against evil. Women traditionally bore tattoos around the mouth and on the arms. Men carved wood with intricate designs. Musical instruments include the mukkur mouth harp and, among the Sakhalin Ainu, the stringed tonkori. Ainu traditional dance was inscribed on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2009.

The Ainu traded furs, eagle feathers, dried salmon and kelp for Japanese rice, sake, lacquerware and iron, and acted as middlemen in the 'Santan trade' with the Amur region that brought Chinese silk to Japan. As Japanese settlements grew in southern Hokkaido, conflicts erupted: Koshamain's War of 1457 and, most significantly, Shakushain's War of 1669, in which Ainu groups rose against the trade terms of the Matsumae domain and were defeated after their leader was killed during peace talks.

Afterwards Matsumae and the merchants to whom it leased trading posts (basho) increasingly controlled Ainu life, forcing many into labour in fisheries under harsh conditions. The Kunashir-Menashi uprising of 1789 was the last armed Ainu resistance. In the early nineteenth century the shogunate took direct control of Ezo for periods to counter Russian expansion.

In 1869 the Meiji government renamed Ezo as Hokkaido and established a Development Commission to settle and exploit it. Ainu land was declared state property and distributed to settlers and companies; hunting deer and fishing salmon in rivers, the basis of Ainu livelihoods, were restricted. Ainu were registered as Japanese subjects, given Japanese names and pressed to abandon their language, tattoos, earrings and ceremonies. The Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1875) led to the relocation of Ainu from Sakhalin and the Kurils.

The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 granted small plots of often poor land for farming and set up separate schools, framing the Ainu as a declining people to be assimilated. Poverty, disease and discrimination followed. Ainu human remains were collected from graves by researchers for anthropological study, a practice that has led to repatriation claims in recent decades.

Ainu activists campaigned for rights and cultural revival from the 1920s and more strongly from the 1970s. Kayano Shigeru, a collector of Ainu language and folklore from Nibutani, became the first Ainu member of the National Diet in 1994 and spoke there in Ainu. In 1997 the Sapporo District Court, in a case about a dam at Nibutani, recognised the Ainu as an indigenous people, and the same year the 1899 act was replaced by a law promoting Ainu culture.

Following the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Diet unanimously passed a resolution in 2008 recognising the Ainu as an indigenous people. The Ainu Policy Promotion Act of 2019 made this legal, prohibited discrimination and provided support for regional revitalisation. In 2020 the national Ainu museum and park Upopoy opened at Lake Poroto in Shiraoi. Debates continue over land and fishing rights, education and the return of remains.

Many place names in Hokkaido derive from Ainu words, adapted to Japanese pronunciation and written with kanji chosen for their sound. Their exact etymologies are sometimes debated, but they preserve the Ainu relationship to the land across the whole island.