The Ancestors of the Earliest Settlers in Japan
The Origin of the Population of Japan
The Ainu, also called Aynu, Aino, and in historical texts Ezo, are an indigenous people in Japan (Hokkaidō) and Russia (Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands). Historically, they spoke Ainu and related varieties. Most of those who identify themselves as Ainu still live in this same region, though the exact number of living Ainu is unknown. This is due to confusion over mixed heritages and to ethnic issues in Japan resulting in those with Ainu backgrounds hiding their identities. Intermarriage with Japanese has blurred the concept of a pure Ainu ethnic group. Official estimates of the population are of around 25,000, while the unofficial number is upward of 200,000 people.
The Ainu were distributed in the northern and central islands of Japan, from Sakhalin island in the north to the Kuril islands and the island of Hokkaidō and Northern Honshū, although some investigators place their former range as throughout Honshū and as far north as the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula in what is now Cape Lopatka. The island of Hokkaido was known to the Ainu as Ainu Moshir, and was formally annexed by the Japanese at the late date of 1868, partly as a means of preventing the intrusion of the Russians, and partly for imperialist reasons.
Traces of Paleolithic culture, mainly stone tools, occur in Japan from around 30,000 BC onwards. The earliest “Incipient Jōmon” phase began while Japan was still linked to continental Asia as a narrow peninsula.
As the glaciers melted following the end of the last Ice Age (approximately 12,000 years ago), sea levels rose, separating the Japanese archipelago from the Asian mainland; the closest point (in Kyushu) about 190 km (120 miles) from the Korean Peninsula is near enough to be intermittently influenced by continental developments but far enough removed for the peoples of the Japanese islands to develop their own ways.
The Jōmon period is the time in Prehistoric Japan from about 14,000 BC to about 300 BC, when Japan was inhabited by a hunter-gatherer culture which reached a considerable degree of sedentism and cultural complexity.
The name “cord-marked” was first applied by the American scholar Edward S. Morse who discovered sherds of pottery in 1877 and subsequently translated into Japanese as jōmon.; the pottery style characteristic of the first phases of Jōmon culture was decorated by impressing cords into the surface of wet clay. This pottery, dated to around 16,000 years ago, is perhaps the oldest in the world (pottery nearly as old has been found in southern China, the Russian Far East, and Korea). The period was rich in tools and jewelry made from bone, stone, shell, and antler; pottery figurines and vessels; and lacquered wood. The Jōmon is often compared to pre-Columbian cultures of Pacific Northwest North America because in both regions cultural complexity developed within a primarily hunting-gathering context (with limited use of horticulture).
The very long—approximately 14,000 years—Jōmon period is conventionally divided into a number of phases: Incipient, Initial, Early, Middle, Late and Final, with the phases getting progressively shorter. Most dates for the change of phase are broadly agreed, but dates given for the start of the Incipient phase still vary rather considerably, from about 14,000 BC to 10,500 BC.
The fact that this entire period is given the same name by archaeologists should not be taken to mean that there was not considerable regional and temporal diversity; the chronological distance between the earliest Jōmon pottery and that of the more well-known Middle Jōmon period is about twice as long as the span separating the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza from the 21st century.
It currently appears that the earliest pottery in the world may have been made in Japan, at or before the start of the Incipient Jōmon period (sometimes termed the Epi-Jōmon period). In 1998 a number of small fragments were found at the Odai Yamamoto I site, which have been dated to the 14th Millenium BC; subsequently more pottery of the same age was found at other sites such as Kamikuroiwa and Fukui Cave.
Archaeologist Junko Habu claims that “The majority of Japanese scholars believed, and still believe, that pottery production was first invented in mainland Asia and subsequently introduced into the Japanese archipelago”, however at present it appears that pottery emerged at roughly the same time in Japan, the Amur River basin of far eastern Russia, and China.
The manufacture of pottery typically implies some form of sedentary life due to the fact that pottery is heavy, bulky, and fragile and thus generally useless to hunter-gatherers who are constantly on the move in search of food; however this does not seem to have been the case with the first Jōmon people, who perhaps numbered some 20,000 over the whole archipelago. It seems that food sources were so abundant in the natural environment of the Japanese islands that it could support fairly large, semi-sedentary populations. The Jōmon people used chipped stone tools, ground stone tools, traps, and bows, and were evidently skillful coastal and deep-water fishermen.
The first Jōmon Pottery is characterized by the cord-marking that gives the period its name, and has now been found in large numbers of sites. The earliest vessels were mostly smallish round-bottomed bowls 10–50 cm high that are assumed to have been used for boiling food, and perhaps storing it beforehand. They belonged to hunter-gatherers and the size of the vessels may have been limited by a need for portability; as later bowls increase in size, this is taken to be a sign of an increasingly settled pattern of living.
By the end of the Incipient Jōmon phase, around 8,000 BC, a semi-sedentary lifestyle apparently led to an increase in population density, so that the subsequent phase, the Initial Jōmon, exhibits some of the highest densities known for foraging populations.
Genetic mapping studies by Cavalli-Sforza have shown a pattern of genetic expansion from the area of the Sea of Japan towards the rest of eastern Asia. This appears as the third principal component of genetic variation in Eurasia (after the “Great expansion” from the African continent, and a second expansion from the area of Northern Siberia), which suggests geographical expansion during the early Jōmon period. These studies also suggest that the Jōmon demographic expansion may have reached America along a path following the Pacific coast.
The Early (4,000–2500 BC) and Middle Jōmon (2500-1500 BC) periods saw an explosion in population, as indicated by the number of settlements from this period. These two periods occurred during the Holocene Climatic Optimum (between 4000 BC and 2000 BC), when temperatures reached several degrees Celsius higher than the present.
After 1500 BC, the climate cooled, and populations seem to have contracted dramatically. Comparatively few archaeological sites can be found after 1500 BC.
The Final Jōmon is succeeded by the Yayoi period (ca. 300 BC-AD 300) outside Hokkaido; within Hokkaido the Jōmon is succeeded by the Zoku-Jōmon (post-Jōmon) or Epi-Jōmon period. The Zoku-Jōmon culture is in turn succeeded by the Satsumon culture around the 7th century.
Koshintō refers to the original animism of Jōmon period Japan which is a basis of modern Shinto practices. The search for traces of Koshintō began with Restoration Shinto in the Edo period. Some movements which claim to have discovered this primeval way of thought are Oomoto, Izumo-taishakyo, and Shinrikyō.
The Japanese word ko means “ancient or old”; shin from Chinese Shen, means “spiritual force or spirit” often loosely translated as “deity” or “god”; and tō from Chinese Tao, means “The Way”. Thus Koshintō literally means the “Ancient Way of the Gods”. The term Shinto itself originated in the 6th century CE, so paradoxically, the reconstructed Koshintō predates any use of the word Shinto.
There are no records of “pure” Koshintō in early Japanese literature. By the time Japan was producing literature, its native religion had already intermixed with Taoism and Buddhism. Medieval development meant that Shinto was integrated into Buddhist symbology.
Koshintō research began at the same time as examinations into Early Buddhism. In this era, Japan’s shrine rituals were being “purified” of their religious nature and turned into national forms, a process called State Shinto today. Religionists began looking for the origin of these forms in a primitive “nature religion”. Early folklorists such as Yanagita Kunio were also seeking a purely Japanese tradition.
Onisaburo Deguchi, the founder of Oomoto, was an extremely influential Koshinto researcher in the Imperial period. He influenced nearly all modern Koshinto lines except for that of Takuma Hisa. Such research continues today and is often connected with aikido and other martial arts.
The Yayois
During the Final Jōmon period, a slow shift was taking place in western Japan: steadily increasing contact with the Korean peninsula eventually led to the establishment of Korean-type settlements in western Kyushu, beginning around 900 BC.
The Yayoi people, named after an archaeological site near Tokyo where archaeologists first uncovered artifacts and features from that era, began to enter the Japanese islands, intermingling with the Jōmon. Yayoi culture quickly spread to the main island of Honshū mixing with native Jōmon culture.
The Yayoi period, an Iron Age era in the history of Japan traditionally dated 300 BC to AD 300, saw saw the introduction of new technologies and practices like intensive wet-rice farming in paddy fields, a new style of pottery similar to those of the Mumun culture, and bronze and iron metallurgy introduced from China and Korea.
By the 1st century AD, Yayoi farmers began using iron agricultural tools and weapons. They wove textiles, lived in permanent farming villages, and constructed buildings with wood and stone.
A hierarchical social class structure also emerged in this period as the Yayoi population increased and the society became more stratified and complex. They also accumulated wealth through land ownership and the storage of grain. These factors promoted the development of distinct social classes.
Yayoi chiefs, in some parts of Kyūshū, appear to have sponsored, and politically manipulated, trade in bronze and other prestige objects. This was possible due to the introduction of an irrigated, wet-rice culture from the Yangtze estuary in southern China via the Ryukyu Islands or Korean Peninsula.
Wet-rice agriculture led to the development and growth of a sedentary, agrarian society in Japan. Local political and social developments in Japan were more important than the activities of the central authority within a stratified society.
The Yayoi followed the Jōmon period (13,000–400 BC) and Yayoi culture flourished in a geographic area from southern Kyūshū to northern Honshū. The settlements of these new arrivals seem to have coexisted with those of the Jōmon for around a thousand years.
The origin of Yayoi culture has long been debated. The earliest archaeological sites are Itazuke site or Nabata site in the northern part of Kyūshū. Chinese influence was obvious in the bronze and copper weapons, dōkyō, dōtaku, as well as irrigated paddy rice cultivation. Three major symbols of the Yayoi culture are the bronze mirror, the bronze sword, and the royal seal stone.
In recent years, more archaeological and genetic evidence has been found in both eastern China and western Japan to lend credibility to this argument. Between 1996 and 1999, a team led by Satoshi Yamaguchi, a researcher at Japan’s National Science Museum, compared Yayoi remains found in Japan’s Yamaguchi and Fukuoka prefectures with those from China’s coastal Jiangsu province, and found many similarities between the Yayoi and the Jiangsu remains. DNA tests conducted in 1999 support the theory that the origin of the Yayoi people was an area south of the Yangtze.
Some scholars have also concluded that Korean influence existed. Hudson has cited archaeological evidence that included but were not limited to “bounded paddy fields, new types of polished stone tools, wooden farming implements, iron tools, weaving technology, ceramic storage jars, exterior bonding of clay coils in pottery fabrication, ditched settlements, domesticated pigs, and jawbone rituals.” The migrant transfusion via the Korean peninsula also gains strength due to the fact that Yayoi culture began on the north coast of Kyūshū, where Japan is closest to Korea. Yayoi pottery, burial mounds, and food preservation were discovered to be very similar to the pottery of southern Korea.
However, some scholars argue that the rapid increase of roughly four million people in Japan between the Jōmon and Yayoi periods cannot be explained by migration alone. They attribute the increase primarily to a shift from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural diet on the islands, with the introduction of rice. It is quite likely that rice cultivation and its subsequent deification allowed for mass population increase. Regardless, there is archaeological evidence that supports the idea that there was an influx of farmers from the continent to Japan that absorbed or overwhelmed the native hunter-gatherer population.
Some pieces of Yayoi pottery clearly show the influence of Jōmon ceramics. In addition, the Yayoi lived in the same type of pit or circular dwelling as that of the Jōmon. Other examples of commonality are chipped stone tools for hunting, bone tools for fishing, shells in bracelet construction, and lacquer decoration for vessels and accessories.
Todays Japan
The relationship of Jōmon people to the modern Japanese and Ainu remains uncertain, but it seems to have included both the ancestors of the contemporary Ainu people and Yamato people. Some consider the Japanese of today to be descended from a mixture of the ancient hunter-gatherer Jōmon culture and the mostly Korean-derived Yayoi culture. According to this theory these two major ancestral groups came to Japan over different routes at different times.
Direct comparisons between Jōmon and Yayoi skeletons show that the two peoples are noticeably distinguishable. The Jōmon tended to be shorter, with relatively longer forearms and lower legs, more wide-set eyes, shorter and wider faces, and much more pronounced facial topography. They also have strikingly raised brow ridges, noses, and nose bridges.
Yayoi people, on the other hand, averaged an inch or two taller, with close-set eyes, high and narrow faces, and flat brow ridges and noses. By the Kofun period, almost all skeletons excavated in Japan, except those of the Ainu and Okinawans, resemble those of modern day Japanese.
Recent Y-DNA haplotype testing has led to the popularly accepted (though untested) hypothesis that haplogroup D-M55 Y-DNA, which has been found in some percentages of samples of modern Japanese, Ryukyuan, and Ainu males, may reflect patrilineal descent from members of a Jōmon period culture of the Japanese Archipelago.
Analysis of mitochondrial DNA of Jomon skeletons from Hokkaido indicates that haplogroups N9b and M7a are likely a Jomon contribution to the modern Japanese mtDNA pool.
The Ryukyuans
Mark J. Hudson of Nishikyushu University posits that Japan was settled by a Proto-Mongoloid population in the Pleistocene who became the Jōmon, and that their features can be seen in the Ainu and Okinawan people (The Ryukyuan or Lewchewan people), the indigenous peoples of the Ryukyu Islands between the islands of Kyushu and Taiwan.
The Ryukyuan language family, one of the two branches of the Japonic language family, the other one being Japanese and its dialects. The generally recognized subgroups of Ryukyuans are Amamians, Okinawans, Miyakoans, Yaeyamans, and Yonagunians.
Chinese historical writings first mentioned the Ryukyus during the 6th-7th centuries (the Sui Dynasty). Exact details of these early voyages are still unknown, and it is widely believed that the ancient Ryukyus described by the Chinese consisted of the modern day Ryukyuan Islands and Taiwan.
The Ryukyu Islands were inhabited early in historical times, by migrants believed to have crossed into the northern Amami-Okinawa Islands via Kyushu. Multiple waves of migrants, including those related to the Jomon, and, later, newcomers from Kyushu, continued to populate these islands. Similarities between the Ryukyuan and Japanese languages suggests a common origin in the language of immigrants from continental Asia to the archipelago.
Many Chinese moved to Ryukyu to serve the government or to engage in business during this period. The Chinese, during the Ming dynasty, sent from Fujian 36 Chinese families at the request of the Ryukyuan King to manage oceanic dealings in the kingdom in 1392 during the Hongwu Emperor’s reign. Many Ryukuan officials were descended from these Chinese immigrants, being born in China or having Chinese grandfathers. They assisted in the Ryukyuans in advancing their technology and diplomatic relations.
A Shimagaijin is a person who is not of Ryukyuan descent but lives in Okinawa Japan because he/she prefers to and who also has adjusted to the ways of the Okinawan people and lifestyle. The literal translation is “Island’s Outsider”.
The Ryukyuan languages split from Old Japanese somewhere between the 3rd and 5th centuries. There is, however, disagreement on whether to include the Ryukyuans in the Yamato, or identify them as an independent ethnic group, or as a sub-group that constitutes Japanese ethnicity together with the Yamato because of close similarities suggested by genetics and linguistics.
Shinobu Orikuchi argues Ryukyuans are the “proto-Japanese”, whereas Kunio Yanagita suggests they were a sub-group who settled in the Ryukyu Islands while the main migratory wave moved north to settle the Japanese archipelago and became the Yamato people.
The Jōmon culture included both the ancestors of the contemporary Ainu people and Yamato people. Around 300 BC, the Yayoi people began to enter the Japanese islands, intermingling with the Jōmon. The Yayoi period, starting around 500 BC, saw the introduction of practices like wet-rice farming, a new style of pottery, and metallurgy, introduced from China and Korea.
Yamato people, also in older literature Yamato race, and Wajin (literally “Wa people”) is a name for the dominant native ethnic group of Japan. It is a term that came to be used around the late 19th century to distinguish the residents of mainland Japan from other minority ethnic groups who have resided in the peripheral areas of Japan, such as the Ainu, Ryukyuans, Nivkh, Oroks, as well as Koreans, Taiwanese, and Taiwanese aborigines who were incorporated into the Empire of Japan in the early 20th century.
The name was applied to the Imperial House of Japan or “Yamato Court” that existed in Japan in the 4th century, and was originally the name of the region where the Yamato people first settled in Yamato Province (modern-day Nara Prefecture). Generations of Japanese historians, linguists, and archeologists have debated whether the word is related to the earlier Yamatai.
The Japanese language is a Japonic language that is sometimes treated as a language isolate; it is also related to the Ryukyuan languages, and both are suggested to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.
The Satsumon and Okhotsk cultures
The Satsumon culture is a post-Jōmon, partially agricultural, archeological culture of northern Honshu and southern Hokkaido (700–1200 CE) that has been identified as the Emishi, as a Japanese-Emishi mixed culture, as the incipient modern Ainu, or with all three synonymously. It may have arisen as a merger of the Yayoi–Kofun and the Jōmon cultures.
The Satsumon culture appears to have spread from northern Honshu into Hokkaido, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and southern Kamchatka, merging with or displacing the Okhotsk culture in those areas.
The Okhotsk culture is an archeological coastal fishing and hunter-gatherer culture of the lands surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk (600–1000 CE in Hokkaido, –1500 or 1600 CE in the Kurils): the Amur River basin, Sakhalin, northern Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and Kamchatka.
It appears to have spread outwards from the Amur River region, only to be partially absorbed or pushed back by the Satsumon culture spreading north from Japan, but surviving for example in the Nivkh of Sakhalin and the Amur and in Itelmen of Kamchatka.
The historically attested Ainu people appear to retain a strong element of the Okhotsk; while the Satsumon culture (and perhaps language) appears to have dominated among the mix of people who would later be known as the Ainu, fundamental Okhotsk elements remained, such as the bear cult.
A recent reevaluation of cranial traits suggests that the Ainu resemble the Okhotsk more than they do the Jōmon. This agrees with the reference to the Ainu being a merger of Okhotsk and Satsumon culture, a post-Jōmon, partially agricultural, archeological culture of northern Honshu and southern Hokkaido (700–1200 CE) that has been identified as the Emishi, as a Japanese-Emishi mixed culture, as the incipient modern Ainu, or with all three synonymously.
It may have arisen as a merger of the Yayoi–Kofun and the Jōmon cultures. The Satsumon culture appears to have spread from northern Honshu into Hokkaido, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and southern Kamchatka, merging with or displacing the Okhotsk culture in those areas
The Emishi
The Emishi or Ebisu constituted a group of people who lived in northeastern Honshū in the Tōhoku region which was referred to as michi no oku in contemporary sources. Some Emishi tribes resisted the rule of the Japanese Emperors during the late Nara and early Heian periods (7th–10th centuries CE).
More recently, scholars believe that they were natives of northern Honshū and were descendants of those who developed the Jōmon culture. They are thought to have been related to the Ainu. The separate ethnic status of the Emishi is not in doubt; this understanding is based upon a language that is separate from Japanese, which scholars have been unable to reconstruct.
The Emishi were represented by different tribes, some of whom became allies of the Japanese (fushu, ifu) and others of whom remained hostile (iteki). Recent scholarship has created a much more complicated portrait of this people. By and large, they are seen as indigenous to Japan and not simply as ancestors to the Ainu, but descendants of the Jōmon. Even though historically they emerge as serious challengers to the nascent Japanese state they had inherited a rich and separate tradition that went back several millennia before the Japanese speakers came to the islands of Japan.
The Emishi in northeastern Honshū relied on their horses in warfare. They developed a unique style of warfare where horse archery and hit-and-run tactics proved very effective against the slower contemporary Japanese imperial army that mostly relied on heavy infantry. Their livelihood was based on hunting and gathering as well as on the cultivation of grains such as millet and barley.
Recently, it has been thought that they practiced rice cultivation in areas where rice could be easily grown. The first major attempts to subjugate the Emishi in the 8th century were largely unsuccessful. The imperial armies, which were modeled after the mainland Chinese armies, were no match for the guerrilla tactics of the Emishi.
It was the development of horse archery and the adoption of Emishi tactics by the early Japanese warriors that led to the Emishi defeat. The success of the gradual change in battle tactics came at the very end of the 8th century in the 790s under the command of the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro. They either submitted themselves to imperial authority as fushu and ifu or migrated further north, some to Hokkaidō.
By the mid-9th century, most of their land in Honshū was conquered, and they ceased to be independent. However, they continued to be influential in local politics as subjugated, though powerful, Emishi families created semi-autonomous feudal domains in the north. In the two centuries following the conquest, a few of these domains became regional states that came into conflict with the central government.
In the study of Jōmon skeletal remains dating from thousands of years ago, a direct connection with the modern Ainu was confirmed, showing a definite linkage between the two groups. This linkage however, shows that the Jōmon people were very different from modern Japanese and other modern East Asians.
The physical appearance of a number of the Ainu who were first encountered by the Europeans in the 19th century were similar to Caucasians, and thus caused quite a stir among contemporary academics, and has spurred debate about their origins. It is thus surmised that the Jōmon also were physically unlike other East Asians.
This said, physical anthropologists have found that diachronically, and geographically, the skeletal structure of the Jōmon population changed over time from southwest to northeast, paralleling the actual migration of Japanese speakers historically, so that more Jōmon traits are preserved in the north.
Studies have also shown that skeletal remains from larger settlements in the Tōhoku corresponding to where burial mounds, or kofun (from Sino-Japanese “ancient grave”), were built have traits that are halfway between Ainu and present day Japanese, so the idea that the Emishi were made up solely of Ainoid ancestors is untrue. The Emishi were a mix of both Ainoid and types of people scholars have called “Kofun people” who were not a separate race or ethnic group, but were a mixture of both native Jōmon and the more recent groups identified with the Yayoi culture.
Kofun are megalithic tombs or tumuli in Japan, constructed between the early 3rd century and the early 7th century AD. They gave their name to the Kofun period (middle 3rd century to early-middle 6th century). Many of the Kofun have distinctive keyhole-shaped mounds (zenpo-koenfun), which are unique to ancient Japan. The Mozu-Furuichi kofungun or tumulus clusters have been proposed for inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List, while Ishibutai Kofun is one of a number in Asuka-Fujiwara similarly residing on the Tentative List.
This dovetails nicely with the “transformation” theory that native Jōmon peoples changed gradually with the infusion of Yayoi immigrants into the Tōhoku rather than the “replacement” theory which posits that one population (Jōmon) was replaced by another (Yayoi).
The Emishi were composed of two main populations, the Jōmon Ainoid who were the majority and a smaller group the Kofun united by a common Ainoid language distinct from Japanese. These two populations were not distinguished by contemporaries, but rather by present-day physical anthropologists. Historically, they were seen as one group by contemporaries, mainly those who were descendants of the natives (the Jōmon) called Emishi and Ebisu who also had in their population those of mixed ethnicity, most likely descendants of early Japanese colonists. In addition, the contemporary Japanese for their part looked upon the Emishi as foreigners and barbarians whose lands they desired to conquer and incorporate into the Japanese state.
Though it is not known how much the Emishi population changed as Japanese settlers and frontiersmen began to live in their territories even before the conquest, the existence of Emishi Kofun types attests to some form of ethnic mixing. The Japanese established trading relations with the Emishi where their horses were imported and iron tools and weapons exported to their territories. To complicate matters, some ethnic Japanese allied themselves with the Emishi in their wars against the Yamato court. The latter were known in the Nihon Shoki as “Japanese captives” of the Emishi.
The people who migrated to the northern tip of Honshū and Hokkaidō region retained their identity and their separate ethnicity, and their descendants eventually formed the Satsumon culture in Hokkaidō. Historically, they became a distinctly different population from those who were conquered and integrated into the Japanese state. The Emishi not including them became more like other ethnic Japanese while the Hokkaidō Emishi, known by contemporaries as Watarishima Emishi, or “Emishi who crossed to the island”, eventually became known as the Ezo, and later in the modern period the Ainu.
Haplogroups
The Ainu have often been considered to descend from the Jōmon-jin people, who lived in Japan from the Jōmon period. One of their Yukar Upopo, or legends, tells that “They lived in this place a hundred thousand years before the Children of the Sun came”.
Recent research suggests that the historical Ainu culture originated in a merger of the Okhotsk culture with the Satsumon culture, one of the ancient archaeological cultures that are considered to have derived from the Jōmon period cultures of the Japanese Archipelago. Their economy was based on farming, as well as hunting, fishing and gathering.
Full-blooded Ainu, compared to people of Yamato descent, often have lighter skin and more body hair. Many early investigators proposed a Caucasian ancestry, although recent DNA tests have not shown any genetic similarity with modern Europeans.
The Jomon share some physical characteristics, such as relatively abundant body hair, with Caucasians, but anthropological genetics shows them to derive from a separate genetic lineage from that of Europeans. Cavalli-Sforza places the Ainu in his “Northeast and East Asian” genetic cluster. Omoto has also shown that the Ainu are Mongoloid, and not Caucasoid, on the basis of fingerprints and dental morphology.
Anthropologist Arnold Henry Savage Landor described the Ainu as having deep-set eyes and an eye shape typical of Europeans, with a large and prominent browridge, large ears, hairy and prone to baldness, slightly flattened hook nose with large and broad nostrils, prominent cheek bones, large mouth and thick lips and a long region from nose to mouth and small chin region.
Recent anthropological studies suggest immigration from Siberia via Korea and/or Polynesia to be the ancestors of the earliest settlers in Japan. Genetic testing has shown them to belong mainly to Y-haplogroup D-M55. Y-DNA haplogroup D2 is found frequently throughout the Japanese Archipelago including Okinawa. The only places outside of Japan in which Y-haplogroup D is common are Tibet and the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.
In a study by Tajima et al. (2004), two out of a sample of sixteen (or 12.5%) Ainu men have been found to belong to Haplogroup C-M217, which is the most common Y-chromosome haplogroup among the indigenous populations of the Russian Far East and Mongolia. Hammer et al. (2006) have tested a sample of four Ainu men and have found that one of them belongs to haplogroup C-M217.
Some researchers have speculated that this minority of Haplogroup C-M217 carriers among the Ainu may reflect a certain degree of unidirectional genetic influence from the Nivkhs, a traditionally nomadic people of northern Sakhalin and the adjacent mainland, with whom the Ainu have long-standing cultural interactions.
Based on analysis of one sample of 51 modern Ainus, their mtDNA lineages have been reported to consist mainly of mtDNA haplogroup Y (11/51 = 21.6% according to Tanaka et al. 2004, or 10/51 = 19.6% according to Adachi et al. 2009, who have cited Tajima et al. 2004), haplogroup D (9/51 = 17.6%, particularly D4 (xD1), haplogroup M7a (8/51 = 15.7%), and haplogroup G1 (8/51 = 15.7%).
Haplogroup M is an enormous haplogroup spanning all the continents, the macro-haplogroup M, like its sibling N, is a descendant of haplogroup L3. All mtDNA haplogroups considered native outside of Africa are descendants of either haplogroup M or its sibling haplogroup N.
The geographical distributions of M and N are associated with discussions concerning out of Africa migrations and the subsequent colonization of the rest of the world. In particular, it is often taken to indicate that it is very likely that there was one particularly major prehistoric migration of humans out of Africa, and that both M and N were part of this colonization process. Haplogroup M7 is found in East Asia, especially in Japan, southern China, and Vietnam.
Haplogroup M7a has been found elsewhere mainly among Japanese and Ryukyuans, and with lower frequency among Udegeys, Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, Taiwanese aborigines, Buryats, Central Asians, and Waars of the Jaintia Hills in Meghalaya, India.
Haplogroup Y has been found in approximately 66% of Nivkhs and approximately 20% of Ainus. However, this haplogroup also has been found in approximately 2% of Koreans, and in South Siberian and Central Asian populations with an average frequency of 1%. It is also fairly common among indigenous peoples of Kamchatka and the Malay Archipelago.Its subclade Y2 has been observed in 40% of a large pool of samples from Nias in western Indonesia.
MtDNA haplogroup D is believed to have arisen in Asia some 48,000 BC. It is a descendant haplogroup of haplogroup M. It is found in Northeast Asia (including Siberia). Its subclade D1 (along with D2 and D4) is one of five haplogroups found in the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the others being A, B, C, and X.
MtDNA Haplogroup D is found frequently throughout East Asia and Central Asia, where it makes up the second most common mtDNA clade (after H), and is also common in some populations of North Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Americas; in addition, it has been found with low frequency in some populations of Europe and Southwest Asia.
The subclade D4, which is spread also all over Southeast Asia, Siberia, Central Asia, and indigenous peoples of the Americas, is the most frequently occurring mtDNA haplogroup among modern populations of northern East Asia, such as Japanese, Koreans, Mongols, and Tungusic-speaking populations of northern China. It is the most common haplogroup among the Buryats and Khamnigans of the Buryat Republic, the Kalmyks of the Kalmyk Republic, and the Telenghits of the Altai Republic.
MtDNA haplogroup G is a descendant of mtDNA haplogroup M, and has been found most frequently among indigenous populations of easternmost Siberia, but it is also common among some populations of East Asia, Central Asia, the Altai-Sayan region of southern Siberia, and the sub-Himalayan region.
Haplogroup G is divided into subclades G1 and G2a, which represent the Koryaks, an indigenous people of Kamchatka Krai in the Russian Far East, who inhabit the coastlands of the Bering Sea to the south of the Anadyr basin and the country to the immediate north of the Kamchatka Peninsula, the southernmost limit of their range being Tigilsk, and Itelmen, sometimes known as Kamchadal, an ethnic group who are the original inhabitants living on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia.
The Chukchi are an indigenous people inhabiting the Chukchi Peninsula and the shores of the Chukchi Sea and the Bering Sea region of the Arctic Ocean within the Russian Federation. They speak the Chukchi language. The Chukchi originated from the people living around the Okhotsk Sea.
Chukchi, together with Koryak, Kerek, Alutor and Itelmen, forms the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family, a language family of extreme northeastern Siberia, but it is now virtually extinct, the vast majority of ethnic Itelmens being native speakers of Russian.
While the family is sometimes grouped typologically and geographically as Paleo-Siberian, a catch-all term for language groups with no identified relationship to one another that are believed to represent remnants of the language map of Siberia prior to the advances of Turkic and Tungusic, no external genetic relationship has been widely accepted as proven. The most popular such proposals have been for links with Eskimo–Aleut, either alone or in the context of a wider grouping.
It is an East Asian haplogroup. Today, haplogroup G is found at its highest frequency in northeastern Siberia (Itelmens, Koryaks, etc.). Haplogroup G is one of the most common mtDNA haplogroups among modern Japanese and Ainu people (as well as among people of the prehistoric Jōmon culture in Hokkaidō), and it is also found at lower frequency among some other populations of East Asia, Central Asia, Bangladesh, and Nepal. However, unlike other mitochondrial DNA haplogroups typical of populations of northeastern Asia, such as haplogroup A, haplogroup C, and haplogroup D, haplogroup G has not been found among indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Haplogroup C-M217 is the modal haplogroup among Mongolians and most indigenous populations of the Russian Far East, such as the Northern Tungusic peoples, Koryaks, Itelmens, and Nivkhs. The subclade C-P39 is quite common among males of the indigenous North American peoples whose languages belong to the Na-Dené phylum.
The frequency of Haplogroup C-M217 tends to be negatively correlated with distance from Mongolia and the Russian Far East, but it still comprises more than ten percent of the total Y-chromosome diversity among the Manchus, Koreans, Ainu, and some Turkic peoples of Central Asia although in a genetic study in 2004, haplogroup C-M217 was more frequent among Koreans than previously thought (16.5%). Among the Kazakhs, who are a Turkic people of Kazakhstan and neighboring areas in northern Central Asia, Haplogroup C-M217 once again emerges as the most common haplogroup.
Beyond this range of high-to-moderate frequency, which contains mainly the northeast quadrant of Eurasia and the northwest quadrant of North America, haplogroup C-M217 continues to be found at low frequencies, and it has even been found as far afield as Northwest Europe, Turkey, Pakistan, Nepal and adjacent regions of India, Vietnam, the Malay Archipelago, and the Wayuu people of South America.
Within Japan, haplogroup C-M217 has been found almost exclusively among Ainus (2/16=12.5% or 1/4=25%) and among Japanese of the Kyūshū region (4/53=7.5% or 8/104=7.7%).
Other mtDNA haplogroups detected in this sample include A (2/51), M7b2 (2/51), N9b (1/51), B4f (1/51), F1b (1/51), and M9a (1/51). Most of the remaining individuals in this sample have been classified definitively only as belonging to macro-haplogroup M.
Studies published in 2004 and 2007 show the combined frequency of M7a and N9b to be at least 28% in Okinawans (7/50 M7a1, 6/50 M7a(xM7a1), 1/50 N9b), 17.6% in Ainus (8/51 M7a(xM7a1), 1/51 N9b), and 10% (97/1312 M7a(xM7a1), 1/1312 M7a1, 28/1312 N9b) to 17% (15/100 M7a1, 2/100 M7a(xM7a1)) in mainstream Japanese.
These mtDNA haplogroups is otherwise found mainly among Nivkhs, an indigenous ethnic group inhabiting the northern half of Sakhalin Island and the region of the Amur River estuary in Russia’s Khabarovsk Krai, and with lower frequency among Tungusic peoples, Koreans, Mongols (including Kalmyks and Buryats), Chinese, Japanese, Central Asians, South Siberian Turkic peoples (e.g. Tuvans, Todjins, Soyots), Koryaks, Alyutors, Itelmens, Taiwanese aborigines, Filipinos, Indonesians, and Malaysians.
In the late 20th century, speculation arose that people of the group related to the Jomon may have been one of the first to settle North America. This theory is based largely on skeletal and cultural evidence among tribes living in the western part of North America and certain parts of South America.
It is possible that North America had several peoples among its early settlers—these relatives of the Jōmon being one of them. The best known evidence that may support this theory is probably Kennewick Man.
Genetic mapping studies by Cavalli-Sforza have shown a sharp gradient in gene frequencies centered in the area around the Sea of Japan, and particularly in the Japanese Archipelago, that distinguishes these populations from others in the rest of eastern Asia and most of the American continent.
This gradient appears as the third most important genetic movement (in other words, the third principal component of genetic variation) in Eurasia (after the “great expansion” from Africa, which has a cline centered in Arabia and adjacent parts of the Middle East), and a second cline that distinguishes the northern regions of Eurasia, and particularly Siberia, from southerly parts of the continent), which would make it consistent with the early Jōmon period, or possibly even the pre-Jōmon period.
Haplogroups N9b, D4h2, G1b, and M7a were observed in these individuals, with N9b being the predominant one. The fact that all these haplogroups, except M7a, were observed with relatively high frequencies in the southeastern Siberians, but were absent in southeastern Asian populations, implies that most of the Hokkaido Jomon people were direct descendants of Paleolithic Siberians.
Recent studies have revealed that mtDNA haplogroup N9b exists at a relatively high frequency in the southeastern Siberian populations (Udegey, 30.4%; Ulchi, 6.9%, Starikovskaya et al., 2005), whereas it is absent or scarce in the other East and Southeast Asian populations outside Japan. It is highly possible that this haplogroup was introduced to Japan by the Paleolithic ancestor of the Hokkaido Jomons from the lower Amur region of Siberia.
The coalescence time of N9b (ca. 22,000 years) was before or during the last glacial maximum, implying that the initial trigger for the Jomon migration in Hokkaido was increased glaciations during this period. Interestingly, Hokkaido Jomons lack specific haplogroups that are prevailing in present-day native Siberians, implying that diffusion of these haplogroups in Siberia might have been after the beginning of the Jomon era, about 15,000 years before present.
Haplogroup N9b is the only subclade of N9 that really seems to be particularly limited to the Japanese Archipelago and southeastern Siberia. Furthermore, as far as I know, haplogroup N9b has not been found in Palaeo-Siberians of Chukotka and Kamchatka, but rather among Japanese and among Tungusic peoples of Primorye (Udegey) and the lower Amur River (Ulch). Its distribution is better described as “circum-Japan Sea” than “circum-Okhotsk.”
The gist of it is that the prehistoric Jomon people of Japan belonged to mtDNA haplogroups tying them to southeastern Siberia, but some haplogroups present there today were lacking in them. Then, the Ainu seem to have inherited the Jomon gene pool, but their major lineages tie them to the Okhotsk people. So, it seems that the deepest ancestry of Japan is not peculiar to it, but rather an extension of ancient Siberian variation with different population strata attributed to the Jomon, the Ainu, and (probably) the modern Japanese.
The Modern History
In 1264, Nivkh people reported to the Yuan Dynasty of China that Ainu invaded the land of Nivkh, resulting in battles between Ainu and the Yuan Dynasty. Active contact between the Wajin (the ethnically Japanese) and the Ainu of Ezochi (now known as Hokkaido) began in the 13th century. The Ainu were a society of hunter-gatherers, who lived mainly by hunting and fishing, and the people followed a religion based on phenomena of nature.
During the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) the Ainu became increasingly involved in trade with Japanese who controlled the southern portion of the island that is now called Hokkaido. The Bakufu government granted the Matsumae clan exclusive rights to trade with the Ainu in the Northern part of the island. Later the Matsumae began to lease out trading rights to Japanese merchants, and contact between Japanese and Ainu became more extensive.
Throughout this period Ainu became increasingly dependent on goods imported by Japanese, and suffered from epidemic diseases such as smallpox. Although the increased contact brought by trade between the Japanese and the Ainu contributed to increased mutual understanding, sometimes it led to conflict, occasionally intensifying into violent Ainu revolts, of which the most important was Shakushain’s Revolt (1669–1672).
In 1868 there were about 15,000 Ainu in Hokkaido, 2000 in Sakhalin, and around 100 in the Kurile islands.
The turning point for Ainu culture was the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. A variety of social, political and economic reforms were introduced by the Japanese government, in hope of modernising the country in the Western style, and included the annexation of Hokkaido.
Sjöberg quotes Baba’s (1980) account of the Japanese government’s reasoning: ‘ … The development of Japan’s large northern island had several objectives: First, it was seen as a means to defend Japan from a rapidly developing and expansionist Russia. Second … it offered a solution to the unemployment for the former samurai class … Finally, development promised to yield the needed natural resources for a growing capitalist economy.’
In 1899 the Japanese government passed an act labeling the Ainu as former aborigines, with the idea they would assimilate—this resulted in the land the Ainu people lived on being taken by the Japanese government, and was from then on under Japanese control. Also at this time, the Ainu were granted automatic Japanese citizenship, effectively denying them the status of an indigenous group.
The Ainu were becoming increasingly marginalized on their own land—over a period of only 36 years, the Ainu went from being a relatively isolated group of people to having their land, language, religion and customs assimilated into those of the Japanese.
In addition to this, the land the Ainu lived on was distributed to the Wajin who had decided to move to Hokkaido, who had been encouraged by the Japanese government of the Meiji era to take advantage of the island’s abundance of natural resources, and to create and maintain farms in the model of western industrial agriculture.
While at the time the process was openly referred to as colonization (“takushoku”), the notion was later reframed by Japanese elites to the currently common usage “kaitaku”, which instead conveys a sense of opening up or reclamation of the Ainu lands.
As well as this, factories such as flour mills and beer breweries and mining practices resulted in the creation of infrastructure such as roads and railway lines, during a development period that lasted until 1904. During this time the Ainu were forced to learn Japanese, required to adopt Japanese names and ordered to cease religious practices such as animal sacrifice and the custom of tattooing.
The 1899 act mentioned above was replaced in 1997—until then the government had stated there were no ethnic minority groups. It was not until June 6, 2008 that Japan formally recognised the Ainu as an indigenous group (see Official Recognition, below).
Intermarriages between Japanese and Ainu were actively promoted by the Ainu to lessen the chances of discrimination against their offspring. As a result, many Ainu are indistinguishable from their Japanese neighbors, but some Ainu-Japanese are interested in traditional Ainu culture. For example, Oki, born as a child of an Ainu father and a Japanese mother, became a musician who plays the traditional Ainu instrument tonkori. There are many small towns in the southeastern or Hidaka region where full-blooded Ainu may still be seen such as in Nibutani (Ainu: Niputay). Many such children live in Sambutsu especially, on the eastern coast. In 1966 the number of “pure” Ainu was about 300 (Honna, Tajima, and Minamoto, 2000).
Their most widely known ethnonym is derived from the word ainu, which means “human” (particularly as opposed to kamui, divine beings), basically neither ethnicity nor the name of a race, in the Hokkaidō dialects of the Ainu language; Emishi (Ebisu) and Ezo [endzo] (Yezo) are Japanese terms, which are believed to derive from another word for “human”, which otherwise survived in Sakhalin Ainu as enciw or enju. Today, many Ainu dislike the term Ainu because it had once been used with derogatory nuance, and prefer to identify themselves as Utari (comrade in the Ainu language). Official documents use both names.
On June 6, 2008, a bipartisan, non-binding resolution was approved by the Japanese Diet calling upon the government to recognize the Ainu people as indigenous to Japan, and urging an end to discrimination against the group. The resolution recognised the Ainu people as “an indigenous people with a distinct language, religion and culture”, and rescinded the 1899 law.
Though the resolution is historically significant, Hideaki Uemura, professor at Keisen University in Tokyo and a specialist in indigenous peoples’ rights, commented that the motion is “weak in the sense of recognizing historical facts” as the Ainu were “forced” to become Japanese in the first place.
As a result of the Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1875), the Kuril Islands were handed over to Japan, along with its Ainu subjects. A total of 83 North Kuril Ainu arrived in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on September 18, 1877 after they decided to remain under Russian rule.
They refused the offer by Russian officials to move to new reservations in the Commander Islands. Finally a deal was reached in 1881 and the Ainu decided to settle in the village of Yavin. In March 1881 the group left Petropavlovsk and started the journey towards Yavin by foot. Four months later, they arrived at their new homes. Another village, Golygino was founded later.
Under Soviet rule, both the villages were forced to disband and residents were moved to the Russian dominated Zaporozhye rural settlement in Ust-Bolsheretsky Raion. As a result of intermarriage, the three ethnic groups assimilated to form the Kamchadal community. In 1953, K. Omelchenko, the minister for the protection of military and state secrets in USSR banned the press from publishing any more information on the Ainu living in the USSR. This order was revoked after two decades.
The North Kuril Ainu of Zaporozhye are currently the largest Ainu subgroup in Russia. The Nakamura clan (South Kuril Ainu on their paternal side) are the smallest and numbers just 6 people residing in Petropavlovsk. On Sakhalin island, there are a few dozen people who identify themselves as Sakhalin Ainu, but many more with partial Ainu ancestry do not acknowledge it. Most of the 888 Japanese people living in Russia (2010 Census) are of mixed Japanese-Ainu ancestry, although they do not acknowledge it (full Japanese ancestry gives them the right of visa-free entry to Japan). Similarly, no one identifies themselves as Amur Valley Ainu, although people with partial descent can be found in Khabarovsk. It is believed that there are no remaining living descendants of the Kamchatka Ainu.
In the 2010 Census of Russia, close to 100 people tried to register themselves as ethnic Ainu in the village, but the governing council of Kamchatka Krai rejected their claim and enrolled them as ethnic Kamchadal. In 2011, the leader of the Ainu community in Kamchatka, Alexei Vladimirovich Nakamura requested that Vladimir Ilyukhin (Governor of Kamchatka) and Boris Nevzorov (Chairman of state Duma) include the Ainu in the central list of the Indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East. This request was also turned down.
Ethnic Ainu living in Sakhalin Oblast and Khabarovsk Krai are not organized politically. According to Alexei Nakamura, as of 2012, there are only 205 Ainu living in Russia (up from just 12 people who self-identified as Ainu in 2008) and they along with the Kurile Kamchadals (Itelmen of Kuril islands) are fighting for official recognition. Since the Ainu are not recognized in the official list of the peoples living in Russia, they are counted as people without nationality or as ethnic Russian or Kamchadal.
In 2004 the small Ainu community living in Kamchatka Krai wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin, urging him to reconsider any move to award the Southern Kuril Islands to Japan. They also urged him to recognize the Japanese genocide against the Ainu people, which Putin declined. According to the community, their tragedy is comparable in scale and intensity only with the genocide faced by the indigenous people of the Americas.
As of 2012, both the Kurile Ainu and Kurile Kamchadal ethnic groups lack the fishing and hunting rights which the Russian government grants to the indigenous tribal communities of the far north.
According to the Russian Empire Census of 1897, 1,446 persons in the Russian Empire reported Ainu language as their mother tongue, 1,434 of them in Sakhalin Island.
The southern half of Sakhalin was acquired by Japan as a result of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, but at the end of World War II in 1945, the Soviets declared war on Japan and took possession of the Kuril islands and southern Sakhalin. The Ainu population, as previously Japanese subjects, were “repatriated” to Japan.
During Tsarist times, the Ainu living in Russia were forbidden from identifying themselves as such, since Imperial Japanese officials claimed that all the regions inhabited by the Ainu in the past or present belonged to Japan. The terms “Kurile”, “Kamchatka Kurile”, etc., were used to identify the ethnic group. During Soviet times, people with Ainu surnames were sent to gulags and labor camps, as they were often mistaken for Japanese. As a result, large numbers of Ainu changed their surnames to Slavic ones.
After World War II, most of the Ainu living in Sakhalin were deported to Japan. Of the 1,159 Ainu, only around 100 remained in Russia. Of those who remained, only the elderly were full-blooded Ainu. Others were either mixed race or married to ethnic Russians. The last of the Ainu households disappeared in the late 1960s, when Yamanaka Kitaro committed suicide after the death of his wife. The couple was childless.
To eradicate Ainu identity, Soviet authorities removed the ethnic group from the list of nationalities which could be mentioned in a Soviet passport. Due to this, children born after 1945 were not able to identify themselves as Ainu. The last known deportation of Ainu to Japan occurred in 1982, when Keizo Nakamura, a full blooded Northern Kuril Ainu, was deported to Hokkaido after serving 15 years’ hard labor in the province of Magadan. His wife, Tamara Timofeevna Pikhteevoi, was of mixed Sakhalin Ainu and Gilyak ancestry. After the arrest of Keizo in 1967, Tamara and her son Alexei Nakamura were expelled from Kamchatka Krai and sent to the island of Sakhalin, to live in the city of Tomari.
Unlike the other Ainu clans currently living in Russia, there is considerable doubt whether the Nakamura clan of Kamchatka should be identified as Northern Kuril Ainu, Southern Kuril Ainu or as Kamchatka Ainu. This is due to the fact that the clan originally immigrated to Kamchatka from Kunashir in 1789.
The Ainu of Kunashir are South Kuril Ainu. They settled down near Kurile Lake, which was inhabited by the Kamchatka Ainu and North Kuril Ainu. In 1929 the Ainu of Kurile Lake fled to the island of Paramushir after an armed conflict with the Soviet authorities. At that time, Paramushir was under Japanese rule.
During the Invasion of the Kuril Islands, Akira Nakamura (b. 1897) was captured by the Soviet army and his elder son Takeshi Nakamura (1925–45) was killed in the battle. Akira’s only surviving son, Keizo (b. 1927), was taken prisoner and joined the Soviet Army after his capture. After the war, Keizo went to Korsakov to work in the local harbor. In 1963 he married Tamara Pikhtivoi, a member of the Sakhalin Ainu tribe. Their only child Alexei was born in 1964. The descendants of Tamara and Alexei are found in Kamchatka and Sakhalin.
In 1979 the USSR removed the term “Ainu” from the list of living ethnic groups of Russia, an act by which the government proclaimed that the Ainu as an ethnic group were extinct in its territory. According to the 2002 Russian Federation census, no responders gave the ethnonym Ainu in boxes 7 or 9.2 in the K-1 form of the census, though some still might exist. During the 2010 Census of Russia, the authorities rejected the claim from a group of mostly mixed race Ainu living in Kamchatka that they were not extinct.
The only Ainu speakers remaining (besides perhaps a few partial speakers) live solely in Japan. There, they are concentrated primarily on the southern and eastern coasts of the island of Hokkaidō.
Due to intermarriage with the Japanese and ongoing absorption into the predominant culture, there are no truly Ainu settlements existing in Japan today. The town of Nibutani (Ainu: Niputay) in Hidaka area (Hokkaido prefecture) has a number of Ainu households and a visit to some of the Ainu owned craft shops close to the Ainu museums (there are two of them in Nibutani) is an opportunity to interact with the Ainu people. Many “authentic Ainu villages” advertised in Hokkaido such as Akan and Shiraoi are tourist attractions and provide an opportunity to see and meet Ainu people.
Today, it is estimated that fewer than 100 speakers of the language remain, while other research places the number at fewer than 15 speakers. The language has been classified as “endangered”. As a result of this the study of the Ainu language is limited and is based largely on historical research.
Although there have been attempts to show that the Ainu language and the Japanese language are related, modern scholars have rejected that the relationship goes beyond contact, such as the mutual borrowing of words between Japanese and Ainu. In fact, no attempt to show a relationship with Ainu to any other language has gained wide acceptance, and Ainu is currently considered to be a language isolate.
Words used as prepositions in English (such as to, from, by, in, and at) are postpositional in Ainu; they come after the word that they modify. A single sentence in Ainu can be made up of many added or agglutinated sounds or morphemes that represent nouns or ideas.
The Ainu language has had no system of writing, and has historically been transliterated by the Japanese kana or Russian Cyrillic. Today, it is typically written in either katakana or Latin alphabet. The unwieldy nature of the Japanese kana with its inability to accurately represent coda consonants has contributed to the degradation of the original Ainu. For example, some words, such as Kor (meaning “to hold”), are now pronounced with a terminal vowel sound, as in Koro.
Many of the Ainu dialects, even from one end of Hokkaido to the other, were not mutually intelligible; however, the classic Ainu language of the Yukar, or Ainu epic stories, was understood by all. Without a writing system, the Ainu were masters of narration, with the Yukar and other forms of narration such as the Uepeker (Uwepeker) tales, being committed to memory and related at gatherings, often lasting many hours or even days.
Most Hokkaido Ainu and some other Ainu are members of an umbrella group called the Hokkaido Utari Association. It was originally controlled by the government to speed Ainu assimilation and integration into the Japanese nation-state. It now is run exclusively by Ainu and operates mostly independently of the government.
Other key institutions include The Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture (FRPAC), set up by the Japanese government after enactment of the Ainu Culture Law in 1997, the Hokkaido University Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies[dead link] established in 2007, as well as museums and cultural centers. Ainu people living in Tokyo have also developed a vibrant political and cultural community.
On March 27, 1997, the Sapporo District Court decided a landmark case that, for the first time in Japanese history, recognized the right of the Ainu people to enjoy their distinct culture and traditions. The case arose because of a 1978 government plan to build two dams in the Saru River watershed in southern Hokkaido. The dams were part of a series of development projects under the Second National Development Plan that were intended to industrialize the north of Japan. The planned location for one of the dams was across the valley floor close to Nibutani village, the home of a large community of Ainu people and an important center of Ainu culture and history.
In the early 1980s when the government commenced construction on the dam, two Ainu landowners refused to agree to the expropriation of their land. These landowners were Kaizawa Tadashi and Kayano Shigeru—well-known and important leaders in the Ainu community. After Kaizawa and Kayano declined to sell their land, the Hokkaido Development Bureau applied for and was subsequently granted a Project Authorization, which required the men to vacate their land. When their appeal of the Authorization was denied, Kayano and Kaizawa’s son Koichii (Kaizawa died in 1992), filed suit against the Hokkaido Development Bureau.
The final decision denied the relief sought by the plaintiffs for pragmatic reasons—the dam was already standing—but the decision was nonetheless heralded as a landmark victory for the Ainu people. In short, nearly all of the plaintiffs’ claims were recognized. Moreover, the decision marked the first time Japanese case law acknowledged the Ainu as an indigenous people and contemplated the responsibility of the Japanese nation to the indigenous people within its borders.
The decision included broad fact-finding that underscored the long history of the oppression of the Ainu people by Japan’s majority, referred to as Wajin in the case and discussions about the case. The legal roots of the decision can be found in Article 13 of Japan’s Constitution, which protects the rights of the individual, and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The decision was issued on March 27, 1997, and because of the broad implications for Ainu rights, the plaintiffs decided not to appeal the decision, which became final two week later. After the decision was issued, on May 8, 1997, the Diet passed the Ainu Culture Law and repealed the Ainu Protection Act—the 1899 law that had been the vehicle of Ainu oppression for almost one hundred years.
While the Ainu Culture Law has been widely criticized for its shortcomings, the shift that it represents in Japan’s view of the Ainu people is a testament to the importance of the Nibutani decision. In 2007 the ‘Cultural Landscape along the Sarugawa River resulting from Ainu Tradition and Modern Settlement’ was designated an Important Cultural Landscape. A later action seeking restoration of Ainu assets held in trust by the Japanese Government was dismissed in 2008.
Much national policy in Japan has been developed out of the action of governmental advisory boards, known as shingikai in Japanese. One such committee operated in the late 1990s, and its work resulted in the 1997 Ainu Culture Law. This panel’s circumstances were criticized for including not even a single Ainu person among its members.
More recently, a panel was established in 2006, which notably was the first time an Ainu person was included. It completed its work in 2008 issuing a major report that included an extensive historical record and called for substantial government policy changes towards the Ainu.
The Ainu Party (Ainu minzoku tō) was founded on January 21, 2012, after a group of Ainu activists in Hokkaido announced the formation of a political party for the Ainu on October 30, 2011. The Ainu Association of Hokkaido reported that Kayano Shiro, the son of the former Ainu leader Kayano Shigeru, will head the party. Their aim is to contribute to the realization of a multicultural and multiethnic society in Japan, along with rights for the Ainu.
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