Ainu people

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Ainu people live in northern Japan and southeastern Russia, and no one can say exactly how many of them there are. In 2023, an official survey in Hokkaido gathered 11,450 responses. In 2021, the Ainu population in Russia was estimated at just 300. Yet unofficial estimates from 2002 placed the total in Japan at 200,000 or higher. The gap exists because assimilation has been so thorough that many people of Ainu descent have no knowledge of their own ancestry. Their homeland, which they call Ainu Mosir, reaches from Hokkaido and the Tōhoku region of Honshu across Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and the Kamchatka Peninsula. Ainu ancestors lived on that land before the modern Yamato and Russians arrived. How did Chinese dynasties, Japanese lords, and Russian explorers each come to depend on the Ainu? What happened when Japan decided to absorb them completely? And what did the Ainu themselves believe, say, and carry through all of it?

  123443

• 2. Names and Origins

  ›

  Ainu, the name most widely known, means a human being. In the Ainu language the word sets people apart from kamuy, the divine beings. Many Ainu also call themselves Utari, meaning comrades or people, and official documents use both names. A Latin manuscript from 1591, titled De yezorum insula, recorded Hokkaido's native name as Aino moxori, the land of the Ainu. Even so, the words Aino and Ainu did not become common ethnic labels until the early nineteenth century. The first appearance of the ethnonym in a reference article came in 1819, in a German work. Neither European nor Japanese sources thought of the Ainu as a distinct ethnic group until the late 1700s.

  Neighbors used other names. The Sakhalin Ainu called themselves Enchiw. Nivkh and Nanai neighbors called them kuyi, and the Qing dynasty named Sakhalin Kuyedao, meaning island of the Ainu. In the 8th century, the Nihon Shoki used the word Emishi for northern peoples. It was written with characters for shrimp and barbarian, and once with characters meaning hairy people. Modern speakers consider the term derogatory.

  The deeper roots lie in the Jōmon period, which ran from roughly 14,000 to 300 BCE. Historians generally agree that the Ainu descend from Jōmon hunter-gatherers through the Satsumon culture of the Epi-Jōmon period, with later influence from the Okhotsk culture. The Epi-Jōmon peoples began in the 5th century BC in northern Honshu and Ezo. The Yayoi culture later pushed them east. Scholars describe Ainu culture as layered: a Jōmon base, a Japanese layer acquired through long contact, and a strong northern element from the Okhotsk population. Some authors even describe its development as the resistance of a Jōmon society to the emerging Japanese state. Genetic research links the Ainu closely to other Northern and East Asian populations and to the Jōmon lineage.

  The ancient Emishi remain a puzzle. The old view that they were simply the Ainu has been largely disproven. Yet at least some Emishi spoke Ainu languages, and Ainu-like place names dot the Tōhoku region. Japanese subjugation of the Emishi began in the 9th century and pushed their descendants toward the northern islands. Europeans, meanwhile, once argued that the Ainu were related to white Europeans because of facial hair and paler complexions. Researchers have not accepted that idea. Far from being isolated, these ancestors worked as middlemen, moving goods between Honshu and Northeast Asia.

  913414245

• 3. Furs and Silk

  ›

  In 1234 the Mongols conquered the Jin dynasty, and trouble soon followed on Sakhalin. The Nivkh and Udege repeatedly raided the Ainu of Northern Sakhalin. In 1263 the Mongols answered by setting up an administration post at Nurgan, where the Amur and Amgun rivers meet. The following year, the Northern Sakhalin peoples invaded Nivkh territory and pushed into the Amur region, which the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty controlled. The History of Yuan records that people it calls the Guwei fought the Nivkh every year. On the 30th of November 1264, the Mongols attacked. The Northern Sakhalin Ainu resisted, but by 1308 they were subdued and paying tribute at posts named Wuliehe, Nanghar, and Boluohe.

  The Ming dynasty took control of the Amur region in 1387 and founded the Nurgan Regional Military Commission outpost in 1411. It recruited headmen from Sakhalin for administrative posts, with titles such as commander and assistant commander. In 1431, an assistant commander named Alige brought marten pelts to the Wuliehe post. In 1437, four more assistant commanders presented tribute: Zhaluha, Sanchiha, Tuolingha, and Alingge. These posts were hereditary and passed down the male line. Headmen brought their sons along, and the Ming paid back tribute with silk uniforms. Chinese influence traveled with the silk. Chinese New Year, dragon and spiral motifs, iron cookpots, cotton, and agriculture spread among the Ainu, Nivkh, and other Amur peoples.

  The Manchu people founded the Qing dynasty in 1644 and called Sakhalin Kuyedao or Kuye Fiyaka. The 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk set the Stanovoy Range as the border with the Russian Empire. The next year, Qing forces reached the Amur estuary and demanded tribute from the residents, including Sakhalin Ainu. Tribute payers registered by hala, the clan on the father's side, and by gashan, their village. By 1732, Sakhalin had 6 hala, 18 gasban, and 148 households registered as tribute bearers. By 1750 the wider fur-tribute system counted fifty-six hala and 2,398 households. The reward was Nishiki silk brocade and official silk gowns. Those who offered especially large furs could even marry an official's adopted daughter. Officials traveled to the remote lower Amur and Sakhalin each summer to collect fur, since the region was too far from regional offices.

  Under the Qianlong Emperor, a trade post stood at Deren, upstream of Kiji Lake. The explorer Rinzo Mamiya reported 500 to 600 people at its market during his stay. The silk robes handed out at such posts would soon turn up in Japanese markets.

  1916172718

• 4. Between Two Empires

  ›

  In 1635, Matsumae Kinhiro, the second daimyō of Matsumae Domain in Hokkaidō, sent Satō Kamoemon and Kakizaki Kuroudo to explore Sakhalin. One of the explorers, Kodō Shōzaemon, spent the winter of 1636 on the island. In spring 1637 he sailed along the east coast to Taraika, now Poronaysk. The Tokugawa bakufu gave the Matsumae clan exclusive rights to trade with the Ainu in the north of the island. The Matsumae later leased those rights to merchants, and contact grew. Rival Ainu groups competed to import Japanese goods, while smallpox and other epidemics cut their numbers. A Japanese settlement rose at Ōtomari, on Sakhalin's southern end, in 1679. Far from Sakhalin, in 1756, a finance official had imposed an assimilation policy on Ainu fishing on the Tsugaru Peninsula. From then on, Ainu culture rapidly vanished from Honshu.

  The Matsumae clan was nominally in charge of Sakhalin but neither protected nor governed the Ainu there. Instead it pressed them for Chinese silk, which it sold in Honshu as a special Matsumae product. To get it, the Ainu fell into debt to the Santan, or Ulch, traders near the Qing office. Much of the silk was the very uniforms the Qing had issued, and its quality exceeded that traded at Nagasaki. Shogunal surveys later confirmed that the goods came from Qing posts. One elder from Nayoro, Yaenkoroaino, even held a memorandum written in Manchurian that named him a Qing official. Such reports struck a serious blow to the Matsumae monopoly, and the Tokugawa government took control of Sakhalin in 1807.

  Meanwhile, the Ainu had become indispensable to Russian-Japanese contact. They served as guides, translators, and go-betweens, and Russian images of official meetings show them standing beside Russian and Japanese figures. From 1778 to 1779, a Russian delegation met Japanese individuals at trading posts in northern Hokkaido. Two Russians spoke Japanese, yet the talks were held in Ainu. A Japanese speaker used broken Ainu, a Hokkaido Ainu corrected it, and Ainu guides who had come from the Kuril Islands translated it into Russian.

  The cost of Japanese control was severe. The Tokugawa shogunate took direct control of southern Hokkaido from 1799 to 1806, and Japan proclaimed sovereignty over Sakhalin in 1807. Ainu women were separated from their husbands and either raped or forcibly married to Japanese men. Ainu men were deported to merchant subcontractors for terms of five or ten years. Santan traders also kidnapped or bought Ainu women from Rishiri Island to become wives. Even by 1853, the shogunate had failed to monopolize Ainu trade with the Asian mainland. In the 18th century there were 80,000 Ainu. By 1868 about 15,000 remained in Hokkaido, 2,000 in Sakhalin, and around 100 in the Kuril Islands.

  2019272216

• 5. Annexation and Assimilation

  ›

  In 1869, the imperial government established the Hokkaidō Development Commission as part of the Meiji Restoration. The researcher Katarina Sjöberg quotes Yūko Baba's 1980 account of three aims. Hokkaido would defend Japan against an expanding Russia, give work to the former samurai class, and supply resources for a growing capitalist economy. The 1875 Treaty of St. Petersburg gave Japanese-administered Sakhalin to Russia. The Kuril Islands, along with their Ainu inhabitants, came under Japanese administration. On the 18th of September 1877-83 North Kuril Ainu arrived in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. In 1945 the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Sakhalin and the Kurils. Ainu living there were repatriated to Japan, except those who chose to stay.

  The law that defined the next century arrived in 1899. Japan labeled the Ainu "former aborigines," expecting them to assimilate. The government took the land where they lived and gave them automatic citizenship, which effectively denied their status as an indigenous group. Settlers received the land to build farms in the style of Western industrial agriculture. Officials called this colonization at the time, and later softened it to the phrase "opening up undeveloped land." Flour mills, beer breweries, mining, roads, and railways followed in a development period that lasted until 1904. The Ainu were ordered to stop animal sacrifice and tattooing. The same rules applied to the Ainu of Sakhalin after its annexation as Karafuto Prefecture.

  Discrimination hardened into daily life. The government and the mainstream population regarded the Ainu as dirty and primitive, and most became petty laborers. Many Ainu encouraged intermarriage to protect their children from discrimination, so many Ainu today look no different from their neighbors. One example is Oki, born to an Ainu father and a Japanese mother, who became a musician playing the traditional Ainu instrument, the tonkori. Anglican missionaries arrived from the early 1870s, among them Bishop Philip Fyson and the Rev. John Batchelor. Batchelor wrote at length in English about Ainu beliefs and daily life.

  Ainu men were first recruited into the Japanese military in 1898. Sixty-three Ainu served in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and eight died in battle or from illness. Fifty-four received military awards, and three won the Order of the Golden Kite. Decades later, the gap remained measurable. In 1993, the Ainu community in Hokkaido received welfare payments at 2.3 times the rate of Hokkaido as a whole. High school enrollment ran 8.9% lower and college enrollment 15.7% lower. Ainu households reportedly earned 41.6% less than the national average. In surveys by Ryoko Tahara, nearly 30 percent of Ainu women found reading Japanese difficult. Activists lobbied for research, and the government pledged ¥7 million, about US$63,000, from 2015. A survey of 1,000 people that year showed improvement, though conditions still trailed those of Japanese peers.

  2425383736

• 6. Words Without Writing

  ›

  In 1966, about 300 native speakers of Ainu remained. By the 1980s there were fewer than 100, and only 15 used the language daily. In 1993, the linguist Alexander Vovin put the number at fewer than 15 and called the language almost extinct. Today the Hokkaido Ainu language is likely extinct, with no known native speakers. Sakhalin Ainu and Kuril Ainu were declared extinct in the 20th century. Schools bear part of the blame, since Ainu children were placed in Japanese-language schools where speaking Ainu was forbidden.

  The language had been prestigious once. Early Russian and Japanese administrators used it to speak with each other as well as with the Ainu. Linguists now classify it as a language isolate. Researchers have tried to link it with Japanese, but modern scholars reject any tie beyond contact and borrowed words. No link to any other language has won wide acceptance. Where English uses prepositions such as to, from, and at, Ainu places them after the word, as postpositions. A single Ainu sentence can pile affixes onto a word to carry whole ideas.

  The Ainu language has no indigenous writing system. It has been transliterated with Japanese kana or Russian Cyrillic, and was typically written in katakana or the Latin alphabet. Without writing, the Ainu became masters of narration. Epics called Yukar and tales called Uepeker were committed to memory and told at gatherings that could last many hours or even days. Many Ainu dialects, especially those from opposite ends of Hokkaido, are not mutually intelligible. Yet every Ainu speaker understands the classic language of the Yukar.

  Revival began with Shigeru Kayano, a folklorist, activist, and former Diet member who was himself a native speaker. In 1987 he opened an Ainu language school funded by Ainu Kyokai. By 2011 a growing number of second-language learners, especially in Hokkaido, were studying the language. Distinctive Ainu patterns and the Yukar have been designated Hokkaido Heritage.

  1310675

• 7. Hearth and Spirits

  ›

  The Ainu traditionally lived in small villages called kotan, usually of fewer than ten households. Each kotan took its name from the nearby river, and sat where food was easy to find, especially where salmon swam upstream. Inside a house, called a chise, the layout carried meaning. The house ran east to west, about seven by five meters, with an entrance at the west end that doubled as a storeroom. On the east side was a sacred window, the rorun-puyar, through which gods entered and left. Ainu are told never to look in through it. A husband and wife sat on the left side of the central fireplace, and children and guests sat facing them.

  Babies were not given permanent names at first. For two or three years they carried temporary names, some meaning small excrement or old excrement, to ward off the demon of ill health. Scraps of worn cloth were used for baby clothes, because illness gods and demons were thought to loathe dirty things. A marriage proposal had its own ritual. The suitor visited, and the woman handed him a full bowl of rice. He ate half and returned the rest. If she ate it, she accepted him. If she set it aside, she refused.

  Food came from river and mountain. The Ainu hunted from late autumn to early summer, when the plants had withered and game was easy to spot. Hunters used arrows and spears tipped with poison called surku, made from aconite roots and stalks. The recipe was a household secret that differed from family to family. Bears were hunted in the spring thaw, and for a large catch a whole village might drive deer off a cliff. Salmon was called kamuy chep, the god's fish, and shipe, true food. Dried salmon fed families and also served as a major trade item with the Japanese. The Ainu never ate raw fish or meat, always boiling or roasting it.

  The Ainu are traditionally animists, believing that everything in nature holds a kamuy, a spirit or god. Kamuy-huci is the hearth goddess, Kim-un-kamuy is the kamuy of bears and mountains, and Repun Kamuy rules the sea. The religion has no professional priests, so the village chief performs the ceremonies. The best known rite is Iyomante, the sending back of a bear. A cub was captured and raised as a family member, then ritually killed. Having been treated well in life, its spirit was believed to protect the adoptive community. When a person died, the soul was thought to travel through the hearth of Kamuy-huci to the afterlife. Treasured possessions were deliberately broken to release their spirits, and graves were marked with carved poles called kuwa.

  5058808662

• 8. Recognition at Last

  ›

  In 1978 the Japanese government planned two dams in the Saru River watershed in southern Hokkaidō. One site lay near Nibutani village, a center of Ainu culture and history. When construction began in the early 1980s, two Ainu landowners, Tadashi Kaizawa and Shigeru Kayano, refused to give up their land. After the Hokkaidō Development Bureau obtained a Project Authorization requiring them to leave, they appealed and lost. Kayano and Kaizawa's son Koichi then sued, since Kaizawa had died in 1992. On the 27th of March 1997, the Sapporo District Court ruled. It denied the relief sought because the dam already stood. Even so, the ruling recognized the Ainu right to enjoy their own culture for the first time in Japanese history, and the court acknowledged them as an indigenous people. The plaintiffs chose not to appeal. On the 8th of May 1997, the Diet passed the Ainu Culture Law and repealed the 1899 act that had governed Ainu life for almost one hundred years.

  Official denial of Japan's diversity was slow to end. After 1945, successive governments built a single Japanese identity and denied that more than one ethnic group lived in Japan. After the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, Hokkaido politicians pressed Tokyo to recognize Ainu rights. On the 20th of May 2008, Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo answered a parliamentary question by acknowledging the Ainu as earlier arrivers in northern Japan but avoided calling them indigenous. On the 6th of June 2008, the Diet passed a non-binding resolution calling for recognition as an indigenous people. A binding law followed in 2019. In 2020, then Deputy Prime Minister Tarō Asō said, "No other country but this one has lasted for as long as 2,000 years with one language, one ethnic group, and one dynasty."

  Institutions have grown around the cause. The Hokkaido Ainu Association was renamed the Hokkaido Utari Association in 1961, because the word Ainu was often used as an insult. It took back its original name in 2009 and is now run exclusively by Ainu. On the 21st of January 2012, an Ainu political party was founded, led by Kayano Shiro, son of the former leader Kayano Shigeru. Since late 2011, the Ainu have also cooperated with the Sámi people of northern Europe. The National Ainu Museum opened on the 12th of July 2020 at the Upopoy park complex in Shiraoi, Hokkaidō. Upopoy means singing in a large group in the Ainu language. Even archaeology is changing, with the Kamui-nomi ceremony now performed at excavation sites, where inaw, shaved sacred sticks, are offered to the Ishikari River.

  The struggle continues over the oldest food of all. In July 2023, a group of Ainu from Hokkaido sued the government to reclaim the right to fish for salmon in rivers. That fishing has been outlawed for a century, apart from a small allowance of salmon for ceremonies. The group argued that Japan had not honored the 2007 United Nations declaration it had signed.

  2943791546