Who Are the Ainu?

The Ainu are the Indigenous people of northern Japan — of Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and southern Sakhalin — with a language, a spiritual world, and a way of life distinct from those of the Wajin, the ethnic Japanese majority. For most of the modern era, the Japanese state denied that distinctiveness outright; not until 2019 were the Ainu finally recognized in law as an Indigenous people. This essay traces how the Ainu were unmade over more than a century of colonization and forced assimilation, and then asks a harder question about the present: now that recognition has arrived on paper, has anything fundamental actually changed?

Explore the data: Who gets to speak for the Ainu? Representation, stance, and sovereignty across 500 Japanese-language comments

From Trade to Colonization

The Ainu and the Wajin had traded and interacted with one another since at least the 13th century. That relationship changed decisively with the colonization of Hokkaido in the 1860s, when Wajin settlers poured into the island, seized the more fertile land the Ainu occupied, and pressed them to abandon hunting and fishing for a settled, agricultural life.

To force the transformation, the government enacted the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act in 1899 — 北海道旧土人保護法, a title whose word dojin (土人) was a derogatory term for “primitives” or “savages.” Framed as protection, the law banned the Ainu from hunting and from practicing their customs, forbade them to speak their own language, and funnelled their children into segregated schools. It brought famine to Ainu communities, and the Ainu population fell sharply.

The deepest wound was to identity. The Ainu were required to surrender their identity as Ainu and become “Japanese,” even as they faced open discrimination from the Wajin. By the 1930s most had given up their cultural practices for a Japanese way of life, and intermarriage between Ainu and Wajin had become common. Japan, in turn, reinforced its self-image as a single, unified ethnic nation. The idea that “Japan consists solely of Wajin” became a wellspring of the nationalism — and later the fascism — of the Japanese empire, and it has remained central to Japanese national identity ever since. The very survival of the Ainu as a distinct people quietly contradicted that story.

Recognition, and Its Limits

Some restrictions eased after Japan’s defeat in 1945. A number of Ainu made a living in tourist areas, selling traditional handicrafts to visitors, while the struggle to keep Ainu language and identity alive continued. The first major legislative breakthrough came in 1997, when the Ainu Culture Law replaced the 1899 act and officially recognized the Ainu as a distinct ethnic group with its own culture and language. Yet the state still refused to name them the Indigenous people of Hokkaido — a recognition that would not come until 2019, for a land that Japanese colonizers had once dismissed as a “no man’s land” awaiting Wajin settlement.

Since 2019, the landscape of Ainu cultural preservation has changed markedly. The government began funding facilities and organizations devoted to preservation, and towns and municipalities received grants to build their own cultural centres. In under five years, a cluster of new Ainu facilities has risen across Hokkaido. On the surface, the Ainu appear at last to have won the right to tell their own history.

Has Anything Really Changed?

But has anything fundamental changed? In January 2020 — less than a year after the Ainu were legally recognized as an Indigenous people — Deputy Prime Minister Tarō Asō described Japan as the only country to have sustained “one ethnic group and one dynasty” for two thousand years.¹ The remark drew immediate criticism for erasing the very people the state had just acknowledged; Asō apologized the following day.² Yet the reflex it revealed runs deep. The detailed history of Ainu suffering under the colonization of Hokkaido still appears in no school textbook, and in only a handful of museums. Most Japanese know, in a vague way, that the Ainu were treated badly — but not the specific violence they endured, nor what that century meant for the Ainu as a people.

It was this gap — between a recognition freshly granted and a history still unspoken — that drew me to the subject. There is remarkably little research on the most recent chapter of Ainu preservation, which is exactly what makes it such a compelling and worthwhile question to study.

A Familiar Pattern

The Ainu experience under colonization echoes that of Native Americans in the United States with unsettling precision. Native Americans, too, were forced onto reservations and sent to boarding schools to receive a “civilized education.” The resemblance is no coincidence: the Japanese government hired American advisors to guide the colonization of Hokkaido, and American westward expansion was unfolding at almost the same moment.

A Note on Ainu Words

A few Ainu words recur throughout the sections that follow:

Ainu word	Meaning
Ainu	human beings
Kamui	gods
Chise	a traditional Ainu house
Kotan	an Ainu village
Kamuinomi	a ritual for sending the spirit of a hunted animal back to the gods

A Culture Rooted in Nature

The Ainu developed a distinctive culture bound tightly to the natural world. Though theirs was a hunter-gatherer society, its spiritual and material culture was remarkably sophisticated. In the Ainu worldview, certain animals and plants are divinities, or Kamui. These Kamui take the form of animals — usually the ones that provide food, clothing, fuel, and other necessities — and descend from the realm of the gods to bring provisions to human beings. After a hunt, then, people perform a ritual to thank the deity dwelling within the animal for its gift and to send its spirit home to the divine realm. Dressed in traditional clothing, participants chant Ainu songs and offer food and wine to the god. This ceremony is called the Kamuinomi.

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Footnotes

1. Tarō Asō, then Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, speaking at a political meeting in Nōgata, Fukuoka Prefecture, on 13 January 2020. As reported by the Associated Press, he said Japan was the only nation to have lasted 2,000 years with “one language, one ethnic group and one dynasty.” The original Japanese, per the Tokyo Shimbun (14 January 2020), reads: 「二千年の長きにわたって、一つの民族、一つの王朝が続いている国はここしかない」. The remark was also formally raised in a written question submitted to the National Diet later that month. ↩

2. Asō apologized on 14 January 2020, saying he had meant that Japan had endured for a long time without major migration or occupation by other peoples (Associated Press, 14 January 2020). ↩