Introduction

Extract

The geographic center for the Ainu people, an ethnic group, has for the last four hundred years been the Japanese island of Hokkaido and farther north. Their ancestors, in the ancient time period of Jōmon (15,000 B.C. to 300 B.C.), were the original inhabitants of the Japanese main islands. The arrival of migrants from the Asian continent during the Yayoi period (300 B.C. to 250 A.D.) pushed them to the north. There were still many Ainu on the northeastern third of the main island of Honshu for the next millennium but by the early modern era, they mainly lived on the northern island—slightly smaller than the state of Maine—which was then called Ezo by the Japanese. Ezo in Chinese characters can also be read as Emishi, a name not only for an area but also for a group of people. Emishi meant to Japanese people “the barbarians,” which is how they thought of the Ainu ancestors who had earlier lived in a larger portion of Japan. The Ainu people themselves called their northern island Ainu Mosir, which means “the peaceful land for people.” Then, when the other three main Japanese islands were unified under a Shogunal government in 1600, the samurai leaders of the Matsumae domain monopolized trade with the Ainu, which they exploitatively conducted. Many Ainu men were forced to labor under brutal conditions and many women became sex slaves to the Japanese. When a merchant working for the domain was suspected of murdering an Ainu chief in 1789, the Ainu carried out an uprising against the domain that came to be called the Menashi-Kunashir Rebellion. The rebellion was swiftly put down and the Ainu leaders were executed.