The Momoyama family had come from Miyagi Prefecture, in the northeast of the main Japanese island of Honshu, where there are still traces of the mysterious Ainu strain.

As a result, many Ainu are indistinguishable from their Japanese neighbors, but some Ainu-Japanese are interested in traditional Ainu culture.

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 ).

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 ( Yezo ) ( both ) are Japanese terms, which are believed to derive from another word for " human ", which otherwise survived in Sakhalin Ainu as enciw or enju.

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.

It is believed that there are no remaining living descendants of the Kamchatka Ainu.

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.

While modern Ainu have predominantly tested as being mongoloid ( due to heavy race mixing ), The race to which the Ainu belonged cannot be determined until ancient remains are tested.

A recent reevaluation of cranial traits suggests that the Ainu resemble the Okhotsk more than they do the Jōmon.

It differs by including Nivkh, Japonic, Korean, and Ainu ( which the Nostraticists had excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families ) and in excluding Afroasiatic.

Research on the distribution of place names that include fuji as a part also suggest the origin of the word fuji is in the Yamato language rather than Ainu.

Powell said that the Ainu descend from the Jōmon people who are an East Asian population with " closest biological affinity with south-east Asians rather than western Eurasian peoples ".

MacRitchie himself argued in his Testimony of Tradition, under a chapter subheading entitled " A Hairy Race " ( p. 167 ) that they were somewhat connected to the Lapps or Eskimos, but were a distinct race because of their very long beards, concluding: " one seems to see the type of a race that was even more like the Ainu than the Lapp, or the Eskimo, although closely connected in various ways with all of these " ( p. 173 ).

By guarding the border, rather than conquering / colonizing Ezo, the Matsumae, in essence, made the majority of the island an Ainu reservation.

The Ainu languages that are now spoken by Ainu minorities in Hokkaidō ; and were formerly spoken in southern and central Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands ( an area also known as Ezo ), and perhaps northern Honshū island by the Emishi people ( until approximately 1000 CE ), are associated with the founding Jōmon people of Japan from than 14, 000 years ago or earlier, and the Satsumon culture of Hokkaidō, although the Ainu also had contact with the Paleo-Siberian Okhotsk culture whose modern descendants include the Nivkh people ( whose original homeland was mostly occupied by the Tungusic people ), which could have linguistically influenced the Ainu language.

The revival of Ainu culture, and especially music, has meant more than just the development of a cohesive group of Ainu people, however.

In 1878 in Sapporo, it was decided to set higher bounties for wolves than bears in order to further motivate the ethnic Ainu people into killing wolves, which were once considered sacred to them.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, " indigenous specifies that something or someone is native rather than coming or being brought in from elsewhere: an indigenous crop ; the Ainu, a people indigenous to the northernmost islands of Japan.

This is due to confusion over mixed heritages and to ethnic issues in Japan resulting in those with Ainu backgrounds hiding their identities.

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.

Intermarriages between Japanese and Ainu were actively promoted by the Ainu to lessen the chances of discrimination against their offspring.

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.

However, Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex said Kanzō Umehara considered the Ainu and some Ryukyuans to have " preserved their proto-Mongoloid traits " According to anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons physical features of the Proto-Mongoloid were characterized as, " a straight-haired type, medium in complexion, jaw protrusion, nose-breadth, and inclining probably to round-headedness ".

Mark J. Hudson Professor of Anthropology at Nishikyushu University, Kanzaki, Saga, Japan, said Japan was settled by a " Proto-Mongoloid " population in the Pleistocene who became the Jōmon and their features can be seen in the Ainu and Okinawan 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.

According to the Russian Empire Census of 1897, 1446 persons in the Russian Empire reported Ainu language as their mother tongue, 1434 of them in Sakhalin Island.

As a result, large number of Ainu changed their surnames to Slavic ones.

However, they are either numerically insignificant ( Ainu ), their difference is not as pronounced ( though Ryukyuan culture is closely related to Japanese culture, it is nonetheless distinctive in that it historically received much more influence from China and has separate political and nonpolitical and religious traditions ) or well assimilated ( Zainichi population is collapsing due to assimilation / naturalisation ).

Historically, many peoples who had interactions with the ancestors of the Ainu called them and their islands Kuyi, Kuye, Qoy, or some similar name, which may have some connection to the early modern form Kai.

However, the Ainu people did have a name for all of their domain, which included Hokkaido along with the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and parts of northern Honshu, which was Ainu Mosir (), a name taken by the modern Ainu to refer to their traditional homeland.

Turkic – Mongolic – Tungusic and Korean – Japanese – Ainu, grouped as " North Asiatic ".

Turkic – Mongolic – Tungusic and Korean – Japanese – Ainu, grouped in Eurasiatic.

Turkic – Mongolic – Tungusic and Korean – Japanese – Ainu, grouped in a common taxon ( cf.

In Japan, because of intermarriage over many years with Japanese, the concept of a pure Ainu ethnic group is no longer feasible.

Active contact between the Wajin ( the ethnically Japanese ) and the Ainu of Ezochi ( now known as Hokkaido ) began in the 13th century.

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.

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 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.

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 " 拓殖 ), the notion was later reframed by Japanese elites to the currently common usage " kaitaku "( 開拓 ), which instead conveys a sense of opening up or reclamation of the Ainu lands.

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.