Historically, they spoke the Ainu language and related varieties and lived in Hokkaidō, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They settled down near Kurile Lake, which was inhabited by the Kamchatka Ainu and North Kuril Ainu.

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.

Until the twentieth century, Ainu languages were also spoken throughout the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands.

The name Kuril originates from the autonym of the aboriginal Ainu, the islands ' original inhabitants: " kur ", meaning man.

The Ainu people were early inhabitants of Kuril Islands, although there are few records that pre-date the 17th century.

Its near perfect shape gave rise to many legends about the volcano among the peoples of the region, such as the Itelmens and Kuril Ainu.

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.

Kunashir Island (;, Kunashiri-tō ; or クナシㇽ, Kunasir ), possibly meaning Black Island or Grass Island in Ainu, is the southernmost island of the Kuril Islands, which are controlled by Russia and claimed by Japan ( see Kuril Islands dispute ).

There are also small numbers of Japanese people in Russia some whose heritage date back to the times when both countries shared the territories of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands ; some Japanese communists settled in the Soviet Union, including Mutsuo Hakamada, the brother of former Japanese Communist Party chairman Satomi Hakamada whose daughter Irina Hakamada is a notable Russian political figure.

As of 2003, roughly 16, 800 people ( ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Tatars, Nivkhs, Oroch ) inhabited the Kuril Islands.

The Ainu of Sakhalin and the Kurils appear to have been a relatively recent expansion from Hokkaido, displacing the indigenous Okhotsk culture ( in the case of Sakhalin, Ainu oral history records their displacement of an indigenous people they called the Tonchi who, based on toponymic evidence, were evidently the Nivkh ), and indeed a mixed Kamchadal – Kuril Ainu population is attested from southern Kamchatka.

G. F. Muller ’ s Voyages & Découvertes faites par les Russes ( Amsterdam, 1766 ) contained a list and description of the Kuril Islands, including Urup whose people were said to trade with the Japanese but were not under their control.

Owing to their location along the Pacific shelf edge and the confluence of Okhotsk Sea gyre and the southward Oyashio Current, the Kuril islands are surrounded by waters that are among the most productive in the North Pacific, supporting a wide range and high abundance of marine life.

The best examples of volcanic arcs with both sets of characteristics are in the North Pacific, with the Aleutian Arc consisting of the Aleutian Islands and their extension the Aleutian Range on the Alaska Peninsula, and the Kuril-Kamchatka Arc comprising the Kuril Islands and southern Kamchatka Peninsula.

* 1875 – The Treaty of Saint Petersburg between Japan and Russia is ratified, providing for the exchange of Sakhalin for the Kuril Islands.

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.

During the Invasion of the Kuril Islands, Akira Nakamura ( b. 1897 ) was captured by the Soviet army and his elder son Takeshi Nakamura ( 1925 – 1945 ) was killed in the battle.

Japan claims the Russian-administered Kuril Islands, the four southernmost isles of the island chain north of Hokkaido, annexed by the Soviet Union following World War II.

A territorial dispute with Russia, dating from the end of World War II, over the two southernmost of the Kuril Islands, Etorofu and Kunashiri, and the smaller Shikotan and Habomai Islands northeast of Hokkaidō remains a sensitive spot in Japanese-Russian relations as of 2005.

In summer, however, sunshine hours are lowest on exposed parts of the Pacific coast where fogs from the Oyashio current create persistent cloud similar to that found on the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin.

Japan has territorial disputes with Russia over the Kuril Islands ( Northern Territories ), with South Korea over Liancourt Rocks ( known as " Dokdo " in Korea, " Takeshima " in Japan ), with China and Taiwan over the Senkaku Islands and with China over the status of Okinotorishima.

High densities have also been reported but not quantified in the western North Pacific around the Sea of Japan, Sea of Okhotsk, Kuril Islands, Kamchatka and the Commander Islands and in the Southern Hemisphere off the coasts of South Australia, Patagonia, off the coast of southern Brazil and the tip of southern Africa.

Breeding colonies can be found in the Pacific from the Kuril Islands, around the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk throughout the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands to southeast Alaska, and in the Atlantic from the Gulf of St. Lawrence through Greenland and the coast of Ireland down to Portugal, as well as in the high Arctic islands.

" These allegations were due to Beria's suggestion to his assistants that to improve foreign relations it was reasonable to transfer the Kaliningrad Oblast to Germany, part of Karelia to Finland, the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic to Romania and the Kuril Islands to Japan.

The discovery of large populations in the North Pacific was the major economic driving force behind Russian expansion into Kamchatka, the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, as well as a cause for conflict with Japan and foreign hunters in the Kuril Islands.

The andesite line follows the western edge of the islands off California and passes south of the Aleutian arc, along the eastern edge of the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, Japan, the Mariana Islands, the Solomon Islands, and New Zealand's North Island.

These points are: the boundary with Poland on a long Vistula Spit separating the Gdańsk Bay from the Vistula Lagoon ; and the farthest southeast of the Kuril Islands.

Russia's major islands and archipelagos include Novaya Zemlya, the Franz Josef Land, the Severnaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands, Wrangel Island, the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin.

A group of Ainu people ( between 1863 and early 1870s )

In 1264, Nivkh people reported to the Yuan Dynasty of the Mongol Empire that Ainu invaded the land of Nivkh, resulting in battles between Ainu and the Yuan Dynasty.

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.

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.

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.

On June 6, 2008, a bi-partisan, 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 law passed in 1899.

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.

Similarly, no one identifies themselves as Amur Valley Ainu, although people with partial descent can be found in Khabarovsk.

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.

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.

They also urged him to recognize the Japanese genocide against the Ainu people, but Putin declined.

The Ainu have often been considered to descend from the Jōmon-jin people, who lived in Japan from the Jōmon period.

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.

Some researchers have speculated that this minority of Haplogroup C3 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.

During the Soviet times, people with Ainu surnames were sent to gulags and labor camps, as they were often mistaken for the Japanese.