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.

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 ).

Ainu population decreased drastically in the 19th century, due in large part

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 ".

In MacRitchie's view the indigenous population of Britain were thus a " quasi-European " Ainu race, with minor Mongoloid traits who he considered ancestral to the Picts, a view earlier proposed by Walter Scott.

Data on Ainu population is not available ; " Ainu " may have been either included in the " Other " category or the Ainus may have identified themselves as " Japanese " during the census.

Tanner Peter is a world renown author on the subject of " Ainu " population and he himself leads a recognition society for their ethnic representation in government.

There is no consensus, however, that the Ainu languages have sources in any other known language, and the unique population genetics of the Ainu people support the hypothesis that they were largely isolated from the rest of the world for many thousands of years.

Much of his childhood was spent in areas with a mixed Japanese and Ainu population, and his father, unusually for the time, socialised with Ainu.

In the most desperate period for the Ainu, however, in late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the population declined to only 15, 000 or so, Ainu music was very scarce ; even the famous bear-sending ceremony was described as a " once-in-a-lifetime " experience in 1948.

The Japanese government deliberately banned Ainu language, music, and dance ( including the bear ceremony ) in 1799 in an attempt to homogenize the Ainu with the larger Japanese population.

He encountered a predominantly Ainu population ( at least 600 people ; another source mentions only 300 Ainu inhabitants ) as well as Japanese nationals who, judging by Nevelskoy's account, exercised authority over the native inhabitants.

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.

A small population of Ainu still survive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a result of the Treaty of Saint Petersburg ( 1875 ), the Kuril Islands were handed over to Japan, along with its Ainu subjects.

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 1868 there were about 15, 000 Ainu in Hokkaido, 2000 in Sakhalin, and around 100 in the Kurile islands.

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

Though the resolution is historically significant, Hideaki Uemura, professor at Keisen University in Tokyo and a specialist in indigenous peoples ' rights, commented that the motion is " weak in the sense of recognizing historical facts " as the Ainu were " forced " to become Japanese in the first place.

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 ".

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.

During the Tsarist times, the Ainu living in Russia were forbidden from identifying themselves as such, since the Imperial Japanese officials had claimed that all the regions inhabited by the Ainu in the past or present, are a part of Japan.

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

After World War II, most of the Ainu living in Sakhalin were deported to Japan.

Of those who remained, only the elderly were full-blooded Ainu.

Due to this, children born after 1945 were not able to identify themselves as Ainu.

Many of the Ainu dialects, even from one end of Hokkaido to the other, were not mutually intelligible ; however, the classic Ainu language of the Yukar, or Ainu epic stories, was understood by all.

Without a writing system, the Ainu were masters of narration, with the Yukar and other forms of narration such as the Uepeker ( Uwepeker ) tales, being committed to memory and related at gatherings, often lasting many hours or even days.

Most Ainu relocated to Hokkaidō when the Japanese were displaced from the island in 1949.