The same schema was adopted by James Patrie ( 1982 ) in the context of an attempt to classify the Ainu language.

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

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.

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.

Today, many Ainu dislike the term Ainu because it had once been used with derogatory nuance, and prefer to identify themselves as Utari ( comrade in the Ainu language ).

The resolution recognised the Ainu people as " an indigenous people with a distinct language, religion and culture ", and rescinded the law passed in 1899.

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 of this the study of the Ainu language is limited and is based largely on historical research.

Although there have been attempts to show that the Ainu language and the Japanese language are related, modern scholars have rejected that the relationship goes beyond contact, such as the mutual borrowing of words between Japanese and Ainu.

In fact, no attempt to show a relationship with Ainu to any other language has gained wide acceptance, and Ainu is currently considered to be a language isolate.

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.

Similarly, the Ainu language consistently does not distinguish between " be " and " become "; thus ne means both " be " and " become ", and pirka means " good ", " be good ", and " become good " equally.

Omoto has also shown that the Ainu are Mongoloid, and not Caucasoid, on the basis of fingerprints and dental morphology.

The town of Nibutani ( Ainu: Niputay ) in Hidaka area ( Hokkaido prefecture ) has a number of Ainu households and a visit to some of the Ainu owned craft shops close to the Ainu museums ( there are two of them in Nibutani ) is an opportunity to interact with the Ainu people.

The unwieldy nature of the Japanese kana with its inability to accurately represent terminal consonants has contributed to the degradation of the original Ainu.

It should be noted that Japan has a small number of minorities such as Ryūkyū peoples, Koreans and Chinese, and on the northern island of Hokkaidō, the indigenous Ainu minority.

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 ).

Japanese society, with its ideology of homogeneity, has traditionally rejected any need to recognize ethnic differences in Japan, even as such claims have been rejected by such ethnic minorities as the Ainu and Ryukyuan people.

( There used to be a similar style, Rekuhkara, practiced by the Ainu in Hokkaidō, but that has since died out.

Japan has granted mutual exchange visas for Japanese and Ainu families divided by the change in status.

The Ainu of Hokkaidō, Japan, once practiced a type of throat singing called rekuhkara, which has since become extinct.

* Shiretoko National Park in Hokkaidō, Japan has a hot springs waterfall called Kamuiwakkayu-no-taki, which translates as " river of the gods " in the Ainu language.

Ainu has no generally accepted genealogical relationship to any other language family.

Ainu is a moribund language, and has been endangered for at least the past few decades.

This has led to an increasing number of second-language learners, especially in Hokkaidō, in large part due to the pioneering efforts of the late Ainu folklorist, activist and former Diet member Shigeru Kayano, himself a native speaker.

They hunt deer and bear, and their culture has much in common with the bear cult of the Ainu.

It has been suggested that this myth points to an actual neolithic people who existed separately from the Ainu, and may even have been examples of Homo floresiensis, the so-called " hobbit " hominid.

Evidence cited for this has included pit dwellings which differ from Ainu dwellings, and pottery which does not fit in with what is known of Ainu culture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eventually, the title was abandoned in the later Heian period after the Ainu had been either subjugated or driven to Hokkaidō.

The Ainu, an indigenous people of Japan, traditionally had facial tattoos.

By the mid-18th century, Qing officials had registered 56 surname groups ; of these, Qing sources note that six clans and 148 households were those of Ainu and Nivkh who came under the Qing administrative umbrella on Sakhalin.

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.

Furthermore, Powell said that dental analysis showed the skull had a 94 percent chance of being a Sundadont group like the Ainu and Polynesians and only a 48 percent chance of being a Sinodont group like that of North Asia.

It is believed that the Jōmon had very likely migrated from North Asia or Central Asia and became the Ainu of today.

Satsuma Domain controlled interactions with the Ryūkyū Kingdom ( and through Ryūkyū, had access to Chinese goods and information ), while Tsushima Domain handled diplomatic and trade relations with Joseon Dynasty Korea, and Matsumae Domain managed interactions with the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido.

* Tōgo Yoshida ( 1864 – 1918 ), proposed in the Dai Nihon Chimei Jisho, published between 1907 and 1910, that " Ishikaripet " had its origin in the Ainu language word " Ishikarapet ", meaning " a beautifully formed river "; ishu meaning " beautiful ", kara meaning " constructed " and pet meaning river.

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.

However it is also true that he had a strong rational, empirical temper, dismissed as nonsensical the myth-reviving fantasies of kokugaku scholars, and throughout showed an intense curiosity, distinctive for its lack of patriotic superiority, in foreign cultures, both within Japan ( the Ainu and Okinawan cultures ) and abroad ( China, and Western countries ).

Such scenes also happened in Japan and Korea, as the two countries stated themselves as a single-nation country, ethnic minorities had to hide their national identity for centuries, and many resulted in assimilation, such as Ainu and Ryukyuan people in Japan, migrants of Goguryeo, Balhae and Tungusic peoples in Korea.

Besides publications such as the aforementioned pamphlet, the government also created cultural shows featuring Ainu song and dance that acted as tourist attractions ( this occurred, of course, after the ban on Ainu music had been lifted ).