Ainu Mythology - History

History

Recent research suggests that Ainu culture originated in a merger of the Okhotsk and Satsumon cultures. 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. Active contact between the Wajin (the ethnically Japanese) and the Ainu of Ezochi (now known as Hokkaido) began in the 13th century. 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.

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. The Bakufu government granted the Matsumae clan exclusive rights to trade with the Ainu in the Northern part of the island. 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 1868 there were about 15,000 Ainu in Hokkaido, 2000 in Sakhalin, and around 100 in the Kurile islands.

The turning point for Ainu culture was the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. A variety of social, political and economic reforms were introduced by the Japanese government, in hope of modernising the country in the Western style, and included the annexation of Hokkaido. Sjöberg quotes Baba’s (1980) account of the Japanese government's reasoning:

‘ … The development of Japan's large northern island had several objectives: First, it was seen as a means to defend Japan from a rapidly developing and expansionist Russia. Second … it offered a solution to the unemployment for the former samurai class … Finally, development promised to yield the needed natural resources for a growing capitalist economy.’

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. As well as this, factories such as flour mills and beer breweries and mining practices resulted in the creation of infrastructure such as roads and railway lines, during a development period that lasted until 1904. 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.

The 1899 act mentioned above was replaced in 1997—until then the government had stated there were no ethnic minority groups. It was not until June 6, 2008 that Japan formally recognised the Ainu as an indigenous group (see Official Recognition, below).

Intermarriages between Japanese and Ainu were actively promoted by the Ainu to lessen the chances of discrimination against their offspring. As a result, many Ainu are indistinguishable from their Japanese neighbors, but some Ainu-Japanese are interested in traditional Ainu culture. For example, Oki, born as a child of an Ainu father and a Japanese mother, became a musician who plays the traditional Ainu instrument tonkori. 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). Many such children live in Sambutsu especially, on the eastern coast. In 1966 the number of "pure" Ainu was about 300 (Honna, Tajima, and Minamoto, 2000).

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 蝦夷) 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). Official documents use both names.