Ainu

The Ainu are indigenous to Hokkaido, southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, ancestors once living across northern Honshu. Their culture emerged around the thirteenth century from Satsumon and Okhotsk traditions. They hunted deer and bears, took salmon and seals, honouring them as spirits and carving ritual staffs called inau, while acting as trade middlemen between Honshu and the Amur.

On Sakhalin they clashed with the Yuan, which subdued them by 1308 and drew tribute. Japanese frontiersmen advanced under Matsumae, enfeoffed at southern Ezo by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1590 and given the Ainu trade monopoly.

Forced exchange rates and overfishing drove chieftain Shakushain to revolt in 1669, crushed by 1672. Smallpox and exploitative trading thinned the Ainu villages in the eighteenth century; the shogunate took southern Hokkaido in 1799 and claimed Sakhalin in 1807, drafting Ainu men for forced labour as Russian ships probed coasts.