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Ainu
The Ainu are generally considered to be the aborigines of the Japanese archipelago, i.e., the inhabitants of the islands before the arrival of the Yamato, the Japanese people who dominate the society today. This is similar to the status of the American Indians, the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere prior to the arrival of Europeans and Africans. The Ainu are considered to be racially distinct from the so-called mainland Japanese, though of course they are Japanese citizens. In some accounts the Ainu are considered to be Caucasian, in contrast to the Mongoloid Yamato Japanese, though such biological distinctions are difficult to defend scientifically.
One popular scenario accounting for the origins of the Japanese suggests that the hunting and gathering Ainu occupied much of Japan before the arrival of the Yamato people from the mainland and were gradually pushed north by the more powerful agriculturalists who brought rice irrigation technology with them. According to this theory, the Ainu were either assimilated into the Yamato Japanese culture and gene pool, or else retreated to the northern island of Hokkaidō where the most visible vestiges of traditional Ainu culture remain today.
There are fewer than twenty thousand people today who identify themselves as Ainu. As was the case when the aboriginal peoples came into contact with the Westerners in the New World, the exposure of the Ainu to the Yamato Japanese, Russians to the north, and other peoples in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries left the Ainu population decimated by disease. Today, most who survived have been linguistically, culturally, and genetically assimilated into Yamato Japanese society.
The transition from a hunting and gathering economic base to agriculture, industrialism and urbanism, together with a national policy of assimilation, made the traditional Ainu religious and cultural systems difficult to sustain. As a result, there are no communities in Japan today where Ainu is the common everyday spoken language. There are place names in Tōhoku and Hokkaidō that are used today that derive from the Ainu language (e.g., Sapporo, Oshamanbe) and there are a handful of people who remember Ainu songs and folk epics. Mostly, however, the language and culture persist as the result of a conscious effort to preserve Ainu ethnic heritage, promote respect for the Ainu people and eliminate discrimination against them, and give them and their concerns an appropriate place in national and international political processes.
As is common with many hunting and gathering societies in the northern latitudes, a bear cult played a prominent role in the Ainu ritual cycle. Sacrificing a young bear to the gods for continued well-being and success in the hunt was a foundational component of Ainu religious life. But today, that ritual and the lifestyle that undergirded it has all but disappeared. The bear ritual is conducted only rarely, and then only as a tourist attraction.
However, a thriving folk art industry—of carved wooden bears; colorful clothing; dolls of Ainu in their ritual garb with tattooed lips for the women and extensive facial, head and body hair for the men; model hunting and fishing implements; and other artifacts associated with Ainu culture—is being supported by an active tourist trade. It is perhaps ironic that carved wooden bears have become a popular tourist item, symbolizing the bear cult associated with traditional Ainu culture, for in past times among the Ainu themselves it was considered bad form to carve the image of a bear, for fear that such an image would offend the bear spirit.
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