Ainu

Ainu (ī`n), aborigines of Japan who may be descended from a Caucasoid people who once lived in N Asia. More powerful invaders from the Asian mainland gradually forced the Ainu to retreat to the northern islands of Japan and Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands in what is now the Russian Far East; today, they reside mainly on Hokkaido. Reduced in number, they live by hunting, fishing, and small-scale farming. The Ainu have attracted the attention of tourists, and some now make a living by selling reproductions of their cultural artifacts. Physically, they seem related to European peoples, i.e., they have much more body hair than typical East Asians, but intermarriage has introduced Asian traits among them. Contact with the Japanese has led also to culture change and assimilation, which the Ainu have resisted in the past, with decreasing success. Their religion is highly animistic and centers on a bear cult; a captive bear is sacrificed at an annual winter feast and his spirit, thus released, is believed to guard the Ainu settlements.

Bibliography

See N. G. Munro, Ainu Creed and Cult (1963); I. Hilger, Together with the Ainu (1971).

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Ainu

Ainu couple in ceremonial dress, Hokkaido, Japan.

(credit: Courtesy of the Consulate General of Japan, New York City)

Indigenous people of what is now Japan. Pushed north by the Japanese people over the last 2,000 years, the remaining Ainu today live principally in northern Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. Once physically and culturally distinct from the Japanese, their origins and their role in Japanese history and prehistory have been the subject of scholarly debate. Many contemporary Ainu claim some connection to the prehistoric Jomon culture. The Ainu language, which has no known relationship to any other language, is virtually extinct, having been supplanted by Japanese. The Ainu were traditionally hunters, fishermen, and trappers; their religion centred on spirits believed to be present in animals and the natural world.

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Ainu 

a people on the island of Hokkaido, Japan. Population, approximately 20,000 (1967 estimate). They speak Japanese and the Ainu language. The Ainu, who until the 18th century also lived in Kamchatka and until the beginning of the 20th century on southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, were assimilated by the Nivkh and the Itel’men; some of them were moved to Japan. In language and physical characteristics the Ainu greatly differ from the Japanese, but they do display a resemblance to the population of Southeast Asia. Their ancestors in the early Neolithic period apparently migrated from there to Japan, where they formed one of the oldest sectors of the population. The Japanese colonization of Hokkaido in the middle of the 19th century destroyed the traditional way of life of the Ainu, which was based on a settled hunting and fishing economy. On the island of Hokkaido the Ainu are gradually being assimilated by the Japanese.

REFERENCE

Narody Vostochnoi Azii. Moscow, 1965.

S. A. ARUTIUNOV

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Ainu 

the language of the Ainu, spoken principally on the island of Hokkaido (Japan).

Dialects of the Ainu language were also spoken on the Kurile Islands, on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and on the island of Sakhalin in the 18th and 19th centuries, but only isolated speakers of Ainu still live on Sakhalin. The exact number of speakers of Ainu is unknown, since the Ainu are being readily assimilated by the Japanese and use the Japanese language. The Ainu number about 20,000 (1967). The Ainu language features an absence of opposition of voiced and unvoiced consonants (b, d, and g appear only as positional variants, or allophones, of p, t, and k between vowels); the system of consonants is in general poorly developed. The Ainu language is agglutinative in structure, with suffixation predominating. It should be noted that indication of the singular or plural is optional in Ainu grammar, which places the Ainu language close to languages of an isolating structure. Ainu has a unique counting system based on twenties—90 is designated as “five twenties minus ten.” The genealogical ties of Ainu are not established. A considerable number of geographic terms on the Japanese islands can be traced to Ainu.

REFERENCES

Dobrotvorskii, M. M. Ainsko-russkii slovar’. Kazan, 1875.
Pitsudski, V. Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore. Kraków, 1912.
Batchelor, J. An Ainu-English-Japanese Dictionary, 4th ed. Tokyo, 1938.
Batchelor, J. A Grammar of the Ainu Language. Tokyo.

A. A. LEONT’EV