The Ainu of Hokkaido

A documented history

When Japan colonized Hokkaido in 1869, it declared the island terra nullius - empty land - over a people who had lived there for centuries. The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 then formalized the assimilation: Ainu were labeled 'former aborigines,' given marginal farmland, and pressed into Japanese-language schooling and assimilation policy that suppressed Ainu language and customs.

The erasure was ideological as much as legal. Official Japan described itself as a homogeneous nation, and for most of the twentieth century the Ainu simply did not exist in the national story - a policy Kayano Shigeru, the first Ainu member of Japan's parliament, spent a lifetime documenting and undoing.

1. 1869Japan colonizes Hokkaido and declares it terra nullius; Ainu lands pass to the state.
2. 1899Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act imposes assimilation; Ainu language and customs suppressed.
3. 1994Kayano Shigeru becomes the first Ainu member of Japan's Diet; his memoir reaches English readers.
4. 2008The Diet unanimously recognizes the Ainu as an Indigenous people of Japan.
5. 2019New Ainu law replaces the 1899 Act and commits the state to respect Ainu pride.
6. 2020Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum, opens in Shiraoi, Hokkaido.

A way of knowing

Ainu tradition is built around kamuy - the spirits present in animals, fire, water and tools - and around yukar, long oral epics that carried law, history and ecology without writing. Kayano Shigeru's memoir Our Land Was a Forest (with Mark Selden) records that world from inside: a childhood of salmon rivers, bear ceremonies and carved ritual objects, and the moment a collector's visit made him a keeper of his own culture.

This was working knowledge: salmon management, hunting seasons, and the etiquette of taking life, all run on reciprocity: gifts to the kamuy in return for what was taken. It is the same grammar of obligation this atlas meets on every continent - developed here independently, in a northern archipelago.

A living nation

In 2008, Japan's Diet unanimously resolved to recognize the Ainu as an Indigenous people - the first official admission. In 2019 the Act Promoting Measures to Achieve a Society in which the Pride of the Ainu People is Respected replaced the 1899 law for good, and in 2020 the National Ainu Museum, Upopoy, opened in Shiraoi - the country's first national institution dedicated to Ainu history and culture.

Recognition remains partial: the 2019 Act does not restore land or salmon-fishing rights, and Ainu organizations continue to press for the return of ancestral remains held by universities. The legal undoing is real and unfinished at once.