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Exploring Japan

The Ainu One of the earliest groups of people to inhabit Japan were the Ainu. Most Japanese are descended from a mixture of Mongol, Malay and Polynesian peoples. The Ainu are quite clearly different and more like the peoples of Siberia. They are taller, more heavily built and have more facial and body hair than most Japanese. The Ainu language is quite different from Japanese and very few people speak it today. In the Ainu language the word “ainu” simply means “man.” In their religion the salmon, the owl, the killer whale and the bear were specially sacred. Bears were sacrificed to carry messages to their ancestors. Nowadays about 25,000 Ainu still live in Hokkaido. They carve wooden bears to sell to Japanese tourists, who visit reconstructed Ainu villages.

Exploring the Ainu One of the first people to study the Ainu way of life was an Englishman, John Batchelor (1854-1944). Although he had no proper schooling, he trained to become a missionary for the Church of England. In 1879 he came to Hokkaido to preach the gospel. To do this he had to learn the Ainu language. By 1889 he was able to publish an Ainu-English-Japanese Dictionary. Batchelor built schools for the Ainu and gave them medical care. He lived among them for 60 years, until he was forced to leave when the World War II broke out in 1939.

T his early photo of an Ainu man was taken about 100 years ago. Notice his bushy beard. He wears boots and warm clothing to protect himself against the chilly climate of Hokkaido. ( left) T his detail from an eighteenth-century scroll shows an Ainu family. At this time only a few Japanese had any contact with the Ainu, who were regarded as primitive savages.

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