Ainu people
The Ainu are the indigenous people of the lands surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, including Hokkaido Island, Northeast Honshu Island, Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula and Khabarovsk Krai, before the arrival of the Yamato Japanese and Russians.
- Ainu people500 related topics
Kuril Islands
The Kuril Islands or Kurile Islands (Japanese: "Kuril Islands" (クリル列島) or "Thousand Islands" (千島列島)) are a volcanic archipelago part of Sakhalin Oblast in the Russian Far East.
The name Kuril originates from the autonym of the aboriginal Ainu, the islands' original inhabitants: kur, meaning 'man'.
Yamato people
Applied to the Imperial House of Japan or "Yamato Court" that existed in Japan in the 4th century; further, it was originally the name of the region where the Yamato people first settled in Yamato Province (modern-day Nara Prefecture).
The term came to be used around the late 19th century to distinguish the settlers of mainland Japan from minority ethnic groups inhabiting the peripheral areas of the then Japanese Empire, including the Ainu, Emishi, Ryukyuans, Nivkh, Oroks, as well as Austronesians, Chinese, Koreans, and Micronesian peoples who were incorporated into the Empire of Japan in the early 20th century.
Sea of Okhotsk
Marginal sea of the western Pacific Ocean.
The Okhotsk people and the later Ainu culture, a coastal fishing and hunter-gatherer people, were located around the lands surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as in northern Japan.
Ezo
Japanese term historically used to refer to the lands to the north of the Japanese island of Honshu.
The same two kanji used to write the word "Ezo", which literally mean "shrimp barbarians" in Chinese, can also be read in the Japanese language as "Emishi", the name given to the indigenous people of these lands, the descendants of whom are most likely related to the Ainu people.
Ainu language
Ainu (アイヌ・イタㇰ, ) or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu, is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
Hokkaido
Second largest island of Japan and comprises the largest and northernmost prefecture.
Although there were Japanese settlers who ruled the southern tip of the island since the 16th century, Hokkaido was considered foreign territory that was inhabited by the indigenous people of the island, known as the Ainu people.
Tōhoku region
The Tōhoku region (東北地方), Northeast region, or Northeast Japan (東北日本) consists of the northeastern portion of Honshu, the largest island of Japan.
In mythological times, the area was known as Azuma (吾妻, あづま) and corresponded to the area of Honshu occupied by the native Emishi and Ainu.
Japanese people
Ethnic group that is native to the Japanese archipelago and modern country of Japan, where they constitute 98.1% of the country’s population.
Later, Philipp Franz von Siebold argued that the Ainu people were indigenous to northern Japan.
Matsumae clan
The Matsumae clan (松前氏) was a Japanese clan that was confirmed in the possession of the area around Matsumae, Hokkaidō as a march fief in 1590 by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and charged with defending it, and by extension the whole of Japan, from the Ainu "barbarians" of the north.
Karafuto Prefecture
Prefecture of Japan located in Sakhalin from 1907 to 1949.
Most were of Japanese or Korean extraction, though there was also a small White Russian community as well as some Ainu indigenous tribes.