Amazing Ainu – The “Indians” of Japan

TOKYO – Long before the coming of the Japanese to the islands now known as Japan, the northern portion of the island chain was inhabited by tribes of ancient people whose physical traits were not typically Oriental.

These tribes inhabited the northern part of the main island of Honshu, all of Hokkaido, the Kurile islands and the southern portion of Kamchatka Peninsula, and in that sense they were the indigenous “Indian” tribes of these regions.

These first inhabitants of Japan called themselves Ainu (Aye-nuu), which means human or man – and is similar to the custom of some of the Indian tribes of North America, the Navajo in particular, who call themselves Dine (Dee-nay) or “The People.”

Unlike the indigenous Indian tribes of North and South America, however, the Ainu inhabitants of Japan had physical features that made them distinctly different from Oriental Asians as well as the Indians of the Americas.

The eyes of the Ainu did not have the epicanthic fold that is characteristic of Orientals. Their eyes were unusually large and round, even for Caucasians, and ranged from brown, light brown and gray, to blue-gray. Also unlike Orientals and American Indians, Ainu men had exceptionally heavy body and facial hair.

The earliest mention of the Ainu of Japan and the regions north of Japan is found in ancient Chinese records, which refer to them as “the hairy people.”

It seems that the Ainu originated somewhere on the northeastern Asian continent (like the original, indigenous tribes of Korea who disappeared long ago), and then moved southward over eons of time.

In contrast, the ancestors of modern Japanese came from Korea, China and the islands that extend southwest to Taiwan. As these newcomers moved northward on the island chain they began encountering the Ainu just north of what is now Tokyo.

The new Asian immigrants to Japan were more culturally advanced than the native Ainu, considered them sub-human, both racially and culturally, and presumed that they had no rights to the areas they inhabited – just as European Americans were to view and treat indigenous American Indians in more modern times.

By the 7th century A.D., the Japanese were launching major military campaigns against the Ainu, decimating their population and pushing those who survived further north. This was the period when the term shogun (show-goon) first came into use in the compound Sei-i-Tai Shogun, which translates as “Barbarian Subduing General,” used to designate generals charged with eliminating the Ainu.

Large numbers of Ainu, like American Indians in later centuries, also died from diseases that were new to them.

By the 19th century there were only twenty to thirty thousand Ainu left. A few of these survivors lived in still relatively isolated mountainous regions north of Tokyo, and the rest in Hokkaido and on the Kurile islands north of Hokkaido.

It was during this era that the Japanese government, on the advice of an American politician, resolved to eliminate the Ainu as a distinctive culture by forbidding the use of the Ainu language, forcing the Ainu to take Japanese names, and prohibiting the practice of their traditional customs.

The attempt to eradicate Ainu culture ended in the 20th century, and there is now a growing movement among the remaining population to revive their language and many of their cultural ways. However, racial mixing has continued to diminish the number of full-blooded Ainu, and they now number only a few thousand, most of who live in small villages in Hokkaido.

Ainu-Japanese mixtures are especially conspicuous in the vicinity of Sendai, north of Tokyo. They are noticeable for their abundant hair, and for their eyes. Strangely, the genes that make the Ainu eye are often incompatible with the genes of the Japanese eye, making deformities common. The most common of these deformities is eyes that are too far apart; often to such an extreme that one of the eyes withers away.

But, when the two sets of eye genes work, especially in females, the results are astounding. Their eyes are huge, striking in color, and so hypnotic that people can’t avoid staring at them.

In the 1950s and 60s, a number of mix-blood Ainu-Japanese girls were brought to Tokyo from the Sendai area and put to work as models and as extras in movies.

They were very successful as models – giving rise to the Japanese art and comic preference for drawing young females with huge, luminous eyes – but they did not fare as well as movie starlets because their eyes distracted so much attention from the Japanese stars.

Visiting one or more of the remaining Ainu villages in Hokkaido is like stepping through a time portal to an age when the world was young.

Copyright © 2007 by Boye Lafayette De Mente
______________________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Boye Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan, Korea, China and Mexico since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, journalist, and editor. He is the author of more than 50 books on these countries, including the first books ever on the Japanese way of doing business: Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business, first published in 1959, and How to Do Business in Japan, published in 1961.

To see a complete list of his titles [each one linked to Amazon.com’s buy page], go to his personal website: http://www.phoenixbookspublishers.com/.