The Ainu are an indigenous ethnic group who reside in northern Japan and southeastern Russia, including Hokkaido and the Tōhoku region of Honshu, as well as the land surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, such as Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Khabarovsk Krai.

In response, the Mongols established an administration post at Nurgan (present-day Tyr, Russia) at the junction of the Amur and Amgun rivers in 1263, and forced the submission of the two peoples.

From 1409 to 1411 the Ming established an outpost called the Nurgan Regional Military Commission near the ruins of Tyr on the Siberian mainland, which continued operating until the mid-1430s.

[33] The Manchu Qing dynasty, which came to power in China in 1644, called Sakhalin "Kuyedao" (Chinese: 库页岛; pinyin: Kùyè dǎo; lit.

Residents who were required to pay tributes had to register according to their hala (ᡥᠠᠯᠠ, the clan of the father's side) and gashan (ᡤᠠᡧᠠᠨ, village), and a designated chief of each unit was put in charge of district security as well as the annual collection and delivery of fur.

[38]The Qing dynasty established an office in Ningguta, situated midway along the Mudan River, to handle fur from the lower Amur and Sakhalin.

[41] The Tokugawa bakufu (feudal government) granted the Matsumae clan exclusive rights to trade with the Ainu in the northern part of the island.

To obtain Chinese silk, the Ainu fell into debt, owing much fur to the Santan (Ulch people), who lived near the Qing office.

Policies of family separation and assimilation, combined with the impact of smallpox, caused the Ainu population to drop significantly in the early 19th century.

[49] Despite their growing influence in the area in the early 19th century as a result of these policies, the Tokugawa shogunate was unable to gain a monopoly on Ainu trade with those on the Asian mainland, even by the year 1853.

[55] Additionally, factories like flour mills and beer breweries, along with mining practices, resulted in the creation of infrastructure such as roads and railway lines during a development period that lasted until 1904.

[58] The Ainu have historically suffered from economic and social discrimination, as both the Japanese government and mainstream population regarded them as dirty and primitive barbarians.

[65] The discrimination and negative stereotypes assigned to the Ainu have manifested in lower levels of education, income, and participation in the economy as compared to their ethnically Japanese counterparts.

Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo answered a parliamentary question on May 20, 2008, by stating,[68] It is a historical fact that the Ainu are the earlier arrivers of the northern Japanese archipelago, in particular Hokkaido.

For example, then Deputy Prime Minister Tarō Asō notably claimed in 2020, "No other country but this one has lasted for as long as 2,000 years with one language, one ethnic group, and one dynasty.

[80] Linguists such as Juha Janhunen and Alexander Vovin argue for a Satsumon origin of Ainu dialects, with deeper links to cultures centered in Central or Northern Honshu.

[86] Archaeologists have considered that bear worship, which is a religious practice widely observed among the northern Eurasian ethnic groups (including the Ainu, Finns, Nivkh, and Sami), was also shared by the Okhotsk people.

Based on Ainu-like toponyms throughout Tohoku, it is argued that the Emishi, like the Ainu, descended from the Epi-Jōmon tribes and initially spoke Ainu-related languages.

[108] Although some researchers have attempted to show that the Ainu and Japanese languages are related, modern scholars have rejected the idea that the relationship goes beyond contact, such as the mutual borrowing of words.

Traditional Ainu cuisine consists of the meat of bears, foxes, wolves, badgers, oxen, and horses, as well as fish, fowl, millet, vegetables, herbs, and roots.

They enhanced the poison with mixtures of roots and stalks of dog's bane, boiled juice of Mekuragumo (a type of harvestman), Matsumomushi (Notonecta triguttata, a species of backswimmer), tobacco, and other ingredients.

[139] In some areas, when a daughter reaches a marriageable age, her parents allow her to live in a small room called a tunpu, annexed to the southern wall of the house.

Additionally, worn-out material was thought to protect babies from the gods of illness and demons, due to these entities' abhorrence of dirty things.

However, it is noted that, similar to the Japanese religious consciousness, there is not a strong feeling of identification with a particular religion, with Buddhist and traditional beliefs both being part of their daily lives.

They also built sacred altars called nusa (a fence-like row of taller Inau decorated with bear skulls), separated from the main house and raised storehouses and often observed outdoor rituals.

The organization changed its name to Hokkaidō Utari Association in 1961 due to the fact that the word Ainu was often used in a derogatory manner by the non-Ainu ethnic Japanese.

Some of them are:[163] On March 27, 1997, the Sapporo District Court decided a landmark case that, for the first time in Japanese history, recognized the right of the Ainu people to enjoy their distinct culture and traditions.

It completed its work in 2008, issuing a major report that included an extensive historical record and called for substantial government policy changes towards the Ainu.

[6][citation needed] In 1756 CE, a kanjō-bugyō (a high-ranking Edo period official responsible for finance) implemented an assimilation policy for Ainu engaged in fishing in the Tsugaru Peninsula.

[193] In 2004, the small Ainu community living in Russia in Kamchatka Krai wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin, urging him to reconsider any move to award the Southern Kuril Islands to Japan.