Ainu People - Geography

Geography

The Ainu were distributed in the northern and central islands of Japan, from Sakhalin island in the north to the Kuril islands and the island of Hokkaidō and Northern Honshū, although some investigators place their former range as throughout Honshū and as far north as the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula in what is now Cape Lopatka. The island of Hokkaido was known to the Ainu as Ainu Moshir, and was formally annexed by the Japanese at the late date of 1868, partly as a means of preventing the intrusion of the Russians, and partly for imperialist reasons.

According to the Russian Empire Census of 1897, 1446 persons in the Russian Empire reported Ainu language as their mother tongue, 1434 of them in Sakhalin Island.

The southern half of Sakhalin was acquired by Japan as a result of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, but at the end of World War II in 1945, the Soviets declared war on Japan and took possession of the Kuril islands and southern Sakhalin. The Ainu population, as previously Japanese subjects, were "repatriated" to Japan.

During the Tsarist times, the Ainu living in Russia were forbidden from identifying themselves as such, since the Imperial Japanese officials had claimed that all the regions inhabited by the Ainu in the past or present, are a part of Japan. The terms "Kurile", "Kamchatka Kurile", etc., were used to identify the ethnic group. During the Soviet times, people with Ainu surnames were sent to gulags and labor camps, as they were often mistaken for the Japanese. As a result, large number of Ainu changed their surnames to Slavic ones. After World War II, most of the Ainu living in Sakhalin were deported to Japan. Out of the 1,159 Ainu, only around 100 remained in Russia. Of those who remained, only the elderly were full-blooded Ainu. Others were either mixed race or married to ethnic Russians. The last of the Ainu households disappeared in the late 1960s, when Yamanaka Kitaro committed suicide after the death of his wife. The couple were childless. To eradicate the Ainu identity, the Soviet authorities removed the ethnic group from the list of nationalities which could be mentioned in a Soviet passport. Due to this, children born after 1945 were not able to identify themselves as Ainu. The last known deportation of Ainu to Japan occurred in 1982, when Keizo Nakamura, a full blooded Northern Kurils Ainu was deported to Hokkaido after serving 15 years hard labor in the province of Magadan. His wife, Tamara Timofeevna Pikhteevoi was of mixed Sakhalin Ainu and Gilyak ancestry. After the arrest of Keizo in 1967, Tamara and her son Alexei Nakamura were expelled from Kamchatka Krai and sent to the island of Sakhalin, to live in the city of Tomari.

Unlike the other Ainu clans currently living in Russia, there is considerable doubt whether the Nakamura clan of Kamchatka should be identified as Northern Kurils Ainu, Southern Kurils Ainu or as Kamchatka Ainu. This is due to the fact that the clan originally immigrated to Kamchatka from Kunashir in 1789. The Ainu of Kunashir are South Kurils Ainu. They settled down near Kurile Lake, which was inhabited by the Kamchatka Ainu and North Kuril Ainu. In 1929, the Ainu of Kurile Lake fled to the island of Paramushir after an armed conflict with the Soviet authorities. At that time, Paramushir was under Japanese rule. During the Invasion of the Kuril Islands, Akira Nakamura (b.1897) was captured by the Soviet army and his elder son Takeshi Nakamura (1925–1945) was killed in the battle. Akira's only surviving son, Keizo (b.1927) was taken prisoner and joined the Soviet Army after his capture. After the war, Keizo went to Korsakov to work in the local harbor. In 1963, he married Tamara Pikhtivoi, a member of the Sakhalin Ainu tribe. Their only child, Alexei was born in 1964. The descendants of Tamara and Alexei are found in Kamchatka and Sakhalin.

In 1979, the USSR removed the term "Ainu" from the list of living ethnic groups of Russia, an act by which the government proclaimed that the Ainu as an ethnic group was extinct in its territory. According to the 2002 Russian Federation census, no responders gave the ethnonym Ainu in boxes 7 or 9.2 in the K-1 form of the census, though some still might exist. During the 2010 Census of Russia, the authorities rejected the claim from a group of mostly mixed race Ainu living in Kamchatka that they are not extinct.

The only Ainu speakers remaining (besides perhaps a few partial speakers) live solely in Japan. There, they are concentrated primarily on the southern and eastern coasts of the island of Hokkaidō.

Due to intermarriage with the Japanese and ongoing absorption into the predominant culture, there are no truly Ainu settlements existing in Japan today. The town of Nibutani (Ainu: Niputay) in Hidaka area (Hokkaido prefecture) has a number of Ainu households and a visit to some of the Ainu owned craft shops close to the Ainu museums (there are two of them in Nibutani) is an opportunity to interact with the Ainu people. Many "authentic Ainu villages" advertised in Hokkaido such as Akan and Shiraoi are tourist attractions and provide an opportunity to see and meet Ainu people.