about tribes of japan
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The Ainu people are historically residents of parts of Hokkaido (the Northern island of Japan) the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin. According to the government, there are currently 25,000 Ainu living in Japan, but other sources claim there are up to 200,000. The origin of the Ainu people and language is, for the most part, unknown. However, there have been many theories on the subject.
One theory suggests that the Ainu people are remnants of the Jomon-jin, or the hunter-gathers who inhabited Japan during the Jomon Period (14,500 BC – 300 AD) and perhaps even before. Around the year 300 AD, another group of immigrants known as the Yayoi people made their way to the islands of Japan, introducing new agricultural techniques and technology and integrating with the Jomon people. It is believed that the Yayoi group may not have reached as far as the Northern island of Hokkaido, allowing the Jomon hunter-gatherer way of life to survive in that area.
One Ainu myth claims that "They lived in this place a hundred thousand years before the Children of the Sun came." It's interesting that this myth seems consistent with the theory of the Ainu descending from Jomon-jin. More recent research suggests that the historical Ainu culture could have come about through the merging of the Okhotsk culture and the Sastumon, a Jomon group very similar to the Ainu.
Physically, the Ainu stand out distinctly from the Japanese as a separate ethnic group. Ainu people tend to have light skin, a stout frame, deep-set eyes with a European shape, and thick, wavy hair. Full-blooded Ainu may have even had blue eyes or brown hair. In the past, the Ainu were proposed to be of Caucasian decent, given their appearance, but recently it has been proved through dental morphology and fingerprinting that the Ainu are in fact Mongoloid, not Caucasoid.
These days, the concept of a pure Ainu is very blurred. Distinguishing the Ainu from other Japanese is almost impossible due to intermarriage with the Japanese, migration, and denial of the Ainu identity to avoid discrimination.
You can see just by the appearance of the Ainu that traditional Ainu culture is significantly different from Japanese culture. First of all, both men and women keep their hair at shoulder length and wear traditional Ainu garb. Men, never shaving after a certain age, usually have full beards, and women undergo mouth tattooing to signify their coming to adulthood.