Ainu

The Ainu are the indigenous people of Hokkaido, northern Japan, and historically also Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands, distinguished from the majority Yamato Japanese population by a distinct language isolate, animist religious tradition centered on the bear ceremony (iomante) and a historically hunter-gatherer-fisher economy rather than wet-rice agriculture. Ainu communities were subject to systematic Japanese state assimilation policy from the Meiji era (from 1869) through the twentieth century, including land dispossession and language suppression, and Japan did not formally recognize the Ainu as an indigenous people in national law until 2019. Ainu language and cultural revitalization efforts are a documented and active contemporary movement, though the language itself is considered critically endangered by UNESCO with very few fully fluent first-language speakers remaining. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/