The First People of Japan

Most people believe that the Japanese people were the first inhabitants of Japan, but this is not true. I was surprised to discover that this honor belongs to the Ainu when I visited Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido.

Ever since they first came into contact with the Japanese people, the Ainu suffered from discrimination. Many of them have intermarried and hidden their identity to avoid discrimination. Thus, most are indistinguishable from Japanese people today.

For a long time, the Japanese government denied that the Ainu even existed. Fortunately, in 1997 the Japanese government recognized the Ainu as a distinct ethnic group for the first time. Since then a cultural revival has been taking place and more people with Ainu ancestry have been learning their language and customs.

Ainu people believed everything had a spirit or god. The most important religious event for the Ainu is the Bear Ceremony. Before this can take place a bear cub is taken from the wild and raised in the village for one and a half years. During the ceremony offerings are made to the gods. The bear is then killed with ceremonial arrows in front of an altar.

The Ainu people believed that this ritual would send the bear’s spirit and their offerings back to the gods. At first I thought that they performed this ceremony to apologize to the gods for eating the bear, but the purpose of the ceremony was to enhance communication between the Ainu and the Gods. It was also one of the social highlights of the year; the whole village gathered for three days of singing, dancing and rice.

Ainu people had a very different diet to that of Japanese people. They never ate raw fish, instead preferring boiled or roasted fox, bear, wolf, fish and vegetables. The Ainu also wore their own type of clothes, made from the bark of elm trees.

The Ainu also wore their own type of clothes, made from the bark of elm trees. In winter they used animal skins to keep warm. Men had long beards and moustaches and both sexes had shoulder length hair.

Women tattooed their upper lip because the tribe believed that without these tattoos they could not get married or enter the afterlife. Women began tattooing their upper lips in childhood and once they were fifteen or sixteen years old their tattoos were complete, and they were ready to get married. Men were only eligible for marriage once they reached the age of seventeen or eighteen. Not quite the Japan of today!

Laura Arnold

Tags: Japan