The Ainu Association of Hokkaido acknowledged it has little control over the use of these images. “We told the SDF that we do not have the authority to grant the use of patterns,” said a ...

According to a legend of the Ainu people of Hokkaido, there was an old woman with a gift of divination who lived by the ...

The Ainu, a minority ethnic group from the northernmost island of Japan, was investigated for DNA polymorphisms both from maternal (mitochondrial DNA) and paternal (Y chromosome) lineages ...

The Ainu are believed to go back 15,000 years - further back than the Sumerians or Egyptians. For this reason, some people say the Ainu are not just a people, but a whole "Ainu race".

Ainu people were stripped of their land and fishing rights, and formally assimilated into Japanese culture with the passing of the Former Aborigines Protection Act. They became the vanished people.

Japan’s government introduced a bill on Friday to recognise the country’s ethnic Ainu minority as an “indigenous” people for the first time, after decades of discrimination against the group.

I am an Ainu. However, sometimes when I tell people I was born not in Hokkaidō, but in Tokyo, and was raised in Saitama Prefecture, it brings the conversation to a halt, as if they are thinking ...

The Ainu illustrated with a captured bear in the Ezo Shima Kikan (“Strange Views from the Island of Ezo”), a set of three scrolls dating to 1840 that are now in the Brooklyn Museum.

After an attention-grabbing New York feature film debut, Fukunaga Takeshi moved back to Japan to direct his second feature, about Ainu people. The coming-of-age story is about a 14-year-old boy ...

In a first for Japan, a bill to legally recognize the Ainu as the indigenous people of Japan is about to be submitted to the Diet. The bill includes clauses that oblige the government to adopt ...

Paint your nails with swirling Ainu designs, try on salmon-skin shoes, sample Ainu food or stay at a themed hot-springs hotel – Hokkaido in Japan is belatedly celebrating its indigenous people.

Nearly 150 years ago, Ezo, home of the indigenous Ainu people, was rechristened Hokkaido, formalizing the centuries-long process of the island's assimilation into Japan. To mark this occasion, a ...