ABSTRACT
Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Ainu, an indigenous minority people of northern Japan, spoke their own language (which has no known relatives), subsisted mainly by hunting, fishing and gathering, and maintained their distinctive culture. 1 They viewed the things around them such as animals and natural phenomena as gods or spirits, and strove to achieve harmony with the spirit world. Their settlement area once extended from northern honshu through hokkaido, Sakhalin and the northern Kuriles, but almost all of those who lived in Sakhalin and the Kuriles moved from their homelands to hokkaido after the Second World War. The word ainu in their language means ‘human being’.
