Among the Eastern savages, the Emisi are the strongest.
Nihon shoki. Japanese Chronicle 720
At the crossroads of civilizations. This material would have appeared on VO without fail, since I promised to write it back in 2015. They have been waiting for the promised three years, but here the wait has stretched out for as many as five years. But thanks to the persistence of one of the VO participants, the matter got off the ground and this article appeared. It is quite possible that it will become the beginning of a new cycle, because at the crossroads of civilizations in the past and in the present, there was and is a lot of things that can and should be talked about.
So, the Ainu. They are written about in all books devoted to the history of the samurai, and in all these books the messages about them are very abrupt.
For example, Mitsuo Kure's Samurai. In the "Introduction" it is said that the Kyoto government in the 6th-7th centuries was engaged only in trying to break the resistance of the Emishi (ebisu), "barbarians" from the north of Honshu, who were experienced equestrian warriors and archers. And that the prisoners and allied Emishi often acted as mercenaries who defended Kyushu from the invasions of the Chinese and Koreans, and even acquired all the rights of the samurai. And many noble clans were descended from prisoners of the Emisi, as evidenced by the endings "be" in their surnames, indicating their status as prisoners or slaves - Abe, Mononobe, etc. The very same word emishi (ebisu) is translated as "shrimp barbarians", that is, "shrimp eaters", but at the same time that this word is derived from the Ainu emchiu or enchu, which means "people", as well as the Japanese e-muhe - "Brave warriors". They were also called "hairy barbarians", which in the description makes them similar to the Ainu of interest to us, who were also "hairy people". But Ainu and Emisu are the same thing or not? There is still no exact answer to this question. It is only known that when the ancestors of the Japanese, who belonged to the Altaic language group, arrived in Japan, it was already inhabited. And they had to beat off from the aborigines literally every piece of land suitable for rice cultivation, that is, they had to fight continuously. And the "Japanese" attacked the Emisu aborigines, and the Emisu attacked the "Japanese" in response.
The advantage was on the side of the latter due to the fact that their social organization was significantly higher in terms of its level. They already had a written language and a state, but the Emis lived in a tribal system and did not know the written language. As a result, by the 9th century, the "Japanese" captured the entire territory of emisu residence, except for the island of Hokkaido.
In general, it is believed that archaeological data indicate the proximity of the Emishi culture and the Neolithic Jomon culture - this is, firstly. And, secondly, that it is close to the medieval culture of the Ainu we are interested in. This allows us to consider the emishi as a kind of intermediate link in the evolution of the aboriginal population of the Japanese islands from the Neolithic era to the modern Ainu. That is, the “hairy barbarians” of the Emisi are, as it were, the ancestors of the later Ainu, and also “hairy” ones. But the latter were no longer horsemen, but fishermen and hunters, although they, of course, shot accurately from bows.
According to the Soviet historian A. B. Spevakovsky, the newcomer Japanese borrowed a lot from the same Ainu, including the rite of "opening the soul", that is, hara-kiri. In his monograph "Samurai - the military estate of Japan" it is written that ezo (another name for emishi) are the Ainu who lived in the northeast of the country and were forced out to the island of Hokkaido. That is, we can assume that the emishi (ezo) are either the Ainu proper, moreover, very militant, or some kind of ethnic community, which then transformed directly into the Ainu. Well, modern historiography considers the Emisi to be a proto-Ainu community. Here is such a complex "science" for us today, connected with this people.
As for Japanese museums (meaning the museums of Hokkaido, dedicated specifically to the Ainu), they are reported about the same thing almost everywhere: the Ainu are the indigenous population of Japan. In the Ainu language "Ainu" means "human being", that is, as it often happened to the culture of various peoples, their self-name was identical to the concept of "people". The Ainu lived not only in Hokkaido, but also on Sakhalin (the Japanese name for Karafuto), and on the Kuril Islands.
Japanese scientists attribute the Ainu culture to the so-called Okhotsk culture, which between the 5th and 9th centuries spread from Sakhalin through the Sea of Okhotsk to the Kuril Islands and the Hokkaido coast, where they began to produce unique ceramics. However, a legitimate question arises as to what happened before that time and where did the Ainu come from on the islands of the Japanese archipelago and on the mainland. After all, if their culture is related to the culture of the Jomon period, then this is such a gray-haired antiquity that little can be said about it at all.
We know about this time only from archaeological artifacts, but no more. The Ainu themselves can tell us little. After all, they did not have a written language and everything that they know about their past is just legends and traditions. And then, the Japanese practically did not study them in the past, since they saw them as their fierce enemies. After all, not only did they own the coveted lands, they were also typologically very different from them, and in ancient times people of a different physical type were almost always considered “savages” and “enemies”.
As for the Europeans, they encountered the Ainu only in the 17th century and were also very impressed by their appearance, which was so different from the appearance of the "indigenous" Japanese already familiar to them. And they, too, were in no hurry to study them, limiting themselves to stating the fact that a tribe of people unlike the Japanese lives on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, but where they came from is unknown.
Only modern science has made it possible to determine both the initial region of origin of the ancestors of today's Ainu and the route of their advance to the place of modern residence. So, the analysis of their haplogroups showed that 81, 3% of the Ainu population belongs to haplogroup D1a2, which was preceded by group D. Well, it is very ancient and appeared in Africa about 73,000 years ago. Then the D1 mutation arose in Asia about 60,000 years ago. Its subclade D1a2b1 was found in a representative of the Jomon culture, who lived about 3,500-3,800 years ago in Japan. Well, at present, subclades of haplogroup D are noted in Tibet, on the Japanese and Andaman Islands. A study of the genetic diversity observed in the D1 subgroup in Japan shows that this group was isolated here between 12,000 and 20,000 years ago. That is, the Ainu all this time did not mix with anyone, and their contacts with the newcomers "Japanese" compared to these millennia are relatively recent.
It is believed that in their wanderings in Asia, the ancestors of the Ainu reached Japan about 13,000 years ago and created the Jomon culture there. Place names of Ainu origin indicate that they once owned the island of Kyushu, as well as that they also lived in Kamchatka, but for some reason they did not move to America through Beringia.
They were not engaged in agriculture. And since hunting and gathering require large free spaces, the Ainu settlements were always far from one another. The Ainu religion is primitive animism and totemism, and the bear was considered the main totem animal. The Japanese even believed that the Ainu descended from the bear and therefore are not real people, which in their eyes was another reason why they could be killed. The hairiness of the Ainu, their thick, wide beards, which had to be supported with special sticks while eating, thick curly hair on the head and on the body - all this terrified them. And then, in addition, there is also the cult of the bear, about which the Ainu themselves said that this was their ancestor!
And about Ainu women, for example, the following story was told. They usually wore swinging robes, with a red cloth apron at the front at the waist. And when they went to pick raspberries and met a bear in the thickets, they waved these aprons at him and shouted: "Bear, bear, go away, but have you seen this?" The bear saw, got scared and left!
At the same time, the Ainu were very afraid of snakes (although they were not killed). They just believed that if a person sleeps with his mouth open, a snake can crawl in there and drive him crazy.
In general, both in appearance and in their customs, the aboriginal Jomon culture and the culture of the aliens from the Yayoi mainland were extremely different from each other, which inevitably gave rise to their confrontation. But at the same time, the aborigines adopted the metal from the aliens, and the aliens from the aborigines the skills of riding in the mountains and, in fact, the cult of lone warriors, who later became the spiritual support of the Japanese samurai warriors. And this is not surprising, because the confrontation between both of them lasted for almost one and a half thousand years - a period more than sufficient for the interpenetration of even the most diverse cultures. Nevertheless, assimilation between them never happened, and the reason for this, again, was most likely a purely ethnic factor.
The history of the Ainu is perhaps as tragic as the history of the American Indians. They were also herded into a kind of reservations, they were transported to the islands of the Kuril ridge, forced to engage in agriculture, that is, they broke their usual way of life. Rebellions against the Japanese administration in Hokkaido and other islands were suppressed by force of arms. True, after the Meiji revolution, they began to build hospitals for the Ainu, the most cruel decrees were canceled, but … at the same time, men were forbidden to wear their luxurious beards, and women were forbidden to make a traditional tattoo around their lips. That is, it was nothing more than an attack on traditional culture and its gradual destruction. True, according to the "Law on the Patronage of the Aboriginal Population" adopted in 1899, each Ainu family was allocated a land plot with a 30-year exemption from paying land and local taxes and registration fees. It was possible to pass through the lands of the Ainu only with the permission of the governor. Seeds were given to poor Ainu families, and schools were built in Ainu villages. However, on the whole, it all served one purpose: to make the natives live in Japanese. In 1933, they were converted into Japanese subjects with the assignment of Japanese surnames, while the young Ainu were also given Japanese names. However, it must be said that the Ainu did not want to recognize themselves as Japanese for a very long time, they rejected Japanese culture and demanded the creation of their own sovereign state.
Currently, there are about 25,000 Ainu living in Japan, but no more than 200 people speak their native language, and it is gradually forgotten. And only on June 6, 2008, by the decision of the Japanese parliament, the Ainu were recognized as an independent national minority, which, however, did not particularly affect their lives. But now their culture is completely and completely placed at the service of the tourism industry in Japan. Bear figurines carved from wood are sold in Hokkaido in almost every shop, and even in museums without fail, although ethnographers know that in the Ainu religion there was a ban on the image of their animal totem. Robes, bags with a characteristic pattern, wooden carved plates, and much more are produced. Ainu museums in Hokkaido, and in the most modern version, open one after another, typical Ainu houses and entire villages are built, festivals with music and dances are organized. So, outwardly, the culture of the Ainu seems to be preserved. But it, like the culture of the North American Indians, has long ago fallen under the skating rink of modern civilization, and basically meets its requirements, and by no means the Ainu culture.
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The site administration and the author express their heartfelt gratitude to the management of the Nibutani Ainu Museum in Biratori and personally to Mr. Amy Hirouka for the opportunity to use photographs of their exhibits and information.
I must note that for the first time in my practice, the administration of the museum, with which I contacted for permission to use his photographs, treated this in such a thorough manner. The site's email address was requested to familiarize itself with the content of its materials, then the title of the article, my professional data, as well as copies of borrowed photographs. Only after that was the contract drawn up, which I signed, sent to the museum by e-mail, where it was stamped.
This is how, in general, all museums in the world should work. But it often happens like this: you ask permission and they answer you: okay, take it! Or they don't answer at all. In the first case, this, of course, saves time, in the second, it is extremely impolite. As a result, I was once again convinced of the responsible and exceptionally conscientious attitude of the Japanese towards their work. Well, the result of this attitude is in front of you today.
