This is a bibliography of works on the Ainu people of modern Japan and the Russian Far East.
This is a bibliography of works on the Ainu people of modern Japan and the Russian Far East.
The Ainu are an indigenous ethnic group who reside in northern Japan and southeastern Russia, including Hokkaido and the Tōhoku region of Honshu, as well as the land surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, such as Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Khabarovsk Krai. They have occupied these areas, known to them as "Ainu Mosir", since before the arrival of the modern Yamato and Russians. These regions are often referred to as Ezochi (蝦夷地) and its inhabitants as Emishi (蝦夷) in historical Japanese texts. Along with the Yamato and Ryukyu ethnic groups, the Ainu people are one of the primary historic ethnic groups of Japan.
Hokkaido is the second-largest island of Japan and comprises the largest and northernmost prefecture, making up its own region. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaidō from Honshu; the two islands are connected by the undersea railway Seikan Tunnel.
Nivkh, or Gilyak, or Amuric, is a small language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages spoken by the Nivkh people in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun, along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. "Gilyak" is the Russian rendering of terms derived from the Tungusic "Gileke" and Manchu-Chinese "Gilemi" for culturally similar peoples of the Amur River region, and was applied principally to the Nivkh in Western literature.
Ishikari Subprefecture is a subprefecture of Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan, located in the western part of the island. The subprefecture covers 3,539.86 square kilometres (1,366.75 sq mi) and on July 31, 2023 had a population of 2,379,802. The subprefecture takes its name from the Ishikari River, the third longest in Japan, which flows through western Hokkaido and empties into the Sea of Japan in the city of Ishikari. There are 6 cities, three towns, and one village under its jurisdiction. Sapporo is both the capital of Hokkaido Prefecture and Ishikari Subprefecture. Shikotsu-Toya National Park is located in the southern part of the subprefecture, and Shokanbetsu-Teuri-Yagishiri Quasi-National Park in the north.
Ezo (蝦夷) is the Japanese term historically used to refer to the people and the lands to the northeast of the Japanese island of Honshu. This included the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, which changed its name from "Ezo" to "Hokkaidō" in 1869, and sometimes included Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. The word Ezo means "the land of the barbarians" in Japanese.
The Yonaguni language is a Southern Ryukyuan language spoken by around 400 people on the island of Yonaguni, in the Ryukyu Islands, the westernmost of the chain lying just east of Taiwan. It is most closely related to Yaeyama. Due to the Japanese policy on languages, the language is not recognized by the government, which instead calls it the Yonaguni dialect. As classified by UNESCO, the Yonaguni language is one of the most endangered languages in all of Japan, after the Ainu language.
Ainu, or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu, is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isolate with no academic consensus of origin. It is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.
Ae-oyna-kamuy (アエオイナカムイ) or Oyna-kamuy (オイナカムイ) for short is an Ainu kamuy (god) and culture hero. In Ainu mythology, he is credited with teaching humans domestic skills, and for this reason he is called Ainurakkur, and otherwise known as Okikurmi.
Kesen dialect or Kesen is a Japanese dialect spoken in Kesen County, Iwate Prefecture, Japan.
Shizunai River is a river in Shinhidaka, Hokkaidō, Japan. The Shizunai River drains from the Hidaka Mountains into the Pacific Ocean.
Bronisław Piotr Piłsudski was a Polish ethnologist who researched the Ainu people after he was exiled by Tsar Alexander III of Russia to the Far East.
Yoshio Nishi was a Japanese scholar of Tibeto-Burman linguistics.
Shiro Hattori was a Japanese academic and writer. Born in Kameyama, Mie, Hattori was a linguist known particularly for his work on premodern Japanese and Japonic languages and the Ainu language. He was a professor at the University of Tokyo.
Archdeacon John Batchelor, D.D., OBE was an Anglican English missionary to the Ainu people of Japan until 1941. First sent under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society of the Church of England, Batchelor lived from 1877 to 1941 among the indigenous Ainu communities in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. He was a charismatic and iconoclastic missionary for the Anglican Church in Japan and published highly regarded work on the language and culture of the Ainu people. Batchelor only reluctantly left Japan at the outbreak of the Second World War in the Pacific in 1941.
Take Asai (浅井タケ) or Tahkonanna was the last fluent speaker of the Sakhalin Ainu language. She was born in Otasu village on the West coast of Sakhalin Island, and moved to Rayciska (Raichishika) during her childhood. After World War II she was relocated to Hokkaido and toward the end of her life lived in an old-age home in Monbetsu, Hidaka, Hokkaido. She served as an informant with the Piłsudski Research Project and other projects until her death in 1994.
Sakhalin Ainu is an extinct Ainu language, or perhaps several Ainu languages, that was or were spoken on the island of Sakhalin, now part of Russia.
Kotan-kar-kamuy is the creator deity of the Ainu people. He should not be confused with god of the land Kotan-kor-kamuy, or the god of the sky Kandakoro Kamuy.
Proto-Ryukyuan is the reconstructed ancestor of the Ryukyuan languages, probably associated with the Gusuku culture in the early second millennium AD.
The Ainu languages, sometimes known as Ainuic, are a small language family, often regarded as a language isolate, historically spoken by the Ainu people of northern Japan and neighboring islands, as well as mainland, including previously southern part of Kamchatka Peninsula.
The mintuci is a water sprite or an aquatic supernatural creature, a half-man-half-beast, told in stories of Ainu mythology and folklore. It is also considered a variant of the kappa and therefore a type of yōkai.