The island of Hokkaido, today famous mainly for its enchanting winter landscapes, hides a history long forgotten by many. Originally, the island was known as Ezochi and was not inhabited by the Japanese but by the Ainu people. Their name, like that of many indigenous populations in Africa and the Americas, originally meant “the people.” The Ainu had settled on the island several millennia before Christ. For centuries, they lived through gathering, hunting, and fishing, forming a tribal society based on clans, the prestige of their chieftains, and small community villages known as kotan.

The Ainu also maintained political and commercial relations with continental powers, including the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the Chinese Ming and Qing dynasties. Between the 1500s and 1600s, the Yamato Japanese gradually increased their influence over the southern part of the island. For a long period, the Japanese settlers in the south traded fish, silk, and furs with the Ainu, while also imposing certain tribute payments upon them.

Things changed dramatically after the Meiji Restoration. In 1869, the imperial government occupied the entire island, officially annexing it in 1874. That same year, it began promoting the settlement of Japanese colonists and the agricultural, mining, and industrial development of Hokkaido. The Ainu people paid the price for this expansion: while Hokkaido’s total population rose from 58,000 in the 1870s–1880s to 240,000, the Ainu population dropped from roughly 80,000 in the 1700s to just over 10,000 by 1870.

The Ainu lands were confiscated and redistributed to settlers, and many indigenous families were relocated to the most barren and inhospitable regions of the island. They were forced to abandon their traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle to become sedentary farmers, a shift that ultimately reduced them to cheap labor for the Japanese.

The Ainu also underwent a process of forced assimilation into Yamato culture: they were given Japanese names, compelled to send their children to Japanese schools, and ordered to abandon cultural practices deemed “barbaric,” such as tattooing (especially common among women) and animal sacrifices. In shaping its policies toward the Ainu, the Japanese government modeled its approach on the Native American reservation system implemented in the United States, a country that, during that period, exerted significant influence over the Land of the Rising Sun.