About the Ainu People
The Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan, have lived in the northern part of the Japanese islands - Tohoku on Honshu and Hokkaido, in Sakhalin, and in the Kurile Islands since ancient times. They have cultivated their own distinctive culture founded on a strong respect for, and interaction with, the environment. Through time, that culture evolved via trading with the Chinese, Koreans, and Russians, the northern indigenous people of Asia and Alaska, and the Yamato people, the ancestors of the majority of Japanese today.