The Ainu people are historically residents of parts of Hokkaido (the Northern island of Japan) the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin. According to the government, there are currently 25,000 Ainu living in Japan, but other sources claim there are up to 200,000.
The Jōmon people are considered to be a people of northern ancestry and belong mostly to Haplogroup D2 (D-M55 branch) which characterizes the northern people of Asia. Thus, despite their morphological similarities to Caucasoid populations, the Ainu are essentially of North Asiatic origin.
According to the government, there are currently 25,000 Ainu living in Japan, but other sources claim there are up to 200,000. The origin of the Ainu people and language is, for the most part, unknown. However, there have been many theories on the subject.
The Jomon people are the original native Japanese people and originated somewhere in Southeast-Asia or in Indonesia. The Yayoi originated near the Yangze-river area in southern china and moved over the Korean pensuila into Japan. There they mixed with the Jomon and the modern Japanese(yamato) was created.
Definition of Ainu. 1 : a member of an indigenous people of the Japanese archipelago, the Kuril Islands, and part of Sakhalin Island. 2 : the language of the Ainu people.
The Ryukyuan people (????, Ryūkyū minzoku, Okinawan: Ruuchuu minzuku), also Lewchewan, are an East Asian ethnic group native to the Ryukyu Islands between the islands of Kyushu and Taiwan. Politically, they live in either Okinawa Prefecture or Kagoshima Prefecture.
The Ainu have often been considered to descend from the Jōmon people, who lived in northern Japan from the Jōmon period ( c. 14,000 to 300 BCE) One of their Yukar Upopo, or legends, tells that "[t]he Ainu lived in this place a hundred thousand years before the Children of the Sun came".
The first two Europeans to reach Japan in the year 1543 were the Portuguese traders António da Mota and Francisco Zeimoto (Fernão Mendes Pinto claimed to have arrived on this ship as well, but this is in direct conflict with other data he presents), arriving on a Chinese ship at the southern island of Tanegashima where
Traditional Ainu cuisine uses meats, such as salmon and deer, obtained through fishing and hunting, wild plants gathered in the mountains such as cardiocrinum cordatum bulbs (turep) and acorns, as well as various grains and potatoes obtained through farming.
"Full-blooded" Ainu, compared to people of Yamato descent, often have lighter skin and more body hair. Many early investigators proposed a Caucasian ancestry.
The Ainu in Russia are an indigenous people of Russia located in Sakhalin Oblast, Khabarovsk Krai and Kamchatka Krai. Although only around 100 people currently identify themselves as Ainu in Russia (according to the census of 2010), it is believed that at least 1,000 Russian people are of significant Ainu ancestry.
The two indigenous peoples of Japan, the Ainu and the Okinawans, live on the northernmost and southernmost islands of the country's archipelago.
According to Mitsuru Sakitani the Jōmon people are an admixture of two distinct ethnic groups: A more ancient group from Central Asia (carriers of Y chromosome D-M55), that were present since more than 30,000 years in Japan and a more recent group (carriers of Y chromosome C1a) that migrated to Japan about 13,000 years
Shinto, also known as Shintoism or kami-no-michi, is a religion originating from Japan. Classified as an East Asian religion by scholars of religion, its practitioners often regard it as Japan's indigenous religion. The kami are worshiped at kamidana household shrines, family shrines, and public shrines.
Both Nippon and Nihon literally mean "the sun's origin", that is, where the sun originates, and are often translated as the Land of the Rising Sun. This nomenclature comes from Imperial correspondence with the Chinese Sui Dynasty and refers to Japan's eastern position relative to China.
