The Ainu homeland, Ainu Mosir, spans Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, a world of hunting, fishing and trade that the Japanese long knew as Ezo. From the seventeenth century the Matsumae domain held a shogunal monopoly on Ainu trade, and contract fisheries drew Ainu labor into an increasingly unequal economy; armed resistance, from Shakushain's war in 1669 to the Menashi-Kunashir rising of 1789, was put down and left the balance of power with the Japanese.
The Meiji state annexed Hokkaido outright in 1869 and pursued assimilation: the Former Natives Protection Act of 1899 reclassified the Ainu as former aborigines, pushed families from hunting and fishing into farming, and schooled children in Japanese, while tattooing, earrings and eventually the iyomante itself were discouraged or banned. Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu communities were displaced by the shifting Russo-Japanese border settlements, and the Ainu language fell nearly silent within three generations.
Recognition came slowly. The Ainu Cultural Promotion Act of 1997 replaced the 1899 law, the Japanese Diet resolved in 2008 that the Ainu are an indigenous people of Japan, and the Ainu Policy Promotion Act of 2019 wrote that recognition into law for the first time, prohibiting discrimination and supporting language and ceremony. Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum and Park, opened at Shiraoi in 2020. Ainu identity today is a matter of revival rather than bare survival: language classes, dance, craft and ritual are being relearned and taught by Ainu themselves.