Paint your nails the Ainu way, make embroidery, wear fish-skin shoes, stay in a themed hotel – Hokkaido, Japan celebrates its indigenous people

On the Japanese island of Hokkaido visitors can learn about its hunter-gatherer first people in a variety of ways, from craft workshops to a luxury hotel stay

Try on bark-fibre robes – very scratchy – or salmon-skin shoes, sample Ainu cuisine, and snap up souvenirs such iPhone cases, pottery and magnets

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An Ainu man wearing traditional clothes at Upopoy National Ainu Museum and Park in Sapporo, Japan. The museum reveals the richness of ethnic Ainu culture, language and history beyond Japanese national identity. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 6:15pm, 25 Sep 2023

The tourist information centre in the small town of Shiraoi is not just a great spot to grab some souvenirs, it also offers an insight into how the first settlers of Japan’s Hokkaido island have secured their future.

For sale alongside pottery and fabrics featuring the swirling designs beloved by the Ainu are magnets, iPhone cases and stickers featuring manga- or cartoon-style depictions of Ainu warriors and kamuy – the indigenous people’s spirit animals.

Although I cannot help but wonder what the Ainu who lived here 1,000 years ago would make of the cartoon depictions of their descendants, this on-trend merchandising is one of many tools being used by guardians of Ainu culture to remind the wider world of their presence.

Tureppon, the mascot of the recently opened Upopoy National Ainu Museum and Park, is another. Her name comes from the word turep, which means “lily bulb” in the Ainu language, and she clutches a walking stick made from a turep stalk and a cake made from its seeds.

A family inside an Ainu home. Photo: Getty Images

As other indigenous groups secured protection and respect, the Ainu – hunter-gatherers who once had the 83,500 square kilometres (32,200 square miles) of Hokkaido to themselves – went largely ignored and, as Japan developed, they became less and less visible.

It was only in 2008 that the Japanese government recognised the Ainu as an indigenous people.