As one of my academic interests is Ainu studies, I will focus on the Ainu.

Let's start from the Edo period:

The Matsumae clan had been granted a trade monopoly by the Tokugawa and achieved standing as daimyô of their own right. In 1604, Hokkaidô was divided in what was called wajinchi (Land of the Wa people) and ezochi (Land of the Ezo (people)) and several scholars have argued that this clearly shows that the Shogunate did not regard Hokkaidô as part of Japan. Initially the Matsumae influence didn’t reach very far, even though trade did extend to the entire Ainu sphere, i.e., not just Hokkaidô, but also the Kuriles and Sakhalin. Furthermore, because Hokkaidô then was too cold for rice cultivation Matsumae was desperately dependent on revenues from trade with the Ainu. As they had been granted their trade monopoly, the Matsumae were gradually able to prevent the Ainu from going to Honshû to trade by themselves as they always had been, instead forcing them to trade with Japanese merchants at trading outposts called basho. Previously, the Ainu had been able to freely choose where to trade and with whom. Under the basho system this was no longer possible leading to the doomed revolt of 1669 by the Ainu leader Samkusaynu. After defeating the revolt, the Matsumae strengthened their rule resulting in the Ainu being treated differently according to where they lived:

- the very few Ainu who lived in the Wajinchi (the area under direct control of the Matsumae, the area known as Oshima peninsula) were treated like wajin,

- the Ainu in the rest of Hokkaidô (where the basho system was in place) would keep a certain degree of autonomy as long as they swore allegiance to the Matsumae,

- and the rest of the Ainu, especially on the Kuriles and on Sakhalin, to where the influence of the Matsumae never extended much beyond trade.

The Matsumae did strive to keep the Ainu apart from the wajin, prohibiting them from learning Japanese, (though this prohibition wasn’t a strict rule) instead communicating through interpreters with them. They also barred them from wearing straw sandals and straw hats, but the Ainu didn't really care about that one. The Matsumae also tried to prevent the Ainu from practicing agriculture though in 1716 they ordered the Ainu to plant crop as they were fearing a famine. Interestingly enough, the Matsumae also respected the opposition of the Ainu towards capital punishment and left it up to the Ainu how they would deal with offenders.

By the mid-18th century, the basho system developed into the basho ukeoi system, with merchants employing the Ainu as laborers to work at fishing farms. From fish and other sea creatures they produced fertilizers which were exported as far as China. Growing demand led to more and more exploitation of Ainu workers but the revolts were never successful.

It is the end of the 18th century when a Russian emissary lands in Nemuro trying to establish trade links. This alarms the shogunate which decides to send a delegation to Hokkaidô, the Kuriles and Sakhalin. In 1799, in order to secure the northern border, the shogunate puts Ezochi under direct rule against the will of the Matsumae. The shogunate pursued a policy of assimilation: they lifted the ban on straw sandals and straw hats, the Ainu were encouraged to learn Japanese and to take on Japanese names, they tried to ban traditional customs such as the wearing of earrings and tattoos, and iomante, the famous bear-sending ceremony. They also introduced capital punishment for murder. It is controversial however how much effect policies had as the shogunate did not want to antagonize the Ainu. They also offered food to impoverished Ainu and medical treatment (something the Matsumae had refused to do).

After the international situation had quieted down, in 1821 the Matsumae were allowed to take over again (and who turned back the clock on a lot of the policies of the shogunate). In 1855 after the Treaty of Shimoda (which determined the border between Japan and Russia to be between Iturup and Urup) the shogunate took over again. The assimilation policies were pursed again, this time with more success (in 1855 about 95% of the Ainu exclusively used Ainu names, whereas in 1857 more than 60% were using Japanese names next to their Ainu ones).

Then, in 1868, came the Meiji restoration. On a national level this meant the dissolution of the feudal class system, and for the Ainu this meant the end of the exploitative basho ukeoi system. On its face this meant an equal status with the wajin and the treatment of the Ainu as Japanese subjects but at the same time this also meant that they no longer received food from their previous employers and opened them up to direct competition with wajin. The Meiji government pursued a policy of what they called “developing” Hokkaidô, but which by some has been called “domestic colonization” (contrasted with Japan’s external colonies which it acquired later, which in legal terms were treated differently from Japan proper).

For the Meiji government, one priority was to secure Hokkaidô against Russia, and they sought to achieve this with an even higher degree of assimilation of the Ainu and the massive migration of wajin to Hokkaidô. Advances in agriculture made the agricultural transformation of Hokkaidô possible. While the number of Ainu stayed roughly the same, they quickly became a tiny minority in their own homeland (the percentage of Ainu inhabitants as compared to the total population dropped from 14.63% in 1873 to 0.54% in 1936).

Traditional customs were outlawed, hunting and fishing rights were restricted, and they were expected to learn Japanese. The land was treated as terra nullius and a lot of land grants were given out to wajin immigrants. In 1899, the government enacted the Protection of former Natives of Hokkaidô Act which gave land grants to Ainu who were to use the land for agricultural purposes. The law had also other provisions such as providing medical treatment for Ainu as well as establishing primary schools for the Ainu. Ainu also received support for going into agriculture, in the form of tools etc. The law was ostensibly for the “protection” of the Ainu but the law was actually rather problematic. The land grants were often of infertile soil, and the schools were a separate system of schools much worse than wajin schools: Ainu usually entered school one year later than their wajin peers at seven years old, they usually went to school only for four years instead of six, and the number of subjects taught was lower. At the same time, the draft was extended to Hokkaidô, with the first Ainu serving in the Japanese military in 1896. Until 1910, 136 Ainu had served in active duty.

Then in the 1920s, in the brief period referred to as “Taishô democracy”, various social movements became more prominent, and this also happened to the Ainu community. They weren’t successful at first in forming an organization but in 1930 the Hokkaidô Ainu-kyôkai (Hokkaidô Ainu Association) was born. By 1930 the political climate had shifted again, with its leaders – many of whom had succeeded in wajin society after all - pursuing a policy of assimilation of the Ainu into Japanese society. They thought the only way for the Ainu to alleviate their suffering was to become loyal subjects of the emperor. And even though the organization was partially controlled by the Hokkaidô government, it did not act out of the same motives.

In 1937 this very limited kind of activism led to a major overhaul of the Protection Law, relaxing certain restrictions – Ainu now did also receive support for going into other professions not just agriculture, and the Ainu school system was abolished.

Regarding language use, by 1940 the language shift to Japanese had been completed. By this time the Ainu language community had ceased to exist, even though individual native speakers have survived for much longer.

By the interwar period, the Ainu had mostly been assimilated into Japanese society and were regarded as subjects of the Japanese emperor. In the west, from this period on the Ainu were often described as a “dying race”. At the same time, Japanese nationalists became interested in the idea of the origin of the Japanese people (which led to a lot of human remains taken out of Ainu graves by universities in the name of science, but that is a different story), and even after the war, the nationalists tried to incorporate the Ainu into the genetic construction of the Japanese people – so instead of being “the other”, they re-made the Ainu into the “civilizational ancestors” of the Japanese and reinterpreted the colonialization of Hokkaidô into a “brotherly competition between different lifestyles”. At the same time, as with other minorities, Ainu continued to suffer from discrimination, even in the new democratic Japan after the war.