Why the first samurai were not Japanese at all

Few people know, but the Japanese are not the indigenous people of Japan. Before them, the Ainu lived here, a mysterious people, in whose origin there are still many mysteries. The Ainu sided with the Japanese for a while, until the latter succeeded in driving them north.

The Ainu did not engage in agriculture, they obtained food by hunting, gathering and fishing. They lived in small settlements, quite remote from each other. Therefore, their habitat was quite extensive: the Japanese islands, Sakhalin, Primorye, the Kuril Islands and the south of Kamchatka. Around the 3rd millennium BC, Mongoloid tribes arrived on the Japanese islands, who later became the ancestors of the Japanese. The new settlers brought with them a rice culture that allowed them to feed on a large number of the population in a relatively small area. Thus began difficult times in the life of the Ainu. They were forced to move to the north, leaving their original lands to the colonialists.

But the Ainu were skilled warriors who perfectly controlled the bow and sword, and the Japanese did not manage to defeat them for a long time. A very long time, almost 1,500 years. The Ainu were able to handle two swords, and on the right thigh they wore two daggers. One of them (maki-maki) served as a knife for committing ritual suicide - hara-kiri. The Japanese were able to defeat the Ainu only after the invention of the guns, having managed to learn a lot from them regarding military art by this time. The code of honor of the samurai, the ability to wield two swords and the mentioned hara-kiri ritual - these seemingly characteristic attributes of Japanese culture were actually borrowed from the Ainu.

Scientists still argue about the origin of the Ainu. But the fact that this people is not related to other indigenous peoples of the Far East and Siberia is a proven fact. A characteristic feature of their appearance is very thick hair and a beard in men, which the representatives of the Mongoloid race are deprived of. For a long time, it was believed that they can have common roots with the peoples of Indonesia and the aborigines of the Pacific Ocean, since they have similar facial features. But genetic studies have ruled out this option. And the first Russian Cossacks, who arrived on Sakhalin Island, even mistook the Ainu for the Russians, so they did not look like Siberian tribes, but rather resembled Europeans. The only group of people from all the analyzed variants with whom they have a genetic relationship, were people of the Jomon era, who were supposedly the ancestors of the Ainu. The Ainu language is also strongly knocked out of the modern linguistic picture of the world, and they have not yet found a suitable place for it. It turns out that during the long isolation the Ainu lost contact with all the other peoples of the Earth, and some researchers even distinguish them as a special Ainu race.

Today, there are very few Ainu left, about 25,000 people. They live mainly in the north of Japan and are almost completely assimilated by the population of this country.