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What lesson 33 did not say about Hokkaido
Year 1 sent Alex here on a bicycle and told him that Japan settled the island in earnest from the 1870s, displacing the indigenous Ainu, and then moved on to the dairy farming. Here is the rest. The Ainu are the indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kurils, and their language is not related to Japanese at all — it is an isolate, which is why the place names resist you so completely. The island was renamed and annexed in 1869, and the law that governed Ainu life from 1899 handed out farmland and schooling together, so the generation that learned to farm learned Japanese and did not pass on what they had. That law stood until 1997. The Diet acknowledged the Ainu as an indigenous people by resolution in 2008 and in statute in 2019, and ウポポイ, the national museum and park, opened at Shiraoi in 2020. There are now very few people who grew up speaking the language, and it is classed as critically endangered. What survives in daylight is the map: most of the names on it are Ainu, written in characters that were never meant to mean anything, and every time a train announcement says 登別 it is saying a word in a language that was taught out of the people who owned it.