The Japanese government has finally recognised that the Ainu are indegenous people, and therefore a minority ethnic group.

Since Hokkaido was annexed to Japan in the late 1800's Japanese authorities tried to make Ainu culture and language disappear. Now that they have almost succeeded, they can become more tolerant toward the Ainu.

Recognition at last for Japan's Ainu

I wonder if this has something to do with recent DNA research that suggested that a substanstial part of the Japanese gene pool was of Ainu origins.

Japanese roots surprisingly shallow

In the l980s new research on DNA taken from burial remains revealed even more startling results: The islands' first inhabitants had little in common with most modern Japanese — but were almost identical to the Ainu, a tiny indigenous group now found on Hokkaido.

The same analysis also showed modern Japanese are close genetic kin to Koreans and Chinese.

A younger generation of Japanese archaeologists now accepts that some sort of migration took place and that ethnic minorities like the Ainu are much more closely related to Japan's original inhabitants.

Debate among researchers focuses on just how many migrants came and whether they violently displaced the natives — or peacefully intermarried with them.

"It's only since the 1970s that we started to see this period in history more dispassionately," said Yoshinori Yasuda, a professor of archaeology at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto.

The public remains largely ignorant of these developments, despite the enormous popular interest in Japan's past.

Newspapers, which devote a remarkable amount of print to archaeological finds, proclaim any site, no matter how old, as left by "our ancestors."

School textbooks still give the last ice age as the date of the most recent migration to Japan from mainland Asia — if they mention outside influence at all.

Even the museums curated by archaeologists themselves often display diagrams showing how ancient hunters evolved into the present-day Japanese "salaryman."

So widely accepted are such views that when NHK aired a documentary two months ago describing some of the recent DNA findings, it was immediately deluged by more than 200 calls.

"Most of the viewers expressed shock or surprise," said NHK spokeswoman Akiko Toda. "A few refused to believe it."
Jomon Genes : Using DNA, researchers probe the genetic origins of modern Japanese

The researchers began to realize that YAP might prove useful when an initial study of Asian populations revealed that only men from Japan seemed to harbor the genetic marker. In Taiwan and Korea, for example, not a single man was found to possess YAP, Hammer and Horai reported in the American Journal of Genetic Studies suggest that Japan s original inhabitants, the Jomon, mixed with a later culture, the Yayoi. The Jomon's closest descendants today inhabit Japan's northern and southern islands.
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From that evidence, Hammer and Horai hypothesized that the YAP element was originally carried to Japan by the Jomon and that the Yayoi, who came from the region that now makes up North and South Korea, lacked the marker. More recent research has strengthened this theory.

Working with several colleagues, the two researchers mapped the distribution of YAP-positive chromosomes throughout Japan. While men living in central Japan rarely carry YAP. the Ainu and inhabitants of the southern islands, the two populations apparently least influenced by the Yayoi, frequently do.
In the article The Origins of Japanese people on this website, it was suggested that 35% of Japanese men belong to the Ainu haplogroup D. This means that at least 1/3 of the Japanese gene pool is of Ainu (or Jomon) origins through the paternal line.

This hard scientific evidence that modern Japanese are of mixed Yayoi (Sino-Korean) and Jomon (Ainu) descent has not been accepted by the largest part of the population. Things are starting to change. The NHK (a public TV channel) is trying to popularise the new findings. The recognition of the Ainu is probably a consequence to this new understanding of the genetic origins of the Japanese.