The origin and history of possibly the first inhabitants of the Japanese archipelagos, the Ainu, are shrouded with mysteries, partly because they have never possessed letters. Their speech, with a number of dialects, is not related to Japanese. This hirsute race are physically unlike their Mongoloid neighbours and may be descendants of early Caucasoid type people once widely spread over Northern Asia. They inhabit mainly Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, even though this book concerns the ones in Hokkaido. Until the Meiji Restoration (1868) when many Japanese began to flood the shores of Hokkaido, formerly called Ezo, they lived by foraging, hunting, and fishing, the population totalling 15,000 then and 17,000 in the middle of this century. They worship bears and their religion is animistic