TOKYO -- A Japanese university student with Indigneous Ainu roots has taken to YouTube to share her culture and language, which she has learned to embrace over the years. Maya Sekine, 20, runs "Sito ...

Chances are you haven’t met an Ainu speaker in Japan. After all, Google’s Endangered Languages Project puts the number of native speakers at fewer than five. But the Ainu people once populated a wide ...

Like other indigenous groups, the Ainu people of Hokkaido and the north-eastern Honshu island of Japan have experienced marginalization. After the Japanese government annexed their territory in 1890, ...

TOKYO (Reuters) - When Tsubasa Okitsu was growing up in northern Japan, he was ashamed of his heritage as an Ainu, an indigenous ethnic group that has long suffered discrimination in a country where ...

More than a century after colonisation, the Ainu language almost vanished. Now machines are listening to hours of old recordings and learning to give it a new voice. The cassette player would catch ...

After centuries of forced assimilation, Japan’s indigenous Ainu population, language and culture are emerging once more thanks to anime, the country’s thriving sub-cultures and YouTube. Maya Sekine is ...

TOKYO (Reuters) - On a wooded lake shore in northern Japan, the government is building a modernist shrine that has divided the indigenous Ainu community whose vanishing culture it was designed to ...