The history of the Sakhalin Ainu and the Russian-Japanese rivalry in the Russian Far East (XVIII century - September, 1875)

In the XIX century the Ainu people, consisting of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and Kuril groups, were involved in the border dispute between Russia and Japan. The latter forcibly resettled the Kuril and Sakhalin Ainu to the Japanese territory in order to use ethnicity in the dispute with Russia. As a result, the Kuril Ainu disappeared as a group in the 1940s and the Sakhalin Ainu were left without their homeland. The article focuses on the history of the Sakhalin Ainu before their first forced relocation to Hokkaido in 1875.