Japanese scientists dug up more than 1,600 Ainu remains for study, and Ainu groups sued universities to bring them home

From the 1880s to the 1970s anatomists from the universities of Tokyo, Kyoto and Hokkaido dug up Ainu graves in Hokkaido and Sakhalin to study skulls. Koganei Yoshikiyo of Tokyo took more than 160 skulls in the Meiji era. Kiyono Kenji of Kyoto took more than 50 from Sakhalin in the Taishō era. Kodama Sakuzaemon of Hokkaido University collected large numbers in the Shōwa era. In 1982 Hokkaido University disclosed that it held 1,004. In 2016 twelve universities held 1,676 Ainu remains. Ainu tradition is to bury the dead and leave the grave untouched. From 2012 to 2017 Ainu from Urakawa, Monbetsu, Urahoro, Asahikawa and Shinhidaka sued Hokkaido University. Four suits ended in settlements returning remains to the descendant group of the kotan, not to an individual heir as the Civil Code assumes. The Urahoro Ainu Association sued Hokkaido University in 2014 and Sapporo Medical University in 2018, recovered about 100 remains, and reburied them, the third reburial in August 2019. In November 2019 it sued the University of Tokyo for six more. The state moved 1,287 remains to a memorial facility at Upopoy in Shiraoi by December 2019, to be returned to local groups on application. The Urahoro group, now Raporo Ainu Nation, also sued for salmon-fishing rights; the Sapporo High Court rejected that claim on 2 July 2026 and the group did not appeal.