In 1869 the new Meiji government renamed Ezo as Hokkaido and established a Colonisation Office to survey, allot and settle it, an undertaking that brought hundreds of thousands of mainland Japanese migrants north over the following decades. Britannica records that the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuriles, were largely assimilated under the growing Japanese presence. Ainu land rights were not recognised in the allotment system, salmon fishing and deer hunting were restricted, and the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 completed a policy of assimilation, granting small agricultural plots on conditions and promoting Japanese language and schooling in place of Ainu practice. In the south, the Ryukyu Kingdom, which had paid tribute to both China and Japan, was declared a Japanese domain in 1872 and abolished in 1879, its king removed to Tokyo and its territory made Okinawa prefecture over Chinese objection. Japan recognised the Ainu as an indigenous people by Diet resolution in 2008 and by statute in 2019.
The Meiji state annexed Ezo as Hokkaido and settled it, imposed assimilation on the Ainu, and abolished the Ryukyu Kingdom, making it Okinawa prefecture
The Kaitakushi count of 1873 recorded 16,272 Ainu in Hokkaido, already much reduced. The Ryukyu Kingdom's population at its abolition in 1879 is estimated at roughly 310,000. Both figures come from early Meiji administrative counts of uncertain completeness, and Ainu numbers are further blurred by assimilation policy, which removed the category itself from later records.
There was no significant direct death toll: neither the colonisation of Hokkaido nor the annexation of Ryukyu involved mass killing. Ainu population decline in the nineteenth century came from introduced disease, the disruption of subsistence and intermarriage and assimilation, and was not separately recorded; the losses are visible only in the shrinking number of people registered as Ainu.
Britannica records the assimilation of the Ainu under Japanese settlement and the framework of the 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, which promoted Japanese language and agriculture in place of Ainu language, subsistence and custom.
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