Were the Emishi people of Japan a cultural distinct people.?

Question:

Answer:

The Emishi or Ebisu (蝦夷?) were a group of people who lived in northeastern Honshū in what is today known as the Tōhoku region. Some Emishi tribes opposed and resisted the rule of the Japanese Emperors during the late Nara and early Heian periods (7th–10th centuries AD).

Recent scholarship has created a much more complicated portrait of this people. By and large, they are seen as indigenous to Japan and not simply as ancestors to the Ainu, but descendants of the Jōmon. Even though historically they emerge as serious challengers to the nascent Japanese state they had inherited a rich and separate tradition that went back several millennia before the Japanese speakers came to the islands of Japan.

In the study of Jōmon skeletal remains dating from thousands of years ago, a direct connection with the modern Ainu was confirmed, showing a definite linkage between the two groups. This linkage however, shows that the Jōmon people were very different from modern Japanese and other modern East Asians. The physical appearance of a number of the Ainu who were first encountered by the Europeans in the 19th Century were similar to Caucasians, and thus caused quite a stir among contemporary academics, and has spurred debate about their origins. It is thus surmised that the Jōmon also were physically unlike other East Asians. This said, physical anthropologists have found that diachronically, and geographically, the skeletal structure of the Jōmon population changed over time from southwest to northeast, paralleling the actual migration of Japanese speakers historically, so that more Jōmon traits are preserved in the north.

Studies have also shown that skeletal remains from larger settlements in the Tōhoku corresponding to where burial mounds (kofun) were built have traits that are halfway between Ainu and present day Japanese, so the idea that the Emishi were made up solely of Ainoid ancestors is untrue. The Emishi were a mix of both Ainoid and types of people scholars have called "Kofun people" who were not a separate race or ethnic group, but were a mixture of both native Jōmon and the more recent groups identified with the Yayoi culture. This dovetails nicely with the "transformation" theory that native Jōmon peoples changed gradually with the infusion of Yayoi immigrants into the Tōhoku rather than the "replacement" theory which posits that one population (Jōmon) was replaced by another (Yayoi).

The Emishi were composed of two main populations, the Jōmon Ainoid who were the majority and a smaller group the Kofun united by a common Ainoid language distinct from Japanese. These two populations were not distinguished by contemporaries, but rather by present-day physical anthropologists. Historically, they were seen as one group by contemporaries, mainly those who were descendants of the natives (the Jōmon) called Emishi and Ebisu who also had in their population those of mixed ethnicity, most likely descendants of early Japanese colonists. In addition, the contemporary Japanese for their part looked upon the Emishi as foreigners and barbarians whose lands they desired to conquer and incorporate into the Japanese state.

Though it is not known how much the Emishi population changed as Japanese settlers and frontiersmen began to live in their territories even before the conquest, the existence of Emishi Kofun types attests to some form of ethnic mixing. The Japanese established trading relations with the Emishi where their horses were imported and iron tools and weapons exported to their territories. To complicate matters, some ethnic Japanese allied themselves with the Emishi in their wars against the Yamato court. The latter were known in the Nihon Shoki as "Japanese captives" of the Emishi.

The people who migrated to the northern tip of Honshū and Hokkaidō region retained their identity and their separate ethnicity, and their descendants eventually formed the Satsumon culture in Hokkaidō. Historically, they became a distinctly different population from those who were conquered and integrated into the Japanese state. The Emishi except them became more like other ethnic Japanese while the Hokkaidō Emishi, known by contemporaries as Watarishima Emishi, or 'Emishi who crossed to the island', eventually became known as the Ezo, and later in the modern period the Ainu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emishi