the existence of more than one ethnic group in Japan. Following the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, Hokkaido politicians pressured the government to recognize Ainu rights. Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo answered a parliamentary question on May 20, 2008 by stating that "it is a historical fact that the Ainu are the precursors in the northern Japanese archipelago, in particular Hokkaido. The government acknowledges the Ainu to be an ethnic minority as it has maintained a unique cultural identity and having a unique language and religion." On June 6, 2008, the National Diet of Japan passed a non-binding, bipartisan resolution calling upon the government to recognize the Ainu as indigenous people. In 2019, eleven years after this resolution, the Diet finally passed an act recognizing the Ainu to be an indigenous people of Japan. Despite this recognition of the Ainu as an ethnically distinct group, political figures in Japan continue to define ethnic homogeneity as key to overall Japanese national identity; Taro Aso, in 2020, notably claimed that “no other country but this one has lasted for as long as 2,000 years with one language, one ethnic group and one dynasty”. Origins The Ainu have often been considered to descend from the diverse Jōmon people, who lived in northern Japan from the Jōmon period ( 14,000 to 300 BCE). One of their , or legends, tells that "[t]he Ainu lived in this place a hundred thousand years before the Children of the Sun came". Recent research suggests that the historical Ainu culture originated from a merger of the Okhotsk culture with the Satsumon culture, cultures thought to have derived from the diverse Jōmon-period cultures of the Japanese archipelago. The Ainu economy was based on farming, as well as on hunting, fishing and gathering. According to Lee and Hasegawa of the Waseda University, the direct ancestors of the later Ainu people formed during the late Jōmon period from the combination of the local but diverse population of Hokkaido, long before the arrival of contemporary Japanese people. Lee and Hasegawa suggest that the Ainu language expanded from northern Hokkaido and may have originated from a relative more recent Northeast Asian/Okhotsk population, who established themselves in northern Hokkaido and had significant impact on the formation of Hokkaido's Jōmon culture. The linguist and historian Joran Smale similarly found that the Ainu language likely originated from the ancient Okhotsk people,