Ainu were forced to be petty laborers during the Meiji Restoration, which saw the introduction of Hokkaidō into the Japanese Empire and the privatization of traditional Ainu lands. The Japanese government during the 19th and 20th centuries denied the rights of the Ainu to their traditional cultural practices, most notably the right to speak their language, as well as their right to hunt and gather. This denial of Ainu cultural practices mostly stemmed from the 1899 Law for the Protection of Native Hokkaido Aborigines. This law and its associated policies were designed to fully integrate the Ainu into Japanese society with the cost of erasing Ainu culture and identity. The Ainu's position as manual laborers and their forced integration into larger Japanese society have led to discriminatory practices by the Japanese government that can still be felt today. Intermarriage between Japanese and Ainu was actively promoted by the Ainu to lessen the chances of discrimination against their offspring. As a result, many Ainu are indistinguishable from their Japanese neighbors, but some Ainu-Japanese are interested in traditional Ainu culture. For example, Oki, born as a child of an Ainu father and a Japanese mother, became a musician who plays the traditional Ainu instrument . There are also many small towns in the southeastern or Hidaka region where ethnic Ainu live such as in Nibutani (). Many live in Sambutsu especially, on the eastern coast. Standard of living This discrimination and negative stereotypes assigned to the Ainu have manifested in the Ainu's lower levels of education, income levels and participation in the economy as compared to their ethnically Japanese counterparts. The Ainu community in Hokkaidō in 1993 received welfare payments at a 2.3 times higher rate, had an 8.9% lower enrollment rate from junior high school to high school and a 15.7% lower enrollment into college from high school than that of Hokkaidō as a whole. The Japanese government has been lobbied by activists to research the Ainu's standard of living nationwide due to this noticeable and growing gap. The Japanese government will provide ¥7 million (US$63,000) beginning in 2015, to conduct surveys nationwide on this matter. The Ainu and Ethnic Homogeneity in Japan The existence of the Ainu has challenged the notion of ethnic homogeneity in post-WWII Japan. After the demise of the multi-ethnic Empire of Japan in 1945, successive governments forged a single Japanese identity by advocating monoculturalism and denying