Ezo

For other uses, see Ezo (disambiguation).
"Yesso" redirects here. For the footballer, see Diego Yesso.
Map of the "Land of Iesso" by French cartographer Alain Manesson Mallet (1683)

Ezo (蝦夷) (also spelled Yezo or Yeso)[1] is the Japanese term historically used to refer to the people and the lands to the northeast of the Japanese island of Honshu.[2] This included the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido,[3][4][5][6] which changed its name from "Ezo" to "Hokkaidō" in 1869,[7] and sometimes included Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.[3][4] The word Ezo means "the land of the barbarians" in Japanese.[8]

In reference to the people of that region, the same two kanji used to write the word Ezo can also be read Emishi. The descendants of these people are most likely related to the Ainu people of today.[9]

  1. ^ Batchelor, John. (1902). Sea-Girt Yezo: Glimpses at Missionary Work in North Japan, pp. 2–8.
  2. ^ Harrison, John A., "Notes on the discovery of Ezo", Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 40, No. 3 (Sep., 1950), pp. 254–266 [1]
  3. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference KDJ was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference DJR was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference SMK5 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Gakken was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005). "Ezo" in Japan Encyclopedia, p. 184.
  8. ^ "Settler colonialism in the making of Japan's Hokkaido¯". The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism. Routledge. 2016. pp. 351–362. doi:10.4324/9781315544816-36. ISBN 978-1-315-54481-6.
  9. ^ Haywood, John; Jotischky, Andrew; McGlynn, Sean (1998). Historical Atlas of the Medieval World, AD 600–1492. Barnes & Noble. pp. 3.24–. ISBN 978-0-7607-1976-3.