The companion Web site to a Smithsonian exhibit, "Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People," provides background information on the Ainu and also gives an insider's view on how a museum show is pulled together.

Benedek Baráthosi Balogh, a school teacher from Hungary, first became fascinated with the Ainu people during a visit in 1908. The Museum of Ethnography in Budapest offers an impressive online "sample" of the hundreds of photographs, sketches, and artifacts Baráthosi Balogh brought home from his travels among the Ainu.

Hosted by the Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, Hokaido, this site presents several essays on the history, practices, and beliefs of the Ainu.

Committed to researching, restoring, and reproducing Ainu culture, FRPAC actively lobbies the Japanese government and people to acknowledge and honor the Ainu's contributions to Japanese culture.

After nearly 25 years proselytizing and observing among the Ainu in the second half of the last century, Batchelor wrote this, his second book on the Ainu. Highly detailed and profusely illustrated with the author's own photographs and drawings, it covers everything from fetiches to fishing, education to exorcism. See Ainu Legends.

First published in 1962, 20 years after the author's death, this authoritative book was written by a Scot who spent the last 12 years of his life among the Ainu of Hokkaido. It is an amateur anthropologist's take on Ainu ceremonies, funerary practices, spirit beliefs, and other customs.

A highly personal memoir of three generations of a contemporary Ainu family, and by extension of Ainu culture and history in general, this book serves as Shigeru's fervent contribution to preserving the Ainu's fast-dwindling cultural heritage.