A recent study of Japanese racism traces its virulence to fixation on a sense of racial superiority and Japan's need to establish the "otherness" of everyone else on earth. Some of this can no doubt be traced to Japan's history of purging its own indigenous people. The archipelago once belonged to the aboriginal Ainu, the emishi. The warrior class, samurai, seems to have had its origins in this compulsion to exterminate the emishi.
— Madonna Kolbenschlag, Eastward Toward Eve