* Anthropologist C. Loring Brace believe the Ainu were the early nobility and Samurai.
* Anthropologist Marvin Harris believes the Japanese custom of 'white-face' was an emulation of these early noblemen.
Marvin Harris is Marxist, but maybe he's right about this one.
What's the linguistic relationship of Japanese to other languages? Seems I remember reading that it's believed to be related distantly to Turkic languages.