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Naming of Hokkaido
When establishing the Development Commission the Meiji Government decided to change the name of Ezochi. Matsuura Takeshir? submitted six proposals, including names such as Kaihokud? and Hokkaid? to the government. The government eventually decided to use the name Hokkaid?, but decided to write it as, as a compromise between and because of the similarity with names such as T?kaid?. According to Matsuura, the name was thought up because the Ainu called the region Kai. Historically, many peoples who had interactions with the ancestors of the Ainu called them and their islands Kuyi, Kuye, Qoy, or some similar name, which may have some connection to the early modern form Kai. The Kai element also strongly resembles the Sino-Japanese reading of the characters (Sino-Japanese Japanese pronunciation: [ka.i], Japanese kun'yomi [emisi]), which have been used for over a thousand years in China and Japan as the standard orthographic form to be used when referring to Ainu and related peoples; it is possible that Matsuura's Kai was actually an alteration, influenced by the Sino-Japanese reading of Ka-i, of the Nivkh exonym for the Ainu, namely Qoy or IPA: [k?u?i].
There is no known established Ainu language word for the island of Hokkaido. However, the Ainu people did have a name for all of their domain, which included Hokkaido along with the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and parts of northern Honshu, which was Ainu Mosir, a name taken by the modern Ainu to refer to their traditional homeland. "Ainu Mosir" literally translates as "The Land Where People (the Ainu) Live", and it was traditionally used to be contrasted with Kamuy Mosir, "The Land of the Kamuy (spirits)"
