 The "Kai" element also strongly resembles the On'yomi, or Sino-Japanese, reading of the characters ("on'yomi" as [, カイ], "kun'yomi" as [, えみし]) 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 .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 "Aynu Mosir" (), a name taken by the modern Ainu to refer to their traditional homeland.