When establishing the Development Commission, the Meiji government decided to change the name of Ezochi. Matsuura Takeshirō submitted six proposals, including names such as and , to the government. The government eventually decided to use the name Hokkaidō, but decided to write it as , as a compromise between and because of the similarity with names such as . According to Matsuura, the name was thought up because the Ainu called the region "Kai". 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 .