Kamuy Fuchi

← Encyclopedia

The fire in the middle of the floor is not allowed to die. It is banked at night and woken in the morning, fed and tended across the generations, and if by some carelessness it goes out entirely the misfortune is grave, because the fire is not a thing but a person, and the person is an old woman who lives there. Every house has one. She sits at the center of it, in the sunken hearth, and unlike the other great powers of the Ainu world she does not come and go. The bear descends from the mountains as an honored guest and is sent home again; the orca lord governs the open sea from his own country and is glimpsed only at its edge; the owl keeps the village from a height and returns to the sky. But the grandmother of the hearth has no far country to return to. She is here, in this house, on this day, and on every day, which is exactly why — before any prayer travels to the bear or the sea or the sky — it is spoken first to her.

Her name in Ainu is Ape-huci-kamuy. It is built of three plain words: ape, fire; huci, grandmother or venerable female elder; and kamuy, the term the Ainu use for the persons-of-power who fill the visible world and visit it clothed in bodies. The name means, with almost no ornament, “the grandmother fire-god.” She is also called Kamuy Fuchi, or Kamuy-huci — the kamuy who is grandmother — and this ordinariness is itself a theological fact. The most exalted of the household deities carries the humblest and most domestic of names.

Interior of a traditional Ainu dwelling (cise) from the Saru River valley, reconstructed at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. The hearth in the center of the floor is the seat of Ape-huci-kamuy, the fire grandmother. Photograph by Yanajin33, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The grandmother’s names and her coming

Where she is addressed with full ceremony she is not called by the household word alone but by a longer, honoring name: Apemerukoyan-mat Unamerukoyan-mat, which the record renders “Rising-Fire-Sparks Woman, Rising-Cinder-Sparks Woman.” The name paints her as the fire does its own work — the crackle and lift of sparks off a live flame made into a title. She bears also the epithet Iresu Kamuy, “the one who rears the people,” glossed in the ethnographies as “People-Teacher.” It is she who reared humankind, and in the tradition she is the teacher who gave the women their crafts, the one who first showed the arts by which a household keeps itself alive. Of the great kamuy she is thus the most maternal in office as well as in name: not a lord of a wild domain but the elder who raised the family and still presides over it.

How she came to be is told in more than one way, and the yukar — the long chanted epics, and the kamuy yukar in which a kamuy speaks its own story in the first person — together with the ethnographers who wrote them down preserve the accounts side by side rather than choosing among them. In one telling she descends from the heavens accompanied by Kanna-kamuy, the kamuy of thunder and lightning. In another she is struck into being from the fire-drill itself, the tool that spins fire out of wood, and is reckoned the sister of Hasinaw-uk-kamuy, the goddess of the hunt. In a third she is the daughter of an elm tree, fathered upon it by the sky-possessing originator Kanda-koro-kamuy. That her origins multiply is fitting for a deity encountered not once and far away but continually and near: she is the least genealogical of the kamuy precisely because she is the most present. One does not travel to her mountain or her sea. She is already in the room.

She reaches the written record at close range, and through more than one kind of witness. The load-bearing testimony is the living Ainu tradition itself and the yukar it carries, and above all the Ainu scholars who wrote their own world from within it: Chiri Yukie, whose Ainu Shin’yoshu of 1923 set down the sacred songs in the Ainu language with a Japanese translation of her own; her brother Chiri Mashiho, the pioneering Ainu linguist; and later Kayano Shigeru, collector, culture-bearer, and eventually the first Ainu member of the Japanese Diet. Alongside them stands the outsider ethnography, which must be read with its lens declared. The missionary-physician Neil Gordon Munro described the fire goddess and her rites at first hand in Ainu Creed and Cult, published after his death; the missionary John Batchelor left a large record shaped, and sometimes distorted, by the Christian frame he brought to it. The description that follows leans on the tradition’s own voice where it can, and marks the outsider sources as what they are.

The god one lives with

Everything turns on a single office: Ape-huci-kamuy is the intermediary. In the Ainu account of the world there are two lands — Ainu Mosir, the quiet land of humans, and Kamuy Mosir, the land of the kamuy — and the whole of religious life is the traffic of hospitality between them. The kamuy are persons of their own country who visit the human world in a borrowed body, bringing the gift of meat or fur or light, and who are honored and sent home so that they will come again. But a human prayer, on its own, cannot cross into Kamuy Mosir and find the god it is meant for. It needs a bearer. The fire grandmother is that bearer. Because she alone is permanently resident in the house — because she never leaves — she is the one who hears what is said at the hearth and carries it onward to whichever kamuy it is addressed to. The Hokkaido record puts her function plainly: fire warms and lights and cooks, and it also listens to human appeals and conveys them to the other kamuy. She is the switchboard of the sacred world.

From this follows the rule that orders every rite: she is addressed first. No major ceremony begins by speaking to its intended god. It begins at the hearth, with words to the grandmother, who is asked to receive the offering and pass it on. The libation of sake or millet beer is poured onto her flame before it is lifted to any other power; the gods are given the first share, and she is the first of the gods. The whittled prayer-sticks called inau — lengths of willow shaved so that the curling ribbons of wood stay attached along the shaft, made beautiful and given away — are set for her at the hearth, and rows of taller inau stand at the nusa, the altar-fence east of the house. When the drink is offered up it is raised toward the kamuy on the carved libation-stick, the ikupasuy, its tip dipped so that the god may share. Even the iyomante, the great bear-sending in which the mountain kamuy is returned to his own land laden with gifts, opens with prayer to the fire goddess before the bear’s spirit is set on its road home. She is the first door through which the entire economy of exchange must pass.

Her mediation is not reserved for the great occasions. She is the most intimate of the kamuy, addressed in the ordinary registers of a day. Thanks are given to her before a meal is eaten, since it is her fire that has cooked it; she is prayed to in sickness, appealed to for a household in trouble, spoken to when a child is born or a journey begun. The other gods are visited at their thresholds — the mountain, the river-mouth, the offshore water — but the fire grandmother is met in passing, a hundred times, at the one place a person cannot avoid. In the Ainu understanding a spirit-force called ramat animates the living world and its powers, and the fire is where that force is nearest to hand: not a distant majesty but a warmth one can put a cold hand toward. The theology and the domestic fact are the same thing. The god who hears every prayer is the god who keeps the room from freezing.

Inau — willow sticks shaved so the curled ribbons of wood remain attached — of the kind offered to Ape-huci-kamuy and the other kamuy; these are guardian-of-the-house inau displayed at Upopoy. Photograph by タクナワン (Takunawan), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Her presence at the hearth makes that hearth the hinge of the whole cosmos, and not only for prayer. It is a gateway. Through the fire, humans and kamuy communicate; the hearth is described as the point at which the two lands touch. It is also the abode of the dead. The Ainu word for ancestor is glossed, in the record kept both by Ainu scholars and by outside ethnographers, as “those who dwell in the hearth” — the forebears are near, close as the fire, present in the house they once kept. And the hearth is the door of departure as well as of return: when a person dies, the soul is thought to travel through the fire of Ape-huci-kamuy on its road to the afterlife. She stands, that is, at both thresholds of a life. The child is born into a house warmed by her; the dead pass out through her flame. The Wikipedia account of the fire goddess records her as the keeper of exactly this gateway between the world of humans and the world of the kamuy, and Encyclopedia.com’s survey of Ainu religion sets her at the center of the hearth-centered household in which the fire is never allowed to fail.

She has a face, and the tradition draws it with care. She is pictured as an old woman dressed in six layers of kimono bound close with a sash, and over them another six layers left loose to flutter free — a figure at once wrapped and streaming, like a fire that is both banked and leaping. She judges the conduct of the household that lives around her: she sees everything done in the house, and she guards it against harm from within and without. This is a moral office, not a merely warming one. The grandmother who cooks the food and hears the prayer is also the elder who watches how the family behaves.

It is worth marking how sharply her office differs from those of the wild kamuy, because the distinction is the whole point of her. The bear-god of the mountains, the orca lord of the open sea, the owl who is the maker and watchman of the village — these are guests. They arrive from elsewhere clothed in a body, they are feasted and honored, and they are sent home to Kamuy Mosir. Their sanctity is the sanctity of the visitor. Ape-huci-kamuy’s is the sanctity of the resident. She is not sent anywhere, because she is not visiting; she is the host’s own fire, the fixed point around which the coming and going of all the others is organized. To fold her into the pattern of the guest-gods — a kamuy who does her work and is returned home — is to miss what she is. She is the one who stays so that the others can be received.

The fire that did not go out

The Ainu are a living Indigenous people of Hokkaido, of southern Sakhalin, and of the Kuril chain, and the fire at the center of the house is theirs still. Ape-huci-kamuy is not a deity recovered from a closed past but a present god, named at hearths and ceremonies that continue. Her record, though, passes through a hard century, and the shape of that century has to be told plainly.

With the Meiji state’s annexation of Hokkaido, and above all with the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 — a law whose very title fixed the Ainu as a remnant to be managed rather than a nation with a future — assimilation was pressed on the Ainu as policy. The language was driven out of the schools; the tattooing of women’s faces and the great communal rites were discouraged and suppressed; a people of hunters and fishers was pushed toward a farming life not their own. (The full arc of that dispossession and of the recovery that followed is carried at Nibutani, the Saru-valley heartland where the 1997 dam ruling recognized Ainu cultural rights in law, and at Upopoy, the national center of the revival.)

The assimilation had an intellectual companion, and it did the fire goddess a particular injury. Ainu religion was widely framed by outside observers as a “primitive nature-worship” — the naive adoration of flame and animal and stone by a people supposedly without a theology of their own — and sometimes as a debased echo of Japanese Shinto. Both framings are misreadings, and both belong to the history of colonial and assimilationist scholarship rather than to any accurate account of the thing itself. What the fire grandmother stands at the center of is not the worship of a flame. It is a coherent theology of hospitality: an ordered moral economy in which persons-of-power visit the human world, are received and honored, and are sent home, and in which the fire is the household’s permanent host and its ambassador to all the rest. The resemblance of the Ainu kamuy to the Japanese kami is a genuine linguistic question, not evidence that the Ainu borrowed their gods; the two traditions took shape apart, in different languages and different lands. To call Ape-huci-kamuy a fire-fetish is to describe the switchboard of an entire cosmology as a superstition about heat.

Recognition, when it came, came late and by law. A resolution of both houses of the Japanese Diet in 2008 called on the state to acknowledge the Ainu as an Indigenous people, and the Ainu Policy Promotion Act of 2019 recognized them, for the first time in Japanese law, as an Indigenous people of Japan. The revival is visible and continuing. Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum and Park, opened at Shiraoi on the southern coast of Hokkaido on 12 July 2020, its memorial ground on the height above Lake Poroto set aside for the ancestral remains and for ceremony; the community and museums at Nibutani, the home of Kayano Shigeru, keep the language and the rites. Much of the closest description of the fire goddess still rests on outsider ethnography — Munro’s Ainu Creed and Cult, Batchelor’s missionary writings, read with their frames marked — and that dependence is worth stating rather than hiding. But the deeper witness is the one that never depended on the ethnographers at all: the tradition carried by the Ainu themselves, and set down in their own hand by Chiri Yukie and Chiri Mashiho and those who followed.

There is a symmetry in it that the tradition would recognize. The wild gods leave and are asked to return, and the asking is never certain; the grandmother of the hearth was asked to leave by a century of policy and did not go. The women who reclaim the language now, the ceremonies rekindled at Nibutani and Upopoy, the songs chanted again by people who learned them on purpose — these are the same fire, banked through a long cold and woken. She is the god one lives with, and a people determined to go on living has kept her lit.

→ Related: Kamuy · Kotan Kar Kamuy · Kim Un Kamuy · Repun Kamuy · Shiretoko · Lake Akan · Nibutani · Upopoy · The Jomon · The Okhotsk · The Nivkh