Kamuy

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In late autumn a bear comes down out of the mountains toward a village on the river. The people who meet it do not see, first of all, an animal. They see a guest who has dressed for the journey — one who has pulled on a coat of fur and flesh in order to cross from his own country into theirs — and who has done what any guest with manners does: he has brought presents. The meat is a present. The pelt is a present. He has carried them across the border himself, and he expects, in the way of guests everywhere, to be received with honor and sent home again well pleased. From that single scene the whole grammar of the Ainu sacred world can be read out, clause by clause. The bear is a kamuy.

The word names the divine persons who fill the world. There are kamuy of the animals — the bear, the owl, the fox, the killer whale, the salmon that runs the rivers in its season. There are kamuy of the elements the household cannot live without and cannot command: fire, water, wind, the sun. There are kamuy in made things, in a well-carved boat or a good iron blade, and there are kamuy in the powers that fall on a village unbidden, in sickness and in storm. A kamuy is not a spirit hovering behind the thing, a ghost of the object. It is a person — a being with a will of its own, with kin and a household and a home country — and the thing seen in the human world is the dress it has chosen to appear in.

A word carried into the record on three roads

Kamuy — also romanized kamui — reaches the documentary record along three converging paths, and the differences among them matter, because on them hang the questions of whose knowledge a given claim about the kamuy actually rests on.

The first road is the one that runs from within: the oral literature the living Ainu carry, and above all the kamuy yukar, the “songs of the gods.” These are first-person chants in which a kamuy narrates its own story — a bear, an owl, a river-fish, a marsh-hen tells, in its own voice, of its journey down into the land of humans and of how it was treated there. Said to be among the most ancient of the many Ainu performance forms, they were for uncounted generations sung and not written. Their first setting-down in writing by an ethnic Ainu came in August 1923, when the Tokyo firm Kyōdo Kenkyūsha published the Ainu Shin’yōshū — the “Collection of the Ainu Chants of the Gods” — thirteen kamuy yukar transcribed in the roman alphabet from the mouths of the elders and translated into Japanese by a young Ainu woman, Chiri Yukie. She had done the work in her teens, at the urging of the linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke, who had recognized what she was and sent her blank notebooks; she collapsed and died of heart failure at nineteen, in 1922, and did not live to see the book she had made. It opens with the song of the owl-god, whose refrain — rendered by later translators as “Silver droplets fall, fall all around” — has become the most quoted line in all of Ainu literature (Asia-Pacific Journal). With that small volume the kamuy entered print as what they had always been in the chants: speaking persons.

Chiri Yukie (left, 1903–1922), whose Ainu Shin’yōshū set thirteen kamuy yukar in writing for the first time by an ethnic Ainu, with her aunt Imekanu, herself a keeper of the chants. Photograph circa 1922, unknown author, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The second road is outsider ethnography, and it must be read with the lens it was ground through kept in view. The English missionary John Batchelor spent decades among the Ainu and compiled a great deal of vocabulary and doctrine, but he compiled it as a Christian evangelist, forever sorting the kamuy into the categories of his own faith, and his testimony has to be sifted for what the sorting distorted. The physician and anthropologist Neil Gordon Munro, who settled at Nibutani in the Saru valley, watched and recorded the rituals with a closer and more sympathetic eye; his findings were gathered after his death into Ainu Creed and Cult. Both are indispensable and both are outside witnesses, and where the record of the kamuy rests on them alone it rests on the observation of strangers.

The third road is the modern scholarship the Ainu themselves have carried, which returns the word to its owners. Chiri Yukie’s younger brother, Chiri Mashiho, became a professional linguist and turned the tools of the discipline on the language of the kamuy from the inside. The folklorist and activist Kayano Shigeru of Nibutani spent a lifetime collecting the vanishing implements and recording the yukar, and in 1994 took a seat in the House of Councillors as the first Ainu member of Japan’s Diet, where he put questions to the government in the Ainu language. Around them a scholarly literature has grown — Sarah Strong’s study and translation of Chiri Yukie’s chants among it — that reads the kamuy not as folklore but as theology.

“Inao of the Ainu”: the whittled willow prayer-sticks, their shavings left curling from the wood, offered to the kamuy and planted in rows at the altar. Engraving from Popular Science Monthly, vol. 34 (1888–1889). Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

One question hangs over all three roads and is worth naming at the outset, because it has so often been answered badly. The Ainu kamuy and the Japanese kami are formally close, and the two peoples were long in contact; whether, and how, the words are related is a genuine and unsettled linguistic matter. But closeness of the words has repeatedly been pressed into service as an argument about the things — as if the kamuy were a provincial, half-forgotten echo of Shinto, the Ainu having borrowed their gods from their neighbors and misremembered them. That inference does not follow, and the kamuy world does not need it. What the chants describe is a complete and internally consistent account of how the divine and the human are bound to each other, owing nothing for its coherence to any other tradition.

The god who comes as a guest

A kamuy lives, when it is at home, in a country of its own. The Ainu call it Kamuy Mosir, the land of the kamuy, and it is laid out much as the human land is; mosir is simply “land” or “world,” and the human world is Ainu Mosir, the land of humans. In Kamuy Mosir a bear-kamuy walks about in a house in a body like a person’s own, indistinguishable there from any of its kind; the fur and the four legs belong to the visit, not to the being. When it resolves to travel down into Ainu Mosir, it puts on the animal — dresses itself in the pelt and the flesh, as a person dons a coat to go out into the cold — and what the hunters find in the forest is the kamuy so clothed. The same holds for the owl in its feathers, the killer whale in its black-and-white body, and, in their own manner, for the fire on the hearth and the water in the river and the sickness that walks into a village.

What animates the visit is ramat, the sacred life-force. A greater kamuy extends its ramat into the vessel it will inhabit, and the ramat is the being’s presence within it; the University of Oregon’s account of the kamuy describes the whole exchange as one governed by this indwelling force and by the obligations it sets in motion (Windows to the Ainu World). When the vessel dies or breaks — when the bear is taken, when the bowl shatters — the ramat is released and returns home to the kamuy, leaving the body behind in the human world. The body is not a corpse but a gift.

Here the logic of the visit becomes the logic of a social occasion, and it is read out along exactly the lines an Ainu household would recognize. A guest does not arrive empty-handed; a guest who is well received will speak well of the house afterward and will come again. So it is with the animal-kamuy. It comes as a visitor and brings its own meat and its own pelt as the presents proper to the call. The humans, receiving the gift, are bound in their turn to return honor — and the honor is specific and tangible. There is prayer. There is tonoto, the ritual millet wine, and there are millet dumplings and the choicest food the village can set out. And there are the inaw — also written inau — the prayer-sticks whittled from willow or dogwood so that the shavings are left curling in fringes and ringlets from the shaft, standing in rows like a company of small attendants. They are planted at the nusa, the outdoor altar of taller inaw where the skulls of honored kamuy are kept, and the libation of wine is lifted and offered with the ikupasuy, the flat carved offering-stick that a man holds to his lips and to the cup. Thus honored, thanked, and sent off, the kamuy carries the ramat home; and if it was well treated it comes back gladly, and it tells the other kamuy that the Ainu are open-handed hosts, so that more of them choose to make the journey. Mistreatment travels home too, and keeps the guests away.

This is the heart of the thing, and it is worth stating plainly against a long habit of misstating it. The kamuy world is not a nervous animism, a peopling of the bushes with spirits to be feared and flattered. It is a moral economy of reciprocity between two peoples, human and divine — an ordered traffic of gifts and return-gifts, hospitality and obligation, in which human ritual is the diplomacy that keeps the two lands on good terms. The Ainu owe the kamuy honor; the kamuy owe the Ainu their return; and the whole apparatus of prayer and inaw and feast is the machinery by which the debt is kept balanced in both directions.

Within that economy move the great kamuy of the ordinary world, each with its own office. The most beloved, and the one addressed first in nearly every prayer, is the grandmother of the hearth-fire, Ape-huci-kamuy — also called Kamuy-huci — the aged goddess who sits always at the center of the house and carries the words of the household up to all the other kamuy; no petition reaches its destination except through her. Repun-kamuy, the killer-whale lord of the offshore waters, drives the fish and the whales toward the shore and is the giver of the sea’s harvest. Kotan-kar-kamuy is the maker of the land itself, the one who shaped the country and set the villages in it. Ae-oyna-kamuy, the culture-hero, came down and taught the first people the human arts — to weave and to carve, to hunt and to fish, to build and to worship. And Kim-un-kamuy, the bear-god of the mountains, is the guest of the opening scene: the one whose visit is honored in the fullest of all the ceremonies, the bear-sending, iyomante. Seen from within, and described at the distance the record keeps, the iyomante is no sacrifice offered to appease a hungry power. It is a farewell feast. It gathers the whole community to honor the bear-kamuy with the best the village has and to send it back to Kamuy Mosir loaded with parting gifts, so that it will return to its own people speaking well of the Ainu — and will come again.

Interruption, and the long return

The traffic between the two lands ran on the assumption that the human side could keep its part of the bargain, and for a long stretch of the modern era the Japanese state made sure it could not. When Meiji Japan annexed Hokkaido and opened it to settlement, the ground on which the reciprocity stood was taken away in pieces. The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 — a law whose very title branded the Ainu kyūdojin, “former aborigines,” the living written into the past tense — dispossessed them of land and set in motion an assimilation that struck directly at the practices through which the kamuy were honored: the Ainu language, the women’s mouth tattoos, the ceremonies. The iyomante itself was outlawed in 1955 as cruelty to animals, and was exempted, for its cultural significance, only in 2007. What the state could not do was end the thing it was suppressing. The chants were still known; the inaw were still cut.

The framing that accompanied the dispossession has proved nearly as durable as the laws, and it is a problem in its own right. Ainu religion was cataloged by outsiders as “primitive nature-worship,” a survival of savagery, at best a debased provincial echo of the neighbors’ Shinto — a description that served the assimilation by making its object seem a thing no one need regret losing. It should be recognized for what it was: not a finding about the kamuy but an instrument of the policy, and one that the record exists in part to correct. The kamuy were never idols and never a childish fear of the woods. They were the persons of a theology of reciprocity as articulate as any, and the modern scholarship — Strong’s reading of Chiri Yukie among it — increasingly says so, and reads the yukar as the sophisticated account of obligation between worlds that they always were.

The public recovery of that view is by now well documented, and it belongs as much to the courts and the statute-books as to the universities. In the case brought over the flooding of ancestral land at Nibutani for a dam, the Sapporo District Court ruled on 27 March 1997 — in a suit pressed by Kayano Shigeru and Kaizawa Tadashi — that the Ainu were an indigenous people with a culture the state was bound to weigh, the first time any organ of the Japanese state had said so. Political recognition followed, in a unanimous Diet resolution of 6 June 2008 and at last in the Ainu Policy Promotion Act, promulgated on 26 April 2019 and effective from 24 May 2019, which for the first time named the Ainu in law an indigenous people of Japan (Library of Congress). Around those milestones the tradition has become institutional and visible again: the sacred end-of-the-earth peninsula of Shiretoko was inscribed as a UNESCO natural World Heritage site in 2005, and the national museum and park at Shiraoi, Upopoy, opened on 12 July 2020 as a “symbolic space for ethnic harmony,” while the museums of the Saru valley keep Kayano’s collected implements and recordings in Ainu hands.

None of which is the point at which the story closes, because the story is not a monument. In the Ainu country the willow is still cut and whittled so that the shavings hang curling from the shaft, and the sticks are still set up in their rows for guests who are honored, thanked, and asked — as good guests always are — to come again.

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