Kim-un-kamuy

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Late in winter, after the sow has denned and cubbed, a bear no bigger than a dog is carried down out of the mountains and into a village on the river. For a while it lives in the house like one of the family. It is fed by hand, kept warm, played with by the children; the ethnographic record, drawing on Ainu testimony, says it was sometimes nursed at the breast until its teeth came in. When it grows too large and too strong for the hearth-side, it is moved to a stout enclosure of logs built for it, and there it is fed the best the village can spare — good meat, dried fish — for a year, or two, or as long as three. Then, on a chosen day, the people who raised it dress it in ornaments, sing and dance for it, weep over it, and kill it. To an outsider the sequence looks like a cruelty at the end of a kindness, and it was written up that way for a long time. Seen from within, it is nothing of the kind. The animal in the pen was never merely an animal. It was a guest — a great person from another country who had come clothed in fur to visit, and whom his hosts were now, at last, sending home.

The guest has a name. He is Kim-un-kamuy, and to understand why a village would spend three years feeding a bear it means to kill is to understand who the Ainu — the indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril islands — take him to be.

The god in the mountains and the bear he wears

The name is transparent in the Ainu language: kim, “mountain,” and un, “dwelling in” or “of” — Kim-un-kamuy, the kamuy who lives in the mountains, the mountain-god (Wikipedia). The same great being carries other titles in the chants and prayers — Metotush Kamuy and Nuparikor Kamuy — names that fix him to the high inland country of ridges and forests where the bears keep their range. He is one of the kamuy, the divine persons who fill the Ainu world, and his particular office is the bear and the mountain both.

He is known, in the human world, in the body of the brown bear. Not any brown bear anywhere: the animal of Hokkaido is the higuma, the Ussuri or Ezo brown bear, Ursus arctos lasiotus, whose range runs from the Russian Far East and northeast China across to Hokkaido and the islands of the Okhotsk sea, and which is the only bear species native to the island (Ussuri brown bear). South of the Tsugaru strait, on Honshu, the bear is a different and smaller creature, the Asian black bear; the great brown bear of the north is Hokkaido’s own, and it is in that body that the mountain-god comes down.

But — and this is a distinction the tradition guards carefully — not every bear is Kim-un-kamuy. The chants know also the ararush, the “monstrous” or ill-natured bear, a separate and dangerous kind. The bear that Kim-un-kamuy inhabits is benevolent, a person with manners and obligations; the ararush is not that person at all. To meet a bear in the forest, then, is not automatically to meet a god. It is to meet someone who must be recognized — a guest, or a brute, and the difference matters for one’s life. Kim-un-kamuy is a person known and received, never a species worshiped.

The iomante, painted by Hirasawa Byozan (1822–1876), who lived for periods among the Ainu: the community gathered before the altar where the sent bear lies among lacquer offerings, fish, and cloth, inaw fixed to its head and to the fence. Ink and colors on linen, 1875. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

He reaches the documentary record along two very different roads, and it matters which of them a given claim travels on. The first is the living Ainu tradition itself — above all the yukar and kamuy yukar, the epic songs, in which a kamuy tells its own story in the first person: a bear, an owl, a fish speaks in its own voice of its journey down among humans and of how it was treated there. These were sung for uncounted generations before they were written; their touchstone in print is the Ainu Shin’yōshū, the “Collection of the Ainu Chants of the Gods,” transcribed and translated into Japanese by the young Ainu woman Chiri Yukie and published in 1923. From within that tradition the bear is not a symbol but a speaker, and the whole account of who he is comes first-hand, in his own words.

The second road is outsider ethnography, and it has to be read with its lens kept in view. The earliest explicit written notice of the bear-sending is Japanese: Hata Awakimaro’s Ezo kenbunki of 1798, followed the next year by the annotated paintings of the Ezo-shima kikan (1799). In the twentieth century the fullest close record was made by the Scottish physician and anthropologist Neil Gordon Munro (1863–1942), who settled among the Ainu at Nibutani in the Saru valley from 1930 until his death and gave the last decade of his life to the study of their religion; his findings were gathered after he died into Ainu Creed and Cult, published in 1962. Alongside him stands the English missionary John Batchelor, who collected a great deal but sorted everything he found through the categories of his own Christian faith, and whose testimony must be weighed for what that sorting distorted. Where the record of Kim-un-kamuy rests on Munro or Batchelor alone, it rests on the eyes of visitors.

The tradition keeps an origin story for the whole relationship, preserved in the ethnographic literature. The wife of Kim-un-kamuy once went down to a human village and did not come back. The god, searching for her, was bewitched by a fox into the shape of an old bear; and the people who took that bear in, honored it, and afterward raised its cub thereby learned, for the first time, how a bear-god is to be received and sent home. It is a story about the origin of a courtesy — how humans came to know the manners owed to a divine visitor.

Putting on the bear, and the sending-home

To follow the theology, begin with the body. A kamuy, when it is at home, lives in a country of its own, Kamuy Mosir, the land of the kamuy, laid out much as the human land, Ainu Mosir, is: there the bear-god walks about in a house in a form like a person’s, indistinguishable from his own kind. When he resolves to travel down into the human world, he puts on the bear the way one puts on clothing. The pelt and the flesh are his hayokpe — his “armor,” his outward shell or disguise — and the fur and the meat he carries in that costume are not spoils for a hunter to seize but the presents a great guest brings to the house he visits (Iomante). To kill the bear rightly, on this understanding, is not to destroy the god. It is to unfasten the armor so that the person inside can go home; the death opens a door between the two worlds, and the spirit passes back through it into Kamuy Mosir, leaving its gifts of meat and hide behind.

That is the meaning of the great ceremony, the iyomante — also written iomante. The word is built to say exactly what the rite does: i, “that (one),” plus oman, “to go” or “to be sent,” plus the causative -te — “to make that one go,” to send him home. It is a farewell, not a sacrifice offered to appease a hungry power. The University of Oregon’s account of the ceremony describes it plainly as the sending-back of the mountain-god who, having visited the human world and given the gifts of his bear-body, is returned with honor to the world of the kamuy (Windows to the Ainu World).

The shape of it, at the distance the public record keeps, runs like this. The cub is taken in late winter, after the mother’s denning, and brought into the village to be raised — first indoors and cared for as a child, then, once it has grown, in a wooden enclosure, the heper-set, where it is fed the best the community has for one to as many as three years. When the appointed day comes the honored guest is decorated and tethered to a stake dressed with inaw — the whittled willow prayer-sticks whose shavings are left curling from the shaft — and the whole village gathers to pray, to sing, and to dance. The physical death is effected first with blunted, ornamented ceremonial arrows, the heper-ay, the “flower arrows,” and then by the killing itself; and the being is sent off laden with the goods a traveler needs. He goes home with inaw, with ritual sake (a millet brew in the old way), with dried salmon, with millet dumplings, the sito — all bundled as heper-sike, the traveling gifts. So provisioned, he arrives back in Kamuy Mosir rich and well treated, and he tells the assembled kamuy how open-handed the Ainu are with their guests; and being pleased, he is moved to make the journey again. None of this is set down here as an instruction. It is described as the record describes it, from the outside, with the interior meaning explained from within: the rite is a matter for the community that holds it, not a procedure to be followed.

What the whole apparatus makes visible is a relation, not a transaction. The bear is fed for years and mourned at its death because it is a person to whom the household has become bound; the gifts are lavished on it because a guest who leaves rich will speak well of his hosts and return, and a guest who leaves slighted will stay away and take the run of bears with him. It is reciprocity made into ceremony — hospitality given to a divine visitor, and the visitor’s homecoming arranged so carefully that the traffic of life between the two worlds is never broken. In this the mountain-god belongs to a whole order of such comings and goings. His close counterpart is the fish-owl: Blakiston’s fish owl, the village-guardian kotan-kor-kamuy, has a sending-home rite of its own, the kamuy-hopunire, by which that kamuy too is returned to its country honored. The bear-sending is the fullest and most demanding instance of a logic that governs the Ainu dealing with the divine at large — the same logic by which the orca-lord of the offshore waters drives the whales shoreward as his gift, and by which every animal-kamuy is received as a guest and sped home as one.

A coherent theology, read as savagery, and its long return

The afterlife of Kim-un-kamuy’s ceremony is a case study in how a fully worked-out theology can be taken for barbarism by those who cannot read it. To the raisers of the bear the iyomante was the honoring and homecoming of a god; to outside observers it looked like the rearing of an animal only to slaughter it, an exhibit of the “primitive.” That reading was not merely private opinion. In 1955 the Hokkaido prefectural government issued a notification, signed by the governor, that branded the iomante a “savage custom” and so, in effect, prohibited it (Iomante). The label did not stand on its own; it sat within the long Meiji-and-after project of assimilation that had already moved against the Ainu language, the women’s mouth tattoos, and the ceremonies, and had dispossessed the people of Hokkaido of their land under the 1899 Former Aborigines Protection Act — a statute whose very name spoke of the Ainu as a people already past. The “savage custom” of 1955 was that policy applied to a rite: not a finding about the bear-god but an instrument against the people who knew him.

The prohibition was undone only slowly, and late. It was formally withdrawn in April 2007, after Japan’s Ministry of Environment had recognized in 2006 that such ceremonies could be treated as an exception under the country’s animal-welfare law — a small legal accommodation that reversed a half-century’s ban. It came in the same stretch of years as a larger change of national mind: Japan endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a Diet resolution of 2008 acknowledged the Ainu, and the Ainu Policy Promotion Act of 2019 at last recognized them in law as an indigenous people of Japan. The fuller reckoning with that history of dispossession and recovery belongs to the places where it was fought and is now kept — the Saru-valley heartland of Nibutani and the national museum at Upopoy. What concerns Kim-un-kamuy is narrower and more particular: for fifty-two years the sending of the mountain-god was a thing the state called savage, and it is not called that now.

Across the same century the rite was carried and recorded as much from within the community as from without. Munro’s film of a Nibutani bear ceremony, made around 1931 and later shown in London as Iyomande: The Ainu Bear Festival, was among the earliest moving records of the rite; a Japan House introduction to it notes that Munro wanted to demonstrate that the Ainu had a cultural identity and heritage worth contextualizing and preserving at a time when discrimination threatened their way of life (Japan House London). His Ainu Creed and Cult preserved the Nibutani record in print. Two generations on, the Ainu scholar-activist Kayano Shigeru — later the first Ainu member of Japan’s Diet — supervised a bear-sending at Nibutani in 1977, which the folklorist Himeno Tadayoshi filmed as Iyomante kuma okuri: the ceremony documented now under Ainu direction, for the community’s own keeping, rather than by a visitor for a distant audience.

The higuma, the Ussuri or Ezo brown bear (Ursus arctos lasiotus) — the only bear native to Hokkaido, and the form in which the mountain-god comes down among people. Photograph by bryansjs, Hokkaido, 2019, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Today the mountain-god and his ceremony are shown on the terms of the people whose god he is. At the Ainu museum in Kayano’s home valley at Nibutani, and at Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum and Park at Shiraoi that opened in 2020, the taxidermied higuma stands and the inaw are cut, and the iyomante is explained as what it always was — the reception and sending-home of a divine guest — and not as the spectacle of the primitive that the notification of 1955 took it for. The reversal is not only legal. A rite once filmed by strangers to prove the Ainu had a culture is now presented by the Ainu themselves, to whoever will listen, as a courtesy their people have always known how to perform: how to take in the guest who arrives in fur, how to feed him and honor him for years, and how, when the time comes, to open the door and send him back to the mountains rich enough to want to come again.

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