Kotankarkamuy

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At the beginning there was no land. Earth and water lay mingled in a bottomless slush, neither sea nor ground, and nothing that walked could stand on it. Then a small bird came down out of the sky — a water wagtail, the little slate-and-white bird that runs along the edge of streams bobbing its long tail — and set to work. It fluttered over the mire and splashed the water aside; it packed the patches of soft earth firm, stamping them down with its feet and beating them flat with its tail, until the ooze dried and hardened and rose, patch by patch, into islands that lifted their backs above the sea. Those islands are Ainu Mosir, the land of humans. The one who sent the bird down to make them — or who came down wearing the bird’s small body — is Kotankarkamuy, the maker of the land.

The name is plain Ainu and says what he does. Kotan is a village, a settled place, and by widening a whole inhabited country; kar is to make; kamuy is a divine person, one of the spirit-beings who fill the Ainu world. Kotan-kar-kamuy is “the one who makes the land,” the village-maker, the deity who shaped the ground under the human house. The record of the creation sometimes names him instead by a near-twin, Mosir-kara-kamuy — mosir, the floating land, the world, plus kara, again to make — so that in the cosmogonies the same figure is at once the land-maker and the world-maker, and the two names lean against each other without quite separating.

The maker and the owl

There is a second name that sounds almost the same and is not. Kotan-kor-kamuy carries kor, to hold or to possess, where the maker carries kar, to make; and where the maker built the village, the holder keeps it. Kotan-kor-kamuy is the owl god, the great fish owl that sits above the kotan and watches over it — “the god that protects the village,” in the reading the ethnographies settled on. One morpheme apart, the two are constantly run together in the popular accounts, and the older record keeps them distinct: the maker who founded the land, and the guardian who holds it. The maker belongs with the owl who is his paired keeper, because in the Ainu frame the founding of the human world and the watching over it are two faces of a single care — that the land of humans should exist, and that it should be watched.

Neither should be mistaken for a third figure whose name also crowds close. Kando-koro-kamuy, the sky-god, the possessor of the heavens, is not the maker but the one who gives the order to make. In the fuller creation accounts it is he who looks down on the formless slush and commands that the land be raised; the land-maker is the one who descends and does the work, in the small industrious body of the wagtail. The Ainu cosmos is peopled thickly with such kamuy, and the names that ring alike belong to different persons with different offices — a distinction the tradition itself is careful about, whatever later readers have blurred.

A world made in order

To the Ainu the world was never a single place. There is Ainu Mosir, the land of humans; there is Kamuy Mosir, the land of the kamuy, the divine persons’ own country from which they come visiting; and there is Pokna Mosir, the world below. The kamuy are not gods who rule from a distance but persons of another country who cross over into this one, putting on the body of a bear or an owl or a fire the way a traveler puts on a coat, bringing with them the gift of their flesh and pelt and warmth, and expecting in return the honor a guest is owed. Into this scheme the land-maker fits at the foundation: he is the one who shaped the ground of Ainu Mosir and set it in order, so that people could stand on it and live.

His ordering was not a single word of command but a craftsman’s labor, and its fullest telling is a story about fire. Humankind had no way to make fire, and the maker set out to give them one. His first experiment failed. Striking at poplar wood — yai-ni — he raised no clean flame but instead threw off two malign beings: kenas-unarpe, a hag of the marshes, and mosir-sinnaysam, a monster of the land, both loosed into the world by the botched attempt. He tried again with a different wood, the elm — cikisani — and this time it took. From the pale shavings that flew off the elm sprang Hasinaw-uk-kamuy, the goddess of the hunt; from the dark shavings sprang Kim-un-kamuy, the god of the mountains, the great brown bear. Creation here is a kind of woodworking, and the other great kamuy are struck from it as sparks and chips — the huntress and the bear-god both born of the maker’s second, successful stroke. It is a cosmogony that grows the pantheon out of the maker’s own hands rather than setting it beside him ready-made.

A Blakiston’s fish owl (Bubo blakistoni) at Kushiro, Hokkaido — in Ainu tradition Kotan-kor-kamuy, the owl god who holds and guards the kotan. Photograph by MIKI, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The comparative scholarship reads the wagtail episode as a version of a very old and very widespread pattern. Because the creator does not shape the land with his own bare hands but sends a small animal down to raise it out of the water, the account belongs to what folklorists call the earth-diver type — the cosmogony in which a bird or a beast fetches or beats the first ground up out of a primal flood — and the Ainu instance sits among the earth-diver stories of Central Asia and of Native America, a northern kin of tellings that circle the top of the world. That placement is a matter for the outside disciplines, and it does not touch the story’s standing inside the Ainu world, where the wagtail is not a motif but the bird that made the ground.

At the top of this order the land-maker stands highest, and is, tellingly, honored least. The record is blunt about it: for all that every kamuy answers ultimately to him, Kotankarkamuy is only rarely worshiped. The Ainu addressed their prayers not to the remote founder but to the kamuy who came close and clothed themselves in a body a household could receive — the grandmother of the hearth-fire who carries every prayer, the bear-god of the mountains who comes down as an honored guest, the orca lord who drives the whales toward the shore, and, watching over the kotan itself, the owl. The maker is acknowledged, not courted; the gods who are prayed to are the ones who visit.

The god that holds the village

The owl is the Blakiston’s fish owl — Bubo blakistoni, now often placed in the genus Ketupa — and it is a bird built to be taken for a god. It is the largest living species of owl: sixty to seventy-two centimeters from head to tail, with a wingspan of roughly a hundred and seventy-eight to a hundred and ninety centimeters, the largest individuals nearing two meters, and females weighing as much as about four and a half kilograms. It haunts the riverbanks and old-growth forests of Hokkaido, the Kurils, Sakhalin, and the Russian Far East, hunting fish from the water’s edge in the northern dark. To the Ainu it is Kotan-kor-kamuy, the god that holds the village, and it wears other names besides: Kamuy Ekasi, the divine grandfather or elder; Kamuy Chikap, the sacred bird. In the telling it is a calm god, unhurried where the mountain kamuy are quick and fierce — a great grave presence that keeps its watch over the kotan and stirs only when something serious threatens the people it holds. Its office is not to bring meat, as the bear and the whale do, but to guard, and to carry word of the village to the other gods.

That the maker and the owl should be paired is fitting rather than accidental. One made the human land and withdrew to the top of the order; the other sits low and close, above the roofs, keeping the land in view. Between them they hold the two halves of the same concern. And it was the owl, not the maker, that gave the tradition one of its most luminous documents — and gave it, for once, in an Ainu voice.

The record and the missionary

The way Kotankarkamuy reaches the modern record runs along two threads that the sources keep close but distinct. One is the creation cycle itself, the wagtail and the elm and the raising of the land, carried in the oral literature and set down by collectors of Ainu myth. The other is the missionary record, and it must be read with care. John Batchelor, the Anglican clergyman who spent decades among the Ainu and compiled the first substantial English accounts of their religion, reported Kotan-kar-kamuy as the almighty and eternal ruler of the universe, the supreme being to whom all lesser kamuy are intermediaries answerable. From that report a theory grew: that the Ainu had once held an original monotheism, a single high god over the crowd of spirits.

The theory has not worn well, and the reason is instructive. The scholar Norbert Richard Adami has argued that Batchelor was reading his own faith into what he saw — that “Batchelor’s views leading into this direction resulted from a straitened and sometimes misinterpreted mode of perception based on his faith.” A clergyman looking for the God he already believed in found a supreme creator standing over the kamuy, and framed the land-maker in the shape of that expectation. What the Ainu themselves did with the figure — set him at the summit and rarely prayed to him, reserving their devotion for the gods who came near — fits a moral economy of visiting and hospitality far better than it fits a throne. The maker is real and he is first; but the reading that made him an Ainu Jehovah says more about the reader than about the god, and the outsider’s frame has to be marked wherever it colors the record.

The song the owl god sang

The living Ainu are a people of enormous oral literature and, until the twentieth century, no writing. Their sacred songs are the yukar — the long chanted epics — and among them the kamuy yukar, the songs of the gods, in which a kamuy speaks in the first person and narrates its own visit to the land of humans: the bear tells its own story, or the fox, or the owl. These were held in memory and performed, not written; and then a young Ainu woman wrote them down.

Chiri Yukie was born in 1903 and had learned the kamuy yukar from her elders, in a household still fluent in the songs. Encouraged by the Japanese linguist Kindaichi Kyosuke, she set thirteen of them down in romanized Ainu, each with her own Japanese translation, and made of them a book: the Ainu Shin’yoshu, the “Collection of Ainu Songs of the Gods.” It was the first work of Ainu literature ever set down in writing by an Ainu. She did not live to see it. She died of heart failure in the autumn of 1922, nineteen years old, the manuscript barely finished; the book appeared the following year, in 1923, from the Tokyo publisher Kyodo Kenkyusha. Her younger brother, Chiri Mashiho, went on under the same linguist’s sponsorship to become a distinguished scholar of the Ainu language.

She opened the collection with the owl. The first song in the Ainu Shin’yoshu is “The Song the Owl God Himself Sang,” sung in the first person by Kotan-kor-kamuy, the village-holding god flying over the kotan and looking down on rich and poor. Its refrain, which recurs through the song, is “Shirokanipe ranran pishkan, konkanipe ranran pishkan” — “silver droplets fall, fall all around; golden droplets fall, fall all around” — the owl god scattering wealth as he flies. That the whole written literature of a people should begin with a god describing its own flight, in that god’s own voice, is a fact worth sitting with; and that the god should be the guardian owl, not the remote maker, is of a piece with everything else. The kamuy who are near are the kamuy who speak.

Annexation, suppression, and return

The flowering came under a hard sky. In 1869, the year after the Meiji Restoration, the new imperial state annexed the northern island, renamed it Hokkaido, and opened it to colonization; mainland settlers poured in and the land that had been Ainu hunting and fishing ground was surveyed and given away. Thirty years later the assimilation was given its legal form. The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 — its very title fixing the Ainu as a remnant to be managed toward disappearance — parceled out poor allotments, pressed hunters toward farming, and set the machinery of a policy that suppressed the language, the women’s tattoo, and the great communal rites. For most of a century the official posture held that the Ainu were a vanishing people. That Chiri Yukie’s book was made at all, in those years and in that voice, is part of why it matters.

The people did not vanish. Through the later twentieth century Ainu scholars and culture-bearers worked to recover what the assimilation had attacked — recording the yukar before the last fluent reciters were gone, reviving the crafts and the songs, asserting a public pride the law had told them to abandon. Kayano Shigeru, an Ainu activist and scholar and the first Ainu member of the national Diet, built the collections and led the documented ceremony that anchored the revival in the Saru valley. Recognition at the level of the state came late: a Diet resolution in 2008 acknowledging the Ainu as an indigenous people, and then the Ainu Policy Promotion Act of 2019, which recognized them in law, for the first time, as an Indigenous people of Japan. In July 2020 the national museum and park, Upopoy, opened on the southern coast at Shiraoi, a state institution devoted to the language and the worldview a state had once legislated against.

The guardian and the guarded now stand in the same frame in a further sense. The Blakiston’s fish owl the tradition calls the god that holds the village is itself classed Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List and listed under CITES Appendix II, its old-growth riverside forests thinned across its northern range. The bird that the Ainu made a kamuy — Kamuy Ekasi, the divine grandfather, sitting above the roofs and keeping his grave watch — is now among the creatures a conservation science watches in turn. The land the wagtail beat firm out of the sea still holds the village it made room for, and the owl still holds the village, and both are, in the tradition’s own reckoning, gods that a people keeps faith with. The maker founded Ainu Mosir; the owl watches it; and the young woman who wrote the owl’s song down gave the first of them a first line in an Ainu hand.

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