Nibutani

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The reservoir behind the Nibutani Dam lies flat and gray against the hills, and swans come to it in April. The water stands over a stretch of the Saru River that the valley’s Ainu held to be thick with kamuy — the divine persons who fill the land of humans — and over kotan ground where salmon had been taken and boats launched and the gods addressed for as long as anyone could count back. The court that let the water stay is the same court that, in the same judgment, first named the Ainu an indigenous people in the law of Japan. The place was drowned and the precedent was won in one stroke, on one day, in one ruling, and both facts belong to Nibutani.

Nibutani — in the Ainu language Niputay, which local tradition glosses as a place of trees, of the growing forest — is a district of the town of Biratori, in Ainu Piratur, the “cliff-cove.” It sits in the valley of the Saru River, Sar-un-pet, the “reed-marsh river,” in the Saru District of south-central Hokkaido, the great northern island of the Japanese archipelago. On the map it is an unremarkable rural settlement of a few hundred people. In the history of the Ainu and of their recognition as a people it is a center of gravity.

The reed-marsh river and its kotan

The Saru valley is old Ainu country. The river runs down out of the Hidaka mountains to the Pacific, and up it, run after run, came the salmon that were the staple of life on the northern island; along it stood the kotan, the riverside villages, tied to the water that carried fish up from the sea and carried people between the coast and the high forest. To the Ainu who lived in the valley the Saru was not scenery but a country dense with kamuy and with the yukar, the long oral epics that name its hills and waters and tell what happened at them. The mountains that ring the basin hold chinomi-shir, sites set apart for prayer; on the river the people performed chip-sanke, the launching of the dugout boat. This is the valley that a Sapporo court would later describe as bound to Ainu culture in a relation with the land that could not be severed without severing the culture itself.

Into the written record Nibutani comes above all through one man born there. Kayano Shigeru was born in the village on June 15, 1926, and raised in poverty; he died in Sapporo on May 6, 2006. From his grandmother Tekatte, who told him the old stories in Ainu, and from the last of the elder chanters, he learned the language and the yukar at an age when the speech of his people was already going silent under a policy designed to end it. In 1952, alarmed that the implements and the words of the Ainu were being dissipated — sold off, thrown out, forgotten — he began to buy back and gather the material culture of daily life, and to record the oral tradition: the yukar of human heroes and the kamuy-yukar, the songs in which a god speaks in the first person and tells the story of its own visit to the human world. This was the same genre that Chiri Yukie, a young Ainu woman from farther east, had first set down in writing in her Ainu Shin’yoshu of 1923. Kayano became one of the last fully fluent speakers of Ainu and the most productive collector and transmitter of its tradition in the twentieth century; he compiled some hundred books, including collections of the epics and, in 1996, a full Ainu-language dictionary, and he founded Ainu-language schools — fifteen in the region — and an Ainu-language radio broadcast, so that the speech would have somewhere to go.

That labor of gathering is the tap-root of the two museums that now stand in the district, both opened in 1992. One is public: the town-run Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum, which holds a collection of 919 items of local Ainu daily life jointly designated an Important Tangible Folk Cultural Property. The other is private and personal: the Kayano Shigeru Nibutani Ainu Museum, built on the more than a thousand pieces Kayano had assembled over forty years, standing beside the public museum as its founder’s own testament. Together they make the district what it is often called — the living center of Ainu cultural transmission — not because the culture was preserved there under glass but because one valley kept enough of its language and its objects and its songs in continuous, deliberate use to hand them forward.

The Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum, Biratori, with reconstructed cise (houses) and pu (raised storehouses) on its grounds, June 2009. Gpwitteveen, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

A country full of kamuy

To understand why flooding a bend of the Saru could be argued in a courtroom as an injury to a people, one has to see the valley as its own tradition sees it. Within the Ainu frame the land is Ainu Mosir, the land of humans, and it is visited constantly by the kamuy — the divine persons whose own country is Kamuy Mosir. A kamuy is not the animal or the fire or the object it appears in; it is a person of its own household and kin who comes into the human world clothed in a body, as a guest puts on traveling clothes. The salmon running up the Saru, the bear coming down from the mountains as Kim-un-kamuy the god of the high forest, the fire on every hearth as the grandmother-goddess of the flame who carries each prayer, the land itself shaped by Kotan-kar-kamuy the maker-of-places, the orca out beyond the river-mouth as Repun-kamuy the sea-lord — these are the visiting powers, and they come bearing gifts: the meat, the pelt, the run of fish that a land without them could not feed itself on.

This is not, as an older and colonial scholarship liked to say, a “primitive nature-worship” or a debased echo of the Japanese kami-cult. It is an ordered moral economy of reciprocity between two peoples, the human and the divine. The kamuy give the gift of their bodies; the humans return honor — prayer, ritual sake, and above all the inaw, the whittled willow prayer-stick with its curls of shaving left attached, planted at the nusa altar-fence set apart to the east of the house. And when a kamuy has been received, its spirit is sent home to Kamuy Mosir loaded with gifts and honor, so that it will speak well of the village among its own kind and choose to come again. The logic reaches its most concentrated public expression in the iyomante, the bear-sending — a rite whose meaning, at the distance of the record, is precisely this: the honored guest, the mountain god who had lived among the people wearing the body of a bear, is formally sent back to its own country so that the exchange of gift and return may continue unbroken. The killing, within the frame, is not an ending but a release and a departure.

To live in the Saru valley rightly, on this understanding, is to keep the relation: to receive the visiting kamuy, to honor them with the inaw and the words, and to send them home. Kayano’s lifelong insistence was that this world lives only if its language lives — that the objects and the songs and the place-names are the body in which the kamuy-world is remembered, and that to lose the words is to lose the gods. The public museum’s own arrangement carries the point. It sets the Ainu way of the Saru basin out in four zones: an Ainu Zone of everyday life, its carved knives and trays and the elm-bark attus robes; a Kamuy Zone of the dramas of the gods, the prayers and rites and legends; a Mosir Zone of the blessings of the earth, the hunting and fishing and gathering by which the valley fed itself; and a Morew Zone named for the gently curving line, the scroll-figure that runs through Ainu carving and embroidery. Prayer, subsistence, and art are not filed apart from one another; they are shown as one fabric, the way of a people in a particular valley. In 2007 the valley itself was recognized at the level of the state: the cultural landscape along the Saru River, shaped by Ainu tradition and by later settlement, was designated Japan’s third national Important Cultural Landscape, and the only one in Hokkaido. What Nibutani teaches, in the end, is that a religion of hospitality to the gods is a religion of a specific place — that to keep the river and the words and the objects is to keep the faith, and that the two cannot be pulled apart without loss to both.

The drowned place and the won precedent

The modern reception of Nibutani is inseparable from the fight over the dam. Under a government project dating to 1978, the state moved to build a dam on the Saru; construction on the Nibutani Dam advanced through the following years, and land in the valley was marked for the reservoir. Two Ainu landowners of the Saru — Kaizawa Tadashi and Kayano Shigeru — refused to give up their ground. To flood the site, they argued, was to drown places that belonged to the Ainu and to the kamuy: the ceremonial river, the chinomi-shir on the surrounding heights, the country that Ainu culture was inseparable from. When the land was expropriated over their refusal, they went to court.

On March 27, 1997, the Sapporo District Court, under Chief Judge Ichimiya Kazuo, handed down its judgment in Kayano and another v. Hokkaido Expropriation Committee — the case remembered as the Nibutani Dam decision. The court ruled the expropriation unlawful: the project authority had proceeded without weighing the value of the Saru valley to Ainu culture, and had thereby failed a duty it owed. For the first time in Japanese case law the court recognized the Ainu as an indigenous people, holding that they had lived in Hokkaido and formed their own distinctive culture before the Japanese arrived, and that their right to enjoy that culture was protected under Article 13 of the Constitution and Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. From this the court drew a governing principle: when the state pursues policies that will affect the culture of an indigenous minority, it bears a special duty to give that culture adequate consideration, and may not encroach on it without weight and justification. The legal literature on the ruling is extensive; the fullest English accounts are the Murdoch University commentary on the Nibutani Dam case and the scholar Mark Levin’s translation and analysis of the decision.

And yet the plaintiffs lost their land. By the time judgment came the dam was built and the reservoir was filling, and the court declined to void the completed works — invoking the doctrine that lets an administrative act stand, despite its illegality, where undoing it would do disproportionate harm to the public interest. So the finding of illegality was declared while the relief was refused: the water stayed, the kotan ground stayed under it, and the ruling stood as a moral and legal landmark rather than a physical reversal. The reservoir that swans now visit is the drowned place; the doctrine of recognition it produced is the won precedent. Nibutani is the paradox held in one judgment.

The Nibutani Dam impounding the Saru River at Biratori, September 2007. Photograph by 河川一等兵 (Kasengawa Ittouohei), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The judgment did not stand alone for long. Within weeks, in May 1997, the Diet passed the Act on the Promotion of Ainu Culture, and in the same measure repealed the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 — the assimilation-era law whose very name, branding the Ainu “former aborigines,” had underwritten a century of dispossession and of pressure on the language, the women’s tattooing, and the ceremonies. The new law, which took effect that July, spoke of respecting Ainu pride and promoting Ainu culture; critics noted at once that it granted culture more readily than land or rights, and it did not name the Ainu an indigenous people in so many words. That last step came later, along a road the Nibutani ruling had helped open: a 2008 resolution of both houses of the Diet calling on the government to recognize the Ainu as indigenous, and then the Ainu Policy Promotion Act of 2019, which recognized them in national law, for the first time, as an indigenous people of Japan.

Kayano did not live to see the 2019 act, but he had already carried the cause into rooms no Ainu had entered. In 1994 he was seated in the House of Councillors, the first Ainu member of the Diet of Japan, and there he did a thing without precedent in that chamber: he put his questions in the Ainu language, the speech his grandmother had taught him and the law had tried to end, spoken now on the floor of the national legislature. The dictionary, the hundred books, the schools, the radio hour, the two museums, the boats launched again on the Saru — all of it was of a piece with the lawsuit, and all of it was aimed at the same end: to keep enough of the tradition alive that recognition, when it came, would have something to recognize.

The dam remains, and the water remains over the old ground. But the valley has not gone quiet in the way the assimilation policy intended. In the museums a few hundred meters from the reservoir the four zones stand open and the yukar play; the language Kayano gathered is taught to children who mean to pass it on; the inaw are whittled and the boats go down the Saru. The court could not give the kotan back, and it did not pretend to. What it gave instead was a sentence in the law of Japan that the Ainu are a people who were there first and whose world is their own to keep — a sentence first written, of all places, over a flooded bend of the reed-marsh river.

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