Shiretoko

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The government surveyors who charted the far northeast of Hokkaido in the Meiji years did not name the place they came to at the top of the island. They wrote down the name that was already on it. In the language of the people who had lived there past memory, the land was sir-etok — sir, the earth or the land, and etok, the point, the tip, the far end that juts out ahead of everything else — and so the country’s own maps came to say, in Ainu, where the land runs out. Shiretoko: the end of the earth. Follow that word northeast off the coast and it becomes a thing one can walk, a seventy-kilometer finger of volcanic rock thrust into the Sea of Okhotsk, ridged along its spine by a chain of stratovolcanoes and narrowing, past the last road, to a cape that faces the drift ice. About two-thirds of the way out, where a river runs warm off an active volcano, the map keeps another Ainu word, and this one is plainer still about what kind of place this is. The river is called Kamuywakka — kamuy and wakka, the water of the gods.

The word the mapmakers kept

The name is exact, and it is old. Sir-etok — also written sir etok or shir etok — is read out by lexicographers of the Ainu language as “the place where the earth protrudes” or, in the gloss that has stuck to it in every guidebook and on every signboard, “the end of the earth” (Wikipedia). It describes the geography with an economy no coined name could match. The peninsula runs some seventy kilometers from southwest to northeast and is about twenty-five kilometers across at its base, tapering as it goes. Down its middle rises the volcanic chain, crowned by Mount Rausu, a stratovolcano of 1,661 meters that is the highest ground in all of eastern Hokkaido. That peak, too, carries an Ainu name older than the map: the people of the district call it Chacha-Nupuri, which is given as “the father mountain,” and in an older usage “the old-man mountain” — the elder of the range, standing over the rest. The town and cape that share the name Rausu take theirs, in turn, from the Ainu ra-ush. To read the map of Shiretoko is to read Ainu, syllable after syllable.

The land reaches the wider documentary record along two roads, and the difference between them is the difference between naming a place from inside and cataloging it from outside. On the first road, the tradition-internal one, Shiretoko is not scenery and never was. It is a dwelling-place. The Ainu — the indigenous people of Hokkaido, of Sakhalin, and of the Kuril islands, a living people whose homeland this is — hold its mountains and rivers and shores to be the abodes where kamuy and ancestors reside, so that the toponyms themselves are freighted with the divine. Kamuywakka is not called the water of the gods as a figure of speech. The name records a fact about the water, in the same register in which Chacha-Nupuri records a fact about the mountain. A landscape spoken from within is a landscape of persons.

On the second road, the scholarly-consensus one, Shiretoko enters the international record on a single dated day. On 14 July 2005 the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO inscribed a zone of land and adjoining sea — 71,100 hectares, reaching from the central spine of the peninsula out to Cape Shiretoko and three kilometers offshore into the Okhotsk — as a natural World Heritage site under criteria (ix) and (x), the criteria for outstanding ecological processes and for the conservation of biodiversity (UNESCO World Heritage Centre). The nomination spoke the vocabulary of ecosystems and endemism and productivity. It described a wilderness of the first rank, and it did so almost entirely in the third person of natural science.

The Shiretoko range — the volcanic spine of the peninsula the Ainu named sir-etok, ‘the end of the earth’ — seen from the south, across the strait from the Notsuke Peninsula. Photograph by Highten31, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The two roads name the same ground from opposite ends. One speaks of a homeland; the other of a wilderness. And the interesting thing about Shiretoko is that, once the vocabulary of the second is laid over the observations it gathered, the two descriptions turn out to be describing the same fact — because the ecology the scientists cataloged is, in the Ainu account, the theology.

The physical peninsula makes the point on its own. Its outer half has no road. Beyond the last village the coast can be reached only by boat or on foot, past cliffs where waterfalls drop straight into the sea, and the cape itself — the etok, the tip the whole name turns on — faces open water that fills each winter with pack ice come south from the Amur. It is genuinely a place where the human world thins out and stops. That thinning is exactly what the Ainu name marks: not an emptiness, but a threshold, the point past which the land belongs less and less to people and more and more to the persons who own the mountains and the sea.

A landscape peopled with persons

To the Ainu the world is full of kamuy: the divine persons who come into the human land clothed in a body — an animal, a made thing, a force of the weather or the water — bringing gifts, receiving honor, and returning home. They are not spirits hovering behind nature; they are guests who wear a form to make the visit. Shiretoko is among the great gathering-houses of these persons, and its most honored guests are named.

The brown bear that moves through the Shiretoko forests — Hokkaido holds the densest brown-bear population in Japan, and the peninsula is thick with them — is Kim-un-kamuy, the god of the mountains, one of the most exalted of all the kamuy. He comes down out of the high country wearing the fur and the flesh, and in the tradition-internal account he comes bearing them, the meat and the pelt his presents to the human household; in return he receives prayer, ritual millet wine, and the whittled willow prayer-sticks, and is sent home to his own country with honor. Offshore, in the open water where the whales run, moves Repun-kamuy, the god of the deep sea, the killer-whale lord who drives the fish and the great whales toward the shore and is the giver of the sea’s harvest. Overhead, in the riverside forest, the enormous Blakiston’s fish-owl — the largest owl in the world, and here critically endangered — is honored among the kamuy of the village and its rivers, a guardian of the place where the people live. The National Parks of Japan describe the Ainu worldview of this coast plainly: the land, the sea, and the creatures in them are understood as kamuy, and the human task is to live in right relation with them (National Parks of Japan).

What binds these guests to the human household is not fear but obligation, and it runs both ways. The kamuy come as visitors and bring the gift proper to a visit — the bear his meat and pelt, the sea-god his fish and whales — and the people, receiving the gift, are bound to return honor: prayer, the ritual millet wine, and the inaw, the willow prayer-sticks whittled so the shavings hang curling from the shaft, set up in rows at the outdoor altar. Described at the distance the public record keeps, that is the whole apparatus — an ordered traffic of gifts and return-gifts between two peoples, human and divine, in which the ritual is the diplomacy that keeps the two lands on good terms. A guest well received speaks well of the house and comes again; a guest ill-used stays away and takes the harvest with him. On this coast the arrangement has a particular shape, because the givers here are the great providers — the mountain that sends down the bear, the sea that sends in the salmon and the whale — and the whole of Shiretoko is, in that light, a single house of hospitality strung between the peaks and the water. It is a different register of the sacred from the caldera-lake shrines of Lake Akan inland; here the holiness is in the provisioning itself, in the giving and the return.

And the water itself can be a kamuy. At Kamuywakka — kamuy “god,” wakka “water” — a river warmed and turned strongly acidic by the active volcano Shiretoko Iozan spills down a stepped course of falls, so that its pools run from lukewarm at the foot to bath-warm higher up, steaming where the hot springs feed in near the top (HOKKAIDO LOVE!). The water is at once dangerous and holy: the raw power of the mountain made touchable, the heat of the volcano turned into something a person can stand in. The falls sit at roughly four hundred meters up the flank of the sulfur mountain, and the climb to them is seasonal and reservation-limited, open only in the warm months when the river is safe to enter. To name such a place the water of the gods is not to decorate it. It is to say what it is.

Kamuywakka — ‘the water of the gods’ — the warm, acidic falls on the flank of Shiretoko Iozan, the active volcano whose heat the river carries down to where a person can stand in it. Photograph by alonfloc, 2007, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

Here the Ainu account and the scientists’ account fold into one. The thing that makes Shiretoko extraordinary in the ecological record is the drift ice. Each winter the Sea of Okhotsk sends its seasonal ice down to these shores — the lowest latitude at which sea ice regularly forms anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere — and the ice, melting in spring, seeds a bloom of plankton that feeds the whole coastal sea. From that bloom the productivity climbs, link by link. The enriched sea feeds the salmon and the Dolly Varden trout, which run up the peninsula’s rivers in their season; the running fish feed the brown bear that takes them at the falls, the Steller’s sea eagle that winters here in the world’s largest numbers, and the fish-owl that hunts the same streams. Some 264 species of birds have been recorded on the peninsula — nearly half of all the bird species known in Japan — and the Steller sea lion hauls out on its coasts while orca, minke, and beaked whales work the water beyond (UNEP-WCMC datasheet). What the datasheet calls the interaction of marine and terrestrial ecosystems — ice to plankton to salmon to bear to eagle — is, told the other way, a single circle of giving: the sea kamuy provisioning the mountain kamuy, the mountain kamuy provisioning the human world, and the human world bound to return honor so that the givers come again. The sacredness of the place and its ecology are not two facts laid side by side. They are one fact seen from two directions.

This is the point at which a long habit of description has to be set aside rather than repeated. Ainu religion was for a century cataloged from outside as “primitive nature-worship,” a fear of the woods dressed up as faith, and Shiretoko in particular was reframed by the modern state as wilderness — empty land, scenic resource, a place of no persons but the visiting tourist. Both descriptions miss what the names on the map have been saying all along. This is not a peopleless nature to be worshiped from a distance; it is a country peopled with persons, ordered by hospitality and return, governed by the same manners that order a human household. The bear is a guest. The water is a god. To call the arrangement superstition is to have declined to learn the grammar of it.

Frontier, park, and world heritage

The afterlife of Shiretoko runs the whole arc of Ainu dispossession and the long recovery that is still under way. When Meiji Japan annexed Hokkaido and threw it open to settlement, the assimilationist regime it built — codified in the 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act, whose very title branded the Ainu kyudojin, “former aborigines” — took the ground on which the old reciprocity stood and put in its place a frontier. The Ainu language, the women’s mouth tattoos, the customary hunting, and the ceremonies were suppressed; the land was reassigned. The end of the earth, emptied in the state’s imagination of the persons who had named it, was recast first as frontier and then as scenery. Much of the peninsula was designated Shiretoko National Park in 1964, four decades before the world heritage listing, and the wilderness became a destination.

The 2005 inscription set the seal on that reading in the vocabulary of natural value. It recognized, accurately and at the highest level, the sea-ice-driven marine-and-terrestrial ecosystem, the lowest-latitude seasonal ice in the hemisphere, the sea eagle and the fish-owl and the bear. What it did not much record was the people whose word “the end of the earth” is. The nomination centered outstanding natural value; the Ainu presence in the documentary file is comparatively muted, a documentary asymmetry that is worth naming rather than smoothing over. The land was entered on the world’s register under a description that its first namers would not have recognized as complete.

The wider recovery of the Ainu as a present-tense people has begun, slowly, to change how the place is read. The full history of that recovery belongs to the Saru valley, where a court first recognized the Ainu as an indigenous people in 1997, and to Shiraoi, where the national museum keeps the record; here it is enough to mark the turn. A Diet resolution in 2008 and the Ainu Policy Promotion Act of 2019 recognized the Ainu in law as an indigenous people of Japan, and the national museum and park at Shiraoi, Upopoy, opened in 2020. In their light the sacred landscape has begun to be presented again as what it is — a country of kamuy — its peaks and waters interpreted through the worldview its names came from, with the Ainu present not as a memory attached to the scenery but as the living heirs of the ground.

For the tradition did not end when the state declared its bearers “former.” It was carried through the assimilation years by the people themselves. The great songs of the kamuy — the yukar — were first set in writing by an ethnic Ainu when the young Chiri Yukie transcribed thirteen of them and translated them into Japanese in her teens; the book, the Ainu Shin’yoshu, appeared in 1923, the year after her death at nineteen. Her brother Chiri Mashiho became a linguist and turned the discipline’s tools on the language from inside it, and the Saru-valley folklorist and legislator Kayano Shigeru spent a life collecting the vanishing implements and recording the chants. Through them the account of Shiretoko as a house of kamuy survived the century that had written it off.

Which is why the plainest thing to be said about the peninsula is also the thing the map has been saying without interruption since before the surveyors arrived. Where the road stops and the last cape leans out toward the ice, the land is still called sir-etok, the end of the earth, in the language of the people who live there yet; and two-thirds of the way out, where the volcano warms the river, the water is still called the water of the gods, by people who still mean it.

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