The Ainu

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A bear cub is carried into the village and raised inside the house. The women of the household feed it, and when it is too large to nurse from a bowl a woman may suckle it at her own breast, as she would a child. For a year or two it lives among people, named and spoken to and indulged. Then, in the cold of late winter, it is led out to the sacred altar, honored with the finest food and drink the village can give, and killed — and the killing is understood not as the end of the bear but as its release: the spirit-being who had been wearing the bear’s body is sent home to its own country, loaded with gifts, asked to come again. This rite, the iyomante, is the most concentrated expression of a whole way of seeing the world. To the Ainu, the indigenous people of the northern islands, the bear was never only a bear.

The Ainu are the original inhabitants of Hokkaido — the great island north of the Japanese mainland — together with southern Sakhalin and the Kuril chain that arcs toward Kamchatka, and in earlier centuries the northern reaches of Honshu as well. Their land they called Ainu Mosir, the quiet land of humans; ainu itself means, simply, “human.” They are a people of their own language, their own descent, and their own religion, and on every count distinct from the Yamato people who built the imperial state to the south. The kamuy of the Ainu are not the kami of Japanese Shinto; the two traditions arose apart, and to fold the one into the other is to lose what is most particular about both.

A people of the north

Who the Ainu are, and where they come from, is a question the modern disciplines have answered only in outline. The leading account ties them to the Jomon — the hunter-gatherer population that occupied the archipelago for millennia before the rice-farming, metal-working newcomers who became the Yamato arrived from the continent. On Hokkaido, beyond the reach of intensive wet-rice agriculture, the older way of life persisted and elaborated into what scholars call the Satsumon and the related Okhotsk cultures, and out of that long northern continuity the Ainu emerged. Their language is a true isolate, with no demonstrated kinship to Japanese, to Korean, or to any other family — a sign, in itself, of deep separateness.

The Ainu were hunters, fishers, and gatherers, and remained so when the south had long been a world of paddy fields and tax registers. The rivers gave salmon and trout, run after run; the forests gave deer and the brown bear and edible roots and the bark that was beaten into cloth; the sea gave fish and seal and the great marine mammals. Millet was grown, but the foundation of subsistence was the harvest of the wild, taken in its season and according to its rule. A settlement was a kotan, a cluster of houses by water, and the house itself — the cise, with its hearth at the heart — was the unit of the world.

To the chroniclers of the southern state, this northern country was a place apart and its people a people apart. The early Japanese annals call the land Ezo and its inhabitants Emishi, terms long since recognized as derogatory, the vocabulary a settled agrarian polity uses for the unsubdued. For centuries Ezo lay outside the realm: a frontier, a country of “barbarians” beyond the pale of the rice-and-rank order, traded with, raided, and feared, but not governed.

Palace reception near Hakodate, 1751: Ainu men bring gifts of fur and salmon to a Japanese overlord, an image of the trade relation that the Matsumae domain controlled. Woodblock print, unknown artist, 1751. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

That arrangement hardened under the Tokugawa shoguns. In 1590 the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi granted the southern tip of Hokkaido to the Matsumae clan, who held it as a march fief — a frontier domain charged with managing, and profiting from, the Ainu trade. The Matsumae took for themselves a monopoly: Ainu furs, eagle feathers, dried salmon, and sea produce flowed south, and Japanese iron tools, lacquerware, rice, and sake flowed north, all on terms the domain set and steadily worsened. The exchange impoverished the hunters and bound them in dependence on goods they could no longer do without. In 1669 the resentment broke into open war. The chieftain Shakushain raised a broad coalition against the Matsumae and against the trade order itself, demanding a return to direct dealing with the south. The rising was crushed; reinforced by neighboring domains, the Matsumae prevailed, and when Shakushain came to a peace parley he and other Ainu leaders were killed by treachery, cut down at the feast after the gifts had been exchanged. The defeat fixed Ainu subordination for the remainder of the Edo period.

The world of the kamuy

Within the Ainu frame, the world is double. There is Ainu Mosir, the land of humans, and there is Kamuy Mosir, the land of the kamuy — the spirit-beings, the gods. The kamuy are everywhere: in the bear and the owl and the killer-whale, in the salmon that fills the rivers, in fire and water and the wind, in the made things of the house — the boat, the pestle, the hearth itself. A kamuy is not the animal or the object; it is a person of its own country who has come to visit Ainu Mosir, and who puts on the body of a bear or the form of a tool as a human puts on a coat to go abroad. The bear that climbs down the mountain wears the skin and flesh of the bear the way a guest wears traveling clothes; the meat and the fur are the gifts it brings.

This turns the whole of life into a relation of exchange and hospitality between two peoples, the human and the divine. The mountain kamuy, Kim-un-kamuy, is the lord of the bears and the high country; the sea kamuy, Rep-un-kamuy, governs the marine creatures, and the killer-whale is reckoned among the greatest of beings. There is a maker of the world, Kotan-kar-kamuy, and a culture-hero, Ae-oyna-kamuy, who taught the people to weave and carve, to hunt and fish, to build the house and conduct its rites. But the kamuy nearest at hand, and the most honored, is the goddess of the hearth fire — Kamuy Fuchi, the fire grandmother, who burns in the center of every house and is its mistress. She is the first to be addressed in prayer and the intermediary through whom messages pass to all the other kamuy. The hearth is the axis of the home and she is its presiding spirit, and no major rite is performed without her.

An Ainu elder. Engraving from Popular Science Monthly*, vol. 33 (1887–1888). Wikimedia Commons, public domain.*

The currency of this relation is the inau — the prayer-stick, a length of willow or other wood with curls of shaving left attached along its length, planted in the ground or set at the altar as an offering, a thing made beautiful and given to the gods. Rows of inau, sometimes hung with the skulls of bears, stand at the nusa, the sacred altar-fence set apart east of the house. Libations of millet beer or sake are poured, lifted toward the kamuy with the carved offering-stick, the ikupasuy, whose tip is dipped in the drink so that the gods may share it. Words go with the gifts. The Ainu had no writing; their sacred literature was oral, and immense. The yukar are the long epics, chanted through the night to the beat of a stick on the edge of the hearth — heroic sagas of human champions, and the kamuy yukar, in which a kamuy speaks in the first person and tells its own story, the bear or the owl or the fox narrating its visit to the land of humans. To recite them was itself a way of keeping faith with the gods and drawing them near.

It is here that the iyomante stands. The bear-sending — its practice on Hokkaido attested across centuries — gathers the whole theology into a single act. A cub is taken, often when its mother has been hunted in the den, raised in the village as a member of the household, treated with tenderness for a year or two and addressed with the affection due a guest who does not yet know it is leaving. Then it is honored at the altar with the best of food and drink, surrounded with inau, addressed with prayers and yukar, and ritually killed, its spirit thus freed from the worn-out body to return to Kamuy Mosir bearing the gifts the people have heaped upon it — the offering-sticks, dried fish, millet wine, the news that it was well received among humans. A kamuy sent home satisfied speaks well of the village among its own kind and comes again, descending the mountain once more to bring the gift of its body. The killing is not cruelty and not, within the frame, even loss; it is the completion of hospitality, the formal sending of an honored guest back to its own country so that the cycle of giving may continue unbroken. Owls — the great owl is itself a kamuy, the watcher of the village — and foxes and other creatures were sent in the same way. The relation of humans and kamuy is not worship across a distance but a reciprocity of gift and return, each people standing in need of the other’s good faith: the kamuy bring meat and fur and salmon to a land that has none of their own, and the people send the spirits home rich and honored, that they may wish to come back.

The kamuy world is its own. It is not a provincial form of the kami-cult that the imperial court systematized in the Kojiki and the great shrines to the south. Both traditions find the sacred filling the visible world, and a comparison can be drawn; but the Ainu cosmos of visiting spirit-persons, the sending-rite, the willow inau, the chanted kamuy yukar, and the fire grandmother at the center of the house belongs to a people and a language entirely their own. Like the Norse or the Celts or the Slavs of the far west, the Ainu kept a world of spirits in animal and elemental form that was never anyone’s to absorb — a shamanism and a divination of the northern forests, with its own logic of the soul and its passage between two lands.

Annexation, suppression, and return

The country apart did not remain apart. In 1869, the year after the Meiji Restoration brought the new imperial government to power, the state formally annexed Ezo, renamed it Hokkaido, and set up the Hokkaido Development Commission to colonize it. Mainland settlers poured north under official sponsorship; land that had been the Ainu’s hunting and fishing ground was surveyed, opened, and given away. Salmon fishing and deer hunting — the foundations of Ainu life — were restricted and then forbidden in the places that mattered, the new commercial economy claiming the rivers and the woods.

The legal instrument of assimilation came in 1899: the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act. Its very name fixed the Ainu as a remnant — “former aborigines,” a vanishing people to be managed out of existence rather than a nation with a future. The act parceled out small, often poor allotments of land that could not be sold or mortgaged while confirming the loss of the rest, much of it already in settler hands; it pressed a people of hunters and fishers toward farming, a livelihood not their own and ill-suited to the ground they were given; it set up segregated schools and drove the children toward Japanese, away from the speech of their parents. The Ainu language, the tattooing of women’s faces, the wearing of earrings by men, the great communal rites — the marks and customs of a distinct people — were discouraged and suppressed under a policy whose aim was to dissolve the Ainu into the Japanese nation. For most of the twentieth century the official posture held: the Ainu were a dying culture, a subject of the ethnographers’ cameras and the museum case, photographed and cataloged as a “vanishing race” even as living Ainu endured discrimination, poverty, and the steady erosion of their language toward silence.

An Ainu bear-sending ceremony on Sakhalin, photographed during a 1914 expedition. National Museum of Denmark via Flickr Commons; no known copyright restrictions.

That it did not in fact vanish is the burden of the present age. Through the later twentieth century Ainu activists, scholars, and culture-bearers worked to recover what the assimilation had attacked — collecting and recording the yukar before the last fluent reciters died, reviving the embroidery and the wood-carving and the music and the dance, asserting in public a pride the law had told them to abandon. The 1899 act, by then a notorious relic, was finally repealed in 1997 and replaced by a measure for the promotion of Ainu culture. Recognition at the level of the state followed. On June 6, 2008, both houses of the Japanese Diet unanimously passed a resolution calling on the government to acknowledge the Ainu as an indigenous people. And in 2019 the Ainu Policy Promotion Act — formally the act on promoting measures to achieve a society in which the pride of the Ainu people is respected, promulgated on April 26 and effective from May 24 — recognized the Ainu in law, for the first time, as an indigenous people of Japan, with provisions against discrimination and for the support of Ainu communities and culture.

In April 2020 Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum and Park, opened at Shiraoi on the southern coast of Hokkaido — a national institution, set on a lake, devoted to the language, the crafts, the music, and the worldview of a people the state had once legislated toward extinction. The recognition is incomplete, and Ainu voices have noted that the new law grants culture and dignity more readily than land or resource rights. The language, after a century of suppression, survives in the mouths of very few, and is taught now as something to be brought back rather than something passed unbroken from a grandmother’s hearth. Most Ainu today live as their Japanese neighbors do, and most who practice a religion practice Buddhism; the iyomante is performed, when it is performed, as a festival of cultural memory rather than the central rite of a hunting world.

And yet the bear is still sent home in song. The yukar are chanted again, by people who learned them deliberately and mean to pass them on. The fire grandmother is named. A people written into the law as “former aborigines” in 1899 stood recognized in the law of 2019 as the first inhabitants of the northern islands, a living nation with a right to its own world — not the relic the conquering century insisted they were, but the visitors’ hosts still, keeping the old hospitality between the land of humans and the land of the kamuy.

→ Related: The Yamato People · The Yamabushi · Yamato · Divination · Soul · Reincarnation · Buddhism · Amaterasu · Susanoo · Okuninushi · Inari Kami · Hachiman · Ise Grand Shrine · Izumo Taisha · Mount Miwa · Kumano Sanzan · The Norse · The Celts · The Slavs