The most discussed Ainu ceremony is a sending. A kamuy that has come as a guest is helped to return to its own world with gifts and honour, and the best known form of it involves a bear. It is the point at which outside accounts have most often gone wrong, because a visitor sees the killing and not the framework, and reports a sacrifice. In the Ainu account it is neither a sacrifice nor a hunt: it is a farewell to a guest, staged so that the guest goes home well provided and well spoken of.
The atlas describes the shape of the ceremony and does not set out its conduct. The songs, the sequence and the words belong to the communities that hold them, some of it is restricted, and none of it is instruction to be reproduced from a reference work.
The tradition was interrupted rather than lost. Assimilation policy from the late nineteenth century onward took land, forbade practices, pressed the Japanese language into households and treated Ainu religion as folklore in the process of disappearing. Administrative discouragement made the bear ceremony effectively impossible for decades, and that discouragement was later withdrawn. What survived did so in families, in the recorded oral literature, and in the memory of elders.
Recognition in Japanese law as an indigenous people came in 2019, and a national cultural centre in Hokkaido now supports the language and the ceremonies. Whether that constitutes continuity or revival is a question Ainu communities themselves argue about, and it is theirs to settle.