One Figure or Two: What the Ethnography Actually Shows

The identification question is not an artefact of poor record keeping so much as a real feature of how Ainu oral tradition varied across communities and collectors. Neil Gordon Munro's ethnographic work and John Batchelor's earlier missionary-era collections, the two foundational bodies of recorded Ainu religious material that later scholarship has relied on most heavily, do not fully agree on the point, reflecting genuine variation in what different communities and different narrators told each of them a century apart. Munro's material tends to keep the culture hero and creator functions more separated across distinct named figures; Batchelor's earlier collection is less consistent on the point.

The atlas records this as an open disagreement in the ethnographic record rather than resolving it, since resolving it would mean asserting which of several genuinely differing oral traditions, recorded from different Ainu communities at different times, represents the authoritative version, a judgement the sources themselves do not support making. What is consistent across the record is that Kotan-kar Kamuy names creative, land-shaping agency specifically, whether or not the same figure is also remembered under other names for the separate work of teaching practical skills.