Ainu

Traditional Ainu religion sees the world as shared between humans (ainu) and kamuy, spirit-beings who visit the human world wearing the forms of animals, plants, tools and natural forces. A bear, a fire, a boat or a storm is the temporary body of a kamuy, and right conduct toward it decides whether the visitor returns to the land of the spirits speaking well or badly of its human hosts. The hearth goddess Kamuy-huci, keeper of the household fire, stands closest to people and carries prayers upward to the other kamuy; Kim-un Kamuy, the bear god of the mountains, and Repun Kamuy, the orca god of the open sea, preside over the animals on which Ainu hunting and fishing depended.

Worship centered on the household rather than on a temple or a professional priesthood. Offerings of whittled willow wands called inaw, with libations of sake, accompanied prayers spoken by the male head of a house, while women tended the hearth on which everything turned. The most famous ceremony, the iyomante or bear-sending, raised a bear cub within the community and then ritually sent its spirit home laden with gifts, an act of hospitality between species that Neil Gordon Munro documented in detail among Hokkaido communities before the Second World War.

The Ainu carried their theology in oral literature rather than scripture: yukar, long chanted epics in which kamuy and heroes speak in the first person, preserved cosmology, ritual instruction and history together. Donald Philippi's translations brought these songs of gods and humans to English readers, and epic chanting, nearly silenced during the assimilation era, is now part of a deliberate Ainu cultural revival.

The Ainu homeland, Ainu Mosir, spans Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, a world of hunting, fishing and trade that the Japanese long knew as Ezo. From the seventeenth century the Matsumae domain held a shogunal monopoly on Ainu trade, and contract fisheries drew Ainu labor into an increasingly unequal economy; armed resistance, from Shakushain's war in 1669 to the Menashi-Kunashir rising of 1789, was put down and left the balance of power with the Japanese.

The Meiji state annexed Hokkaido outright in 1869 and pursued assimilation: the Former Natives Protection Act of 1899 reclassified the Ainu as former aborigines, pushed families from hunting and fishing into farming, and schooled children in Japanese, while tattooing, earrings and eventually the iyomante itself were discouraged or banned. Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu communities were displaced by the shifting Russo-Japanese border settlements, and the Ainu language fell nearly silent within three generations.

Recognition came slowly. The Ainu Cultural Promotion Act of 1997 replaced the 1899 law, the Japanese Diet resolved in 2008 that the Ainu are an indigenous people of Japan, and the Ainu Policy Promotion Act of 2019 wrote that recognition into law for the first time, prohibiting discrimination and supporting language and ceremony. Upopoy, the National Ainu Museum and Park, opened at Shiraoi in 2020. Ainu identity today is a matter of revival rather than bare survival: language classes, dance, craft and ritual are being relearned and taught by Ainu themselves.