Ape-huci Kamuy

The name says what she is. Ape is fire and huci is grandmother, and the kamuy of the hearth is addressed in the terms a household uses for its oldest woman. That is not a courtesy applied from outside; it is the relationship. She is resident rather than visiting, present in the house continuously, and the one member of the kamuy world who is always there.

Her place is the hearth at the centre of the Ainu house, and the hearth is the centre in more than a floor plan. It is where food is cooked, where the household sits, where guests are received and where the seating order is fixed by who a person is. The fire is not allowed to go out casually, and a fire that has been let die is a household failure of a specific kind rather than an inconvenience.

Because she is always present, she is a witness. What is said and done in the house is done in front of her, and undertakings made at the hearth are made in her hearing. She is addressed in the ordinary voice of the household, not in a formal register kept for great occasions, and the addressing is done by whoever is there.

Old age is the point of the grandmother title rather than an incidental detail. In the Ainu account authority in the kamuy world, as in the human one, comes with having been around, and the fire has been around longer than anyone. She is the senior person present in any house on the island.

The structural fact about Ape-huci Kamuy is that she is the channel. A prayer or an offering intended for the kamuy of the mountains, of the sea or of a particular place is not sent directly; it is given to the fire, and she conveys it. The first portion of drink and of food goes to her before it goes anywhere else, and offerings addressed elsewhere are placed at or passed through the hearth.

That makes her the busiest deity in the system and the least ceremonious. She is the one an ordinary person actually deals with, several times a day, in the middle of doing something else, and the great ceremonies that involve other kamuy pass through her as a matter of routing rather than of honour. A tradition without a priesthood needs a mechanism by which an ordinary household can reach the whole kamuy world from its own floor, and she is it.

The inaw, the shaved willow stick that serves as offering, message and marker at once, stands at the fireside as it stands at the eastern window and at the sacred place outside. The fireside inaw is the household's standing line of communication.

Missionary and ethnographic observers noticed her early, because she is impossible to miss in a house, and she is one of the best documented figures in the recorded material. The atlas describes her position and the shape of the practice, and does not set out the words used, which belong to the households and communities that use them.