Kim-un Kamuy

The name means the kamuy of the mountains, and the mountains in question are the wooded interior of Hokkaido, above and behind the river settlements where the Ainu lived. He is the most consequential visitor in the system, and he arrives as a bear.

The distinction the tradition draws, and that outside accounts have flattened for a century and a half, is between the visitor and the costume. A bear encountered in the forest is a kamuy in a bear's body, and the body is a gift being delivered. Meat and fur are not taken from an animal; they are received from a guest who brought them, having gone to the trouble of putting them on. What that produces is not a hunting religion in the ordinary sense but a set of obligations of hospitality, in which the correct handling of the remains matters as much as the hunt.

The kamuy yukar make this explicit, because in them the bear speaks. He describes coming down, describes what the household did, and states whether he will return. A poor reception is reported back in the land of the kamuy and has consequences for the household, which puts a great deal of weight on conduct that a European reader would file as table manners.

The brown bear of Hokkaido is a genuinely dangerous animal, and none of this is sentimental. It is a way of holding together the facts that the bear is powerful, that killing it is necessary and that killing it incurs a debt.

The ceremony of sending is the best known and most misdescribed thing in Ainu religion. Outside accounts, from early European visitors to modern summaries, report it as a bear sacrifice, and that framing is wrong at the root. A sacrifice offers a victim to a deity. A sending returns a guest to his own house with gifts and honours, so that he goes back well provided and speaks well of his hosts. The killing is inside the farewell, not the point of it.

The atlas describes the shape of the ceremony and does not set out its conduct. The songs, the order, the words and the handling belong to the communities that hold them; some of it is restricted; and a reference work that printed a procedure would be offering instructions for a rite that is not its to give.

The ceremony was also interrupted. Assimilation policy in Hokkaido from the late nineteenth century onward pressed against Ainu practice generally, and administrative discouragement in the twentieth century made the bear ceremony effectively impossible to hold for decades. That discouragement was later withdrawn. Ainu communities have since resumed ceremonies, with recognition in Japanese law as an indigenous people since 2019 and public support for cultural transmission.

Whether what is held now is continuous with what was held before, or a revival after a break, is argued within Ainu communities themselves. It is their argument, and the atlas records that it exists rather than adjudicating it.