Ainu Religion

The central idea is easy to state and easy to get wrong. A kamuy is not a spirit inside a bear. In the Ainu account the kamuy live in their own land, where they have houses and families and look much as people do, and when one of them comes to the human world it puts on a body, the body of a bear or an owl or a fish, and brings its meat and fur with it as a gift. The animal a hunter meets is the visitor and the costume together. What the hunter owes is what a host owes a guest who has arrived bearing presents: courtesy, food, drink, and a proper send-off home.

This turns the whole relationship around from what an outsider expects. Ainu practice is less about petitioning powers than about discharging obligations of hospitality, and the exchange runs both ways. A kamuy treated well speaks well of the household on its return and comes again. A kamuy treated badly does not, and the failure is understood as a breach of manners with consequences.

The category is wide. Fire is a kamuy, and the hearth goddess is the one every household deals with daily and the intermediary through whom messages go to the rest. Mountains, rivers, illnesses and even well-made tools can be kamuy. What is not a kamuy is aynu, the human being, and the two words define one another.

The instrument of the relationship is the inaw, a stick of willow shaved so that the curls remain attached, set up at the hearth, at the eastern window, at the sacred place outside the house and wherever a kamuy is addressed. It is offering, message and marker at once.

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.