The Ainu and Their Folk-Lore

John Batchelor was a missionary who lived among the Ainu of Hokkaido, and this Religious Tract Society book is his late nineteenth century ethnographic study of Ainu folklore and religious belief, including the kamuy deities. Its value is that it is a firsthand documentary record of Ainu belief as observed at close range during a period with few other written accounts. Its limit is the reason for its tier two placement: Batchelor wrote as an outside missionary observer with his own conversion purpose, not as an Ainu voice, and later Ainu led scholarship has revised some of his readings, so a claim resting on his interpretation should be checked against that later, community grounded scholarship.