Ainu Spirituality: Kamuy and the Bear Ceremony
Ainu spirituality is the religion of the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, built on exchange between humans and kamuy, the owners of the world. This guide covers what kamuy are, the ramat soul, the iyomante bear ceremony, inaw and hearth prayer, yukar oral transmission, the Meiji suppression, and the recognition and revival since 1997.
What is Ainu spirituality and what do the Ainu believe?
Ainu spirituality is the religious system of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, and it is organized around exchange between human beings and kamuy, the owners of the world's phenomena. The Ainu word ainu means human. Kamuy covers the beings who hold and animate everything humans depend on: fire, fresh water, the mountains, the sea, bears, owls, wolves and salmon, and also made objects such as boats and cooking pots. Ainu and kamuy occupy two worlds, ainu mosir, the land of humans, and kamuy mosir, the land of the kamuy. A kamuy entering ainu mosir arrives dressed in a body, and the meat and fur it leaves behind are the gifts a guest brings. The host's obligation is to send the visitor home well, with inaw, millet beer, food and formal speech, so that the kamuy will report favorably and come again. Nothing here requires belief in a doctrine. There is no scripture, no priesthood and no congregation. A household head prays at the hearth, an elder leads a village ceremony, and knowledge passes through sung and spoken narrative rather than through a text.
The picture most descriptions give is drawn from Hokkaido communities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it was never uniform. Sakhalin Ainu, Kuril Ainu and Hokkaido Ainu differed in funeral custom, in the shape of their prayer sticks and in how they conducted the bear ceremony, and neighboring kotan, or villages, on the same river could differ too. No council existed to settle a disputed point. Much of the written record also came from outsiders working with their own frames: the Anglican missionary John Batchelor read Ainu prayer through Christian categories, and the Scottish physician Neil Gordon Munro, who lived at Nibutani until his death in 1942, recorded ritual detail he could not always interpret. The correction has come from Ainu writers and their collaborators, above all Yukie Chiri, her aunt Imekanu, her brother the linguist Mashiho Chiri, and later Shigeru Kayano. Reading them first, and the colonial-era ethnographers second, changes what the tradition looks like. The Ainu had no single word meaning religion as a separate department of life, which is one reason early outside classifications of it went wrong so consistently.
What does the word kamuy mean?
Kamuy names a being that owns, controls or animates something in the world. Deity and spirit are the usual English renderings, and neither fits. A kamuy has a will, a household, standing among other kamuy, and a direct interest in how humans treat it. The word attaches as readily to a cooking pot as to a mountain, which is why any translation leaning on Western ideas of divinity misfires at once.
Does Ainu spirituality have scripture or clergy?
No. Authority rests on memory and standing rather than on office. An ekashi, a respected elder man, leads village ceremony and speaks the long formal prayers; a household head prays at his own hearth; a katkemat, a woman of standing in the household, holds duties the men do not. Nobody confers these positions. A person acquires one by having heard enough, over enough years, that the community defers to him. That is also why colonial schooling did so much damage. It broke the listening, and there was no institution underneath to carry the knowledge instead.
Are all kamuy benevolent?
No. Ainu accounts separate good kamuy from wen kamuy, harmful beings that bring illness, accident and famine, and several stories describe a kamuy that behaved badly and lost its standing as a result. Even a well-disposed kamuy can turn if it is insulted or neglected. The relationship is contractual rather than sentimental, and prayers regularly include complaint, reminder and bargaining alongside thanks.
Who are the kamuy, and how do Ainu people relate to them?
The kamuy are the beings who own and animate the world's species, forces and objects, and Ainu people relate to them roughly as hosts relate to guests: with hospitality, formal speech, gifts and the expectation of return. The best known include Ape-huci-kamuy, the fire grandmother of the hearth, who receives every prayer first and passes it on; Kim-un-kamuy, the mountain deity who appears as a brown bear; Repun Kamuy, the offshore deity who appears as an orca; Kotan-kor-Kamuy, the village guardian who appears as a Blakiston's fish owl; Horkew Kamuy, the wolf; and Wakka-us-Kamuy, who holds fresh water. Household objects and the house itself have kamuy of their own. What holds the system together is obligation running both ways. A kamuy gains standing in kamuy mosir by the quality of the send-off it receives, so a generous village attracts return visits and a careless one does not. These are not spirit animals in the modern Western sense, and reading them that way collapses a relationship of mutual duty into personal symbolism. Spirit Animal Meaning: What They Represent and How They Guide Us covers that separate vocabulary.
Whether the kamuy form a fixed hierarchy is argued. In everyday practice Ape-huci-kamuy comes first, since no prayer reaches any other kamuy except through her. Some accounts instead put a creator figure at the top, Kotan-kar-kamuy, the maker of the land, though Batchelor's emphasis on a supreme creator is now widely read as his own theology imported into the material. Ainu prayer language rarely settles the question, because a ceremony addresses whichever kamuy has business with the occasion. The category is also wider than animals and weather. A boat, a pestle, a knife and the house itself carry kamuy or a soul of their own, which is why worn-out tools were sent away with a small rite rather than thrown out. The wolf, Horkew Kamuy, belongs here as one named kamuy among many rather than as a symbol to be interpreted. The classification is practical: it tells you whom to address, in what order, and with what. Which kamuy matter also depends on where a kotan sits. Repun Kamuy, the orca, carries weight in coastal communities that hunted at sea and almost none in a settlement far up a river, where the bear and the salmon fill the same place in the year.
Which kamuy matters most in daily life?
Ape-huci-kamuy, the fire grandmother who lives in the hearth. She never leaves the house, and every prayer addressed to any other kamuy is spoken to her first so that she can carry it onward. In practice this makes the hearth the site of most Ainu religious activity, and it makes tending the fire properly, without spitting into it or handling it carelessly, an obligation that runs continuously rather than on ceremonial occasions.
Do the Ainu worship the kamuy?
Worship fits awkwardly. Ainu prayer includes thanks and respect, but it also carries requests, reminders of past favors, and complaints when a kamuy has failed to deliver what was expected. Stories describe humans scolding a kamuy outright, and a kamuy losing rank for neglecting its duties. The relationship assumes mutual need, since kamuy want the inaw, the drink and the words that only human beings can supply.
Are kamuy the same as Japanese kami?
No, although the words resemble one another and both cover beings tied to natural forces. Shinto kami are served at shrines by a trained priesthood inside a national institutional structure, while kamuy are hosted at a domestic hearth and an outdoor altar fence by householders and elders. Linguists disagree over whether the Ainu term was borrowed from Japanese, whether the borrowing ran the other way, or whether neither happened.
What do the Ainu believe happens to the soul after death?
Ainu accounts hold that a person carries ramat, a soul or spirit-substance, and that at death the ramat leaves the body and travels to the world of the dead, most often named pokna mosir, the land below. The road there is described as reversed. Mourners turned clothes inside out, undid knots, and carried the body out through an opening other than the everyday door, so that the departing soul would not find its way back into the house. Grave goods went with the body, and they were deliberately broken, cracked or pierced first, because a pot or a knife has its own ramat and only a broken object releases it to travel. A carved grave post, the kuwa, marked the burial, cut in different forms for men and for women. In some communities the house of the dead person was burned in a rite of its own. What happens after arrival is described inconsistently, and Ainu narrators recorded in different regions gave different answers, some including a soul that returns among descendants. Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth covers rebirth doctrines elsewhere; the Ainu material resists being filed under them.
Ramat is the piece that makes the whole system coherent, because one word covers what is in a person, a bear, a willow tree and a lacquer bowl. Death moves ramat rather than ending it, which is why a funeral and a bear ceremony share a grammar: both are sendings. The living keep up relations afterward through icarpa, memorial offerings in which food and drink are poured out for named ancestors, still held today at community gatherings and at sites of historical grief. The dead were not to be summoned casually. Ainu funeral speech includes instructions to the deceased to go on and not look back, and mourning custom discouraged prolonged calling of the name. Munro recorded elaborate variation in these rites at Nibutani in the 1930s, and the Sakhalin material differs again, so any single tidy account of the Ainu afterlife should be read as one community's version rather than the tradition's position. Sakhalin Ainu practice, recorded by Bronislaw Pilsudski at the start of the twentieth century, diverges again from the Hokkaido pattern in both burial and mourning.
What is ramat?
Ramat, sometimes written ramachi, is the soul or animating essence present in people, animals, plants and manufactured things. It is not exclusive to humans, and it carries no moral score. The important property is portability. Ramat can leave a body, travel, be sent and be received, and every sending ceremony in the tradition, from a funeral to iyomante to the small rite for a cracked bowl, rests on that single assumption.
Why were grave goods broken?
Because breaking an object releases its ramat so that it can travel with the dead. A whole pot stays behind; a cracked one has been sent. Excavated Ainu graves contain lacquerware, blades and ornaments damaged on purpose before burial, which is one of the few places where archaeology touches this belief directly rather than taking a narrator's word for it. Worn-out tools got the same treatment for the same reason.
What is icarpa?
Icarpa is a memorial rite in which food, tonoto, the ceremonial millet beer, and formal words are offered to ancestors, usually poured onto the ground or into a fire at a designated place. Families and communities hold icarpa at annual gatherings, at reburial sites for returned ancestral remains, and at places where Ainu people died in forced labor or displacement. It is among the most widely continued Ainu ceremonies today.
What happens during iyomante, the Ainu bear ceremony?
Iyomante is the ceremony in which a bear's spirit is sent back to kamuy mosir carrying gifts and a good report of the village that hosted it. In the classical Hokkaido form, hunters took a cub from a den in early spring, usually after killing the mother, and brought it into the kotan. The cub was raised there for one or two winters, handled and fed by the community, in some accounts nursed by a woman, and kept in a wooden cage once it grew large. The ceremony itself came in winter. Messengers invited neighboring villages, inaw were shaved, tonoto was brewed, and the cub was led out and played with before being killed with ceremonial arrows and pressed between logs. The head was skinned with the hide left attached, dressed with inaw and ornaments, and set at the nusa altar facing east, where it was offered food and drink and addressed with speeches asking it to return. Dancing, rimse, and yukar recitation ran through the night, and the meat was distributed among the guests. Bear Spirit Animal: Strength, Healing, and the Power of Introspection covers bear ceremonialism among other northern peoples.
The theology matters more here than the procedure. Ainu understanding holds that a kamuy of the mountains put on a bear body to visit, and that the visit ends when the host releases the guest from the costume. The killing is the release, and the long period of raising the cub is hospitality rather than captivity as an outsider tends to read it. Iyomante means, roughly, to send it off. Practice varied by region: Sakhalin Ainu conducted their bear rite differently from Hokkaido Ainu, including in the method of killing and in what was done with the skull afterward. Nineteenth-century Japanese and Western observers described the ceremony as barbaric, and that judgment fed later restriction of it. Ainu commentators, Shigeru Kayano among them, have argued that the framing inverts the ceremony's meaning, which turns on an obligation of care toward a guest who is expected to come back. The ceremony carried social weight beyond religion, since a village that could feed a cub through two winters and then feast several settlements was demonstrating that it could afford to.
What does the word iyomante mean?
Iyomante, also written iomante, means approximately to send it off, or to see it home. Notice what the name leaves out. The killing is the mechanism, but the word points at the departure, and a related verb, iwakte, covers the smaller sendings given to lesser animals and to worn-out objects. The bear ceremony is the most elaborate instance of a form applied very broadly.
Were bears the only animals sent this way?
No. Ainu communities also held a sending ceremony for Kotan-kor-Kamuy, the Blakiston's fish owl, and bears killed in the hunt rather than raised in the village received a sending rite at the kill site or on return to the kotan. Smaller creatures and used tools got shorter sendings. The bear ceremony is the fullest version of a common form, not a separate category of ritual.
Who took part in iyomante?
The whole kotan, plus invited guests from other villages. An elder led the prayers and the speeches, men handled the ceremonial arrows and the butchering, and women brewed the tonoto, prepared the food and carried much of the singing and dancing. Raising the cub was a shared responsibility over months, and the household that kept it carried costs that the wider village helped to meet.
What are inaw, and how do the Ainu pray at the hearth?
Inaw are prayer sticks whittled from willow, dogwood or lilac, with long curls of shaving left attached to the stem, and they are the standard gift and message given to kamuy. A carver shapes them fresh for a ceremony, and the type, the length, the number of curls and the choice of wood vary by which kamuy is being addressed and by region. Completed inaw are planted in rows in the nusa, an altar fence outside the east side of the house, and the tallest are made for the most important recipients. Prayer at the hearth is the everyday form. The household head, or an ekashi at a larger ceremony, sits at the fire holding an ikupasuy, a flat carved stick, dips its tip into tonoto and flicks droplets toward the fire and the inaw while speaking a formal prayer. Ape-huci-kamuy receives it first and relays it onward. Women tend the fire and hold ritual duties toward it of their own. This account describes what has been recorded rather than supplying a procedure, because these are not rites for outsiders to stage.
The ikupasuy shows how badly early outsiders read the material. Western observers following John Batchelor called it a mustache lifter and assumed its function was to hold a beard clear of a drinking cup. Ainu explanations describe an implement that carries a person's words to the kamuy, and the carved patterns on the underside of the blade sit where the person holding it cannot see them, which recorded Ainu accounts read as carving aimed at the kamuy rather than at the room. Household architecture encodes the same distinctions. The chise has an east-facing ritual window, the rorunpuyar, through which ceremonial objects and the bear's spirit pass, and which nobody looks through or hands ordinary goods across. The hearth sits in the middle of the single room, and seating positions around it are assigned rather than casual. A layout that looks purely domestic is also the ritual plan of the house. Inaw turn up in almost every recorded Ainu rite, from a household prayer over a new pot to the great winter ceremonies, which makes them the most reliable marker that ritual is under way.
What are inaw made from?
Green wood, cut so the shavings curl and stay attached to the stem: willow most often, with dogwood and lilac also used. The carver works with a small knife, leaving the kike, the curls, hanging along the shaft. Shapes have names, and the named shapes go to particular kamuy. Old inaw are not thrown away. They stay standing at the nusa and weather in place over years, which is why an altar built up across a generation is a thicket rather than a row.
What is a nusa?
An outdoor altar, and the household's ritual record. New inaw are added at every ceremony and the old ones are left where they stand, so a nusa that has grown for thirty years shows how much ritual a family has done. Bear skulls from iyomante were set there. Because the nusa stands off the east wall and the ceremonial window opens straight onto it, house and altar form one axis, which makes the orientation of an Ainu house a ritual fact rather than a preference about light.
Do Ainu people still pray at a hearth today?
Some do. Most Ainu families now live in ordinary Japanese housing without a traditional open hearth, so kamuynomi prayer ceremonies are more often held at community centers, at cultural association buildings, in reconstructed chise and outdoors during seasonal ceremonies. Prayer to Ape-huci-kamuy still opens these occasions, and a fire is lit for the purpose even when the setting is a hall or a riverbank rather than a house.
How is Ainu spiritual knowledge carried in yukar and oral tradition?
Ainu spiritual knowledge was carried entirely in performed oral genres, because the Ainu language had no writing system before outsiders began transcribing it. The genres are distinct. Yukar are long heroic epics centered on the young hero Poiyaunpe, recited in the first person over hours or whole nights. Kamuy yukar are songs in which a kamuy narrates its own visit to the human world, each built around a sakehe, a short refrain repeated between the lines. Oina are sacred narratives about Ainurakkur, also called Okikurmi, the culture hero who taught humans their arts. Uwepeker are prose tales. Doctrine in this tradition arrives as testimony: a listener learns how a kamuy expects to be treated by hearing the kamuy describe being treated well or badly and say what it did about it. Performance had rules of its own. Recitation happened at night, listeners lay down to hear it, and the reciter beat time with a stick against the edge of the hearth or against a box lid. A skilled reciter held thousands of lines in memory.
Getting that material into a form that survived colonization owes most to a small number of Ainu people. Yukie Chiri, born in 1903, transcribed thirteen kamuy yukar in romanized Ainu with her own Japanese translation, and the collection, Ainu Shin'yoshu, appeared in 1923, the year after she died at nineteen. Its first song, the owl god's, opens with silver droplets and golden droplets falling all around, a line now known well outside Ainu communities. Her aunt Imekanu, also called Matsu Kannari, wrote out an enormous body of epic material in notebooks by hand. Her brother Mashiho Chiri became a linguist and worked on Ainu grammar and lexicon at Hokkaido University. Shigeru Kayano recorded elders on tape through the second half of the twentieth century. The Japanese linguist Kyosuke Kindaichi collaborated with several of them, which is why much early published Ainu text carries a Japanese scholar's name on the cover. One family did much of this. Yukie Chiri, Imekanu and Mashiho Chiri were niece, aunt and nephew, and between them they account for a large share of everything written down in Ainu before the war. Ainu scholars now argue for reading those earliest texts against their Japanese translations rather than through them.
What is a sakehe?
A sakehe is the refrain that runs through a kamuy yukar, dropped in between the lines as the song proceeds. Each song has its own. The words are often not words at all, but syllables that sound like an animal cry, and a listener identified the song from its refrain before the story got anywhere. Yukie Chiri kept the sakehe in her transcriptions. Later editors sometimes cut them, which shortens the song and takes the shape of the performance out of it.
Who was Yukie Chiri?
Yukie Chiri, 1903 to 1922, was an Ainu woman from Noboribetsu who spent part of her childhood with her aunt Imekanu and became the first Ainu person to write Ainu oral literature down in Ainu herself, in her own hand, with her own Japanese translation beside it. Outsiders had transcribed Ainu texts before her, Batchelor and Pilsudski and Kindaichi among them, but the transcriber and the tradition had not been the same person. She died of heart disease at nineteen, on the night she finished the manuscript. Ainu Shin'yoshu was published the following year.
Can yukar be heard today?
Yes, though the situation is fragile. Recordings made through the twentieth century sit in archives and some have been published; Ainu cultural associations, the Nibutani museums and Upopoy run recitation and language classes; and a small number of performers have learned to recite from tapes and notebooks rather than from a household elder. Continuous household transmission of the long epics has largely broken.
How did Japanese colonization suppress Ainu religion?
Japanese state policy suppressed Ainu religion mainly by outlawing the activities the religion was attached to, rather than by banning belief. From 1869 the Meiji government renamed Ezo as Hokkaido, set up the Kaitakushi colonization commission, and opened Ainu land to settlers. An 1871 directive prohibited the tattooing of Ainu women and the wearing of earrings by Ainu men, and forbade the custom of burning the house of a dead person. Through the 1870s and 1880s salmon fishing in rivers was banned, deer hunting was restricted, and the aconite-tipped arrows and spring traps that Ainu hunters used were prohibited. Those measures removed the salmon, the deer and the bear cubs that ceremonies were built around, and they wrecked the subsistence base at the same time. The 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act completed the program. It allotted small plots on condition they be farmed, funneled children into Japanese-language schools, and fixed a legal category, former aborigines, that stayed on the statute book until 1997. Researchers meanwhile excavated Ainu graves and removed ancestral remains to universities.
The mechanism is worth stating plainly, because it explains why the religion thinned rather than going underground. A tradition with no scripture and no clergy lives in occasions: the salmon run, the bear taken in the hills, the funeral, the seasonal prayer. Remove the occasions and the knowledge attached to them has nowhere to be used, and a generation later nobody can perform it. Language policy finished the job, since schooling in Japanese cut children off from the register that prayer and yukar are composed in. Direct pressure existed too. Ainu households were absorbed into the Japanese family registry, and Shinto observance formed part of the assimilation program. The 1955 prefectural notice discouraging iyomante as a cruel custom arrived after most of this had already happened, and it finished off a ceremony that had few practitioners left to discourage. Poverty compounded all of it, because a family reduced to wage labor on a settler farm had neither the materials nor the free days that a ceremony needs.
Was Ainu religion itself made illegal?
Not as a whole. No statute declared kamuy belief unlawful. What the state banned were specific practices: tattooing, burning the house at a funeral, river salmon fishing, poisoned arrows. The effect on ceremony was much the same. The 1955 Hokkaido notice on iyomante was administrative guidance rather than a criminal prohibition, but Ainu communities read it as an instruction and largely complied with it.
What did the 1899 act actually do?
The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act allotted each Ainu household a plot of farmland that reverted to the state if it went uncultivated, placed Ainu communal property under official management, funded segregated schools teaching in Japanese, and presented all of it as protection. Much of the allotted land was poor or was lost. The act was repealed only in 1997, ninety-eight years after it passed.
What happened to Ainu ancestral remains?
Japanese universities excavated Ainu graves from the late nineteenth century into the postwar decades and kept what they took. A government survey counted more than 1,600 sets of remains held by universities, with Hokkaido University holding by far the largest collection. Litigation and negotiation since the 2010s have returned some to communities for reburial. Most were not returned. Those went to a memorial facility built at Upopoy, which several Ainu groups accepted as a holding position rather than as a settlement.
How is Ainu spirituality being revived today?
Ainu spirituality is being rebuilt through a combination of legal recognition, community ceremony and institutional support, with 1997 as the hinge year. That year the Sapporo District Court, ruling on land taken for the Nibutani Dam in a case brought by Shigeru Kayano and Tadashi Kaizawa, held the expropriation unlawful because the authorities had failed to weigh the Ainu culture attached to the valley, and described the Ainu as an Indigenous people with a protected interest in it. The court still declined to undo the taking, since the dam was finished by the time judgment came, so the plaintiffs won the reasoning and lost the land. The same year the Diet passed the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act, which repealed the 1899 statute. A Diet resolution in 2008 acknowledged Ainu indigeneity, and the 2019 Ainu Policy Promotion Act put that recognition into law, prohibited discrimination, and created routes for communities to take salmon for ceremonial use. On the ground the calendar has filled back in. Kamuynomi prayer ceremonies and icarpa memorials are held regularly. The Asir Chep Nomi new salmon ceremony has run in Sapporo since the early 1980s, and the chipsanke boat-launching ceremony continues at Nibutani. Traditional Ainu dance, protected as a national folk cultural property since 1984, was inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2009. Upopoy, the national Ainu museum and park at Shiraoi, opened in 2020.
Recognition has not settled the harder questions, and Ainu opinion divides over what has actually been won. The 2019 act supports culture, tourism and community projects while saying nothing about land, compensation or self-determination, and critics inside Ainu organizations describe it as permission to perform rather than a return of rights. The salmon question is live. The Raporo Ainu Nation at Urahoro sued in 2020 asking the courts to recognize a collective right to take salmon from the Tokachi River, and the Sapporo District Court rejected the claim at first instance. There is disagreement too about ceremony held in front of paying audiences, which some Ainu people regard as the only viable transmission route left and others as display. For a parallel case of a living Indigenous tradition managing outside visitors to its sacred ground, see Uluru: History, Alignments and Spiritual Significance. Younger Ainu people have taken up craft, dance, language and ceremony in numbers their grandparents' generation would not have predicted, often while living in Sapporo or Tokyo rather than in a rural kotan.
What does the 2019 Ainu Policy Promotion Act do?
It recognizes the Ainu as an Indigenous people of Japan in statute for the first time and prohibits discrimination on the basis of Ainu identity. It sets up a grant system for municipal projects in Ainu culture, tourism and industry. It eases some regulatory barriers, among them the procedures for taking river salmon for ceremony and for gathering materials in national forest. It creates no land rights and no compensation mechanism.
Is the Ainu language recovering?
Slowly, and from a very low base. Ainu is a language isolate with no proven relatives, and UNESCO classifies it as critically endangered, with a handful of fluent elderly speakers. Revival work runs through community classes in Hokkaido, radio lessons, dictionaries and archived recordings, and Upopoy uses Ainu in its signage and announcements. Most people using any Ainu today learned it from a class, a dictionary or a recording rather than from a parent, and the number who can hold a conversation has never been counted in a way that specialists treat as reliable.
Can Ainu communities fish salmon for ceremonies now?
In limited circumstances. River salmon fishing remains regulated, but prefectural permits have been issued for ceremonial catches such as Asir Chep Nomi for decades, and the 2019 act directed that such applications be handled with Ainu tradition in mind. What communities have not obtained is a recognized right that exists independently of official permission, which is exactly what the Urahoro litigation sought.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Ainu religion related to Shinto?
Ainu religion is not a branch of Shinto and did not develop from it. Both traditions address beings tied to natural forces, and the words kamuy and kami resemble each other, but Shinto has shrines, an organized priesthood, a written body of myth in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, and a national institutional history that Ainu practice has no equivalent of. The historical relationship between them is one of imposition: Meiji assimilation policy pushed Ainu households toward Shinto observance rather than the two traditions growing from a common root.
Do Ainu people still hold iyomante ceremonies today?
Full iyomante with a bear cub raised inside the community is now rare. The Hokkaido government discouraged the ceremony in a 1955 notice that was not withdrawn until 2007, and by then the chain of people who had performed one had largely broken. What continues is the wider family of sending and prayer ceremonies: kamuynomi, icarpa memorials, the new salmon ceremony, and iyomante rimse, the bear-ceremony dance, performed without a bear. Occasional revivals have been staged, and they remain contested inside and outside Ainu communities.
How many Ainu people are there in Japan, and where do they live?
There is no reliable national figure. Japan's census asks no question about Ainu identity, and the standard source is a Hokkaido prefectural survey of Ainu households, which counted roughly thirteen thousand people in 2017, down from higher counts in earlier rounds. That decline reflects who is willing to be counted as much as it reflects demography, because many people conceal Ainu ancestry to avoid discrimination. A substantial Ainu population also lives in the Tokyo area, outside the survey's scope entirely.
Can non-Ainu people practice Ainu spirituality?
Ainu ceremony belongs to Ainu communities, and no Ainu organization offers initiation or ritual training to people outside them. Attending one is not the same question. Visitors are welcome at public ceremonies at Upopoy, at Nibutani and at community events, and nothing stops an outsider learning the language, reading Ainu authors or supporting Ainu organizations. Staging a kamuynomi or an iyomante yourself is a different matter, and Ainu writers and cultural associations have not treated that as open to visitors. Smudging and Space Clearing: Practices, Ethics and Alternatives sets out the wider argument about borrowing Indigenous ritual.
Why do Ainu women have mouth tattoos, and do they have a spiritual meaning?
Ainu women wore sinuye, tattoos around the mouth built up over years from childhood and finished before marriage, with further patterns on the forearms. Recorded explanations vary. They include protection against harmful beings, a mark of adult status, and a requirement for being recognized by ancestors after death, and it is not obvious that these compete rather than describing three things one mark did at once. Japanese authorities banned tattooing in 1871. Families kept it up quietly for decades afterward, so women who had been tattooed as girls in defiance of the ban were still living late in the twentieth century, and the practice ended with that generation rather than with the order. Ainu artists have since revived the designs in painted and drawn form rather than in ink, and the mouth pattern now appears in performance, portraiture and museum display.
What is Upopoy, and is it a good place to learn about Ainu belief?
Upopoy is the National Ainu Museum and Park at Shiraoi in Hokkaido, opened in 2020, with a museum, a reconstructed kotan, performance spaces and a memorial facility holding ancestral remains that could not be returned to communities. The name means singing together in a large group. It is a reasonable starting point, staffed by Ainu people and signed in the Ainu language, though it is state-funded and some Ainu critics object to its emphasis on culture and tourism over rights and land.
Is Ainu spirituality a form of shamanism?
Only partly. Ainu communities had tusu, a trance practice used to diagnose illness, find lost things and identify the cause of misfortune, carried out by a tusukur, in most Hokkaido accounts a woman. The tusukur was not the central religious specialist, though. Everyday and ceremonial religion ran through the household head and through the ekashi at the hearth, not through trance. Grouping Ainu practice with Siberian shamanism, as early ethnographers did, misplaces the emphasis, even though contact and shared features with neighboring peoples of the north are real.
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