A Guide to Ainu Folklore | The Indigenous Northern Japanese | Human Voiced, No Ads

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:01]Anu means human just that the people as distinct from everything else. It's a naming convention shared by indigenous groups around the world. But in the case of the IU, it carries a particular weight because the line between human and everything else is not quite where you would expect it to be.

[00:00:26]In a new understanding, the non-human world is not empty or passive, but rather it is teeming with camoi, divine spirits. You'll find them in the mountains, the rivers, the fires, the animals, and even in a well-used tool.

[00:00:42]And these spirits are conscious, purposeful and morally demanding. They give gifts to humans, a bit of food, resources, maybe a little warmth.

[00:00:54]But there's a catch. They expect specific forms of respect in return.

[00:01:01]Maintain the relationship and the world holds together.

[00:01:06]Disrespected and everything unravels.

[00:01:11]This is the worldview that belongs to the indigenous people of Japan's far north. Genetically distinct from the Japanese, speaking a language connected to no other on Earth. and carrying one of the most remarkable folklore traditions that most people have never even heard of.

[00:01:31]Well, if you've never heard of it, perhaps now is the time.

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[00:02:02]Thank you in advance. Let's begin.

[00:02:07]And I suppose we may as well take off from the topic of the introduction, the camo.

[00:02:15]What on earth is that?

[00:02:17]It's a little complicated. Essentially the concept of camoy is the organizing principle of a new cosmology and the key to understanding everything else in Anu folklore. So being the foundation it's best to start from here. The word camoy is commonly translated as god or spirit.

[00:02:38]But neither translation is quite adequate to the fullness of what the IU people mean by it. You see a camoya is not necessarily a transcendent thing.

[00:02:49]not necessarily omnipotent, not necessarily morally perfect in the sense that monotheistic traditions tend to demand of their deities. A camoy is rather just a being of inherent power, awareness, and moral significance that inhabits and animates particular aspects of the world. A species of animal, natural phenomenons, tools, places, diseases. They've got camoy for everything.

[00:03:17]But a camoy world is not above the human world or separate from it.

[00:03:22]It rather overlaps it and requires constant maintenance of the relationship between the two realms for both to function properly.

[00:03:32]The Inu recognize camoy of extraordinary diversity and specificity.

[00:03:38]Kim unun camoy is a mountain deity, the lord of bears, the most important camoy in the au spiritual hierarchy given the bear's centrality to a new subsistence and root uh ritual life.

[00:03:53]Repun camoy is the deity of the sea often manifested as an orca whale. Ape huchi or fui is the goddess of fire. one of the most uh important and frequently invoked Kamoy in daily life who meditates her between the human and spirit worlds. All prayers pass through her since she is the fire that burns at the center of every new home and whose smoke carries human requests upward to the camoy world.

[00:04:26]There are camoy of rivers, wind, thunder, specific mountains. There is a camo of the weasel, the owl, the eagle.

[00:04:36]There are camoy of illness, not the malevolent in a simple moral sense, but spirits that have rather been offended or neglected, and whose attention, once fixed on the household, manifests as a disease, and you don't want one of them on your hands.

[00:04:52]The relationship between humans and camoy is explicitly commercial in its metaphors and moral in its requirements.

[00:05:02]You see, camoy visit the world in disguise.

[00:05:05]The deer you hunt, that's a camoy. It's just wearing the suit of a deer as a new descriptions sometimes put it. and who has come to the human world to bring gifts, meat and hide in exchange for gratitude, ritual attention and proper ceremony that humans offer in return.

[00:05:26]The camoy in this understanding is not really killed when hunted, more that the fleshy vehicle of the deer suit is destroyed and the camo's essence is liberated to return to the spirit world bearing the wine, the carved inowl prayer sticks and the spoken gratitude that the au hunter has provided.

[00:05:49]The camoy world in several AU narrative traditions is structured exactly like the AU world. The camoy have houses, families, celebrations and social obligations.

[00:06:02]They enjoy offerings made to them and report positively on the humans who made them which attracts other camoy to visit the human world in the form of game animals, fish and other resources so they could get the same sort of treatment.

[00:06:18]The structure is reciprocal and it has profound consequences for the a new relationship to the natural world. The animals are not resources to be exploited.

[00:06:29]They are beings of moral standing whose treatment is subject to ethical requirements that parallel those governing the treatment of human persons.

[00:06:40]A bear killed carelessly without proper ceremony or proper thanks is a wronged camoy. and a camoy who has been wronged.

[00:06:49]Well, they're going to report the injustice to the spirit world, deterring other camoy from visiting an animal form and causing the community's luck in hunting and fishing to slowly deteriorate.

[00:07:02]The ethical framework governing the relationship to nonhuman nature is therefore not essentially different from the ethical framework governing human social relations.

[00:07:13]Both require gratitude and respect. This uh maintenance of obligations that run in both directions is mutually beneficial, sure, but this is not the framework of most western traditions. And it produces a fundamentally different relationship to the environment, one whose practical consequences were visible in the sustainable hunting and fishing practices that characterized I knew life for generations.

[00:07:42]And one of the I suppose most important features of the camoy concept is its extension to the manufactured object of sufficient age and intensity of use.

[00:07:56]A worn out tool, a knife whose blade has been produced by years of sharpening, or a bow whose wood has been shaped by a lifetime of drawing, may accumulate a camo presence that requires respectful treatment rather than simple disposal.

[00:08:13]The tool is not simply worn out. It's not an old piece of garbage. Far from it. It has rather acquired personhood through use, through the investment of human care and the accumulated memory of the work that it has done.

[00:08:30]Disposing of it carelessly is an offense against that accumulated presence.

[00:08:35]This is not a minor peripheral aspect of a new belief. It reflects a foundational premise that a personhood and moral standing are not fixed properties of certain categories of being but are generated by relationship, history and accumulation of care and attention over time.

[00:08:53]The world is not divided into persons and things. The division is permeable and things can become persons through the right kind of relationship.

[00:09:07]Next up, we have the Aomante, the bear sending ceremony. Perhaps the most important ritual in traditional AU life, not to mention the focal point of the AU relationship with the spirit world. It is a ceremony of extraordinary complexity, emotional intensity, and it has perhaps been profoundly misunderstood by outside observers who have tended to describe it in terms that emphasize its surface level strangeness without engaging with the theological and social framework that actually gives it its true meaning.

[00:09:46]The yomante involves the raising of a bear cub captured in the ring.

[00:09:51]Typically, when the cub is small enough to be handled, it's kind of hard to uh capture them when they're older. In the community for one to three years, they feed it, care for it, and treat it as a guest of honor in the human world. At the ceremony itself, the bear is ritually killed. Its spirit sent back to the camoy world with gifts and gratitude and its flesh and blood consumed by the community in a feast that is simultaneously a celebration and a renewal of the covenant between the spirit and human worlds.

[00:10:25]The cub during its time in the community is treated with genuine affection alongside its ritual significance.

[00:10:34]It may be nursed by women alongside human infants. It's given a name. It lives in a special cage built for the purpose.

[00:10:44]But it's regularly handled, played with, and treated as a member of the community whose needs and well-being truly matter.

[00:10:54]This is not theater or pretense. In the I knew understanding, the bear cub is a young camoi who has chosen to spend time in the human world and treating it well during this period as a demonstration of the community's reliability as a partner in the exchange relationship.

[00:11:12]The bearup experiences I knew hospitality, care and food. When its spirit returns to the camoy world, it reports on what it experienced and its positive report encourages other camoy to visit in animal form.

[00:11:30]The ceremony itself is conducted with elaborate ritual precision. The bear is led from its cage in procession, brought before the assembled community, addressed in formal speeches of gratitude and explanation.

[00:11:45]It is then offered food and wine. The killing conducted with specific ritual implements, including the monet, a cross-like press of wooden poles that restrains the bear while causing it minimal prolonged suffering, is followed by immediate prayers and apologies.

[00:12:04]The bear's blood is then drunk by the hunters as a mark of intimacy of the exchange. The head is given the place of honor at the feast. Adorned with enol, the carved willow prayer sticks whose whittleled shavings curl outward in a distinctive form is one of the most recognizable elements of a new material culture.

[00:12:25]The inour gifts, objects made with skill and care, offered to the camo as expressions of human craft and gratitude.

[00:12:34]The feast that follows consumes the bear's flesh in an act that is explicitly understood as the community receiving the camo's gift in return for the gifts that it has given.

[00:12:46]But here's the thing. This was all banned in 1955 on grounds that it constituted cruelty to animals, which well, culture aside, I don't think you can really argue against it being cruelty to animals. I know animals get slaughtered in slaughter houses and everything, but uh this is a little bit different.

[00:13:13]The problem is this regulation struck the I knew community as a profound misunderstanding of what the ceremony involved and what it meant.

[00:13:24]The surprising thing is that the ban was eventually lifted in 2007 which of course a lot of people would have seen as a step back for uh animal rights but it is what it is. This was because there was decades of advoc advocacy rather by uh I knew cultural organizations and the ceremony has been revived in a modified form at several IU cultural centers.

[00:13:53]The revival debate touches on one of the most difficult questions in the study of indigenous traditions and that is how to practices whose meaning depends on an entire cosmological framework survive the partial destruction of that framework and what is preserved and what is lost when a ceremony is revived by a community that is largely separated from the daily cultural context that gave the ceremony its original weight.

[00:14:20]Pretty complicated, huh?

[00:14:23]The Inu communities working to maintain and revive the omante are grappling with this question from the inside which is exactly where it should be grappled with I suppose.

[00:14:38]Well, next let's move on to the Yukar that is the uh great epic poems of the Inu oral tradition and they are one of the most remarkable bodies of indigenous literature in the world. The human yukar are heroic narratives told in the first person by human protagonists. Long intricate tales of warriors who go off to distant lands, encounter supernatural beings, rescue the distressed, write wrongs and then return home as heroes, but also having bearing hard one wisdom.

[00:15:15]The Camoy Yugara spirit songs, shorter but equally intricate narratives told in the first person by Camoy who described their experiences as in the divine world and their visits to the human world.

[00:15:30]Together, these two traditions constitute an oral literature of considerable sophistication, employing specific metrical patterns, elaborate parallelisms, refrains, and specialized vocabulary that differs significantly from the ordinary spoken ainu.

[00:15:48]The performance of yukar was not a casual activity either. It was a skilled art form requiring years of training, an extraordinary memory, and the capacity for sustained performance.

[00:16:01]Major Yukar could take many hours or even multiple sessions to complete.

[00:16:06]The performers were typically women, a feature of Inu oral tradition that distinguishes it from many other heroic epic uh traditions globally, where the bard is almost universally male.

[00:16:18]I knew women were the primary transmitters of the great narrative tradition and the female performers voice giving expression to heroic male protagonists created a specific aesthetic quality an act of imaginative ventriloquism requiring both technical mastery and deep cultural knowledge. The recording of Yukar by researchers in the late 19th century and early 20th was complicated by this tradition. You see, many of the most important performers were elderly women whose knowledge had not been transmitted to the younger ones, and the urgency of documentation was matched by the inadequacy of the available recording technology.

[00:17:00]The content of the Ukar reflects the IU world in its full complexity.

[00:17:06]The protagonists travel between the human world and the camoy world, between their home village and distant lands that are simultaneously geographic and supernatural.

[00:17:17]They encounter enemies who are sometimes human and sometimes divine, fight battles in which the outcome depends on ritual knowledge and spiritual power as much as physical prowess, and navigate relationships with supernatural beings that require the correct forms of speech and behavior to manage safely.

[00:17:37]The specific challenges and adventures described in the UK are not simply entertaining stories. They are in the context of oral tradition practical guides to the ethical and ritual requirements of navigating a world saturated with camoi. How to address a spiritual encounter unexpectedly or conduct yourself when you receive supernatural assistance and what obligations you might incur when you are assisted.

[00:18:07]What debts require payment.

[00:18:10]The camoy yukar are particularly fascinating because they are narrated from the perspective of the divine. The spirit speaks in its own voice, describes its own experiences, motivations and relationships with humans.

[00:18:24]One famous camoyukar is narrated by the owl, the blackeston's fish owl, who inhabits her Kaido, who presents itself as the guardian and protector of a human village, watching from the forest at night, warning the community of approaching dangers, keeping particular watch over the children, things like that. The owl camoy's description in its uh own domestic life in the spirit world mirrors the a new domestic world it observes in the human realm reinforcing that principle that the divine and human worlds are structured well kind of the same way.

[00:19:06]Another famous camoy yukar is narrated by a small fish hook that has accumulated camoy presence through years of use and that describes its own inner life with a combination of pride in its function and awareness of the relationship it embodies between the fisherman and the sea.

[00:19:25]The ueipeca are the shorter pros narratives closer to what we would call folktales or legends that address different register of experience from the heroic epic where the yukar deal with extraordinary protagonists in extreme situations.

[00:19:44]The UPCa often address ordinary life, social relationship, the consequences of breaking taboos and encounters between ordinary people and the extraordinary.

[00:19:56]They function as a form of moral education, showing through narrative the specific ethical requirements of a new life, all the basic stuff, the hospitality of guests, how to treat your elders, and of course the ritual obligations.

[00:20:12]Well, how clever characters navigate difficult situations too is a big deal.

[00:20:17]Many u have specifically comedic dimensions. The trickster figure, the absurd situation, the resolution through wit rather than force.

[00:20:29]It all provides a relief from the moral weight of the camoy yukar and the heroic intensity of the major yukar.

[00:20:39]Well, let's keep going. Let's talk about the creatures of the IU folklore because there's plenty of them to talk about.

[00:20:48]The IU world is populated with a remarkable diversity of supernatural beings and that's beyond the major camoy of nature and the heroic protagonists of the Yukar.

[00:21:00]These beings range from the benevolent to the dangerous, from the small to the vast, and their descriptions reveal an imagination that is simultaneously firmly grounded in specific landscape features of northern Japan and extraordinary creative in the beings it projects onto that landscape.

[00:21:21]The Koro Pokuru, literally people under the leaves of the butterbar plant, are perhaps the most charming and most disgusted of the smaller supernatural beings in the Au tradition.

[00:21:34]They are a race of small people living underground or in hidden places of the landscape who were in the world before the Inu arrived and with the whom the Inu coexisted in a relationship of kind of a weary mutual benefit.

[00:21:53]Now, in most commonly told versions of the tradition, the Koropokuru would leave fish and game for the Inu near their houses at night in exchange for receiving a few small gifts left out for them. They were shy though, and they didn't like being seen. The detailed echo's fairy traditions cross many cultures. If you watch the uh English folklore video, you'll know what I mean.

[00:22:20]But also uh a relationship would break down when a young a new man would grab one of the korupokuru as it delivers gifts. Big mistake. Whereupon the small people departed and were no longer seen again. That one guy who just had to ruin it for everyone.

[00:22:42]The story is a parable about the conditions of exchange. gifts might require the right of relationship, including the respect of the givers's boundaries, and the young man had violated them. Therefore, well, the little people went away, never to be seen again.

[00:23:04]Grabbing what you want rather than accepting what is offered destroys the possibility of reciprocity.

[00:23:11]There's been considerable scholarly and popular discussion about whether the Koro Boguru represent a memory of an actual earlier population.

[00:23:21]Perhaps a pre-Inu people of smaller stature who inhabited the region before being displaced. Or perhaps they were purely mythological figures.

[00:23:31]The Jon people, the prehistoric inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago from whom the Aua largely descended, don't show any marked difference in stature from the Inu themselves.

[00:23:44]So the memory of an earlier people interpretation is not strongly supported by physical anthropology.

[00:23:53]But here's something that's more likely.

[00:23:56]The koro pokuru belong to a widespread human tendency to populate the landscape with smaller invisible beings who represent the nonhuman life of the world. The beings who are there when you're not looking, who maintain the world's functioning in ways that humans rarely notice, and whose relationship to the human community is governed by the same principles of respect, exchange that govern all relationships in the AU moral universe.

[00:24:29]The Repun Camoy are the next ones, the offshore gods, the sea deities, and they're among the most powerful and most feared of the beings in AU tradition, reflecting the centrality of the sea and its resources to AU coastal life. The orca whale is the most important of the sea camoy, understood as the lord of the ocean, who controls the availability of marine resources, and whose good will is essential to successful fishing. I knew fishermen addressed the orca with specific prayers and ritual forms when they encountered it at sea, and the killing of an orca was either absolutely prohibited or surrounded by elaborate ceremony, depending on the specific regional tradition. Everyone had slightly different ideas.

[00:25:20]The orca's dual nature, simultaneously a powerful predator and a provider of food through its role in driving fish, shows the new understanding of camoy power as morally ambiguous in ways that are not reducible to simple good or evil.

[00:25:38]The nitn camoy are a category of malevolent spirit, literally bad gods or demon spirits.

[00:25:47]They represent the dangerous and destructive aspects of the supernatural world. The yang to the yin, I suppose.

[00:25:55]Unlike the major camoy of nature, who are powerful but potentially benevolent when properly respected, the nitn camoya beings whose intentions toward humans are primarily hostile.

[00:26:08]They cause illness, misfortune, and inhabit dangerous places. Deep pools in rivers where people might drown, avalancheprone mountain faces, the margins between the settled human world and the wild natural one. The Inu shamanic tradition, the ritual practitioners who could diagnose and treat spirit-caused illness dealt primarily with the nitnik camoy using their knowledge of the spirit world to identify which malevolent being was responsible for a given affliction and how to sort out that problem, find the influence and neutralize it.

[00:26:46]The shamanic specialist, particularly the female shaman, the Tusukur, was essentially a figure in a new community life that no one could do without. One whose knowledge provided the community with its primary means of managing the dangerous aspects of the world.

[00:27:05]The Upas Camoy, the snow deity or frost god, represents the specific supernatural character of Hokkaido winter, which is among the harshest in East Asia and which shaped a new culture in fundamental ways.

[00:27:21]Winter on Hokkaido brings months of deep snow, temperatures that regularly fall well below freezing, and the specific dangers of a landscape that can become lethal to the unprepared.

[00:27:34]The Ubas Camoy is not simply a personification of cold, though. It is a being with motivations and requirements, capable of being addressed and appeased, whose severity in any given winter reflects the quality of the human community's relationship to the spirit world. Rituals conducted at the onset of winter were partly practical preparations for the difficult months ahead and partly forms of negotiation with these supernatural forces whose decisions would shape whether the winter was survivable or catastrophic.

[00:28:10]And believe me, up in the north in Hkaido, the winter is extremely cold.

[00:28:17]Not as cold as northern China, but extremely cold. Anyway, this is the I knew version of a universal human impulse to address the conditions of life not merely through material preparation but through the management of the relationships that govern those conditions at this deeper level.

[00:28:41]Next, let's talk about the in the sacred objects and a little bit about prayer.

[00:28:48]First up, the Enow are the physical expression of a new prayer and the material medium of the relationship between the human and spirit worlds.

[00:28:57]They're pretty recognizable wooden objects, most commonly made from willow, that are shaped by cutting and shaving wood in specific ways that produce the characteristic curling shavings that are the in's most visually distinctive feature.

[00:29:13]The shavings are not removed from the stick. They remain attached curling outward from the surface of the carved wooden spirals that represent both the physical act of human craft and the spiritual offering that the craft embodies.

[00:29:28]The making of enal is a skilled art that requires specific knowledge of the appropriate forms for different purposes, different camoy dresses and different ceremonial contexts.

[00:29:40]A man who could make Inar well was a person of spiritual as well as technical capability.

[00:29:47]No doubt a popular person in the village.

[00:29:51]And the diversity of inau forms is quite remarkable too. There are small in made for personal prayer placed at domestic altars or carried on the person. There are large ceremonial ino erected at sacred places in the landscape at the entry to a village. The margin between the settled and wild worlds had significant natural uh natural features rather like unusual rock formations or old large trees that have accumulated a camoi presence.

[00:30:23]There are specifically shaped enow for addressing specific camoi. The fire goddess Fui who has Eno whose forms are different is different rather from those addressing the mountain deity which differ again from those addressing the Sahi deity and so on and so forth. You get the point. The language of Eno, the visual vocabulary of carved form, pattern and arrangement is a material language parallel to the verbal language of prayer. and reading it requires knowledge of the tradition that cause a casual observation cannot really provide you.

[00:31:03]Next is the Hessot altar, the sacred window sill on the eastern side of a traditional AU house through which prayers were directed toward the camoy.

[00:31:14]That was the domestic focal point of the Inau tradition. You know how European homes in medieval times would have hearths? Well, I knew I had the uh Hezekot altar on the window sill.

[00:31:29]The Enow were placed on the Hezekot and renewed periodically.

[00:31:34]Old Eno that had served their purposes were not simply discarded, but rather treated with respect as objects that had been in contact with the divine.

[00:31:44]The Eastern orientation of the altar reflects the AU cosmological significance of east as the direction of the rising of the sun and the entry of light and life into the world. The spatial organization of traditional ayenu houses was a cosmological map as much as a functional dwelling with each direction, each area of the house and each piece of furniture carrying a specific symbol and significance.

[00:32:13]The fire in the center of the house was not simply a source of heat and light.

[00:32:18]It was the residence of Fu, the fire goddess and the domestic focal point of the entire Anu spiritual world.

[00:32:29]The Tuki, the ceremonial drinking cup used in ritual context, is another material object of deep significance.

[00:32:38]out from wood, often with elaborate decorations, including the mustache lifter bar, which distinguishes the male ceremonial duki. The cup was used in specific ritual contexts, including the ceremony of sending prayers to the camoy through the medium of wine, a sake or millet beer that was offered as a gift.

[00:33:03]The mustache lifter, a small bar attached to the edge of the cup that held the characteristic I knew male mustache out of the liquid, is one of the most immediately recognizable elements of traditional a new male dress and ritual equipment.

[00:33:18]I knew men traditionally wore full mustaches and the specific form of the tuki was designed to accommodate this.

[00:33:26]The intersection of personal appearance and ritual function in the design of Tuki reflects the degree to which I knew material culture was organized around the requirements of spiritual life rather than purely practical considerations.

[00:33:44]I knew shamanism, the practice of specialist ritual practitioners who could communicate with uh the spirit world is one of the most distinctive and least widely known aspects of a new life. The IU shamanic tradition has specific features that distinguish it from both the Siberian shamanic traditions to the north and from the Japanese spiritual traditions to the south.

[00:34:10]But the thing is it shares elements of both. Right in the middle it reflects the position of a new people at the intersection of multiple cultural spheres.

[00:34:21]The primary shamanic specialist in AU tradition was the Tusu Kur literally means one who trembles or the one who shakes a name that references the physical manifestations of spirit possession that characterize the shamanic state. that Uzu was predominantly though not exclusively a woman and her role in the community was of quite a bit of importance.

[00:34:47]He was the person who could diagnose the specific spiritual case of illness, identify which camoy or nitn camoy, remember that's the bad ones who were responsible and conduct the ritual interventions necessary to address the problem.

[00:35:05]Biscuit the diagnosis, treatment and cure. They all relied on her. Sometimes him, but mainly her. Illness in the I knew framework was not primarily a physical manifestation.

[00:35:17]It was a relational disruption, a sign that the relationship between a person, household, or community in some aspect of the spirit world had gone wrong and it required a kind of correction.

[00:35:32]The Tuzu Kuru's knowledge of the spirit world acquired through training, experience, and the specific spiritual gifts that marked her as a suitable one for the role gave her the ability to navigate this relational diagnosis in ways that ordinary people simply could not.

[00:35:49]The shamanic ceremony was conducted in specific context requiring the tusukur to enter a state of altered consciousness typically through rhythmic movement, the use of specific ritual equipment and the assistant of a few helper spirits who facilitated communication with the other world.

[00:36:10]The physical manifestations described in accounts of the too soon. This is the ritual ceremony. Um the trembling, the rapid breathing, speaking in voices other than the practitioners uh practitioner's own are consistent with descriptions of shamanic trans states across a wide range of cultures and have been the subject of considerable anthropological analysis.

[00:36:34]What is specific to the AU tradition is the detailed cosmological framework within which these states are embedded.

[00:36:42]The Tuzukur was not simply entering an undifferentiated spirit world, but navigating a specifically structured divine realm whose geography, inhabitants, and protocols were mapped by the tradition that she'd been trained in.

[00:36:58]Then there's the Nusa, the ritual altar used in outdoor ceremonies, the spatial focus of many shamanic and community ritual activities.

[00:37:09]The nua typically consisted of a row of inow in various forms planted in the ground at a specific outdoor location creating a dedicated sacred space at the boundary between the human settlement and the natural world.

[00:37:24]It was at the Nusa that major ceremonies were conducted and that the communication between the human community in the camoy world was most formally managed or with that specialist knowledge of the tutu there.

[00:37:39]Now, the outdoor sacred space was distinct from the domestic sacred space of the Hessot altar in ways that reflected the distinction between individual and family spiritual practice and community level spiritual practice.

[00:37:53]Of course, both were essential and both required maintenance, but the Nusa ceremony was a communal event in a way that domestic prayer just couldn't match up to.

[00:38:07]Finally, the Akashi, the male elder, a grandfather-like figure, the complimentary ritual specialist to the female Tusukur, where the Tuzukur's role centered on direct communication with the spirit world through transers and possession.

[00:38:24]The Akashi's ritual role was granted in knowledge of correct verbal forms, proper ceremony, and the accumulated wisdom of that oral tradition.

[00:38:36]The Akashi led the verbal prayer, made the formal speeches of addresses to the camo and conducted the rituals of daily and seasonal life that required expert knowledge of protocol rather than direct spiritual contact of the shaman.

[00:38:53]This division of spiritual labor between the male and female specialists, each with their own domain of expertise and their own relationship to the spirit world, reflects the IU understanding of gender as complimentary rather than hierarchical because both roles are after all essential. Neither is subordinate to the other and the community's spiritual life simply requires both of them to function.

[00:39:21]A new cosmological traditions describe a world whose origins are divine and whose structure reflects the specific features of the North Pacific environment in which they lived.

[00:39:32]The creation accounts vary considerably across regional traditions. Hokkaido, Sakalin, and the Kuril Islands each had their own specific versions of the narrative, but certain themes recur with sufficient consistency to constitute a recognizable high cosmological framework.

[00:39:53]In one widely recorded tradition, the world before creation was a formless chaos, a muddy, watery mixture without distinction or order. a big mess really.

[00:40:07]The creator deity, sometimes identified as Camoy Moshiri, the divine world or divine land, sent a wagtale bird down to the surface of the water to create some land. The wagtail beat its wings and stamped its feet on the surface, compacting the mud, pushing the water aside, and gradually solid land was formed.

[00:40:30]This creation by an animal agent rather than directly by a divine word or act is quite characteristic of a cosmological sensibility in which the natural world i.e. birds, animals and specific creatures of the a new landscape are active participants in the creation of maintenance of the world rather than passive objects of divine creation.

[00:40:52]Now, as for the wagtail, that's a small bird quite common in Hkaido, whose characteristic tail bobbing movement is easily read as a stamping action.

[00:41:02]The cosmological narrative is grounded in the observation of actual natural behavior. Of course, the structure of Au cosmos in the mature tradition involves multiple worlds arranged vertically. The upper world or heavens camoy mushiri where the camoy reside in their divine communities. The middle world mosheri which is the human world and the lower world pna mohiri associated with the dead and the various underworld beings.

[00:41:35]Communication between these worlds moves along a vertical axis with fire particularly the domestic hearth fire serving as the primary conduit between the human middle world and the divine upper.

[00:41:49]Smoke rises and they carry the prayers up. The dead however descend.

[00:41:56]So the model is not entirely unlike cosmological models found across many cultures. But the specific IU version has distinctive features as the lower world is not a place of punishment or darkness but rather just a parallel domain whose inhabitants have their own lives and whose relationship to the upper and middle worlds is one of exchange rather than absolute separation.

[00:42:23]The origin of the Inu people themselves is addressed in several distinct narrative traditions.

[00:42:31]One important tradition holds that the Inu are descended from the offspring of a divine dog and a divine woman, a union that establishes from the beginning the intimacy between the human and animal worlds that characterizes the cosmology.

[00:42:46]This is not a derogatory origin story in the IU understanding. You see, the dog was more of a divine being and the human animal mixture that resulted was a feature of the a new position in the world as beings who stood at this intersection of the divine and earthly, the animal and spiritual.

[00:43:05]Another tradition holds that the first were created directly by the camo and placed in specific landscapes of Hkaido with various features of the land created around them to provide the resources they needed.

[00:43:20]In this version, the landscape is not a neutral environment in which people had and do live, but a specifically designed home whose features reflect divine intention and whose specific character shapes the people who inhabit it. The concept of IU Moshiri, the IU land, the human world is not simply a geographic destination, but a spiritual concept, i.e. the specific portion of the cosmos that the I knew have begun um giving a rather stewardship of that requires their care and ritual intention to maintain the proper functioning order.

[00:44:00]The decline of the natural world is not in the IU understanding simply an ecological problem.

[00:44:07]It's a relational one. A sign that the obligations of reciprocity between humans and camoy have been sufficiently well rather insufficiently maintained.

[00:44:19]That the gifts of the natural world have been taken without adequate return.

[00:44:25]This theological understanding of ecological decline is not a modern environmentalist retrofit onto a traditional culture but rather a direct expression of the camoy framework that has given the a new life generations after generation.

[00:44:41]It is one of the aspects of a new cosmology that has attracted the most serious attention from contemporary environmental philosophers.

[00:44:51]Well, let's talk a little bit about material culture in art. The specific patterns that characterize a new textile and woodwork design, the specific forms of personal adornment and arrangements of objects and all that, well, they all express the understanding of the world and the human beings placed within it.

[00:45:11]The section will uh focus of course on the aspects of I knew material culture that most directly intersect with folklore and spiritual tradition that we've been discussing. But of course there's other parts of material culture that are in a different realm. But today we're talking about the folklore aspects.

[00:45:30]First up we got the traditional au garment woven from the inner bark of the elm tree. It's decorated with the geometric patterns that are most immediately recognizable features of a new visual culture. The patterns traditionally applied to embroidery and applique in dark blue and white are characterized by complex curvear forms.

[00:45:55]You've got spiral scrolls, these interlocking curves, and they all form this visual vocabulary of quite a bit of sophistication, we could say.

[00:46:07]Well, they're not purely decorative either. The specific forms placed on specific parts of the garment protect the wearer at the specific bodily locations that they cover, serving as a form of spiritual armor. A woman who embroidered a garment for her husband was performing an act of care that was simultaneously domestic and ritual, providing both warmth and spiritual protection.

[00:46:32]The knowledge of the appropriate patterns for appropriate purposes was a form of expertise transmitted from mother to daughter that was valued as any other form of practical knowledge.

[00:46:44]Then there was the practice of lip tattooing in IU women. One of the most discussed and most misrepresented aspects of their culture.

[00:46:53]Adult old Inu women traditionally wore a tattoo around the mouth, a wide dark band that extended beyond the natural lip line, giving the tattooed face a characteristic expression that has sometimes been misread by outsiders as intimidating or strange.

[00:47:11]The practice began in childhood with small marks applied progressively as the girl grew, expanding to the full design by the time she reached adulthood.

[00:47:21]The lip tattoo was not merely ornamental, but it was rather a marker of adult female identity, a form of spiritual protection, I guess, particularly important around the mouth at the sight of speaking, eating, and breathing. The connection to an ancestral practice that made women recognizable to the divine world as I knew women rather than a being of ambiguous identity.

[00:47:47]But what about a woman without a lip tattoo?

[00:47:51]Well, in the I knew belief, she was incomplete in the social and spiritual framework.

[00:47:58]The practice was banned by the Japanese government in 1871 as part of a broader campaign of forced assimilation that stripped the Inu of multiple cultural practices simultaneously.

[00:48:13]A new wood carving, particularly the carving of ceremonial objects and household items, employed the same curve vocabulary is the textile tradition, expressing in wood the visual language that thread expressed in fabric.

[00:48:29]The most elaborate carved objects were typically those with the most direct ritual significance, the prayer stick holders, the sake cup stands, and the ceremonial spoons and food containers.

[00:48:41]The carving of these objects was uh not a craft separate from spiritual function. It was an act of carving that was quite integral to the relationship with the other world performed correctly and with the right intentionality and invested the object with the spiritual charge and an appropriate purpose.

[00:49:02]But a poorly made or carelessly made ceremonial object was not just aesthetically deficient but spiritually sufficient. Unable to function as a bridge between the human and the camo.

[00:49:16]Useless garbage.

[00:49:19]This integration of craft and spirituality is characteristic of many indigenous traditions and it represents a fundamentally different relationship between the made world and the sacred than most western frameworks allow.

[00:49:36]But before we finish up, let's talk about what the future holds and how we got ourselves into the modern uh situation of the AU culture.

[00:49:49]The history of the I knew over the past two centuries has not been good. It's one of systematic dispossession, suppression, and marginalization.

[00:50:00]It's only been partially addressed by more recent Japanese government recognition and the legal protections that have gradually, albeit incompletely, been extended to the Anu community.

[00:50:12]The Inu were officially recognized as an indigenous people of Japan only in 2019.

[00:50:19]That's right, only about what 7 years ago. A recognition that came after decades of advocacy.

[00:50:27]And that, sure, while it was welcome, doesn't really reverse the accumulated losses of the preceding century and a half. Understand the current state of AU folklore and tradition requires honest engagement with that history.

[00:50:44]The Maji period of Japanese history between 1868 and 1912 was catastrophic for AU culture. The colonial expansion of the Japanese state into Hkkaido, renamed from Azo, its AU name in 1869, proceeded through the allocation of AU lands to the Japanese settlers, the for settlement of nomadic and semi-nomeatic Anu communities, the prohibition of traditional practices, including the Eomante bear ceremony, hunting with poisoned arrows, and the use of Anu language in schools. It was all over.

[00:51:21]The lip tattooing ban of 1871 was one element of a broader project of force assimilation intended to transform the IU into good little Japanese subjects fitting in with the general population.

[00:51:38]Well, the explicit aim was cultural erasure and it achieved substantial success.

[00:51:44]Within two or three generations, the majority of the Anu population had lost fluent command of their language and practical knowledge of their ceremonial tradition.

[00:51:54]The response of a new cultural activists and scholars from the late 19th century onward represents one of the most remarkable stories of resistance in the modern modern world rather in terms of culture. the work of Yuki Chiri, who completed her collection of Camo Yukar transcriptions and translations at the age of 18 in 1922, writing in the preface with devastating clarity that she had gathered these songs because, quote, "My race is declining and the songs will soon be forgotten forever."

[00:52:28]He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 19 before she could see the work published.

[00:52:35]Now that's sad I think. But Jur's collection compiled with the assistance of the linguist Kyoske Kindichi preserve text that would otherwise have been lost within a generation and it stands as a monument to both the richness of the tradition and the urgency of its documentation.

[00:52:56]Contemporary IU culture life is shaped by the tension between the reality of significant cultural loss and the genuine vitality of the revival movements that have emerged over the past four decades.

[00:53:10]The Uppoi National Anu Museum opened in Shira Shi excuse me Hokkaido in 2020 represents the most ambitious government investment in a new cultural preservation to date. The museum has been welcomed by many in the IU community, a kind of long overdue recognition, while others raise concerns about the degree to which the IU community's own voices shape the institution's interpretive framework.

[00:53:42]The question of who controls the representation of indigenous culture, the indigenous community, or the national institutions that fund and manage the museums. Well, that's a complex one that the IU case highlights with particular clarity.

[00:54:01]The Inu language once on the verge of extinction with only a handful of fully fluent native speakers remaining by the late 20th century has been another sub uh subject of substantial revitalization efforts including language documentation projects, the development of teaching materials and the establishment of immersive language programs.

[00:54:24]The language's isolation, its lack of demonstrated relationship to any other language family makes it both uniquely precious and uniquely challenging to revitalize since learners can't draw on the support of a related language community.

[00:54:39]The current number of fluent AU speakers is still very small, but we hope it'll get bigger.

[00:54:48]What remains and what the revival movements are working to sustain is something more than the sum of specific practices, artifacts and texts, but rather a way of understanding the world.

[00:55:00]The camoy framework, the principle of reciprocal relationship between the human and spiritual, the understanding of the landscape as a community of persons rather than a collection of resources.

[00:55:12]All of these are not merely ethnographic curiosities. their ways of knowing that the genuine relevance beyond the IU community itself. Ways of thinking about the relationship between human beings and the world they inhabit that differ profoundly from the dominant frameworks of industrial modernity. And that offer for anybody willing to engage with them seriously. A genuinely different perspective on what it means to live well in a world that's not merely just a backdrop to human whims.

[00:55:45]The bear in the forest. The wagtail that stamped the land into being. The fire goddess who carries the prayers. The small people under the butterbell leaves who left fish at the door by night.

[00:55:59]They all refuse to be wiped away by some scientific understanding or government medddling.

[00:56:07]They are in the end of the day expressions of a coherent and sophisticated relationship to the world.

[00:56:14]Yuki Chiri dying at 19 with her collection barely published.

[00:56:20]She knew what was at stake.

[00:56:23]We're so glad that she spent that time in her life before she was so cruy taken away from us writing down these things.

[00:56:34]It's a shame. Go and read her work, collection of I knew divine songs. You should be able to find it.

[00:56:42]Anyway, the future still receives these stories.

[00:56:48]They're still speaking.

[00:56:50]And with fingers crossed and cautious optimism, I think the story of the I knew people is not quite over yet.

[00:57:00]Let's hope that preservation efforts continue.

[00:57:04]Anyway, thank you so much for uh listening. Hey, I suppose I'm one of the ones who are doing those preservation efforts, right? Me and the lads who came up with this idea for a another folklore video.

[00:57:20]Everyone does their part.

[00:57:22]And you do yours by just listening to this and liking, subscribing, commenting, and telling your friends.

[00:57:28]And thank you to everybody supporting on the Patreon, YouTube memberships, merch store, and donation links. Keeping everything ad free.

[00:57:36]Yeah, a different kind of hero.

[00:57:40]Anyway, that's enough from me for tonight and I will see you in the next exciting video. I hope you enjoyed our time together and I look forward to the next time you pay us a visit. So, for now, good night and farewell.