h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Kinda interested in the Ainu at the moment, as part of an "Ancient Peoples You Didn't Know Still Existed" kinda thing...

Hmm, what can I tell you.

Its a pretty deep subject so not something you can just chuck off an entry on in half a second or I would

As it happens I live right by Shibchar river in Sutnai (Shizunai in the language of the invading barbarian Japanese) one of the kotan (settlements) that used to be an Ainu stronghold. It is still a major centre for Ainu council meetings etc. so I have quite good first-hand access to the people and the culture if you have any specific areas of interest? Oral literature [=mythology]? Language? Tattoo designs? Cuisine? Building techniques? Religion and superstitions? Music? Weaving techniques and fashions? Its a pretty broad subject

As for the didn't know still existed thing: last year there was a big 'people you didn't know still existed and what to do about them' conference in Africa. Shortly before the conference, the utari (Ainu council of elders) overthrew their leaders for being a pair of appeasing morons who hadn't been half vocal enough in opposing the local MPs 'one nation, one people' speeches alleging the Ainu were fully integrated and no longer existed. And the Japanese government cunningly decided they couldn't approve the diplomatic credentials of the new leaders in time and prevented them attending the conference. Just to try and ensure that you continued to not know they still existed [The local MP by the way was Suzuki Muneo, whos just tearfully resigned, and the responsible foreign minister was Tanaka Makiko, who just got sacked over her arguments with Suzuki about which of them had their pants on fire)

Some people might say its a bit dumb to have a conference on put-upon people where the putters-upon get to decide who attends. But I'm just an old cycnic.

I'm interested in their view of how the world was created and what might be hiding under their beds at night.


I've been aware of them courtesy of National Geographic Magazine
since about 1974.

I'm not the one who didn't know they still existed.

I've been having various conversations on the site with people who ae relatively uneducated in world cultures, including their own.

I had to explain the importance of 70AD to a girl living in Jerusalem.

Well, when you consider that some of the "host" governments are keeping the original inhabitants alive (sometimes quite accidently) as quaint pets, it is not hard to believe they would like the ones that didn't bite them to speak to the world.

I met a man at church who did not know that Samaritans were real people. He thought they were a parable device the Christ used.
When I told him their was a small functioning contingent still around, it blew his little mind.

[A little bit of Ainu mythology, per request]

Once upon a time, the Green Pigeon God decided to go and see what the Sisam (evil Japanese barbarians accross the sea) were like.

On his way, he passed by Samayunkur's house, and Samayunkur called out 'Oi, Green Pigeon God, come to my house. The silly Sisam will worship you with their silly Shinto origami, and if you die you won't be resurrected. But I will worship you with Inaw (wooden sticks carved with curly wood shavings not quite detached). So Samayunkur dressed up in his sunday best and tried to shoot the Green Pigeon God [being shot at and eaten is a great honour if youre a pigeon god, ed.] but dodged the arrow. Samayunkur was pretty angry. 'You stupid pigeon God, if you go and see the Sisam they will kill you and not worship you properly, and you won't get resurrected properly, and your body will fester with maggots, and all the other gods will abandon you because you smell so bad, and if you ever do get resurrected it will be as a tiny little ordinary green pigeon.

But the Green Pigeon God went anyway. On his way he passed Okikurmi's house, Okukurmi said the same thing, but still the Green Pigeon God didn't listen. And when he got to the Sisam village, they shot him, and worshipped him with silly Shinto origami.

So the Green Pigeon God couldn't come back to life, and his body festered with maggots, and all the other gods stayed away because of the stench. And when he finally did get resurrected it was as a tiny little ordinary green pigeon. And all because he didn't do what he was told by the (friendly, Ainu) humans (who were only trying to shoot and eat him as is proper).

Moral: any Green Pigeon God with any sense (or at least fear for his karma) will in future bloody well stand still and get shot as he ought, and P.S. the Japanese are a bunch of hairless barbarians.

[Heavily paraphrased (the original is in the first person, from the pigeon's PoV) from 'Kamuy Yukar' ('Songs of the Gods': childrens wood-block picture book + English and Japanese translation pamphlet + CD + tape), as recited by Shirasawa Nabe and Nakamoto Mutsuko, pub. Katayama Institute of Linguistic and Cultural Research, 1995., JPY7,300.]

> I'm interested in their view of how the world was created
> and what might be hiding under their beds at night.

I'll see what I can find on their creation myths. I'm about to pop out for the day, so it will not be till tonight though. Later!

Bye bye.

Well, I'd had an idea that one of the traditional Ainu dances celebrated the creation myth in some way; and I managed to find my small guidebook to the dances of the Shiraoi area (from the Shiraoi Ainu Museum, well duh), only it wasn't in there Nor is there any mention of a creation myth in the book I have which is designed to help school teachers fix all the Ainu-related mistakes in the standard school curriculum; I suppose its trying to stay factual

So it looks like I may need a trip to one or all of the library, my local Ainu centre, or a bookshop or six. I've identified a book that definitely has detailed coverage of the creation myths of the Amur-Sakhalin Ainu, so if I draw a blank with locally I can try tracking that down. Sounds like we've got some stuff about shooting the sun, and an iron man, and some brother/sister incest stuff going on (like in the Japanese and Korean myths). May take a few days to flesh this out, but I'm all fired up now

One slightly unexpected problem I ran into doing a Japanese web seach for 'Ainu creation myths' is that the creation myth of Middle Earth, Ainulindalë ('Music of the Ainur', Ainurindare in Japanese) just happens to contain the letters Ainu, and since there are no spaces in Japanese Google can't tell the difference. And the whole world is hung up on Tolkien at the moment, so the Middle Earth stuff features high on the results

Yeah. I know. I've been Googling in English and having a high old time.
I ran across a minority opinion by an geneticist that says that the ancestors of the samurai and the royal family of Japan were actually Ainu...instead of "Konon"(not sure if that is right, notes on another file.)
I got moderated talking about the Ainu on another thread. A good sign, I think.

I haven't run across any creation stuff, but I have run across stuff about their "returning" spirits to their alternate universe home,
like that ceremony with the shaved sticks and the tethered bear cub.
Some stuff about the tattoos.
And some stuff about ancestors of the Ainu being some of the ancestors of the Inuit and some of the northwestern Indians of America. Mostly speculation based on skeletons.

Now, the really fun part. Where did the Japanese come from?

Well, I can't claim to have much original insight into this; but I currently subscribe to the Japanese (language) is a creole thoery. The grammar is just too stunningly similar to Korean, with odd bits of identical vocab going back to earliest recorded Japanese, and yet the rest of it (if you ignore all the Chinese loan-words they have in common) completely different. Under that theory, we get the Japanese royal family and court coming over for Korea (for whatever reason) and influencing the official language in the process (much as English Received Pronunciation is a result of our German monarchs being unable to speak English properly).

Key thing here though; most Japanese and Koreans have the Mongol Spot birth mark at the base of the back. Most Ainu don't. However, both Japanese and Ainu _are_ mostly lactose-tolerant (ability to usefully digest milk as an adult a disease shared by only 3% of the worlds population), which is really wierd as traditionally they wouldn't have been drinking milk much, but suggests they were both present in the Urals 10k years ago when random famine number 45937 caused the 3% can digest to turn into 3% can't in the peoples who ran away into western Europe (and the proto-Japanese/Ainu ran the other way?).

[This is all stuff I've read over the years and stored away and I have none of the sources easily to hand; so anyone who disagrees will just have to label me a bigot and let me get on with things 'cause I can't justify any of it ]

Interestingly, it seems the topic is no longer controversial to discuss. NHK did a big series of specials last year on the origins of the Japanese. Oh, right, very helpful guys: http://www.nhk.or.jp/nihonjin/ says 'The "Distant journey of the Japanese" home page closed on 31 March 2002'. Cheers. So this is going to have to be hearsay too. Anyway, its a commonly held view that there is a distinctly 'Japanese' facial type and build that is different from e.g. Korean or various styles of Chinese (although obviously you find some people of different types amongst each). The programme showed evidence from taking facial proportion measurements that there is a distinct Korean face with proportions x, y, z, and distinct NNW by N Outer Mongolian face with proportions a, b, c, and etc. etc., and then for an encore walked around, oh I don't know, Shinjuku or somewhere, showing that for each Japanese person you stopped you could say '80% Korean' or '75% NNW by N O Mongolian' or '...' etc. but the one thing you absolutely couldn't claim about the Japanese was that there was any uniformity at all. [And the programme makers returned alive to the studio to tell the tale. Wow]

Anyway, back to our Ainu friends. There seems to be a lot of crossover between Ainu and Japanese creation myths (brother ejaculating between sisters toes, forming primordial island etc.). The material I've found tends to ascribe this to Ainu trading contact with the Japanese in Tohoku, but on the other hand its a widely held view that the Japanese word for god Kami is derived from (not the other way around) the Ainu word Kamuy (god/bear/etc.). I think its important to remember here though that while the recorded (by others) history of the ancestors of the Ainu in Hokkaido goes back around 7/800 years modern Ainu rhetoric is that the 'Ainu Culture' per se dates back only 4/500. So there is no such thing as Ainu culture or traditions without interaction with the Japanese barbarians. That's not to say the language isn't much older, and no doubt they are both preserving the same n-000-year-old stories but theres a lot of crossover anyway.

Another closed web site: http://www5c.biglobe.ne.jp/~onokoro/ seems until a couple of months back to have had a wealth of informed opinion on Ainu and Japanese myths but has been taken off-line (says he's too busy to maintain it or something? don't see why he couldn't have left what he had in place ). And sadly, only the second-layer contents page [telling you everything you are missing] is preserved in the Internet Archive, but I've managed to recover a whole load of the pertinent info though Google's cache since its demise is recent enough.

And did you come accross http://www.dai3gen.net/ Seems to be an amateur linguisticist with a site devoted to Ainu Language and Japans Ancient History.

Anyway, I might pop out to the library in a while and see what I can see of the 3-or-so books that look ideal, and up to the Ainu museum to see if I can get a first hand account (you see I have the idea that the creation myth maybe doesn't actually feature that highly on the Ainu agenda, and the best way to confirm that is from the horses mouth).

Oh yeah; Iyomante, the sending back of the spirit of the bear cub: http://www.ainu-museum.or.jp/ the Shiraoi Ainu museum has its guide-book online in English and but also has a really detailed record of the ceremony with photos: http://www.ainu-museum.or.jp/iyomante/ Choose the left-hand link; you are agreeing to a disclaimer saying they have no time and little patience to respond to e-mails from PC animal-rights activists who have no respect for other cultures traditions. The IV is the pre-ceremony, V is the killing, skinning etc. of the bear, and VI is the prayers for the ancestors. The cub gets strangled between a pair of logs, BTW. They also have 2 Uwepeker (legends) online as a pdf (Japanese translation only, sadly) and MP3 files. Not a yukar or a kami-yukar, but better than not hearing it at all. For more what Ainu sounds like try the Radio Ainu course at http://www.stv.ne.jp/radio/ainugo/ The series from Jan - Mar 2000 covers extracts from various prayers, and Oct - Dec 1999 reads a whole Uwepeker over the course of the series.

http://cwis.livjm.ac.uk/lan/teaching/japanese/japanroo.htm

Let me mention this article from Discover magazine a few years ago that really held my attention, then I will read your above post.

I was having problems with one or all of my Window's Media Player downloads messing with my registry and disabling my Java capablities, so I erased it.
I have hit many of the sites you have mentioned, or versions thereof.

The article I linked above has some interesting ideas and excuses,
most of which are disputable by the official version of things, which is that the whole bunch of 'real' japanese are descended from a star.
Hello, Erich von Daniken...

I have had to revise some of my previously held ideas, but that doesn't mean I'm buying anything whole hog at the moment. Too much is unknown.

The reference to the "tomb of noses" in the above article is....um...disturbing.

Just as much as the accounts I've heard of U.S. Special Forces boys collecting ears during Vietnam and Laos...

Well, the library didn't have any of the books I had gone to look for [hey, population 25,000 in the middle of nowhere, I should be glad of a public library at all right; and they offered to try and order them; I didn't dare say yes; I know for a fact one of the things I was looking for is a boxed CD/book/video set costing over 1000 quid]

But it did have some others instead

So I am now armed with a general tome of Ainu stories collected / edited by Kayano Shigeru (an Ainu who actually served a term as a proportional representation seat MP for the Socialist party and is famous for a committee speech where he demanded the return of the Salmon to its rightful owners: the Ainu ... and the Owl [photo taken half-way through the word salmon: http://www5.hokkaido-np.co.jp/20century/ainu/kayanosan.html]).

But the gem I found, for the definitive source of alternate versions, is the 1232-page Volume 1 (Hokkaido, Ainu) of the 30-odd volume General Survey and Analysis of Japanese Folktales (1989). It classifies the stories into 593 basic motifs, and has a helpful cross-reference with the motif numbers used for the Japanese stories in the other 29-odd volumes Brothers Grimm? Hans C Andersen? Bunch of second-rate amateurs not worthy to lick boots ...

So (without, as yet, any useful notes or alternative versions), here goes with the tale of Kotankarkamuy and the Owl: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A723656 . Whether this will transmogrify into a general tract on Ainu, or just stand as a story on its own, or whatever, time will tell, but it seemed better than adding another story translation to this conversation where no-one but you and me will find it ...

Much appreciated. Wow, that story was related when I was nine months old!

Oh, I don't know about just you and me. Zarquon's Singing Fish is real interested in what I've told her so far.

She's a Zen Quaker who reads Tarot.

Sir Bossel's got a little Japanese cultural itch he likes to scratch every now and then and I gave him that link from the Discover article.

Now, going back to your earlier "what might be hiding under their beds at night":

Kayano says in his commentary that when he was young owls were really common (although they are now almost imaginary creatures) and you could hear them all night from the nearby mountains: 'Pewrep chikoip fummm, pewrep chikoip fummm' over and over. He goes on 'a voice out of the blackness is quite enough to threaten a child, and all you had to say to one that was crying continuously is "a pewrep chikoip will come and get you" and it would shut up on the spot'

Getting closer; I have some mentions of how the Ainu themselves were made now. http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A723791 I've kept the old entry separate for the moment

Its proving quite hard to find a single consistent creation account, but this is beginning to sound like a good story skeleton to hang some other detail off (like some of the other stories about What Aynu-Rakkur Did Next or some more about how these 6 people were made and what they did if I can find it).

And, Oh Best Beloved, I adore the explanation of How The Otter Lost His Memory

Time now, I think, for and

Absolutely mind-boggling. A little dense in structure, but there is a lot going on there.

What was that you said about a sister's sticky toes?

I like the bit about the male and female gods suddenly seeing each other without clothing.

The "ball of fire" birth method...um, is a little weird...

But here we have the Adam and Eve thing, the Phoenix, the concept of a progressive creation and the idea of man being a little less than divine. I like the bit about the women learning to sing and dance better than the men.

The sticky toes is the Japanese/Shinto creation myth for the Creation of the Land [Earth] (as distinct from the Creation of the Land [Nation] we're dealing with here).

Izanagi and Izanami, divine foot fetishists, get it on and the semen drips on the void and creates Onokoro, the original island. Or something like that. Haven't read the kojiki (old-things-record) for years so could be imagining it all

Also a little confusing is that in one of the pages I came upon in the last couple of days was something stressing the (comparative theological) importance of Ainu-Rakkur being half-man half-god, whereas he seems to be the issue of 2 gods here, or at least a god and a spirit.

And I don't know where it fits in yet, but I've also turned up something on there only being a woman to start with, and she lies with a white dog and begets man. (There are also stories further down the timeline about a man taking a dog for a wife).

As for the maligned otter, came accross another lovely reference: god told the otter to have half the water in the river flow one way and half the other, but the otter got it wrong and that's why all the water flows away into the sea ...

Anyhow, need to find another reference to the Six Original People and What They Did Next. Might have to do some work today too, being a Monday an' all

When Mosirkarkamuy was making man, he wasn't sure where to put the sexual organs. So he sent the otter back to heaven to get instructions. The gods, knowing how forgetful the otter was, decided to tell him the opposite: 'put them on the forehead'. The otter reported this as 'put them between the legs' and so thats what the creator did.

OR in another version

The gods decided the forehead would be the place to put the vital reproductive organs and sent the otter as a messenger. But on the way the otter went for a swim to catch some fish (we've heard this one before) and forgot what he had been told, so he told Mosirkarkamuy to put them on the crotch. There is nothing as forgetful as an otter.

OR (no otters here)

Long ago when the gods were making man they were having headaches over where to put the source of human abundance, dithering between the forehead, the armpits and the crotch. And to this day humans have hair on their heads, armpits and crotch as a result of the gods experimenting to see which one was best.

The Ainu obviously had some major suppressed dissatisfaction with their body layouts.

Well, it's more entertaining than hearing Victorian lies about what the Druids believed.

I've been trying to avoid that Shinto angle like the plague.
Looks like the Ainu have the "trickster" covered, too.