In August 1923, the publishing company Kyōdo Kenkyūsha released a book titled Ainu Shin’yoshu (Collection of the Ainu Chants of the Gods). This unassuming little volume is thought to be the first published work of Ainu oral traditions translated and compiled by an actual Ainu – someone indigenous to the island of Hokkaido and its surroundings, once known as the Ainu Mosir. The Ainu in question was Chiri Yukie (知里幸恵), a young woman from the Noboribetsu Ainu community in southwestern Hokkaido. Chiri wasn’t alive to see her work published and admired, having passed away the year before at 19 years old. Despite her short life, Chiri’s accomplishments inspired many to appreciate and preserve Ainu traditions for future generations.
Chiri’s Early Years
Chiri Yukie was born in 1903 in the aforementioned town of Noboribetsu in southwestern Hokkaido, an island long home to the indigenous Ainu. Nowadays Noboribetsu is famous for its onsen resort in “Hell Valley,” one of the many jigokudani profiled in Krys Suzuki’s in-depth article on the hellish natural phenomena. But long before the advent of Japanese colonialism, Noboribetsu was a flourishing Ainu community that thrived on coastal fishing. Unfortunately, Japanese assimilation policies and bans on many Ainu cultural practices, such as nighttime fishing, forced many Ainu to abandon some of their traditional ways of living. Japan passed the Former Aborigines Protection Act in 1899, imposing the foreign concept of land ownership and essentially making the Ainu people citizens of Japan against their will.
Many Ainu took up farming as a way to keep their land and earn a living under encroaching Japanese subordination. Chiri’s family was one such group of Ainu who suddenly found themselves tilling the land. Alas, farming didn’t always provide enough financial stability, and when Chiri was old enough to attend school, her parents sent her to live in the Ainu community Chikabumi in Asahikawa with her aunt Kannari Matsu. Chiri’s aunt was an oral storyteller employed as a “Bible woman” by the Church Mission Society. Chiri’s grandmother Monashnouk, another revered oral storyteller, came to live with them not long after. To live and learn from not one but two Ainu women well-versed in their people’s lore was no doubt an invaluable and impressionable experience for young Chiri.
The elementary school Chiri began attending in 1910 adhered to Japanese educational standards intended to promote assimilation. Chiri already had some bilingual skills thanks to her mission school-educated mother. This gave her a slight advantage over her peers who only understood Ainu, but that didn’t make her completely immune from discrimination. Despite graduating with a strong academic record, the first school Chiri applied to rejected her, most likely because she was Ainu. She attended another school in the meantime — she was the only Ainu in a class of Japanese students. She was eventually accepted to Asahikawa District Vocational School in 1917, where discrimination once again reared its head. The ostracization was bad enough for Chiri to discourage a younger friend of hers from continuing her education.
A Turning Point
Meeting the wajin (ethnic Japanese) scholar and linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke in 1918 set the stage for Chiri’s undertaking of transcription and translation. Kindaichi originally traveled to Asahikawa to confer with Monashnouk on Ainu oral traditions, specifically yukar, a ritualistic heroic narrative. He became keenly interested in Chiri after learning of her stellar bilingual and writing capabilities. He believed preservation of the Ainu’s oral culture would help hasten their progress in a rapidly changing world.
It’s not clear how exactly Kindaichi convinced Chiri to work with him. It is known, and perhaps inevitable, that some of his arguments carried a heavy colonialist bent positioning the Ainu people as a “dying race” and the act of preservation a dire and important task. Anxiety over her people’s future, especially the declining population, no doubt played a factor in convincing Chiri, though it’s unlikely she subscribed to the notion of Japanese ethnic superiority. However he persuaded her, Chiri eventually decided to help him.
The Early Beginnings of the Ainu Shin’yoshu
Chiri began her work in earnest after graduating in 1920. Kindaichi had already returned to Tokyo but sent Chiri blank notebooks for her to fill with whatever she pleased. She wrote down, among other oral works, urekreku (riddles), utashkar (children’s word games), and upopo (festival songs). Chiri also provided Kindaichi with a few yukar, long heroic narratives both Matsu and Monashnouk were well-versed in. Some of these yukar would later appear in more polished form in the Ainu Shin’yoshu.
Just as it is now, transcribing and translating was no simple task. Because the Ainu language has no official written system, Chiri first transcribed the oral tales into the Latin alphabet, which she most likely learned from the mission school-educated Matsu. From there, she translated into Japanese. She had no access to a dictionary in Chikabumi, not even the missionary John Batchelor’s rudimentary Ainu-Japanese-English copy. When stumped on how to translate a word, she jotted her questions to Kindaichi in the notebook’s margins.
Compiling the Ainu Shin’yoshu
Kindaichi’s postcards to Chiri were full of high praise for her work, and he made her another proposition: to compile and publish a collection of Ainu legends for a larger, less scholarly audience. Chiri agreed. Out of the vast wealth of Ainu chants and tales she transcribed, she focused on yukar, specifically kamui yukar, tales told from the first-person perspective of kamui. Chiri probably didn’t have access to the earlier drafts of these yukar, having mailed them off to Kindaichi, so she essentially had to translate from scratch.
Much like the Japanese word kami, kamui can be variously translated as god, spiritual entity, divine being, and so on. Kamui can take on the form of animals, weather phenomena, and plants. The Ainu cultivated a respectful and nuanced relationship with the kamui; kamui yukar played an important ritual role in fortifying that communion. Many kamui yukar in the Ainu Shin’yoshu feature the revered Ainu hero Okikurmi, fearless and god-like, and the narrator of two kamui yukar in Chiri’s collection. His cousins Samayunkur and Shupunramka also make an appearance, though they are not nearly as heroic as Okikurmi. Chiri also included a yukar that showcases Ainu humor. The second kamui yukar “The Song the Fox Sang” features a fox kamui with less than stellar vision: for instance, he mistakes a pile of excrement for a beached whale, then goes on to misidentify other objects.
Translating and writing for a wider, more generalized audience also called for a more attentive approach. Kamui yukar are oral works, meant to be chanted, not read. The act of reading carries a vastly different level of participation than the act of chanting. She would have to make certain accommodations for the reader’s enjoyment. For example, the refrain, or sakehe, is repeated numerous times throughout the yukar, often after every phrase. It’s evident in Chiri’s surviving notebooks that she initially included the sakehe more often, but decided to gradually filter it out. How should she ensure readability without sacrificing the integrity of her people’s oral tradition and the lyrical cadence of these chants? Chiri ultimately opted to only include the sakehe at the beginning of a chant, and also left them untranslated.
Astutely, Chiri also left detailed footnotes clarifying an Ainu custom or word, such as inau, shaved wooden sticks used in ceremonies. Even these succinct explanations carried a wealth of information about the Ainu way of life.
Her Last Days in Tokyo
Kindaichi had earlier offered to host Chiri in his home in Tokyo, and Chiri was now eager to accept. However, a trip to Tokyo was no simple matter for Chiri, who suffered from congenital heart disease. Her father, suffering from a similar condition, was also purportedly anxious about Chiri making the long journey. Chiri was not deterred, and she set sail for Tokyo in May 1922.
While in Tokyo, Chiri worked on the Ainu Shin’yoshu manuscript and helped with domestic work in the Kindaichi household. She also took to reminiscing more about her childhood in her journals, some of which still survive. Chiri expressed a fierce unwavering devotion to Noboribetsu very early on in her life. Her longing for these places only deepened as she grew older. In her letters to family, she often expressed with a raw earnestness her longing for the sights and sounds of the sea.
Chiri had many reasons to look forward to going home. Prior to her departure to Tokyo, Chiri became engaged to an Ainu man named Murai Sōtarō and planned to marry him upon her return to Hokkaido. Chiri looked forward to married life and becoming a mother, but a medical examination in Tokyo dampened those dreams. Chiri’s heart was too weak to handle the strenuousness of pregnancy and childbirth. Nevertheless, while Chiri mourned for this lost future, she still believed marriage was possible for her, albeit a childless one. She also grew more certain about what her purpose in life would be, as expressed in a letter to her parents:
I have come to feel keenly that I have been granted a great mission that only I can perform. This is to set down in writing for posterity the literary art that my beloved brothers and sisters passed down over the several thousand years of the past. For me, this is a most appropriate and precious task.
Strong, (2011). p. 42
Unfortunately, a combination of work and Tokyo’s warm climate taxed Chiri’s already compromised health. On the night she finished the final proofreading of her manuscript, her heart gave out and she passed away.
A Lasting Legacy
Chiri had clearly intended to put down in writing more of her people’s rich oral culture, and others took up the mantle in Chiri’s stead. Her younger brother Chiri Mashiho became a respected Ainu scholar and ethnographer. He compiled a new Ainu-Japanese dictionary, one more thoroughly comprehensive than John Batchelor’s, and an Ainu place name dictionary. Following her retirement and return to Noboribetsu, Matsu took up transcribing and translating hundreds of Ainu tales, sending some to Kindaichi and others to Chiri Mashiho. The Japanese government awarded her the Purple Ribbon Medal in 1956 for her work.
The manuscript Chiri Yukie worked so hard on was published almost a year after her death and garnered high praise from Ainu scholars. It wouldn’t be until the 1970s when Chiri’s wish to share her people’s traditions with a wider public audience would come true. A 1973 in-depth biography by Fujimoto Hideo, followed by a more accessible edition of the Ainu Shin’yoshu in 1978, helped illuminate Chiri’s life and legacy to a larger, non-academic audience. In 2010, on the 88th anniversary of her passing, the Chiri Yukie Gin-no-Shizuku Memorial Museum opened in her hometown of Noboribetsu.
The preface Chiri wrote for the Ainu Shin’yoshu months before her death carries a sadness for her people’s loss in a world slowly becoming less accommodating, but it also carries hope. The final paragraph of her preface reads thus:
I who was born an Ainu and grew up with the Ainu language have written down with my halting brush just one or two very short pieces from among the sundry tales that our ancestors enjoyed relating on rainy evenings and snowy nights, whenever they had time to get together.
If the many of you who know us could kindly read them, I, together with the ancestors of my people, would consider it a source of supreme happiness, of boundless joy.
Strong, p. 196
Sources
Chiri, Yukie. (2013). The Song The Owl God Sang: The collected Ainu legends of Chiri Yukie (B. Peterson, Trans.). BJS Books.
Strong, Sarah M. (2011). Ainu Spirits Singing: The Living World of Chiri Yukie’s Ainu Shin’yoshu. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press.
