Ainu transmission is oral and it is formidable. The yukar are long epic recitations, performed in a distinct literary register of the language, held in memory and delivered over hours, and alongside them sit shorter song forms and prose narrative. The literature is substantial and it was never written by those who held it.
The outside record was made during dispossession. Japanese policy from the late nineteenth century assimilated the Ainu by law, restricting language, practice and livelihood, and the ethnography of that period was produced in the same decades. Foreign collectors, missionaries and Japanese scholars all worked in it, and the results are detailed and were gathered as a culture was being dismantled.
One transmission is exceptional and is worth naming. Chiri Yukie, a young Ainu woman, wrote down and translated a collection of the songs of the kamuy in the 1920s, in her own language and in Japanese, and died at nineteen having completed it. Her work is a rare case of the tradition committing itself to writing on its own terms, and it remains a foundation of the field.
Legal recognition came late. The assimilation law was replaced only in 1997, and the Ainu were recognised as an Indigenous people by the Japanese state in 2008.
The atlas records the structure and defers on ceremony.