The ceremony of sending is the best known and most misdescribed thing in Ainu religion. Outside accounts, from early European visitors to modern summaries, report it as a bear sacrifice, and that framing is wrong at the root. A sacrifice offers a victim to a deity. A sending returns a guest to his own house with gifts and honours, so that he goes back well provided and speaks well of his hosts. The killing is inside the farewell, not the point of it.
The atlas describes the shape of the ceremony and does not set out its conduct. The songs, the order, the words and the handling belong to the communities that hold them; some of it is restricted; and a reference work that printed a procedure would be offering instructions for a rite that is not its to give.
The ceremony was also interrupted. Assimilation policy in Hokkaido from the late nineteenth century onward pressed against Ainu practice generally, and administrative discouragement in the twentieth century made the bear ceremony effectively impossible to hold for decades. That discouragement was later withdrawn. Ainu communities have since resumed ceremonies, with recognition in Japanese law as an indigenous people since 2019 and public support for cultural transmission.
Whether what is held now is continuous with what was held before, or a revival after a break, is argued within Ainu communities themselves. It is their argument, and the atlas records that it exists rather than adjudicating it.