Kamuy

The atlas holds Kamuy as an entry in its own right, and the reason is that Ainu religion does not have the shape the deity table normally assumes. There is no fixed list of gods with names, ranks and portfolios, no priesthood keeping the list, and no scripture in which the list is written down. There is a word, kamuy, and a relationship the word describes, and named figures come out of it as required.

A kamuy lives in kamuy mosir, the land of the kamuy, where it has a house, a family and a form much like a person's. To come here it puts on a body. The bear a hunter meets is a kamuy dressed as a bear, and the meat and the pelt are the presents a guest brings. What is owed in return is hospitality: food, drink, courtesy, and a proper send-off home, at which point the borrowed body is left behind and the guest returns to speak of how it was treated.

The consequence is that the relationship, and not the being, is the unit. Whether a particular mountain, a particular illness or a particular carved tool counts as a kamuy is answered by whether it is being dealt with as one, and the boundary is not policed. Ranking works the same way: the kamuy of fire is the one every household deals with daily, and the kamuy of the mountains is the one the great ceremony concerns, but there is no throne and nobody sits on it.

The counterpart of kamuy is aynu, human being. The two words define each other, and the word the Ainu use for themselves is one half of that pair.

Almost everything recorded about the kamuy comes out of chanted oral literature, and the form of that literature is itself the argument. In the kamuy yukar, the songs of the kamuy, the kamuy narrates. The bear, the owl, the fox or the fire says what it did, what it saw the humans doing, what it thought of them, and how it decided to act. The audience is not told about a being; the audience is put inside one.

That is a theological claim delivered by grammar. If a kamuy is a person with a point of view, the way to present it is to let it speak, and a tradition that had wanted to present its powers as forces to be placated would not have chosen this form. The songs are full of judgements on human conduct made from the far side, and a good many of them are complaints.

Each song carries a refrain, a fixed burden repeated through the narrative, which identifies it and keeps the beat as the chanter marks time. Collectors have usually left the refrains untranslated, because they often carry no lexical sense, and printing them as sound is more honest than inventing a meaning.

The songs were written down late, mostly by outsiders working from elderly informants, and unevenly. One collection stands apart because it was made from inside: a young Ainu woman transcribed the kamuy yukar she had learned from her grandmother, translated them into Japanese herself, and the volume appeared in 1923. The atlas points at these texts and does not attempt to summarise the songs into a doctrine they were never written to hold.