Ainu: the Indigenous People from Japan

Part 1 — 26.08.2020

The Ainu are indigenous people from Japan who live mostly in Hokkaido and northern Honshu but also the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin. There are approximately two hundred thousand of them.

Ainu’s origins are uncertain since they show neither linguistic nor genetic similarities with the Japanese. However, one of their legends says that ‘the Ainu lived in this place a hundred thousand years before the Children of the Sun came’.

In the past their economy and social activities were based on hunting, foraging and fishing. Nowadays Ainu people have the same lifestyle as the Japanese but they try to preserve their traditions alive.

Part 2 — 02.09.2020

Around the age of 6 or 7 Ainu girls began to be tattooed in preparation for their future marriage.

The tattoo was performed by a trained woman who started making a few dots and then small cuts near the upper lip with a ceremonial knife. The cuts were rubbed with charcoal and every year the ceremony was repeated until the wedding day, when the final cut was made by the groom. The age of marriage was 17 to 18 years for men and 15 to 16 years for women – at these ages the sexes were regarded as adults.

According to Ainu beliefs, the wives of heavenly deities also have tattoos on their lips and arms, therefore, if a demon of disease comes and sees that Ainu women are marked the same way, he will mistake them for goddesses and flee away.
Nowadays this practice is not performed anymore because Ainu were assimilated into the Japanese society.

Part 3 — 09.09.2020

Ainu are animists, believing that everything in nature has a kamuy (a spirit or God) inside. Among their festivities, we have the Bear Festival, which was a religious ceremony - a special day when the village bear was sacrificed and an Ainu woman received a bear cub to raise. It would be part of the village until it got too big and dangerous to live with.

Then, during the ceremony, the bear was sacrificed to the mountain and a new bear cub was given to an Ainu woman. The meat was eaten,
the skin saved and sometimes people would paint themselves with the blood.
The bear was for Ainu a sacred animal, a superior creature and a guardian of the village it grew up in.

Written by Manuel Jose Flores Aguilar