| Looking for the endangered Ainu Lord of Hokkaido
"In short, the Ainu young man didn't return to his hometown and stayed directly with the pioneers. However, without him, it is doubtful whether the pioneers will survive that winter."-Haruki Murakami, Adventures in Search of Sheep
Hokkaido's "exotic sense" can be seen from the map. Whether it is the name of a city or a mountain or lake, there is an indescribable strangeness and a somewhat appropriate poetry. In fact, these names are all derived from the pronunciation of Ainu, and then borrowed from Japanese characters-because this is the hometown of Ainu people.
Ainu people in 1904, pictures from the Internet
When I came to Ahan Town, apart from experiencing the three lakes in Daodong, another major reason was to look for the traces of Ainu people. This kind of desire is often a paradox: wherever tourists can go without barriers, it is difficult to see pictures that are not interfered. Even if they are with locals, it is inevitable to listen to one or two far-fetched allusions in front of Mozhou Lake. The aborigines all over the world share a similar fate. As a kind of cultural capital, they are often distant and vague, only as a part of that picture.
Ainu Village
Hokkaido officially became Japanese territory for just over 100 years, but the Ainu people have lived in the Japanese archipelago (especially what is now northeastern Honshu and Hokkaido) for thousands of years, dating back to the end of the Paleolithic Age at the longest. After years of assimilation, the pure Ainu blood no longer exists. Even in the Ainu village-which is already the largest Ainu settlement in Hokkaido-there are only 30 households with a population of less than 130 people.
Contemporary Ainu people can no longer capture the traces of their ancestors from their faces, and their clothes are worn on the right side like kimonos, which is different from the traditional left side wearing method. The picture comes from the Internet
I wonder if the Ainu youth named "The Full Moon" in "The Adventure of Seeking Sheep" has ever regretted it. In the novel, he was hired as a guide by the first pioneers who came to Hokkaido. He left his birthplace in his twenties and never went back. He taught the pioneers to survive in harsh conditions, married one of the girls, gave birth to three children, and changed his Japanese surname. Later, the Meiji government promoted animal husbandry, and the Ainu boy became a shepherd until his descendants died in the battlefield of the Russo-Japanese War wearing woolen military coats.
Ainu Village
There are different opinions as to how the Ainu people first came to Japan. In appearance, they have the characteristics of both Europa and Mongolian races, with brown skin, prominent eyebrow bones and deep eye sockets; However, in terms of language, Ainu belongs to the Malay-Polynesian language family, and their legends and narrative poems have much in common with the folk creations of Oceania and Australia. The new world drift theory may be evidence. According to this view, the Ainu people may have come from near the equator and drifted northward with the Hokkaido and Sakhalin plates.
Ainu Village
The Ainu people used to make a living by fishing, hunting and gathering, and worshipped nature and animals as gods. The image of the owl, the patron saint of the Ainu people, can be seen everywhere in the village. There is a totem pole in the center of the village, which is carved with symbols of brown bears, whales, deer, owls and other gods. On both sides of the totem pole are restaurants and handicraft shops built opposite to each other.
A small handicraft shop in Ainu Village
Craftsmanship seems to be a common skill among aborigines all over the world. Ainu people's handicraft is mainly woodcarving, but this is not their innate skill. From the Meiji era onwards, the Ainu people were forbidden to fish and hunt, and had to live by agriculture and handicrafts. But they will get close to nature in their own way: they make a homemade harmonica called "Mukkuri" from bamboo, which is used to imitate the sound of wind, rain, birds and brown bears in traditional Ainu dances.
Music performance in the Ainu National Museum
Ainu homes, Chise, can be seen sporadically in the village, made of thatch, dwarf bamboo or bark. The small habitat, called Ponchise, is for families of two to four people. They live around the stove and cook outside the house.
Habitat
In April 2019, Japan passed a new bill, the Ainu National Support Law, which officially recognized Ainu as an "indigenous nation" for the first time, aiming to "revive Ainu culture and promote ethnic symbiosis". At this point in time, it is not difficult to imagine that this is just a pragmatic strategy before the Tokyo Olympics. After more than a century of obliteration and assimilation, those wild hunters who once defeated the dark forest have long since disappeared in history.
