Ainu Spirits Singing: The Living World of Chiri Yukie's Ainu Shin'yoshu

Notes

249 Notes Preface 1. Wajin is a Japanese-language word used to designate someone belonging to the dominant ethnic group of the Japanese archipelago. “Japanese” (Nihonjin) is a broader category indicating someone with Japanese citizenship, whether wajin , Ainu, or another ethnic group. 2. By using the past tense in this way I do not, however, wish to imply that traditional Ainu lifeway skills and technologies have been lost or that individuals and institutions are not working actively to preserve and perpetuate them. They are. 3. The question of names is further complicated by the fact that Ainu converts to Christianity, especially those converted by missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were given Western Christian personal names at baptism. I have included those names (when known) at first mention of the person. 4. The linguist Kinda’ichi Kyōsuke points out that most Ainu speakers normally palatalize the sound “si,” pronouncing it as “shi,” but that some may palatalize all syllables starting with the sound “s,” and in general Ainu speakers do not make a strong distinction between these sounds with or without the palatalization . Much the same is true for “ch” (1960, 19–21). Following Chiri Yukie’s system thus reflects usages of many, although not all, Ainu speakers. It is important to recognize that there are only a very few Ainu-language speakers today and all of them are bilingual, regularly using Japanese both inside and outside the home. As Kirsten Refsing notes, we need to take into consideration the “influence of the dominating language” (Japanese) upon the language in transition (Ainu) (1986, 67). 250 Notes to Pages xiv–3 5. Chiri Mashiho has argued that i and u when immediately following a vowel have consonant values and should be transcribed as y and w (Kinda’ichi 1960, 15–16). This orthography is now widely adhered to in Japan when Ainu words are given in the Latin alphabet. In Japan today, however, the Japanese phonetic system, katakana, is generally preferred over the Latin alphabet by Japanese speakers transcribing Ainu. Chapter One: Chiri Yukie and the Origins of the Ainu Shin’yōshū 1. The notebook is entitled Nisshichō (Daily record). Portions of this notebook , including the page in question, have been interpreted and transcribed by Nakai (1991, 233–241) and Fujimoto (2002, 298–309, 313–316). 2. Although relatively short, this river, now known as the Okashibetsu, has three branches. The writer is probably recalling one of them; however, we do not know which one. The Ainu name Ukatchiupet glosses to mean “river where lances were mutually thrown” (Chiri and Yamada 1958, 27). 3. See Togashi (2001, 172–173) and Kinda’ichi (1942, 164–170). According to ethnographic accounts such as those given by Munro (1963), in Ainu culture supernatural powers of discernment and fortune-telling especially in women were connected to possession events called imu. (Imu is often referred to as a fit of hysteria . The affected person, usually in response to being startled, begins to shriek or babble and behave in unusual ways without being aware of what she is doing.) Monashnouk is said to have experienced imu on more than one occasion. For a brief study of imu and female shamanism among the Ainu, see Wada (1996) and Refsing (2002, 30–32). 4. According to Kitamichi (2001), who has studied Chiri Yukie’s Ainu notebooks in depth, while at the Kinda’ichi house in the summer of 1922 Yukie transcribed from her own memory two kamui yukar (one about a fabulous bird called a kesorap, the other about a red-capped crane) and at least a portion of a yukar, “Omanpeshunmat.” Although she did not translate these transcriptions, she left room in her notebook for translation, and it seems likely that she intended to provide one. She also transcribed for Kinda’ichi a yukar, “Shupne shirika,” that she had heard recited by the Saru River valley oral performer Hiramura Kotanpira. 5. Tsuboi, following Kitamichi, conjectures that Shibusawa did not do the typing himself and that the typing was completed by an unknown third person and was rushed and poorly done (2007, 84). This would account for the large number of typographical errors in the original 1923 edition of the Ainu shin’yōshū. Kinda’ichi later, in 1957, explained that Shibusawa stopped by his house soon after 251 Notes to Pages 4–9 Yukie had arrived in Tokyo and offered to...