Jessica Lanan Illustration

An Ainu folktale

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

I have a wonderful old book on Ainu folklore by Carl Etter. The author was a theologist, not an anthropologist or archaeologist, so the focus of the book is to draw comparisons between Ainu folklore and biblical folklore in order to encourage people to be open-minded about the universal elements of various religious. It’s organized by theme: “virgin birth stories,” “walking on water stories,” etc… It’s a quite out of date (published in 1959) and is long out of print, but I found it at a used book store in Tucson not long after returning from my trip to Asia. I had hoped to find some Ainu communities still existing in Hokkaido, but they were largely wiped out by the Japanese in the late 1800s and I didn’t find much information there aside from one very nice “Museum of Northern Peoples” in Abashiri.

I’ve heard the largest population of the Ainu people lies to the north on Saghalien (a.k.a. Sakhalin?) and the Kurile islands. Many of the stories in my book were collected on these islands (and the author spares no detail about the rugged terrain and awful weather he slogged through on horseback etc. to find his storytellers.) I was searching for photographs of Sakhalin and it seems like half of them were pictures of people’s overturned jeeps stuck in the mud, so it looks like traveling conditions haven’t improved too much. But look at this lovely photograph I found. Doesn’t it make you want to go there, even if your jeep will end up in a ditch?

I don’t know who took this, but I assume that must be the photographer’s buddy down there waving the blue shirt.

There are lots of great stories where Ainu and gods alike get into all sorts of trouble, but one that I found especially interesting involved a village and the “smallpox god.” 

Here is the small segment, from pages 110-111:

“There was a certain Ainu who had inherited from his ancestors a set of special earrings. He wore them only when he attended some special religious festival.

One day another Ainu proposed to buy these earrings, but their owner refused to sell. Finally he was persuaded to part with the precious heirlooms and traded them for a large pile of treasures. But the new owner had no sooner reached his home with his purchase than the earrings automatically returned to their previous owner.

[…]

That night [the original owner] dreamed a dream in which his tutelary deity appeared, saying:

‘I am your tutelary god. The earrings were given to your father by Shikerepeni-Kamui. The god who came today and traded for the earrings is the smallpox god.

To make a shady deal with another Ainu is bad enough, but to get the good end of a trade with the smallpox god is really asking for trouble.

‘When the smallpox god returned home he missed the earrings and became very angry. He is now scheming to kill you and all the people in your village,’ continued the god in the dream.

The god and the dream told the Ainu to instruct the people of the village to lay in sufficient wood and carry enough water to their homes to last them until spring. He also told him to warn the villagers not to go out of their houses until spring, lest the smallpox god attack them. 

Next morning, the Ainu went to his neighbors and warned them of the danger they were facing, and they all laid in wood and water as instructed. 

That evening the sky was filled with dark clouds. It became so dark the people could hardly discern between day and night. They heard weird sounds above the clouds which warned them that the smallpox god was there. These dark clouds remained over the village and the weird sounds continued all through the winter and far into the spring. None of the villagers stirred from their houses, and finllay the smallpox god concluded he had misjudged the location of the village and went away.

Just as soon as the smallpox god left, the black clouds disappeared and there was clear weather again. When the clouds were gone, the Ainu who owned the earrings came out of his house and prayed to his tutelary deity as follows:

‘Since this great trouble came upon us because of this miraculous set of earrings, won’t you please take away their power, lest we have further danger?’

After his prayer, the Ainu presented the earrings as an offering to his tutelary deity, and they never returned again. Anxiety was removed from the hearts of the villagers, and things moved along as usual.”

(The full title is: Ainu Folklore: Traditions and Cultures of the Vanishing Aborigines of Japan, by Carl Etter. If there’s an ISBN, it’s not marked anywhere on my copy I just discovered that the ISBN system was not implemented until 1967, so never mind.)

Tags: Folktales
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