THE BEAR RITUAL OF THE AINU

        The Ainu are an aboriginal hunter/gatherer/fisher people who once 
Inhabited many of the islands that bound the southern half of the Sea of 
Okhotsk north of the main Japanese island of Honshu. There were Ainu 
populations, now extinct, who were on the Kurile islands.(1) The few hundred 
Ainu who inhabited the southern half of Sakhalin Island were relocated to 
the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido at the end of World War II when 
Sakhalin became a territory of the recently defunct USSR.(2) The Ainu native 
to Hokkaido are, and were, the most numerous and are the best known to the 
outside world; they are still living on Hokkaido although their tribal 
culture has been obliterated. The origins of the Ainu have been a puzzle to 
physical anthropologists since they were first observed by Westerners in the 
late nineteenth century. They are not a Japanese or Mongoloid people for they 
have wavy hair, abundant body hair, frequent lack of the epicanthic fold about 
the eyes and a well developed chin. A variety of archeological and dental 
evidence suggests that the Ainu are descendants of the Jomon people of the
early Neolithic in Japan and that the Jomon people are, therefore, not the 
ancestors of the present day Japanese (Ohnuki-Tierney 1974, Turner 1976).
        The interest of the Ainu to us concerns the most spectacular element 
of their culture which served to call the Ainu to the attention of the Western 
world. The Ainu practiced an elaborate bear cult into the 1920s which 
immediately calls to mind the Paleolithic bear cult and the epiphany of the 
Great Goddess as Bear Mother. The Ainu captured a bear cub, nurtured it for 
months and then sacrificed it during an elaborate ritual. They are the only 
people to have retained a full fledged bear cult into the twentieth century 
and the Paleolithic elements are unmistakable; the Ainu are truly spectacular 
from a Western anthropologist's viewpoint.  
        The bear in Ainu ritual is distinctly masculine and not the Great 
Goddess as Bear Mother. It would certainly be 'inappropriate' to sacrifice the 
Bear Mother who represents the Goddess as Life Giver. This Ainu bear is the 
earthly manifestation of the head of the mountain gods, Chira-Mante-Kamui; his 
bear form is his disguise when visiting the earth. The Ainu gods view humankind 
as equal to them. They wish to be on the best of terms with human beings because 
the offerings made during rituals reach the kingdom of the gods where they become 
the banquet items when the gods themselves hold festivals. The flesh and skin of 
the deity's disguise is the god's offering to humankind. The ritual surrounding 
the bear frees the god to return to his kingdom where the deities can enjoy the 
fruits of the ritual; those ritual 'fruits' magically increase when they reach 
the abode of the gods. There are several important groups of deities, two of 
which are the mountain gods of which Chira-Mante-Kamui is one, and the sea gods 
and goddesses. 
	When a bear cub is caught in the mountains, he is brought home alive and 
served human food in a log cage. If he is so young that he has no teeth, he is 
suckled by a human nurse. When the bear is two or three years old, the Bear 
Festival, called Iomante or Kumamatsuri, is held in mid-winter when the fur is 
thickest and the meat is sweetest with fat.(3) When all is prepared, the bear is 
taken out of the cage with a rope and placed between the altar and the god's 
window. Villagers shoot the bear with ceremonial arrows and then kill it with 
ordinary arrows or crush it with a huge log. The dead bear is placed before the 
altar, offerings are made to it and dances are performed. Festivities last for 
three days and nights. On the first night, to the left of the fireplace, a secret 
ceremony is performed called Keo-Mante, which means sending the dead body off.  
The brain, tongue and eyeballs are taken out of the skull and it is filled with 
flowers. This ceremony is held at midnight and it sends the Chira-Mante-Kamui's 
spirit back to his mountain heaven home. No women are allowed to take part in this 
particular ceremony. It is important to realize that these ceremonies do not 
involve making peace with the bear's spirit because it provided food for humans.  
The Ainu do not conceive of these rituals as involving concepts of this sort.  
Their relationship with a god is the primary focus of the ceremonies, not the 
mere acquisition of calories which mandates the placation of the animal spirit 
(Kindaichi 1949).

References:

Kindaichi, K. 1949. "The Concepts Behind the Ainu Bear Festival (Kumamatsuri)". 
        Southwest. J. 	Anthropol. 5: 345-350.

Merriam-Webster. 1972. Webster's New Geographical Dictionary.
        Springfield, Mass.: G & C. Merriam Co.

Ohnuki-Tierney, E. 1974. The Ainu of the Northwest Coast of Southern Sakhalin. 
        New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Turner II, C.G. 1976. "Dental Evidence on the Origins of the Ainu and Japanese." 
        Science 193: 911-913.


(1) The 56 Kurile Islands form a 750 mile chain extending from the Kamchatka Peninsula 
of Russia to the northeast coast of the Japanese island of Hokkaido. These volcanic 
islands were discovered in 1634 by the Dutch navigator Martin de Vries and were 
occupied by the Russians in the 18th century. They were given to Japan in 1875 in 
exchange for North Sakhalin Island and then returned to Russia
in 1945 (Merriam-Webster 1972: 632).

(2) Sakhalin is a large island of almost 26,000 sq. m and 589 m. long. It lies in the 
western part of the Sea of Okhotsk between Russian and Hokkaido. It's earliest imperial 
history is Chinese, the Japanese first visited c.1630 and they had explored and 
sparsely settled it by the end of the 18th century. A dispute with Russia 1853+ 
resulted in Sakhalin being ceded to Russia and the Kurile Islands went to Japan. 
It was occupied by Japan in 1905 and then returned to Russia in 1946 
(Merriam-Webster 1972: 1051).

(3) There is a spectacular and authentic film of an Ainu Bear Festival which is narrated 
in English. It was filmed in the Saro River Valley in Hokkaido in the early 1930's and 
depicts the last such ceremony conducted by the Ainu. It is titled Iomante and is 
available for rental showing by the University of California Extension Media Center, 
Berkeley, CA 94702.
