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カムイ（kamuy）
In Ainu traditions, kamuy are beings with an important role or powerful influence in human life, including fire, water and animals such as bears. Prayers, offerings and spirit-sending ceremonies sustain relationships with them.
Upopoy explains ramat as spirits understood to dwell in animals, plants, natural phenomena, tools and other things. Beings with an important role or powerful influence in human life are called kamuy. When a body dies or an object breaks, its ramat is understood to return to the world from which it came.
The category includes fire, water, wind, mountains and many living beings. Akan’s community account also includes disease and destructive forces beyond human control. It describes prayers of protest when such powers act unjustly. Kamuy therefore cannot be reduced to benevolent animal figures.
In Upopoy’s account, kamuy live in human form in their own world, appearing as animals or natural phenomena when they visit this one. Meat and fur are understood as gifts they bring. Offerings of drink, carved wood and ceremonial hospitality form the human side of the exchange.
Akan’s account calls prayer ceremonies kamuy-nomi. Before addressing other kamuy, people first pray to the hearth deity Ape-huci-kamuy so that their words reach the intended recipient. The household fire thus provides a setting for communication as well as daily life.
Obihiro’s museum describes the ikupasuy as a carved wooden prayer stick. Its tip is dipped in drink as words are conveyed to kamuy. Inaw are shaved-wood offerings, presented to beings including the household fire deity or placed at outdoor altars. The two objects have distinct forms and uses.
The cup photograph comes from Upopoy’s January ceremony section; the other image shows inaw prepared at Shiraoi in 2016. Their particular shapes and contexts belong to the communities documented.
Iomante honours a kamuy’s spirit and sends it back to the kamuy world. In the traditional bear-spirit sending described by Obihiro’s museum, a captured cub was reared for about a year. The bear was killed in the ceremony, its meat and fur taken, and its spirit honoured and sent home.
Akan’s account emphasizes preparations of food and drink, songs, dance and offerings, expressing gratitude and inviting a future return. The sending concerns the spirit; the bear is one example within the wider concept of kamuy.
In his published first-person account on Akan’s community site, Hideo Akibe recalls being scolded as a child for tormenting snakes. Adults called the snake Tanne-kamuy and told him not to mistreat it. He distinguishes his childhood puzzlement from his later understanding, giving a particular example of ideas passed on within a family.
Chiri Yukie’s Ainu shin’yōshū, published in 1923, presents thirteen kamuy narratives in romanized Ainu alongside Japanese translations. It records oral transmission in a parallel written form. The pictured cover and pages belong to the copy held by Hokkaido’s Museum of Literature.
Upopoy describes how assimilation policies, restrictions on customs and discrimination from the later nineteenth century made it difficult to pass on language and knowledge. From the 1970s, local transmission activities included crafts, songs and dance. People continue to learn, practise and explain these traditions, with differences between regions, generations and individuals.
Ramat are spirits associated with many beings and things; beings important or powerful in human life are called kamuy.
No. Akan’s account includes harmful powers such as disease and destructive wind.
So that the words reach the intended kamuy correctly.
Ikupasuy are carved prayer sticks dipped in drink; inaw are shaved-wood offerings.
The kamuy’s spirit. Bear-spirit sending is one example, not the whole concept.
Romanized Ainu texts alongside Japanese translations.
