Yukar: voices and transmitted stories

The Ainu are Indigenous people of the northern Japanese archipelago and surrounding areas, especially Hokkaido. Yukar names orally transmitted Ainu narrative poetry. In a narrower sense it often means heroic epics; a broader use includes narratives voiced by kamuy, spiritual beings. Ainu oral literature also includes prose tales and other forms. Names, melodies and genre boundaries vary by region.

A narrative often takes the form of a protagonist recounting personal experiences. The performer supplies the voice, but the “I” may be a young hero or a kamuy appearing as an animal or natural phenomenon. Listeners follow events through that speaker. First-person narration is therefore different from the performer telling their own autobiography.

Heroic epics can use repeated short melodies, a beat and accompanying calls, lasting from tens of minutes to hours. The Kayano recording collection describes performers lightly tapping the hearth rim with a wooden repni stick. Kamuy narratives commonly insert a story-specific refrain, called sakehe or saha, between narrative passages. This recurring sound helps give a tale its audible identity.

Tamura Suzuko’s Saru dialect dictionary draws mainly on recordings and notes from the lower and middle Saru River in 1955–1961. Its genre guide gives kamuyyukar for refrained narratives downstream and menokoyukar in the middle reaches. Material labelled yukar also includes a kind earlier researchers called oyna. These names belong to particular speakers and collections.

The first tale in Chiri Yukie’s Ainu Shin’yōshū is voiced by an owl kamuy flying above a human village while repeating words about silver and gold drops. It accepts a poor child’s wooden arrow and is taken home. The family’s respectful welcome is answered with wealth. The tale ends with harmony in the village and the owl returning to its own world. Voice, refrain and encounters between humans and kamuy work together.

Chiri Yukie’s written owl narrative begins with “Shirokanipe ranran pishkan, konkanipe ranran pishkan,” which her Japanese translation renders as silver and gold drops falling all around. The “I” then follows the water over a village and sees children playing with little bows and arrows. The line returns before the children run and call out. A recurring phrase accompanies advancing action; the narrative speaker remains the owl rather than changing with each return of the refrain.

These narratives were passed on through listening, memory and performance. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes differences of skill and personal style, and changes through repeated telling. Writing preserves one record; recording also retains a particular voice. Learning rhythm, wording and delivery from experienced performers passes on a tradition that can be performed again.

The Edo-period Ezo hōgen Moshiogusa preserves Ainu-language material. The two-volume edition digitised by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics has a preface dated 1804. A narrative transcribed in older kana bears a heading rendered as “Yūgari: a matter of jōruri.” Jōruri is the recorder’s Japanese comparison, rather than evidence that the Ainu epic originated in that performance tradition.

From the Meiji period, assimilation policies that included Japanese-language education sharply reduced the use of Ainu in daily life. Ainu people also took up the pen to preserve their language and stories. Records made by Chiri Yukie and Kannari Matsu became important resources for later study. Documentation developed alongside the weakening of everyday transmission.

Chiri Yukie (1903–1922) grew up hearing narratives from her grandmother and aunt. She later wrote down kamuy narratives in romanised Ainu and translated them into Japanese. Her thirteen-tale Ainu Shin’yōshū was published posthumously in 1923. Its preface expresses her wish to preserve ancestral words and share them with readers.

Kannari Matsu wrote down inherited epics, while Kindaichi Kyōsuke transcribed, translated and annotated them. Kokugakuin University supported publication of the nine-volume Ainu jōjishi yukar-shū. The recorder and the translator performed different roles. Variant narratives, summaries and notes make the editorial layers of a written collection visible.

Kayano Shigeru’s collected recordings include The Demonic Village told by Hatozawa Wateke in 1960, alongside heroic epics by Hiraga Satamo and Nitani Ichitarō. The collection, issued in 1998 and reissued in 2008, combines audio with Ainu text, romanisation, Japanese translation and notes. Recording dates identify the particular tellings separately from publication dates.

In March 1956, Ainu Yukar was selected nationally as an intangible folk cultural property requiring measures such as documentation. From the 1970s, Ainu-organised study groups and later language classes contributed to renewed learning. Museum archives now provide dictionaries and documentation. Translations offer further entry points, including Sarah M. Strong’s English translation and study of Chiri’s collection, published in 2011.

The Foundation for Ainu Culture’s 2026 storyteller-training plan centres on elders directly teaching narration, normally near the tradition bearer’s home. It distinguishes the bearer and learners from an adviser knowledgeable about oral literature, who provides guidance on site, and an assistant who helps the bearer. These are concrete teaching roles alongside the separate work of making archives. The plan describes an arrangement, rather than proving that the year’s learners completed their training.

Upopoy’s beginner Ainu video course lists a Kamuy Yukar narrative in four versions: without subtitles, with Japanese, with Ainu and with both languages. They share the identifier R03-20-044. Original-language text and translation thus provide different ways into the material. This paper-puppet teaching production is a different kind of record from a dated recording of a particular tradition bearer; the two cannot be treated as the same performance.