In 1922, a nineteen-year-old Ainu woman transcribed thirteen songs that no one else remembered, and died the night she finished the manuscript.

The night is warm – a Tokyo night, September, thick with humidity that plasters a shirt to one’s back. In a small upstairs room of a house in Hongo, a girl bends over a desk. Before her lie rows of tiny characters – not Japanese but Latin – written by hand with such care, as though each letter were a monument to memory. Beside them rests the remainder of a manuscript. Thirteen stories. Thirteen voices – owl, fox, frog, otter, god of the sea – that for millennia spoke of themselves in the first person, because in the world this girl comes from, animals are persons. She checks the final page. Closes the notebook. In a few hours, her heart will stop.

She is nineteen years and three months old. In her pocket lies a letter to her parents, written four days earlier: she feels she has been given a mission that only she can fulfill. “I will be home soon,” she wrote. She will not return. But the manuscript – that will remain. It will appear a year later as a small, unassuming volume, its first page beginning with a sentence that generations will repeat: “Long ago, this vast land of Hokkaido was the free domain of our ancestors.” This is not a novel. Not a scholarly treatise. It is the testament of a people about to vanish – written by the hand of a girl who knew she was vanishing with them – the Ainu.

There are books born from a brilliant flash of inspiration, and books that take an entire lifetime to write. This one was born both ways at once. A whole lifetime – because the girl had carried it inside her since childhood, since her grandmother’s first songs by the fire. And in one brief burst – because she wrote it down over months of feverish work, with a failing heart, with longing for the sea, with the knowledge that time was running out. This is the story of Chiri Yukie. The story of a girl who gave writing to the Ainu people as they were already departing – and paid for it with the only currency she had.

Nupur-pet – when the murmur of the river meant “freedom”

Before Noboribetsu became an onsen resort town, before tour buses began ferrying crowds to Jigokudani – the “Hell Valley” – there was an Ainu fishing settlement here, on a river the Ainu called Nupur-pet – the dark, murky river. Salmon ran upstream in autumn, deer came down from the mountains, and the sea – close, within arm’s reach – provided the rest. This was Ainu Mosir – “the quiet land of people,” as the Ainu called their islands. Not “Japan.” Not Hokkaido. Their own land, without borders, without title deeds, without a state.

On this land, on June 8, 1903, Chiri Yukie (知里幸恵) was born. Her father, Chiri Takakichi, was a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War and one of only three Ainu to be awarded the Order of the Golden Kite – one of Japan’s highest military decorations. The paradox speaks more about the era than any textbook: the same man who shed blood for Emperor Meiji returned home to a community forbidden to fish for salmon at night, to speak their own language, or to tattoo their lips. Her mother Nami came from the Kan’nari clan – a family of oral tradition keepers, bards, and singers.

The Meiji era was not a dawn for the Ainu. It was a dusk. In 1869, Ezo was renamed Hokkaido, and Ainu land was incorporated into the Japanese state. In the following years, the government settled Japanese colonists en masse on Hokkaido, displacing Ainu communities and stripping them of their traditional livelihoods. Night fishing for salmon was banned. Lip tattooing for women – a practice that signified maturity and beauty for Ainu women – was banned. The bear ceremony – iyomante – the most sacred ritual in Ainu spirituality – was banned. Three decades later, in 1899, the Former Aborigines Protection Act – Hokkaidō Kyū-dojin Hogo-hō (北海道旧土人保護法) – was enacted, imposing the foreign concept of land ownership under the guise of protection, banning traditional practices, and forcing the Ainu to take up farming. Even the title of the law was an insult: kyū-dojin – “former natives” – a phrase that locked an entire people inside a museum case.

The Ainu – fishermen, hunters, gatherers – were now expected to plow fields where nothing grew. The tools were foreign, the techniques foreign, the purpose foreign. The Chiri family tried farming too. It did not work. Poverty that had not previously existed – because in the Ainu world, the concept of “ownership” had no equivalent, the land belonged to no one, the salmon was a gift, not a commodity – now pressed down like a stone. When Yukie was six years old, she was sent to live with her aunt. Not out of cruelty. Out of poverty.

The grandmother who did not speak Japanese

Chikabumi – an Ainu settlement on the outskirts of Asahikawa, far in the north of Hokkaido. A small house by an Episcopal church mission, where aunt Imekanu – known by her Ainu name Kan’nari Matsu – worked as a Bible storyteller. But in the evenings, when the lights went out, the house came alive with a different voice.

That voice was Monashinouku – Yukie’s grandmother, born in 1848, when the Ainu still lived by their own laws. Monashinouku barely spoke Japanese. Her world was Ainu itak – the Ainu language, a language without writing. And her storytelling was not mere speech – it was song. Monashinouku was an utar-rera – a great bard, a keeper of tradition who carried dozens of songs and stories in her memory, the way Westerners keep thousands of books in libraries.

In the evenings, by the fire, Monashinouku sang kamuy yukar – “songs of the gods.” This is the oldest known form of Ainu oral tradition. In kamuy yukar, animal spirits – kamuy – speak about themselves in the first person. The owl says: “I, the guardian god of the village.” The fox says: “I, the clever wanderer.” Each song has its own refrain – sakehe – repeated rhythmically by the singer, pulsing like a heartbeat, keeping the story in motion. In this world, hunting is not killing – it is an exchange of gifts between humans and spirits. The animal “chooses” to be caught, and in return the human offers inau – wooden prayer offerings. Then the spirit returns to its own world, satisfied.

Six-year-old Yukie listened to these stories every evening, absorbing two languages and two worlds at once. She grew up as a child who moved fluidly between Japanese and Ainu, between the school blackboard and her grandmother’s fireside. Such children – fully bilingual, with knowledge of the oral tradition – were fewer with each passing year. Soon there would be none.

The school that taught shame

At the Japanese elementary school in Asahikawa, Yukie was one of the top students – particularly in languages and literature. She was also Ainu – and at that time and place, that meant being no one. The bullying was daily, systemic, crushing. Ainu children bore the stigma of what the Japanese state officially called kyū-dojin (旧土人 – “former natives”), a term that in practice meant “primitive people of the past.”

In 1916, at thirteen, Yukie sat the entrance exam for the Asahikawa Girls’ Higher School. She was rejected. Not because of her grades – those were excellent. Because of her origins. An Ainu girl at a higher institution? Not in the Taishō era. She ended up at a vocational school – one of the few institutions that accepted Ainu at all. She graduated ranked fourth out of a hundred and ten students.

Her entire generation suffered from what later scholars would call an ethnic inferiority complex. Yukie carried it too. Japanization seeped into every crack of life: children were punished at school for speaking Ainu, women were forbidden from tattooing their lips, men from wearing long beards and earrings. Even names were changed to Japanese ones. Many Ainu concluded that assimilation was the only path to survival – and it was a tragically rational conclusion.

But underneath – deep down, in a place the school could not reach – something else lived. In a letter from her teenage years, Yukie wrote: “In an instant the landscape that had been here since the dawn of time vanished. Where have the people gone who joyfully lived off its fields and mountains?” This is the sentence of a girl who is barely a teenager. It reads like the opening of a philosophical essay. Or like a farewell. Both are true.

Kindaichi and the blank notebooks

In the summer of 1918 – Yukie is fifteen – the Japanese linguist Kindaichi Kyōsuke (金田一京助) arrives in Chikabumi. He is traveling across Hokkaido in search of the last keepers of the oral tradition. He is looking for Imekanu and Monashinouku. But when he meets the teenager living with them – a girl who speaks both languages fluently and knows her grandmother’s songs – he immediately understands what he has found.

Kindaichi was a complex figure. On one hand – a scholar who genuinely valued the Ainu tradition and believed in its preservation. On the other – a man of his era who spoke of the Ainu as a “dying race” and approached their culture with the fascination of an ethnographer, not a partner. Yukie’s brother – Chiri Mashiho, a future linguist – would later criticize Kindaichi for his colonial assumptions and for distorting Ainu culture to serve Japanese academia.

But the paradox of history is that it was Kindaichi himself – with all his limitations, all his paternalism – who triggered in Yukie something the Japanese school system could not: pride. When he told her that what her grandmother sang in the evenings had value – enormous, irreplaceable, universal value – something shifted inside her. She decided to dedicate her life to recording and translating yukar.

Kindaichi returned to Tokyo but sent her blank notebooks. And here something remarkable begins. Yukie did not record her grandmother’s songs the way a linguist would have. She invented her own method: on the left side of the notebook – the Ainu text written in Latin script, phonetically, closer to the actual pronunciation than convention dictated. On the right – a Japanese translation, poetic, beautiful, full of sensitivity to both linguistic worlds. Kindaichi later noted that her transcription method was more accurate than previous romanizations – closer to the living speech of the Ainu, unfiltered by Japanese phonetics.

One must understand what it meant to transcribe an oral tradition. This is not copying a book. Kamuy yukar were living performances – each singing slightly different, each bard adding their own pauses, accelerations, sighs that were part of the piece. To capture this in writing is like photographing the wind. Critics doubted whether it even made sense. But Yukie knew something the critics did not: that her grandmother was seventy years old, that no one younger knew these songs, and that an imperfect photograph of the wind is better than none at all. In 1921, she sent her first manuscript to Kindaichi – under the title Ainu Dentsetsushū (アイヌ伝説集, lit. “A Collection of Ainu Legends”). It was a working draft. The book did not yet have the title that would make it famous.

An evening in Chikabumi

Winter, around 1920. Aunt Imekanu’s house in Chikabumi, on the outskirts of Asahikawa. Outside, snow is falling – thick Hokkaido snow that muffles every sound. Inside, the air smells of smoke from the hearth. Monashinouku sits on a mat by the fire, eyes closed. She is seventy-two and her wrinkles are so deep they look like grooves carved into wood.

She begins to sing. She does not open her eyes. The voice is low, worn, but the rhythm is sure – like footsteps on a night path one walks confidently in the dark, because one knows it by heart. The sakehe returns every few lines, like a breath: “shirokanipe ranran pishkan.” “Silver droplets fall, fall all around.” In the song, the owl speaks – the great guardian god of the village, kotan-kor-kamuy – telling how it hovered over a poor hamlet and decided to bestow gifts upon a destitute boy.

Across from Monashinouku sits Yukie. She is seventeen. On her lap she holds a notebook sent from Tokyo. She writes Ainu sounds in Latin letters – sounds no keyboard will ever fully capture. Each word she tries to trap in a script that was never made for this language – guttural vowels, consonants that do not exist in Japanese, pauses that may be part of the song, or perhaps part of the grammar. At the next sakehe she lifts her head. Her grandmother sings with her eyes closed. No tears come – she is too old for tears, too tough, too Ainu. But for a moment, the voice trembles. And Yukie hears it.

Later, at night, when her grandmother is asleep, Yukie will read again what she has written. And she will begin to translate it into Japanese. Not literally, not academically – beautifully. Because this is not a translation of words. It is a translation of a world.

Thirteen voices from another world

Ainu Shin’yōshū (アイヌ神謡集, lit. “A Collection of Ainu Songs of the Gods”) – this would be the title of Yukie’s book – contains thirteen kamuy yukar in the Horobetsu dialect. A dialect that no living person on earth speaks today.

The first and most famous song is titled “The Song the Owl God Sang of Himself – Silver Droplets Fall, Fall All Around.” The owl – kotan-kor-kamuy (“god-owner of the village”) – is, on Hokkaido, Blakiston’s fish owl, a monumental bird with a wingspan exceeding one and a half meters. In Ainu cosmology, the owl is the guardian of human villages, an intermediary between the spirit world and humankind. In Yukie’s song, the owl tells how, hovering over a poor village, it notices a destitute boy shooting a small bow. It decides to “fall” to his arrow. An old man receives the owl, makes offerings. At night, the owl sings and scatters treasures around itself – silver and golden droplets – transforming the poor house into a palace.

After the owl come the rest: two foxes, a rabbit, a young wolf, a frog, a god of the sea, an otter, a swamp mussel, the spirit of damp earth, and twice Okikirmui – an Ainu culture hero. Each figure speaks in the first person: “I, the fox,” “I, the frog.” Each has its own sakehe – a refrain distinct from the others, melodically specific, repeated after every line like a pulse. The fox sings “Towa towa to.” The mussel – “Tonupeka ranran.” The frog – “Tororo hanrok hanrok!” These refrains were more than ornament: they sustained the trance of the narrative, keeping the listener in a particular state.

Traditionally, kamuy yukar were the domain of women. Men sang yukar – long heroic epics about human heroes. Women sang the songs of the spirits. This means that the entire Ainu cosmology – the relationship between humans and the spirit world, with animals as persons, with ritual as an exchange of gifts – lay primarily in women’s hands. When Monashinouku sang, she was a priestess of an entire universe. And when Yukie wrote it down, she was recording more than texts. She was recording the architecture of a world as the Ainu people saw it.

It is worth pausing to see how radically different this cosmology is from the Western one. In Ainu tradition, animals are not lesser than humans – they are kamuy, spiritual beings who take on animal bodies to visit the human world. A bear that dies in a hunt does not die – it returns to its own world with the gifts it received from humans. This is why hunting is not an act of violence but an act of hospitality: the human invites the spirit, and the spirit decides whether to accept the invitation. In this world, the animal is a subject, not an object. It has a voice, a will, a story. And it was precisely these stories that Yukie collected. Thirteen voices – from the mighty owl to the humble swamp mussel – speaking to us from a place where humankind is not the master of creation, but a neighbor.

The preface that became a testament

The preface to Ainu Shin’yōshū is dated March 1, 1922 – the Taishō era, year eleven. Yukie is eighteen. She writes in a Japanese so beautiful that Japanese reviewers would later express astonishment: how could an Ainu girl command such Japanese? The answer is simple: she was raised in both languages and possessed a talent that does not ask about pedigree.

The preface opens with the sentence that has become the most recognizable line in the history of Ainu literature:

その昔この広い北海道は、私たちの先祖の自由の天地でありました。

Sono mukashi kono hiroi Hokkaidō wa, watashitachi no senzo no jiyū no tenchi de arimashita.

Long ago, this vast land of Hokkaido was the free domain of our ancestors.

Then Yukie paints an image of the world that has passed: uninhabited mountains covered in forest, frigid seasons that set the rhythm of life, seas full of fish, rivers full of salmon, the sounds of nature that were the voices of spirits.

Then the tone shifts. The landscape vanishes – “in the blink of an eye.” Forests cut down, mountains altered, the sea gone silent. And the people? Remnants, staring in bewilderment at a world that races forward without them. Yukie writes about her generation without self-pity but with clear-eyed awareness: “We are a handful of kinfolk who stare wide-eyed at the state of the world as it continues to advance.” But then she adds hope: perhaps someday two or three strong people will emerge from their ranks and match their stride to the world’s march.

And then – “but.” This is the most important “but” in the entire text. What of the language? What of the words our ancestors used? The beautiful words they passed down through the ages? Will they too perish with us, the perishing weak? “Oh,” Yukie writes, “that would be too painful, too sorrowful.” And that is why – she explains – on rainy evenings, on snowy nights, whenever she had a free moment, she set down with her pen even just one or two stories from those her ancestors told each other.

She closes with a heartfelt plea: may the many people who wish to know us read these words. If that comes to pass, it will be a boundless joy for her and her ancestors alike. Signed: Chiri Yukie. Eighteen years old.

From Muroran to Tokyo – a journey without return

Before leaving for Tokyo, Yukie became engaged to a young Ainu man named Murai Sōtarō. She planned to return, marry, lead the life Ainu women had always led. Her father – himself suffering from a heart condition, the same one that had plagued Yukie since birth – did not want her to go. But Yukie was determined. In May 1922, at the port of Muroran, her mother, full of hope for her bright daughter’s future, waved goodbye.

In Tokyo, Yukie moved in with the Kindaichi household. She worked on the manuscript and helped around the house – doing laundry, cooking, cleaning. In letters to her family she missed the sea. In her diary – fragments of which survive to this day – she returned in her thoughts to Noboribetsu: to the crash of waves, the smell of smoke, the sound of wind on the cliffs. She wrote a passage that is today quoted in Japan as “the Ainu declaration”:

“I am Ainu. I am Ainu wherever I go. What part of me is like the Japanese? … Being Ainu does not mean I am not human. We are the same people, aren’t we? I am glad to be Ainu.”

August 1922 – the heart fails. A medical examination delivers the verdict: too weak for pregnancy. The dream of motherhood dies in a Tokyo doctor’s office. For a nineteen-year-old who has just become engaged, who grew up in a culture where being a mother was foundational to identity – the blow must have been one that cannot be measured from the outside. But Yukie does not break down – at least not on paper (and paper is all we currently have). In her letters she writes that marriage to Murai is still possible, though childless. And she writes something else – a sentence that reads today like an act of will carved from stone: “I feel deeply that I have been granted a great mission that only I can fulfill. That mission is to set down in writing the literary art that my beloved brothers and sisters have passed down for thousands of years.”

The diary breaks off at the end of July. We do not know why. Perhaps she no longer had the strength to write two things at once. Perhaps the manuscript consumed all the energy her heart could still produce. Two months of silence remain – August and September – during which we have no record of her thoughts. Only the result: thirteen songs, ready for print.

The night of September 18

Tokyo, September 18, 1922, late evening. Four days ago Yukie wrote to her parents: “I will be home soon.” Now she sits over the manuscript, checking final corrections. Thirteen songs – each in dual form: the Ainu original in Latin script on the left, the Japanese translation on the right. The preface at the beginning. A table of contents.

It is hot. Tokyo Septembers are humid, suffocating, impossible for anyone – let alone a girl from the cold north with a weak heart. Kindaichi and his wife are somewhere in the house. Yukie closes the notebook. Clearly finished. Ready for the printer.

We do not know what she did between closing the notebook and dying. We do not know whether she smiled, cried, or simply went to sleep. We know that a few hours after closing the manuscript – on the night of September 18 to 19 – her heart stopped. Sudden cardiac arrest. She was nineteen years and three months old.

The letter to her parents – “I will be home soon” – never arrived in time. Murai Sōtarō never married her. Monashinouku never heard her songs printed in a book – though she would not have been able to read them anyway, since writing was a foreign world to her. Kindaichi buried Yukie at Zōshigaya Cemetery in Tokyo. More than half a century later – in 1975 – her remains were moved to Tomiura Cemetery in Noboribetsu. She finally returned to the sea.

A book without authors – only her voice

In August 1923 – nearly a year after Yukie’s death – the Tokyo publisher Kyōdo Kenkyūsha published Ainu Shin’yōshū. The editor was the renowned ethnologist Yanagita Kunio (柳田國男), the father of Japanese folklore studies. But neither Yanagita nor Kindaichi placed their names on the cover or title page. The book was – in its entirety – the work of Chiri Yukie. Her preface, her transcription, her translation.

Behind the scenes, someone else was at work: Shibusawa Keizō (渋沢敬三), heir to the great Shibusawa Eiichi – the father of Japanese capitalism. Keizō anonymously sponsored both Yukie and later her brother Mashiho. No one learned of this during their lifetimes. A characteristically Japanese motif: the powerful patron who operates from the shadows.

The book won acclaim – but initially within a narrow academic circle. The true breakthrough came half a century later. In 1973, Fujimoto Hideo published a biography of Yukie titled Gin no shizuku furu furu – “Silver Droplets Fall, Fall.” In 1978, Ainu Shin’yōshū entered the prestigious Iwanami Bunko series – Japan’s equivalent of a national literary canon. A small but significant change: the first edition’s cover read “Compiled by Chiri Yukie.” Iwanami corrected this to “Compiled and Translated by Chiri Yukie.” The nineteen-year-old was not merely a collector of songs – she was their author in a new medium. She gave writing to a people who had never had it.

In 2023, Iwanami published yet another revised edition that went further still: it changed the attribution from “compiled and translated” to simply “Chiri Yukie: Ainu Shin’yōshū.” The rationale: in oral tradition, each performance is a creative act, and the performer is a co-author of the story. A hundred years after her death, the girl reclaimed full authorship over her ancestors’ songs.

Those who carried on

Yukie was not the last. Her aunt Imekanu – Kan’nari Matsu – returned to Noboribetsu after retirement and devoted the rest of her life to transcribing and translating yukar. Together with Monashinouku, they compiled eighty-five volumes of stories in the Horobetsu dialect. Fifty-two went to Yukie’s brother Mashiho; thirty-three to Kindaichi. In 1956, Matsu received the Purple Ribbon Medal from the Japanese government – a decoration for contributions to culture.

Chiri Mashiho (知里真志保, 1909–1961) – Yukie’s younger brother – became a linguist and one of the most important scholars of the Ainu language. He studied at Tokyo Imperial University under Kindaichi’s tutelage, but over time became his fierce critic. He accused Kindaichi – and Japanese ethnography as a whole – of treating the Ainu as relics of the past, objects of study, not a living people. He compiled his own dictionaries: etymological and toponymic, based on the structures of the Ainu language itself, not on Japanese approximations. He did not live to see his fifty-third birthday – he died in 1961, the same year as their father and aunt Matsu. As though an entire generation departed together.

Critics also drew attention to the controversial role of John Batchelor – an English missionary who was the first to record the Ainu language and compiled the first Ainu-English dictionary. Batchelor did open the door to documentation, but at the same time he Christianized the Ainu and distorted their tradition – his photographs of the Ainu bore captions like “our Ainu servants.” It was Batchelor who facilitated Kindaichi’s meeting with Yukie’s family. Scholarship and colonialism walked hand in hand – and Yukie’s work was the first moment when the Ainu voice spoke for itself, without a mediator. Through the pen of an Ainu woman, not an ethnographer.

The role of a Pole cannot be omitted here. Bronisław Piłsudski – the elder brother of Marshal Józef – was exiled to Sakhalin in 1887, sentenced for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. In exile, he became one of the world’s foremost researchers of Ainu culture. He lived among the Sakhalin Ainu, married an Ainu woman named Chuhsamma, and had two children with her. He collected ten thousand Ainu words, hundreds of legends and songs, and above all – recorded Ainu speech and singing on one hundred Edison wax cylinders. These were the first and for many decades the only sound recordings of the Ainu language in history – today considered priceless, reconstructed in the 1980s by Sony. In 1903, he also visited Hokkaido, and in 1912 published in Kraków, under the auspices of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, the monumental Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore – to this day one of the foundational works in Ainu studies. As an exile from a country erased from the map, he felt a kinship of fate with the Ainu – “people crushed by civilization rather than saved by it,” as he wrote. Piłsudski worked two decades before Yukie, on Sakhalin rather than Hokkaido – but he was the first to demonstrate that Ainu oral tradition deserved the same scholarly instruments applied to European cultures.

In 2010, the Chiri Yukie Memorial Museum – Gin no Shizuku Kinenkan (銀のしずく記念館) – “Museum of Silver Droplets” – opened in Noboribetsu. It stands at the place where she was born, on the banks of the Nupur-pet. Her preface – the one from March 1922 – is available on the museum’s website in more than twenty-four languages, including Ainu and Esperanto. In 2019, Japan enacted the Ainu Promotion Act – the first legislation officially recognizing the Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan. Ninety-seven years after Yukie’s death.

Silver droplets fall, fall all around

Shirokanipe ranran pishkan, konkanipe ranran pishkan – silver droplets fall, fall all around, golden droplets fall, fall all around. This is the sakehe of the first song in Yukie’s collection. The refrain of the owl – the guardian god who hovers over the village and bestows gifts. When Monashinouku sang it by the fire, the silver and gold were snow and moonlight on the sea. When Yukie wrote it down in a notebook, the silver and gold became the very act of writing.

Did Yukie make it in time? Her book is preserved, translated, still in print. But the Horobetsu dialect is extinct – its last native speakers departed long ago. The songs she recorded can no longer be sung the way Monashinouku sang them – from the throat, from memory, from the whole body. They can be read. They can be translated. But they cannot be fully resurrected, because they were a living tradition, and a living tradition requires living people.

But perhaps I am asking the wrong question. Perhaps “making it in time” does not mean “saving the whole.” Perhaps it means: “leaving a mark so deep that the world can no longer pretend nothing was ever here.” Because before Yukie, the Ainu existed in Japanese consciousness as a curious, primitive people of the north, an ethnographic object, an exhibit. After Yukie, they existed as people with a voice, a cosmology, a literature. With a testament that begins with the words “long ago, this land was the domain of freedom.” That sentence changed something in the Japanese imagination – not immediately, but it worked slowly, over years, until it changed.

Something, then, remained. A notebook written in Latin script by the light of a Tokyo lamp. A grandmother who sang with her eyes closed. A girl who gave writing to a world that had never known writing – and died with the notebook under her hand. Seven years later, that girl’s younger brother, in a professor’s office in Tokyo, will open his sister’s archives and begin building an entire academic discipline on their foundations.

I think about the fact that Yukie had a congenital heart defect. She knew she was ill. She knew time was short – perhaps not how short, but she knew there was not enough of it. And she chose. She did not choose motherhood, she did not choose a quiet life with Murai by the sea, she did not choose herself. She chose thirteen songs in which owls, foxes, and frogs speak in human voices about a world that was already departing. Because she knew that if she did not do it – no one would.

Shirokanipe ranran pishkan. The silver droplets still fall.

SOURCES

1. Strong, Sarah M. Ainu Spirits Singing: The Living World of Chiri Yukie’s Ainu Shin’yōshū. University of Hawai’i Press, 2011.

2. Chiri Yukie, Kyoko Selden (trans.). “The Song the Owl God Himself Sang. ‘Silver Droplets Fall Fall All Around,’ An Ainu Tale.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 14, issue 15, 2016.

3. Fujimoto Hideo. Gin no shizuku furu furu mawari ni: Chiri Yukie no shōgai (『銀のしずく降る降るまわりに – 知里幸恵の生涯』). Sōfūkan, 1973.

4. Philippi, Donald L. Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans: The Epic Tradition of the Ainu. Princeton University Press / University of Tokyo Press, 1979.

5. 知里幸恵『アイヌ神謡集』岩波文庫, 1978; 補訂新版, 中川裕補訂, 岩波書店, 2023.

6. 知里幸恵 銀のしずく記念館 (Chiri Yukie Gin-no-Shizuku Kinenkan). https://www.ginnoshizuku.com/

Kayano Shigeru. Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir. Westview Press, 1994.

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

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inari.smart

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