The Melting World

The past weekend I took a brief trip to Tokyo, and it’s such an enormous, chaotic, mad elephant compared to our slow and peaceful existence in the Hokkaido mountainside. Oh yes, I was glad to come back to fresh air and quiet, but I really love Tokyo, too, for its vibrant energy and for its […]

An inescapable event for anyone attending schools in Japan, the annual Sports Day, which was held this Sunday. Here my son shows off an example of the sports day fashions. I, of course, got an extra added gift of sunburn. All in all, it was a surreal, and completely humorous event. Sorry I couldn’t film […]

How did we end up in these elf outfits exactly? Well, the race entailed putting on costumes stuffed in a colorcoded bag and then we had to run about 50 meters to unstack some plastic cones and then race back to tag the next group of lucky nursery school parents/child. I think my husband is […]

A and T chilling during the long-winded sports day opening ceremony.

Last week Arashiyama was the setting for the Chi-nomi-Shiri-Kamuy-nomi, an Ainu ceremony of prayer to the gods and blessing of prayer sticks. The ceremony was led by the local Chikabumi Ainu.

Here are the foods prepared for the gods.

Here I am with my son and the inimitable Fusa-san and some of the ladies.

Here Ota-sensei (L) blesses the new prayer sticks with Kawamura Kenichi (R), the leader of the Chikabumi. The sticks are called Inaw. The inaw are carved into birds who will then fly the prayers to the chosen gods (lIwasaki-Goodman & Nomoto, 1999, p. 223, in Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People, Dubrueil & Fitzhugh, eds.).

Here are the opening prayers conducted inside the chise. The male elders and other respected male leaders said prayers, while the leader’s wife poured the sake. I didn’t see the entire ceremony because my son decided to shout his own prayers out loud and so I thought it best he do that outside.

Here is a picture of the smaller chise (traditional Ainu house) on the grounds of the park at Arashiyama (Storm mountain).

The shaded awnings of the chise is where some people, including my son, elected to stand during the outside portion of the Chi-nomi-Shiri-Kamuy-nomi Ainu prayer festival held May 27.

anonymous artist – Outsider art exhibit at local library I haven’t had the chance to get to this place lately. Been traveling about and reading books on the treatment of the peasant class during the pre-modern and modern era of Japan. Once again, I am opening my eyes wider to what is in the hidden […]

This is the first book-length work in English I’ve found to comprehensively explain Wajin-Ainu power relations: Siddle, Richard. (1996). Race, Resistance, and the Ainu of Japan. London: Routledge. And what a book! It details the complexities and contradictory historical records about the Wajin conquest of Hokkaido and the impact on the Ainu, who are Hokkaido’s […]

I am finishing up a book by John Lie (2001), called “Multi-ethnic Japan.” I plan on using much of its argument to teach Identity and Culture here at Hokkaido U of Education. Fascinating stuff, and I learned much about the hybrid character of Japanese culture, or rather it opened my eyes to what is already […]

From class forum: Thanks, Paula, for that illuminating entry from Wikipedia: just goes to show how clumsy these terms can be when only one nation-state, Iceland, can be said to exist. Perhaps Wikipedia needs an edit because Japan is NOT one homogenous nation that the world and Japan sell it as: always have been ethnic […]

Yesterday evening my family and I drove out, creeping our way instinctively through a blizzard, to the neighboring village of Higashikawa. We had been invited by a local NPO worker who said the townspeople wanted to speak with foreigners for advice about setting up a concierge system for incoming foriegn tourists who wished to hike […]

I just spent a steady hour with a red pen (I don’t usually use a red pen, but I felt a bit peevish) dancing, sliding and hopping through two English Literature students’ graduate theses on Midsummer Night’s Dream and something by D.H. Lawrence I have never read. The smell of coffee grounds scooped into an […]