Aino Folk Tales

Aino Folk-Tales
by Basil Hall Chamberlain

This is a collection of Ainu folktales, by the translator of the Kojiki.

"The Ainu are an ethnic minority in Japan, living primarily on the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido, although there were also small populations of Ainu living on the island of Sakhalin and in the Kuriles until the end of World War II, when the Soviet Union took control of Sakhalin and the Ainu there fled. Until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan took formal possession of Hokkaido and began the systematic integration of the Ainu into the Japanese nation, the Ainu lived almost exclusively as hunter-gatherers north of the always advancing frontier of Japanese agriculture. 'Traditional' anthropological wisdom holds that the Ainu are descended from the aboriginal inhabitants of Japan who were gradually dispossessed of their land by the invading Japanese and their superior civilization. This view is held up by the fact that the Ainu generally do not look Japanese, by the apparently radical differences between the two languages, and by the large number of Ainu place-names in Japan proper. More recent anthropology, however, sees a far greater continuity between the two cultures, with many deep and ancient similarities."