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Yukie Chiri


Yukie Chiri around 1920
Yukie Chiri around 1920

Despite her short life, Yukie Chiri’s anthology of Ainu folktales made a lasting impact on the preservation of Ainu tradition. To understand her motivation in capturing and preserving Ainu folktales in written form, one must look to the social policies Japan was enacting to suppress the Ainu people at the time. Japan began rapidly modernizing after opening its ports in the late 1860s and as it sought to redefine itself as a powerful nation-state, it incorporated colonial practices that included the annexation of Ainu land (Nauendorff). By 1869, the land was renamed Hokkaido and the Japanese government implemented harsh policies including the Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899, which banned the practice of Ainu customs and traditions. It imposed the foreign concept of land ownership and essentially made the Ainu people into citizens of Japan against their will (Fusek).


The bans also extended to the use of the Ainu language. By the 1920s, Ainu-itak, the Ainu language, was already critically endangered, with only a small fraction of Ainu children still able to speak it (Nauendorff). Today, only around 16,000 people in Japan claim Ainu ancestry, with the number of proficient speakers decreasing rapidly.


Yukie Chiri was born in 1903 in Noboribetsu, Hokkaido to Takakichi and Nami Chiri. Her parents were farmers and didn't have the financial stability to raise her so she lived with her parents for just five or six years before leaving to live with her grandmother, Monashinouku, and aunt, Imekanu, in Asahikawa (Fusek). Her grandmother was a bard, a seasoned storyteller, born in 1848 in the time when Ainu lived in their own way and spoke the Ainu language (Yokoyama). Even at the end of the Meiji era, Monashinouku continued to speak the Ainu language while Yukie was living with her which helped her become fluent in both Ainu and Japanese.


Yukie and her aunt, Imekanu
Yukie and her aunt, Imekanu

Around 1918, while living in Asahikawa, Yukie met Professor Kindaichi Kyosuke, a linguist known for his research on the Ainu language (e-kenshin). He convinced her of the importance of preserving Ainu tradition and encouraged her work. Thanks to his influence, she began working on a manuscript when she graduated from vocational school. The main focus of her transcription work was on kamui yukar, which told tales from the first-person perspective of the kamui. Translation of the Ainu word kamui include god or deity, and can take the form of animals, weather phenomena, and plants (Fusek).


Kamui yukar are oral works typically performed by women through chanting. Yukie modified the stories accordingly to fit in written format as it was vastly different from the participatory oral tradition. People doubted the use of transcribing traditional oral performances into a written text, whether romanized or rendered into Japanese or into English, yet such transcriptions preserved Ainu tradition from oblivion (Chiri Yukie and Selden). By 1921, she sent a manuscript to Kindaichi of her completed work.


Previously, Kindaichi had urged Yukie to move to Tokyo and make the 13 tales into a book, but she was reluctant to do so. She wanted to stay in Asahikawa as she had already promised to marry a young Ainu man, Murai (Yokoyama). Her father was also against the move, however Yukie was determined to write a book about the Ainu language and culture, so in May 1922 she left for Aomori from Muroran Port, seen off by her mother. That August was the hottest since 1902 and it took a serious toll on Yukie who suffered from a congenital heart disease and had repeated heart attacks by the end of the month (Yokoyama). She would eventually be told by a doctor that she wouldn’t be able to have children as the strain of pregnancy would be too hard for her heart to handle, and though this was devastating news, she only grew more certain of her purpose in life as seen in a letter to her parents:


I have come to feel keenly that I have been granted a great mission that only I can perform. This is to set down in writing for posterity the literary art that my beloved brothers and sisters passed down over the several thousand years of the past. For me, this is a most appropriate and precious task (Fusek).


By September, in a letter dated the 14th, she wrote, “I will return to my hometown. I will live in Noboribetsu for the rest of my life. My mission is to write down the literature passed down by my ancestors over the past thousands of years" (Yokoyama). The letter continues with her writing, "The proofread manuscript has just arrived and I am looking at it now" (Yokoyama). However, on the night of the 18th, when all of the proofreading was finished, she suffered a heart attack and died of mitral stenosis at the age of 19.


Yukie Chiri’s manuscript was published with the title Ainu Shin'yōshū the following year in 1923 and received popular acclaim. Though her life was brief, her foundational work not only preserved Ainu culture, but shared it with the world. She even changed the way the Ainu language was written. At the time, Ainu was written in Roman letters, but when Yukie started writing in the notebook given to her by Kindaichi, she wrote the Roman transcription on one half and the Japanese translation of the Ainu language on the other half (Yokoyama). In one of the letters exchanged between them, Kindaichi notes that the romanization of Ainu had typically been done by adding vowels at the end, such as yukara and uepekere, however, Yukie adopted a writing style that is closer to the pronunciation of the Ainu people.


In a diary she kept while living in Tokyo, she reflects on the challenges of being Ainu in

Japan:


If I went to Tokyo and kept quiet, no one would know that I was an Ainu, but if I were to disclose it and say that I was an Ainu, people would look down on me, and I'm worried that I might not like that […] Just because I'm an Ainu doesn't mean I'm not a human being. There’s no such thing. Aren't we the same person? I'm happy to have been an Ainu (Yokoyama).


The foreword she wrote for the book encapsulates the feelings she had towards the issues

Ainu faced:


Long ago, this spacious Hokkaido was our ancestors’ space of freedom. Like innocent children, as they led their happy, leisurely lives embraced by beautiful, great nature. Truly, they were the beloved of nature; how blissful it must have been. [...] That realm of peace has passed; the dream shattered tens of years since, this land rapidly changing with mountains and fields transformed one by one into villages, villages into towns. [...] The few of us Ainu who remain watch wide-eyed with surprise as the world advances. And from those eyes is lost the sparkle of the beautiful souls of the people of old, whose every move and motion were controlled by religious sentiment; our eyes are filled with anxiety, burning with complaints, too dulled and darkened to discern the way ahead so that we have to rely on others’ mercy. A wretched sight. The vanishing—that is our name; what a sad name we bear (Nauendorff).


Others followed her footsteps and continued working on preserving Ainu culture. Mashiho Chiri, Yukie’s younger brother who, though he didn’t learn the Ainu language until high school, became a respected Ainu scholar and ethnographer, compiled a new and more

thoroughly comprehensive Ainu-Japanese dictionary and an Ainu place name dictionary (Fusek; Nauendorff). He didn’t see Kindaichi’s involvement as completely benevolent and criticized both Kindaichi and other ethnographers for their anthropological approach, accusing them of distorting Ainu culture for their own academic and colonial purposes and, in Kindaichi’s case, someone who treated the Ainu as relics of the primitive past rather than as equals.


There is still a long road ahead regarding the treatment of Ainu in Japan, but some headway has been made in the past couple decades. In 2008, the Japanese government officially acknowledged the Ainu as an indigenous people and the Ainu Policy Promotion Act of 2019 further provided a legal framework to protect and promote Ainu culture (Nauendorff). Had it not been for Yukie Chiri’s groundbreaking work in preserving these oral traditions, there may not have been the progress we see today.


These actions don't erase the sense of loss felt in the past when Japan actively restricted the Ainu people. The preface Chiri wrote for the Ainu Shin’yōshū months before her death carries a sadness for her people’s loss in a world slowly becoming less accommodating, but it also carries hope. The final paragraph of her preface reads:


I who was born an Ainu and grew up with the Ainu language have written down with my halting brush just one or two very short pieces from among the sundry tales that our ancestors enjoyed relating on rainy evenings and snowy nights, whenever they had time to get together. If the many of you who know us could kindly read them, I, together with the ancestors of my people, would consider it a source of supreme happiness, of boundless joy (Fusek).



Selected Works

アイヌ神謡集 [Ainu Collection of Mythology], available on Aozora Bunko in Japanese


Related Media

Songs of Kamui (2024), film based on the life of Yukie Chiri


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Works Cited


Chiri Yukie, and Kyoko Selden. “The Song the Owl God Himself Sang, “Silver Droplets Fall

Fall All Around,” an Ainu Tale.” Japan Focus, vol. 14, no. 15, 1 Aug. 2016,

apjjf.org/2016/15/chiri, https://doi.org/10.1017/s1557466016018349. Accessed 8 May 2025.


e-kensin. “真砂徳子の起ーパーソン 風をおこす人々　第2回 「知里幸恵　銀のしずく記

念館」館長　横山 むつみ(よこやま むつみ) さん.” Archive.org, 10 Aug. 2012,


Fusek, Alyssa Pearl. “The Life and Legacy of Ainu-Japanese Translator Chiri Yukie - Unseen

Japan.” Unseen Japan, 5 July 2021, unseen-japan.com/the-life-and-legacy-of-ainu-chiri-yukie/. Accessed 8 May 2025.


Nauendorff, Marvin. “Linguaphile Magazine.” Linguaphile Magazine, 21 Aug. 2024,


Yokoyama Mutsumi. 「知里幸恵を伝える意義」[the Significance of Communicating about Yukie Chiri]. 普及啓発講演会 [Public Awareness Lecture]. Written Report.




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