The Ainu People of Hokkaido
The Ainu are the indigenous people of Hokkaido and the formerly Ainu-inhabited territories of Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and parts of northeastern Honshu. Their culture — distinct language, animist spiritual tradition, oral literature, music, and material culture — developed over millennia of subsistence life in the forests, rivers, and coastal waters of Japan’s northern islands. The Ainu were legally recognised as an indigenous people of Japan in 2019, following decades of advocacy, reversing their historical exclusion from Japanese civic identity and providing the foundation for renewed cultural preservation and tourism infrastructure centred on Hokkaido.
Upopoy National Ainu Museum
Upopoy National Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, Hokkaido (opened 2020) is Japan’s first national museum dedicated to indigenous culture — a major investment in Ainu cultural recognition built on the shore of Lake Poroto. The museum’s permanent collection covers Ainu language, crafts, ceremonies, relationships with the natural world, and history of relations with the Japanese state. Outdoor reconstructed kotan (Ainu village) buildings, cooking demonstrations, and seasonal ceremonial performances complement the indoor galleries. The Ponpira Ainu Cise (Ainu cultural exchange facility) within the complex offers craft workshops and music performances. Upopoy is 35 minutes from Tomakomai Station by express bus.
Ainu Craft Traditions
Embroidery (Karakarpe): The most visually distinctive Ainu craft — complex curvilinear designs embroidered in chain stitch, outlined with stem stitch, applied to robes (attus), leggings, and ceremonial garments in white and indigo on dark fabric. The designs are not purely decorative — the specific patterns and their placement protect the wearer by appeasing spiritual beings at vulnerable points (cuffs, collar, hem). Traditional attus fabric was woven from the fibres of the Japanese elm (ohyo) bark.
Wood carving: Ainu men carved wooden objects used in ceremony and daily life — inaw (ritual prayer sticks made by shaving a willow branch into a curled wooden beard), mukkuri (jaw harp), and the ikupasuy (libation wand) used in the kamuy nomi ceremony to communicate with spiritual beings. Contemporary Ainu carvers produce craft works for sale that maintain traditional design vocabularies in accessible forms.
Bark weaving: Elm bark was stripped, dried, and processed into fibre then woven on a back-tension loom into the attus robe fabric — a labour-intensive textile tradition now maintained by specialist weavers.
Ainu Spiritual Culture
Ainu cosmology positions all aspects of the natural world as kamuy — spiritual beings that take animal, plant, or natural phenomenon form when visiting the human world. The brown bear is the most powerful kamuy; the salmon is the gift-bringer who sustains life. The iyomante (bear ceremony), in which a captive bear cub raised within the community was ceremonially sent back to the spirit world after a specific ritual period, was the central ceremony of Ainu religious life. The ceremony is no longer practised in its original form; its meaning and the controversy around it are part of the Upopoy museum’s honest cultural documentation.
Visiting Ainu Cultural Sites
Beyond Upopoy, significant Ainu cultural facilities include the Hokkaido Museum in Sapporo (comprehensive natural and cultural history including Ainu material culture), the Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum in Biratori (in the Saru River valley, a historically significant Ainu community), and the Akan Ainu Kotan in Akan-cho (a living village community adjacent to Lake Akan with craft shops, performance venues, and resident Ainu artisans). The Saru River area is considered the cultural heartland of Hokkaido’s Ainu communities and receives fewer tourists than Sapporo-area facilities, offering more direct engagement with practising craftspeople.