Iyomante

• Japanese: イヨマンテ (iyomante)

The iyomante is a traditional Ainu ritual practice, often described in English as a bear-spirit-sending ritual, or simply as the bear ceremony.

The practice centers around the ritual killing of a bear cub raised in the community for some time (since hunting and killing the cub's mother), followed by the appeasing and sending off of the bear cub's spirit. The community would then partake of the bear meat. In many Ainu communities, bears are believed to be gods that have chosen to take form in the human world, and the iyomante is an established part of the Ainu relationship with these gods, that they help them return to the spirit world at the appropriate times.

In the Tokugawa period, Japanese officials and fishery bosses were often invited to participate in such rituals as honored guests. In the Meiji period, however, Japanese became merely passive spectators, as the ritual became more strongly formalized as something to be preserved and maintained, and demonstrated or performed, as a "traditional" practice representative or emblematic of Ainu "tradition." Before long, tourists' failures to observe proper etiquette while attending these sacred ceremonies led to the performance of fake, non-sacred, iyomante ceremonies, as demonstrations for the tourists.

The emphasis on the iyomante over other practices, as particularly significant, emblematic, and central to the tradition is likely an invention of the Meiji period. Still, communities may have seen it as a particularly important ritual prior to that time; it is unclear. In any case, though, by the 1920s, many Ainu leaders themselves saw the practice as obsolete, or even "barbaric." Some saw it as part of a discredited past, as they came to believe in the ideologies of modernity. Some argued the practice should be discontinued rather than maintained as a mockery of its true form, to be performed for visiting officials. Even as they advocated ending the practice, however, most of these leaders also spoke of the great religious significance of the ritual killing of the bear cub, itself.

By the 1930s, the iyomante was often said to be being performed in the "old" or "classic" style, with the idea that each performance might be the last ever performance of the "true" "traditional" "old" ritual. For the vast majority of Ainu, however, the ritual practice was already well divorced from the concerns and realities of their everyday lives. From that time forward, up into the 1950s, there were extensive government efforts to ban or restrict the practice of the iyomante, in the name of animal welfare, protecting public morals, and supposedly in order to prevent the objectification of Ainu culture. Yet, at the same time, civil and military officials, as well as members of the Imperial household, continued to have iyomante performed for them as special demonstrations. Even as it continued to be performed, though, the ceremony took on new meanings, and new purposes, for those Ainu who continued to perform it, as their everyday lives and concerns had changed considerably. The ceremony also came to be influenced significantly by pressures from scholars, tourists, and officials.

Other animal-spirit-sending rituals continued to be performed as late as the 1960s-1970s, and in the 1970s, as indigenous movements gained strength around the world, the iyomante was revived, and came to be seen by many Ainu as a mark of pride, solidarity, and connection with or practice of one's own traditions.

References

• David Howell, "Is Ainu History Japanese History?," in ann-elise lewallen, Mark Hudson, Mark Watson (eds.), Beyond Ainu Studies, University of Hawaii Press (2015), 109-111.