AINU PERFORMANCE

October 14, 2007

On Sunday evening, one of Noriko’s assistants, Yuki, took me to a traditional Ainu music performance. The Ainu are the indigenous people of Japan, mostly from Hokkaido, the northern island. Today, they are a minority, with only about 150,000 Ainu remaining.

Traditionally, the Ainu people sing and dance to entertain the gods. In this performance, the myth of the origin of the god of fire was sung. After doing some research, I have learned that within the Ainu belief system, according to scholar Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, “the musical instruments are said to be imbued with souls.” In general, the religion of the Ainu people is animist – that everything, animate or not, has a soul.

There were three musicians, two men and a woman. The performance was interactive: at one point, the female singer taught the crowd a verse and had everyone sing in unison. This reflects the fact that typical Ainu music performances are an experience for the entire community.



The choice of instruments was very interesting, ranging from a tonkori (a stringed instrument of the Ainu people), an open-faced drum of the Ainu people (about 16” in diameter), a djembe (Western African large hand drum), a goblet drum (North African medium-sized hand drum), a xylophone, and a violin.

The Ainu drum (I am unsure of its name, unfortunately) was an especially beautiful drum: there was an abstract pattern of people around the drum – although, it should be noted that the sound of the drum was not extraordinary.

The performance highlights the general interconnectedness of music, religious or not. The synthesis of Eastern and Western instruments is a very interesting concept: to a varying degree, fusion music is apparent in almost every culture. Nonetheless, in a religious context, the hybridization of Japanese (Ainu), Western and African instruments is a very progressive prospect. For me, it is so interesting to observe the indigenous Ainu musicians perform religious music on non-traditional (Western and African) instruments. One would think that Ainu music would be performed entirely on the instruments of the Ainu people; or at the very least, on Japanese instruments.