Standing rule (from the akkorokamui entry, now page-level): Ainu kamuy are not "monsters" but powers in a distinct, living cosmology. This wing presents Ainu material as Ainu — never silently absorbed into "Japanese folklore." Where a being was partially absorbed into Shinto practice (Akkorokamui as Atkorkamuy), the absorption is the labeled event, not the identity.
Why this wing is framed differently
The rest of the site can treat its subject as a literary inheritance — Sekien's catalogs, Edo tale-collections, a tradition whose carriers wrote things down and whose descendants run festivals. Ainu tradition is the heritage of a colonized people whose oral literature (yukar) was collected late, under pressure, often by outsiders (Batchelor's missionary ethnography is cited here with that caveat attached, never as neutral). The register here is respect and attribution; the delight register applies only where the tradition itself is playing (the okkeruipe earns it).
What the drafted entries already show
The five entries sketch a cosmology with its own grammar, different from the Wajin tradition at every joint:
- Exchange is explicit. The mintuchi trades catches for drowning victims, fortune for inaw and sake — contract, stated aloud. Wajin yokai hide their terms in etiquette; kamuy publish theirs.
- Origins are institutional. The mintuchi are demobilized smallpox-war veterans — 61 grass-figures animated by Okikurmi against the disease god, retired into the rivers. The kenashikorunarpe is a failed fire-drill from the maker-god's own workshop — a defect that received a domain. Beings have employment histories, not just grudges.
- The land has an owner. Kenashikorunarpe's very name — "the old woman who owns the wooded plain" — makes hunting trespass by default; the missed arrow is a property veto.
- Mercy is built in. The akkorokamui is so red "the redness shines out to the skies" — the sea-giant that ships its own warning light.
- Memory is archaeology. The koropokkuru departure narrative points at real pit-dwellings and pottery — per the refutation of Tsuboi's literal reading, the Ainu's own architectural past "estranged into little people": a people's folklore remembering its own former life-ways. The deepest single idea in the wing.
- The ridiculous has a seat. The okkeruipe, defeated by answering in kind — the wing's proof that this cosmology also laughs.
The cornerstone, and who wrote it
This wing's framing rules exist because of a colonial history, and they are best stated by naming the one Ainu-authored primary the site stands on.
Chiri Yukie (知里幸惠, 1903–1922) compiled the Ainu Shin'yōshū — thirteen kamuy-yukar, the songs the gods sing about themselves — transcribing them in romanized Ainu with her own Japanese translations facing. The repertoire was largely her grandmother's. She was nineteen, and she died before the book was printed; it was published in 1923. Her preface is dated 1 March 1922.
The preface is not folklore-collecting. It is a young woman recording her own dispossession while doing the philology anyway. She describes Hokkaidō as it had been for her ancestors, then the decades since — the mountains becoming villages, the villages becoming towns — and names what her people were being called: "oh, the perishing ones — that is our name now." Then she states her actual worry, which is linguistic: that the many beautiful words handed down would vanish along with the people said to be vanishing. And then, in the plainest line in the book: born Ainu, raised inside the Ainu language, she wrote down one or two of the smallest of the stories.
That is the wing's cornerstone, and it settles the register. The collection opens with the owl god's own song, "Shirokanipe ranran pishkan" — silver droplets falling all around. Cite her by name. Quote with attribution. Translate carefully. Never paraphrase this material as "Japanese folklore" — she wrote her preface precisely because that erasure was already underway, and she was right about the mechanism.
Comparative notes (labeled as comparison, never lineage)
- Mintuchi/kappa: same child-size, same sliding-arm anatomy, no dish, different theology — parallel solutions, not borrowing, absent evidence.
- Kenashikorunarpe/yamauba: both forest women; the hag comparison illuminates differences (ownership vs hospitality-with-rules).
- The mizuchi/mintuchi name-echo: flagged philological question only.
Wing roster and gaps
Drafted: the five above. Named in entries but undrafted: amemasu (the lake-trout that swallows boats — also in the census), huri, Repun Kamuy (sea god context), Pakoro-kamuy (smallpox god), Okikurmi (culture hero), Kotan-kar-kamuy (maker god). The Ryukyuan wing (kijimuna etc.) needs its own parallel framing page — same principle, different people.